The unforgettable war
It was almost four o'clock in the morning on the twenty-ninth of April in the year 1945 when Hitler finished dictating his will: "Despite my belief throughout my years of struggle that I was incapable of taking on the responsibility of marriage, I have now decided, before ending my life, to marry the woman who has come after years of true friendship, willingly chosen, to this city that has been besieged, to share my fate and destiny, and to accompany me to the next world as my wife by her own choice. This fate will compensate for what we have lost together during my long years of service to my people. As for the art collection that I have acquired over the years, it was not for my personal gain, but rather, I desired to include it in a museum of paintings that I established in the city of my birth, Linz, situated on the Danube. I have chosen to die with my wife to escape the shame of surrender or capitulation, and what we desire is for our bodies to be immediately cremated in the same place where I have spent the majority of my daily activities during twelve years of service to my people."
The next day, Monday, April 30, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Hitler took his wife, Eva Braun, by the hand to their private suite, where he presented her with a poison pill and a pistol at the same time, so that a double suicide would be completed. As for Hitler, he swallowed a cyanide poison capsule that takes a human soul in less than a minute. Then the bullet was fired into his mouth, crushing his skull. As for Eva Braun, she was dead without blood, as she had swallowed the poison capsule.
The bodies were then wrapped in blankets and placed in the Chancellery garden, where Hitler used to disappear under it in a highly fortified hideout equipped with everything. Then, 180 liters of gasoline were poured on the cold bodies and they were carefully burned according to the will. As for the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, he first poisoned his six children with his wife, then they went to the garden where a soldier was ordered to shoot them in the back of the head, and the bodies were partially burned. It was later possible to identify the identities of the bodies. As for Hitler and his body, no trace was found to the extent that some believed that he had disappeared and would organize the resistance from another place. Some even claimed that he had escaped to South America and was living there in a secret place?!
The sure thing is not the disappearance of Hitler or his death from nothingness; rather, it is the end of the Second World War in Europe and the surrender of Germany to the Allies unconditionally on May 7, 1945, after European cities had turned into ruins. "The defenders of the roar in Europe stopped, as did the airplanes from dropping their bombs at midnight on the 8th-9th of May, 1945. A strange, albeit desirable, silence prevailed over the European continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. During this elapsed period, which lasted five years, eight months, and seven days, millions of men and women were killed in over a hundred battlefields and in over a thousand cities subjected to air raids, in addition to millions more killed by the Germans in gas chambers or at forced labor trenches. Tomorrow, the majority of Europe's historic cities turned into rubble, and with the arrival of warm weather, the foul odors emanated from the bodies that had no one to bury them, with no count or reckoning."
This terrible war, which must not be forgotten, should be studied by our children and grandchildren, because the humans who were killed in its fields were like us, but their unfortunate fate was to be born between the years 1915-1945 and particularly in the European theater. There is justification for Europeans to celebrate the end of this war, which represented the peak of human violence in all of its recorded and known history. In a span of six years, the toll was the death of over fifty million humans, and more than 80 million were wounded, disabled, or missing. The Russians alone lost more than twenty million people, and the Germans lost over six million.
And more than a million German children became orphans, and more than ten million Germans emigrated from areas outside Germany, where they used to form the majority of the population, such as the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and Prussia in Poland. Many of them died on the way, only God knows, and the world paid 1,384,000 million dollars for the expenses of the war, not to mention the amount of 260,000 million dollars, the value of what the war destroyed, which extended its effects to 59 countries involved, and darkened the cities of Europe over the six years, not knowing a lamp or an electric light at night. Europe's factories turned into weapons production, and millions were forced into concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands died on the battlefields, and tens of thousands of souls were taken in slow death in camps under extremely humiliating conditions.
The fierce fighting in the cold and snowstorms remains a tragic chapter in itself. "The snow-laden winds from the east were slapping the faces that had eaten and been consumed by the long beards, and thousands of tiny crystals were tearing these faces as if they were Moses' blades, faces from which nothing remained but skin and bone. As much as exhaustion had taken hold of the men, hunger had taken hold of them to the same extent. These snowy winds were tanning the men's skin and drawing tears from their submerged eyes, resembling caves. These winds were also penetrating the soldiers' tattered clothes down to the bone, and when one of these men loses all ability to move, or when the fear of death loses all meaning to him, his empty body soon falls and freezes completely, exactly like a machine that stops after consuming its last drop of fuel, and a shroud of snow extends to cover this frozen thing except for the tip of the shoe or the slightly raised frozen arm, as if this scene witnessed that in this place a man lay sprawled, a lifeless body.
And this eloquent depiction of the battles on the Russian front reached its peak in the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted for nearly a thousand days and claimed the lives of more than a million people. When the German Sixth Army, led by von Paulus, along with two Romanian divisions, was surrounded, they fell into the trap, with no more than 40 km wide and 20 km deep, by the Russian counterattack launched by one and a half million soldiers. Twenty German divisions from the cream of the German army were left with only ninety thousand soldiers at the end, dragging their frozen feet in the snow into captivity, to be consumed by the cursed lice and typhus in the swamps of Siberia. In the end, only five thousand soldiers, their eyes filled with the vision of the motherland, returned after aging before their time, to endure the sorrows of bitter memories.
