Haunted City

For those of us who regularly introduce young people to the complicated history of Germany in the twentieth century, Nuremberg most probably figures in two places in our syllabi. Who hasn’t shown the clip of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will in which Hitler descends from the heavens, then wends his way through the city en route to 1934 Nazi party congress? Nuremberg appears again a decade or so later, a symbol of German defeat, shame and guilt, the site of the trials of Nazi war criminals. In the years immediately following the Second World War, however, Neil Gregor tells us, most Germans in Nuremberg focused on other things. As he explains in this important book, they recalled not their enthusiasm for the Third Reich and their complicity in the crimes of the regime. Rather, they reflected most on their own misery, loss and suffering. The sources of that suffering were legion. The city lay in ruins, repeatedly hit by Allied bomb attacks. Many who had fled the bombs for the safety of the countryside had tremendous difficulties returning to the city, and for some evacuees, there would be no homecoming. A city already unable to feed or house its own citizens found itself overrun by expellees, Germans driven out of eastern Germany and eastern Europe by the Red Army at the end of the war. For some of Nuremberg's citizens, the war that ended in 1945 was followed by a long waiting period in which hopes that a loved one missing in action might return from the front were disappointed, or a father, son or brother taken prisoner by the Red Army continued to languish in the Soviet Union, in some cases until the mid-1950s. Many Germans labelled still others as ‘victims of denazification,’ people they saw as unjustly accused by the victorious Allies, who were unable to distinguish between, on the one hand, those really responsible for the regime's excesses, and on the other, those who had been caught up in the maelstrom and saw themselves as victims of a regime ‘whose terroristic nature had left them no alternatives’ (p. 103). In this exhaustively researched, elegantly written book, Gregor analyses how experiences of loss shaped narratives of the war and the postwar period in which Germans were the victims of Hitler's war and the postwar blunders of the Allied occupation forces.

Archaeology · Complicity · Enthusiasm · German · Gulag · International law · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Nuremberg trials · Political science · Spanish Civil War · War crime · World War II · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Psychology