After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

by Giles MacDonogh

When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, the Allied powers converged on Germany and divided it into four zones of occupation. A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs, was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. Rape was rampant. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, Germany was literally starving to death. Over a million German prisoners of war died in captivity, where they were subjected to inadequate rations and often tortured. All told, an astounding 2.25 million German civilians died violent deaths in the period between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift. A shocking account of a massive and vicious military occupation, After the Reich offers a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath. Historian Giles MacDonogh has unearthed a record of brutality which has been largely ignored by historians or, worse, justified as legitimate retaliation for the horror of the Holocaust. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary firstperson accounts, MacDonogh has finally given a voice to tens of millions of civilians who, lucky to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish peace.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, World War II, War, European History, Politics

656 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2007

About the author

Giles MacDonogh (born 1955) is a British writer, historian and translator.

MacDonogh has worked as a journalist, most notably for the Financial Times (1988–2003), where he covered food, drink and a variety of other subjects. He has also contributed to most of the other important British newspapers, and is a regular contributor to the Times . As an historian, MacDonogh concentrates on central Europe, principally Germany.

He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history. He later carried out historical research at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris.

MacDonogh is the author of fourteen books, chiefly about German history; he has also written about gastronomy and wine. In 1988 he won a Glenfiddich Special Award for his first book, A Palate in Revolution (Robin Clark) and was shortlisted for the André Simon Award. His books have been translated into French, Italian, Bulgarian, German, Chinese, Slovakian, Spanish, Russian and Polish.
Reviewing 1938: Hitler’s Gamble in Spectator Magazine , Graham Stewart said: "Giles MacDonogh has repeatedly shown himself to be in the front rank of British scholars of German history. The depth of his human understanding, the judiciousness of his pickings from source material and the quality of his writing make this book at once gripping and grave."

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had so many issues with this book. First, I had thought the book was supposed to be an overview of the post-war years in Germany, from WWII through the creation of the FRG and the GDR on into the 1960s or even the 1970s. Instead, it focused almost entirely on the mid- to late 1940s - from the last part of the war through the occupation, and ending with the creation of the two-nation Germany. The author, MacDonogh, spends much of the first half of the book listing all the horrible things the Allied troops did to the German people - rape, murder, theft on both the small and the grand scale. He makes no attempt to hide the fact that he considers the "atrocities" perpetrated by the Allies to be just as bad as those things done by the Germans to their neighboring countries - and even to their own people - not to mention all the horrible things done to the Jewish race.
Don't misunderstand - there are plenty of examples of individual Allied troops committing crimes against German civilians. (In the case of the Soviet Army, especially, the pillaging and acts of revenge were on a wide scale.) But to compare these acts to a national policy of genocide (as regards the Jews) and scorched-earth (as regards Poland and Russia) is ludicrous. The generally accepted estimate is that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis; add to that all the homosexuals, foreign nationals, political prisoners, religious minorities, and others that were relieved of all their possessions, herded into concentration camps, and used as slave labor until they dropped from sheer exhaustion. In many cases, those who managed to survive this experience returned to their homes to find that everything they had owned had been given away to others.
This main premise - that the Allied armies were just as bad as the Nazis - was my main issue with the book. There were others. Anytime one of the people quoted in the book refers to the "English" army, MacDonogh made sure to insert the notation [sic] - meaning, I'm sure, that it was the British army, since England is only one part of the nation of Great Britain. All well and good - except then he constantly referred to the "Russians" or the "Russian army", when any historian of the era can tell you that the same idea applies - Russia was only part of the nation of the USSR.
The author several times refers to the theft of artwork owned by Hitler, Goering, and the German state in general - yet, as I learned in The Rape of Europa, much of this artwork was "bought" from French, Dutch and Austrian dealers after the pieces were stolen from art museums or private collections throughout Europe.
For all this, though, there were many new pieces of information that I learned from the book. For instance, I was unaware that, immediately after the war, Austria and Vienna were divided up into sections much like Germany and Berlin. It's for these occasional bits of new information that I rated the book as highly as I did.