Perhaps the greatest lesson and tragedy at the same time from the story of World War II is the relationship between the world and politics. The politicians who were planning the fate of the European peoples at that time made such mistakes that led to two consecutive wars over a period of thirty years. The minds of scientists, in a part of their activity, served the desires of politicians through technology, and the culmination of this process, which ended World War II, was the development of nuclear weapons. Perhaps this contradiction between the world and politics has not been fully resolved until now. Politicians in Europe celebrated while the Bosnian War raged, and celebrations were also held in Moscow amid the Chechen War in the Caucasus. Did the human race truly benefit from the lessons of history?!
Perhaps the story of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, when the clouds of war gathered in the sky of Nazi Germany on the eve of the war, has great significance for scientists’ view of history and events. He tells us in his book “The Part and the Whole - Dialogues in the Field of Atomic Physics” about his vision of the inevitability of the coming war. “If a ship is to be stranded in a devastating hurricane, it is necessary to close the ship’s hatches, tighten its ropes, and secure its moving parts in order to confront this destruction with the greatest possible degree of security. Based on this philosophy, I searched in the spring of 1939 for a country house for my family in Mountainous heights where my wife and children can take refuge when the cities collapse?! Then he reveals to us a strange conversation that took place between him and the Italian scientist (Enrico Fermi), who later inaugurated the invention of the first nuclear reactor in 1942. The Italian scientist Fermi had fled Italy from fascist persecution. The interview and dialogue between the two men took place in the summer of 1939, that is, before the The war is in a month or less, and it is striking that the German scientist (Werner Heisenberg), who knew of the imminent arrival of the storm of war through cold scientific rational analysis, was insisting with the same force on returning to Germany to build it in the post-war stage, as Heisenberg was on a visit to America in That time was on the eve of war, so he could visit his scholar friends before he was no longer able to do so. Heisenberg said in response to Fermi, who asked, “What do you want next in Germany?” You will not be able to stop the war, but here you can start again. The whole country was built by Europeans fleeing their homelands because they could not bear the narrow relations there, they could not bear the differences and conflicts between small nations, oppression, liberation, revolution, and all the misery inherent in these circumstances. Because they want to live here in another wide, liberated country without the burden of all the past history... Why would you want to overlook this good fortune?!
Heisenberg's answer was: 'What you're saying, I feel it well and I have said it to myself more than a thousand times, as the possibility of coming from suffocating Europe to the spaciousness here has been haunting me constantly since my first visit ten years ago. Perhaps it was my duty to emigrate at that time, but I decided to form a circle around me of young people who want to participate in the new of science, which will mean something after the war, with others having good knowledge in Germany. I will feel betrayed if I abandon these young people now.'
And when Fermi asked him, "Don't you consider it possible for Hitler to win the war?" Heisenberg's answer was: "No, modern wars are led by technology, and because Hitler's policies have isolated Germany from all other major powers, the technological effort on the German side is much less than that on the side of potential enemies. This position is so clear that sometimes I am inclined to hope that Hitler, in his knowledge of the truth, will refrain from risking entering the war, but all that is now considered a mere dream, because Hitler's reaction is not rational, and he may simply not want to see reality". Fermi's amazement reached its peak in this conversation from Heisenberg's insistence on returning to Germany with his conviction that an imminent war would occur and that Hitler would engage in the war irrationally. When was the war ever rational?
Fermi asks, "Despite this, do you still want to return to Germany?" Heisenberg responds, "Each of us is born in a specific environment with a specific linguistic and intellectual space, and if one does not resolve early on from this environment, they will grow up as best as possible in this space and will be able to influence it as best as possible. It is known from historical experiences that every country will sooner or later be affected by revolution and war, and of course, it is not prudent advice to emigrate each time before either occurs. Not everyone can certainly emigrate, so people should learn to prevent disaster as much as possible rather than simply fleeing from it. Perhaps what is required is for each individual to bear the burden of disasters in their country, as this would encourage them to take necessary measures to prevent the disaster from happening."
When Germany fell, the Americans rushed eagerly in search of the spoils of war, not in golden ingots, but in the gray matter, a metaphor for human brains. Colonel Bash advanced to seek his prey, represented by the nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg. The Americans wanted to know two things precisely: first, how far had the Germans progressed in their research on the atomic bomb, and second, the rocket technology used by the Germans at the end of World War II, represented by the V1 and V2 rockets. By possessing a nuclear warhead on a guided missile, its owner could become a great power, as power was no longer tied to territory or population. Heisenberg said when Colonel Bash came to arrest him, his feeling was like "a swimmer who continued swimming until death, then saw dry land for the first time." He then asked one of the American guards if he admired our freedom nestled among the mountains, to which the guard replied, "This is considered the most beautiful place on earth that he has known so far."
The predicament in which politicians found themselves after the end of World War II was more severe than the story of the monkey and the carpenter, whose tail got stuck in the crevice. It is mentioned in the book of Kalila and Dimna that a monkey saw a carpenter spreading a wooden board and placing a wedge in the crevice. When the carpenter left for a moment, the monkey imitated the carpenter, not knowing the secrets of the profession, and his tail slipped into the crevice. When the carpenter raised the wedge, the monkey's tail got stuck in the crevice, and he almost fainted from the intensity of the pain. The carpenter, upon realizing this, began to beat him, and what he received from the carpenter was more severe than the trapping of his tail in the crevice.
The politicians saw the scientists building nuclear weapons, so they wanted more, but in the end, they got themselves into a terrifying mess. They didn't see any benefit except to withdraw their tails from this scientific dilemma, so they became obedient disciples to the scientists. They started entering the school of science, ethics, and values, learning from it the new language.