Product Description

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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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7693 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-21
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Review

Praise for Giles MacDonogh’s previous books:

(. )

Prussia: ‘Well-researched, well-written and important’

(Independent )

Berlin: ‘A rich book, packed with information, understanding and enthusiasm, stuffed with wonderful tales well told and suffused by prodigious reading’

(Daily Telegraph )

Frederick the Great: 'Stylishly written and rich in detail, this biography offers the most rounded portrait of Frederick the Great yet to appear in English’

(Sunday Telegraph )

The Last Kaiser: ‘Compelling’

(The Sunday Times )

Synopsis
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.

About the Author
MacDonogh is the author of eleven books on subjects as diverse as German history, French gastronomy and wine. \n \nHe has written for major newspapers in Britain and Europe such as the Financial Times, the Guardian and The Times. He contributes to magazines all over the world.

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Customer Reviews

seconhand history
On the 27th September 1938 Neville Chamberlain famously said:
"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
At least Chamberlain never attempted to write an article about Czechoslovakia. The fourth chapter in the book "After the Reich" is written by someone who apparently knows nothing about the far- away country. Based almost entirely on biased and outdated German materials it mixes with aplomb facts with fiction.
The two Hitler's henchmen Karl Hermann Frank and Reinhard Heydrich are almost portrayed as some sort of martyrs. It is well documented that they planned a complete annihilation of the Czech nation. Mac Donogh claims that Nazi brutality was "measured" apart from the destruction of Lidice which was "provoked" by British. The war loss of 340 000 inhabitants (higher per capita than France or Britain) was probably due mainly to some acts of kindness. Not a word is mentioned about numerous SS and Wehrmacht atrocities during the Prague uprising in May 1945 despite irrefutable evidence - including films and photographs.
I shall not go into Mr. MacDonogh's figures - all wildly inaccurate but shall deal with his lack of knowledge on the topic. It is evident that his command of German (or his ability to translate into English) is insufficient.
Few examples:
Heydrich was not a "deputy" Reichsprotector but an acting Reichsprotector - a crucial difference.
He authorised countless executions of the Czechs on his arrival to Prague in 1941 - certainly in a measured manner.
Frank was never a Reichsprotector, nor a Secretary of State but the State Secretary.
It is not true that "Czechs continue to deny that any wrong was committed against the German Bohemians after the war". The post-war excesses have been acknowledged (and apologised for) by President Havel on many occasions. There are countless Czech articles and books dealing with the matter. The title of Tomas Stanek's book "Persecution 1945" is self-explanatory..
Mac Donogh's poor command of geography is startling. He insists on calling the Czech towns by their German names and frequently fails to give their Czech equivalent thus denying the reader the opportunity to find these places on the currently available maps. Maps are anathema to him: the only map in the book that of 1945 Central Europe is full of inaccuracies and huge errors- for example it does not show the division of East Prussia between Poland and the Soviet Union.
He locates Northern Bohemia next to Lower Bavaria.Kasperské Hory in Southwest Bohemia is moved to Eastern Bohemia. Jihlava is on one page south of Prague on another in Western Moravia.
Domazlice (Taus) is mistaken for Horsovsky Týn (Bischofteinitz).
In fact one cannot find a page without errors, misspellings or embellishments. I shall give a typical example.The massacre in Usti nad Labem (Aussig) happened on the 31st July 1945 not the 30th.It was "in the open" and thus seen by countless witnesses. Most of the local Czechs (including the town's Mayor) tried to protect the Germans against the soldiers (Czech and Russian) and some outside civil gangs. The maximum of documented victims is 43 with perhaps another 50 drowned not 400 - 1000 quoted. It is true that one woman with a pram was thrown in the river. In Mac Donog's account she becomes "women with prams"
These days there is on the bridge a commemorative desk with the words: "Na pamet obeti nasilí 31. cervence 1945 - Zum Gedenken an die Opfer der Gewalt vom 31. Juli 1945."
In remembrance of the victims of outrage of the 31st July 1945 - hardly an act of people in denial.
To conclude this is an inaccurate copy and paste job skilfully presented to the gullible public.
The one star is for the topic.

