Remembrance Day is always a good opportunity to be thankful for your very existence. Had the Nazis not been defeated, it’s very likely that you would not be alive right now.
Long before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, many smart people in Europe had already figured out what they were all about. The Nazi Party had already been in power for more than half a decade and by 1939 discerning people had figured out their plans. Their goal was world domination, complete destruction of all Jews and enslavement of all people who were not of Germanic origin. Along the way they would murder anyone who opposed them, as well as homosexuals, Gypsies and the disabled.
Before the Allied armies defeated Germany, the Nazis had murdered over 6 million Jews, as well as thousands of gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, captured soldiers and citizens of occupied Europe.
Had the Nazis won WWII, Canada would not exist. There is a good chance your parents would never have met. Your grandparents may have been put in a slave labour camp and it is possible that your ancestors would have been murdered.
Canadian soldiers who were sent off to fight in Europe would not have known much about the Nazis. What was clear, however, was that this was an existential fight. If they lost the war, they faced the very real likelihood of being executed by the Germans. The same fate might have waited the families back home.
You can imagine that most of them were more terrified than courageous. Nevertheless, they did what was asked of them, Germany was defeated and you are here today because of that very fact. So we should all be thankful of the soldiers who fought for Canada in WWII.