By immediate- I mean for the 10 years or so after the war, and I’m asking about the German people. How long did it take for most of Germany to accept what had really happened? When a typical German accepted the truth, how did they react? Were there editorials and opinion pieces in the newspapers and other media (radio, I suppose) that addressed the Holocaust and other atrocities, and if so, what was their take? What was life like for German veterans of the war (the ones that were not involved with war crimes)? What was the typical German opinion about their veterans? After the war, what did most Germans think about the Allies, and the USA in particular?
How did all these topics differ between East and West Germany?
About this part: Well, there was Denazification, which you might have heard about.
One of the gripes of the R.A.F. (West German left-wing terrorist group, quite active in the 70’s) was that they felt that Denazification hadn’t been thorough enough, though – guys like Otto Ernst Remer, Hans Globke and Hanns-Martin Schleyer (who they ended up kidnapping) were still walking the streets as free men.
But of course, that was a generation later than what you’re specifically asking about…
The West German government saw itself as the legal successor state to Nazi Germany, and adopted a policy of collective guilt and repentance: all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes. The East German government, on the other hand, considered itself as having been established by the German working class, which had played little or no active part in the administration of Nazi Germany. Under this interpretation, the Nazi government, like all other avowedly capitalist governments, neither represented nor acted in the interests of the German working class; members of the latter were at best brave resisters against Nazi oppression, or at worst well-meaning people who were deluded into passively accepting the Nazi system. The East German government therefore did not see itself or the vast majority of the German people as responsible for the violence and atrocities perpretrated by the Nazis.
You can find a very detailed treatment of the social and economic postwar situation in East Germany in Mary Fullbrook’s The People’s State: East Germany Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale University Press, 2005).
From what I’ve read, in Germany and Japan, there was simply a giant collective shrug. They had other things to worry about, like eating. Nobody gave a damn anymore.
My mother was born during WW2 in Germany, her biological father was a Nazi of unknown rank(I have a picture of him wearing a “trench coat” with medals and stuff).
The Germany she grew up in sounds like a post apocalyptic movie from her memories, she has talked about how precious chocolate was. About how for long periods in her childhood her diet was lard on stale bread, and then sometimes they had nothing.
She told me how several times bandits or burglers were driven off by her uncle using a gun, once they had to fend off them making away with the few cows the family had. No electricity, no running water, spotty police protection.
She said a pedophile(her assumption) attempted to grab her once and she was running and terrified, that roads were dangerous and women were concerned about rape.
This corresponds to the story from a German woman who lived through the war. She just managed to make it across to allied territory. She thought that most of the women in the east were raped by communist soldiers. Apparently large parts of the country had been destroyed by bombing, and all the allies were looting everything of value. I’m sure her story was colored by tragedy and desperation, but it certainly evoked the feeling of a shattered nation.
It could possibly have been worse. How do these kinds of stories compare with the period following World War I, when the victors demanded huge restitution from Germany after the peace conference at Versailles?
The crushing economic burdens thus laid upon Germany are, as the history is commonly told, a major factor in pushing Germany to become an embittered nation, thus leading to its rearmament between the wars, and ultimately to the mind-set that enabled Naziism to rise and prosper.
The lessons having been learned, the victors after World War II made deliberate attempts to prevent that from happening again. Most famously, this thinking was one of the main factors that went into the Marshall Plan, which aimed to rebuild Europe – Germany included – with massive economic assistance.
While it’s true that the (western) Allies went to great lengths to prevent the errors made after WWI, you really can’t say that the German people was worse off in the 20s. The country was completely ruined in 1945, that was just not the case after WWI due to the lack of widespread bombing.
This however ensured very thouroughly that the backstabbing legend of post-WWI could not resurface, as every German could see what 12 years of Hitler had done to the country - and this time, we knew it was our fault.
Denazification concentrated mainly on the big players, so called “Mitläufer”, regular people who had joined the party for personal gain and had commited no major crimes, were mostly let off. How else would you have gone about rebuilding the country with one half of the population dead and the other half in jail? We needed teachers, judges, officials, policemen - they couldn’t all have spotless records. The same thing happened in 1989/90, where only the biggest Stasi criminals were tried and convicted, and the whole army of spies and snitches were able to transition to a new life in unified Germany. See the end of Lives of Others for that aspect.
If you go to Time magazines website, you can search the archives and read articles from that time. Its very interesting to read articles from a certain week from the perspective of people who didn’t know how things were gonna turn out.
The immediate post war years seem to be pretty miserable. The articles of the time speak of a pending humanitarian crisis. Every city of any size in Germany was rubble. The winter of '46/'47 was a misery of cold and uncertainty about the future, whatever food they got was courtesy of the occupying armies. I’m not sure there was a lot of self reflection going on. Probably just a dazed “i cant believe this is happening”.
It’s quite amazing that by 1955 under Adenauer they were well on their way to being back on their feet. They got alot of help, but considering the state of the country in 1945 its kind of mind blowing.
This is pretty much backwards. The reparations that were demanded after WWI may have been burdensome, but Germany was allowed to continue to exist as an independent nation, and its cities were not in ruins. By contrast, during WWII much of its infrastructure was destroyed and the country was then dismembered into four zones, and occupied and ruled (for a while) by the forces of its enemies. Heck, the country was not fully reassembled until 1989.
Essentially, the Allies (especially, but by no means only, the Russians) concluded that they had been far too damn lenient after WWI, and Germany’s pride and militaristic spirit now needed to to be completely crushed and eradicated. That is what happened (and, so far, it seems to have actually worked this time).
As for German veterans, I get the feeling that people just wanted to ignore, forget and rebuild. A German woman published a book in 1959 called “A woman in Berlin”. It wasn’t well received. Theres a movie too.
*It is 1945, the German capital has recently fallen to the Soviet Army, and the two women exchange what is apparently a common greeting at that time and place: “How often?” The unspoken, self-evident meaning of this question is “How many Russian soldiers have raped you?” *
It was the late 60’s / '70’s before you started to get books and documentaries with people wanting to discuss and reflect on what happened.
You could also read The Dark Arena by Mario Puzo (yes, that Mario Puzo). It gives some insight into the day-to-day life of Germans and GIs living in post-war Bremen. It’s fiction, but written by someone who was there.