No Spark in Cold War

The Atlantic and its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War

The second half began in the wreckage of the first, with the almost complete destruction of the country whose recovery was to be a major theme of the following 50 years.

“Germany had had the fate of Genesis’ Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire,” Stone writes. “Two out of five boys born between 1915 and 1925 were dead or missing. The 10 million surviving Wermacht men were herded into makeshift camps behind barbed wire and another 10 million non-Germans, released from the camps or from forced labour, were wandering around.”