The end of World War II: “A state of exception whose impact is still being felt”

Enlarge

The Second World War ended 80 years ago. Yet the initial post-war period was suffused with violence, social dislocation and the difficult task of coming to terms with Nazi crimes. Historian Professor Johannes Grossmann, Chair of Recent and Contemporary History at LMU, spells out what the end of the war meant for the German population in the early days – and how the repercussions can be felt to this day.

How did the Germans find out that the war had ended on 8 May 1945?

Johannes Großmann: Mostly by radio, which was already broadcasting in real time. Some newspapers too were published several times a day – as “special editions”, for example. News of the capitulation and the end of the war thus spread very quickly. Things were already relatively peaceful wherever the Allies had arrived earlier: In Aachen, for example, that was already the case in the fall of 1944. On the other hand, indoctrination persisted until the last for people in the few areas still controlled by the Wehrmacht – including a few spots in Bavaria and parts of Austria, Bohemia and Saxony.

The violence continued

What was life like in the immediate aftermath of the war?

Most people were undoubtedly relieved. But they were also uncertain about how the Allies would behave toward them. After all, recent studies indicate that a large majority of the Germans were aware of the war of annihilation and of violence toward the Jews from their own experience, first-hand accounts and rumors – even if National Socialist propaganda systematically suppressed such information.

After the end of the war, the Allies put up posters showing pictures from the concentration camps: pictures of starving figures and mountains of corpses. And they forced Germans to see camps such as Buchenwald and Dachau with their own eyes.

Enlarge

So, did all the violence come to an end on 8 May?

No. It continued – on the one hand because many people had become dulled and calloused because of the violence they themselves had experienced or even taken part in; and also because weapons that had fallen into private hands were used for plundering and violent robberies. In the first weeks after the war, marauding gangs scoured the country. Some were victims of the Nazi regime and wanted revenge. Others were ideologically blinded – or quite simply criminals.

Violence by the occupying forces was also a factor. Sexual assaults were ubiquitous. Here, however, the formal end of the war did indeed mark a decisive inflection point, because the Allies now issued very clear orders to put a stop to violence against civilians. Harsh penalties that went as far as the death sentence were imposed. Ultimately, the Allies could only credibly counter accusations of indulging in victors’ justice if they themselves refrained from war crimes.

In the occupied territories of Poland and Czechoslovakia too, the cycle of violence did not stop after the war. Today, there is a consensus among historians that wars, especially those that go far beyond military conflict – through systematic genocide and the displacement of populations, as in World War II – do not simply end at the push of a button.

How did opponents of the regime fare after the war ended?

Elites who were not compromised were sought out to rebuild society and a political system under the aegis of the Allies. For local administration purposes, the latter often deployed political players who had been sidelined by the National Socialist regime: social democrats and centrist politicians, but also nationalists and national liberals who had opposed National Socialism out of monarchist or religious convictions. Not all of them were impeccable democrats.

Many “returnee emigrants” who had fled from the Nazi regime and gone abroad now returned with good language skills and now found themselves much in demand. Some, however, were reluctant to come back. Others found it difficult to reintegrate into a society that, to some extent, still stigmatized them as “traitors to the fatherland”.

What happened to the surviving victims of the Nazi regime, and to those who had been deported?

After the end of the war, former victims of the Nazi regime and deportees often lived uprooted in Germany. The millions of displaced persons included numerous inmates of the concentration camps: Jewish survivors, people slandered by the regime and queer people, but also millions of forced laborers from Russia, the Ukraine and other formerly occupied territories. Throughout the Second World War, violence and the displacement of populations had always gone hand in hand.

Many of these “displaced persons” did not want to return to their country of origin. Even after the war, the Jewish population still faced the threat of pogroms in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, for example. As a result, many survivors initially remained in the former concentration camps, which the Allies transformed into “displaced persons” camps. These severely traumatized people needed basic provisions and a perspective for their life. Many found what they were looking for by emigrating to Palestine or the USA. Former Soviet forced laborers and prisoners of war were likewise hesitant to return to a home where captivity was regarded as cowardice toward and collaboration with the enemy. Many remained in Western Europe or emigrated to the USA or Canada.

What did German supporters of the Nazi regime do after the war?

