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Much has been written about US efforts to solve the 'German problem' after the Second World War. Scholars have carefully studied US attempts to de-Nazify, pacify and democratise post-war Germany and have identified the creation of large-scale student exchange programmes as an integral part of that agenda. As this article shows, 1945 was not the first time in the twentieth century that US policy-makers and educators had pondered the German problem and sought to address Germany's apparently deficient democratisation and excessive militarism, as well as the alarmingly narrow horizons of its youth. Based on long-neglected or inaccessible archival materials in Europe and the United States, this article charts the development of US student exchanges with inter-war Germany and demonstrates that a fuller understanding of US re-education policies in West Germany requires paying attention to the 1920s and 1930s. The article traces the discovery of the German student as an object of US democratisation efforts in the inter-war period and shows that US re-education policy after 1945 was deeply informed by the experiences made, connections forged and convictions won (sometimes without reliable evidence) by US internationalists in the inter-war years. Facing the German problem after the First World War, the article argues, helped establish a modus operandi —and a modus cogitandi —with regard to the German student that would inform US cultural diplomacy well into the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that Russia's use of memory laws has facilitated the armed conflict in Ukraine, bolstering the rhetorical justification for Russia's latest aggression. The use of memory laws is hardly new for various legal systems around the world. Most of the early European memory laws have focused on the protection of victim groups from harmful ideologies, however the last two decades have seen a shift away from victim-centric to state-centric laws, especially in Eastern Europe. These laws protect the state's honour and reputation and have serious ramifications domestically, in terms of human rights violations, but also in international relations. I argue that due to the relationship between identity-building and collective memory, the use of the most nefarious types of memory laws that exculpate the state from earlier crimes has enabled Russia to amplify its propaganda around Ukraine's so-called 'denazification', justifying its aggression against Ukraine. The case study constitutes an example of the many reasons why memory laws should be used sparingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on two different versions of the childhood and life history of a female "child of a Russian" who grew up in the Soviet occupation zone and the later German Democratic Republic (GDR). Besides a biographical-narrative interview, there is also a published text on the author's childhood memories. The article concentrates on the childhood of the author/interviewee, since the published version does not provide any information on her later life, and picks out two so-called "key scenes" that appear in both the published version and the interview, comparing the different versions with each other and examining them for ruptures, inconsistencies and changes. For the purpose of better understanding the analysis of these scenes, a third scene is added, which, however, only comes up in the interview. The analysis pursues the question of whether different presentations of a scene have something to do with the methodological particularities of an oral autobiographical narration as opposed to a written one, and what kind of knowledge is gained from contrasting two different self- testimonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A transformative military occupation aimed at the radical ideological change of an occupied country must exercise cultural control. The occupiers must complement repression with propaganda and censorship to create new narratives and prohibit those deemed undesirable. Do transformative military occupations carried out by dictatorships and liberal democracies differ in the way in which they handle information control? I argue that the mechanisms of cultural control used by the Third Reich in France (1940-1942) and by the United States in Germany (1945-1949), shared significant similarities in spite of the fact that their respective agendas were inspired by opposite ideological tenets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years after 1945, German Protestant church leaders and lay intellectuals emerged as ubiquitous critics of the war crimes trials conducted by the Allied occupation governments. Marshaling the financial resources and international connections of the newly formed Protestant Church in Germany, a network of church administrators, theologians, and jurists petitioned occupation authorities for the release of hundreds of convicted Nazi perpetrators. While a generation of critical scholarship has linked the campaign against war crimes trials to the persistence of Protestant nationalism in Allied-occupied Germany, this article argues that the campaign also marked an inflection point in postwar German politics. Protestant church leaders and jurists not only echoed popular attacks on Allied "victors' justice" but also developed a novel language of human rights that would shape their later interventions in West German