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Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany Kindle Edition
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives.
In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters.
Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.
- ISBN-13978-0691143170
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateAugust 10, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- File size3882 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"All told, Grossmann's book paints a fascinating portrait of the 'close encounters' in occupied Germany among Jews, Germans, and Allies. Her gendered lens helps better nuance our understanding of this chaotic period. I highly recommend this book for scholars, students, and the general public."---Lynn Rapaport, Holocaust and Genocide Studies
"Winner of the 2006 Fraenkel Prize in Category A, Wiener Library"
"Grossmann has succeeded marvelously in reintegrating the history of Jews into the history of postwar Germany. Her book . . . is an essential contribution to the social and cultural history of the immediate postwar era."---Benjamin Lapp, Central European History
"Despite legend and conventional wisdom, there was intense interaction between Jews and Germans. Germans and Jews have both overlooked or forgotten this episode in their joint history, which Grossmann brings to life with a particularly fascinating examination of gendered experience and sexuality."---Jay Howard Geller, American Historical Review
"Atina Grossman has written an exceptionally fascinating book. . . . Atina Grossman has done us all a great service."---Julia Schulze Wessel, Shofar
"Atina Grossman's tale of the complicated relationship between surviving Jews, Germans, and Allies is enthralling and well written. The author has an eye for the telling anecdote and genuine sympathy for the people she writes about. Her extensive and creative use of German and Yiddish sources and her family connections to the Jewish DPs make the book both personal and scholarly."---Hal Elliott Wert, Journal of Military History
"Grossmann, herself the daughter of German-Jewish refugees, . . . has written the definitive history of [Allied-occupied Germany]." ― Jewish Post and News
"Jews, Germans, and Allies is an important historical document, especially in light of those revisionists who would impose a universal amnesia about the suffering and losses incurred during the Holocaust. The grim statistics that Ms. Grossmann presents in her carefully researched and well-organized book carry evidence of the terrible truth. But the testimony of the survivors she quotes contains the final, ineradicable facts of history."---Hilma Wolitzer, East Hampton Star
"This book makes a significant contribution by illuminating the fascinating and complex interactions between surviving Jews and their neighbors in postwar Germany."---Timothy Schroer, H-Net Reviews
"Any historian with even the vaguest idea of the monumental effort that goes into producing a research monograph like this, with thousands of archival and secondary sources used (the notes alone run to some 100 pages), will find it difficult to level serious criticism against it. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, Jews, Germans, and Allies has rightfully won a number of awards."---Kay Schiller, European History Quarterly
"Winner of the 2008 George L. Mosse Prize, American Historical Association"
"Atina Grossmann's great insight is that the postwar reappearance of a traumatized Jewish population--and the survivors' high rates of marriage, pregnancy and childbearing--cannot be understood apart from the parallel victimhood of the 'German' population."---Paul Grant, Books & Culture
"A pioneering and innovative study that will undoubtedly stimulate work in the fields of German and Jewish post-war history in the coming years."---Shirli Gilbert, Patterns of Prejudice
Review
"Jews, Germans, and Allies stakes out new historical and theoretical ground. Beautifully written, studded with verbal and pictorial images, Grossmann's text takes us on a gripping historical journey. A master narrative: she maintains complete control of the riveting history she tells, while weaving in amazing snapshots of individual lives and contemporary reports."―Debórah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University
"Diving into the wreckage, Professor Grossmann expertly sifts through the chaos, refusing reductionist paradigms and describing in detail the many complex encounters between Germans, Americans, Brits, Russians, French, and Jews in postwar Germany. This is fascinating social history that focuses as much on women as on men, on the occupiers as well as on the occupied."―Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From
