On this anniversary on the end of WWII in Europe and the beginning of an entirely new world, I offer an excerpt from one of our great historians, Fritz Stern, who died just last year. Stern, a native of Breslau ,Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) grew up under Hitler’s regime, emigrated to the United States, and began his academic career in 1946 teaching Columbia University’s fabled “core course” in Western Civilization. Looking back on his life in January 2016, he told an interviewer, “Sometimes I bemoaned the fact that I had to grow up amid the disintegration of a democracy; now, at the end of life, I am having to experience again the struggles of democracy.”

From ‘Five Germanys I have Known’:

On May 8, 1945, the day of Germany’s unconditional surrender, the German state ceased to exist. The German threat, defeated at last, turned into the German Question: How would its people come to understand its past and prepare for its future? …

The German state had disappeared, but the German people remained, in rubble, hunger, grief, and desolation. Some seven million Germans had lost their lives or were somewhere still in foreign lands; transportation and communication were in chaos. Families were torn apart, and millions of men, women, and children straggles along through forsaken countrysides; soon millions more came pouring back from the east into a truncated country, divided among its Allied occupiers. The Germans were shell-shocked, and as they began to clear away the physical rubble, they seemed only dimly aware of the moral ruin that had befallen them. In a mere twelve years, they and their Nazi leaders had wrecked a world and left for themselves an inescapable burden of guilt and responsibility. In 1940 they and their European minions had been masters and exploiters of the continent; five years later, they were degraded, confused, and uncertain pariahs. To the end, most of them had believed that the providential Führer could work yet another miracle. Never before had they known such total defeat and disgrace.

Most of us on the outside had always believed in an ultimate Allied victory — an irrational hope, gloriously fortified by Churchill’s rhetoric and British stamina, its origin in our disbelief that such evil could triumph in Europe. The hope had gradually acquired a certain realistic basis after the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943 and after the Allied invasion of France in June 1944; though even then the Germans had the capacity to launch new weapons and offensives. But by the winter of 1944-45, the Red Army advanced relentlessly from the east while Anglo-American troops, backed by awesome air power, reached German lands from the west, and finally the enemy was crushed. But at what cost, so unevenly divided among the Allies! …

Germany’s defeat also brought to light the full extent of the Germans’ barbarism…. We didn’t yet know about the systematic extermination of the Jews, but what  we knew was enough for most of us — for me — to become indifferent to the suffering of Germans during and after the war…. The punitive decisions taken at the Potsdam Conference, and the ensuing expulsion of some ten million Germans from the east, aroused little or no compassion. It was the Germans themselves who had begun a program of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe, to use today’s parlance; the Czech and Soviet moves seemed responses to it. That Germans, too, were often innocent victims of the sadism that Hitler had unleashed we acknowledged only later….

In retrospect, I think that three great plans had a decisive part in shaping postwar Europe — and, incidentally, did so when statesmen were making efforts consciously to learn from the past, though this was scarcely noticed at the time. In Britain the Beveridge Report of 1942 aimed to create a welfare state that would lessen the class conflicts that had weakened the nation before the war. The Marshall Plan of 1947, initially open to the USSR and Czechoslovakia as well as to the nations of Western Europe including the three western zones of occupied Germany, made clear that the United States recognized European recovery as a political necessity and a step towards European integration. This unprecedented act of self-interested generosity did much to cement American-European ties, which were further strengthened in 1949 by the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a western alliance aiming at coordinating the military and political strategies of its members. And, third, the Schuman Plan of 1950 created  an iron, steel, and coal community between France and West Germany, a collaboration that was meant to resolve age-old economic and political rivalries. These three plans expressed the great hopes of the early postwar years, and by and large they proved successful….

In retrospect, I believe those years saw American statesmanship at its most constructive and visionary. At the time , I regretted the gradual breakup  of the wartime alliance, but the designs of Soviet expansionism, driven by fear and ambition, made a collective Western defense an imperative. In Dean Acheson’s famous phrase, we were “present at the creation,” but we couldn’t  know we were at the beginning of what much later was called les trentes glorieuses,  three glorious post-war decades in which Western Europe, ever closer to some form of integration, also managed to create a more prosperous, less inegalitarian society.