No Crime without Laws?
NO CRIME WITHOUT LAWS?

By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR


AS SPRING ROLLED into the early summer of 1945, Germany stood - or lay prostrate - on the edge of the Allies' fearsome vengeance for six years of increasingly total war. To add to the three million men (and boys) already killed, Germany herself was utterly ruined. Nearly two million German civilians were also dead, nearly four million homes had been destroyed by British and American bombing, and over seven million people were homeless.

While the Soviet armies smashed and gang-raped their way towards Berlin, German soldiers and civilians were to pay a dreadful price for this Bolshevised Gotterdammerung. On its bloody heels was to come the terrifyingly brutal expulsion of perhaps 16 million German civilians from parts of eastern Europe where there had been ethnic-German communities for centuries: at least two million of them would be murdered in the process. And then was to come the four-power occupation by the Allied armies, as the former Reich was dismembered, looted, starved - and finally re-assembled (in two parts) as the Cold War got under way.

This is the canvas upon which Giles MacDonagh paints his quarter-million word account of the remains of Hitler's empire, from the liberation of Vienna in 1945 to the Berlin airlift of 1948-1949. He presents in it an epic panorama of war and peace, of cruelty, stupidity, greed, starvation and the very, very hard world of realpolitik - in which there is but an occasional flicker of human valour and human value: the 10-year old German lad successfully defending with an axe his mother from Russian rapists, the Archbishop of Cologne urging his freezing people to steal coal from the thieving Allies, and the German slave-worker in Britain for whom the regulars of the local pub bought drinks and had a five-shilling whip-round.

MacDonagh tells his terrible tale with sweeping lucidity, in a long-established narrative style, without stylistic artifice or technical conceit. Nor does his story need either. After all, Germany had lost the war she had started by 1942, or by early 1943 at the latest - a war conducted, especially in the east, with murderous savagery against civilian and soldier alike. The Russians, among many others, had ever reason to seek vengeance - and by the spring of 1945, they were drinking very deeply at that sweetly poisoned well.

None of the other Allied powers comes out of the story shining either, at least by the standards for which the war was ostensibly fought by them. France's colonial troops from Morocco distinguished themselves with their taste for rape (or at least got the blame for it), while a far higher proportion of German prisoners died in French custody than that of the British or the Americans.

And while the British kept their prisoners in Bergen-Belsen, they made preparations to test Britain's atom bomb (along with chemical warfare) on Germany's North Sea islands. Britain returned 45,000 Cossacks to the Soviets, overlooking their status as prisoners-of-war and supposed protection by the Geneva Convention. Another 3,000 people (some of them not even Soviet citizens) were also handed over to certain death: the Argylls, "were particularly brutal to women and children".

In Austria, the Field Security Service ("a secret service in uniform", in the words of one member) arrested all names on lists drawn-up in advance (just as the Soviets had done in their fearsome occupations of Poland and the Baltic states). A torture-centre was maintained in London's Kensington Palace Gardens, and another at Latchmere House in the city's suburbs. There were yet more in Germany, at Bad Nenndorf and Gutersloh. And the conduct of nearly all the immensely distinguished British lawyers in the war-trials of Germans would not have been out of place in Stalin's Russia - or Hitler's Germany itself. As MacDonagh notes, the old maxim of "nulla poena sine lege" (there is no crime without laws) was shamefully and shockingly ignored at Nuremberg.

Nor is the American role in the occupation of post-war Germany without blemish, by those standards that the Americans are never slow to claim as their own. Indeed, their conduct in post-war Germany may be eerily familiar to the modern reader. In Frankfurt, for instance, the Americans lived "in the conquerors' part of the city" - an oasis in the middle of a starving desolation of ruins, for which a special pass was required even to approach its vicinity. Here, Eisenhower entertained his mistress, who later described this small city as being, "very elegant - lots of marble and fountains and indoor flower gardens, great curving staircases and very luxurious offices, several tennis courts [that] could have fitted into Ike's office. Bouquets of fresh spring flowers were placed in our offices every day".

Meantime, nearly three and a half million German prisoners-of-war were "re-designated" to another status, which took them beyond the protection of the Geneva Convention. As a result, the Red Cross could be denied access to the concentration camps in which the prisoners were held: and they could then be prosecuted in the shamefully trumped-up kangaroo trials (from a strictly legalistic viewpoint) shortly to be seen in Nuremberg. They could also be - and were - wilfully starved: although the Americans baulked at using the re-designated prisoners as slave-labourers, for the American trade-unions objected.

At one torture-centre near Stuttgart, the Americans used long periods of solitary confinement, extremes of hot and cold temperatures, deprivation of light and sleep, mock trials, and mock executions, where German prisoners (hooded) were told they were approaching the gallows, before being bodily lifted off the ground "to convince them that they were about to swing". As for the reprisal-murder of civilians: "one shot merited the destruction of a village. As they advanced, if a shot was fired from a village, they either stopped, or evacuated and whistled up the air force".

In Bayreuth, meanwhile, after reducing the historic town to rubble, American soldiers took over the opera house, where they entertained themselves with jazz on the piano of Liszt. They were also alleged to have danced the jitterbug on the grave of Wagner. The land of Goethe and Beethoven (among others) must indeed have wondered what was coming next ......

And yet from the ruins came a GDR and an FRG - each in its own way, more of a success that a failure. And since then has come a Germany once-more united within post-war frontiers, and at the heart of a Europe increasingly united, at least in formal terms. It is a Europe that had better stay that way, too. The prospect of old irredentisms, of old fault-lines, ever re-opening is one too terrible to contemplate.

www.iain-fraser-grigor.co.uk

ends

casahistoria
Any modern writer of post war Germany who mentions the names of Hajo Holborn and Michael Balfour in the first few pages clearly has done their reading. This book fills in the gap left in many English language histories of postwar central Europe: from the actual end of war and its immediate impact to the outbreak of the Cold War. Covering not just the zones of Germany, but also Austria and the events of German speaking Europe elsewhere - the German Reich at its largest.

The initial 100 pages or so are a harrowing account of the treatment of the German speakers as they were invaded, occupied, looted, raped and for the millions in the east, moved westwards. The brutality by all concerned is meticulously documented - too much so in places - I wanted to skip on as it was so disturbing and relentless. The Red Army is well documented by others, less so the proportionately greater savagery of the Czechs on the Sudetenlanders (especially grim as MacDonogh makes clear the pre 1938 Sudetenlanders were ex Austrians, not Germans who had been unlawfully deprived of the chance at self determination after Versailles by a nationalist Czech regime.).

Another eyeopener is the evidence that all the allies used prisoners of war in ways similar to Speer in his use of slave labour (and often in the face of resultant deaths). The US was especially cynical in this matter announcing they had released all POW's in mid 1946 when in fact they released them to be handed over to other allies: Belgium and France, for manual work. The USSR was still returning POW's in the mid 1950's.

The early stance of the US was surprisingly tough. Outside the Soviet Zone, the US had and maintained the hardest stance to its prisoners and civilian population for the first 18 months. Torture seems to have been common initially amongst all the occupiers as they sought to do the necessary and root out Nazi's. However MacDonogh's examples indicate a direct line of war's dehumanisation that makes treatment of Iraqi prisoners seem minor.

One issue with After the Reich is caused by its heavy reliance on documentary sources, especially memoirs. This had meant a skew towards recounting the experiences of the better off, in particular the womenfolk of the German/Prussian nobility. At times this leads perhaps to a too unconsidered appreciation of the sometime self-serving motivation of the 1944 plotters, many of whom were close to the writers of the memoirs used.

The final section takes a reader swiftly but clearly through the fog of the origins of ther Cold War, only after 500 pages of the aftermath analysis what follows has a clarity lacking in the work of many other revisionist writers.

Since the Wende, this has been a topic occupying the history shelves of most German bookshops. MacDonogh has done English readers a service with this account. The underlying sentiment is that this book records the consequences of the far greater evil perpetrated on others by the Germans - a feeling that many of those recorded reflect, despite their misery. It is not surprising that with the opening of the east Germans have wished to document the period, nor is it surprising that Anglo-saxon writers have shunned it for so long.