"An evocative and richly documented book set in the rubble-strewn streets of postwar Berlin, in the Jewish refugee camps, and in the offices of the Allied occupiers. With an eye for drama and an ear for distinctive tonalities, Grossmann interweaves the three closely related and intersecting stories of Jewish survivors, defeated Germans, and American occupiers to show how these 'close encounters' produced contrapuntal memories of the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. This remarkable work transcends the genres of German and Jewish history and sets a new standard for writing the history of 'entanglements' in the post-1945 era."―Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
"Atina Grossmann's book is, without any doubt, a pioneering work on postwar German, Jewish, and partly also American history. Grossmann uses a whole range of previously unknown sources. The picture emerging from this wealth of new material is quite different from the many stereotypes, which still dominate our view of this unlikely historical episode. The most striking difference is the crucial role that gender plays in her analysis."―Michael Brenner, University of Munich
"Few other books, if any, have told the story of Germany's postwar Jews with such an eye to their interaction with non-Jewish Germans. Grossmann shows that both groups were victims in different ways, but that the status and character of their victimhood was of course very different. She has an eye for telling detail, and the gendered aspects to the story are particularly rich."―Mark Roseman, Indiana University
From the Inside Flap
"Atina Grossmann has written a beautiful book, methodologically sophisticated and rich in its detailed reconstruction of everyday life. It opens a grand view on the fascinating and critical period of the years immediately following the end of World War II in Europe."--Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors
"Jews, Germans, and Allies stakes out new historical and theoretical ground. Beautifully written, studded with verbal and pictorial images, Grossmann's text takes us on a gripping historical journey. A master narrative: she maintains complete control of the riveting history she tells, while weaving in amazing snapshots of individual lives and contemporary reports."--Debórah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University
"Diving into the wreckage, Professor Grossmann expertly sifts through the chaos, refusing reductionist paradigms and describing in detail the many complex encounters between Germans, Americans, Brits, Russians, French, and Jews in postwar Germany. This is fascinating social history that focuses as much on women as on men, on the occupiers as well as on the occupied."--Helen Epstein, author ofChildren of the Holocaust and Where She Came From
"An evocative and richly documented book set in the rubble-strewn streets of postwar Berlin, in the Jewish refugee camps, and in the offices of the Allied occupiers. With an eye for drama and an ear for distinctive tonalities, Grossmann interweaves the three closely related and intersecting stories of Jewish survivors, defeated Germans, and American occupiers to show how these 'close encounters' produced contrapuntal memories of the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. This remarkable work transcends the genres of German and Jewish history and sets a new standard for writing the history of 'entanglements' in the post-1945 era."--Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
"Atina Grossmann's book is, without any doubt, a pioneering work on postwar German, Jewish, and partly also American history. Grossmann uses a whole range of previously unknown sources. The picture emerging from this wealth of new material is quite different from the many stereotypes, which still dominate our view of this unlikely historical episode. The most striking difference is the crucial role that gender plays in her analysis."--Michael Brenner, University of Munich
"Few other books, if any, have told the story of Germany's postwar Jews with such an eye to their interaction with non-Jewish Germans. Grossmann shows that both groups were victims in different ways, but that the status and character of their victimhood was of course very different. She has an eye for telling detail, and the gendered aspects to the story are particularly rich."--Mark Roseman, Indiana University
From the Back Cover
"Atina Grossmann has written a beautiful book, methodologically sophisticated and rich in its detailed reconstruction of everyday life. It opens a grand view on the fascinating and critical period of the years immediately following the end of World War II in Europe."--Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors
"Jews, Germans, and Allies stakes out new historical and theoretical ground. Beautifully written, studded with verbal and pictorial images, Grossmann's text takes us on a gripping historical journey. A master narrative: she maintains complete control of the riveting history she tells, while weaving in amazing snapshots of individual lives and contemporary reports."--Debórah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University
