Customer Reviews

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the real story of the final days and occupation of Germany during and after WWII rather than the glossed over baby boomer version many of us were fed growing up. It isn't pretty. The Red Army systematically raped women aged 14 to over 80, nuns, and even patients in hospital beds by the thousands. Those men who tried to protect them and some women that resisted were shot. Whatever alcohol was available anywhere to drink was confiscated and the raping increased tenfold. Whatever was not nailed down, and indeed much that was, was looted and taken back to Russia. The rest was often burned down in many cases. The French behavior was not much better. Again, rape on a large scale. I have yet to see anything official from either country recognizing these atrocities, much like the Japanese history in China and the Turks in Armenia. Nor have I seen anything regarding the US mismanagement of the german POWs and allowing thousands to starve. If you doubt it, go to Remagen and visit the little museum next to the remains of the bridge.

I have heard ugly Americans and even read some despicable comments by Israeli journalists and book reviewers that "they had it coming to them", because 30 odd percent of the voters in this country voted for Hitler, long before his designs of massive extermination and a scortched earth policy in defeat was widely known. This is akin to Bin Laden's claim that there are no innocent US citizens, because enough people vote and pay taxes. THus 9-11. Then you have atrocities responded with by more atrocities.

The book is smooth reading, and breaks down the final days and the occupation for Germany and Austria under the different occupying powers. Seperate regions also recieve special attention based on the topics. All sources are listed as well.

History should include all stories, whether they are flattering or not. This book is an important gap filler which is being filled by similar books that have come out in the past decade.

AFTER THE REICH is a good compilation documenting the total collapse of the German government and of a German people at the complete mercy of the victors. The book is complete with many first person narratives of the difficult lean years following the end of the European war. The account makes no judgement as to whether the Germans deserved what they got or whether the Allies were too harsh on a people that they, for better or worse, gained responsibility for once an area was overrun. It really becomes a question as to whether or not you view Germany as liberated or conquered.

Much of this story has been told before and appeared in various books such as THE LAST DAY OF THE WAR, THE LAST 100 DAYS, THE BATTLE OF BERLIN, and so on. I also read a German book, loosely translated, THE OCCUPIERS AND THE OCCUPIED. As such you find many of the same themes: Bombed out cities, forced evacuations, winters with no heat, households with no food, and nasty deeds committed by the Red Army and its clients. What I did find new with this book was more detailed information about the fate of the German territories and population east of the Oder Neisse line, as well as the remaining German population in East Prussia. There was also quite a bit about how the vengeful Czechs were apt pupils of their former masters and took revenge to the extreme.

The book also spends several chapters discussing Austria and how quickly the Austrians disassociated themselves from the Germans and Germany. It is not difficult to imagine the Austrians flying the swastika one day and digging through their closets to display Austrian flags the next.

The book's narrative timeline begins during the last months of war. Only a year prior to the surrender the Third Reich occupied almost half of Europe. By May 1945,though the last vestiges of the German army continued to fight on, "liberated" Germans were already feeling the victors' wrath. As the Allies did not yet have a unified plan for post war Germany the people were generally treated as little more than serfs in their own bombed out country. The eleventh hour French wanted revenge, the British sought to restore some order by pushing for the restoration of limited self government, while the Americans pushed through Germany with little to no plan at all. Meanwhile the Soviets were busy annexing half of East Prussia and making a gift of the remaining German lands east of the Oder to the Poles. The Soviets moved into Germany with a no-holds-barred approach to private property and personal civil rights. Life was certainly cheap for Germans in the eastern territories.

What becomes clear is that as the German forces were pushed back or rapidly withdrew they left a power vacuum in their wake. This was very evident in the east. For those "Germans" left behind in eastern Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia law and order disappeared overnight. The void was rapidly filled by competing armed mobs, bandits claiming to be resistance fighters, and other armed irregulars whose only purpose seemed to be to rob, pillage, torture, and kill. The Czechs in particular took over operation of former Nazi camps and herded in Germans by the thousand. "German" was a broad definition applied to legitimate German nationals, people who spoke German, professionals, and essentially anyone who had something the armed brigands wanted.

In the midst of the crisis the Red Army turned a blind eye to the plight of soldiers and civilians alike. Remember that to the communist Russian way of thinking there was no distinction between German soldier and German civilian. Everyone was considered a potential war criminal. However, even though the Soviets were carting off whole factories and emptying out museums the Red Army did restore some order. In occupied Austria and Berlin they organized local governments, reopened theaters, and prompted the resumption of newspapers and radio. In this the Russians were leagues ahead of the western Allies.