[Rogier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even as I'm just starting this book it grips me rightaway. I was raised just after WW2, in Holland, as it was still smarting from the occupation, in a city (Rotterdam) where I could still see the charred buildings from when the center city was bombed away by aerial bombardment in the Blitzkrieg, May 5th of 1940. In the midst of this circle of charred buildings a new city center was going up during my schoolyears. There was plenty of knee-jerk hatred of the Germans around, however in my parents' home I was raised with a profound appreciation of German culture, and influences that ranged from psychology and psychotherapy to antroposophy (Rudolf Steiner) and the Christengemeinshaft. So I ended up with German as my first second language, long before I knew that I would end up with English as my second first language.

And I heard many of the stories first hand of what the end of the occupation was like in Holland, and the end of the war in Germany as well. I knew first hand many people who were displaced by the Russians, etc. So I grew up with the full realization of how wars run over the backs of the normal citizens of a country. It does not matter which side you're on. The destructive forces that are being unleashed leave little standing in their way. And as this book reminds us, Hitler seized power with only 33% of the vote.

One of the endorsements on the cover calls this book "courageous." That would be because, where history is always written by the winners, the "other half" of the story is never told. Except we do know it. We're just in denial, for it's easier to paint one side white and the other black. In the course of this book I'm getting the whole historical picture, but at the same time, as I'm reading these pages, many personal encounters come to life again, but against a richer historical background.

My acquaintance with Germany and German culture goes back to at least 1955 in my conscious recollection--when we vacationed in the Schwarzwald, with my "aunt" Erika Springer. And this book helps me relive a lot of that background, with a new and richer understanding of the historical stage on which it all played out. And it's more relevant than ever, for not only was the 20th century the most destructive one in history, we're not making a very good start in the 21st century either, and we're once again witnessing up close how wars are fought without any idea what to do in the case you "win," making it very, very easy, to win the war and lose the "peace," or at least whatever it is that comes after the fighting stops.

The book offers a rich painting, curiously relevant again, as the world, with US and England in the lead, is having to face the disastrous consequences of Pyrrhic victories in Afghanistan, and Iraq. It is however shy on insight and interpretation, though it reports some curious glances. In the context of the seemingly unending raping and pillaging that went on, fueled by progressive discovery of the guts of the Nazi destruction machine, and the seeming justification for revenge that it provided, he footnotes a comment from a diary of "the straitlaced Helmuth James Graf von Moltke," who at one point reports his amazement that in the Paris of 1940, the women were "positively queueing up to get a German soldier into bed."

The rage of revenge comes dripping off the pages, interlaced with curious interludes of humanity, which definitely seems to be the exception, not the rule. All in all this is a sobering read in case one maintained any illusions about the gentler sides of human nature. The book ends with the unfolding of the two Germanies, and the start of the cold war, as yet another footnote to history showing that winning wars is not as easy as it seems. More and more one comes to think of wars as just the acting out of a bunch of lunatics who convince themselves about what they're fighting for, and when it's over one side declares themselves to be the winner, without regard to any great clarity of what it was that was won. The war! Which war? Oh the old war? But we're still at war? Oh this is just a cold war, you say? Likewise the supposed " winning" of the cold war by America as the Soviet Union disintegrated is evident as yet another delusion, just as much as the end of world war two brought no peace, just a shift in the lay of the land.

[Sean Chick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seriously, what goes around comes around, and when you start a war of racist aggression and butcher millions, the occupiers are not likely to be all that kind. If anything, we were almost too kind, letting many Nazi war criminals free, particularly in the morally bankrupt army that approved Hitler's crusade in the east and thought they'd triumph before winter 1941. The German occupation was brutal, and this cannot be ignored, but somehow there is a tinge of justice to it all, the feeling that at long last a bunch of criminals got what they deserved. On the other end the murder of millions of across Europe in a war only Hitler and his flunkies wanted, seems like the real crime, and this was just the inevitable fallout of an insane and brutal policy that failed. The end of the iron dream was never going to be pretty.

UPDATE: Looked this one over again. I appreciate that MacDonogh discussed the less savory aspects of occupation. Yet, it still has an apologetic tone that I find highly flawed. I did tick up my rating though.

