Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Europe is approaching a turning point. By the early 2040s, the last American WWII veterans are expected to have passed away, and within the next decade, roughly 70% of the more than 200,000 Holocaust survivors will be too. From such moments on, WWII will in effect increasingly recede from living memory, while its transmission will shift permanently from direct testimony to cultural memory: to schools, museums, archives, films, commemorations, and increasingly, (social) media.

The question this raises is not whether the disappearance of the last witnesses will make Europe forget the war — it almost certainly will not — but how the end of direct testimony reshapes the politics of remembering it. The disappearance of living witnesses does not arguably make historical revisionism or conspiracy thinking inevitable. However, as first-hand testimony disappears, so does one bulwark against distortions of the past. As such, WWII memory will rely increasingly on institutions to preserve and interpret the experiences of survivors, potentially making it more open to contestation, selective use, and political instrumentalisation.

From Living Memory to Cultural Memory

Historian Jan Assmann described this kind of transition as a shift from communicative memory – sustained orally and informally through everyday conversation between generations who lived an event or heard it from someone who did – to cultural memory, which is carried by museums, monuments, archives, commemorations, films, school curricula and (social) media.

Communicative memory typically weakens within two to three generations, even inside families with a direct connection to the war. Research on Belgian households found that by the youngest generation, knowledge of family WWII stories had reduced greatly. Some scholars described this phenomenon as a “mnemonic drift” in which each new generation reinterprets inherited narratives against a background of experience that has less and less in common with the original event.

The numbers back it up. In France, 57% of respondents cite school as their main source of knowledge about the war, ahead of films and series (31%) and online content (30%), while family transmission, the “entourage” that once carried living memory, accounts for only 23%. Indeed, institutional interpretations have now become the locus for much wider audiences. This is important because a museum exhibit or a commemorative ceremony selects, increasingly without testimony review, which stories to tell and which perspectives to highlight or leave out, and is therefore conceivably not completely neutral in the way it presents history.

Living witnesses have also carried a moral authority in public debates about the war. Even if their presence has never prevented political manipulation, it has placed limits on it by allowing distorted claims to be confronted publicly by people with first-hand experience. Once those witnesses are gone, that kind of responsive authority will be much harder to reproduce.

WWII memory will then be transmitted more through cultural memory, which is taught and interpreted by others, such as educators, museums, but also governments and politicians, which is the phenomenon that is opening the door to further political use.

Memory as a Political Weapon

Historical memory has never been neutral. Governments and political actors have always selected, interpreted, and mobilised the past to fit and legitimise present agendas — crafted agendas that may possibly be amplified by removing a powerful form of testimonial authority from public debate.

Russia offers one of the starkest contemporary examples of WWII memory being used politically. Since annexing Crimea in 2014, and especially since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has framed the war through WWII imagery, describing Kyiv’s government as “Nazi”. This rhetoric comes from a historical dispute over Ukrainian nationalism during WWII, in which movements such as the OUN and UPA resisted Soviet rule while also collaborating at different stages with Nazi forces. Russia has emphasised this collaboration to portray current Ukrainian nationalism as “fascist,” allowing the Kremlin to present the current war as a continuation of Russia’s historic struggle against fascism.

At the same time, it has downplayed the Soviet Union’s own role in triggering the war, including the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. This narrative has been reinforced institutionally, as a 2020 constitutional referendum established the protection of “historical truth” and respect for the “memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” directly in Russian law, particularly in regard to the Soviet past and the glorification of the Soviet Army.

In turn, Ukraine has rewritten its own commemorative calendar to distance itself from Moscow’s narrative of WWII. Indeed, in 2023, Zelensky replaced the Soviet-style Victory Day with a new Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism on 8 May.

But the instrumentalisation of WWII seeps farther than just geopolitics, equally into domestic and electoral spheres, where it can be used to fit contemporary political visions of both the nation and Europe.

