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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009)
Description: One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day.
The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hint...