The British, French, and Americans all handled their zones with different political agendas. Over the course of several chapters it is clear that the western Allies moved away from their philosophy that Germany would never rise again once the Cold War kicked into high gear. In essence Germany benefited from the Cold War in that attention was turned toward the evil Communist east and West Germany was finally united as a political unit.

The reason I gave AFTER THE REICH only three stars is that it suprsingly lacks balance when discussing the toils and tribulations of the Germans themselves. Surely there must have been German farmers, family households, and businessmen who did not suffer lost homes, ruined cities, unheated houses, or desperate hunger. Not every village was flattened by bombs or forfeited to Poland. For the most part the book focuses on the German soldiers and civilians who suffered in the worst possible situations. No doubt there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who did. As such there had to be an equal number who managed somewhat better and did not lose all of their possessions. I suppose those stories would not make much in the way of intersting reading.

AFTER THE REICH is a book that should be read in conjunction with other references on the subject. In fact a great companion volume for AFTER THE REICH is ENDGAME.

Americans would like to believe that we marched into Germany,routed out all the Nazis and restored peace in a fair and just manner....This book sheds light on the sometimes darker reality of occupation and de-nazification.

The author draws important distinctions between the different occupation zones and what went on under Russian, French, British, and American oversight. In a way, this approach makes the timeline feel a bit dis-jointed, but often the difference between zones was so great, that it would be hard to use any other approach to telling the story.

I was in Munich several years ago when I met an older gentleman who shared his story with me. He was a German P.O.W. in the United States.At the end of the war, they were sent to NC and put on a ship for France. He assumed he would son be released. Imagine his surprise when he discovered the US government turned him over to France and he would stay a P.O.W. for the next 3 years working manual labor. Though lacking first person perspective, this work does tell these important stories that few realize.

If you're interested in the post-war period, this book is a worthy read.

I had just finished reading two books The Germans in Normandy, and the Bitter Road to Freedom, a new history of the Liberation of Europe. I thought After the Reich would be a good follow up to find out the rest of the story. The book did not disappoint me. I took the book with me during a recent vacation and thought that I might be better served reading a historical fiction or more contemporary novel. The book exceeded my expectations ! At times, it was a bit academic and presumed a previous knowledge of history, geography, art, literature, etc which only sharpened my desire to learn more. I found the antecedote comments of the author and the quotes and comments of persons who had real life experiences during the period to be enlightening. The author skillfully tied the events and circumstances to the people that lived them. I felt as if I was reading a first person history of people who had witnessed the times and events. There were so many facts that were presented which were outside of the information normally contained in history books that I was shocked and unaware of what had occurred during the period of occupation. I was assigned to an Army Military, counter intelligence unit, in Germany in 1963 as a young draftee and was surprised that there were still DP's in Germany at that time. This book helped portray how significant the Displaced Person issue was after the war and what a colossal task the Allies had ahead of them to sort out the damage to persons and property. I believe the author was honest and straighforward, without sugar coating, the roles of the various participants responsible for the occupation of Germany. I wondered, as I read the book, how I would have personally dealt with the events if I had been a US soldier as part of the occupation. It certainly was a moral and ethical gut check ! I highly recommend the book. The next time that I visit Germany, I will have a better appreciation and different perspective of the history that has occurred over the past years.

I just completed reading, "After the Reich" by Giles MacDonogh. From pages 1 through five-forty six, I learned much. Much more than I thought I knew about the Allied occupation of Germany after World War Two.
I learned that conquers' can sometimes be just as cruel as those conquered.
The Allies did a service to the world by destroying Hitler and his armies. They fought together with a common cause, and mostly a common goal: this all unraveled after victory over the Third Reich.

To deny that during or after any war there have not been murders, torture, rapes, theft and enslavement one would have to be either totally naïve or never been beyond the borders of their own small world. I served in the military, and while I was fortunate enough to have not been a witness to these barbaric acts I knew in the back of my mind that some soldiers, wearing the American uniform, were doing just that. However, I am appalled and ashamed of how some Americans and many other Allies participated in terrible acts of violence and subjugation to the defeated of World War Two.

"After the Reich" is a great read. When you are done please take time to compare how much more thought and care was put into the occupation and help to get the Japanese back on their feet after World War Two. Why? Because we didn't have so many world powers involved in it.

