Book Review — Aftermath by Harald Jähner
This morning, I finished Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955, by Harald Jähner. Since 2011, Harald has been an honorary professor of cultural journalism at the Berlin University of the Arts. The book was written in 2022.
After a war that claimed over 20 million soldiers and up to 55 million civilians, how did the German population left behind after the death of Adolf Hitler react? Anyone who has read about the horrors of World War II should be interested in how German society evolved from that state to become a wealthy and respectable country today. How did former “national comrades” (Volksgenossen), which is what German citizens were called during Nazism era, become regular citizens again?
Tip: Saying it’s due to the Marshall Plan is utterly simplistic.
To satisfy your curiosity, in this book, Harald weaves stories and events together into a distinct narrative of post-war Germany.
Do you know that when the Protestant and Catholic Churches admitted their guilt in 1945, there was no explicit mention of the 6 million Jews that had perished during the Holocaust? Why? Why did the Holocaust play a shockingly small part in the consciousness of most Germans in the post-war period? In this book, you will understand, even if you do not sympathize, as the author gives readers an inside look at what it was like to be an average German from 1945 to 1955, when they had to cope with such issues as scavenging for food in postwar rationing, coping with large refugee migrations, and cleaning up the “rubble” of their destroyed cities.
First, when did World War II even end in Germany in 1945? Are you aware that there are three dates for the official capitulation of Germany? There is May 7. There is May 9. As I was reading, I asked a history buff about the day World War II ended in Germany, and he was enthusiastic in his answer: September 2. He is wrong. Harald explained the reason for the three dates. Did you notice I left out the third date? Yeah, that was intentional.
Human psychology fascinates me. A 15-year-old German boy in 1945 would be 92 years old today. If he is adventurous enough, he would likely be an estimable member of the society. But after the war, this boy likely broke into stores, climbed over dead people, and looted anything in sight. Sometimes, older people see food in the hands of hungry, dire-looking children and forcefully take the only bread available to them. A story was told of how four urbane, cultivated citizens carefully lured a lost cow into a background for a slaughter. After enlisting the help of a Soviet soldier to put two bullets into the defenseless animal, they went to work on the dead creature with kitchen knives. They weren’t alone with their booty for long.
‘Suddenly, as if the underworld had been spying on them, a noisy crowd gathered around the dead ox,’ Ruth Andreas-Friedrich later recorded in her diary. ‘They crept from a hundred basements. Women, men, and children. Were they lured by the smell of blood?’ And within minutes, everyone was tussling for the scraps of meat. Five blood-smeared fists ripped the ox’s tongue from its throat.
Even the church adapted. In his famous New Year’s Eve sermon, in the middle of “starvation winter”, Cologne’s Cardinal Josef Frings put the seventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal’, into perspective. ‘We live in times when, under conditions of great hardship, individuals are allowed to take what they need to maintain their life and health if they cannot come by it in any other way, either through work or by asking.’ And thus, stealing came to be known as ‘fringsing’.
No one is cosmopolitan, churchy, or classy in the face of ruin and hunger. In Nigerian slang, “War na your mate?” Bystanders who witnessed ‘organizing’ and ‘Fringsing ’ felt not morally superior but simply stupid. ‘We weren’t clever enough’, ‘I wasn’t up to it’, ‘my father wasn’t good at stealing, but he was an excellent organiser’ — these were typical comments from the time of the great Fringsing. It was no longer a matter of being fair or unfair, only whether one was fit enough for the grey economy or not.
War does something to the psyche that is difficult to understand. Many prisoners had serious behavior problems because they had been forced to work for years in the concentration camps. Their trauma led to violent, angry, and rebellious behavior, even toward people who were trying to help them. Because of this destructive behavior, Allied soldiers often lost respect and sympathy for them. Unimaginable things were done by the allied soldiers. In one instance, after another round of unruly behavior as the prisoners were transported from the camps to their homes, the top Soviet liaison officer could no longer take it. He picked ten of them at random, had them taken out, and shot them as a lesson to others.
Some people often wonder about the Israeli settlements in Palestine. They ponder why the Jews could not settle amicably in European and American countries since the world was on their side after the war. Yet, as revealed in the book, hostility did not end against the Jews after the war. For instance, in Poland, more than a year after World War II ended, a town of 25,000 Jews was reduced to just 200 people. In other cases like this, it took the efforts of agents from Jewish aid organizations to help the survivors flee from such hostile territories. In Munich, one citizen wrote to a newspaper about Jews who were “the sputum, the yeast, and the scum of elements who were never deported but, to avoid regular work, came here from the eastern states, in many cases completely illegally, and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.”
Some prisoners never wanted to leave the camp for fear of persecution and the news that they would be unwelcome even by their own families. More than 150,000 of them were still living in camps after 1951, in spite of countless repatriation and access programmes.
NewWorldAlert: billet (to assign temporary accommodation to)
Some did not leave these camps because of patriarchy. During the war, with a shortage of men to carry out roles traditionally reserved for men, women found out that they could run a city without men. They drove trams, cranes, and bulldozers, cut screw threads and rolled metal plates, and took over parts of public administration and company management. They solved all the strange mysteries of how men used to do their prestigious jobs before the war. And they were used to making the biggest decisions on their own. So , when the soldiers came back, they were distressed. With many of them impotent because of the treatment in the camps, they considered themselves ‘useless’. Coupled with the fact that they could not work because they were infirm, it basically led to the collapse of the family.
