The very idea of an army and military service was highly controversial in post-war West Germany. After Nazism was defeated the Western allies initially banned the country from having an army. They relented in the s under Cold War pressures. But the new Bundeswehr was intended to be "citizens in uniform", as different as possible from previous German armies, over which a veil was often drawn.
When I first visited Germany on a school exchange in the s, the father of the family I was staying with talked readily about older military history, and proudly took me to the huge memorial near Detmold commemorating the massacre in the Teutoburger forest of Roman legions by German tribes.
He was much more reticent about his own service in WW2. The West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl began tentatively in the s to try and draw other world leaders into shared commemoration of German military casualties. It was widely claimed that Nazi war crimes had been committed by the SS and other elite units, while the mainstream Wehrmacht army had - like most of the German population - remained ignorant of and uninvolved in the Holocaust.
But then a s travelling exhibition called The Crimes of the Wehrmacht showed how the army had often been complicit in atrocities. This challenged the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" says Fulbrook, and "forced a shift in conversations, with young people now interrogating their grandparents in new ways. The awkwardness of such family conversations is what can make German commemoration of war still so difficult.
And broader hostility towards the military in general remains strong. Today's Germany has tiptoed only very slowly towards becoming a more "normal" military power, with the Bundeswehr deployed abroad. But "because of our guilt" he told me, "there is in every German a deep unconscious knowledge of this bad side combined with uniforms, weapons, army, brutality and war".
The private or small-scale remembrance of the millions of soldiers lost in war is still intense. War graves are central to this, with cemeteries in communities small and large hinting at the scale of the loss. The charity responsible for German war graves, the Volksbund, founded in , still organises many of Germany's commemorations of the war dead including the national day of mourning.
Since the end of the Cold War its work has also included the highly sensitive task of recovering soldiers' remains and maintaining German military cemeteries in parts of Central and Eastern Europe where the most terrible Nazi crimes were committed. The Volksbund stresses what it sees as its educational role. And that idea, in the end, strongly shapes German remembrance of war. Individual grief at the loss of family members, including millions of soldiers, is real enough.
But the memory of the vast numbers of other victims of Germany's wars will always be present too. The Allies learned that forcing Germany to a mere unconditional surrender had been a mistake. As the fighting finally ended in May , the first best option was simply to erase Germany from the map.
But the Third Reich steeled itself and its population to fight to the bitter end, at huge cost both to the Germans and those who had to pay the price of crushing them. We associate Japan with the kamikaze myth , but it surrendered before the Home Islands were invaded. German resistance ended when Soviet and American forces joined hands with no live Germans in between. The point of insisting on this violence is not to question its legitimacy in a self-righteous armchair exercise in ethics.
The point is to put in question the 21st-century memory of that leaves the violence out and imagines the world that came after as made out of the positive energies of solidarity, mobilization, and cooperation alone.
What this causes us to do is to lose sight of the war itself and how it remade the world. Three types of war came together to consume the Third Reich in the spring of , each of which helped shape the world down to the present day. The first was the gigantic clash of land armies and accompanying tactical air power that culminated in the battle for Berlin itself.
It was preeminently the war waged between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, and it was out of that furnace that the Soviet military emerged as the most formidable land army the world had ever seen.
This stood in a tradition that extends back, by way of the great struggle with Napoleon, to the emergence of Russia as a modern military power under Peter the Great. This line extends forward into the use of force as part of Russian statecraft today.
The second type of warfare on display in was the massive war of colonization started by the Third Reich six years earlier, which climaxed as the Red Army itself advanced into Germany.
Soviet troops unleashed a wave of violence against civilians, and in particular sexual violence against German women, that gave a new edge to the notion of a racial war. In the immediate aftermath began the ethnic cleansing of the German population of Eastern Europe, the largest forced movement of people at that point, variously estimated at between 12 million and This would reshape the ethnic map of Europe and complete the logic of ethnonationalism set in motion by the nationalisms of the 19th century.
After , it would remake large parts of Asia and Africa. Finally, the air war and its close relative the naval blockade were the quintessential expression of a modern mode of warfare, in which both Britain and the United States invested the majority of their war efforts.
The city of Berlin, which the Red Army blasted its way into beginning on April 16, , was ruined ahead of time by the attacks of the British and American bomber fleets that had begun in earnest in November All told, they dropped 68, tons of explosives on the German capital in addition to the 40, tons fired at the city by Soviet artillery in the final two weeks of the war.
By , London and Washington had gained complete control of the oceanic highways and much of the airspace of the world. Out of this gigantic effort was born the technology of modern logistics, radar and sonar, a new generation of aircraft with jet propulsion, and the Manhattan Project.
Surprisingly, there are historians who want to argue the priority of one or other of these modes of warfare. That is to miss the point. World War II was what it was because it was all three at once—a global, hypermodern confrontation of air and sea power, the greatest land conflict in history, and the death pangs of colonial warfare.
The Axis powers were overwhelmed by the vast pressure brought to bear on all three fronts, from the Atlantic Ocean to the skies above the Pacific, from North Africa to Ukraine and the interior of China.
But the complexity of the war also produced the complexity of its outcome. Avoiding pipes, windows, and other sources of leaks is also crucial. Additionally, storing materials on a shelf can prevent them from being damaged by floods and pests. Lastly, choosing an appropriately sized, lignin-free, acid-free container is an important part of preservation. At the conclusion of this article, a link will be provided where you can view and purchase these kinds of products.
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His first step was to arrange the letters by year, and then further organize the materials chronologically. Because his grandfather only recorded the day of the week, month, and day, Jeff has printed calendars from , , and so he can match the letters to their correct years. To help with this tedious work, he has involved his young sons in the process, turning it into a family project. During this organization, Jeff has uncovered letters on stationary, postcards, and ephemera, including a menu from Christmas in He notes that the menu includes the meal that was served roast turkey, sage dressing, mincemeat pie, and ice cream , but also the names of officers and non-commissioned officers in attendance, most of whom were from the Northeastern United States.
He married a woman named Rita and together they had four girls and one boy. When asked if he had ever been in battle, Jack recalled that he was once shot at in Italy, but he felt the shooter was only trying to scare him with no ill will intended.
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