The devastation of Europe and Japan
World War II left both Europe and Japan in the ruined, with the highest death rates and high property damage. The greatest cities of Europe remained undamaged, though the countryside was destroyed by the ground war. While trying to rebuild Europe from the devastations, the allies held trials in Germany, where they captured Nazi leaders and were charged with crimes against humanity. The U.S. occupied Japan under the command of General MacArthur, he destroyed the Japanese army and gave farmers and workers more power in the economy. He also changed the constitution in Japan making everyone turn their view point. The hierarchy was changed as well forcing the emperor to declare him self that he was not a god.
ten best articles
1. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe: review, Keith Lowe is captivated by the account of the remaining oppostion of post-war Europe. "Wretchedly, the world conflict did not end with Hitler’s suicide in the bunker. In this remarkable new history of post-war Europe, Keith Lowe chronicles lingering antagonisms and resentments. In eastern Europe especially, the keynote of liberation was often unimaginable violence. The abiding symbol of “freedom” in future Soviet territories was the open cattle car shunting cargoes of displaced persons – DPs – away from their birthplace. My mother, a refugee from Stalinist oppression in the Baltic states, fled her home in Tallinn in September 1944 to make her way on foot through the catastrophically razed Third Reich to a DP camp near Bremen in Germany, from where she reached England in 1947. Her story is not untypical of the many accounts of displacement and exile recorded here by Lowe".
2. Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse: review by Ian Tompson, "By the war’s end, Berlin’s Jewish community had effectively been wiped out. Hitler and his followers had learnt to scorn the Judaeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak, and their violent social Darwinism culminated in the uniquely German crime of Auschwitz.In a brilliant chapter, Moorhouse relates how Hitler Youth threw themselves enthusiastically into the last-ditch defence of Berlin. Some had been mobilised into the hurriedly formed Volkssturm or People’s Army, a ragtag soldiery that was expected to hold back the Red Army. With Hitler’s defeat imminent, appallingly, uniformed boys were seen to hand out cyanide capsules at a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Really, with its cult of destruction and self-sacrifice, Nazism might have been designed for adolescence.Following Hitler’s suicide, however, a strange silence settled over the moral and material ruins of Berlin. The city’s Trümmerfrauen – 'rubble women’ – dutifully set to work clearing bomb damage by passing buckets of debris down a line. Most Berliners seemed to blame everything on Hitler.They felt no responsibility for the catastrophe at all. In this vitally important work, Moorhouse shows how a great German city was disrupted in different ways by the war, depending on whether its citizens were Jewish, pro-Hitler or simply willing to be degraded into collaboration. As a leading historian of modern Germany, Moorhouse has chronicled a largely unknown story with scholarship, narrative verve and, at times, an awful, harrowing immediacy.
3.GERMANY 1945: From War to Peace By Richard Bessel, reviewed by By BRIAN LADD, "The distinguished British historian Richard Bessel, however, understands the difference between suffering and atonement, and with “Germany 1945” he has produced a sober yet powerful account of the terrible year he calls the “hinge” of the 20th century in Europe. Bessel leaves no doubt about who was to blame for the suffering: Hitler, who chose to destroy his country rather than surrender and face defeat. For the German people — many bombed or chased out of their homes, all at the mercy of the occupying armies — this was the legacy of the Third Reich: not conquest and glory, nor genocide and guilt, but betrayal and ruin, rubble and grief ".
4. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, reviewed byHenry Wend shows the children's moral difficulty with the allies occupation, "If children are included in collective guilt, this could be accepted on the basis that they were going to grow up to be Germans and therefore possibly Nazis" (p. xiv). With this statement, he raises the troubling moral quandary of Allied behavior in a debilitated Germany after organized resistance crumbled in 1945. From MacDonogh's view, the crimes of the National Socialist regime did not justify the brutalization of the German civilian population, mainly because "it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men.When moral and legal authority is commanded by criminals, crime becomes the accepted communal norm, indistinguishable from rule of law during normal times. This tendency breaks down the codes that characterize civil society. MacDonogh marshals abundant examples of such moral ambiguity: Catholic priests encouraging their parishioners to steal bread and coal to stay alive; surly Nazis defending themselves before Soviet judges in the compromised courts at Nuremberg; Allied forces changing the status of surrendered German soldiers so that they could be leased as slave labor throughout Europe; and the economic netherworld of the black market where even money did not hold its face value".
