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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Daniel Cowling, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Description: Germany, spring 1945. Hitler is dead and his armies crushed. Across the conquered Reich, cities lie devastated by Allied saturation bombing; their traumatised populations, exhausted and embittered by defeat, face a future of acute privation and hardship.Such was the broken state of the nation in which a British civilian and military force arrived in the spring and summer of 1945 as explored inΒ Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49Β (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Daniel Cowling. Their zone of occupation was the northern and northwestern part of Germany, the country's former industrial heartland. Th...