With the Americans, an unfamiliar army entered the country. The locals admired everything about them as they passed: their relaxed sitting postures, the confident laughter, their casual way of smoking. ‘The GIs’ shoulders were as wide as wardrobes, their tight buttocks as narrow as cigarette boxes’, as Hildegard Knef put it in her memoirs. They were described as bursting with health, as unusually life-affirming and, we read repeatedly in numerous eyewitness reports, as being as ‘naïve as children’.

Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 (2021)