"Diving into the wreckage, Professor Grossmann expertly sifts through the chaos, refusing reductionist paradigms and describing in detail the many complex encounters between Germans, Americans, Brits, Russians, French, and Jews in postwar Germany. This is fascinating social history that focuses as much on women as on men, on the occupiers as well as on the occupied."--Helen Epstein, author of Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From
"An evocative and richly documented book set in the rubble-strewn streets of postwar Berlin, in the Jewish refugee camps, and in the offices of the Allied occupiers. With an eye for drama and an ear for distinctive tonalities, Grossmann interweaves the three closely related and intersecting stories of Jewish survivors, defeated Germans, and American occupiers to show how these 'close encounters' produced contrapuntal memories of the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. This remarkable work transcends the genres of German and Jewish history and sets a new standard for writing the history of 'entanglements' in the post-1945 era."--Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
"Atina Grossmann's book is, without any doubt, a pioneering work on postwar German, Jewish, and partly also American history. Grossmann uses a whole range of previously unknown sources. The picture emerging from this wealth of new material is quite different from the many stereotypes, which still dominate our view of this unlikely historical episode. The most striking difference is the crucial role that gender plays in her analysis."--Michael Brenner, University of Munich
"Few other books, if any, have told the story of Germany's postwar Jews with such an eye to their interaction with non-Jewish Germans. Grossmann shows that both groups were victims in different ways, but that the status and character of their victimhood was of course very different. She has an eye for telling detail, and the gendered aspects to the story are particularly rich."--Mark Roseman, Indiana University
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Jews, Germans, and Allies
Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
By Atina GrossmannPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14317-0
Contents
List of Illustrations, ix,Preface: Where Is Feldafing?, xiii,
Abbreviations, xvii,
Introduction Entangled Histories and Close Encounters, 1,
Chapter One "Poor Germany": Berlin and the Occupation, 15,
Chapter Two Gendered Defeat: Rape, Motherhood, and Fraternization, 48,
Chapter Three "The survivors were few and the dead were many": Jews in Occupied Berlin, 88,
Chapter Four The Saved and Saving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in the American Zone, 131,
Chapter Five Mir Zaynen Do: Sex, Work, and the DP Baby Boom, 184,
Chapter Six Conclusion: The "Interregnum" Ends, 237,
Abbreviations in Notes, 269,
Notes, 271,
Select Bibliography, 359,
Acknowledgments, 369,
Index, 373,
CHAPTER 1
"Poor Germany"
BERLIN AND THE OCCUPATION
I have never read an adequate description of Berlin (and the American zone) in the early days of the Occupation; I think it would best be a subject for fiction.
—Dewilda N. Harris
May 8: Germany has capitulated. It held out six years against a world of enemies, it will recover again [wieder hochkommen].... Dear God—Berlin has had to endure so much, let this be over with.
May 18: In the Tagliche Rundschau big reports about the death camp in Auschwitz. Even if only a small part is true, and I fear it is all true, then the rage of the entire world against the Nazis is understandable. Poor Germany! [armes Deutschland]
—Anne-Marie Durand-Wever
In April 1945, after almost six years of war, the Allied armies had battled their way through German territory. Many German towns and cities capitulated quickly, but no victory was as important and hard won, both symbolically and logistically, as the Soviet capture of Berlin. By April 21, a gruesome, costly battle on the Seelow Heights had brought the Soviets up to the city limits. The Nazi propaganda machine raged on, exhorting Berliners, "Our walls are cracking, but not our hearts." Contemporary reports estimated, however, that some ten thousand residents committed suicide as the Soviets entered, raping, looting, distributing bread, and assuring water supplies all at the same time. Shocked and fascinated journalists (like future chroniclers) reveled in describing—or imagining, based on Soviet press reports—the spectacular last gasps of the "pounded corpse" that had been Nazi Berlin: "The world's fourth city, in its dying hours, was a monstrous thing of almost utter destruction.... Towers of fire surged into the pall of smoke and dust that overhung the dying city." One American chronicler tried to render his impressions for the hometown audience by asking them to imagine the scene as if one were to knock down every building between 34th and 59th Streets and between Eighth and Park Avenues. Then reduce to a burned out shell seven of every ten homes and apartments between 60th and 86th Streets on the West Side, and in the same way that you might sprinkle salt on an egg sprinkle destruction on the remaining sections of just Manhattan.
