Dan Snow's History Hit - Germany After Hitler

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

80 years ago, as the war in Europe drew to a close, the world began to come to terms with the horrors of the Third Reich. This is the story of the Nuremberg Trials, the first of their kind, that would decide the fate of Nazism's worst criminals. It's also the story of the millions of people who were displaced by the chaos of conflict. For them the war would did not end with victory in Europe, and dragged on for years to come.We're joined by Max Likin, author of '1945: A World at the End of War'. He provides insights into this transformative period and its lasting impact on modern history.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Vasily Grossman was a Soviet journalist. He was a writer who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, was engaged as a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Red Star. He is one of the most famous and celebrated writers of the 20th century for his first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and the fighting up to and through the gates of Berlin. He just wrote beautifully, scouringly, about what he called the ruthless truth of war. Extraordinarily, in 1943, he was with the Red Army as it liberated the Ukraine.

And it was then that he learned that his Jewish mother had been murdered by the Nazis. and it was then that he learned that his Jewish mother had been murdered by the Nazis. He would go on to write some of the earliest first-hand accounts of Nazi death camps. He was present just after the discovery of Treblinka and his words would later be used in the Nuremberg trials, that judicial process that sought to hold German officers, politicians and others accountable for their monstrous crimes. By late April 1945, Vasily found himself in Berlin. You'd think perhaps this would be a time of celebration. The war was finally over. The Soviets, well, they'd turned the tide. They were on the winning side.

But Vasily was a conscientious man, and he was appalled by what he saw the Red Army doing to Berlin and its citizens. He witnessed the looting, the pillaging, the extrajudicial murders, the street killings, and the rapes and assaults that were just such a gruesome hallmark of this period. In the shattered hellscape of the Reich's capital city, with the population homeless, utterly destitute, he saw more monstrous criminality. His description of the people wandering around is very striking. Hundreds of thousands of people just walking the streets, for anywhere to go. Some were Berliners looking for food or shelter or fuel.

looking for food or shelter or fuel. But many more were from just other parts of Germany or from other countries entirely, now liberated, formerly enslaved labourers who have no idea really where they are and how to get home, prisoners of war, refugees from the East who are frankly as terrified of the advancing Soviet Red Army as they had been of the Nazis. In this podcast, I'm going to explore the state of Germany 80 years ago, just in the aftermath of World War II. I'm going to look at the leaders

and the people and the occupiers and the millions just trying to get on with their lives. It's the story of a very difficult piece of the first war crimes trials, the Nuremberg Process, but also the first UN agency, UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, through which the international community tried to do something for this vast traumatized mass of people. As you'll hear, it became clear to me listening to my guest today that these events are really just as important in shaping what has happened since as the more famous celebrated wartime battles and events that they followed upon so closely. The forging of peace can be as dramatic as the prosecution of war. My guest is the excellent Max Licken. He's a

lecturer in history at the Freedom Education Project, Puget Sound. He's author of 1945, A World at the End of War. Enjoy. Max, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. With pleasure. I'm delighted to be here today. What is the Germany that the Allies discover as they complete their occupation of Germany in the spring of 1945, as they march from village to village and town to town, what do they find? The cliche response would be shock and horror. At the scale, not only the scale of devastation, but the scale of organized barbarity, of systematic cruelty

against categories of individuals, of course, Jews principally, but also Russian Red Army prisoners of war, Roma and political refugees. So a great many minorities who were just killed by industrial methods. And the network of camp was so, whether you came from Poland or in Germany,

it was so dense, you could almost walk from one camp to another. I'm exaggerating, but you know, 40 miles this way, 40 miles that way, there'd be another camp or a transit place or a triage place. killing machine. That's the reckoning, which the Russians, the Red Army, of course, had witnessed this already three years before. And, you know, as they were rolling up towards Berlin, they were discovering camps in Poland, but their populations had suffered enormously. And the Americans more or less discovered the barbarity during the Battle of the Bulge when 70 American prisoners of war were executed. And that wasn't quite a war as we imagined it. It was on a different scale of viciousness and ruthlessness. That's the situation that the Allies find as they march across Germany. What is it replaced by? Let's start with Berlin and the Soviet area of occupation. How do the Soviets treat the Germans who they're now occupying? What is life like under the Soviets?

