Aftermath

Harald Jahner W.H. Allen €21 ★★★★★

The legacy of Adolf Hitler was devastation on an unparalleled scale, and in May 1945, as the dust settled after his suicide, it seemed no country was in a worse state than Germany. More than half the population had been displaced, with nine million people bombed out of their homes and 14 million refugees and exiles. German cities had been so flattened that an estimated 500 million cubic metres of rubble littered the streets. Yet within a decade the new West German state was booming and well on the way to becoming the most influential democracy in Europe. How did this happen and at what cost?

The answers the distinguished German journalist Harald Jahner offers in this thought-provoking book are fascinating but disquieting. Although the situation was slightly different in the

Communist-controlled East, Jahner thinks that Germans essentially came to terms with their recent past by ignoring it. The Nuremberg trials were a landmark in international law, but only a handful of leading Nazis ever faced justice for their crimes. Indeed, most Nazi party members were quietly reincorporated into society, many in senior roles. It was a trend endorsed by the first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, who said: ‘One does not throw out dirty water while one does not have clean.’

Ordinary Germans were happy to go along with the fiction that they too had been victims of the Nazis, while turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. And the western Allies actively encouraged them, because their attention was fixed on the Cold War. It was, to say the least, a dubious bargain, but the remarkable thing is that it produced such a successful and diverse democracy. Jahner’s unflinching account is a reminder that historical truths are rarely simple and always nuanced.