The attached column is a 1945 magazine profile of Clement Attlee (1883 – 1967: U.K. Prime Minister: 1945 - 1951) it appeared just a few weeks following the long over-do wrap-up of the Second World War and the hasty ouster of Conservative Party Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965).
You might also want to read an article about Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko.
Published six months after the German surrender was this account of post-war Vienna, Austria: the people, the shortages and the black-market. Originally liberated by the Soviet Army, the Americans occupied the city three months afterward; this is an eyewitness account as to what Vienna was like in the immediate wake of World War II. Reading between the lines, one gets a sense that the Viennese were simply delighted to see an American occupying force swap places with the Soviet Army, although the Soviets were not nearly as brutal to this capital as they were to Berlin.
In compliance with the Potsdam Conference, Vienna was soon divided into four zones of occupation.
An eye-witness account of life in post-war Berlin: the rubble, the black-market, the politics, the night clubs, the newspapers, the natives and the four occupying armies.
You might also like to read articles about post-war Japan.
YANK correspondent Mack Morris wandered through the fallen Nazi capital of Berlin two days after it's collapse and recorded his observations:
"There were Russians in the the square, dancing and a band played. In Unter den Linden were the bodies of dead civilians, the dust of their famous street like grease paint on their faces."
Click here to read about the German surrender proceedings that took place in the French city of Reims on May 6, 1945.
Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.
"Barely existing on brief rations of food and other necessities, the three million-odd Germans in 1948 Berlin are cold and afraid. In their battle for survival they spy on one another, steal coffins from the dead for firewood and raid garbage cans to eat."
Just how accurate was the Allied bombing campaign of Germany? Click here and find out.
This
Collier's Magazine article from 1947 was penned by the German-speaking Sigrid Schultz (1893 - 1980) who's report told on those discontented Germans who enjoyed tweaking the collective noses of the armies that lorded over them - oddly believing that a war between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union was the best answer to their hopes. Elements of the populace spoke openly about the good old days under Hitler and sang the old Nazi anthem, "The Horst Wessel Song":
"In Munich, the signs on the square named for 'The Victims of Fascism' were replaced by signs reading 'The Victims of Democracy'. The police only acted after a Munich paper front-paged the story."
A similar article from 1951 can be read here...
Read about American censorship in Occupied-Japan...
This editorial lends credibility to Andrei Cherny's 2007 tome,
The Candy Bombers
, in which the author states that there was no love lost between the Berliners and the occupying American army in the immediate aftermath of the German surrender:
"Stories keep coming back to this country about American soldiers sticking up Berlin restaurants, or beating up German citizens, or looting German homes. How much of this stuff goes on, we don't know. We do know that some of it goes on, and that any of it is too much. Not that we believe in sobbing unduly over the German people, they let themselves be razzle-dazzled into the war by Hitler and his mobsters."
This is a fascinating article about the surviving Nazi big-shots as they waited for the Nuremberg trials to begin. Incarcerated at the Palace Hotel in Fromburg, Luxembourg (code named "Ashcan") this COLLIER'S MAGAZINE article explains how the camp worked and who was there (Goering, Jodl, Keitel, von Ribbentrop, Streicher, Kesserling and Grand Admiral Doenitz):
"There was no coddling or recognition of rank at Ashcan. The only entertainment was atrocity films. Recently the internees were treated to the spectacle of Buchenwald... Ribbentrop bowed his head and walked straight out to the dining room. Kesserling was white as a sheet..."
In the aftermath of World War II Germany found themselves occupied by four armies; in the attached article General Eisenhower explained what the policy of the German occupation was to be:
"'His idea is that the biggest job for right now is riding herd on the rehabilitation of Germany's political and economic structure...We are working toward a government of Germany by the Germans under the supervision of the Allied General Control Council,' he said. "The government will pass more and more under German civil control. At first we'll have to look down the German's necks in everything they do."'
-To read more 1940s articles about General Eisenhower, click here.
Filed from Berlin by the respected American journalist William Shirer (1904 – 1993), he read the findings of a German opinion poll revealing that
• A majority of Germans tended to hold that Nazism was good, when properly administered.
• Antisemitism was rapidly assuming its customary spot within German society.
• War guilt was largely non-existent and Nazi publications were rolling off the smaller presses with predictable regularity.
Shirer also reported that unrepentant, senior Nazis like Max Amann were getting out of prison, expecting to wield the power they once enjoyed as as one of Hitler's yes-men.
Counted among the hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi combatants during the war were thousands of anti-Nazi German draftees who were predictably alienated from the majority of German P.O.W.s in their respective camps. Subjected to kangaroo courts, hazings and random acts of brutality, these Germans were immediately recognized by their captors as a vital element that could prove helpful in the process of rebuilding Germany when the war reached an end.