politics. Rejecting the dominant contemporary discourses of human rights, rooted in Catholic natural law or American exceptionalism, Protestant trial opponents recentered human rights around a theology of human fallibility in order to criticize the alleged excesses of political justice. Yet even as they promoted tendentious accounts of the Nazi past, Protestant leaders contributed to institutionalizing human rights in West German politics. By the 1950s, veterans of the postwar amnesty campaigns would defend the rights of conscientious objectors and recognition of Germany's territorial losses. The Protestant campaign against war crimes trials demonstrates how human rights gained power in postwar Germany as a political language that bridged nationalist and internationalist commitments, with ambiguous consequences for the consolidation of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany prides itself in having one of the most successful central banks and national currencies with respect to independence and stability. I show that not only were both imposed on the country after 1945, but that German experts and officials resisted both initially. It thus represents a rare case of the successful imposition of institutions from abroad. Events are discussed in light of Peter Bernholz's requirements of stable money and an independent central bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A group of Polish displaced persons (DPs) was stranded in the British zone of occupation in 1945, a smaller part of a much broader population upheaval in Europe in the 1940s that included Nazi forced labour and resettlement plans, as well as the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. The relationship between British military officials, welfare workers and the Polish DPs within the British zone deteriorated quickly after German surrender. Using the issue of repatriation as a focal point, this article will explore the growing tensions between the British and Polish who had fought alongside one another and place these within the wider context of increasing East-West tensions in the immediate post-war world. As the British tendency to look upon the Polish DPs as a troublesome 'nuisance' can be viewed as a by-product of pressure on an economically weakened Britain straining to live up to its pre-war stature, in this context the need to help the very people who embodied the provocation for going to war became irrelevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World War II devastated the international markets for British American Tobacco (BAT). This article uses new archival documents to show how BAT successfully navigated political and social obstacles in military-occupied Germany (1945–1948) to become the leading non-German tobacco concern in West Germany. It reveals BAT's lobbying strategy used a 'revolving door' with the British and American occupation administrations and a targeted message that aligned with changing military priorities. This coordinated approach allowed BAT to overcome military resistance to big business, oppose high tobacco taxes, and push for greater foreign tobacco imports. It ultimately helped the company lay foundations for expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After WWII, the restoration of medical care and Public Health Service were the most important goals of the allied forces in Germany. They saw a connection between the population's health condition and its economic prosperity, which the Western Allies perceived as prerequisite for democracy. The allies participated in reforming the social security system. The Rockefeller Foundation provided grants for the modernisation of public health in Germany by initiating a transatlantic visitation program and a school of Public Health. This involvement stands in connection with the European Recovery Program and can be understood as an addition to US–American economic plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in May 1945, Germany no longer existed as a sovereign, independent nation. It was occupied by the four Allied powers: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. When it came to the postwar European recovery, the biggest obstacle was that the economy in Germany, the dominant continental economic power before the Second World War, was at an almost complete standstill. This not only had severe consequences for Germany itself, but also had strong economic repercussions for surrounding countries, especially the Netherlands. As Germany had been the former’s most important trading partner since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the Netherlands would be unable to recover economically without a healthy Germany. However, Allied policy, especially that of the British and the Americans, made this impossible for years. This article therefore focuses on the early postwar Dutch-German trade relations and the consequences of Allied policy. While much has been written about the occupation of Germany, far less attention has been paid to the results of this policy on neighbouring countries. Moreover, the main claim of this article is that it was not Marshall Aid which was responsible for the quick and remarkable Dutch economic growth as of 1949, but the opening of the German market for Dutch exports that same year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as cultural life in Germany following World War II, military occupation, and changes to German national identity.

