After the Reich
The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The shocking history of the brutal occupation of Germany after the Second World War
When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Germany was a nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs. In the ensuing occupation, hundreds of thousands of women were raped. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, denied access to any foreign aid, Germany was literally starving to death. An astonishing 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed in the post-Reich era.
A shocking account of a massive and brutal military occupation, After the Reich draws on an array of contemporary first-person accounts of the period to offer a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of value, from watches to factories. Millions of ethnic Germans were driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia, stripped of their possessions and subjected to atrocities on the way. The Western Allies behaved better, but sidestepped the Geneva Conventions, using German POWs as slave laborers and letting thousands of them die in captivity, while keeping their zones on starvation rations. Nor were the Germans, with their own death camps finally coming to the world's appalled attention, in a good position to complain. Journalist and historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: A Life of Wilhelm II) gives a gripping, if choppy account of the occupation while portraying Truman, Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam as squabbling over the spoils as feral children scrabbled through the ruins. The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied victory. Photos.
