seconhand history
|
On the 27th September 1938 Neville Chamberlain famously said:
"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."
At least Chamberlain never attempted to write an article about Czechoslovakia. The fourth chapter in the book "After the Reich" is written by someone who apparently knows nothing about the far- away country. Based almost entirely on biased and outdated German materials it mixes with aplomb facts with fiction.
The two Hitler's henchmen Karl Hermann Frank and Reinhard Heydrich are almost portrayed as some sort of martyrs. It is well documented that they planned a complete annihilation of the Czech nation. Mac Donogh claims that Nazi brutality was "measured" apart from the destruction of Lidice which was "provoked" by British. The war loss of 340 000 inhabitants (higher per capita than France or Britain) was probably due mainly to some acts of kindness. Not a word is mentioned about numerous SS and Wehrmacht atrocities during the Prague uprising in May 1945 despite irrefutable evidence - including films and photographs.
I shall not go into Mr. MacDonogh's figures - all wildly inaccurate but shall deal with his lack of knowledge on the topic. It is evident that his command of German (or his ability to translate into English) is insufficient.
Few examples:
Heydrich was not a "deputy" Reichsprotector but an acting Reichsprotector - a crucial difference.
He authorised countless executions of the Czechs on his arrival to Prague in 1941 - certainly in a measured manner.
Frank was never a Reichsprotector, nor a Secretary of State but the State Secretary.
It is not true that "Czechs continue to deny that any wrong was committed against the German Bohemians after the war". The post-war excesses have been acknowledged (and apologised for) by President Havel on many occasions. There are countless Czech articles and books dealing with the matter. The title of Tomas Stanek's book "Persecution 1945" is self-explanatory..
Mac Donogh's poor command of geography is startling. He insists on calling the Czech towns by their German names and frequently fails to give their Czech equivalent thus denying the reader the opportunity to find these places on the currently available maps. Maps are anathema to him: the only map in the book that of 1945 Central Europe is full of inaccuracies and huge errors- for example it does not show the division of East Prussia between Poland and the Soviet Union.
He locates Northern Bohemia next to Lower Bavaria.Kasperské Hory in Southwest Bohemia is moved to Eastern Bohemia. Jihlava is on one page south of Prague on another in Western Moravia.
Domazlice (Taus) is mistaken for Horsovsky Týn (Bischofteinitz).
In fact one cannot find a page without errors, misspellings or embellishments. I shall give a typical example.The massacre in Usti nad Labem (Aussig) happened on the 31st July 1945 not the 30th.It was "in the open" and thus seen by countless witnesses. Most of the local Czechs (including the town's Mayor) tried to protect the Germans against the soldiers (Czech and Russian) and some outside civil gangs. The maximum of documented victims is 43 with perhaps another 50 drowned not 400 - 1000 quoted. It is true that one woman with a pram was thrown in the river. In Mac Donog's account she becomes "women with prams"
These days there is on the bridge a commemorative desk with the words: "Na pamet obeti nasilà 31. cervence 1945 - Zum Gedenken an die Opfer der Gewalt vom 31. Juli 1945."
In remembrance of the victims of outrage of the 31st July 1945 - hardly an act of people in denial.
To conclude this is an inaccurate copy and paste job skilfully presented to the gullible public.
The one star is for the topic.
|
|
No Crime without Laws?
|
NO CRIME WITHOUT LAWS?
By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR
AS SPRING ROLLED into the early summer of 1945, Germany stood - or lay prostrate - on the edge of the Allies' fearsome vengeance for six years of increasingly total war. To add to the three million men (and boys) already killed, Germany herself was utterly ruined. Nearly two million German civilians were also dead, nearly four million homes had been destroyed by British and American bombing, and over seven million people were homeless.
While the Soviet armies smashed and gang-raped their way towards Berlin, German soldiers and civilians were to pay a dreadful price for this Bolshevised Gotterdammerung. On its bloody heels was to come the terrifyingly brutal expulsion of perhaps 16 million German civilians from parts of eastern Europe where there had been ethnic-German communities for centuries: at least two million of them would be murdered in the process. And then was to come the four-power occupation by the Allied armies, as the former Reich was dismembered, looted, starved - and finally re-assembled (in two parts) as the Cold War got under way.
This is the canvas upon which Giles MacDonagh paints his quarter-million word account of the remains of Hitler's empire, from the liberation of Vienna in 1945 to the Berlin airlift of 1948-1949. He presents in it an epic panorama of war and peace, of cruelty, stupidity, greed, starvation and the very, very hard world of realpolitik - in which there is but an occasional flicker of human valour and human value: the 10-year old German lad successfully defending with an axe his mother from Russian rapists, the Archbishop of Cologne urging his freezing people to steal coal from the thieving Allies, and the German slave-worker in Britain for whom the regulars of the local pub bought drinks and had a five-shilling whip-round.
MacDonagh tells his terrible tale with sweeping lucidity, in a long-established narrative style, without stylistic artifice or technical conceit. Nor does his story need either. After all, Germany had lost the war she had started by 1942, or by early 1943 at the latest - a war conducted, especially in the east, with murderous savagery against civilian and soldier alike. The Russians, among many others, had ever reason to seek vengeance - and by the spring of 1945, they were drinking very deeply at that sweetly poisoned well.
