When American soldiers entered German towns at the end of World War II, they painted on the remainders of walls sticking up out of the rubble the words of a famous assertion of Hitler: “Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit, und Ihr werdet Deutschland nicht wiedererkennen” (Give me four years' time and you will not recognize Germany). His years were over, and it was indeed difficult to recognize Germany. Most German cities had been very badly battered by bombing and in the fighting of the last half year of war. Unlike World War I, which had been fought out practically entirely over the towns and lands of others, this time the physical damage caused by war was visible not only elsewhere but in Germany itself.

There could be, furthermore, no doubt whatever this time in the mind of anyone inside the country that Germany had lost the war, that it had in fact been utterly crushed and defeated on all fronts. The presence of Allied troops in almost all of prewar Germany by the time hostilities ended with the surrender of May 1945, quickly followed by the occupation of the small portions not yet seized by the forces of Germany's enemies, drove home to all the reality of defeat, a reality which this time, as contrasted with 1918, had been making itself felt in the preceding months as the fronts moved ever closer to and into Germany itself. Defeat this time was neither unexpected nor deniable.