And so it was early in 1944 when the U.S. Army's Special Projects Division of the Office of the Provost Marshal General was established in order to take on the enormous task of re-educating these German prisoners of war
, all 360,000 of them, in order that they might clearly understand the benefits and virtues of a representative form of government. This article tells the story of their education within the confines of two special encampments that were established just for this purpose, and their repatriation to Germany, when they saw the all that fascism had willed to their countrymen.
In this article the proud father of Anne Frank, Otto Frank (1889 – 1980), explains that by the late Fifties it seemed more and more teenagers were contacting him to say that very few parents or teachers seemed willing to discuss the Nazi years in Germany. These inquiries were too often dismissed as bothersome or simply brushed away with hasty answers like, "The Nazis built the Autobahns".
Otto Frank points out that this was not always the case, and goes on to recall that there existed a more sympathetic and regretful Germany for at least a decade after the war. Yet, in 1960 he sensed that there existed a subtle movement to whitewash Hitler; a battle was being waged for the mind of this teenage generation.
From Amazon: A German Generation
Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.
Out of the smoldering ruins of Japan came the Honda factories; while Germany amazed their old enemies by rapidly beating their crematoriums into Volkswagens. Confidently managed by a fellow who only a short while before was serving as a lowly private in Hitler's retreating army, Volkswagen quickly retooled, making the vital improvements that were necessary to compete in the global markets.
Ludwig Erhard (1897 – 1977), West Germany's Minister of Economics between the years 1949 and 1963, once remarked that Germany was able to launch its "Wirtschaftswunder" (economic miracle) by implementing the principles of a market economy and laissez-fair capitalism within the framework of a semi-socialist state.
An anonymous opinion piece that was published in the August 24, 1946 issue of COLLIER'S MAGAZINE in which the writer expressed his astonishment in finding that peacetime, after such a hard-fought victory, should seem so anti-climactic:
"Consumers goods are so scarce everywhere that all major countries are suffering more or less inflation. A wave of big strikes in this country earlier this year slowed production badly, so that it seems impossible for us to freeze our own relatively mild inflation at its present point."
The pages of PEOPLE TODAY, a short-lived gossip rag and probable ancestor of today's
PEOPLE
, seldom reserved any column space to report on the whereabouts of all the various celebrity Nazis who had missed their date's with the hangman - but for this scoop they made an exception.
Spotted in Argentina during the summer of 1951 was Mussolini's daughter, Edda Ciano (1910 – 1995), Otto Skorzeny (1908 – 1975) and Croatian fascist Ante Pavelić (1889 – 1959). The murderous Pavelić was in the employ of the Argentine dictator, Juan Peron; the other two resided in Europe (Countess Ciano had recently served a two year stint in an Italian prison and Skorzeny, as an ODESSA flunky, was probably no stranger to South America).
Click here to read a related article from NEWSWEEK concerning the post-war presence of Nazis in Argentina.
Click here to read another article about the post-war whereabouts of another Nazi.
Franz von Papen (1879 – 1969) was born into the German nobility; he worked as a diplomat, a politician and during both World Wars he served as an intelligence officer in his nation's army. During the Third Reich von Papen was appointed Vice Chancellor under Adolf Hitler. This article concerns the period in von Papen's life when, after having been acquitted earlier by the international tribunal, he found himself once more on the docket for another misdeed.
Franz von Papen had an IQ that measured 134 - click here to read about the strangely high IQs of the other lunatics in Nazi leadership...
In the chaos and confusion of 1945 Berlin the whereabouts of Gestapo General Heinrich Müller was lost; many believe he had been killed or committed suicide. Another report had it that Müller had been captured with the Africa Korps by the British and subsequently made good his escape into Syria. In an issue of the Soviet newspaper
Izvestia that appeared on newsstands at the end of July, 1950, it was reported that while residing in the Middle East he had converted to Islam, changed his name to Hanak Hassim Bey and was amassing an army of German veterans in order to march on Israel. The attached notice seems to be based on the
Izvestia article.
Distrusting Germans was a common pastime for many people in the Twentieth Century; some thirty years earlier a similar article was published about this distrust.
Here is another article about escaped Nazis.
When a Nazi converted to Islam it was undoubtedly the work of Haj Amin Al-Husseini. Click here to read about him.
An important news item came across the wire in mid-may, 1949:
"The delegates from Western Germany's 11 states gave final approval to the draft of the constitution for the new Federal Republic of Germany."
