Showing posts with label Post WWII Occupation of Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Post WWII Occupation of Germany. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Sunday, July 22, 1945. Open to negotiations, but not threats.

Japanese forces attempting to breakout of the Pegu Hills suffered heavy casualties.

US Task Force 92 bombarded Paramushiro in the Kurile Islands.

Nine U.S. destroyers penetrated Tokyo Bay under the cover of a storm.

The Japanese government announced that it was open to peace negotiations, but not to threats.

Allied military police were allowed to cross into any zone in Berlin.

Adele Jergens was the pinup.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Tuesday, July 17, 1945. The Potsdam Conference begins.

Churchill, who was actually on his way out due to having lost the recent British election, Truman, who was brand new to the Oval Office, and Stalin.

The Potsdam Conference between Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman commenced.

The immediate topic was the governance of postwar Germany.

The British participated in a carrier raid on Tokyo.

German Field Marshal Busch, the former commander of Army Group Center on the Eastern Front, died at the military hospital in Notts at age 60 due to a heart attack.

The King, Queen and Princess Elizabeth visited Ulster.

Last edition:

Monday, July 16, 1945. Trinity.

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Monday, July 16, 1945. Trinity.


The first detonation of an atomic weapon.

The name is nearly blasphemous. The device itself was called the "Gadget".


Nuclear power, sadly, arrived in the form of a weapon.  It had not, however, yet been used that way.

British soldiers were taking advantage of the relaxation of the fraternization rules by chatting with German women.  We often hear of the calorie deprivation of the Second World War, but, while not seeking to be vulgar, the young woman on the far right clearly hadn't been too calorie deprived in the late stages of the war.


While photos can be deceiving, none of these women appear to be upset that the war was over and the British were there.

Related threads:

Saturday, July 14, 1945. Verboten und Nicht Verboten

Last edition:

Sunday, July 15, 1945. Lifting the blackout.

Monday, July 14, 2025

Saturday, July 14, 1945. Verboten und Nicht Verboten

Eisenhower announced the closure of SHAEF.

Eisenhower also eased the fraternization rules between Allied troops and German civilians allowing Allied soldiers to chat and speak to German civilians.  

Nazi German poster recruiting women for for the Reichsluftschutzbund, i.e. civil defense.  Women, and teenage boys, later served on antiaircraft gun crews.  A few months after the end of the war, the same targeted audience was beginning to become friendly to US troops.

By September nearly all of the rules would be removed.

Fraternization in this context does not mean what people commonly assume it does, but it is more in line with the etymology of the word's origins, from Latin through French:  "to sympathize as brothers".  Eisenhower, who was first of all an administrator, and highly intelligent, recognized that contact between the Western Allies, and with Americans in particular, would help have a corrosive impact on Prussianized and Nazified German culture.  Bans on contacts had already been lifted as to contacts with children, which were impossible to prevent between oversupplied American troops and German children anyhow.  The British, contrary to what is often reported in regard to the development in policy, followed suit.

There was really no danger that French troops were going to fraternize to any significant degree with Germans, nor those of any country the Germans had overrun.  And of course in Russian controlled territory, where Eisenhower's orders didn't apply rapine Red Army troops simply terrorize and brutalized civilians, and not only Germans.

Be that as it may, the inevitable problem that existed with American troops in particular fraternizing in the wider sense was already there.  It had been a problem after World War One during which the American Army had taken steps to stop friendly contacts between Germans and Americans with limited success.  At that time, Americans already were noting in letters home that Germany looked more like the US than France did, in that it was more technologically advanced and cleaner.  By the end of World War Two this was much more the case, with Americans being shocked by what they deemed the primitive conditions the French and Italians lived in, and impressed with the more advanced state of German municipalities.  While its often little noted, a non insignificant number of GIs found themselves not really liking the French and outright horrified by the conditions Italians lived in.

With things being the way they are, even before the end of the war the U.S. Army had trouble keeping soldiers away from German women, which is not to say that all such contacts had only one thing in mind.  Having said that, the conditions that followed the havoc of the Eastern Front and the war in general were having a massive impact on German culture even without Eisenhower seeking to step in and direct it.  The German military had been huge with a very large number of German men in it.  Many of them were killed during the war and many were simply missing by 1945.

A vast number of German men were held as prisoners of war as well.  The Western Allies held over 3,150,000 by April 30, 1945.  By the end of the war that number was over 7,614,790,with the 425,000 German POWs in 511 main and branch camps. The Soviet Union also held at least 2,733,739, fewer than a person might suspect, actually, reflecting the nature of the combat in the east.

