After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

by Giles MacDonogh

Overview

The shocking history of the brutal occupation of Germany after the Second World War
When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Germany was a nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs. In the ensuing occupation, hundreds of thousands of women were raped. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, denied access to any foreign aid, Germany was literally starving to death. An astonishing 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed in the post-Reich era.
A shocking account of a massive and brutal military occupation, After the Reich draws on an array of contemporary first-person accounts of the period to offer a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465006205
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	02/24/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	566,971
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

A graduate of Oxford University, Giles MacDonogh is the author of several books on German history and has written for the Financial Times, the Times (London), the Guardian, and the Evening Standard. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Illustrations     ix
Preface     xi
Chronology     xvii
Map     xx
Introduction     1
Chaos
The Fall of Vienna     25
Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe in 1945     45
Berlin     95
Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia     125
Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the Prussian East     162
Allied Zones
Prologue     199
Life in the Russian Zone     201
Life in the American Zone     227
Life in the British Zone     250
Life in the French Zone     269
Austria's Zones and Sectors     278
Life in All Four Zones     314
Crime and Punishment
Guilt     339
Black Market     372
Light Fingers     381
Where are our Men?     392
The Trials     429
The Little Fish     451
The Road to Freedom
Peacemaking in Potsdam     471
The Great Freeze     496
The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic Recovery     517
Conclusion     542
Notes     547
Further Reading     585
Index     589

Editorial Reviews

This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of value, from watches to factories. Millions of ethnic Germans were driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia, stripped of their possessions and subjected to atrocities on the way. The Western Allies behaved better, but sidestepped the Geneva Conventions, using German POWs as slave laborers and letting thousands of them die in captivity, while keeping their zones on starvation rations. Nor were the Germans, with their own death camps finally coming to the world's appalled attention, in a good position to complain. Journalist and historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: A Life of Wilhelm II) gives a gripping, if choppy account of the occupation while portraying Truman, Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam as squabbling over the spoils as feral children scrabbled through the ruins. The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied victory. Photos. (Aug.)

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Publishers Weekly

Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II, 2001, etc.) examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of defeated Germany. The subtitle is probably the publisher's, since MacDonogh advises at the outset, "I make no excuses for the crimes the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible desire for revenge that they aroused." In some ways, that revenge was symbolically charged, as when the Allies put concentration camps to use housing prisoners who proved to have more than an accidental connection to the Nazi state; in others it was trivial, as when Russian soldiers went about demanding wristwatches. But aspects of the conquest were brutal indeed: Those Russian soldiers committed revenge rape on a grand scale, while, MacDonogh asserts, the American liberators at Dachau allowed former prisoners to tear guards and kapos limb from limb. More systematically, the Occupation deprived ordinary citizens of their property and, at least for a time, cast everyone under suspicion as tribunals convened and the long process of denazification began. It soon became obvious to almost everyone concerned, not least the occupied Germans, that as the Cold War got colder this process was confined mostly to the small fry; those Germans "were annoyed," MacDonogh writes, "to see the Party big-shots go free while the authorities continued to harass rank-and-file members who had done nothing monstrous." So it was that from 1945 until May 1948, when the purge ended, the French, British and American courts had tried 8,000 cases but executed only 806, perhaps half of them civil servants and workers, while the"worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not punished at all."Of interest to students of modern Europe, complementing W. G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) and other studies of history from the point of view of the vanquished.

Kirkus Reviews

"An account of tragic human experience, all too little known, in the words of those who lived through it. It is not only a fascinating story but a unique and valuable historical document."—New York Review of Books

"MacDonogh has written a grueling but important book. This unhappy story has long been cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one. Not the Allies, because it placed them near the moral nadir of the Nazis; not the Germans, because they did not wish to be accused of whitewashing Hitler by highlighting what was, by any standard, a war crime. Giles MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth."—Sunday Telegraph (London)

"Giles MacDonogh's shocking new book gives a very different and long overdue alternative view—and all the more sobering for being written in a style that betrays no hint of the author's anger at the appalling atrocities he relates....[A] superb book written by a sympathetic writer in perfect control of his often dreadful material. Overall, MacDonogh has told a story that had to be told and told it very well. The book teaches, in fact, an old and classic lesson: it is better not to start wars, but it is fatal to lose them."—History Today

"A sometimes violent and often disturbing history that prods the reader to think about the choices of conquerors."—Seattle Times

From the Publisher