Books: *After the Reich* (Nigel Jones, UK)

Nigel Jones writes:

In view of the ongoing discussions on the occupation of Iraq, may I draw
the attention of fellow WAISers to the forthcoming publication of an
important book which I feel has lasting lessons about the aftermath of
wars which we ignore at our peril.

The book is *After the Reich* by Giles MacDonogh, and it is to be published in
the UK by John Murray in April, and I imagine in the US around the same
time.

Essentially, it is a study of Germany and Austria under Allied and Soviet
occupation from the closing days of WWII to the Berlin airlift in 1949. It
makes for very sombre reading indeed. MacDonogh is a
distinguished historian of Germany with biographies of Frederick the Great,
Kaiser Wilhelm II and the anti-Nazi resistance hero Adam Trott under his
belt, as well as a history of Berlin and studies of German food and wine.
He is undoubtedly a Germanophile, but his book is no less disturbing for
that sympathy. He claims, and the claims appear to be well-documented, that
far from our received picture of the occupation being a relatively ‘clean’
and peaceful process, it amounted to little less than a lesser Holocaust.
That Germany was systematically raped, both literally and metaphorically.

He claims that:

+Some two million German civilians died in the aftermath of the war–
murdered, starved or by despairing suicide. (These were civilians, chiefly
the old, sick, women and children, since the majority of able-bodied men
were in the armed forces.)

+ That the vast majority of German females in the Soviet occupied zone of
eastern Germany between the ages of eight and eighty were raped by Russian
soldiers as a matter of policy.

+ That of the small German-speaking community of the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia (about one million people) some 250,000 were slaughtered in
cold blood by the Czechs often with revolting cruelty. The Czechs appear to
have been particularly vengeful since they suffered, proportionally, far
less at the hands of the Nazis than the Russians, Poles or French and,
apart from the assassination of the SS Chief Reinhard Heydrich, were far
more compliant with the Nazi occupation.

+ That about 40,000 German soldiers were deliberately starved to death or
died of exposure in a series of camps along the Rhine set up by the
Anglo-Americans.

+ That thousands of German PoWs were used as slave labour in many
countries, but particularly in France, the US, Russia and Britain for years
after the war.

+That notorious Nazi Concentration camps–among them Auschwitz,
Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald–continued to operate as
concentration camps after their ‘liberation,’ but now filled with Germans
rather than their prisoners.

+ That the Nuremberg trials were illegal under international law, and were
merely victors’ justice.

+ That some German prisoners continued to be held by the Soviets as late as
1979.

+ That torture of prisoners was a widespread practice–often carried out
by Jewish refugees from the Nazis serving in the Allied forces.

MacDonogh claims his book–mainly gleaned from German sources–is the
first proper documentation in English of these shocking facts. He rejects
the contention by the Canadian journalist James Braque in his book *Other
Losses* that a million German PoWs were killed as part of a deliberate
Allied policy, and shifts the focus mainly to civilian losses. He leaves
no doubt, though, that Allied policy–by all four of the ‘Big Four’–was
dictated by vengeance, not by a desire to build a new and democratic
Germany. That only came about because of the need to build a bulwark
against Soviet expansion as the Cold War got underway.

The principle objection to the book, given that MacDonogh’s facts are
correct, must be the argument that ‘they had it coming to them,’ i.e., that
Nazi crimes were so horrendous that such mass revenge on the civilian
population is excusable or justifiable. The counter-argument, of course, is
that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that treating the vanquished with
the barbaric methods of the Nazis vitiates the nobility and ‘rightness’ of
the Allied cause.

I have a detailed knowledge of Austrian and German history, having lived in
both countries, but this book shook me to the core. I am astonished that no
powerful neo-Nazi ‘backlash’ has arisen in Germany demanding revenge for
the atrocities that MacDonogh documents so soberly.

The obvious lesson for us today, in my opinion, is that justice must be
tempered by mercy in any occupation, and that outrages such as Abu Ghraib
could have been foreseen. After all, they have happened before. I commend
this book to all WAISers who, like me, fondly imagined that in WWII ‘Right’
triumphed over ‘Might’. Sadly, it did not.

JE comments: I too had always held a belief in the “benign” Allied
occupation of postwar Germany (except, of course, for the Soviet
sector). Another shibboleth bites the dust; I look forward to seeing
MacDonogh’s book.

– For information about the World Association of International Studies
(WAIS), and its online publication, the World Affairs Report, read its
homepage by simply double-clicking on: http://wais.stanford.edu/

John Eipper, Editor-in-Chief, Adrian College, MI 49221 USA