After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

When Hitler’s government collapsed in 1945, Germany was immediately subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. General Eisenhower denied the Germans access to foreign aid, forcing Germans to subsist on about 1,200 calories a day. Over a million German POWs died in Allied captivity, as many as 2 million women were raped by Soviet occupiers, and hundreds of thousands of Germans died in the course of brutal deportations. In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh has drawn from a vast array of first-person accounts to give a voice to the millions of German civilians who, having lost a brutal war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish “peace.”