4 . A WWII photo portrait of General Charles de Gaulle of the Free French Forces . Image cropped by Emiya1980 using befunky . com . Office of War Information , Overseas Picture Division .
5 . Vladimir Putin during an operational meeting with permanent members of the Security Council on November 25 , 2022 . Picture by kremlin . ru , CC BY 4.0 < https :// creativecommons . org / licenses / by / 4.0 >, via Wikimedia Commons initiated close cooperation between both states , including the twinning of French and German municipalities ( more than one thousand in 1981 ), intertwining their peoples as close as possible . Of course , this policy did not make a clean sweep of the past or suddenly eliminate old reflexes . While the French Parliament unanimously made war crimes imprescriptible in 1964 , West Germany protected its former Nazis for many years , though the Frankfurt trials of 1963 did mark a change by putting 22 former SS soldiers who had worked in Auschwitz in the dock before their victims . Be that as it may , reconciliation tended to prevail over anger , as the ceremonies celebrating D-Day suggest . Until 1984 , the commemorations were first and foremost dominated by Anglo-Americans . The French , led by de Gaulle , did not want to recall the memory of D-Day , from which France had been excluded , and which was the prelude , as de Gaulle described it , to a new US occupation . The man of 18 June therefore refused to visit the beaches of Normandy in 1964 . The ceremonies therefore gave pride of place to the former leaders ( Omar Bradley in 1969 , for example ). This configuration did have ulterior motives . By acting in this way , the Anglo-Americans undoubtedly wanted to recall that the Second World War had also been won in the West , while the Soviets reasonably recalled that the Red Army had carried the brunt of the effort until June 1944 . Perhaps they also wanted to show that the democracies remained united in the face of the Eastern bloc . By exalting the solidarity of Great Britain and the United States united to triumph over Nazism , the commemorations fulfilled this purpose marvellously .
However , everything changed in 1984 under the leadership of President François Mitterrand . The ceremony became a civilian one , in that it granted primacy to heads of state and no longer to soldiers . As such , Ronald Reagan , Queen Elizabeth and others came to the beaches of Normandy . The number of nations represented also increased . The first to be included was West Germany . In 1984 , Chancellor Helmut Kohl ruled out attending , explaining that he had no reason to celebrate “ victory in a battle in which tens of thousands of Germans had died ”. In
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Observing Memories Issue 7