Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In addition to the Vertriebene there were the many millions of war veterans—even more after Khrushchev agreed to return the remaining pows in 1955. Like the expellees, the war veterans and their spokesmen saw themselves above all as the unjustly abused victims of the war and the post-war settlement. Any suggestion that Germany, and especially the German armed forces, had behaved in ways that precipitated or justified their suffering was angrily dismissed. The preferred self-image of Adenauer’s Germany was that of a victim thrice over: first at Hitler’s hands—the huge success of films like Die Letzte Brücke (The Last Bridge, 1954), about a female doctor resisting the Nazis, or Canaris (1955) helped popularize the notion that most good Germans had spent the war resisting Hitler; then at the hands of their enemies—the bombed-out cityscapes of post-war Germany encouraged the idea that on the home