Literary Review - August 2007

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HISTORY

RICHARDOVERY The Fury that Followed the Fall

AFTERTHEREICH: FROMTHELIBERATION OFVIENNATOTHEBERLINAIRLIFT

★By Giles MacDonogh (John Murray 618pp £25)

ENDGAME1945: VICTORY, RETRIBUTION, LIBERATION

★By David Stafford (Little, Brown 608pp £20)

NOONECANbe in any doubt after watching Downfall that the end of Hitler’s Germany was bleak almost beyond imagining, the crazed puppeteer in Berlin pulling the few remaining threadbare strings at his disposal before they finally snapped, leaving the German people not as masters of Europe but the antithesis: powerless onlookers in the hands of those their leaders had sought to subjugate. Germany in 1945 was a nightmare of flattened cities, endless trails of refugees and the dispossessed, the sorry detritus of the vicious camp system (wire, barracks and bodies) and a numbed population among whom the hardened party hacks – those who did not choose suicide as the way out – tried to hide away. It is hard to decide why anyone would willingly choose to chronicle such a barren story, but David Stafford and Giles MacDonogh are treading what is by now a well-worn historical path. Over the past five years German historians in particular have gone back to poke around in the dying embers of the Reich, partly to remind the wider world that ordinary Germans were victims too, partly to recapture a period in Germany’s tortured recent past that an earlier generation simply wanted to forget. Of course out of the ashes grew a workable and prosperous new German democracy – though not for that unlucky quarter of the German people who ended up behind the Iron Curtain, trading one dictatorship for another. This transformation is an

Victory in sight: Nuremberg, April 1945

important and remarkable episode in its own right, but whether it can bear the weight of two more 600-page books remains to be seen. The two books here are siblings rather than twins. Stafford focuses on the last weeks of the war and the first weeks of peace, and his geographical range expands as far as the area occupied by the British Commonwealth and American armies in Western and Central Europe. MacDonogh takes up the story from German defeat and carries it through to the Berlin airlift and the founding of the two separate German states in 1949. His account complements Stafford’s by focusing much more on the areas that were overrun by the Soviet armies. Between them they construct an all-too-vivid account of life lived in the shadow of Europe’s worst war, in which forty millions lost their lives and millions more suffered violence, maiming, dispossession, and hunger. For populations living in the Axis-occupied territories this had been the experience of the war years; for millions of German-speakers spread out across Europe it was the experience of the post-war years. It is this part of the story that is the least familiar to a British audience. After the war no one was going to shed many tears for what happened to the ‘master race’ in defeat; the coming of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe produced a policy of official silence (which has in some cases survived the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1990). But over the past decade or so, much more has been unearthed about the harsh treatment meted out to anyone with a German name (including, as MacDonogh shows, Germanspeaking Jews, who had already been victimised by the Germans) in the lands between the USSR and Germany. Around 13 million were forced to leave the region and ended up mainly in what became West Germany. Estimates as to the loss of life vary a great deal, but MacDonogh opts for the official figure of 2.25 million. Like so many of the statistics of wartime deaths there is a good deal of room for argument, but there is no contesting the fact that in the months following German defeat the former subjects of the New Order turned on their former tormentors with a terrible rage. MacDonogh cites Heinrich Bööll’s gloomy aphorism ‘the devil possesses all the power in this world’ in explaining how corrupting unlimited power over defenceless and vulnerable victims can be. It is good to have Stafford’s account of some of the abominable things the SS and Gestapo did to their prisoners

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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