In Romania, during his 2019 European Parliament campaign, populist hard-right AUR leader George Simion used Facebook posts about the dispute at the Valea Uzului Cemetery. The dispute concerned the installation of new Romanian crosses and a monument at a cemetery containing mostly Austro-Hungarian and other non-Romanian war dead, a site of particular importance to the Hungarian minority. The dispute is rooted in Romanian-Hungarian tensions over Transylvania, where a large Hungarian population (1.7 million) came under Romanian rule following the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

Simion mobilised the language of wartime “heroes” and “true patriots”, springboarding him to the national political spotlight and rallying electoral support.

In Italy, the current government, through the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy, has issued commemorative postage stamps honouring figures associated with the Fascist regime. These include the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, economist Maffeo Pantaleoni, and the prefect Italo Foschi, seen as part of an attempt to normalise and reshape public memory of that period. The shrinking number of people who lived through Fascist rule and were thereby able to contest such efforts is likely to make such events more politically viable, raising questions of how the political treatment of the Fascist past may change as direct experience of the regime fades.

WWII Memory in an Age of Crisis and Disinformation

Societal upheaval – such as war, economic shock, a disease epidemic – increases the appeal of simplified and conspiratorial explanations of the world, and eventually of history. Indeed, crisis generates fear, uncertainty, and a feeling of diminished control, which can strengthen people’s motivation to seek recourse in conspiracy narratives by providing people with a “satisfying” explanation of complex events.

This is no new phenomenon. Dating as far back as the 1930s and 1940s, conspiracy theories about Jewish influence fuelled Nazi propaganda, and conspiratorial thinking has spiked around wars, economic collapses, epidemics, and terrorist attacks ever since. What is new, however, is that WWII memory is exceptionally, and now increasingly, exposed to that dynamic.

Teenagers are statistically more likely than adults to endorse conspiratorial claims. This occurs at the moment when younger generations are more likely to get their news from social platforms (40% of Gen Z now rely on platforms like TikTok and Instagram) rather than from traditional media, or from grandparents who lived through WWII.

Social media is undoubtedly accelerating the trend. Platforms tend to reward content that is short, emotionally charged and that simplifies complex historical events into memes and bite-sized videos, all fuelled by corporate algorithms that prioritise advertising revenue over the distribution of thoroughly fact-checked information.

Platform-specific research on Holocaust content shows the same pattern. On Telegram, nearly half (49%) of all public posts discussing the Holocaust either deny or distort its history, rising to over 80% in German-language posts. The share is smaller but still notable on Twitter/X (19%), TikTok (17%) and Facebook (8%). The denial and distortion are often paired with the use of memes and “irony”, slipping past content moderation while spreading extremist ideas to new audiences.

The result is a widening knowledge gap. Surveys of Millennials and Gen Z across the United States, France, and the Netherlands find that majorities do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Staggeringly, in the Netherlands, nearly a quarter (23%) of young adults believe the death toll has been greatly exaggerated or that the Holocaust itself is a myth. Roughly half (49%) of young Americans report having personally seen Holocaust denial or distortion online. In France, nearly two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z (64%) first learnt about the Holocaust in school, compared with 46% of all French adults overall.

As fewer people access a direct connection to WWII, political actors and digital platforms are playing an ever greater role in mediating how the war is understood. Algorithm-driven platforms allow multiple and competing versions of the war to circulate simultaneously, detached from witnesses who could endeavour to challenge the distortion. As a result, historical literacy becomes harder to sustain.

Concluding Remarks

The disappearance of the last WWII veterans and Holocaust survivors will not make Europe forget the Second World War. Cultural memory, including through commemorations, archives, museums, and school curricula, will remain. Nonetheless, a turning point is established, as memory that was once reinforced by living testimony is now passing the torch to collective forms of remembrance to survive. Yet, despite being essential, such forms of remembrance are vulnerable to political interpretation, selection, and distortion, especially in the age of social media.

The challenge to come is therefore how Europe will remember the war and how that memory will be used in the political conflicts of the present. In order to overcome it, commemorations and museums must be paired with an important investment in historical education and media literacy. And in an increasingly digital world, online platforms willing to reward factual accuracy over engagement will also be key to such an endeavour.