The Western Allies did not, and could not have, repatriated German POWS immediately.  The US held German prisoners until 1946 in the US, with it notably being the case that many went from disciplined Nazi soldiers to actually enjoying the last year of their captivity.  Reeducation proved unnecessary as they rapidly evolved into democratic Germans in the last months of their captivity.

The point, however, is that with over 10,000,000 German men in captivity, and with millions of German men killed during the war, and with the German citizenry in the east put to flight, nature began to play a role in things very quickly.  Hundreds of thousands of German women were left without support in a country that had largely resisted imposing female labor on its citizenry during the war.  Man young women knew at an instinctive level that the normal path of finding a lifelong mate had been destroyed.  And the collapse of the Nazi system proved to be a bit like tearing a scab off a wound as even the Nazifield population proved capable of abandoning Nazi propaganda pretty rapidly, even if only superficially in some instance.  

Added to this, the war itself had damaged domestic life globally.  This has been noted in the context of World War Two marriages in the US on this site already.  While the German situation was different, it was found that after the war an appreciable number of Germans, both male and female, simply changed identities up to and including abandoning a spouse, missing or not.  In some instances German women became outright disgusted with German men and blamed them for the war and the fate they'd suffered, something that was also the case with Japanese women.

By June of 1944, Life magazine was noting:

There’s one blonde Fräulein with braided hair who always walked past two MPs every day on her way to do shopping, swinging her hips from side to side even more noticeably than usual. As she passed she would look slyly at the MPs, tap one hip and utter the word, ‘Verboten.’ […]

In Germany fraternization is officially a matter of high policy. But for the GI it is not a case of policy or of politics or of going out with girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies. You don’t talk politics when you fraternize. It’s more a matter of bicycles and skirts waving in the breeze and a lonesome, combat-weary solder looking warily around the corner to see if a policeman is in sight.”

Ultimately somewhere between 14,000 to 20,000 German women would marry American soldiers after the war, something that stands in remarkable contrast to the French, as only 6,500 French women married US soldiers.  Between 10,000 and 100,000 Italian women married U.S. soldiers. 70,000 English women did the same.

Late war German poster celebrating Maria Schultz.  The poster states; "A German Girl! 'Germany will endure all suffering and create a new world', said Maria Schultz on the 12.February 1945, awaiting her death sentence"  Schultz, whose actual last name may have been Bierganz, was arrested when her diary was discovered, which was fanatically pro Nazi and full of fantasies about killing U.S. troops, but she was just let go, not executed.  German women would help rebuild Germany, but not in the way she imagined.

If all of this seems a bit odd, it's probably a lot more human than people might suppose.  Germany had been heavily propagandized during the Nazi era, but the era was a lot shorter than people like to recall, which is frightening in that Germany descended into madness so quickly.  Be that as it may, DNA tends to rule at the end of the day and the Japanese and German examples tend to show that, with the German one perhaps being the most consequential.  Nazi Germany had very distinct concepts of what women were to do, which were more than a little perverse.  Germany itself was, of course, a Christian nation which the anti Christian Nazi party was seeking to transform into something else, and which it was surprisingly successful in doing in its short period of rule.  

Recruiting poster aimed at teenage girls for the Hitler Youth.  The female variant of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls would prove to be downright perverse, encouraging a radical pronatalist view of their role.

The Nazis were heavily invested in an exaggerated martial concept of manliness which failed.  By late 1944 the Allies were on Germany's doorstep.  Fairly soon German soldiers in the East would outright be fighting to the last man to try to protect German civilians from the Red Army, which is much of the reason that the fighting in 1945 was so much worse in the East than at any time prior to that.  German troops did in fact go down fighting in many instances to attempt to give German civilians, including women, the chance to get away, but to a large degree they failed.  German men, in other words, were unable to protect German women from rape and death in the East.

In the West, the German military failure had less severe physical consequences, but German manhood failed there too.  Cities were destroyed and lives wrecked.  The irony, however, was that in the West, the Allies themselves became the protector, and indeed the liberator, of German women.  By making them temporarily Verboten, they gave them independence in a way that they had not had since 1932, if ever.

Italy declared war on Japan.

The French flag was formally unfurled at the summit of the Victory Column in Berlin.

The monument celebrated the German victory over France in the Franco Prussian War.

Japanese destroyer Tachibana was sunk in Hakodate Bay by aircraft of the U.S. Navy.  The battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, plus two heavy cruisers and 4 destroyers, bombarded the Kamaishi steel works in the first naval gunfire directed against the Japanese home islands.

The Simla Conference ended without a positive result.