5. War, Guilt, and World Politics After World War II, By Thomas U. Berger, Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry. Berger shows that Japanese leaders have in fact acknowledged responsibility for the atrocities the country’s forces committed in the past and have tried to make amends. The trouble is that government apologies and admissions of responsibility are interpreted differently by different audiences. The book’s message to Japanese leaders is that for symbolic acts of reconciliation to succeed, they must simultaneously address the fears and grievances of Japan’s neighbors and undercut nationalist movements at home.
6. After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995 (review) Daniel Friel, "The author contends that Germany changed over decades through a collective learning process initially spearheaded by a minority of anti Fascist Germans as well as by the United States and the Soviet Union. By analyzing the development of public discourse and individual experiences since World War II, the book seeks to show how events and structural transformations influenced the behavior and beliefs of ordinary Germans. Compared to the demilitarization of the country's political structure and the reform of the German economy, the necessary changes in German consciousness are seen as a more protracted process that has made incredible advances, even if the project of "civilizing" German society is still incomplete. Jarausch argues that studies of the transformation of German society should focus on the reemergence of civil society rather than on the concept of the special German path (Sonderweg) as the latter concept has moved toward a conception of Westernization that does not show how German society was actually transformed".
7. FAREWELL, DRESDEN By Henri Coulanges, reviewed by Melinda M. Ponder, describing the life of a Jew and the aftermath of the war. "Johanna's pain from such hatred resembles the pain she has always felt from her mother's rejection of her. Just as she is attacked for being German in the war, she has been unloved by her mother because of her physical resemblance to her dead father, a man absent from her mother's heart and memory. ``Farewell, Dresden,'' however, suggests that Johanna's feelings of abandonment, like those of a war-ravaged people who believe they are separated forever from humanity, can gradually change.She goes from seeing warriors not as romantic knights in books but as riderless, emaciated horses of the Dresden circus, then as the horsemen who rape her mother, and finally, as the mounted soldiers intent on murdering all the Germans in Prague, as the war comes to a bloody end.Winner of the $50,000 Grand Prize of the Acad'emie Fran,caise, ``Farewell, Dresden'' remembers for a new generation of readers the most destructive bombing in the European theater of World War II. Its images are unforgettable."
8.The Bombers and the Bombed,’ by Richard Overy, reviewed by BEN MACINTYRE,"Overy explores the full range of European bombing, including the London Blitz, the bombings of Bulgaria, Italy and France, and finally the ferocious Allied assault on Germany that saw Hamburg, Dresden and much of Berlin reduced to charred ruins. Overy’s writing is temperate, but his judgments are devastating, and through it all runs a vein of quiet anger at the sheer profligacy, in squandered blood and treasure, of waging war this way.One by one, comforting myths are demolished. Long-range bombing by Britain and later by the Allies is usually defended as a valid retaliation in response to the indiscriminate German bombing of civilians. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind,” Bomber Harris is said to have remarked after Luftwaffe bombs rained down on London. (Notions of punishment, revenge and tactics were hopelessly entangled from the start.) Overy demonstrates, however, that the tactic of bombing urban areas had been put into action by the British before the Blitz".
9. Churchill and His Myths by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "And it is intertwined with another argument, about the war in which he led his country. Lukacs takes as his text, and as his title, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, the first speech Churchill gave as prime minister on May 13, 1940—three days after the German invasion of France—with its bleak warning of sufferings to come, telling Parliament and people “that immediately ahead of them loomed the prospect not of a Good War,” as Lukacs puts it, “of triumphs near or faraway, but the prospect of plight and suffering in the face of disasters.” But there was no more haunting passage in that speech than the promise “to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime.” With those words Churchill marked out for the future the essential narrative of a noble war fought with a unique moral purpose: the narrative of a Good War that Baker and Buchanan want to challenge.Despite occasional equivocations, Churchill had recognized the nature of the Third Reich from the beginning; and in the autumn of 1938, still in the political doldrums, he staked all his political chips on opposing the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September. The man who rescued his career and his reputation was Hitler. Although Neville Chamberlain was welcomed home by cheering crowds, many Englishmen felt at heart like Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, when he greeted Munich “with a mixture of shame and relief,”
10. HUMAN SMOKE The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker, reviewed by By COLM TOIBIN."The novelist Nicholson Baker' s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy, insisting on charting the precise state of things. He has now applied this system to history, to the few years before the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World War II as a full participant. It is clear Baker has not done this as a literary exercise, nor as a new way of amusing himself and his readers, but because of a passionate view of how the war against Germany was conducted by Britain under Winston Churchill. Baker is adept at managing the reader’s emotion. His vignettes about the treatment of the Jewish population, the deportations and the planned mass murders, are just as carefully chosen, with the same amount of barely contained anger in them as his pieces about what was done to the civilians of Germany and to the civilians of Britain by bombers. It seems that he wishes to stir up an argument as much as settle one. In his afterword he says of the pacifists: “They failed, but they were right.” It is an aspect of the subtlety of his book that the reader is entitled to wonder if it’s true.
2. Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse: review by Ian Tompson, "By the war’s end, Berlin’s Jewish community had effectively been wiped out. Hitler and his followers had learnt to scorn the Judaeo-Christian morality of compassion for the weak, and their violent social Darwinism culminated in the uniquely German crime of Auschwitz.In a brilliant chapter, Moorhouse relates how Hitler Youth threw themselves enthusiastically into the last-ditch defence of Berlin. Some had been mobilised into the hurriedly formed Volkssturm or People’s Army, a ragtag soldiery that was expected to hold back the Red Army. With Hitler’s defeat imminent, appallingly, uniformed boys were seen to hand out cyanide capsules at a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Really, with its cult of destruction and self-sacrifice, Nazism might have been designed for adolescence.Following Hitler’s suicide, however, a strange silence settled over the moral and material ruins of Berlin. The city’s Trümmerfrauen – 'rubble women’ – dutifully set to work clearing bomb damage by passing buckets of debris down a line. Most Berliners seemed to blame everything on Hitler.They felt no responsibility for the catastrophe at all. In this vitally important work, Moorhouse shows how a great German city was disrupted in different ways by the war, depending on whether its citizens were Jewish, pro-Hitler or simply willing to be degraded into collaboration. As a leading historian of modern Germany, Moorhouse has chronicled a largely unknown story with scholarship, narrative verve and, at times, an awful, harrowing immediacy.
3.GERMANY 1945: From War to Peace By Richard Bessel, reviewed by By BRIAN LADD, "The distinguished British historian Richard Bessel, however, understands the difference between suffering and atonement, and with “Germany 1945” he has produced a sober yet powerful account of the terrible year he calls the “hinge” of the 20th century in Europe. Bessel leaves no doubt about who was to blame for the suffering: Hitler, who chose to destroy his country rather than surrender and face defeat. For the German people — many bombed or chased out of their homes, all at the mercy of the occupying armies — this was the legacy of the Third Reich: not conquest and glory, nor genocide and guilt, but betrayal and ruin, rubble and grief ".
4. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, reviewed byHenry Wend shows the children's moral difficulty with the allies occupation, "If children are included in collective guilt, this could be accepted on the basis that they were going to grow up to be Germans and therefore possibly Nazis" (p. xiv). With this statement, he raises the troubling moral quandary of Allied behavior in a debilitated Germany after organized resistance crumbled in 1945. From MacDonogh's view, the crimes of the National Socialist regime did not justify the brutalization of the German civilian population, mainly because "it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men.When moral and legal authority is commanded by criminals, crime becomes the accepted communal norm, indistinguishable from rule of law during normal times. This tendency breaks down the codes that characterize civil society. MacDonogh marshals abundant examples of such moral ambiguity: Catholic priests encouraging their parishioners to steal bread and coal to stay alive; surly Nazis defending themselves before Soviet judges in the compromised courts at Nuremberg; Allied forces changing the status of surrendered German soldiers so that they could be leased as slave labor throughout Europe; and the economic netherworld of the black market where even money did not hold its face value".
5. War, Guilt, and World Politics After World War II, By Thomas U. Berger, Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry. Berger shows that Japanese leaders have in fact acknowledged responsibility for the atrocities the country’s forces committed in the past and have tried to make amends. The trouble is that government apologies and admissions of responsibility are interpreted differently by different audiences. The book’s message to Japanese leaders is that for symbolic acts of reconciliation to succeed, they must simultaneously address the fears and grievances of Japan’s neighbors and undercut nationalist movements at home.
6. After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995 (review) Daniel Friel, "The author contends that Germany changed over decades through a collective learning process initially spearheaded by a minority of anti Fascist Germans as well as by the United States and the Soviet Union. By analyzing the development of public discourse and individual experiences since World War II, the book seeks to show how events and structural transformations influenced the behavior and beliefs of ordinary Germans. Compared to the demilitarization of the country's political structure and the reform of the German economy, the necessary changes in German consciousness are seen as a more protracted process that has made incredible advances, even if the project of "civilizing" German society is still incomplete. Jarausch argues that studies of the transformation of German society should focus on the reemergence of civil society rather than on the concept of the special German path (Sonderweg) as the latter concept has moved toward a conception of Westernization that does not show how German society was actually transformed".
7. FAREWELL, DRESDEN By Henri Coulanges, reviewed by Melinda M. Ponder, describing the life of a Jew and the aftermath of the war. "Johanna's pain from such hatred resembles the pain she has always felt from her mother's rejection of her. Just as she is attacked for being German in the war, she has been unloved by her mother because of her physical resemblance to her dead father, a man absent from her mother's heart and memory. ``Farewell, Dresden,'' however, suggests that Johanna's feelings of abandonment, like those of a war-ravaged people who believe they are separated forever from humanity, can gradually change.She goes from seeing warriors not as romantic knights in books but as riderless, emaciated horses of the Dresden circus, then as the horsemen who rape her mother, and finally, as the mounted soldiers intent on murdering all the Germans in Prague, as the war comes to a bloody end.Winner of the $50,000 Grand Prize of the Acad'emie Fran,caise, ``Farewell, Dresden'' remembers for a new generation of readers the most destructive bombing in the European theater of World War II. Its images are unforgettable."
8.The Bombers and the Bombed,’ by Richard Overy, reviewed by BEN MACINTYRE,"Overy explores the full range of European bombing, including the London Blitz, the bombings of Bulgaria, Italy and France, and finally the ferocious Allied assault on Germany that saw Hamburg, Dresden and much of Berlin reduced to charred ruins. Overy’s writing is temperate, but his judgments are devastating, and through it all runs a vein of quiet anger at the sheer profligacy, in squandered blood and treasure, of waging war this way.One by one, comforting myths are demolished. Long-range bombing by Britain and later by the Allies is usually defended as a valid retaliation in response to the indiscriminate German bombing of civilians. “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind,” Bomber Harris is said to have remarked after Luftwaffe bombs rained down on London. (Notions of punishment, revenge and tactics were hopelessly entangled from the start.) Overy demonstrates, however, that the tactic of bombing urban areas had been put into action by the British before the Blitz".