Within days, Berlin had finally become a battlefront (Frontstadt). There was no functioning transportation or communication system. By April 26, the telephones had stopped working and Berliners cowered in their cellars, cut off from news, awaiting the bitter end. The only thing that still seemed to flow was alcohol—successively liberated by the Berliners and the arriving Soviets—and the amphetamine Pervitin, which people had used to ward off sleep during the nightly bombing raids. Right before midnight on May 1, just as Stalin had envisioned, the red flag was hoisted atop the Reichstag. Some two hundred defenders hung on until May 2, when the SS, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Soviet triumph, blew up a subway tunnel in which people had sought shelter. Horrific rumors of a "death chamber [Todeskammer] under the train tracks" and thousands of casualties (including foreign workers herded into the tunnels) circulated through the city. Countless writers and filmmakers concluded that the city's fate could not be contained in sober, factual accounts, and have vividly depicted the savagery of war's end: the huge casualties as the Soviet armies, competing for Stalin's favor, fought their way into the city, the drunken brutality and sexual violence of the victors, and the determined sadism of the SS, which hanged deserters in the streets even as the flags of surrender were already flying a few streets over.
Es Lebe Berlin: Out of the Rubble
Wolfgang Leonhard, a twenty-four-year-old political officer in the Red Army whose mother, the German Communist exile Susanne Leonhard, was imprisoned in the Gulag, remembered flying, with future East German leader Walter Ulbricht, into a smoldering, still battle-torn Berlin on May 2. Many residents were already wearing white or red armbands. The most prudent among them sported both. German soldiers were being marched out of the city into Soviet captivity. Many would not return for nearly a decade, if ever.
At the same time, the Soviets, fueled by alcohol and embittered by the stubborn German refusal to capitulate, were obsessed with finding and delivering the Fuhrer's body to Stalin. The Soviet newspaper Pravda promised, "Whether he escaped to hell, to the devil's paws, or to the arms of fascist protectors, still he is no more. We shall find out what really happened to him. And if he escaped, we shall find him, no matter where he is." Finally, on May 8, a day after an earlier ceremony with Eisenhower at Rheims, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender in a small villa in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, which had become the Soviet headquarters.
Reducing Berlin to the "greatest pile of rubble in the world" was not, however, the Soviets' ultimate goal. Berlin was a trophy, not only to be conquered, destroyed, and sexually ravaged, but also to be molded, reconstructed, and displayed. The Red Army and its political advisers were prepared not only for relentless battle but for political and cultural propaganda and civic reconstruction. Already by April 28, the Soviet commander Marshall Berzarin had begun taking charge of the city and ordered it to come to life. Berliners were handed shovels and commanded to remove dead people and animals from the streets and to begin clearing rubble. Long lines of women appeared at the water pumps, and within an astonishingly few days basic order had been restored. Even as fighting still raged in the city center, municipal services lumbered into motion. While initial impressions impelled many observers to draw comparisons to ancient Pompeii—and John Dos Passos recorded that, "The ruin of the city was so immense it took on the grandeur of a natural phenomenon like the Garden of the Gods or the Painted Desert"—Berlin's infrastructure was surprisingly intact, ready for both reconstruction and exploitation. Although the Potsdamer Platz, the lively center of Weimar and Nazi Berlin, had become a "steppe," both the western and eastern suburbs were eerily unscathed. The original material damage, in fact, had been less severe than it appeared to be on camera and in the dramatic reports by both awed and triumphant occupiers or shell-shocked Berliners. Restaurants and cabarets were instructed to open for business. Radio Berlin returned to the air on May 4, and by May 14 the Berlin subway (Ubahn) was sputtering back into service.
As Berliners emerged from the cellars in which they had tried to escape the battle, so did, as is detailed in chapter 3, several thousand of their former neighbors, Jews and "partial" Jews who had survived in the "underground" of hiding and disguise, or in mixed marriages. Already on May 8, the first marriage in liberated Berlin was celebrated between two people who had not been allowed to marry under the Nuremberg racial laws. On May 12, the first Jewish religious service was reported in the reopened synagogue in the Lotringer Strasse. And on May 11 or perhaps 12 (the sources differ), another Jewish religious ceremony, also claimed as the first, was presided over by a Soviet army chaplain, in the Jewish Hospital.