Well, the Soviets are hell-bent on revenge and they condone mass rapes and looting. There are no repercussions for gang rape and all that so they really are mad as hell they're coming out of war of extermination on the ost front and they're gonna take revenge and they're gonna take revenge on the most vulnerable people out there and these are women from some say from 8 to 88 but it's just the scale and everything and then there's the looting and you know know, the Red Army soldiers, they like collect watches. They're easy to, they like trophies to carry them on their arms

and people try to get whatever they can. Solzhenitsyn in East Prussia, before he's arrested, very glad to find two little books of German poetry, Goethe, very glad to find some pencils from Cajal Dasch or some great high-quality paper. It's an old rule of war. Wehwichtes. And then the generals, they can take as much as a wagon load,

carpets, furniture, meissen, porcelain, you name it. So it's free for all. And the Allies, the British, the Americans, like to think that they were somehow better than the Soviets. What's the reality in those zones of occupation? Oh, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of stereotyping at work between all nations. So, of course, the Russians are Ivan, who's a vodka-swilling thing, and the Americans are greedy capitalists or whatever.

I mean, then the British are imperialists and so on. There are all these stereotypes that play out. They have to cooperate in Berlin. I think the military people try to get along. There's a code of honor, and they try to establish a workmanship, so a great rapport with the people who speak a different language, but who are still soldiers. Yeah, the national stereotyping comes in very, very quickly. There is no doubt about that.

And among the English, for instance, as they get into their zone of occupation, they don't have such high appreciations of the Poles. So it's a hierarchical world, the world of the army. It's very hierarchical. The soldiers don't eat with the junior officers, and the junior officers don't bingle with the higher-ups, the bigwigs. It's very hierarchical. And then there are these compensation mechanisms with stereotyping,

and that's all there is as a safety valve. What about the German people? As the guns fall silent, is Germany a country full of people walking, trying to get home, trying to escape camps, trying to find safety? Is Germany, and indeed is Eastern Europe, on the move? So in Germany, it's known as Stunde Null.

There's a void of authority. The big father figure, the charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, took his life. The Allies are very keen to eradicate the political institutions that were in place 12 years of Nazi policymaking, of fascism. But the German populations, they crouch in shelters. They're looking for food, trying to be united with their loved ones.

It's very, very day to day. They don't think about rights or institutions. They just think about their immediate needs. It's making it to the end of the week. You know, in the last few days, as you want to see like, you know, May 1st, May 2nd, what happened? German soldiers, Wehrmacht soldiers, desperate to reach Americans and surrender to Americans. Some say up to seven millions moved as fast as possible.

Jodl and negotiators were trying to delay this official surrender act so that they could make it and not become captives of the Red Army. A lot of soldiers going west at full speed, trying not to be shipped off to Siberia or shot on the spot. Hitler is dead. Goebbels is also dead. He'd committed suicide and killed his own children as well. Now, so who's left? Have we got Goering? killed his own children as well. Now, so who's left? Have we got Goering?

We have Goering, the number two, but he fell out with, instead of staying in the bunker on Hitler's birthday, April 20th, fled to the South and said, I'm going to have to be down there. So Hitler got mad at his successor and then he almost ordered Goering to be arrested in the South.

So there was a little standoff with SS, they didn't quite know what to do with Goering for treason, simply because he didn't want to spend his last days in the bunker. But eventually he's arrested by a Jewish American. Yes, correct. Yeah, he's arrested by a Jewish American. There's full of ironies like this, but he thinks he's going to be treated like a warlord and uh going as some uh great credentials he's a world war one hero he won blue max 22 kills richthofen squadron he's a true war hero so he thinks he's going to be treated very well by eisenhower's interrogators and all that

he shows up on the on the balcony with champagne or drinks, greets the journalist, and he thinks he's going to somehow escape the consequences of his wartime actions. But Eisenhower immediately says he has to be treated like a regular prisoner, and they start frisking his, you know, very systematically treat him like a prisoner of war. And they first shipped with others to Luxembourg. And from there, they will go to Nuremberg. So they have to start interrogating them. Because the Allies, in fact, know very little, except for OSS research and analysis people, they know very little about the Third Reich. That comes across more and more.

It takes many years to start to understand the whole machinery albert speer who's a man who made that machinery sing yeah albert speer is the very smooth technocrat who run the war economy and some say he had 12 million people working for him and he was also hitler's favorite architect he had organized the Nuremberg rallies. So there was an understanding that industrialists had participated in this war. Both Americans and Russians wanted to put industrialists on trial, like Krupp and all that. But there was a certain admiration among Americans. He was debriefed, and John Kenneth Galbraith interviewed him, and they wanted to know what had been the impact of aerial bombing. I mean, they could see that Speer had a splendid mind, but totally immoral.

