POLITICIANS use Victory in Europe Day, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender, as an excuse for militarist bombast.

We must not let this pass. May 8 1945 marks the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism.

Communist Party of Great Britain leader Harry Pollitt called it “the greatest victory of all time.”

What may have begun as an inter-imperialist war had become by 1945 a people’s war, mobilising the whole working class in the effort to defeat the most murderous regime in history, Nazi Germany.

It was an internationalist war, the heroism of the armies that fought the Nazis equalled by that of the partisans and resistance fighters who fought and died across occupied Europe. The anti-fascist coalition gave birth to the United Nations — to join which, originally, countries needed to declare war on Nazi Germany — and, through the Nuremberg trials of war criminals, helped shape the modern concept of international law.

The fact that the UN has never truly been a summit of equals, or that international law has so often been disregarded, does not mean that these developments were not steps forward, ones which millions at the time hoped would usher in a more civilised world.

That task seemed all the more urgent as Soviet, British and US troops liberated the death camps and uncovered the mass graves revealing the extent of the Holocaust.

For Britain’s rulers it may have been a war to preserve empire. But for working-class people it was a war for freedom, for independence — and, increasingly, for socialism.

The years after victory saw the establishment of Britain’s welfare state, the nationalisation of industry and the creation of the National Health Service.

Socialism was the antithesis of fascism, which had emerged in the first place as a means of suppressing the working-class movement after the Russian Revolution. The “Axis powers,” as the Nazis and their allies were known, first came together as the Anti-Comintern Pact, a specifically anti-communist alliance. It was natural that many believed the destruction of fascism would be followed by the end of capitalism itself.

This was not to be. Even before the end of the war, US and British leaders were planning the cold war against their wartime allies the Soviet Union.

British forces were despatched to suppress liberation movements from Greece to Indonesia, and the formation of the Nato military alliance — in due course to be chaired by Hitler’s military chief of staff, Adolf Heusinger — marked the realignment of imperialism under US leadership for a new global anti-socialist offensive.

As the story of World War II is increasingly distorted, we should remember the people’s war against fascism and refuse to airbrush the crucial role of the Red Army — which, in Winston Churchill’s words, “tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine” — out of victory. Its erasure is linked to the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators and neofascist movements across much of Europe.

The world of peace and co-operation that seemed so close in 1945 was snatched away. But elements of the people’s victory lasted.

That is why today, as a far-right regime in the United States seeks to tear up international agreements and endorse ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, we should defend the authority of the United Nations and of international law.

As it seeks to enrol Britain in a drive to war against China, we should recognise that today’s appeasement is indulging an out-of-control United States, and call for an independent foreign policy.

And as opportunists and racists try to shut out refugees, we should remember the fates of the refugees from Nazism that Britain and other countries turned away, who died in the death camps.

Our country’s much-mythologised “finest hour” was when we fought against racism and fascism.

The heirs to the heroic generation of 1945 are those fighting them today.