PARIS — For the first time since the armistice that ended World War I with Germany’s defeat in 1918, a German leader joined French officials here to mark the moment the guns fell silent on the Western Front after a war that killed millions.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, laid a floral wreath Wednesday at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, erected in 1835 to honor the army of Napoleon.
Germany, given its defeat in World War I and its shame over Nazism and World War II, has never celebrated Veterans Day. Merkel’s visit was criticized by some in Germany. Across Europe and other parts of the world, people gathered Wednesday to commemorate the end of four years of fighting, from 1914 to 1918, in which millions of lives were lost. The New York Times
