Richard Bessel - Germany 1945: From War to Peace

Publisher : Simon & Schuster UK
Publication date : Sept. 27 2012
Print length : 562 pages
ISBN: 978-1-41652-619-3
ISBN: 978-1-84983-201-4 eBook
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In 1945, Germany experienced the greatest outburst of deadly violence that the world has ever seen.
Germany 1945 examines the countrys emergence from the most terrible catastrophe in modern history. When the Second World War ended, millions had been murdered; survivors had lost their families; cities and towns had been reduced to rubble and were littered with corpses.
Yet people lived on, and began rebuilding their lives in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Bombing, military casualties, territorial loss, economic collapse and the processes of denazification gave Germans a deep sense of their own victimhood, which would become central to how they emerged from the trauma of total defeat, turned their backs on the Third Reich and its crimes, and focused on a transition to relative peace.
Germanys return to humanity and prosperity is the hinge on which Europes twentieth century turned. For years we have concentrated on how Europe slid into tyranny, violence, war and genocide; this book describes how humanity began to get back out.

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1945 was the most pivotal year in Germanys modern history. As World War II drew to a devastating and violent close, the German people were confronted simultaneously with making sense of the horrors just passed and finding the strength and hope to move forward and rebuild. Richard Bessel offers a provocative portrait of Germanys emergence from catastrophe, and he astutely portrays the defeated nations own sense of victimhood after the war, despite the crimes it had perpetrated.
The last months of the war were its bloodiest, as the Allied assault on Nazi Germany reached its climax. .In January alone, as many as one million people died violent deaths. Bessel captures the terrible suffering of these months in the destroyed cities; the acts of vengeance inflicted on Germans by the conquering Soviets, French, and Americans; as well as death marches and the extreme brutality of the Nazi regime against its own people. In spite of this horrific violence, by the end of 1945 people were beginning to put their lives back together and create the foundations of a postwar social, economic, and political culture.
Authoritative and dramatic, Germany 1945 is groundbreaking history that brilliantly explores the devastation and remarkable rebirth of Germany at the end of World War II. Bessels startling narrative depicts perhaps the most important transition of modern times: from the worst outburst of violence in human history to a period of relative peace, prosperity, and civilized behavior. Ultimately, it is a success story, a story of life after death.