None of the other Allied powers comes out of the story shining either, at least by the standards for which the war was ostensibly fought by them. France's colonial troops from Morocco distinguished themselves with their taste for rape (or at least got the blame for it), while a far higher proportion of German prisoners died in French custody than that of the British or the Americans.
And while the British kept their prisoners in Bergen-Belsen, they made preparations to test Britain's atom bomb (along with chemical warfare) on Germany's North Sea islands. Britain returned 45,000 Cossacks to the Soviets, overlooking their status as prisoners-of-war and supposed protection by the Geneva Convention. Another 3,000 people (some of them not even Soviet citizens) were also handed over to certain death: the Argylls, "were particularly brutal to women and children".
In Austria, the Field Security Service ("a secret service in uniform", in the words of one member) arrested all names on lists drawn-up in advance (just as the Soviets had done in their fearsome occupations of Poland and the Baltic states). A torture-centre was maintained in London's Kensington Palace Gardens, and another at Latchmere House in the city's suburbs. There were yet more in Germany, at Bad Nenndorf and Gutersloh. And the conduct of nearly all the immensely distinguished British lawyers in the war-trials of Germans would not have been out of place in Stalin's Russia - or Hitler's Germany itself. As MacDonagh notes, the old maxim of "nulla poena sine lege" (there is no crime without laws) was shamefully and shockingly ignored at Nuremberg.
Nor is the American role in the occupation of post-war Germany without blemish, by those standards that the Americans are never slow to claim as their own. Indeed, their conduct in post-war Germany may be eerily familiar to the modern reader. In Frankfurt, for instance, the Americans lived "in the conquerors' part of the city" - an oasis in the middle of a starving desolation of ruins, for which a special pass was required even to approach its vicinity. Here, Eisenhower entertained his mistress, who later described this small city as being, "very elegant - lots of marble and fountains and indoor flower gardens, great curving staircases and very luxurious offices, several tennis courts [that] could have fitted into Ike's office. Bouquets of fresh spring flowers were placed in our offices every day".
Meantime, nearly three and a half million German prisoners-of-war were "re-designated" to another status, which took them beyond the protection of the Geneva Convention. As a result, the Red Cross could be denied access to the concentration camps in which the prisoners were held: and they could then be prosecuted in the shamefully trumped-up kangaroo trials (from a strictly legalistic viewpoint) shortly to be seen in Nuremberg. They could also be - and were - wilfully starved: although the Americans baulked at using the re-designated prisoners as slave-labourers, for the American trade-unions objected.
At one torture-centre near Stuttgart, the Americans used long periods of solitary confinement, extremes of hot and cold temperatures, deprivation of light and sleep, mock trials, and mock executions, where German prisoners (hooded) were told they were approaching the gallows, before being bodily lifted off the ground "to convince them that they were about to swing". As for the reprisal-murder of civilians: "one shot merited the destruction of a village. As they advanced, if a shot was fired from a village, they either stopped, or evacuated and whistled up the air force".
In Bayreuth, meanwhile, after reducing the historic town to rubble, American soldiers took over the opera house, where they entertained themselves with jazz on the piano of Liszt. They were also alleged to have danced the jitterbug on the grave of Wagner. The land of Goethe and Beethoven (among others) must indeed have wondered what was coming next ......
And yet from the ruins came a GDR and an FRG - each in its own way, more of a success that a failure. And since then has come a Germany once-more united within post-war frontiers, and at the heart of a Europe increasingly united, at least in formal terms. It is a Europe that had better stay that way, too. The prospect of old irredentisms, of old fault-lines, ever re-opening is one too terrible to contemplate.
www.iain-fraser-grigor.co.uk
ends
|
|
|
casahistoria
|
Any modern writer of post war Germany who mentions the names of Hajo Holborn and Michael Balfour in the first few pages clearly has done their reading. This book fills in the gap left in many English language histories of postwar central Europe: from the actual end of war and its immediate impact to the outbreak of the Cold War. Covering not just the zones of Germany, but also Austria and the events of German speaking Europe elsewhere - the German Reich at its largest.
The initial 100 pages or so are a harrowing account of the treatment of the German speakers as they were invaded, occupied, looted, raped and for the millions in the east, moved westwards. The brutality by all concerned is meticulously documented - too much so in places - I wanted to skip on as it was so disturbing and relentless. The Red Army is well documented by others, less so the proportionately greater savagery of the Czechs on the Sudetenlanders (especially grim as MacDonogh makes clear the pre 1938 Sudetenlanders were ex Austrians, not Germans who had been unlawfully deprived of the chance at self determination after Versailles by a nationalist Czech regime.).
Another eyeopener is the evidence that all the allies used prisoners of war in ways similar to Speer in his use of slave labour (and often in the face of resultant deaths). The US was especially cynical in this matter announcing they had released all POW's in mid 1946 when in fact they released them to be handed over to other allies: Belgium and France, for manual work. The USSR was still returning POW's in the mid 1950's.