9. Churchill and His Myths by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "And it is intertwined with another argument, about the war in which he led his country. Lukacs takes as his text, and as his title, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, the first speech Churchill gave as prime minister on May 13, 1940—three days after the German invasion of France—with its bleak warning of sufferings to come, telling Parliament and people “that immediately ahead of them loomed the prospect not of a Good War,” as Lukacs puts it, “of triumphs near or faraway, but the prospect of plight and suffering in the face of disasters.” But there was no more haunting passage in that speech than the promise “to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime.” With those words Churchill marked out for the future the essential narrative of a noble war fought with a unique moral purpose: the narrative of a Good War that Baker and Buchanan want to challenge.Despite occasional equivocations, Churchill had recognized the nature of the Third Reich from the beginning; and in the autumn of 1938, still in the political doldrums, he staked all his political chips on opposing the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September. The man who rescued his career and his reputation was Hitler. Although Neville Chamberlain was welcomed home by cheering crowds, many Englishmen felt at heart like Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, when he greeted Munich “with a mixture of shame and relief,”
10. HUMAN SMOKE The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker, reviewed by By COLM TOIBIN."The novelist Nicholson Baker' s customary style in books like “The Mezzanine” and “Room Temperature” is to observe the world in slow, painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for the sake of accuracy, insisting on charting the precise state of things. He has now applied this system to history, to the few years before the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World War II as a full participant. It is clear Baker has not done this as a literary exercise, nor as a new way of amusing himself and his readers, but because of a passionate view of how the war against Germany was conducted by Britain under Winston Churchill. Baker is adept at managing the reader’s emotion. His vignettes about the treatment of the Jewish population, the deportations and the planned mass murders, are just as carefully chosen, with the same amount of barely contained anger in them as his pieces about what was done to the civilians of Germany and to the civilians of Britain by bombers. It seems that he wishes to stir up an argument as much as settle one. In his afterword he says of the pacifists: “They failed, but they were right.” It is an aspect of the subtlety of his book that the reader is entitled to wonder if it’s true.
audio/ Video
World War II: Aftermath
Japan and World War II Documentary
Aftermath in Germany
Primary source documents
1. Memorandum for the Secretary of War, "Atomic Fission Bombs, I. Purpose of Development; The successful development of the Atomic Fission Bomb will provide the United States with a weapon of tremendous power which should be a decisve factor in winning the present war more quickly with a saving in American lives and treasure. If the Unite States continues to lead in the development of atomic energy weapons, its future much safer and the chances of preserving world peace greatly increased".
2. Memorandum for Chief of Staff; Japans situation for the next 30 days. Top Secret, " During the period 12 August-12 September, 1945, three course are open to the Japanese: a. To drag out negotiations for the purpose of securing more favorable terms; b. To reject the last Allied proposal and continue hostilities; or c. To accept the Allied proposal".
3. New York Times Front Page, August 14, Japan today unconditionally surrendered the hemispheric empire taken by the force and held almost inact for more than two years against the rising powers of the United States and its Allies in the Pacific war. .. Like hthe previous items in the surrender correspondence, today's Japanese document was forwarded through the Swiss Foreign Office at Berne and the Swiss Legation in Washington. The note of total capitulation was delivered to the State Department by the Legation Charge d'Aaffaires at 6:10 p.m., after the third and most anxious day of waiting on Tokyo, the anxiety intensified by several premature or false reports of the finale of World War II
2. Memorandum for Chief of Staff; Japans situation for the next 30 days. Top Secret, " During the period 12 August-12 September, 1945, three course are open to the Japanese: a. To drag out negotiations for the purpose of securing more favorable terms; b. To reject the last Allied proposal and continue hostilities; or c. To accept the Allied proposal".
3. New York Times Front Page, August 14, Japan today unconditionally surrendered the hemispheric empire taken by the force and held almost inact for more than two years against the rising powers of the United States and its Allies in the Pacific war. .. Like hthe previous items in the surrender correspondence, today's Japanese document was forwarded through the Swiss Foreign Office at Berne and the Swiss Legation in Washington. The note of total capitulation was delivered to the State Department by the Legation Charge d'Aaffaires at 6:10 p.m., after the third and most anxious day of waiting on Tokyo, the anxiety intensified by several premature or false reports of the finale of World War II