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
— 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
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