In the ruins of 1945 Germany, twenty-five-year-old Alfred Kornfeld returned to the country of his birth as both an American and an eyewitness to history.

A Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi Germany, served in the U.S. Army, trained in counterintelligence, and entered the defeated Reich before war’s end, Kornfeld became a Berlin-based correspondent for Time. Between October 1945 and his sudden death in December 1946, he filed more than six hundred reports from occupied Germany—probing crime, hunger, homelessness, denazification, the conduct of Allied troops, the return of political life, and the landmark Nuremberg War Crimes Trial.

Salvaging Germany brings a selection of these vivid dispatches into print with attribution to Kornfeld for the first time, framed by Phoebe Kornfeld’s deeply researched account of her uncle’s remarkable life. His reporting captures not only policies and power struggles, but the fragile, contradictory human reality of a society emerging from dictatorship and devastation.

At once intimate family history, recovered journalism, and eyewitness testimony, Salvaging Germany asks a question that still resonates: after catastrophe, what can a nation salvage—and how does democracy begin again?