The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945

by Nicholas Stargardt

The formal creation of two German states in 1949 was rapidly overshadowed by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Now both the Soviet Union and the United States urged their German clients to rearm. Official pronouncements in East Germany shifted dramatically. In February 1949, the official Socialist Unity Party paper, Neues Deutschland, dedicated half its Sunday supplement to commemorating the destruction of Dresden four years earlier. There were photographs, which would soon become iconic, of the dead piled up in the Altmarkt square to be burned, eyewitness reports and an article by the city’s mayor. For the first time, the wanton and needless destruction was blamed on the British and Americans. It set the tone for the new Cold War confrontation and there was again talk of the ‘Anglo-American terror attacks’ – only the ‘Jewish’ epithet was omitted from Goebbels’s original turn of phrase.