A demon-haunted land Witches, wonder doctors, and the ghosts of the past in post-WWII Germany

In the aftermath of WWII, Germany was in shambles. The majority of cities had been laid waste by Allied bombing, before the victorious Allies split the country into Zones of Occupation. As conveyed by history professor Black (Death in Berlin, 2013), a palpable fear and paranoia felt by surviving citizens persisted. Suspicion of government became suspicion of one's neighbors. Numerous accusations of witchcraft proliferated, resulting in lingering stigma even for those found innocent. Healers like Bruno Groning, who claimed a holistic approach to medicine, were viewed with skepticism even as he generated a cult-like devotion. Groning generated a deep trust with his patients, but would choose not to treat those he looked on as bad or evil. A charge of negligent homicide would lead to his downfall. Here, Black focuses on the Groning case as a microcosm of a deeply battered country that was suffering, and viewed its suffering as a result of losing a war. Both an excellent study of a weakened and fickle humanity, and an engrossing story from beginning to end.

University of Tennessee history professor Black (Death in Berlin) delivers a fascinating, richly detailed look at the origins of "mass supernatural events" that occurred in West Germany after WWII. Black focuses primarily on the rise of faith healer Bruno Gröning, and on the scores of "witchcraft trials" that took place across the country from 1947 to 1965. Gröning, who believed that "evil people... stopped good people from being well," lectured to large crowds before authorities cracked down on him for violating a law against treating the sick without a license. He was eventually convicted of negligent homicide in the case of a young girl who stopped her tuberculosis treatments while under his care. Gröning's "obsession with evil," Black writes, links him to the country's simultaneous "witchcraft scare," in which neighbors took each other to court for spreading rumors of spell casting and evildoing. Black suggests numerous sources for these phenomena, including guilt and shame over the Holocaust, trauma caused by the large numbers of Germans killed or displaced in the final months of the war, and the residual influence of anti-Semitism. Vivid character sketches and keen psychological insights enrich her impressive historical research. The result is an arresting portrait of an unexplored chapter in German history. (Oct.)

Of witch trials, quack medicine, and millenarian terrors in the ashes of the Third Reich. Given the fiery end of Hitler's regime and the firebombing of Dresden and other cities, it's understandable that ordinary Germans might have been apocalypse-minded in 1945. That was still true in 1949, writes history professor Black in this sometimes circuitous but well-paced account, four years after the Allied occupation and the division of the country into East and West Germany. In the wave of denazification that immediately followed surrender, old grudges surfaced in accusations of witchcraft and conspiracy theories. At the time, writes the author, German newspapers and kaffeeklatsches alike were also rife with rumors of the end of the world--not so far-fetched given the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War--and with revisitations of the old Norse stories of Ragnarok. Against this backdrop came one of Black's principal subjects, a Danziger who changed his name from a Polish antecedent to the German Gröning--and who signed up for the Nazi Party years before the annexation, suggesting that he was looking forward to a comfortable life under Hitler. Instead, he grifted his way across the postwar landscape, engaging in a form of faith healing that yielded a string of faux miracles--but also a negligent homicide or two. (One of Gröning's tools, not surprisingly, was tin foil.) The German courts eventually restrained "Gröning the Wunderdoktor" from practicing medicine without a license along about the time he died and he and his victims were forgotten. Other memorable figures Black examines include a crusader who "had a way of popping up almost anywhere that witchcraft accusations surfaced" in a country where pharmacies still sold magical potions with names such as "devil's dung" until legally ordered to use "ordinary German names." Though of specialized interest, an eye-opening look into a corner of postwar history that seems more medieval than modern. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.