Harley Schlanger, Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Schiller Institute, delivered this address to a conference in Moscow, “The Elbe Spirit: Humanitarian Dialogue and Memory as a Basis for Cooperation,” on April 24.
It is at such a moment as this, when humanity faces the danger of annihilation from yet another irrational global war, that we from the post-World War II generation have a solemn responsibility to keep the hopes alive that animated those soldiers from the U.S. and the USSR, when they met at the bridge over the Elbe near Torgau, 81 years ago.
The handshakes at the bridge, the embraces shared by those who had sacrificed so much, became a symbol of hope that the pains of war could serve as the midwife to give birth to a bright future of peaceful cooperation.
These hopes had been fueled by the cooperation of leaders in several summits before the war’s end, especially at Yalta in February, 1945, where the discussion included the drafting of a post-war collective security agreement. They were shaped by the commitment to the cooperation among sovereign states expressed in the Atlantic Charter of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941.
Sadly, FDR’s untimely death on April 12, 1945—13 days before the encounter at the Elbe—removed the man who had inspired such hopes. His passing was a significant factor in the descent into the Cold War, which was driven by the war-time leader of Britain, Winston Churchill. In May 1945, Churchill, who is reliably reported to have been unhappy with the post-war designs of Roosevelt, proposed an attack against Soviet troops in Europe, to drive them out. Called “Operation Unthikable,” Churchill’s plan, which was secret until its declassification in 1998, was designed to “impose on Russia the will of the U.S. and the British Empire.”
Churchill’s military aide, Lt. Gen. Sir Hastings Ismay, who submitted the draft of Operation Unthinkable to him, later became the first Gen. Secretary of NATO in 1951. A year later, he defined the purpose of NATO as being “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
