The Brutal History Of The Allied Occupation

641 Pages·2009·5.92 MB·English

PRAISE FOR AFTER THE REICH
“In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh, a British author of several books about
German history, chronicles the final weeks of the war and the occupation that
followed. His ambitious mission: to offer a comprehensive, unsparing account
of what happened to the German people when the tables were turned.
MacDonogh works to assemble a massive indictment of the victors, and his
array of detail and individual stories is both impressive and exhausting.”
—Washington Post Book World
“In his meticulously researched bookAfter the Reich, British-born Giles
MacDonogh, an expert in German history, offers a different view of this
‘noble’ war’s aftermath. With unsparing detail and ample documentation, he
chronicles the events after the victory in Europe in May 1945 to the Berlin
airlift four years later, and exposes the slippery slope of the moral high
ground many of us believed the Allies possessed during those years. . . . One
cannot read After the Reichwithout thinking of the phrase ‘winning the war
but losing the peace’ as the book draws a line from the occupation directly
to the division of Berlin and the Cold War that gripped much of the world
and informed foreign relations for the next 60 years. Scars across Europe
from the post–World War II era remain, and MacDonogh has picked the
scab at a time of modern war and occupation when, perhaps, the world
most needs to examine an old wound.” —Boston Globe
“VE Day on May 8, 1945 mocked the subsequent condition of Europe. As
crowds in London, Paris, and New York celebrated the declaration of peace,
much more misery and death lay ahead. Two, perhaps three million Germans
perished in the years that followed: in captivity; from hunger and casual vio-
lence; and above all, during the expulsions of ethnic Germans from the east,
[on] which the western Allies had agreed with the Russians before hostilities
ended. Giles MacDonogh’s book chronicles this saga from the liberation of
Vienna to the 1948 Berlin airlift and 1949 formation of Konrad Adenauer’s
government in Bonn. It makes grimmer reading than most war stories,
because there is little redemptive courage or virtue. Here is a catalogue of
pillage, rape, starvation, inhumanity, and suffering on a titanic scale. . . . The
book brings together many stories that deserve to be much better known in
the West.” —Max Hastings,Sunday Times(London)
“Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reichis important and timely. He has a pro-
found understanding of Germany, which he communicates in a humane
and engaging style. Though he is sensitive to the sufferings of the Germans
after the war, he never loses sight of the fact that this was an occupation
that the Western powers got right. After the Reich is a remarkable book,
with a rich cast of characters, and it has oblique relevance to our own prob-
lems in the wider world.”
—Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich:
A New History and Sacred Causes
“Mr. MacDonogh has given readers the history of an era all too often
ignored.” —Contemporary Review
“The bitter experiences of a defeated Germany have often been forgotten.
MacDonogh’s book, drawing heavily on the often moving testimony of
those who lived through them, brings them brilliantly into the light.”
—Sunday Times
“Unique and important.” —Guardian
“Mass deportations, murder, and brutalization of helpless noncombatants—
these are the crimes one readily associates with Hitler’s minions as they
ravaged their way across Europe. But MacDonogh, a journalist with partic-
ular expertise in German history, convincingly illustrates that this was the
fate of millions of German-speaking civilians in the period from the fall of
Vienna to the Soviets to the Berlin airlift. . . . Given the horrors visited upon
Europe by the Nazis, one might be tempted to consider these atrocities as
just retribution. However, MacDonogh’s eloquent account of the suffering
of these people is, one hopes, able to evoke strong feelings of both revulsion
and compassion from most readers.” —ALA Booklist
“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. . . . The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained
Allied victory.” —Publishers Weekly
“Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here
historian MacDonogh examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of
defeated Germany. . . . Of interest to students of modern Europe, com-
plementing W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) and
other studies of history from the point of view of the vanquished.”
—Kirkus Reviews
After the Reich
The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
GILES M DONOGH
AC
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2007 by Giles MacDonogh
Hardcover first published in the United States in 2007 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback first published in 2009 by Basic Books
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books,
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[email protected].
First published in Great Britain in 2007
by John Murray (Publishers)
A division of Hodder Headline
A CIP catalog record for this book is
available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-0-465-00337-2
ISBN-10: 0-465-00337-0
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-465-00338-9
Typeset in Bembo by M Rules
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joseph Maximilian Cornelius MacDonogh
born 8December 2002
Absumet heres Caecuba dignior
servata centum clavibus et mero
tinget pavimentum superbo,
pontificum potiore cenis.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Chronology xvii
Map xx
Introduction 1
PART I: Chaos
1. The Fall of Vienna 25
2. Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe
in 1945 45
3. Berlin 95
4. Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia 125
5. Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the
Prussian East 162
PART II: Allied Zones
Prologue 199
6. Life in the Russian Zone 201
7. Life in the American Zone 227
8. Life in the British Zone 250
9. Life in the French Zone 269
10. Austria’s Zones and Sectors 278
11. Life in All Four Zones 314
PART III: Crime and Punishment
12. Guilt 339
13. Black Market 372
14. Light Fingers 381
15. Where are our Men? 392
16. The Trials 429
17. The Little Fish 451
contents
PART IV: The Road to Freedom
18. Peacemaking in Potsdam 471
19. The Great Freeze 496
20. The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic
Recovery 517
Conclusion 542
Notes 547
Further Reading 585
Index 589
viii
Illustrations
1. The inhabitants of East Prussia making their way across the
frozen inland sea
2. Silesians making their way west
3. Sudetenländer being transported in cattle trucks
4. Waste being removed from the trains
5. and 6. Sudeten expellees waiting to board the train to Germany
7. Sudeten Catholics hear an open-air Mass
8. Silesians assemble in the streets of their town prior to their
expulsion
9. The Oder at Frankfurt.
10. The ruins of the White Stork synagogue in Wrocław
(Breslau)in 1991
11. Sudetenländer rounded up in Bergreichenstein pushing their
goods to the assembly camp
12–14. Czech officials inspect Germans’ suitcases for anything of value
15. The Little Fortress in Theresienstadt with German prisoners
16. Ruins of the State Opera House and Jockey Club, Vienna
17. The Cathedral or ‘Steffl’, Vienna
18. The Graben shopping street, Vienna
19. Road sign concerning the road to Vienna
20. Notice concerning food rations for Berliners, 13May 1945
21. Silesian children receiving food from the Western Allies
22. Silesian children looking forward to a new life in West
Germany
23. Victor Gollancz with some severely malnourished German
children
24. A shoe belonging to a German child
25. Sir Robert Birley
26. Lord Pakenham, later Earl of Longford, the second British
Minister for Germany and Austria
ix