Jannes Riemann reviews Leonie Treber’s controversial book on Germany’s ‘rubble women’…

I was listening recently to the Germany – memories of a nation series on BBC Radio 4, in which historian Neil MacGregor – he who curated the British Museum’s exhibition of the same name in 2014 – discussed about how Germany’s “rubble women” had the “Herculean task” of clearing away the debris of the empty ruins, and how their “emotional and physical strength…put the country back on its feet.”

He talked of the “astonishing speed with which the Trümmerfrauen made Germany habitable again”….so much so, that by the late 50s much of West Germany had been rebuilt, in contrast to some British cities, where the rubble remained on the streets until the 60s.

In the decades since WW2, this story has become the de facto reconstruction tale. Almost everyone interested in the topic has seen the famed black and white photos of women standing in orderly rows – buckets in hand, often smiling – atop the vast mountains of brick, stone and dust created by Allied bombings and Russian artillery during the Battle in Berlin, and the story is recounted on dozens of daily tours and in dozens of museums throughout Berlin and beyond.

As a West German schoolchild, I also heard the story consistently throughout the 90s and early 00s. Indeed, it’s one of the few heroic stories I remember from those years, alongside that of Officer Stauffenberg, the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, no doubt because they were “feel good” consolations after previous years of learning how Germans were almost universally complicit either as Nazi perpetrators or followers (Mitläufer).

But was Germany’s remarkable post-war reconstruction really down to these female war survivors? German historian Leonie Treber, in her 2014 book Mythos Trümmerfrauen, claims not. Treber claims the story is a myth: a vastly exaggerated truth that conveniently fed into notions of cultural identity for both East and West Germany.

Her key finding is that the main rubble removal and recycling was achieved by professional workers and big machines – just as it had been during the war when the Nazis preferred women to stay at home and take care of children, work in the arms factories, or sign up as nurses or secretaries. Following wartime bombings, it was special units of the Security and Help Service (SHD or Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst) and/or Air Raid Police (Luftschutzpolizei) who mainly got the urban infrastructure working again.

When Allied bombing intensified across Germany in 1943, and with more and more men fighting on the fronts, forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners …