ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some light on the motives for German behaviour in the period 1945–7, as they appeared to the British occupiers. Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War the new President of the Federal Republic, Karl Carstens, spoke of the ‘grave guilt’ with which the Germans had burdened themselves, because they were responsible for the death of millions of people. The German soldiers who fell deserved as much an honourable memory as the killed civilians. The treatment of the post-war period tended to concentrate on reconstruction leading to the emergence of two German states. German reactions to defeat in 1945 are closely linked to the degree to which National Socialism and Hitler had become rooted in German Society. Many of these German attitudes emerge again from British observations of German reactions to military defeat after 1945.