On May 18, the first concert played in the Funkhaus, with Marshall Berzarin seated proudly and reassuringly in the front row. The first public soccer game, on May 20, attracted ten thousand spectators. The first Soviet film was screened on May 22. On May 27, 1945, the Renaissance Theater reopened—bizarrely, the Soviets licensed a premiere performance of Rape of the Sabines. Berzarin, the relatively popular Soviet Stadtkommandant (soon to be killed in a motorcycle accident), and the new Soviet-dominated Magistrat (municipal government) declared "Es lebe berlin!" (Long Live Berlin). Schools reopened and meals for children were organized. In early June, less than a month after war's end, the municipal swimming pools were filled and the telephones were working again. By the end of June, the city library had opened, three major banks (Commerz, Dresden, and Deutsche) were back in business, and four daily newspapers had been licensed. For a while it seemed like everything merited a "first": the first school day, the first wedding, the first concert, the first day at the public beach on Lake Wannsee—even if such activities had been suspended only for a relatively brief time. Newspapers cheered the reopening of the much-worried-about Berlin zoo. Susi, the ape, had made it through everything "in good shape," Berliners were reassured (with accompanying photo) in some of the first editions.
With the war barely over, the Soviets moved to shift away from the angry calls for vengeance issued by Red Army propagandists, such as the Russian-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, to Stalin's new line of "The Hitlers come and go, the German Volk remains." While Red Army soldiers continued to rape and plunder, other troops were handing out bread and working to rapidly restore municipal and cultural services. "Coal, food, and clothing" were the immediate issues, and "from the beginning food was used as a lever to make people work."16 Soviet efforts at control also took more symbolic and fantastic forms; for example, in June the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) placed Berlin on Moscow time, leaving the already disoriented city brightly lit at midnight and dark at 7:00 A.M. In some instances, the sense of insanity generated by the contradictions of Soviet occupation policy became entirely real, when, in some districts, "the Red Army took the job of liberation too literally and opened up not only the prisons and the concentration camps but the lunatic asylums as well." Much to the consternation of the SMA and their German communist allies, a released patient named Spalinger declared himself Kommandant of a Berlin Soviet (workers and soldiers council). He plastered the city with notices calling for the immediate arrest of all Nazi Party members, to be followed by activation of electric, gas, and water supplies, and a complete street cleaning. In May 1945, only the insane, it seemed, could still want to set up a Soviet republic (as imagined by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht after World War I) or, for that matter, demand the full bringing to justice of all Nazis and members of Nazi organizations.
The Soviets were the only Allied power on the ground in Berlin from late April until early July. The terms of unconditional surrender, however, called for dividing Germany into British, American, French, and Soviet zones, with Berlin to be split into four sectors overseen by a joint Kommandatura (military government). The Americans and Soviets would become the dominant and rival occupiers, but initially their approach to Berlin was quite different. For the Red Army, its generals competing fiercely for Stalin's favor, the Nazi capital was the prize that had to be conquered at all cost. To the Americans, hemmed in by Roosevelt's negotiations with Stalin and the various Allied agreements hammered out at Teheran and Yalta, it was not at all clear that Berlin, ugly and ruined, would be worth a conflict with the Soviet Union, not to mention the many casualties its capture would require. Eisenhower, it was widely assumed, was not unhappy to leave the Battle of Berlin to the Russians. Afterward he reportedly concluded that "it is quite likely, in my opinion, that there will never be any attempt to rebuild Berlin." The U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy, who years later decided that American disdain for the Berlin trophy was a monumental error, recorded his impressions when the Americans moved into the city in July 1945:
Two months after their surrender, Berliners still were moving about in a dazed condition. They had endured not only thousand-plane raids for years, but also weeks of Russian close-range artillery fire. In addition to three million Germans in Berlin, thousands of displaced persons were roaming around the shattered city.
After accusing his Soviet allies of having created in Berlin "another Nanking, with Russians instead of Japanese doing the raping, murdering, and looting," Colonel Frank Howley, the American commander, remembered in 1950:
Berlin in late July was still a shambles from the effects of Allied bombing, especially incendiary raids, and of Russian street fighting, but the Russians already had put large squads of German women to work clearing the rubble in various parts of the city. As the women wearily passed the fallen bricks from hand to hand, in a long human chain, they presumably were spurred on to heroic efforts by the great posters the Russians had erected to assure the Germans that they had not been conquered but "liberated" by the Communists from their Fascist oppressors.
