War and Emerging Remembrance (washingtonpost.com): An interesting article about German veterans of WWII and their coming to grips with the war and its aftermath.

” The shifting current funneled the landing craft toward the eastern end of Omaha Beach, where they disgorged men directly below Hein Severloh’s camouflaged machine gun nest. He recalls emptying belt after belt of ammunition, raking the shoreline for hours as wave upon wave of American GIs struggled through the blood-red surf.”

The effects of the war are still present in everyday live here in Germany. Every once and a while old bombs from allied raids are found in the woods or during construction and have to be detonated/defused. When that happens everybody in like a half kilometer radius needs to be evacuated. M’s mom watched Hamburg get annihilated from her attic window when she was a child. There was an anti-aircraft gun about a kilometer from her house. She remembers going out into the garden as she was a kid and seeing a fighter pilot (English or American, alive or dead, I don’t remember) hanging with his parachute tangled in a tree. Then ladies in the neighborhood cut down the parachute just to get at the silk.

Crazy.