[Henriette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing - so many things I did not know about how the defeated Germans were treated by the allies. It seems the allied powers did not stand back from the Nazis in atrocities against civilians and in their utterly cruel and inhumane treatment of the conquered. War is never pleasant, but I did not know that the peace was tainted with so much hatred and revenge parred with an uncompromising notion of the collective guilt of ALL Germans. The decades and decades that have passed since, only proves the notion that world history is all too often written by those who won the upperhand in any conflict.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not everyone knows that 13 million Germans died AFTER the war in allied occupied territory.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely informative... Should be read by everyone especially anyone who thinks that abu ghraib is something new

[Matthew Eyre · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very sobering look at the fact, not really taught in English schools, that far from ending with cheery squaddies dancing in Trafalgar Square and impromptu street parties a vast amount of bloodshed was still to be spiled. What you sow, you reap. While cowardly SS officers stuffed their uniforms down drains, milions of people were now displaced and at the very mercy of the people their leaders had told them were inferior, even sub-human. A much-needed book

[Kevin J. Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

"War is killing," said General Sherman, and there certainly can be no dispute about that--nor can there be much dispute that the history of those wars, at least most of it, is written by the victors. But what of the defeated? What happens to those who are left behind in the ruins, abandoned by their national armies, left to the mercies of the conquerors? Giles MacDonogh seeks to answer those questions, at least as they apply to Nazi Germany, in After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. And the answers he provides are chilling. Millions of women of all ages were raped, often in the most brutal way, mostly by Russian troops bent on exacting revenge for the destruction of their homeland. Millions more starved in what proved to be one of the most savage winters on record (one cannot think of a more inopportune time for that) through the neglect of occupying forces on all sides. And the individual stories of suffering can be heartbreaking: when the political, social, and economic order is completely shattered through total defeat in a total war, all semblance of civilization disappears for the defeated, and life devolves into a simple matter of survival. In the case of Berlin this was especially true, since the combination of devastating Allied round-the-clock air raids and stiff house-to-house resistance to the Russian advance left the massive city in virtually total ruin.

This story is also often choked with irony, as in the experience of an Sudeten Czech Communist Jew who was sent to the camps shortly after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, spent the duration of the war there, survived, was liberated, and returned to Czechoslovakia only to be branded as a "German", beaten severely, and thrown into jail with none other than the very SS and Gestapo men who had arrested and deported him seven years earlier. There are stories like this throughout this book, as individuals are swept up in the postwar maelstrom of revenge, destruction, ecological disaster, competitive diplomacy, and the reconstitution of national identity in the face of economic, political, and social obliteration. It's a compelling story well-told by Mr. MacDonogh on both an individual and national level in a clear, concise style that is impassioned, dispassionate, and compassionate, all at the same time. An achievement, and a book I highly recommend.

[Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book by Giles MacDonogh more than I actually did. After the Reich had its moments of great interest as it recounted the chaotic, brutal, and bloody aftermath of World War 2 in Germany. However, there were times where it deviated from its focus. It got sidetracked in Austria for a while, and its endless focus on the brutal Allied actions in occupied Germany in the immediate aftermath of war was a far lengthier account than it needed to be. No question it was a horrific time, but it became exhausting to continue reading this author's account of that time, which is why I paused reading for a few months but finally finished after 6 months. As a far better alternative, I found Keith Lowe's outstanding history, Savage Continent, about the same period, to be a much better book, truly an eye-opening read, which I would recommend far more than MacDonogh's book. Unfortunately, After the Reich just didn't live up to Lowe's brilliant book about the same period.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh... MacDonough book has some real strengths: 1)describing in detail the oft-overlooked postwar anarchy that reigned in Germany and Austria, 2)illustrating the tug-of-war between the Allies over Austria, and 3)covering the rise of West Germany out of the Postdam Conference. However, way too much of the book is spent on anecdotal accounts of everday life after the war. Although these details are both important and moving, they consume so much of the text that the book often lacks structure and an overarching analysis.

[Guido Colacci · Rating 5 out of 5]

They certainly don't teach this in schools... slaughter of the innocent...GREAT READ ABOUT TRUTH!

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stomach churning, upsetting but must read.

[Bill Petersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

While some reviewers may take umbrage that MacDonogh would even write such a book regarding the after-shocks of WW2 and the postwar occupation of Germany, others chide him for not going far enough. But this book never promises to tell the full story. In fact, it's one of the few that I have read that doesn't reconstitute the myths that Allies told themselves post-occupancy. It's a topic that few people know about let alone care enough to learn about.

The personal anecdotes and reliance on personal diaries of civilians caught up in the occupation and deportations from eastern Germany towards the west give the book the needed humanity and oral recounting that often goes lacking in other historical books covering such topics. At times, MacDonogh relies to heavily on these personal accounts but I suspect that his intent was to give the average citizen caught up in the aftermath and acts of retaliation and revenge a face. The face of another human caught in the gears of war and punished for being "guilty by association."

Keith Lowe's 'Savage Continent' gives another accounting of the post-WW2 occupation. Illustrating the anarchy that existed in the aftermath of Nazi Germany's surrender and subsequent political power-plays that took place among the Allies across the European continent at that time. Where 'Savage Continent' gives the reader the view from 10,000 feet, MacDonogh gives us the more harrowing account on the ground.

'After the Reich' is a book that further opens the door on the dark closet of the brutality that occurred under the watch of the Allied armies. It isn't the definitive book on the subject though but it adds to the history of WW2 and exposes parts of the past that tend to be forgotten or excused by Allies as necessary retribution.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

History is not just written by the winners, it is also written about the winners.

A very thoroughly researched book, with a wealth of information in it that most people do not have. The sources used are extraordinary, mostly diaries and reminiscences of German and Austrian civilians, as well as letters and diaries of Allied generals, political operatives, and agents. I was warned that certain parts of the book border on being apologist, but personally I did not find that to be true. It is simply a chronicle of what the German people experienced between 1945 and 1949. If MacDonogh has any ideological bias at all, it is simply his condemnation of the collective guilt imposed on Germany - something most people can agree with, since the millions of women who were raped or children who were starved were seen as 'guilty' in the crimes committed by the Third Reich, when obviously they had nothing to do with them.

Only reason I didn't give the book the full five stars is because inexplicably, it suffers from quite a few typos and editorial errors, and sometimes the writing can be convoluted, with sentences bordering on being run-ons, but after all, it's not a novel.

I think everybody should read this book in college-level history classes, just to understand the quote that I opened the review with. Often we forget millions of victims because they fell on the losing side of history.

[Jimm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chilling. The worst part of WWII came after it ended. One regret: here we get just the facts, which are grime enough. But Gile MacDonogh could have used a good editor. Too many German phrases go untranslated and the text is cluttered with too many abreviations. Pgs means something and we were told once, but, if you don't remeber, too bad.

[Rafa · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Pag 518-21): “Los americanos estaban empeñados en purgar el cuerpo político alemán del mal del nazismo” (como se nos ocurre) y basándose en la directiva JCS 1067, “concebida con el deseo de imponer una paz punitiva” crearon unos formularios (Fragebogen) que debía rellenar los alemanes y que constaban de 12 páginas y 133 preguntas: El autor recuerda y simpatiza con Ursula von Kardoff que se sintió "indignada" por las preguntas. Este es uno de los notables crímenes que los Aliados cometieron contra los alemanes…

He de reconocer que rellenar formularios administrativos es una tortura, pero en el contexto de 6 millones de judíos aniquilados; gitanos, homosexuales y enfermos mentales y tullidos diezmados; una guerra mundial con más de 50 millones de muertos, pues no sé. Equiparar a los Aliados con los Nazis, se me antoja un pelín exagerado.

Ah, y por supuesto, en Alemania no había nazis, ¿Qué es eso? Y campos, ¿Qué campos? ¿Los de margaritas? ¿Y los más de 15 millones de trabajadores esclavos? Pues no sé, pregunte a mi criada polaca a la que no pago sueldo y parece anoréxica y al trabajador italiano que no puede subir a los tranvías para no mezclarse con los arios respetables…

Mira que me ha costado terminar este libro de más de 800 páginas de texto (excluyendo notas y bibliografía) y no porque esté mal escrito sino porque me parece un dislate como libro de historia.

