Germany 1945: From War to Peace
In the months after the fall of the Third Reich, Bessel writes, “the entire country seemed to be waiting for a train.” Bessel does an excellent job of evoking the blasted landscape of a conquered Germany—the homelessness and the hunger, the rubble and the mass rape. (Among the book’s fascinating details: Allied soldiers were told to look for insurgents with “belts filled with explosives,” who never emerged; a common postwar crime was bigamy.) There was also, belatedly, disillusionment. Nazi leaders had sacrificed or abandoned their own civilians, underscoring the “obvious bankruptcy of National Socialism.” Germans dissolved into pools of self-pity—which, remarkably, helped lay the foundation (at least in the West) for a democratic and pacifist state. Bessel fully recognizes the repugnance that the Germans’ sense of victimhood and their amnesia about their culpability provokes; and yet, he notes, their eagerness to put Nazism behind them and make “a fundamental break with the past” was “no bad thing.”Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.