Rick Huffman
Author of, Dreams In Blue: The Real Police.
Dreams in Blue: "The Real Police"

AtR is quite a work of scholarship. While the holocaust industry churns out dozens of new books and movies every single year, most based on questionable scholarship and many openly fraudulent, the Communist rape of East Germany is a subject that is brazenly ignored in the schools, media, and publishing industry. It's quite a wonder that several good, but unnoticed, books have been published on this apparently taboo subject in the last ten years.

Like many canonical holocaust books, this book focuses on heart-breaking narrative accounts of suffering. The subject matter is obviously disturbing but is important for the same reason that narratives of the suffering of the Germans, Gypsies, and Jews under the Nazis are important. I periodically revisit this book and continue to have trouble reading certain passages.

It's a shame that some folks on here are giving negative reviews and denying the East German genocide (just as they deny the Armenian genocide) because they feel that the truth threatens their ethnic monopoly on exploiting suffering. This is a fine work of scholarship about a topic that the publishing industry would rather whitewash, and MacDonogh should be commended for his prodigious effort.

This book opens a window on one of the most underexamined period in 20th Century history. The post war occupation of both Europe and Japan is treated like a dark secret not discussed in front of the children.

One reason might be the deification of the WWII generation. Hard truths might tarnish the idealized view we have of them.

Novels, historys and movie treatments are rare. "The Third Man" is one of the few movies that dealt with that period. The"Teahouse of the August Moon" and "I was a male war bride" touched on the occupation but only as backdrop.

The author obviously has his own axe to grind but the book is well documented. I would recommend this book to my friend to fill an blank space that seems to exist between 1945-1950.

The book itself tells the tale of what happened in Europe after the end of the war. But, it does so poorly.
There are many badly written passages, and it does not seem as though anyone proof read it. Ideas hinted at but not followed up upon, wildly out of place colons, people and concepts discussed before they're introduced (and then introduced as though we're meeting them for the first time), no attempt to identify who/what is the subject of sentences and paragraphs, contradictory statements made one after another without any clarifying follow-up. Also, an often painful amount of detail is given about the doings of players in German politics and arts without context of why they are important, or why person X standing in for person Y so many times is relevant or meaningful. We are introduced early to the 'economist' Eugen Margaretha, but only learn 250 pages later that he will later become president of the National Bank. It gets ridiculous.
The worst failure to follow-up on a thought occurred in the chapter relating to how the German populations were treated in Czechoslovakia. He begins the chapter with a quote about how brutal the Czechs were to the Germans despite the fact that while they occupied by them the Czechs never offered any resistance. One would assume he would return to this concept as it is a provocative quote, and appears to be leading to a compelling and interesting profile in national psychology. As it turns out, the opening quote is just a tease; what follows is simply a litany of horrors meted out to the German/German speaking populations without any attempt at all to fill in the hows, the whys or what-fors. He could have done better.

Also, Mr. MacDonough's attempts to appear equitable and even-handed when talking about the crimes of Russian and Western soldiers is laughable. Yes, rapes happened in territories held by the British, French and Americans. Yes, the occupied people were treated with less dignity than they would have liked, and things did get stolen. But, putting these facts forward after endless passages on how the Russian's raped, pillaged, starved and executed their way through their conquered territories as if to show that all the armies were alike struck me as pathetically PC. Trying to make the wholesale gang-rape of entire village populations between the ages of 8 and 80 to the point that many died in the process parallel to 'some rapes were reported' is simply asinine. (And speaking in my own pathetically PC voice, a reader could be excused for believing that all slips in discipline by the French were attributable solely to the African contingents in that army. Mr. MacDonough also seems to have something of a fetish for black American soldiers, as references to them are thrown in nilly-willy).

Regardless, worth a read if you're keen on learning more about a critically important yet oft ignored era. If you appreciate good writing prepared to be frustrated, annoyed and occasionally angry. If you're only looking for a list of bad things that happened along with some tut-tutting about mistakes that were made by the allies, then this is the book for you.

Behavoir in the extreme of good and evil have not boundaries, it does not belong to just one part of the world, it belongs to the whole and we are all reponsible for it; unfortunately there are not inocent, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, we all make a portion of world's hypocrisy.
"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives." Oscar Wilde.

This book is a brutal book to read. First it explicitly describes the torture, rape and abuse of victims of the 3rd Reich as well as the perpetrators of those same crimes against humanity on whom retribution was enacted by their former conquered peoples. Just as brutal is the narrative which jumps around from grandiose descriptions to too much minutia in its description of the monumental year after the war. I think what could have helped this book was an index of names and descriptions of the prominence those names held as well as more maps included in each major section of the book.