The early stance of the US was surprisingly tough. Outside the Soviet Zone, the US had and maintained the hardest stance to its prisoners and civilian population for the first 18 months. Torture seems to have been common initially amongst all the occupiers as they sought to do the necessary and root out Nazi's. However MacDonogh's examples indicate a direct line of war's dehumanisation that makes treatment of Iraqi prisoners seem minor.
One issue with After the Reich is caused by its heavy reliance on documentary sources, especially memoirs. This had meant a skew towards recounting the experiences of the better off, in particular the womenfolk of the German/Prussian nobility. At times this leads perhaps to a too unconsidered appreciation of the sometime self-serving motivation of the 1944 plotters, many of whom were close to the writers of the memoirs used.
The final section takes a reader swiftly but clearly through the fog of the origins of ther Cold War, only after 500 pages of the aftermath analysis what follows has a clarity lacking in the work of many other revisionist writers.
Since the Wende, this has been a topic occupying the history shelves of most German bookshops. MacDonogh has done English readers a service with this account. The underlying sentiment is that this book records the consequences of the far greater evil perpetrated on others by the Germans - a feeling that many of those recorded reflect, despite their misery. It is not surprising that with the opening of the east Germans have wished to document the period, nor is it surprising that Anglo-saxon writers have shunned it for so long.
|
|
|
A sobering look at postwar Germany
|
A lot has been written about World War II, and some has even been written about the aftermath regarding the development of the Cold War. However, there is not a lot of published information giving an overall view of the occupation of Germany and the development of the divided country that lasted for 40 years. After the Reich, by Giles MacDonogh, rectifies that fact. It is heavily sourced, examining individual accounts as well as publications covering certain aspects of the occupation to give a broad overview of the horrors that developed and the neglect and outright savagery that caused the deaths of huge numbers of Germans in the aftermath of the war. MacDonogh gives a vivid yet very depressing picture showing that inhumanity was not limited to the Nazis.
MacDonogh begins the book with the months leading up to the end of the war, as the Soviets were advancing through Poland and eastern Germany, raping and pillaging as much as possible. Revenge was a common motive, vengeance for every inhumane act the Nazis perpetrated on the Soviets during the almost four years of war. Others just gave into their baser instincts. Heavily covered in this book, both at the beginning as well as throughout the text, is how Austria figured into the whole issue. Many on both sides saw the Austrians almost as guilty as the Germans for what happened, yet it was always treated slightly differently.
This makes the beginning of the book quite heavy. While MacDonogh obviously doesn't go into details of individual rapes, the near-constant refrain about the rape and pillaging, both from individual accounts as well as statistical ones, constantly wears on the reader. However, it also gets across just horrible life in Germany and Austria was in the few months after the war ended. He also details the mass starvation that was happening, as the populace lived on the bare minimum (and sometimes less) that allows sustenance. Hundreds of thousands died in this aftermath, and some thought `good riddance" to a population that they blamed for the war. This idea of "collective guilt" for the German populace is also examined by MacDonogh, where he presents figures from both sides of the controversy on whether the German civilians should be treated as a conquered people or as victims of the Nazi horror machine.
This is where After the Reich really becomes interesting, as MacDonogh details the political machinations of both sides (American/British/French against the Soviets) as they jockey for position. Stalin wanted a united Germany that acted as a buffer between the West and Poland/Czechoslovakia (where he was busy installing Communist rule), while the other Allies desperately resisted this idea, for various reasons. The French did not want a united Germany on their doorstep again, while the British and Americans did not want a prospective Soviet ally that close to France. All of this information is clearly presented by MacDonogh in a very interesting fashion.
MacDonogh ends After the Reich with the Berlin crisis and the massive airlift to keep the Soviets from taking over the entire city. Much like Germany itself, Berlin was divided into four occupation zones, but the Soviets tried to force the other Allies out in 1948 by blockading the land route from the Western zones to the city itself. This chapter is actually rather brief, but it's brimming with information. While a more detailed account can probably be found in a book on the Airlift itself, MacDonogh does an excellent job of covering the story well enough for the reader to know why it happened and how it was resolved.
After the Reich is a very important book in a number of ways. It shows us the horrors of trying to rebuild a country that's been devastated by war and its own government's evil, as well as demonstrating that all sides in war are capable of atrocities. We also see how human many of these people who commit these atrocities are. One of the most interesting chapters is on the Nuremburg trials and how the big guys (Goering, Hess, and others) treated the trials. Goering is shown scoffing at everything, Hess pretends to have lost his memory, and they all seem very human. Because of this, they seem even more evil. After the Reich is a riveting overview of the immediate postwar history of Germany, and it's valuable for that..
David Roy
|
|
|
How Lucky We Were
|
"After the Reich" is one of the most harrowing books I've ever read. I've always said that because we weren't invaded, & despite the bombing in Britain, the loss of life & injuries suffered by those at home & away, we were so lucky & this book will show why. I've also wondered what happened in Germany after the war finished & the second half of this book explains all. Many thanks for extending my knowledge.
Rose Harris
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada