A desolate street in an unknown post-war German city

A new online exhibit is available on the Archives and Rare Books Library website highlighting the library’s German-Americana collection. This exhibit, entitled A War in Shades of Gray: German-Americans and Germany in the World War II era, examines the thoughts and experiences of a few German-Americans through images and words from the German-American collection. The exhibit begins in Hitler’s pre-war Germany and continues through the end of the war to the clean-up and the questions that remained after the war.

The exhibit displays photographs, essays, and letters from three archival collections:the George E. Armstrong Photograph Collection, GA-08-02, the Gerhard R. Schade Papers, GA-06-03, and Helmecke family papers, GA-09-04, along with images from the Rare Books Collection. Almost twenty images and documents are on display in the exhibit including Nazi propaganda, a letter from a German-American teaching in Nazi Germany, photographs of the destruction to German homes, buildings, and infrastructure taken at the end of the war, and the thoughts of a German-American on the Cold War that began soon after the end of the war.