Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
PART I - Chaos
Chapter 1 - The Fall of Vienna
Chapter 2 - Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe in 1945
Liberation from the East
Liberation from the West
Disputed Areas
Werewolves
Illustrious Bones
Chapter 3 - Berlin
The Soviets in the Saddle
Subsistence
The Arrival of the Western Allies
The Honeymoon is Over
Autumn 1945
Spring 1946
Chapter 4 - Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia
Beneš’s Return
Revenge
Prague
Landskron
Brno Death March
Iglau and Kladno
The American Zone
Freudenthal, Freiwaldau and Bilin
Brüx, Saaz, Komotau, Aussig and Tetschen
Theresienstadt
Pankrác
Torture
Expulsions
Chapter 5 - Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the Prussian East
Country Life
Working for the Poles
Rural Silesia
Treks
Transit Camps
Home to the Reich
PART II - Allied Zones
Chapter 6 - Life in the Russian Zone
Culture
Chapter 7 - Life in the American Zone
Political Life
Culture
Chapter 8 - Life in the British Zone
British Military Government
The Beginnings of West Germany in the British Zone
Culture
Chapter 9 - Life in the French Zone
Culture
Chapter 10 - Austria’s Zones and Sectors
Vienna
Feeding the Austrians
German Assets
Culture
Soviet Zone
British Zone
Cossacks and Domobranci
American Zone
French Zone
Chapter 11 - Life in All Four Zones
Children
Arts
The Press
Attitudes to 20 July
Jews in Germany and Austria
The Fate of Jewish DPs
PART III - Crime and Punishment
Chapter 12 - Guilt
How Could We Have Known?
Re-education through Propaganda
The Fragebogen and Denazification
Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork
Punishment by Starvation
Fringsen
Frat
Chapter 13 - Black Market
Cigarettes and CARE Packets
Chapter 14 - Light Fingers
Chapter 15 - Where are our Men?
The Status of German POWs
The American Camps
British Camps
The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian Civilians in Germany
The French Camps
Belgium
The Russian Camps.
Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia
The Return of the Warrior
Chapter 16 - The Trials
Interrogations
Prison Walls
The Trials
Chapter 17 - The Little Fish
Lesser Nuremberg Trials
Elsewhere
The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis
PART IV - The Road to Freedom
Chapter 18 - Peacemaking in Potsdam
First Contacts between East and West
Chapter 19 - The Great Freeze
The New Ideologists
The South Tyrol
The Russians Come into the Cold
The Great Freeze
Bizonia
A Thaw in the Weather
Nacht und Nebel
A Solution in the East
Chapter 20 - The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic Recovery
Currency Reform
Crisis in Berlin
Airlift
Austria
The Federal Republic
Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Index
Copyright Page
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 book After 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 Reich without 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 violence; 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 Reich is important and timely. He has a profound 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 problems 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 deportation
s, 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 particular 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, complementing 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
For Joseph Maximilian Cornelius MacDonogh
born 8 December 2002
Absumet heres Caecuba dignior
servata centum clavibus et mero
tinget pavimentum superbo,
pontificum potiore cenis.
The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Plates 1, 2, 8, 21, 22 and 29, Herder-Institut Marburg, Bildarchiv; 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 15, Sudetendeutsches Archiv; 11, 12, 13 and 14, Oberhausmuseum, Passau; 19, Sebastian Cody; 23, 24 and 26, Private Collection; 25, Provost and Fellows of Eton College; 27, Bob McCreery; 28, Dennis Sewell; 29, Volkswagen AG; 30, akg-images/Tony Vaccaro. Plates 9 and 10 are from the author’s collection; plates 16, 17 and 18 are taken from Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch 1944/1945, edited by Eva-Marie Csáky, Franz Matscher and Gerald Stourzh, and reproduced with permission. Every effort has been made to clear permissions. If permission has not been granted please contact the publisher who will include a credit in subsequent printings and editions.
Preface
This book is about the experience of the Germans in defeat. It is about the occupation imposed on them following the criminal campaigns of Adolf Hitler. To some extent it is a study in resignation, their acceptance of any form of indignity in the knowledge of the great wrongs perpetrated by the National Socialist state. Not all of these Germans were involved in these crimes, by any means, but with few exceptions they recognised that their suffering was an inevitable result of them. I make no excuses for the crimes the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible desire for revenge that they aroused.
I have tried as much as possible to use individual accounts to give the flavour of the time. Many of these are by women. There is an obvious reason for this: there were not many men left. Those who survived did so in a variety of places, from internment camps to Soviet mines. The subject is so vast that I have had to use a broad brush. Some elements are immensely well covered, such as the American Zone and the beginnings of the Cold War. It was the start of the American century and the end of isolation, after all. Other parts of the story are hardly told: the French occupation, for example. Because I wished to give the tenor of everyday life at the time, I have divided the book into four parts: the first looks at the chaos that followed the end of the war within the lands that were then Germany, and the punitive stance of the Allies; the second looks at the day-to-day existence of the Germans and Austrians; the third examines crime and punishment; and the fourth introduces the chronology and records the major political developments from Potsdam to the foundation of the two German republics. The Austrian State Treaty lies outside the scope of this book, as it did not occur until 1955.
