Research project

This project explores how West Germans leveraged their own recent postwar experiences to build relationships with the decolonizing world from the 1950s to the 1970s. Under the banner of “reconstruction,” West German politicians, businessmen, and scientists peddled their supposedly apolitical expertise to forge ties with emerging postcolonial states. In turn, leaders of newly decolonized states picked up on this discourse of “postcolonial reconstruction” as they sought out aid and assistance. Overseas development projects, the traditional narrative tells us, in part signified the Federal Republic’s arrival in the liberal West. Yet many of these experts were involved in National Socialist projects of forced labor, expropriation, and genocide. They then went on to attain prominence in organizations that provided credit, infrastructure building, and aid to developing countries, as in the case of Hanna Reitsch, an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, or Heinrich Kraut, President of the World Hunger Aid. The project takes such careers as a starting point and asks whether the appeal of German expertise in “reconstruction” was rooted in the wartime experience of physical destruction, or perhaps also––and more enticingly for the decolonizing world––in reconstruction after occupation and Germany’s loss of sovereignty between 1945 and 1949. In pursuing the trajectories of illiberal actors within postwar development projects abroad, the book explores transnational exchanges of expertise and finance within the shifting political terrain of the Global Cold War.