ABSTRACT: Newspapers and magazines are cultural products and can therefore be considered as works of fiction as well as fact. This article discusses the creation of the news magazine Der Spiegel as an example of cultural transfer, providing an insight into the diverse origins of Der Spiegel, the influence of the magazine on post‐war German journalism, and the adoption of British and American models by much of the German press. The origins, format, content, and writing style of four magazines published in the US, Britain, and Germany are analysed and compared: the US magazine Time, the British weekly magazine News Review, Diese Woche, the immediate precursor to Der Spiegel, and Heute, an illustrated feature magazine published in the US Zone of Germany. All four magazines used colourful language and stylistic devices to interpret the news as well as report it and sometimes peddled a fiction of objectivity that was in fact highly opinionated. Diese Woche was no different in this respect from Time and News Review. The idea that British and American news reporting was accurate and truthful and never mixed fact and opinion, whereas it was only the German press that mixed information with tendentious comment, was one of many myths circulated in post‐war Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: First published in German in 1937, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was one of the most popular books in Germany throughout the Second World War and well into the occupation period. This article investigates why Mitchell's tale of the American Civil War and the South's humiliating defeat and subsequent occupation by hostile powers captured the popular imagination in occupied Germany. Drawing on the portrayal of women in the post‐war German press, the article illuminates how Scarlett O'Hara's transgression of traditional gender roles offered female readers potential for identification with the central character. Through reading Gone with the Wind in relation to debates about women's behaviour, relationships, and bodies during the occupation period, it argues that the novel participated in the victim discourse arising within Germany immediately after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Both the Germans and their American occupiers understood that films were supposed to support a democratic culture and worldview during the occupation following the Second World War. This essay explores how democratic culture comes to be defined at mid‐century through choice, and how two films that played in the Western Zones, Der Apfel ist ab (1948) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), take up choice as a formal aesthetic closely tied to a fraught democratic experience. Best Years, praised by German critics as a realistic portrait of American life, also adopts what the film critic André Bazin calls a democratic and liberal film style of deep focus compositions and shots of long duration that allow the spectator to choose what to look at in the frame. Yet, as even Bazin notes, this choice is slyly coercive. Der Apfel was a critical failure and thematises indecision within the narrative. In contrast to Best Years, it turns the optics of choice into vertiginous confusion in which there are no good choices. This essay argues that the democratic refusal in Der Apfel ist ab is an apt critique of ‘democracy as choice’, and that the film opens up new horizons of political invention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: The status of German high culture and that of German national identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way, setting the German national project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke, among others, described as a ‘Kulturnation’. With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946, Meinecke sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, thereby challenging the Allied occupiers’ disparagement of Germany as barbarous and foolish. By examining two films, Georg Klaren's 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Karl‐Heinz Stroux's 1949 filming of Goethe's Werther, produced in the Tri‐Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic, this article casts new light on this dilemma of cultural self‐definition through the popular medium of cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. The article examines the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and looks at the role they fulfil in a project to recuperate German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the experiences of Baltic, Jewish, and Polish Displaced Persons within the overlapping stories of occupation policy, refugee circumstances, the gathering Cold War, and the process of rebuilding Germany. Using evidence from both the British and American Zones of Occupation, it explains the symbiotic processes of labeling the various groups of the uprooted and the shifting feelings of empathy that occupation authorities experienced for them. The connections between logistics and policy during mass population movements figure in this account, but the author focuses on shortages in housing and employment to trace reevaluations of who was most deserving of assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped the key political interests of the Soviet occupiers: inhospitable landlords were denounced as "Nazis," and many East Germans rewrote their pasts to claim "victim-of-fascism" status. In the West, Germans cast themselves as allies in the battle against Communism. Wartime and postwar victims in both East and West struggled to gain a moral status that would facilitate access to resources and authority; yet in neither East nor West did they create united fronts. Meanwhile, the alliance between local Germans and ethnic German expellees against the DPs and Communists did facilitate integration of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into western German society, changing the social and political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near the end of World War II, a US occupation detachment reached Hof County at Bavaria's northern edge in April 1945. Over the following year, the unit faced myriad, often rampant problems in this part of defeated Germany. Within this chaotic context, tensions between West and East manifested themselves only months after Allied occupation began, in the days after the July 1945 creation of the border between the Soviet and US zones along Hof's northern frontier. The unit's records quickly evinced a clear anticommunism. By mid-1946, the situation remained uncertain as Hof County began to develop as the frontline in the emergent Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences.Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largely unknown speech of the chief administrator of SMA (Soviet Military Administration) Thuringia, Ivan S. Kolesničenko (1907-1984), on 10 January 1947 marked the beginning of the transition from a military to a politically organised (albeit militarily secured) occupation regime in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany. The starting point was the realisation in late 1946 that an improved relationship with the German side was necessary for the better implementation of the original goals of the occupation, among them a peace treaty which would be acceptable for all the Allies and the Germans in all four Zones of Occupation. This transition intersected with the changes in policy towards Germany in 1947 - in itself a contentious topic of historiography until today. Kolesničenko's speech can be seen as a key document for the history of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) and its occupation policy. Between 1945 and 1949 he served as the political head of SMA Thuringia. His initiative was coordinated with the SMAD leadership, which sent copies of the speech to the chief administrators of the other Länder and provinces and thus endued it with the character of an official policy document for the entire zone. The initiative aimed at changed "working styles", other forms of organisation, an - explicitly so named - "Perestrojka" of principles, methods and structures of occupational rule. At the centre was the restructuring of the network of commanders and the strengthening of political control processes regarding German administrations, Länder governments and Länder parliaments. This was supposed to be based on the principle of "control instead of intervention". This "Perestrojka" concept contains no strategic change regarding guidelines related to the policy towards Germany, but possessed decisive importance for later occupation practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a case study of the Protestant churches in the British zone in occupied Germany after the Second World War, the article explores church responses to an often-neglected aspect of the Allies' purge of post-Nazi Germany: their mass internment of German civilians. Whereas the literature is critical of church support for former Nazis and opposition to Allied measures, the article argues for differentiation. Church assistance for internees was even more extensive than previously recognized and erred on the side of assisting undeserving former Nazis, while also being somewhat selective and discerning. Much church activity was in opposition to the British, yet there was also a degree of cooperation and negotiation. The article argues that ecclesiastical criticism of civilian internment was not merely a symptom of a refusal to confront the past or an expression of nationalist ideology. Internment was a genuine object of criticism in its own right and a source of wider church objections to denazification. Ultimately, Allied internment policy, pressure from below, interconfessional rivalry, national solidarity and the lack of a German government all contributed to the Protestant churches becoming outspoken critics of the Allies and advocates for those members of the German people who found themselves in civilian internment camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, scholars have provided seemingly contradictory accounts of violent crime during the US occupation of Germany. Social disorder and violence are commonly described extending for months or years after the war. For scholars of US Military Government, however, the imposition of a strict military regime precluded such crime. Meanwhile, Alan Kramer's quantitative study suggests lower rates of violent criminality and Jose Canoy found fear of crime may have exaggerated perceptions of violence. Both studies reveal how little is known about criminality during the early occupation. This article seeks to clarify divergent accounts by examining new records from German and American archives, and providing a more comprehensive account of criminal violence in the US Zone during the transition from war to peace, March to July 1945. This narrow window of time complements a well-documented increase in American-perpetrated violent crime. The present study uses data of civilian criminality alongside discovery of higher rates of American crime. It reveals a wave of severe disorder that Military Government rapidly brought under control. But in the process, Germans were disempowered and left at the mercy of American soldiers. Consequently, society remained violent even as civilians were forced to live by tight military standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victor Gollancz's book, In Darkest Germany (1947), is compiled from letters written and photographs taken during his six-week visit to the British Zone of Occupation in 1946, and provides a counter to the official British political narrative about the occupation of Germany. This article examines Gollancz's text in the light of more recent theories of photography and of childhood as constructions in order to address his claim that photography is at 'a long remove' from what he saw in post-war Germany, and to discuss the implications this has for our understanding of the German war child. It situates close readings of Gollancz's writing about photography and photographs of '[s]chool children's shoes in Hamburg and Düsseldorf' within the wider contexts of his socialism and the metonymy of children's shoes in post-war Germany, in order to argue that he engages with sophisticated theoretical ideas about the insufficiency of photography and language as means of retrieving a lived reality in pursuance of his efforts to engage a politically apathetic public. The repetitiveness of his photographs of children's shoes positions them as standing in for the situation of German children generally in the aftermath of World War II, with the aim of making these conditions comprehensible to the British public. Underpinning the repetition is the representation of the war child, which seems to escape the issues of photography that Gollancz discusses but which ultimately confirms them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at 'Trümmerfilme' from different zones of occupation and discusses the roles which the young were allocated on German post-war screens. While in all films under-age characters are central to negotiating the severe national crisis following the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazi dictatorship, the analysis highlights emerging differences in the depiction of the young between films from the Soviet Zone and the Western zones of occupation. Despite the general use of the young as figures of distraction from the adults' involvement in Nazi crimes, children in films from the Soviet Zone help to articulate a new national ideal based on collective, public productivity, while the young in films from the Western zones help to formulate the dangers inherited from the immediate past. These differences are reflected in the opposing depictions of the young as innocent in the East and feral in the West, as well as in the intergenerational relations resulting from this. While the children's potential in the East replaces the parent generation, which is implicitly marked as guilty, the dangers posed by the young in the West strengthen the authority of the parents and the nuclear-family model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how films of the occupation period encode the gradual consolidation of a post-war national identity for East Germans in the emerging GDR. For this purpose, this article offers a comparative analysis of the two films Irgendwo in Berlin (1946) by Gerhardt Lamprecht and U nikh est' rodina (1949) by Aleksandr Fainzimmer, translated into German as Sie haben eine Heimat. I focus on how the films employ images of children in order to foreground and illuminate the culturally specific but overlapping concepts of homeland - 'Heimat' and rodina - as essential for the ideas of nation and belonging. Both films provide ideological commentary on the post-war occupation of Germany through the theme of the family fragmented by the war and the need for familial restoration. Hence a child-parent paradigm becomes central to the exposition of the opposing perspectives: those of the infantilised occupied and the paternalistic occupier. My discussion uncovers cross-cultural, historical continuity between the films. It demonstrates that the Soviet film provides 'solutions' to the problems of German post-war identity posed in Irgendwo in Berlin, while the concept of 'Heimat' offers a viable framework for the appropriation of Soviet-style socialism by the GDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a workshop focusing on the military history from West and East Germany (1970-1989) at the Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMS) in Potsdam, Germany, on March 9, 2016. The event was organized by historians Jörg Echternkamp and Rüdiger Wenzke and covered topics including West Germany's Bundeswehr and East Germany's Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), NVA's paratroopers, military traditions, and the post-World War II era, from 1945 to 1949.

The article presents a report from the May 7 and 8, 2015 conference in Cologne, Germany of the GESIS social sciences institute in Leibniz, Germany on children of occupying soldiers with a focus on children of Wehrmacht soldiers. Topics of presentations delivered included resources for Austrian children of occupying Allied soldiers, the descendants of German children of occupying Soviet soldiers, and services for the descendants of German children of French occupying soldiers.

This analysis traces the evolution of the denazification programme in American-occupied Germany from 1945–1948. At the close of the Second World War, high-level American policy-makers proclaimed their determination to drive all Nazis out of power. However, the realities of denazification differed from American officials’ goals; additionally, their objectives in Germany dramatically changed over time. Monitoring German public opinion about the occupation, and keeping public opinion positive, proved of central importance to Military Government officials. They actively promoted denazification in an attempt to bolster German attitudes toward the programme. Using Office of Military Government of the United States documents, this analysis examines the decision to wind down the American denazification programme and shows that the decision came in April 1947 because of negative German public opinion. In place of denazification, American Military Government officials recommended increasing emphasis on reorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses film making in the Soviet-occupied area of East Germany in the post-World War II era. Topics considered include motion picture companies Ufa and DEFA, movie audiences, denazification, intellectual life in Germany in the post-war period, and film aesthetics. The 1947 motion picture entitled "Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows)" by Kurt Maetzig about anti-Semitism is considered.

The article discusses the continuity of film industry regulations and the types of films produced in Germany from the fascist Nazi dictatorship through post-war West Germany. Topics include the genre of Heimatfilm and the Nazi-era Ufa (Universum Film AG); the reinstallation of traditional elites and the termination of the denazification processes by the Allied Forces after the beginning of the Cold War in 1947; and the work of German directors who worked during the Nazi period and under the Allies, including Eduard von Borsody, Wolfgang Liebeneiner, and Carl Boese.

Literary historians normally associate the success of the “Suhrkamp culture” with the legendary Gruppe 47 because of the overlap between the members of both literary circles. But, in fact, Peter Suhrkamp, who was regarded as a representative of a “better Germany” and who received the first publishing license in postwar Berlin, assessed the cultural situation among the ruins differently than the majority of the writers and intellectuals of his time. This article explains why Peter Suhrkamp could not agree with the widespread notion of a “zero hour” after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Peter Suhrkamp, who in 1950 separated from his former publishing partner Gottfried Bermann Fischer and founded his own company, was considered an apt collaborator for the British Allies in their reeducation efforts. Still a partner in the S. Fischer Verlag, he had stayed in Germany during the Nazi regime and protected his authors against official attacks, while Bermann Fischer published the “un-German” émigré writers in exile. Imprisoned on charges of treason in 1944, Suhrkamp was not released from concentration camp until February 1945. The first German publisher to receive a license from the British military government, Suhrkamp developed a pedagogical publishing program for postwar Germany. In 1948, he was invited by the British to prepare German POWs in English camps for their return to Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

American rabbi Abraham Klausner played a vital role in rebuilding Jewish communal life in Germany during the first few years after World War II, advocating on behalf of survivors before U.S. military authorities, securing much-needed supplies, publishing lists of survivors, and establishing the Central Committee of the Liberated Jews as the official representative body of the Jewish displaced persons. The survivors lauded Klausner as their most trusted advocate, yet his zealous Zionism seemed increasingly to outpace that of much of the survivor population. In his May 2, 1948 confidential report to world Jewish leaders, Klausner suggested that after three years in the DP camps, perhaps only thirty percent of the survivors would choose to go to Palestine, and he proposed radical solutions to this perceived problem. Observing the DP situation from Klausner's unique perspective, the author of this article examines the contingent nature of DP Zionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses his experiences as a member of a team of Soviet technology and engineering specialists that toured Germany following World War II in an effort to seek out German technological innovations made during the war, particularly his observations of the attitudes of Germans he encountered.

ABSTRACT The following contribution, taking the example of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, addresses the difficult process of re-activating academic publishing in Soviet-occupied Germany after 1945. As one of the few universities which were not closed during the war, Jena did not experience a 'zero hour' after the Allied occupation. Since the administration had remained relatively intact, the university re-opened on 15 October 1945. At the same time the university endeavoured to establish a functioning academic publishing scheme for internal and external communication. However it became apparent that, despite the Soviets' insistence on the contrary, an independent university press was not envisaged and that licensing as practised by the Soviets impeded cooperation with private publishers. This practice did not change until influential communist functionaries had been installed at the university and the 'bourgeois elites' repressed. The present contribution elucidates the extent of the difficulties that resulted from the one-sided political orientation of the Soviets and explains how these impinged on the main actors and their room for manoeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the restoration of justice administration in Germany under the supervision of American military government authorities from 1945 to 1949. Topics discussed include the denazification, the effect of Allied occupation of Germany on the German justice administration, and the German judicial organisations. Also mentioned are the German courts' reopening and the determination of judicial authorities' potential abuses.