The people of Agsburg were relieved that the war had come to an end in their city without bloodshed.

One inhabitant remembered later, “You had this double feeling of being defeated, yet at the same time liberated.

Defeat had to come.

You could almost touch it.

But only very slowly did we realize what being liberated really meant.

” In an entry in her diary on May the 8th, 1945, another inhabitant of Axborg wrote, “What a beautiful day.

Nature is fresh and young.

The sun is shining and the sky is blue.

You would think that a day like this would be full of jubilation and sound.

That people would be laughing and weeping for joy and that the bells would be ringing because today the word peace is on everyone’s lips.

Peace in our land.

” something we almost dreamt of for six long years at war.

The people of Agsburg were going to work or taking a walk as if there had never been any enthusiasm for Hitler or any war crimes.

But the victors had their doubts about the seemingly unpolitical attitude of the Germans.

They asked awkward questions.

who had been a member of the Nazi party, who had stood by as Hitler’s crimes were committed, and who bore personal guilt.

General Eisenhower’s proclamation number one stated, “We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors.

We shall obliterate Nazism and German militarism.

We shall overthrow the Nazi rule, dissolve the Nazi party and abolish the cruel, oppressive and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created.

The Americans had precise ideas on how the Germans were to organize their future.

The US occupying forces came with well-prepared plans for the structure of administrative bodies, political parties, and cultural life in this new freedom.

With everything based on the model of western democracies, at first many Germans had their doubts about this concept.

People preferred to focus more on their everyday lives than on reappraising their country’s Nazi past.

Many suppressed the guilt issue.

Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of dennazification tribunals took place.

The aim was to determine whether the person summoned was to be classified as a major offender, offender, lesser offender, follower, or exonerated person.

Roughly 2/3 of those interrogated were classified as followers or were exonerated.

At the end of the war, the victors focused first and foremost on the ruling elite of the Third Reich.

In Auxburg on May the 14th, 1945, the US Air Force team also took this footage of the most important representative of the Nazi regime who was still alive, Hamang Guring.

Here, the 52-year-old approaches the camera with a smile on his face.

The dazzling rice marshal had long been Hitler’s deputy, but just before the end of the war, the Nazi leader had removed Guring from all his positions.

Firmly convinced that he would become the Fura successor, Gurling had surrendered to the Americans and been taken to the US interrogation center in Auxburg.

[Music] After his arrest, Guring is said to have claimed that war was like a football match.

At the end, the loser shakes the winner’s hand and all is forgotten.

[Music] With charm and cunning, the prominent prisoner obviously wanted to evade responsibility.

Following an improvised press conference, author Klaus man, who was working in defeated Germany as an American reporter, had this to say about Guring.

You can’t even say that he looked particularly unsympathetic.

Rather the opposite, in fact.

Admittedly, his face did display a certain brutality, and there was often a really evil glint in his eye.

His overall appearance was that of a condoeri, someone who, despite all the cruelty he exuded, still had a touch of joviality about him.

Had I known what was happening in the concentration camps, Guring claimed, I would have taken vigorous action.

Like most Germans, Guring too saw no need to account for the past.

The victors took a different view.

Guring was one of the main war criminals to stand trial in Nuremberg in October 1946 and was sentenced to death.

But hours before his execution, he swallowed a cyanide capsule and took his own life.

The main thing he is said to have commented is that for 12 years I had a good life.

June 1945, Hollywood director George Stevens and his camera team are on their way to Hamburg.

Stevens would rather have been heading for Berlin, but Western reporters were not yet allowed into the German capital, which was in Soviet hands.

Stevens had been waiting for special permission ever since Germany’s unconditional capitulation.

In the meantime, it had become clear that on July the 1st, the Allies would be able to occupy their sectors in Berlin.

Only then would Stevens also be allowed to visit the German capital.

On arrival in Hamburg, Stevens and his team first went to the city’s world famous port to do some filming.

The K Vida Spitzer was still largely intact, but around 80% of the port area had been destroyed in bombing raids.

Vast amounts of rubble and numerous wrecks had made the navigation channels impossible.

Curious, a few children approached the American camera team and let themselves be filmed.

the halfstraser with the old Ela tunnel.

[Music] In 1943, that Hamburg became the target of devastating bombing raids which also completely destroyed the city center.

Fortunately, the war came to an end here without hostilities.

Hitler had declared Hamburg a fortress to be defended to the last bullet, but the city’s military leaders ignored the order to destroy its vital port installations.

On May the 3rd, 1945, Hamburg was peacefully handed over to the British.

Stevens toured the wasteland in his jeep.

In Operation Gomorrah, which the Allies mounted in late July 1943, hundreds of thousands of incenduries caused firestorms of untold ferocity, which claimed 34,000 lives.

[Music] Author Hans Erish Nosac wrote about the wholesale destruction of his hometown.

Someone might think that it is hard to stand where you had lived for many years and where there is now nothing that you would perhaps sigh or sob, but it is not hard, simply incomprehensible.

So incomprehensible that you cannot weigh it.

Indeed, that weight is so appallingly heavy it is almost impossible to describe.

Having a roof over their head, a home, and enough food to keep their families alive was the very minimum of security that people in occupied Germany now wished for.

In early July 1945, George Stevens and his team were at last allowed to leave Hamburg.

Driving over the Ela bridges, they headed for Berlin.

The men still had enough rolls of 16 mm color film to document Hitler’s capital and the conference of the big three, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill in Pottown.

 

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