Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (review)

As World War II entered its final phase in the West in 1944–45, Germans and Germany, having "sown the wind" of war, in the words of Winston Churchill, began to "reap the whirlwind" of devastating loss and utter defeat. By the time of Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945, about three million German soldiers had become POWs held in precariously underprovisioned Soviet prison camps. They were not completely repatriated until 1956, more than a decade after the war had ended. About 750,000 never returned.

The scale of this frightful German experience, which many non-Germans (and some Germans) saw merely as the Nazis' just desserts, had a deeply disturbing and long-lasting impact on the captives themselves and their families, and on Germany in general, and arguably defined much of the politics and culture of postwar society in both East and West Germany.

In his book, Frank Biess tells the story of the troubled reintegration of this mass of former German combatants into their home society during the decade or so following Germany's defeat. It is largely a cultural history of postwar Germany, centered on the soldier "returnees" (Heimkehrer), but told in the context of pertinent political and social factors, and key international developments, particularly the Cold War and the postwar division of Germany.

Biess's main argument is twofold: first, that the POW issue was so large and disturbing for Germans that it virtually defined Germany's "post-war" period and national "narrative" of the war; and second, that despite the Cold War emergence of two very different polities and "top-down" influences in East and West Germany, ordinary Germans in both societies experienced the POW issue in similar ways, and responded "from the bottom up" in similar fashion, especially at the individual and family levels. He makes the important corollary point that the POW phenomenon delayed Germans' willingness to examine their responsibility for unprecedented wartime criminality and genocide.

Cultural history is a tentative affair, and depends on selected and circumstantial, rather than comprehensive and direct, evidence. As Biess points out, there are often large discrepancies between "official" and private narratives and memories, and there are inevitably entire spectrums of private recollections and interpretations. (Is a historian more apt to "find" those that support, or that challenge, his or her thesis?) Biess has done a judicious job marshalling facts in support of his arguments, using an imaginative array of primary sources and a solid and fair selection of secondary ones. Where a scholarly consensus is challenged, or does not exist, he lets us know.

The work for the most part is free of "problematizing" jargon, and the writing is clear. I would have liked even more text describing individual experiences of German soldiers as combatants on the Eastern Front, and as POWs in Soviet camps, and the postwar adjustment experiences of spouses and other members of returnees' families. (Biess gives us some of this.) The work would also have benefited from more information on the social and demographic makeup of the Wehrmacht returnees relative to the larger German population. These would add to the reader's understanding of one of the author's essential—and I believe accurate—claims: the trauma, scale, and ultimately nationwide impact of the Eastern Front POW's experience.

This is a very useful, well-researched, and briskly written work. It contributes much to the historiography of the two postwar Germanys, and to the field of veterans' history in general. It is timely, and advances our general understanding of the varied individual and social costs of war, especially of defeat. It should be read by anyone with these interests.