GERMANY: Tiger, Burning Bright

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The drying scrawls of ink on parchment attested that Germany was a world power once more—for good or evil.

Only seven years after its total defeat, its penance was ended, the penance which its conquerors had vowed to impose for half a century. Germany—the richest, most populous, most important two-thirds of it—had climbed from defeat through vassalage to partnership with its Western conquerors. Its "contract" with the Western allies provided a peace more generous than even the most hopeful German could have imagined in the graveyard days of 1945. Its European...