I mean, humans were just units of, in the input-output table, they were just units like coal or timber, it didn't matter. And so they interviewed him a lot to find out how the German economy, how it had handled raw materials and find Ersatz products and streamline production and handled innovation. And because he was so close to Hitler, they really asked him a great many questions, but he was a very, very skillful operator. So the equivalent in the US would be McNamara during the Vietnam War. So he runs the numbers, everything looks good, everything looks good, but there's a problem there somewhere. Because many of those millions of people who quote-unquote worked for him were in fact enslaved, enslaved laborers working in horrific conditions. You've mentioned Nuremberg. We talked about these leaders they go into captivity the decision to put them

on trial the Soviets and the Western Allies disagreed did they initially about what to do with these senior Nazis yeah the Soviets a great many wanted to just line them up Churchill initially wanted to line them up against the wall and shoot them and the same with the Russians and the Russians they said we can put them on trial but we still need to shoot them. And the same with the Russians. The Russians, they said, we can put them on trial, but we still need to shoot them all. And indeed, there was a toast by Vyshinsky, make they go from the courtroom to the cemetery, and then he drained his vodka and the Americans were like, no, no, no, we have first to produce the evidence. So the Soviets wanted something like a show trial and then, you know, bring them to the gallows.

The Americans, there were half a dozen American federal agencies that tried to figure out what should happen in the post-war. Initially, Morgenthau at the Treasury had a sort of tough peace approach and there would be firing squads and they would deindustrialize the country. But he lost out to other federal agencies, and in the end, the Navy didn't take any interest, but there was the Department of State, War, Navy, Treasury, Justice, and then the Office of Strategic Services, and then, of course, the White House. In the end, the War Office took over, and the views of Justice Jackson came to the surface.

He was close to President Roosevelt, and you trusted him. So in the summer of 1945, Justice Jackson, his vision comes to shape the outcome of the trial. And Justice Jackson is quite incredibly, had only one year of law school. He had been in upstate New York, Albany, but he believed in the majesty of the law. He had made it to the Supreme Court. He wasn't happy in the Supreme Court, but he had dissented during the war with Korematsu. So he had opposed the transfer of Japanese in California to other places, deportations. He was a gifted, persuasive

lawyer, not a good cross-examiner, but someone who deeply believed in the majesty of the law. And then here's one for you, Dan, one also who thought that war is an abomination. So it wasn't just the methods of warfare, which is The Hague and Geneva and so on. He thinks that war was the crime of crimes. And very few people who believe this because there's a certain fatalism about war. We've always had war, and you look at the brain, the limbic systems,

you look at societies and resources that are devoted to war, there is a certain acceptance of this forever war things. But not him. He think that the devastation was such that we have to stop this because civilization cannot survive another world war. So he put all his efforts into that direction to ban war because it's just so indescribably violent.

An English historian who comes very close to that is John Keegan. John Keegan knows that what soldiers witness, it's unfathomable, and that civilians are pretty cruelist, and they want uplifting stories and all that, but war is the ultimate evil, the crime of crimes. And Jackson seems to be very aware of that during the trial. He talks a lot about history. seems to be very aware of that during the trial. He talks a lot about history. They're not just trying these criminals for their monstrous crimes in the preceding few years.

He's trying to do something world historic, isn't he? He's trying to prevent crimes like this happening again. He's trying to prevent war happening again. He even talks about that. Absolutely, Dan. This is very, very true. He tries to set a record for posterity. We need to give them a fair

trial, but we need also to put it on the record. And so he followed the documentary trial. He didn't want a sort of plea bargaining with Goering as Donovan wanted. He wanted to sift through the documents and give irrefutable proofs. And so it's a great deal of wisdom in there because some people want justice, they want retribution. We need to punish the people who did this. But it's very selective. At the end of the day, it's just two dozen people who go up there when there are so many millions of dead. He wanted to set a record. That's another part of justice.

Put it down so that we have the proofs, we have the evidence of what really happened. So he has a dual aim there. Yeah, you're right. He's trying to set a big record for future generations. And the Jackson work still haunts us today because we haven't followed up. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Germany in 1945.