When the Americans, practically sneaking past uncooperative Soviet sentries, finally made their way through—"On July 1, 1945, the road to Berlin was the highroad to Bedlam"—they found, somewhat to their displeasure, that everything crucial to the running of the city had already been organized by the SMA. Berlin was divided into twenty administrative districts, each with its own mayor and council. As the Communist leader Ulbricht insisted, "Communists too must learn to become good bureaucrats." He stated his plans for organizing the city in no uncertain terms: "It must look democratic but we must control everything." Adhering to Ulbricht's plan, reliable cadres hovered in less visible second-ranking positions while the SMA installed Popular Front figureheads—such as the renowned surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, who obediently served through all twentieth-century German regimes, or Catholic Center Party politician Andreas Hermes—in the newly constituted Magistrat. Deputy Mayor Kurt Maron, a tough Communist who was the real power behind the fellow-traveling Lord Mayor Werner, appealed in melodramatic tones, and with liberal repetition of its name, to the city's still extant local patriotism: "Get to work Berlin! Berlin must not and will not go under.... Berlin, our lovely Berlin has sunk in debris and rubble. Berliners, let's get rid of the filth in our streets and squares!" Evoking the physical destruction of the city as a reflection of Nazi rule, he admonished Berliners to "get rid also of all the filth in our hearts and minds." Indeed, by the time the Americans and British moved in, "the Russians had been in the city for nine weeks; a single Communist-controlled union, four political parties, a police force, and a municipal government were already established; and 80% of the factories that had survived the war had been dismantled."
The Americans officially occupied McNair Barracks on July 4, and quickly discovered that they faced more outright opposition from their Soviet allies than from the thoroughly "whipped" Berliners. The confrontation with the Nazi death camps had provoked deep anger at the Germans and uneasy compassion for their victims among the U.S. liberators, but the shock of witnessing what seemed to be a thoroughly destroyed capital, with its pathetic-looking, hungry, and exhausted population, also produced sympathy for the defeated Germans among top American officials. When Secretary of State James Byrnes—who a year later would articulate a new, more conciliatory stance toward Germany in the context of Cold War conflicts—toured the city with President Truman on the eve of the Potsdam Conference, he noted, "Despite all we had read of the destruction there, the extent of the devastation shocked us. It brought home the suffering that total war visits upon old folks, women, and children, besides the men in uniform." Other observers were less charitable. "The city was like a vast archeological excavation where only foundations could be traced, with an occasional bit of wall," the American Jewish writer Meyer Levin noted with some satisfaction. Berlin certainly was "all it was cracked up to be," an American Jewish GI wrote home sarcastically (and a bit jubilantly) on letter paper confiscated from Hitler's destroyed Chancellery.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Jews, Germans, and Allies by Atina Grossmann. Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B00KJAO520
- Publisher : Princeton University Press (August 10, 2009)
- Publication date : August 10, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 3882 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
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- Print length : 405 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,026,373 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,254 in Jewish Social Studies
- #2,619 in History of Germany
- #2,974 in Jewish History (Kindle Store)
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1. I had always thought that most Jewish D.Ps had been in concentration camps; the author notes, however, that many of them fled to the Soviet Union to avoid Nazism, survived the war in the Soviet Union, discovered after the war that their Eastern European hometowns were unwelcoming or dangerous, and then fled to the D.P. camps.
2. I had always thought of D.P. camps as sealed off from their German neighbors- but in fact they needed Germans in a wide variety of service jobs (e.g. plumbers, doctors etc). About 20 percent of D.Ps lived on their own in German towns, where they interacted even more with local Germans.
3. I was vaguely aware that Jews in the D.P. camps were eager to make up for lost time by getting married and having children- but I had no idea how eager. One estimate was that Jewish D.Ps had 50 births per 1000 people in 1947- roughly seven times the German birth rate at the time. Jews also had about ten times as many weddings as Germans.
The book also discusses Germans (who were very traumatized by the war in Berlin, but often were unaffected if they lived in rural areas far from combat) and surviving Berlin Jews (most of whom were elderly and highly assimilated).