ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1945 much of Europe lay in ruins. In the hardest hit areas, cities were reduced to rubble, bridges destroyed and highways made impassable, crops could not be planted; factories were crippled or demolished, and production fell to dangerously low levels. Everywhere in areas hit hardest by war, there were refugees and displaced people, many having lost everything but the clothes on their backs. While touring Berlin in July 1945, on the eve of the Potsdam Conference, President Harry S. Truman saw first-hand the ruined, burned-out buildings, but even more depressing was the “long, never-ending procession of old men, women, and children wandering aimlessly along the autobahn and the country roads carrying, pushing, or pulling what was left of their belongings.”1 Forty years later, Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1974 to 1982, reminisced about his country’s fate immediately after the war: “I had imagined that when we lost the war we Germans would have to live in caves and holes in the ground. . . . There were days during the winter of 1946-47 when we stayed in bed because there was nothing to eat and nothing to burn for warmth.”2
