SUMMER OF FREEDOM

Chronicling “a solemn but glorious hour.”

Hilmes, author of Berlin 1936: Fascism, Fear, Triumph (2018), opens on the official end of World War II in Europe—May 8, 1945—with a kaleidoscope of scenes in national capitals. Crowds celebrate, famous exiled Germans (Thomas Mann, Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht) express their opinions, and, in their homeland, Nazis make themselves scarce. SS chief Heinrich Himmler turns up, objects to his reception, and kills himself. Hilmes reminds readers that Winston Churchill, despite his charisma, remained a conservative aristocrat who never lacked food, shelter, employment, and was shocked to be voted out of office by Britons who yearned to share his good fortune. The author writes that President Harry Truman was, in some ways, an improvement over President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was under the mistaken impression that he could manipulate Stalin. The summer of 1945 ends with Japan’s surrender in September, but Germany holds the author’s focus, and he paints a less cheerful picture than the usual American documentary. Unprepared for millions of surrendering Nazi soldiers, the Allies packed them into massive encampments lacking food and sanitation. Millions of refugees expelled from Eastern Europe fared little better until international organizations got their acts together. Details of the Holocaust were not widely known, and survivors encountered as much antisemitism as ever. Berliners cleared rubble and searched for food but also packed the cinemas and concert halls, which opened within weeks of the war’s end. “There are now more than thirty cinemas open in Berlin,” a Red Army soldier writes to his daughter. “The cinema employees say that there has never before been such an inux of people as there is now.” The future was just around the corner.

A concise history of victory’s aftermath.