This seems to be the Elefant in the room at the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.

Germany and Poland and Ukraine and, no, nothing to see here. Nothing to talk about. Just soccer, soccer, soccer!

Isn’t it even a little weird that a team representing the country that visited so much violence upon Poland and Ukraine only 70 years ago … is rolling from town to town, winning games, apparently with not a care in the world, beyond where the next match will be played?

That would be Germany, which has a very nice team, and none of the players associated with this team were around for World War II. Nor were their fathers. And maybe not their grandfathers.

But there must remain, in Poland and Ukraine, plenty of people who remember when the Germans/Nazis rolled into town in 1939 (Poland), and then in 1941 (Ukraine), and how long they stayed, and how death and destruction followed their arrival as well as their departure.

In fact, to an outsider, the whole of those two countries seems still haunted. Those miles and miles of flatlands were enormous killing fields, and doesn’t that reverberate, still? Or is 70 years really long enough to forget?

So much violence. So many civilians killed. Both countries, intended to be part of the lebensraum (living space) that Germans required, according to Nazi doctrine, and the populations of both countries to be reduced to menial laborers (“slaves” is such an unfriendly word) under their German overlords from the “thousand year Reich.”

That’s not strange to have the German national team around, and thousands of their flag-waving fans? And their chancellor cheering in the VIP section at the quarterfinal? Not at all?

Let’s review a bit what happened to the cities in which Germany has played so far, during Euro 2012.

Lviv, Ukraine: Like many cities in eastern Europe, Lviv (or Lvov) had a German name from its German/Austrian past. In this case Lemberg.

The Wehrmacht took the city in July of 1941 and held it for three full years. It was a mostly Polish town, at the time, and it seems incontrovertible that massacres of intellectuals took place, and that the Germans allowed residents of the city to abuse communists and Jews. The city may have had as many as 200,000 Jewish residents, when the Germans arrived. At the end of the war, fewer than 1,000 were still there. Nearly all the rest were dead, many of them at death camps.

Kharkiv, Ukraine. Often known in the West as Kharkov, the city had a particularly violent military history during World War II. Taken by the Germans on October 24, 1941. Retaken, 16 months later by the Soviets, retaken by the Germans on March 15, 1943, retaken by the Soviets for the last time on August 23, 1943.

This coming and going of armies on the pitiless Eastern Front did not do much for the town; maybe 70 percent of it was destroyed, and no one seems certain how many civilians were killed beyond “a lot,” including most of the city’s Jews. The city had been the third-biggest in the Soviet Union at the start of the way; it certainly was not at the end of it.

Military historians also remember the Battle of Kharkov as the “greatest tank battle in world history” — which is generally not something most Chambers of Commerce would seek out.

Gdansk, Poland.  The city was known by its German name, Danzig, for most of the 20th century, and it was a political football for a millennium. At the outbreak of World War II, it was a bit of Imperial Germany lost behind an independent Poland’s borders (thanks to the Treaty of Versailles), and the Nazis very much wanted it back, and regaining it was one of the pretexts for the invasion of Poland in 1939 that launched World War II in the western hemisphere.

The usual killing of leftists, academics and Jews followed Nazi Germany’s takeover of the city, but when the Soviets came to call in late March 1945, it was ethnic Germans who were mostly killed — though civilians of all backgrounds had been killed by Allied bombing. The city was used as an embarkation point for German refugees, and the callous sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, originally built as a German cruise ship, by a Soviet submarine in January of 1945, killed some 9,400 people — the most lethal maritime incident in history. It inspired the novel Crabwalk by Gunter Grass.

Warsaw. This is where the Germans will play Italy in the Euro 2012 semifinals on Thursday, and perhaps no city was as thoroughly destroyed by the invasion of 1939, all that followed, and the Soviet capture of it 1945.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Warsaw during the war, most at the hands of the Nazis, and the two most famous incidents were the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Both ended with the rebels crushed and essentially annihilated by the Wehrmacht. Warsaw was largely rubble.

And in each of these cities, but particularly Warsaw and Lviv, “liberation” by the Russians was no treat. Warsaw and Poland had a puppet communist government (lackeys of Moscow) for the next 45 years, and Lviv was incorporated into Ukraine and its Polish population mostly forced out. Even now, Ukraine is not exactly a representative democracy, so World War II is still echoing there.

And if Germany makes it to the final? On to Kiev, which also suffered enormously during World War II.

I am not suggesting that the German team or their fans should be treated badly. (If all of Europe held grudges the way, say, the Balkans do, the rest of the continent would still be acting out against nearly everyone else.)

But that all this seems little noted aside from stories which suggest that rising German nationalism is perhaps not a good thing. A sort of willful forgetting.

Poland and Ukraine represent the two European countries most damaged by World War II. France, Britain, Greece … not even close. Poland and Ukraine were conquered, and the Nazis planned to stay and rule forever. And then came the Soviets (or they came back), and more misery followed.

Shouldn’t there be some acknowledgement of this? Of all the history here? But it seems as if it is forgotten or brushed past. Or ignored.

This is particularly bloody ground, with human tragedies on a scale that the West (especially in the Americas) cannot possibly grasp.

This all happened 70 years ago, not 700.

I don’t know what I expect, exactly. A moment of silence, maybe? Perhaps even something uplifting. Like, “those were awful times, and not to be forgotten … and now we can gather and play a soccer tournament.”