Aftermath Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

Harald Jähner, Shaun Whiteside

eBook - 2022

How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The New York Times)—of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust. Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period. The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half the populatio...n was displaced; 10 million newly released forced laborers and several million prisoners of war returned to an uncertain existence. Cities lay in ruins—no mail, no trains, no... more