Last edition:

Friday, July 13, 1945. Japan seeks a way out.

Friday, July 11, 2025

Wednesday, July 11, 1945. Redeploying.


"Joyous Second Division Marines, about to board ship for home after more than thirty months overseas, were not forgotten by the famed division mascot "Eight Ball", who was on hand to bid them a sorrowful goodbye. Saipan. 11 July, 1945. Photographer: Rohde. Photo Source: U.S. National Archives. Digitized by Signal Corps Archive."

The first meeting of the Inter-Allied Council for Berlin took place in which the USSR agreed to hand over civilian and military control of West Berlin to the UK and US.

The Japanese destroyer Sakura hit a mine and sank in Osaka Harbor.

The 8th Air Force began to redeploy from Europe to Okinawa, where they were to receive B-29s after initially having a training role.  The redeployment of its aircraft to the continental US also began on this day.

The US used napalm on resistant Japanese targets on Luzon.

Fadil Hoxha became President of the Assembly of Kosovo and Metohija.

Last edition:

Friday, July 10, 1945. Sentimental Journey.

    Sunday, July 6, 2025

    Friday, July 6, 1945. Norway declares war, a parade in Berlin, an award for King Michael, the US establishes an award, Operation Overcast, Nicaragua ratifies, Chennault resigns, and the mystery of Madelen Mason.

    Norway declared war on Japan, backdating the act to December 7, 1941.

    Occupying Allied forces held a parade in Berlin.

    King Michael I of Romania was awarded the Soviet Order of Victory.


    The king had been instrumental in deposing the right wing military dictatorship late in the war, and causing Romania to be one of the many European powers to switch sides during the war. a list that included Italy and Finland as well.

    President Truman established the Medal of Freedom by executive order, which stated:

    Executive Order 9586

    by President of the United States

    The Medal of Freedom

    Executive Order 9587

    Signed by President Harry S. Truman Friday, July 6, 1945

    By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States and as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, it is hereby ordered as follows:

    There is hereby established a medal to be known as the Medal of Freedom with accompanying ribbons and appurtenances for award to any person, not hereinafter specifically excluded, who, on or after December 7, 1941, has performed a meritorious act or service which has aided the United States in the prosecution of a war against an enemy or enemies and for which an award of another United States medal or decoration is considered inappropriate.

    The Medal of Freedom may also be awarded to any person, not hereinafter specifically excluded, who, on or after December 7, 1941, has similarly aided any nation engaged with the United States in the prosecution of a war against a common enemy or enemies.

    The Medal of Freedom shall not be awarded to a citizen of the United States for any act or service performed within the continental limits of the United States or to a member of the armed forces of the United States.

    The Medal of Freedom and appurtenances thereto shall be of appropriate design, approved by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, and may be awarded by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, or the Secretary of the Navy, or by such officers as the said Secretaries may respectively designate. Awards shall be made under such regulations as the said Secretaries shall severally prescribe and such regulations shall, insofar as practicable, be of uniform application.

    No more than one Medal of Freedom shall be awarded to any one person, but for a subsequent act or service justifying such an award a suitable device may be awarded to be worn with the medal.

    The Medal of Freedom may be awarded posthumously.

    Harry S. Truman 

    The award existed until 1963, by which time over 20,000 had been awarded, and was superseded by the Presidential Medal of Freedom which exists at the current time which has a broader application.

    Operation Overcast was authorized providing that the US could import captured German scientists. 

    Nicaragua ratified the United Nations  Charter, the first nation to do so.

    General Claire Chennault resigned his command of the US 14th Army Air Force in protest to plans to disband it.

    Japanese forces attacked the British positions in the Sittang river bend unsuccessfully.

    B-29 raids continued over Japan.

    The multiple editions of Yank came out.

    The centerfold was quite subdued.

    I have no idea who Madelen Mason was and a google search failed to give any clues.

    Last edition:

    Friday, July 4, 2025

    Wednesday, July 4, 1945. MacArthur declares things wrapped up while additional mopping up occurs in the Philippines.

    "With the 6th Inf. Div. in the Cagayan Valley, Luzon, P.I., about 9 miles north of Bagabag along Highway 4. Scene showing a reinforcing patrol of A Co., 1st Bn. of the 63rd Regt. on road at the frontlines just prior to moving ahead. 4 July, 1945. Company A, 1st Battalion, 63rd Infantry Regiment, 6th Infantry Division. Photographer: Pfc. Murray Schneiweiss."

    General Douglas MacArthur announced that the Philippines had been completely liberated while the 24th Infantry Division organized an amphibious expeditionary force to liberate Sarangani Bay, south of Davao. 

