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)
In 1945 Germany was a nation in tatters. Swathes of its population
were despairing, homeless, bombed-out and on the move. Refugees
streamed towards the West and soldiers made their way home, often
scarring the villages they passed through with parting shots of
savagery. Politically the country was neutered, carved into zones
of occupation. While Britain and America were loathe to repeat the
crippling reparations demands of the First World War, Russia bayed
for blood, stripping their own zone of everything from rail tracks
to lavatory bowls. After the Reich is the first history to give the
full picture of Germany's bitter journey to reconstruction. Giles
Macdonogh expertly charts the varied experiences of all who found
themselves in the German melting pot. His people-focused narrative
unveils shocking truths about how people continued to treat each
other, even outside the confines of war. It is a crucial lesson for
our times.
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