French schoolchildren have a snowball fight at Auschwitz. Many young Britons do not know that "VE Day" stands for "Victory in Europe". Despite this week's 60th anniversary commemorations, the war is fading from Europe's memory. Horst Köhler, Germany's president, recognised as much when he urged his country's parliament "to keep alive the memories of all the suffering".

The second world war is becoming like the American civil war: remembered by history buffs, only vaguely by the public and rarely studied by policymakers. This fading from memory has important consequences. For decades, the memory of war shaped policy in Europe and, to a lesser degree, the US. Now that the war is being forgotten, policy will change accordingly.