In 1946 the writer Walter Kolbenhoff reported from a village in Upper Bavaria: These farmers have never been stuck in air-raid shelters when the bombs rained down and the lives of their loved ones were extinguished. They have never trekked, shivering and hungry, along foreign country roads. While the others greeted as a gift each new day that life granted them, they sat in their farms making money. But that fate has not made them humble. It is as if none of it had happened and it had nothing to do with them.[39]
