When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it started what the world has ever since seen self-evidently as a war of German aggression. But Germans had a very different view, as Nicholas Stargardt, a historian at Oxford University, convincingly shows in this depiction of how ordinary Germans experienced "their" war. In 1939 there were no rallies or marches in Germany, as there had been in 1914. The atmosphere was instead one of muted worry. The Germans had accepted the Nazi propaganda that "they were caught up in a war of national defence, forced upon them by Allied machinations and Polish aggression." Their anxiety only turned into euphoria after the surprisingly easy victories in the early phase of the war, first in Poland then in France.
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