Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
Cruel Allied Occupiers
By Patricia Meehan
After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
by Giles MacDonogh
Basic Books, 618 pp., $32.00
In the spring of 1945 Germany went down into chaos and defeat. In Germany itself, occupied by its enemies, slave labor, concentration camps, starvation, imprisonment without charge, and executions did not disappear with the Nazis. The revelations of the death camps, spread around the world in April 1945 by newsreel footage from Bergen-Belsen, seemed to give a free hand to those who were now in control. Giles MacDonogh has given himself the formidable task of chronicling the lives of Germans when they fell into the hands of their conquerors. In his book After the Reich he has done this in unsparing detail. It is a compendium of human misery. MacDonogh knows Germany and Austria well and has a wide acquaintance there. He has drawn on firsthand accounts and private memoirs which he has been able to add to his research into published sources.
Review, 4571 words
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