One route that some National Socialist and Wehrmacht elites chose to escape from hopelessness or ideological blindness was suicide – in many cases collective suicide. Another was to flee – via the infamous “Ratline” through Austria and Italy to Latin America, for instance. However, most people were willing to grasp the outstretched hand of the Allies and learned to get by. Many did not want to admit their own guilt and claimed to have known nothing of the atrocities. They sanitized their résumés or even claimed to have helped people.

Others argued that they had merely been led astray by the regime. Backing for this view was also given by the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946, where it was mainly political and military elites who were hauled before the court.

The period immediately following the war

What is the importance of the period immediately following the war for us today?

It was a state of exception that should remain of elementary importance to German history going forward. Many of the foundations of today’s political and social order in Germany are rooted in this period – from public broadcasters based on the model of Britain’s BBC to regional and local constitutions to the Basic Law.

The transformation of a “total war economy” to an export-oriented peacetime was likewise accompanied by the Allies. Cultural and academic life was rebuilt. It was especially important to the Allies to reopen universities and establish new ones. They were convinced that education was an indispensable prerequisite for the creation of a democratic, peaceable Germany.

Enlarge

What was done to ensure the German crimes were not forgotten?

Following intensive acts of remembrance in the immediate post-war period, the establishment of the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic gave way to a more general, ritualized commemoration of the “victims of war and tyranny”, accompanied by amnesties and the rehabilitation of former National Socialist perpetrators. Critical debate – in schools, for example – remained difficult, as many teachers, educational policymakers and administrative officials had themselves been part of the Nazi system and had little interest in an in-depth review of their past. Historical research proved to be one exception. For instance, the Institute of Contemporary History, founded in Munich in 1949, very quickly began tackling the issue of National Socialism. Here too, however, the research initially focused on prominent perpetrators and the resistance, rather on the broad swathes of those who simply “went along to get along”.

From the 1960s onward, younger generations in Germany began to ask more critical questions about the role of their parents in the Nazi era. Yet it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that a more self-reflective and self-critical culture of remembrance emerged – often accompanied by the illusion that Germany had always been in the vanguard of these disciplines. Movements such as the History Workshops in the 1980s rocked certain long-held myths, as did the Wehrmacht exhibition at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research as of the 1990s.

Remembrance culture and its challenges

Enlarge

What is the remembrance culture like today?

Awareness of German guilt continues to have an impact. Right from the outset, however, intensive efforts to process the past were flanked by attempts to play it down, relativize the guilt and determine that “enough is enough”. What remains is a broad-based consensus that political decisions – especially foreign policy decisions – must be made with due consideration for the country’s National Socialist past. The principle of “no more war”, with reference to the Nazi past, had remained valid until the 1990s. Thereafter, however, the government justified its active participation in the Kosovo war in 1999 with the argument “no more Auschwitz”.

Germany’s relationship with Russia too was long shaped by historical feelings of guilt, until the attack on Ukraine in 2022 demanded a clear positioning – once again with recourse to the lessons of history. By no means least, remembrance of the Holocaust still shapes Germany’s stance on the conflict in the Middle East.

Are there differences between east and west?

West German society adopted an anti-totalitarian stance, whereas East Germany’s socialist regime exonerated itself of any shared responsibility for National Socialism and its consequences by cultivating an anti-fascist image. For this reason, the West German culture of remembrance was not always accepted when it became institutionalized in the east after 1990. That is one factor that today contributes to the strength of the AfD in eastern Germany. Nor are these the only differences: Women tend to be more interested than men in a culture of remembrance. Younger people tend to be more socially engaged than older people. And – contrary to all the clichés – people with a migration background frequently demonstrate exceptional empathy with the victims of National Socialism.

Now that contemporary witnesses are disappearing, what opportunities do modern technologies afford?

Modern technologies can definitely serve the cause of political education. But when holograms of Holocaust survivors give AI-generated answers, I, as a historian, see problems with their authenticity. Be that as it may, the memory of National Socialism will not depart from us even without personal recollections. One reason is that the children of contemporary witnesses are now bringing their perspective into focus. Another is that the bitter experiences of that time and their consequences have since been woven too deeply into our cultural, political and economic life – in part thanks to the course charted back then by the Allies.

Hands-on history: Eighty years after the end of World War II, students at LMU and pupils have taken a critical look back at the challenges the University faced in the post-war period