Bombing, homelessness, flight and fear. [WWII]

>Finally, those [**Germans**] born in the mid-to-late 1930s experienced the war as children; their childhood world and earliest memories often consisted of bombing, homelessness, flight and fear. This was the generation of Manfred Uschner, born in 1937 and during the 1980s a leading Socialist Unity Party functionary (as Private Secretary of the Politburo member Hermann Axen) in the German Democratic Republic. >As a seven-year-old Uschner had witnessed his grandmother being burned alive in the bombing of Magdeburg on 16 January 1945, an experience which, he asserted, had ‘burned itself into us for ever’ and about which nearly a half a century later he would write: ‘I have never shaken loose from it.’ ___________________________ **Source:** Bessel, Richard. “Introduction: To Hell and Back.” *Germany 1945: From War to Peace*. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 8, 9. Print. **Original Source(s) Listed:** Nicholas Stargardt, *Witnesses of War. Childrens’ Lives under the Nazis* (London, 2005). Manfred Uschner, *Die zweite Etagge. Funktionsweise eines Machtapparates* (Berlin, 1993), pp. 28-9. _________________________ **Further Reading:** [Manfred Uschner](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Uschner) [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED / Socialist Unity Part of Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Unity_Party_of_Germany)