    Hmmm. . . . 

    President Truman released a short statement for the Fourth of July.

    Statement by the President: The Fourth of July.

    July 04, 1945

    AGAIN THIS YEAR we celebrate July 4 as the anniversary of the day one hundred and sixty-nine years ago on which we declared our independence as a sovereign people.

    In this year of 1945, we have pride in the combined might of this nation which has contributed signally to the defeat of the enemy in Europe. We have confidence that, under Providence, we soon may crush the enemy in the Pacific. We have humility for the guidance that has been given us of God in serving His will as a leader of freedom for the world.

    This year, the men and women of our armed forces, and many civilians as well, are celebrating the anniversary of American Independence in other countries throughout the world. Citizens of these other lands will understand what we celebrate and why, for freedom is dear to the hearts of all men everywhere. In other lands, others will join us in honoring our declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    Here at home, on this July 4, 1945, let us honor our Nation's creed of liberty, and the men and women of our armed forces who are carrying this creed with them throughout the world.

    Canadian troops in Aldershot rioted about the delay in returning them home to Canada.

    Rumors started circulating in Berlin that Hitler was alive and well.

    The British Occupation force arrived in the city.

    Last edition:  

    Tuesday, July 3, 1945. Don't use the Bomb.

    Thursday, July 3, 2025

    Tuesday, July 3, 1945. Don't use the Bomb.

    The first draft of a letter by Manhattan Project scientists urging that the Atomic Bomb not be used was circulated.  Hungarian physicist and biologist Leo Szilard was the scrivener.


    This version was not sent, as a new one was worked on in order to secure additional signatures.

    This is the second such example of such a letter, the other one from Robert Oppenheimer, that I've posted in recent days.  Clearly something was really going on inside the Manhattan Project itself at this time, and what that was, was a debate on whether to use the bomb or not.

    Frankly, the views expressed above comport with my own.  Using the bomb was 1) a huge mistake, and 2) deeply immoral in how it was targeted.

    It's interesting, however, that this debate broke out at this point.

    That the atom could be split and that it could be done in such away that the massive release of energy would result in a huge blast had been known, albeit theoretically, for some time.  The knowledge did not come about during the war itself, but before it.

    The war, however, created an enormous imperative to work the physical problems of constructing a bomb out, in large part out of the fear the Axis would get there first.

    The Western Allies, the Germans, and the Japanese all had atomic weaponry programs, although its typically forgotten that the Japanese were working on this as well. The German program was enormously feared.

    The German program was also enormously hampered by Nazi racism, as it had the impact of causing Jewish scientists, such as the Hungarian Leo Szilard to flee for their lives.  They weren't alone in this, however, as generally the highly educated class of men that were in the field of physics weren't really keen on fascism overall.  Germany had some top flight scientists, of course, but many of the best minds in science in Europe had left or put themselves out of serious research work if they remained. Some of those who remained in Europe and were subject to the Germans somewhat doddled in their efforts in order to retard the advancement of the efforts.

    Japan had a program, as noted, and it had some excellent physicists. Their problem here, however, was much like that of the Japanese war effort in chief.  Japan was so isolated that it had nobody else to draw from.

    In contrast, the US effort was nearly global in extent, as the US drew in all the great minds, in one way or another, who were not working for the Germans or Japanese, which was most of the great minds in the field.

    At any rate, moral qualms about using the bomb didn't really start to emerge until very late in the war, and not really until after Germany had surrendered.  Nearly everyone working on the Manhattan Project imagined it as producing a bomb to be used against Germany.  Japan wasn't really considered.

    And there's good reasons for that. For one thing, it was feared that Germany, not Japan, would produce a nuclear weapon and there was no doubt that Germany would use it if they did.  Given that, producing a bomb, and using it first, had a certain element of logic to it.  Destroy them, the logic was, before they can do that to us.

    Working into that, it should be noted, was the decay in the resistance to the destructiveness of war that had started to set in during World War One.  The US had gone to war, in part, over a moral reaction to the Germans sinking civilian ships.  By World War Two there was no moral aversion to that at all and unrestricted submarine warfare was just considered part of war.

    The Germans had also introduced terror bombing of cities during the Great War, engaging in it with Zeppelins.  Long range artillery had shelled Paris in the same fashion.  Between the wars it was largely assumed that cities would be targeted simply because they were cities, which turned out to be correct.  The Germans had already engaged in this during the Spanish Civil War and would turn to during the Blitz, which the British would very rapidly reply with.  By 1945 the US was firebombing Japanese cities with the logic it drove workers out of their homes, and crippled Japanese industry, which was correct, but deeply immoral.

