Ordinary German Lives During
World War II
When I
returned to Heidelberg after graduating from college I had a brief conversation
with a fairly young man staying in the same hotel. When he found out that I had
left Germany early in 1939, he said that I was lucky not to have been in
Germany during the subsequent period of war. I said nothing but thought it was
nervy of him to make that comment, since it was German anti-Semitism that had
us emigrate.
I still
think that, but what I have been reading makes it utterly clear that we were
lucky to have been out of Germany during that war. The book is Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans
Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch. While it went well
for a period, the war subsequently imposed a great deal of suffering on those
ordinary Germans. Not surprising, given a long stretch of time that Germany
continued the war after it was assured that they would lose it.
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