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How Three Million Germans Died
after VE Day
Nigel Jones reviews After the Reich: From the Liberation of
Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles MacDonogh
04/25/07 "The
Telegraph" -- --- Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a
historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his
other consuming interest - German history - he serves a dish to
turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly
uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous
occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of
Germany and Austria.
MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought
no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but
suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war.
After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some
degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable,
but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so
soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave
book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.
His best estimate is that some three million Germans died
unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million
soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that
had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet
captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only
5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands
perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages
along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they
dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave
labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years.
Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late
as 1979.
The two million German civilians who died were largely the old,
women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide -
and mass murder.
Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl
and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones,
perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for
the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a
million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The
survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were
pitched across the border, never to return to their homes.
Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia
as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.
Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding
under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did
not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly)
innocent. MacDonogh's answer is that it could all have been even
worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured
turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal
Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the
population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.
The discovery of the Nazi death camps stoked Allied fury, with
General George Patton asking an aide amid the horrors of
Buchenwald: 'Do you still find it hard to hate them?' But the
surviving inmates were soon replaced by German captives -
Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in
business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the
wire.
It was Realpolitik, not humanitarian concern, that caused a
swift shift in western attitudes towards their former foes. Fear
of Communism spreading into the heart of Europe, and the
barbarities of the Russians - who kidnapped and killed hundreds
of their perceived enemies from the western zones of Berlin and
Vienna - belatedly made the West realise that they had beaten
one totalitarian power only to be threatened by another.
Even that hardline Kraut-hater Patton was sacked for advocating
a pre-emptive strike against Russia. Building up West Germany
and saving Berlin from Soviet strangulation with the 1948
airlift became the first battles of the Cold War - even if that
meant overlooking Nazi crimes and enlisting Nazi criminals in
the 'economic miracle' of reconstruction.
Although MacDonogh roundly condemns all the occupying powers,
the British emerge with some credit. Apart from one Air Marshal
who looted art treasures; and an MI5 interrogator nicknamed 'Tin
Eye' Stephens who ran a private torture chamber, British hands
may have been grubby, but were not deeply blood-stained. British
squaddies preferred to purchase their sex privately with a
packet of fags or a pair of nylons, rather than in the Soviet
style.
MacDonogh has written a gruelling but important book. This
unhappy story has long been cloaked in silence since telling it
suited no one. Not the Allies, because it placed them near the
moral nadir of the Nazis; nor the Germans, because they did not
wish to be accused of whitewashing Hitler by highlighting what
was, by any standard, a war crime. Giles MacDonogh has told a
very inconvenient truth.
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007
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