Aftermath (WWII)

Learn about post-WW II Europe with these old magazine articles. Find information on occupied Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s.

‘A Letter to Germany” by Thomas Mann (Prevent W.W. III Magazine, 1945)

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.

Life in Post-War Vienna (Yank Magazine, 1945)

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.

One Year After the War (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

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.

Anti-Nazi POWs Schooled in the Ways of Democracy (American Magazine, 1946)

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 warstyle=border:none, 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.

The English-German Phrase Book for Occupying Forces (U.S. Army, 1943)

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.

Germany, The Unrepentant (See Magazine, 1950)

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.

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