End of the war 1945 – The mass murderers and their victims

What a year! First things first: Germany is liberated from Nazi rule. The Second World War ended – first in Europe in the spring of 1945, then in the Pacific in the fall. All of this has been described hundreds of times, but is now presented again in original tones from contemporaries. The dramaturg and documentary filmmaker Volker Heise, born in 1961, collected them and provided them with economical comments. The result is a montage of around 1,500 testimonies, arranged chronologically by month and day in quick succession, finds from diaries, letters, books and newspapers.

Women and men, military personnel of all ranks, friends and foes, civilians, the persecuted and the persecutors have their say. Rarely do they say anything pleasant; mostly there is talk of death and destruction, of losses, cold and hunger, and on the part of the victors also of hatred or satisfaction, pride and joy at the final peace. You can experience up close the feelings, disappointments and euphoria of people 80 years ago. A truth telling of the year 1945 of literary merit, regardless of the quality of the passages quoted.

Some of the original tones come from books by renowned authors such as the Soviet writer Wassili Semyonovich Grossman or his German guild colleague Erich Kästner, others from journalists such as Ruth-Andreas Friedrich, who lost her partner Leo Borchard, the Berliners’ first post-war conductor, due to a tragic mix-up Philharmonic Orchestra. There are also testimonies from Allied generals such as British Commander-in-Chief Bernard Law Montgomery or Soviet Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, who could argue about who brought about the decisive turn in the war, one in El Alamein in Egypt or the other in Stalingrad. They met at the Potsdam Conference at the end of July/beginning of August 1945. 17-year-old anti-aircraft workers also have their say.

Reports of the liberation of the concentration camps reveal the murderous dimensions of Nazi rule. In Bergen-Belsen, a British military court sentenced 13 perpetrators to death by hanging. The executioner, who flew in from England, describes how he took the female convicts waiting for their death into consideration when ordering the executions before he placed the rope around the delinquents’ necks. The camp commandant’s wife paints a positive picture of her husband, a mass murderer. Stefan Heym, Erika Mann and the American writer John Dos Passos, among others, reported on the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

Fritz Ernst Oppenheimer, lieutenant colonel in the US Army in Flensburg, is asked by former Wehrmacht commander Wilhelm Keitel why he can speak German without an accent. The German-Jewish emigrant remembers: “I was tempted to rub it in his face that I was born in Berlin, fought alongside him in the Prussian field artillery from 1915 to 1918, in Verdun… wounded several times and with the ironclad Cross.” However, Oppenheimer limited himself to the laconic answer: “The American schools are excellent.” A student from Hiroshima, a victim of the senseless criminal US atomic bomb dropping on August 6, 1945, is quoted, as is the German scientist and pacifist Otto Hahn, who was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in the same year for the first nuclear fission. The suffering of women raped in the last days of the war and the first weeks of peace, rampant sexually transmitted diseases, and the lack of medicine, food and fuel are also remembered, not only, but especially in large cities like Berlin. Even after the war is over, it’s a matter of life or death.

Volker Heise: 1945. Rowohlt, 464 pages, hardcover, €26.