Particularmente, considero que un buen libro de historia no puede estar centrado en testimonios, siempre hay otras fuentes más objetivas, y si se hace se debe dar voz a los que no están de acuerdo con nuestras tesis, lo que no pasa en este volumen, donde si se los menciona es para descalificarlos, como a Erika Mann, hija de Thomas Mann o tacharlos de “judíos”. no sé si preguntarme la causa de ello... Y en el colmo de lo absurdo, llega a basar o ilustrar alguno de sus argumentos en libros o películas sobre la época porque todos sabemos (modo ironía “ON”) que en la narrativa y las películas los guionistas y directores no se permiten licencias narrativas.

Con todo, si esto es malo, peor es hurtarnos el contexto; en la vida en general y en la historia en particular, esto de una notable irresponsabilidad o, peor, parcialidad. Si yo describo una escena diciendo: un hombre se acerca a una mujer con un objeto cortante y le raja la barriga, todos nos llevaremos las manos a la cabeza, pero si añado el contexto, la escena se da en un hospital, el hombre es un cirujano y la mujer experimenta un parto difícil por lo que hay que realizar una cesárea de urgencia, la cosa cambia. Pues no digo más.

Comento algunos dislates. El autor denuncia la muerte de soldados alemanes en campos aliados (estadounidenses y británicos) tras su rendición, y aporta numerosos testimonios, pero escasos datos ya que si vamos a estos vemos que la mortalidad en los campos americanos fue del 0,2% y en los británicos inferior al 0,1%, mientras que en los campos nazis (perdón alemanes que ninguno era nazi) las tasas eran para prisioneros americanos del 1.2%; británicos, del 3,5% y rusos, del 57,5% (dato correcto, no se me ha ido el dedo).

El autor afirma (pag 496): “Alemania y Austria habían perdido por diversas razones a los judíos, que habían constituido una parte notable de sus poblaciones”. Ahora resulta que a las expulsiones y al genocidio le llamamos “diversas razones”.
¡Pero si es que hasta le parece cuestionable y hasta una ofensa que el captor de Rudolf Höss (comandante de Auschwitz) fuese un oficial británico de origen checo con sangre judía y cuya madre murió en Auschwitz!

En fin, como estas tengo decenas o cientos de tontadas con las que escribiría un libro, no tan largo como este ni tan bien redactado, pero creo que no merece la pena. Hay otros volúmenes que tratan directa o indirectamente el tema (Tierras de Sangre, Snyder; El amargo sabor de la victoria, Lara Feigle, por poner un par de ejemplos), que estando más o menos de acuerdo con mis pensamientos creo que son 1.000.000 de veces más objetivos que este que nos ocupa.

O mejor, ya puestos y basándonos en películas, ved "Uno, dos, tres" de Billy Wilder

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hitler never got more than 37.4% of the vote. And yet, after the war all Germans, even those in jail for resistance to the Reich, were punished by the Allies. More often than not they “killed the innocent, not the guilty.” “In most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men.” “Collective guilt” had been applied to all Germans partly because it was an easy way to deny a post-war German, their “rights and national sovereignty”. FDR “had no desire to meet a member of the German resistance who came to see him at the beginning of the war.” Stalin wanted/needed reparations more than revenge post-war and was “anxious not to breed a lasting desire for revenge.” “The Cold War was definitely not desired by the Soviet leader.” Spring 1946, in Berlin, “infant mortality stood at 80 to 90 percent.” Freezing cold, “droves of people” went to see Macbeth where it was below zero in the Berlin auditorium! Lady Macbeth shivered on stage”. Der Fuhrer didn’t like conductor Herbert von Karajan because he didn’t use a score. Luckily, von Karajan was protected from Hitler by Goring. Eisenhower at first bans all forms of frat with Germans under court martial threat. This contributed heavily towards American brutality against Germans.