What happened between the men and their sons was even sadder to read. Most of the people who came back hadn’t seen their kids in a long time, and some came back to meet them for the first time. They had trouble getting along with their kids and were envious of how their kids talked to their mothers and played with them. They thought their kids were too spoiled, so they often used drills and punishments they had learned in the army to get them back in shape. The alienation between fathers and children, particularly with sons, often assumes dramatic forms. Children who had grown up quickly after the war by making their own money through loot and trading on the black market didn’t understand why they should suddenly obey a ‘sick, useless dictator’.
Men who returned from war were disdained, and the ones who had stayed back were not respected. To many, they were responsible for the war and, worse, had been incompetent at it by losing it, bringing shame to the entire nation. The defeat of the male sex was one of many at the end of this war. This may be why the sexual liberation of women became more pronounced after the war. The German women were particularly drawn to the American soldiers, not the least the Black GIs. Hitler and his team had warned them of the fierceness of the soldiers, but seeing them at close range, they could not help but be charmed by their suave. “The ease with which the victors sat enthroned in their cars made them look like affable gods in the eyes of many women.” The soldiers, who had also been warned not to give handshakes or even wave at the Germans, were taken aback by the reception. The threat of “the women who spread diseases” did not dissuade the soldiers from returning the favors. You have to read about the role Beate Uhse played in the sexual liberation of German women. It is a fantastic story of entrepreneurship, pivot, and boldness.
Harald told a lot of stories. How the cigarette became the cowry shell of the post-war era. Its exchange rate might have fluctuated, but it remained one of the more dependable certainties of those years. It was ideal as a currency: it was small, easily transported, stacked, and counted. It came in packs the way banknotes came in bundles. How the times allowed a 27-year-old to be in charge of what might be called the greatest logistical achievement of the American Army since the Normandy D-Day landings — the printing, transportation, and distribution of a total of 500 tons of banknotes from the United States to Germany. How the city of Wolfsburg was created due to Hitler’s hopes that Volkswagen, literally “the people’s car,” would be available for every German, which among other things won him so much love that it took 12 years after the war for a movie by Charlie Chaplain, which parodies Hitler as a buffoon, to be considered appropriate to be shown to the German public.
Harald told stories of the reeducation of the Germans by Americans, including through abstract art. The American propaganda strategists recognized very quickly that art could be very useful in the promotion of democracy. The Americans put a huge amount of energy into encouraging abstract art. They organized grants for young painters, financed exhibitions, and bought paintings in large quantities. It worked. Art came to be one of the differences between how West Germany was influenced by America and its allies, and how East Germany was influenced by the Soviet Union.
But more fundamentally, the reader would be struck by the denial the Germans put up after the war. They considered themselves victims of Hitler, not his accomplices. Some cited the SS and Gestapo’s terror regime over Germans during the war’s final stages, ignoring the fact that, for the most part, Hitler had little need to resort to coercion of his own people because he could rely on the loyalty of the vast majority.
The way the war trials worked could also be to blamed for this point of view: the burden of proof was turned around. It was not up to the prosecution to show proof that the accused was guilty. Instead, the accused had to prove they were not guilty. In theory, acquittal for lack of evidence was not a possibility. The logical reason for this was that a Party member was already guilty because he or she was a part of a criminal group. He now had to show why he should be let off the hook. The Germans considered this prosecution approach persecution and closed ranks. Defendants went about asking non-incriminated acquaintances, respected non-Nazis, or Nazi victims themselves for so-called Persilscheine — denazification certificates — testifying that while the defendants might have been Party members, in practice they had been on the right side. This might mean, for example, that they had helped an old Jewish woman across the street or made jokes about the regime.
Interesting Fact: The American team during the trial between November 1945 and October 1946 consisted of 600 staff.
One of the most intriguing things I got from the book is how the ex-Nazi members were integrated into society. When German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was verbally pummeled, both domestically and internationally, for appointing a former Nazi into his cabinet, he responded by saying, “One does not throw out dirty water while one does not have clean.”
It worked. The call for amnesty wasn’t a call for Nazism to keep going; it was a call for the important will to start over. As many people, including Hermann Lübbe, said at the time, it didn’t matter where someone came from, only where they wanted to go. The German society you see today did not come about by accident. It was a deliberate experiment by the allies and, importantly, by the German people.
My criticism of the book is that while it is promoted as a book about the fallout of the Third Reich, it is more accurately a narration of the events that took place on the western side of the Third Reich. Not as much insight was given about what happened in Eastern Germany. I would like to read how East Germany’s recovery into abject poverty compares to West Germany’s recovery into prosperity.
My review may be easy to read, but Harald’s book may not be as comfortable. It is a dense and tough material of 400 pages that made me read two other books before I summoned the courage to finish. But that does not mean it is not an important book. Nigerian politicians, for one, should read it for lessons on how to unite a nation on the brink of disaster. Nigerian citizens should read it on the role of allies in shaping culture and pushing a nation to prosperity.
The well-written nature of the book is even more impressive considering it was originally written in German. The English translation is masterly — so good that it sounds like it was written in literate and literary English from the start.
I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in World War II because it is important to know what happened after the war and how Germany was able to recover from being completely destroyed and become the so-called economic powerhouse of Europe.
