After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
Giles MacDonogh
Language: English
Pages: 656
ISBN: 0465003389
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although an astonishing 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed in the post-Reich era, few know of this traumatic history. There has been an unspoken understanding amongst historians that the Germans effectively got what they deserved as perpetrators of the Holocaust. First ashamed of their national humiliation at the hands of the Allies and Soviets, and later ashamed of the horrors of the Holocaust, Germans too have remained largely silent – a silence W.G. Sebald movingly described in his controversial book On the Natural History of Destruction.
In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh has written a comprehensive history of Germany and Austria in the postwar period, drawing on a vast array of contemporary first-person accounts of the period. In doing so, he has finally given a voice the millions of who, lucky to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish “peace.”
A startling account of a massive and brutal military occupation, After the Reich is a major work of history of history with obvious relevance today.
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Than it cured. At midday the workers received a thin, evil-smelling soup. An hour later they were hungry again. A hundred men were suffering from dropsy. Big men weighed no more than fifty kilos. One of the British officers allowed them to take the leftovers from the mess - although this was highly illegal. They procured an oven, milk and potatoes and in time they were able to lay on a supplementary meal at midday. The men began to put on weight again. They were over the worst. Sometimes they.
Families, and their wartime alliance with Tito’s partisans who were now showing their colours by raping and pillaging around Klagenfurt.117 The domobranci thought the British would redeploy them to fight the communists. They had not reckoned with the secret arrangements made at Yalta. Sadly for them, the Cold War had not yet started.118 On 19 May 1945 the British and Tito’s men came to an agreement to repatriate all Yugoslav nationals. No differentiation was to be made. The Yugoslavs were not.
Based in Kensington Palace Gardens were also exercised by the several atrocious massacres that had been carried out by SS units in France. One was the killing of ninety-seven soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment at the strikingly inappropriately named village of Le Paradis on 27 May 1940. Responsibility for the crime was pinned on a company commander in the SS-Totenkopf Division, Fritz Knoechlein, who had learned to hate all non-Nazi forms of humanity in the hard school.
Muscovite, Ernst Fischer, was also to be given a job.62 Schöner was not so unhappy about Honner. It was a ‘thankless and difficult post’ and with any luck he would prove unpopular. The Russians were pushing for the reopening of the theatres and cinemas. Because of the war damage, most of Vienna’s great cultural institutions had to make do with what space they could find. The Burgtheater performed in the Ronacher.q The Opera had been bombed out. Klemens Krauss was appointed chief conductor amid.
Friend Wilhelm Bürklin, who was a colonel of the General Staff. In the eyes of the Western Allies a General Staff officer was an even more pungent commodity than a high-ranking Nazi. Bürklin had learned to keep his mouth shut when the Americans were present. They brought the women chocolate and spoke to them about politics in ‘fabulously bad English’. Her friend Erna Bähr washed a uniform jacket for one of them, and received packets of tea and soap. Later they also received buckets filled with.