More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. At the Trials, as you say documentation film is produced of of concentration camps of murder camps we hear testimony is this something new in history what is really new it's what some historians have called the novel witness the novel witness is the documentary evidence. There is a movie that is shown called Concentration Camps that really is an image is worth a thousand words or something that shows the devastation. It shows, you know, a cascade of naked bodies

and a bulldozer putting them in a mass grave, barbed wire, emaciated prisoners. And not only does it show this evidence in images, graphic image, but it also shows that the generals visiting, you see Eisenhower visiting it. So we can't invent this. The guy was there. He showed up. So that's another form of proof. And then we see Germans walking past roads where there are corpses. That's another evidence.

They make them walk past. So it's concordant proof. It's irrefutable proof that we're not making this up. This is what happened. So this novel witness shatters the defendants. After that, they know it's over. There's just no way they can weasel out of this. And that's it.

It's over. And this novel evidence was very, very impactful. They showed a second movie called The Nazi Plan to show the conspiracy and then they use propaganda footage a bit later and there all the German defendants, they perked up because they were next to Hitler. It was the glory days, but it was again thing.

So concentration camps, that documentary is a turning point in human history. Gathering that evidence and then stitching it together and to show here on this day that, on that day this, and it's really very irrefutable. And some of the defendants got the death penalty. Goering escaped it by taking poison that had been smuggled into his prison cell. Speer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Early in the trial, Leigh, the guy who had been in charge of the leisure movements and sort of revamped complacent trade unions, took his life. That was in October. So there were added security measures. And then at the end, Goering took his life.

He didn't want to go to the gallows. But the evidence was there, had been produced in court. And Goering played a very, very important role in the trial. He was a key to the Allies, and he was also a key to the defense. I'll make it brief. But early in the trial, when he has to plead guilty or not guilty, he tries to make a big speech. And Justice Lawrence cuts him off and says, the defendant has to plead guilty or not guilty he tries to make a big speech and justice

lawrence cuts him off and says the friend has played guilty or not guilty so he shuts him down he sits down and gur is angry and at the end of all the guilty non-guilty pleas he again gets to his feet walks to the mic and wants to make another speech and lawrence shuts it down but the beauty is that all the participants they're fascinated by this new courtroom, has this IBM translation system, and they all take part in it. They could all walk up and say, this court is the Kangaroo Court, this is Victor's Justice, and they could refute it. But they take part, they participate, they're curious, they want to see how will this play out. They have a defense attorney, maybe they think they will be able to get a short sentence

or something. And indeed, it's not like they were all taken out and shot. There was a range of different sentences. Yeah. So about 10 went in there by hanging. Some got life, some got 10 years, some got 20 years. We were talking about Speer. Speer got 20 years at Spandau, but it was a lot of horse trading. There were four judges and when they were two against two, disagreeing on the sentencing of one defendant, Lawrence had the additional weight. So quite often it came down to him to meter out the exact sentence. So there were also three acquittals, which shocked some witnesses. But the basic idea is to show

that there is a certain level of fairness and to bring this across. So this is why you have such a vast range of sentences from hanging to 20 years, 15 years, 10 years. You have life and then acquittal, three acquittals. And meanwhile, the rest of Germany is just in turmoil, it's under occupation, but there's

also the displaced people. And give me a sense of who all these displaced people are. There are a range of different people. Yeah, there's an enormous number of displaced people by some accounts, by Wyman. There are 7 million civilians in the Western Zone, 7 million of DPs, they call displaced persons, in the Eastern Zone. These are simply uprooted people who are not within the boundaries of their territory, of their nation, when the war started. They've been on the run. There's a lot of ethnic Germans who fled.

There's a lot of survivors from camps, political refugees. The Wehrmacht had a surprising number of foreign, about 15, 20% of foreign soldiers. So they find themselves in Germany, but they're not German. You have very odd things. You have 30,000 Cossacks. You have a lot of different nationalities who are uprooted. There's a new machinery in place to try to get them home,

to repatriate them as soon as possible. That's the UNRRA had been set in place with flying teams to help out, give them a form of relief, and then ship them back home as quickly as possible. And this is what happened in the summer before October 1945, where 2 million Soviets on German territory were shipped back home. There was a million and a half French, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the forced laborers, and then prisoners of war, quite a lot.

