Review by Choice Review
This book is a catalog of abuses heaped upon Germany after WW II. There is little new in terms of types of abuses, but the sheer volume of examples illustrates that brutality was commonplace at the end of the war and afterward. Foremost among the crimes is that the Russians raped and pillaged on an epic scale. The author thematically organizes zonal coverage with useful insights on manipulations by the Russians and French; the Americans, who sought an exit strategy; and the British search for ways to keep the US in Germany. MacDonogh gives Austria some much-needed coverage. The book has its flaws. The documentation is often thin and hard to trace. A bibliography would be helpful. The author's overreliance on anonymous or relatively unknown sources and his willingness to dip into questionable works, such as those of James Bacque, can cause readers to question evidence. The copyediting is sometimes awkward. Vague antecedents mean the reader has to reread some passages. Still, there is much useful evidence that supports the theme of brutality and demonstrates just how destitute the Germans were after WW II. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. A. Browder Austin Peay State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
"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 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. The massive number of rapes conducted by Soviet soldiers in their zone of occupation has already been well documented. Less publicized but equally disturbing, as Macdonogh's use of eyewitness testimonies confirm, was the treatment of ethnic Germans in their enclaves in various Eastern and Central European nations. There, murder and the driving out of millions of people were routine, and the French, British, and Americans did nothing to stop them. 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, hopefully, able to evoke strong feelings of both revulsion and compassion from most readers."--"Freeman, Jay" Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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, from watches to factories. Millions of ethnic Germans were driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia, stripped of their possessions and subjected to atrocities on the way. The Western Allies behaved better, but sidestepped the Geneva Conventions, using German POWs as slave laborers and letting thousands of them die in captivity, while keeping their zones on starvation rations. Nor were the Germans, with their own death camps finally coming to the world's appalled attention, in a good position to complain. Journalist and historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: A Life of Wilhelm II) gives a gripping, if choppy account of the occupation while portraying Truman, Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam as squabbling over the spoils as feral children scrabbled through the ruins. The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied victory. Photos. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II, 2001, etc.) examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of defeated Germany. The subtitle is probably the publisher's, since MacDonogh advises at the outset, "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." In some ways, that revenge was symbolically charged, as when the Allies put concentration camps to use housing prisoners who proved to have more than an accidental connection to the Nazi state; in others it was trivial, as when Russian soldiers went about demanding wristwatches. But aspects of the conquest were brutal indeed: Those Russian soldiers committed revenge rape on a grand scale, while, MacDonogh asserts, the American liberators at Dachau allowed former prisoners to tear guards and kapos limb from limb. More systematically, the Occupation deprived ordinary citizens of their property and, at least for a time, cast everyone under suspicion as tribunals convened and the long process of denazification began. It soon became obvious to almost everyone concerned, not least the occupied Germans, that as the Cold War got colder this process was confined mostly to the small fry; those Germans "were annoyed," MacDonogh writes, "to see the Party big-shots go free while the authorities continued to harass rank-and-file members who had done nothing monstrous." So it was that from 1945 until May 1948, when the purge ended, the French, British and American courts had tried 8,000 cases but executed only 806, perhaps half of them civil servants and workers, while the "worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not punished at all." 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
