What was it like for German soldiers returning home after World War 2?


 No celebrations and parades were dealt with when German soldiers came back after 1945. The majority found the country lying in heaps of bricks and smoke. Many had spent time in Soviet prison camps, and they spent the next decades of their life not returning home until the middle of the 1950s. By the time they got home, they were not known to them.

During many years, wives had learned how to survive and take the family by their own. The children did not know the man standing before them that was skinny, fatigued. The family was greatly shocked by this. Most men were unable to find their place in the world and that is why they were depressed and took their own lives.


To cope with the humiliation of defeat they were silent. A wall of silence had been created in German households. They did not talk about crimes and horrors. They instead concentrated on hard work. This science contributed to the resurrection of the economy within the shortest time possible, yet it kept them occupied and could not allow them to go back to the past. They just argued about the military strategies at the pub with their long-time friends.


They discussed how they had almost won had it been the weather or decisions. That was the remaining way to save some pride. Others even enrolled in local fire departments to have a uniform and have an orderly sense back to them. The silence was not to be broken until the late 1960s when their children started raising the difficult questions concerning what their fathers actually did.

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