How did life change for West Germans 1945-49?

De-Nazication and the Cold War www.explaininghistory.com

Between 1945-49 Germany's pariah status in world opinion was overshadowed by the Cold War. Surprisingly, the Holocaust was rarely discussed on the global stage, and most ordinary Germans refused to discuss it at all.
Key Question Two In the bottom right picture above we can see Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favourite director being interrogated at a DeNazication hearing. Why was it so important to examine people like Riefenstahl? There was a clear moral case for investigating such people, but was there a political case as well? What part do public trials and inquisitions play in creating new societies?

The Allied Control Commission founded at Potsdam committed all three allies to DeNazifying Germany. Key Question One: How effective was this process in the West? What factors might have inuenced this.

The allies committed themselves to the destruction of Nazism and the removal of it from Germany before the end of the war. Stalin proposed killing the top 50,000 members of the regime to do the job, but Churchill described this as an 'unconscionable act'. The western allies planned for the occupation of Germany for three years before they nally defeated Hitler, but they discovered that they had different priorities by 1945. A vast swathe of Nazis had to remain in ofce during the period of occupation, many others ed to South America. Key Question 3 Why did the Allies choose not to remove tens of thousands of Nazi ofcials? What effect do you think that this had on the German people?

Refugees The end of the Second World War saw the biggest migration of refugees in history. Millions of 'guest workers' from across Europe kept prisoner in Germany were allowed to go home, often they engaged in lawless acts of revenge or petty crime on their way. The Ostdeutsch, Germans who had lived for decades in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States, along with those who had gone east to settle the new conquered territories, all ed reprisals in 1945 as they returned to the Reich or were expelled by the hostile anti German governments in the East. Key Question 4 Is it possible that the scale of these problems distracted allied occupiers from denazication? The Cold War From 1945, Western politicians were in no doubt that the Soviet Union had designs on forcing them out of Germany. Stalin hoped a combined Germany, unarmed and neutral would gradually become a Russian client state. Stalin saw the city of Berlin, divided and at the heart of the Russian zone, as a bargaining chip with the west. When American Marshall Aid began to revive Western Germany and when in 1948 Britain and America combined their two zones, Stalin suspected a new western backed and re-armed Germany would follow. Key Question 5 Was Stalin paranoid? Did his thinking and plotting make it more likely that a West German State would be established?