Reviews
Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany

Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (2006), xiii + 367 (Princeton University Press, London and Princeton, £22.95/$35.00).

In his thoroughly researched and tightly argued book Homecomings, Frank Biess examines the figure of the POW in both halves of Germany from the time of the first large-scale imprisonment of German soldiers at Stalingrad to the release in 1956 of the last ones in captivity. Biess focuses on the two million Germans who returned from Soviet camps both as a practical problem of (re)integration and as a powerful symbol of victimhood and redemption. He argues that these men - and some women -'transcended the binary categories of perpetrator and victim' (5) in that they actively committed violence on the Eastern Front and later experienced it themselves as prisoners. Biess negotiates the fine line, however, between highlighting a discourse of victimization in the post-war Germanys and according that status to these returnees himself. Instead, he carefully places his subject matter within the larger European context of suffering and hardship, and he emphasizes that Soviet POWs in Germany faced a much higher mortality rate than did German POWs in the Soviet Union (3-4).

In choosing Stalingrad as a starting point, Biess shows how certain Christian themes that emphasized the passive endurance of suffering and that would become so prominent in the western zone(s) after 1945 had already emerged by the last years of the war. After 1943, the relatives of missing soldiers turned increasingly to the churches for meaning and solace, and they redirected their hopes for an ultimate victory towards a more modest desire simply to reunite with loved ones. This paved the way for a gradual reinscription of the returning POW in the post-war period from an emblem of German defeat to a figure of redemption, both in the metaphorical Christian sense of suffering that leads to rebirth and in the concrete sense of reparations, given that some Germans saw the prisoners' forced labour in Soviet camps as restitution to Russia on behalf of the entire German nation (111). Moreover, because the returnees had survived a barbed-wire-enclosed camp, the quintessential symbol of totalitarianism, they came to embody anti-totalitarianism and contributed greatly to the symbolic realignment of West Germany with western Europe and North America. Returnees to East Germany, too, symbolized redemption, which often came in the form of public confessions at organized conferences, where 'speakers pleaded guilty to having participated in the Nazi war of destruction' and then portrayed their re-education in Soviet captivity as an epiphany and a 'second socialization' (128).

In fact, Biess draws fascinating parallels throughout his book between the experiences of returnees in East Germany and those in the West. Both East and West sought to shore up post-war masculinity by re-casting the returnees as stoic survivors rather than victims, and both sides worried openly about how best to reintegrate these often shattered men into their post-war states, economies and families. Furthermore, both Germanys clearly excluded certain returnees from the newly forming national communities, even as they embraced the vast majority. In West Germany, a series of trials convicted some returnees of having co-operated with the Soviets while in captivity, a judicial trend that contrasted obscenely with the simultaneous drop in prosecutions of Nazi war criminals by the 1950s. In East Germany, meanwhile, the widespread purges of party and bureaucracy in the late 1940s targeted many returning POWs from western or Yugoslavian camps, on suspicion that such captivity outside an orthodox socialist country had invariably tainted their political convictions. This is the only section in which Biess makes extensive reference to POWs held outside the Soviet Union.

As Biess emphasizes in the third section of his book, 'Divergent paths', not until the late 1940s did the situation for returnees to East Germany begin to differ markedly from that for returnees to the West. Just as former POWs from West Germany began to organize themselves in 1948 and to lobby successfully for government support, East Germany cracked down on its own returnees' efforts to mobilize politically. By May 1950, when the Soviet Union announced the final repatriation of German POWs (34,000 remained behind, on charges of war crimes), the East German government took this as an opportunity to end public discussions of wartime losses for good and to draw the curtain on the 'post-war period'. In West Germany, on the other hand, the Soviet declaration fuelled a new wave of public attention to the fate of POWs. Vocal sceptics and political populists insisted that the Soviets continued to imprison a number of Germans in secret camps, with some estimates as high as a million former soldiers. In fact, there were no 'secret camps', and the Soviets released the last of its 34,000 POWs in two successive waves, 1953-4 and 1955-6. The fact that the Soviets had held many of these men on legitimate charges of war crimes did not deter West Germany from granting them heroes' welcomes upon their return.

Biess has written an absolutely first-rate study of post-war Germany. The fates and laden symbolism of returning POWs provide an ideal lens for examining how Germans as a whole reconfigured and redirected the traumas of war, defeat and guilt, and how the two separately emerging German states approached the problem of integrating returning POWs (and everything that they represented) into two radically different post-war societies. Biess addresses so many big issues in this book, however, that - in spite of its exemplary concision - some topics receive disappointingly cursory attention. He mentions, for instance, the fact of female returnees, but he never addresses their particular problems, experiences or symbolic valence in any depth. Nor does he discuss the specific differences in the reception of returnees who had served in the Waffen-SS and those who had served in the Wehrmacht, although he does mention briefly that West Germany accorded 'returnee status' to many released war criminals (192). On the other hand, the fact that Homecomings contains a mere 231 pages of narrative, all of it written in a clear and accessible style, recommends it for undergraduate classes, as well as for graduate students, academics and the interested public. Moreover, Biess's astute analysis and extensive research make this book essential reading for historians of post-war Germany, the Second World War and the Cold War. In his introduction, Biess hoped that Homecomings would contribute to an integrated 'history of the aftermath' that covered all of Europe. This book certainly provides that yet-to-be-written study with an excellent start and a valuable model.

Erik Jensen

Miami University