So a million and a half going back to France or Alsace-Lorraine. And then by October 1945, people think the work is over. There are about 250 DP camps. Each DP camp is about 3,000 people. They set up their little camps in former German military barracks or close to former concentration camps, or they requisitioned entire villages. But then they realized in the fall of 1945, there are also very, very tearful scenes because

a lot of the Russians, prisoners of war, don't want to get back. They don't want to be shipped back home. There are lots of tragedies because they know that they will be treated as traitors and shipped off to the Gulag. Very, very tearful stuff. A lot of people take their lives. And then meanwhile, from the east, you have yet more people who stream in who don't want to live under a communist regime. So suddenly it's known as the irreducible million from October 1945 onwards. There's a million people there who don't want to go home.

They don't want to move. Some, of course, want to go to Palestine. But a lot of people are stuck there, and they don't quite know how to handle this. Well, Germany is now two Germanys, at least. They have to both rebuild their political systems against the backdrop of this astonishing destruction, turmoil, displacement, brutalism. I mean, it just seems like an impossible task. Germany is completely devastated.

What's the first thing you can do? You have a new phenomenon known as the Trümmerfrauen. That's the women who go and move bricks. They do these chains and they try to clear the debris and the rubble before being able to build something else. So they have to clear, most often than not by hand, and rebuild from ground zero. They have to start anew. There's a lot of widows, a lot of families that are yet not reunited. But the Germans do something on the Western zone, at least. They hitch their fortunes to Americans.

And they do everything they can to be on good terms with Americans. And this is quite often that shocked Americans. When the Germans would fight so viciously, there would be such tough soldiers, there would be no surrender. But the moment they posted the white flag, the Germans would be your best friend. He would go and fetch you coffee. And they were efficient. They were sociable. So how could such tough warriors suddenly be so cooperative? And it took a while. And then the Cold War gets into motion. And then the Germany- American alliance solidifies. So the Germans understand that, of course, Americans have a big surprise.

They can help out and they try to cooperate closely with Americans. The British and the French, there's much more hostility in the French zone of occupation. The French are desperate to regain their prestige and they're very keen to show that they won the war, but the Germans don't quite buy this. And the British, the coffers are empty, they're very tired. They carried this war from the very beginning, and they want to go home. They're done with this war. That's yet another attitude. And then, if I may say so, life regains its rights very quickly. In 1945, in the DPs, in a lot of these camps, the marriage rate is phenomenal. The fertility rate is unbelievable. They create orchestras, they put together football teams, they try to educate the children. So they try to recreate the fabric of a civil society. And it's very, very impressive. They create a mini police. They print newspapers. People try to forget the war, put it behind them. And this is another discussion on trauma. But they try to go forward with a great deal of optimism

and joy because peace has arrived. So let's not forget, the shooting has stopped. The nightmare has stopped. We think so much about the second world war and how it changed history but these months are just as important as what happened during the war what happens after it what does this period mean today or what does it meant in germany the memory not of the war but of these months and years that followed it? Well, there is something that is very, I would say, somewhat tragic, because the memory of World War II, of the sacrifices, the dignity of the dead has been forgotten. A lot of people in World War I, and George Mosser made it as this was a 30-year civil war in the European, so World War I and World War II, that's a lot of conflict.

And people gave their lives believing this would be the last war. And when that memory fades, and René Cassin, the one who drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Eleanor Roosevelt, knew that when this electric charge of the memory dissipates, the next generation has forgotten. Memory dissipates. The next generation has forgotten. And today, if you look at the generation in the White House, has completely forgotten the lessons of World War II. It's just, what is that?

Then people bathe in some sort of militaristic culture. They watch these movies, bands of brothers, or they go and play these games online, and they think that there was a lot of heroism. The lessons of World War II have been forgotten. The calamities of war and the beauty of international cooperation, because what World War II does to Europe, it sets aside these implacable hatreds, this hereditary enmity between France and Germany, and says, why don't we share, pool our resources, call it steel, atomic energy?

And this creates the Treaty of Rome in 1957. That's a new moment. We need to cooperate internationally. We need to pool our best brains together, let them work out problems by rational means. And it's a heightened level of diplomacy. Today, the European project is 27 countries. Hopefully, this will continue, but we'll see where this goes. Well, Max, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what your book is called. Oh, my book is my second book. It's called 1945, A World at the End of War, published by the History Press.

And this is a universal account of soldiers and civilians. And it's a moment, it's a year of beginnings and it's a year of endings. And I tried to chart this transition moment. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.