Learn about post-WW II Europe with these old magazine articles. Find information on occupied Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s.
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.
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.
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.sumo men. These sumo wrestlers weigh about 300 pounds and are very agile…
You might also like to read articles about post-war Japan.
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.
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…
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.
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…
The pages of PEOPLE TODAY, a short-lived gossip rag and probable ancestor of today’s PEOPLE
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…
