Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [19]
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Resistance to Hitler was quashed early by the powerful Nazi machinery of terror, but it never vanished entirely. On 20 July 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and other high-ranking army officers tried to assassinate Hitler and were executed. The mass extermination of Jews and other Nazi atrocities were outlined in the anti-Nazi leaflets distributed in Munich and other cities by the White Rose, a group of Munich university students, whose resistance attempts cost most of them their lives (see the boxed text).
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One of a clutch of fabulous films by Germany’s best-known female director, Margarethe von Trotta, Rosenstrasse (2003) is a portrayal of a 1943 protest by a group of non-Jewish women against the deportation of their Jewish husbands.
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DEFEAT & OCCUPATION
Systematic air raids on German cities followed the invasion of Normandy in France in June 1944, and the return of the Allies to the European mainland. The brunt of the bombings was suffered by the civilian population; Dresden’s Frauenkirche, Germany’s greatest Protestant church, was destroyed during a British raid in February 1945 that killed 35,000 people, many of them refugees. Today, this church has been painstakingly reconstructed after its haunting ruins for so long stood as a symbol for the destructiveness of war.
With the Russians advancing on Berlin, a defeated and paranoid Führer and his new bride Eva Braun committed suicide on 30 April 1945 in Hitler’s Berlin bunker and, on 7 May 1945, Germany capitulated and peace was signed at the US headquarters in Rheims and again in Berlin in what is now the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (a German-Soviet history museum).
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German Boy: A Child In War by Wolfgang Samuel is the true tale of a German family, told through the eyes of the young Wolfgang, who fled Berlin as the Red Army approached.
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At the Yalta Conference (February 1945), Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin agreed to carve up Germany and Berlin into four zones of occupation controlled by Britain, the USA, the USSR and France. By July 1945, Stalin, Clement Attlee (who replaced Churchill after a surprise election win) and Roosevelt’s successor Harry S Truman were at the table in Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam (Brandenburg) to hammer out the details. At Stalin’s insistence, France received its chunk from the Allied regions. Regions east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers (where the border is today) went to Poland as compensation for earlier territorial losses to the USSR.
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Keep on top of everything German – culture, politics, lifestyle and more – at www.germany.info.
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THE BIG CHILL
In 1948 the Allies put together an economic aid package, the Marshall Plan, and created the basis for West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). Meanwhile, German cities were rising out of the rubble and first steps were being taken to re-establish elected government. These advances widened the rift between Allied and Soviet zones; in the latter inflation still strained local economies, food shortages affected the population, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) were forced to unite as the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED; Socialist Unity Party).
The showdown came in June 1948 when the Allies introduced the Deutschmark (DM) in their zones. The USSR saw this as a breach of the Potsdam Agreement, whereby the powers had agreed to treat Germany as one economic zone. The USSR issued its own currency and promptly announced a full-scale economic blockade of West Berlin. To ensure West Berlin’s food supplies, the Allies responded with the remarkable Berlin airlift, whereby American, British, Canadian and some Australian air crews flew into Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport (where there’s a monument of the event today) the equivalent of 22 freight trains of 50 carriages