Alright, so last week I got real curious about how regular German folks felt when Hitler kicked the bucket and the war suddenly ended. Like, one minute it’s chaos, the next, poof, war’s over. What’s that feel like? So I decided to dig in myself.
Step one was figuring out where to even start. My first thought? Hit the internet. I typed in stuff like “German people react Hitler death 1945” and “end of WWII Germany civilian feelings”. Man, most stuff was just big history sites talking about battles or leaders surrendering. Not much about Joe Schmoe in Berlin or Hamburg. Got kinda frustrating scrolling through page after page of war facts.
Then I switched gears. I remembered someone mentioning letters and diaries online. Found a couple of university archives. Phew, that was a slog! Hours spent clicking through blurry scans of old letters and journals. Hard to read sometimes, the handwriting was wild. But then I started spotting stuff. Things like, “We heard it on the radio…” or “…a neighbor cried when the news came…” It wasn’t organized neatly, just raw snippets.
Needed something clearer. Went searching for actual historical documents or reports compiled right then. Managed to find some old Occupation reports from 1945 that the Allies wrote up. Buried in there were bits interviewing Germans. Reading stuff like:
- Sheer relief (“Finally over, we can breathe…”)
- Fear (“What will the Russians do?”)
- Numbness (“Too tired to feel anything”)
- Disbelief (“Could it be true? Is he really gone?”)
- Shame (“What have we done?”)
It hit me then: it wasn’t one feeling. It was this crazy mix of relief, terror, confusion, shame, and exhaustion. People were picking up pieces of their lives while dealing with guilt and uncertainty about the future. They’d just been bombed to hell, lost homes, lost family. Now their leader was dead, and soldiers from countries Germany had been fighting were suddenly right there running things.
Putting it all together took a couple of late nights. I tried to lay out what the common threads were from those letters, diaries, and reports. The big takeaway? Ending fast was good because it stopped the dying, but it didn’t magically fix anything or make people instantly happy. The relief was real, heavy, and mixed with a ton of other messy, scary emotions. Wasn’t like flipping a switch to sunshine and rainbows. More like a very sudden, very confusing stop to an absolute nightmare.
