Giles MacDonogh

Softcover book. 620 pages
ISBN: 978-0-465-00338-9
Stock Number: 0335

This shocking account of brutal occupation and massive “ethnic cleansing” is a bold reframing of the history of World War II and its aftermath. It is much more than a gruesome chronicle of death and human suffering. Enhanced with telling anecdotes, it also provides historical context and perspective. It is probably the best work available in English on this shameful chapter of twentieth century history.

Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era that, in many ways, was worse than the destruction wrought by war.

In this sobering and courageous book British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. His best estimate is that some three million Germans, military and civilians, died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities.

Apart from the wide-scale rape of millions of German girls and woman in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans.

MacDonogh’s important book is an antidote to the simplistic but enduring propaganda portrait of World War II as a clash between Good and Evil, and debunks the widely accepted image of benevolent Allied treatment of defeated Germany.

With photos, source references and index.