Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
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After the Reich (Paperback)
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After the Reich (Paperback)
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When Hitler's government collapsed in 1945, Germany was immediately
divided up under the control of the Allied Powers and the Soviets.
A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs,
was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors.
According to recent estimates, as many as two million German women
were raped by Soviet occupiers. General Eisenhower denied the
Germans access to any foreign aid, meaning that German civilians
were forced to subsist on about 1,200 calories a day. (American
officials privately acknowledged at the time that the death rate
amongst adults had risen to four times the pre-war levels; child
mortality had increased tenfold). With the authorization of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, over four million Germans were
impressed into forced labor. General George S. Patton was so
disgusted by American policy in post-war Germany that he commented
in his diary, "It is amusing to recall that we fought the
revolution in defense of the rights of man and the civil war to
abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles"
Although an astonishing 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed
in the post-Reich era, few know of this traumatic history. There
has been an unspoken understanding amongst historians that the
Germans effectively got what they deserved as perpetrators of the
Holocaust. First ashamed of their national humiliation at the hands
of the Allies and Soviets, and later ashamed of the horrors of the
Holocaust, Germans too have remained largely silent - a silence
W.G. Sebald movingly described in his controversial book" On the
Natural History of Destruction."
In "After the Reich," Giles MacDonogh has written a comprehensive
history of Germany and Austria in the postwar period, drawing on a
vast array of contemporary first-person accounts of the period. In
doing so, he has finally given a voice the millions of who, lucky
to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a
hellish "peace."
A startling account of a massive and brutal military occupation,
"After the Reich" is a major work of history of history with
obvious relevance today.
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