In 1946, Secretary of State warmonger James Byrnes, flips US foreign policy and Russia becomes the principal enemy. Never hindered by morals, the US seizes some of the nastiest Nazis to work for us, and boldly steals German scientific equipment through Operation Paperclip. There were 42,000 American blacks in the occupation. Racial tolerance was better in Germany then, than in the US. “The Russians were firm believers in collective guilt and any German was liable for punishment, even death.” Slow starvation was the usual method by all of the Allies. At first the Germans saw the Americans as “liberating angels” – that soon changed. Americans were asked in Europe, “Why your thirst for vengeance? You were never invaded?” Overheard was, “Yes, Hitler was bad, our war was wrong, but now they are doing the same wrong to us. They are letting us die slowly, the gas chamber worked quicker.” The Geneva Conventions require 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day per prisoner - far more than any post-war prisoner was getting – thus all the Allies were intentionally violating the Conventions for either basic greed or revenge. An American commission found that out of 139 German cases, “137 had ‘had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received by the American War Crimes Investigation team’.” So, to investigate war crimes, you MUST create more war crimes? This book makes all the Allies look really bad – like violent angry children with loaded guns. After WWII 27,000 POWs weren’t released until 1974! Goring once exclaimed, “If only there weren’t this damned Auschwitz! Himmler got us into that mess.” Goring commits suicide by cyanide when he finds out his execution was to be filmed.

[Sheridan · Rating 2 out of 5]

For those who hae come to this topic for the first time this book may seem impressive, scholarly and sincere. It has all the signs of the ambitious academic- impressive but ultimately shallow. There are interminable ramblings about insignificant occurrences (was he paid per page?). For me the glaring omission was that he did not confront the full force of the injustice- the deliberate mass extermination of Germans and then it's falsification. No doubt this tome adds gravitas to Mr. McDonogh's resume and endears him to his ilk in academia but for those who suffered, who know the truth- shame on you Mr. McDonogh..... good effort but you will never be top of the class.

[Cliff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I cannot say when I began this book as I put it down half read a while ago as I found that the first half became very harrowing. It tells the story of what happened to German speaking civilians in places like East Prussia and the Czech lands. Effectively there was what we now call mass ethnic cleansing on a vast scale with whole populations made to up root and walk hundreds of miles with little to eat and often quite unsuitable clothing. I am aware of what the Nazis did to Jews and others, but two wrongs don't make a right. I also found the book hard going during this section as people come and go and I am not sure that we are alwatys told who they are before they first appear. The author does deal at times at length with the experiences of various former German nobility. This may be due solely to the fact that they left memoirs which the ordinary frau in the street did not. I picked the book up again where the author deals with the Allies attitudes towards Austria. He then deals with life in the various occupied zones of Germany and the trials of Nazis. Not only the famous Nuremberg trials, but trials of lesser Nazis both in that city and elsewhere. He implies, though never states in so many words, that there were effectively kangaroo courts and that it might have been better if summary justice had been meted out. The author does not whitewash the allied troops. The mass raping of German women by the Russian troops is well documented. However, he also points out that allied troops carried out similar war crimes, such as mass shootings of prisoners. The final part of the book deals with the slow slide towards the Cold War at a time when the Americans certainly were concerned that the Russians would not stop at Berlin but if given a causus belli would swamp the whole of Western Europe. On several occasions the author refers to Kat Summersby, Eisenhower's 'mistress'. When I did further reading I found that there is serious doubt as to whether they ever had sexual relations (which to my mind is implied as being the case by the use of the word 'mistress'). They were certainly close companions but whether it the relationship went further is open to doubt. There is also one reference to 'Magna Charta'. The h in the second word should not appear. I always have niggling doubts when finding things like this in histories as to what errors ther might be that I don't know about. Certainly the refugee (or 'displaced persons') problem lasted for long after the war ended. I remember, when in the 6th form, collecting money for the International Year of the Refugee which the UN organised for 1959/60. Echoes of today, although I suppose white European refugees are more cuddley thatthose from the Middle East. Interestingly I notice that the strap line to the title has changed over editions. The word Brutal etc has been dropped for the more anodyne as shown in the heading to my review

[Kieran · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sympathetic look at the treatment of Germany and the Germans in the aftermath of defeat in the Second World War. Packed full of interesting anecdotes and examples, but in the middle it would have benefited from being a bit more selective rather than trying to include everything.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-researched volume, albeit a lumbering and unorganized one dealing deals with the atrocities after the war. Thirteen million Germans died after the war. The Red Army, seeking revenge for three million of its soldiers dying in the Nazi camps, decided to eke out revenge by raping, starving, and killing any stray woman they ran across. This extended to children and nuns. And it also involved Poles and Czechs, who were likewise busy with their own retaliation against the Nazi atrocities. And while the Allies weren't exactly angels, MacDonogh points out just how monstrous the Russians were in their need for restitution by any barbarism necessary. Which makes the first half of this book quite fascinating and disturbing. At what point do you cut off the cycle of vengeance? Unfortunately, MacDonogh is on less confident footing when he tries to shoehorn the Nuremburg trials into this awful history. He is much better at documenting the difficulties of trying to rebuild a nation from the considerable rubble of the war, of showing the lack of food, housing, and care for those who survived, and of making a reasonable case that, contrary to Goldhagen, the majority of these Germans did not wish to align themselves with Nazism -- and not strictly out of self-preservation. Ultimately it is the British who come off as the best here (and they were the most well-liked by the Germans during reconstruction). So there's a great deal to soak up here (and I did end up buying more books after flipping through the endnotes), even if the book becomes more de trop as it goes along. Which it really shouldn't have, given the importance of the subject.

[Tomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this book five stars, but there were a few issues that bothered me. One was the use of British colloqialisms (boffin, for example). I spent some time googling these unfamiliar expressions....well, I guess that improved my vocabulary! The author sometimes lost me when I couldn't figure out the antecedent for his pronouns (once an English teacher...). The main problem was the author's use of literary works as comparison to events. I felt that was unnecessary and detracted from the events themselves. Other than these things, which were distracting to me, this was a very, very good book. When the author says "brutal" conditions, he means it. I did not realize how many atrocities were committed after the war was over...and by every country involved. Every country had blood-stained hands. This book explains how the Western Allies were tricked by Stalin in setting up post-war conditions, but also indicts those Allies for ignoring problems. I learned a lot from this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in this time period.

[Ajda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am completely overwhelmed by the described human tragedy in defeated Germany first years after WWII. For the first time I read something more specific about the Allied occupation and as the author describe it-their victorious "thirst for revenge", to punish the defeated enemy. Liberating, but first purging and destroying,if possible, all left after the Nazis regime.
I am at the beginning of the book, so maybe my emotions took hold. Still I feel disgusted. I have always considered Nazis as the main perpetrators and now something doesn't fit.

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book on a part of history not much considered outside Germany. A scrupulously researched study of what happened, month by month, year by year in the various regions of occupied Germany and Austria. It is a shocking and disturbing story of hypocrisy, cruelty and deliberate neglect by the Americans, British, French and Soviet Union. it stands out as an important corrective to most received western histories of the period, which pass over the late 1940s in Germany, except to focus on the division of Germany and the Cold War. This is essential reading.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dealing almost exclusively with the postwar period this work ranges over the expulsions from "the reclaimed territories" in the East - Poland and Czechoslovakia, the operation of the allied occupation forces in Germany and Austria, the final break between the USSR and the formation of the Trizone, and the formation of the FRG. The airlift is also dealt with somewhat cursorily as is the initiation of EU.

There is a somewhat sketchy bibliography but the notes are extensive.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended for readers familiar with Central European social history and revisionist narratives.


Full review: http://lovepovertyandwar.wordpress.co...

[Pat Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most Americans really do not know the darker side of the occupation of Europe after World War II. Check this out and learn more about the darker side of postwar life. Try this book in segments - especially anything to do with the American side of the Occupation.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative, concise, and to us Americans who tend to romanticize the Second World War and our "benevolent" leaders of the period, quite sobering.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent on the early years of the occupation, the treatment of ethnic Germans and the breakdown of relationships between the western Allies & Russia in occupied Germany

[Matty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gave probably a little too much leeway to the guilty parties, but otherwise informative with uncommon info.