American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955

American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955 PDF Author: Jeffry M. Diefendorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521431200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This volume of essays by German and American historians discusses key issues of US policy toward Germany in the decade following World War II.

American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955

American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955 PDF Author: Jeffry M. Diefendorf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521431200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This volume of essays by German and American historians discusses key issues of US policy toward Germany in the decade following World War II.

West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past

West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past PDF Author: S. Jonathan Wiesen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking study, S. Jonathan Wiesen explores how West German business leaders remade and marketed their public image in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. He challenges assumptions that West Germans - and industrialists in particular - were silent about the recent past during the years of denazification and reconstruction, revealing how German business leaders attempted to absolve themselves of responsibility for Nazi crimes while recasting themselves as socially and culturally engaged public figures. Through case studies of individual firms such as Siemens and Krupp, Wiesen depicts corporate publicity as a telling example of postwar selective memory.

The United States and the European Right, 1945-1955

The United States and the European Right, 1945-1955 PDF Author: Deborah Kisatsky
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 081420998X
Category : Conservatism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
"Nazi Germany's defeat in May 1945 commenced a decade-long allied effort to democratize the former Reich. The United States simultaneously began sheltering scientists, industrialists, and military officers complicit in Nazi crimes. What explained this conflict between the spirit and practice of denazification? Did U.S. Cold War anticommunism simply replace antifascism in the postwar period? Did Americans favor rightists over leftists in a quest to restore "order" in Europe?" "In this groundbreaking study, Deborah Kisatsky shows that opportunity, not order, galvanized U.S. foreign policy, and that American dealings with the European Right were more complex than has been presumed. U.S. leaders cooperated with West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to achieve shared Atlanticist goals. And the United States co-opted nationalistic fighters into a secret stay-behind net of the Bund Deutscher Jugend-Technischer Dienst. But allied leaders jointly worked to contain such vocal neutralist-nationalists as the ex-Nazi Otto Strasser. Cooperation, co-optation, and containment of French and Italian, as of German, rightists advanced American hegemony in Europe. These strategies extended techniques of social control perfected within the United States and synthesized domestic and international systems of power in the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Orderly and Humane

Orderly and Humane PDF Author: R. M. Douglas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
The award-winning history of 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe who were driven from their homes after WWII: “a major achievement” (New Republic). Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between 12 and 14 million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless. In this authoritative and objective account, historian R.M. Douglas examines an aspect of European history that few have wished to confront, exploring how the forced migrations were conceived, planned, and executed, and how their legacy reverberates throughout central Europe today. The first comprehensive history of this immense manmade catastrophe, Orderly and Humane is an important study of the largest recorded episode of what we now call "ethnic cleansing." It may also be the most significant untold story of the World War II.

Transmission Impossible

Transmission Impossible PDF Author: Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141656
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Containing a wealth of fresh information on the use of propaganda in the Cold War, the administrative structure of the U.S. occupation, Soviet-American conflicts, and Jewish biography, this book will be of interest to scholars of U.S. foreign relations, German history, occupation history, ethnicity, sociology, and culture."--BOOK JACKET.

They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free PDF Author: Milton Mayer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652597X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

Music After Hitler, 1945-1955

Music After Hitler, 1945-1955 PDF Author: Toby Thacker
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754653462
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
The political control of music in the Third Reich has been analysed from several perspectives, and with ever increasing sophistication. Toby Thacker asks how and why music was controlled in Germany under Allied Occupation from 1945-1949, and in the early years of 'semi-sovereignty' between 1949 and 1955. The 're-education' of Germany after the Hitler years was a unique historical experiment and the place of music within this is explored here for the first time.

Postwar Soldiers

Postwar Soldiers PDF Author: Jörg Echternkamp
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789205581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.

Exorcising Hitler

Exorcising Hitler PDF Author: Frederick Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608193829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 was an event nearly unprecedented in history. Only the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier compares to the destruction visited on Germany. The country's cities lay in ruins, its economic base devastated. The German people stood at the brink of starvation, millions of them still in POW camps. This was the starting point as the Allies set out to build a humane, democratic nation on the ruins of the vanquished Nazi state-arguably the most monstrous regime the world has ever seen. In Exorcising Hitler, master historian Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's Year Zero and what came next. He describes the bitter endgame of war, the murderous Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of people in Central and Eastern Europe, and the nascent cold war struggle between Soviet and Western occupiers. The occupation was a tale of rivalries, cynical realpolitik, and blunders, but also of heroism, ingenuity, and determination-not least that of the German people, who shook off the nightmare of Nazism and rebuilt their battered country. Weaving together accounts of occupiers and Germans, high and low alike Exorcising Hitler is a tour de force of both scholarship and storytelling, the first comprehensive account of this critical episode in modern history.

Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich

Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich PDF Author: Volker Ullrich
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631498282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
"[G]ripping, immaculately researched . . . In Mr. Ullrich’s account, the murderous behavior of the Reich’s last-ditch loyalists was not a reaction born of rage or of stubbornness in the face of defeat—common enough in war—but of something that had long ago tipped over into the pathological." —Andrew Stuttaford, Wall Street Journal The best-selling author of Hitler: Ascent and Hitler: Downfall reconstructs the chaotic, otherworldly last days of Nazi Germany. In a bunker deep below Berlin’s Old Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, took their own lives just after 3:00 p.m. on April 30, 1945—Hitler by gunshot to the temple, Braun by ingesting cyanide. But the Führer’s suicide did not instantly end either Nazism or the Second World War in Europe. Far from it: the eight days that followed were among the most traumatic in modern history, witnessing not only the final paroxysms of bloodshed and the frantic surrender of the Wehrmacht, but the total disintegration of the once-mighty Third Reich. In Eight Days in May, the award-winning historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich draws on an astonishing variety of sources, including diaries and letters of ordinary Germans, to narrate a society’s descent into Hobbesian chaos. In the town of Demmin in the north, residents succumbed to madness and committed mass suicide. In Berlin, Soviet soldiers raped German civilians on a near-unprecedented scale. In Nazi-occupied Prague, Czech insurgents led an uprising in the hope that General George S. Patton would come to their aid but were brutally put down by German units in the city. Throughout the remains of Third Reich, huge numbers of people were on the move, creating a surrealistic tableau: death marches of concentration-camp inmates crossed paths with retreating Wehrmacht soldiers and groups of refugees; columns of POWs encountered those of liberated slave laborers and bombed-out people returning home. A taut, propulsive narrative, Eight Days in May takes us inside the phantomlike regime of Hitler’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz, revealing how the desperate attempt to impose order utterly failed, as frontline soldiers deserted and Nazi Party fanatics called on German civilians to martyr themselves in a last stand against encroaching Allied forces. In truth, however, the post-Hitler government represented continuity more than change: its leaders categorically refused to take responsibility for their crimes against humanity, an attitude typical not just of the Nazi elite but also of large segments of the German populace. The consequences would be severe. Eight Days in May is not only an indispensable account of the Nazi endgame, but a historic work that brilliantly examines the costs of mass delusion.