- but what matter was this to the thousands of Bavarians who were highly distrustful of the new government; they had their own gloried past that was largely due to the royal family known as the House of Wittelsbach:
"A strong faction is campaigning for the return to the throne of former Crown Prince Rupprecht. The eldest son of King Ludwig III, deposed in 1918, Rupprecht is a tall, thin man of vast education. He led Bavarian troops under Kaiser Wilhelm. In World War II, he was exiled to Italy. Since then he has been living with his family at Leutstetten Castle on Lake Starnberg near Munich."
"If the Bavarian people desire monarchy, I shall respect their desire."
Nice work if you can get it...
Written seven months after VE-Day, this article reported on life in the American zone of occupation:
"Today, with every facet of his life policed by foreign conquerors, the German civilian faces the worst winter his country has known in centuries. And it is likely to be but the first of several such winters. He is hungry now, and he will be cold. Shelter is inadequate. His property is looted by his neighbor. Lawlessness and juvenile delinquency disturb him. Public health teeters in precarious balance which might tip the disaster."
"Intelligence officers of the U.S. Army, just returned from Germany, brought appalling stories of the conditions under the policy of divided control established at Potsdam last August. Berlin, they reported confidentially, had a pre-war population of four million and an average daily death of toll of 175. Berlin today, although harboring over a million refugees from what was Eastern Germany, has a population of just over three million; deaths, 4,000 a day."
By clicking the title link posted above you will see a photo of what appears to be the Fascist's answer to the von Trapp Family Singers - but hold, good reader - it was something far more sinister.
Read about American censorship in Occupied-Japan...
While the hunt for Nazis and hidden weapons cachés was taking place in allied-occupied Germany, a small number of U.S. Army detectives happened upon the entire archives of the Nazi Party.
By the time this article appeared on paper, the defeated Germans had been living among the soldiers of four different military powers for two years: the British, the French, the Russians and the Americans - each army had their own distinct personality and the Teutonic natives knew them well. With that in mind, an American reporter decided to put the question to them as to what they thought of these squatters - what did they like most about them and what did the detest most about them?
The Germans did not truly believe that the Americans were there friends until they proved themselves during the Berlin Blockade; click here to read about that...
Not too long after the close of the war, exiled German author Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955) was invited to return to Germany. Walter von Molo, a German writer, who during the Nazi regime remained and worked in Germany, sent the invitation to Mann as an "Open Letter" in the name of German intellectuals. Attached an excerpt of the writer's response.
Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling (1887 - 1945) insisted on his innocence throughout his trial and all the way up to the day of his firing squad. To counter his claims in the courtroom prosecutors produced the diary of Hitler's foreign minister, Alfred Rosenberg, that clearly stated that Quisling was complicit from the very beginning in the invasion of his homeland. A pride of Norwegian military officers recalled the day of the Nazi attack when Quisling refused to give the mobilization order.
Click here to read an article about another European traitor: Pierre Laval.
Printed years before Germany's surrender, here is the digitized copy of the English/German phrase book that was printed by the U.S. Army for distribution among those soldiers who would be occupying that country in 1945. It is beautifully illustrated by the cartoonist Milton Caniff and is sixty-seven pages in length.
"The coming winter will be an extremely trying one for our occupation troops. If present conditions continue, there is certain to be starvation in Germany."
"As for the defendant's guilt: the British Attorney general named seven individually as
'murderers, robbers, black-mailers and gangsters' who led Germany into war..."
Click here if you would like to read what the German people thought about the trials...
Between the years 1941 and 1945 the United States achieved a level of power that the tyrants of yore only dreamed about:
"Clearly here was a phenomenon to make anyone sit up and take notice - a new kind of military machine, a new kind of global power that apparently could be delivered anywhere in the world, at any time... By building 75,000 to 100,000 planes yearly and by improving planes and motors, we have emerged suddenly as an air power...No other nation has made a comparable investment in carrier aviation. No other nation would dare to put an expeditionary force to sea against a nation strong in carriers and land -based aircraft...With the object of defending ourselves, we have solved one problem after another until we have stumbled on a formula for conquering most of the world."
A similar article appeared twenty years earlier...
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) had much to say as to how the German people could come to terms with all the dreadful acts that were committed in their name during the previous 12 years.
"[The German] will try frantically to rehabilitate himself in the face of the world's accusations and hate - but that is not the right way. The only right way is his unconditional acknowledgement of guilt... German penitence must come from within."
Click here to read Jung's thoughts on Hitler.
"The German Army has been defeated, but the German murderers are still murderers, the Junkers are still Junkers and they are still Nazis - and all of them are looking ahead to the next war....Here is what the Germans, whose commanders begged for mercy at the signing of the surrender, did in the 24 hours just before and after the formal deadline for capitulation..."
"No one must be under any illusions about the severity of the terms to be imposed upon the German people by our enemies."