    By July 1945 there were really no more industrial targets left to bomb in Japan, although the bombing was ongoing.  The only point of dropping an atomic bomb was to destroy cities, and the people within them.

    That was obvious to the atomic scientists, but that had been obvious about using the bomb on Germany as well. Targeting would have largely been the same, and for the same purpose.  Allied strategic bombing of Germany has actually halted before the German surrender, as there was no longer any point to it, although the concept the Allies had in mind would really have been to use the bomb earlier than the Spring of 1945.  Indeed, had the bomb been available in very early 1945, there's real reason to doubt that the Allies would have used it on Germany, as Allied troops were on the ground and they were advancing.

    Still, with all that in mind, there was a certain sense all along that Germany uniquely deserved to be subject to atomic bombs.  Japan in this context was almost an after thought.

    Everyone working on the bomb in the US was European culturally.  To those of European culture the Germans were uniquely horrific, and to this day Nazi Germany is regarded as uniquely horrific.  Many of those working on the Manhattan Project, moreover, were direct victims of the Nazis, with quite a few being both European and Jewish refugees.  Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, by late 1944 people were well aware of what was going on in Nazi Germany and that the Germans were systematically murdering Jews.

    The Japanese also were incredibly inhumane and horrific in their treatment of the populations they'd overrun, as well as of Allied prisoners of war. But the nature and extent of their barbarity really wasn't very well known.  Indeed, much of it would not be until after the Second World War, at which time the information was suppressed for post war political reasons.  At any rate, in July 1945, the scientists working on the Manhattan Project did not know of Japanese systematic horrors in China.  Very few people did.

    And the Japanese were scene, basically, as victims of their own culture, which was somewhat true.  Japan had not been colonized by Europeans at all, making them the only nation in Asia to have that status.  Therefore, European culture, and standards, had really not penetrated very much.  Japan had adopted Western technology, but Western concepts of morality in war had not come in with it very much. To the extent that it did, it seemed to evaporate with the introduction of increasing authoritarianism in Japan after World War One.

    But that wasn't really known to the scientific community.

    It was, however, to the military community, which had been fighting the Japanese on the ground.

    We'll discuss that in the context of the bomb in a later thread.  

    The point here is that by this time, many in the non military community, and some within it, who were aware that the Allies were about to produce an atomic bomb were now against using it.

    And, indeed, it should never have been used.

    Moscow radio announced that the body of Joseph Goebbels had been discovered in the courtyard of the Chancellery in Berlin.

    Also in Berlin, the first U.S. troops arrived for occupation duty.

    James F. Byrnes became United States Secretary of State.

    The first civilian passenger car made in the United States in three years rolled off the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit.  The car was a 1946 Super DeLuxe Tudor sedan and was destined for Harry Truman.

    Last edition:

    Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.


    Tuesday, July 1, 2025

    Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

    Today in World War II History—July 1, 1940 & 1945: 85 Years Ago—July 1, 1940: Germans occupy Jersey and Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. 80 Years Ago—July 1, 1945: Australians land at Balikpapan, Borneo.

    US occupation forces arrive in Berlin.

    Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (former commander of the Tuskegee Airmen) assumes command of Godman Field, KY, the first Black officer to command a major US air base.

    US resumes production of cars, with the first rolling off the assembly line on August 30.

    From Sarah Sundin's blog. 

    The Australian and Dutch (mostly Australian) landing at Balikpapan was a major one, which had been preceded by an Allied naval bombardment that lasted for days.

    US landing craft landing Australian infantry, July 1, 1945.

    The Inner German Border was established and the British withdrew from Magdeburg which was part of the Soviet zone.

    German Gen. Willibald Borowietz, 51, committed suicide at the Camp Clinton, Mississippi POW camp.  He had been a POW since 1943, having surrendered with the Afrika Korps.  His wife, Eva Ledien, was of Jewish decent and had killed herself in 1938 so that their children could be Aryanized. Her sister, Käthe (Ledien) Bosse, was killed in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.

    Debbie Harry (Angela Trimble), lead singer of Blondie, was born in Miami, Florida.  She was given up for adoption by her parents and adopted by parents of the lsat name of Harry, who renamed her.  Her birth mother, whom she later located, was a pianist, but who chose not to reunite with her.

    When I was in high school I was a big fan of Blondie.  I have all of their lps.

    Harry started off as a folk singer.  She became a New Wave trend setter with Blondie at age 33, late for a pop musician.  

    Last edition:

    Saturday, June 30, 1945. Mopping up.