The destruction and human misery in Germany in 1945 is barely describable in its scale.2 As the Third Reich collapsed, quite apart from the millionfold murder that Germany had committed across Europe, more than one-third of the boys born to German families between 1915 and 1924 were either dead or missing. Amongst those born between 1920 and 1925 losses amounted to 40 per cent. The rest of the German population was subject to uprooting and displacement on a truly epic scale.
