Winning the Peace: The British in Occupied Germany, 1945-1948
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GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949
At the end of World War II roughly 300,000 American GIs were deployed as occupation forces in Germany. Many of them quickly developed intimate relations with their former enemies. Those informal interactions played a significant role in the transformation of Germany from enemy to ally of the United States, argues Petra Goedde in this study. Goedde finds that as American soldiers fraternized with German civilians, particularly as they formed sexual relationships with women, they developed a feminised image of Germany that contrasted sharply with their wartime image of the aggressive Nazi stormtrooper. A perception of German "victimhood" emerged that was fostered by the German population and adopted by Americans. According to Goedde, this new view of Germany provided a foundation for the political rapprochement that developed between the two countries even before the advent of the Cold War. Her provocative findings suggest that the study of foreign relations should focus on interactions not only between politicians and diplomats but also between ordinary citizens.
The Anglo-Soviet Alliance and the Problem of Germany, 1941-1945
response to the Fascist challenge. Strangely enough, however, it has never been asked whether similar symptoms can be detected in British relations with the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Among the historiographical assumptions to account for this two are of particular importance. Firstly, the Anglo-Soviet alliance of May 1942 was advocated by former anti-appeasers like Churchill and Eden who would not admit that their approach to Stalin was not altogether different from Chamberlain's dealings with Hitler. Secondly, attention has been focused on the United States as the new 'superpower', as though responsibility for co-operation with Moscow during the war as well as for the ensuing Cold War must be laid at the feet of the new leading nation of the West and nowhere else. If it can be proved that the same motives and methods were at work in British relations with both Hitler and Stalin, the concept of appeasement would appear to be meaningless or else to require redefinition. In his study on 'Russia's Road to the Cold War', perhaps the most thorough refutation of American revisionist historiography, Mastny comes to the conclusion that British diplomacy during the Second World War 'makes the