My ‘Germans’ are the German-speaking peoples as they are massed in central Europe. I have therefore included Austria, which called itself ‘German Austria’ until it was annexed in 1938, and subsequently became part of the Greater German Reich. I mention the South Tyrol in Italy, because Austrians saw that as part of their lands, as well as other satellites in Yugoslavia, for instance. I have also examined the plight of the so-called ‘ethnic’ Germans who were expelled, mostly from Czechoslovakia, but also from Hungary and Romania. Elsewhere ‘Germany’ is defined by its 1937 borders, and I have referred to towns and villages by the names Germans would have known. Where possible I have included the Polish or Czech names too.
Although it was my first intention to study the German-speaking peoples as they suffered their chastisements on the ground, I soon realised that it was impossible to make any sense of what was happening without reference to what was taking place on Mount Olympus: the Allied command HQs and the political forces behind them. I had to travel de haut en bas and vice versa - to examine the effect of the occupation on the Germans, but also to look upstairs at what the Olympians were doing, and see what they had in store. On the other hand I have always tried to focus on Germans, not on the Allies.
The book is the fruit of my long acquaintance with both Germany and Austria. My interest began during a short stay in Cologne in my mid-teens and a meeting with one of the two modern German novelists whose writings have most coloured this book. I was a guest of the Böll family and one afternoon the later Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll came to tea. He introduced me to Underberg, the viciously powerful bitters, and I can still feel the wave of fire travelling up from my stomach to my cheeks. We argued about Irish Republicanism, which he favoured. It wasn’t until much later that I began to respect his books, and admire the picture of the returned soldier in those early stories and novels.
I met Ernst Jünger many years later, through my friend the eccentric hotelier Andreas Kleber, who was then still in possession of his family hotel, the Kleber Post in Saulgau in Württemberg (incidentally one of the first venues for the writers’ group Gruppe 47). One night I had dinner with Jünger there and the two of us spoke to ZDF television about the meaning of Prussia. Jünger was a writer from the generation before Böll, but outlived the younger man by decades. He was a mere ninety-seven when I met him and had another six years to live. Again conversation turned to drink: the bottle of Pommard he consumed with his wife every night (he had two-thirds of it, he confessed), and his real love - Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
He became more serious when he complained that he could not wear his Pour le Mérite medal, which he had won in the Great War, when he had been left for dead on the field of battle. He was, I think, the last surviving military holder of the medal. The Allies had swiftly banned the wearing of decorations, and the Federal Republic has followed suit. War could not be officially celebrated, and that went for acts of heroism too. I recalled the First World War memorial in the little park in Berlin-Friedenau where I had stayed with friends. The inscription had been chipped off: in Germany such things were taboo, while in Britain war memorials were still placed at the focal point of any town or hamlet. In Germany there were no more heroes. The Germans had lost the right to them.
Friends of mine, even published historians, have often told me that the Germans ‘deserved what they got’ in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behaviour in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers; and that
when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.
It is true that some of the old men and a lot of the women had voted for Hitler, but it should be recalled once again that he never achieved more than 37.4 per cent of the vote in a free election, and in the last one he was down to 33.1 per cent.1 That meant that, even at his most popular, 62.6 per cent of the German electorate were unmoved by his programme. Of course, at that point it did not propose the slaughter of the European Jews (he never made any public statement on this subject other than dark allusions that have become easier to read in retrospect); nor did it mention his desire to confront Soviet Russia and enslave the Slavs; nor did it hint that he would eventually bring the roof down on the German house and kill a large number of its inmates. It is possible that he might have secured more votes that way, but I think not. To make all Germans responsible for the relatively docile Hitler of 1933 is to apply the Allied weapon of collective guilt. Collective guilt makes them all responsible: women, old men and children, even newborn babies - they were German and they could also be slaughtered or starved to death. Indeed, the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg exhorted the Red Army not to save ‘the child in its mother’s womb’.2
There were many Russians, Poles and Czechs who were not ashamed to feel that way in the heady days of liberation. Some of them were as young as fifteen at the time they joined ad hoc police squads and they may still be alive today and healthy; but I think few of them would now own up to the acts of terrible violence they committed.
If children are included in collective guilt, this could be accepted on the basis that they were going to grow up to be Germans and therefore possibly Nazis. Then, of course, we need to determine at what age a child becomes a German, and can be blamed for the crimes of his country. It is clearly not twenty-one (when many are already in the army), or eighteen (when they were likely to have been called up, and were often among the bravest and most ruthless fighters), or sixteen (when they had already been drafted into anti-aircraft units or, like Günter Grass, about to be forced into the SS), or indeed younger (Hitler Youth boys as young as twelve distinguished themselves in the Battle of Berlin). Maybe in an indoctrinated society a cut-off point for guilt needs to be imposed at seven, and, if so, a date needs to be fixed when the child had attained that age. Was it 1933 or 1945 (twelve years after the last free election)?
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