Germans as Victims

...So do the Americans...

...Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell professor of East European Studies at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe...

...On both sides of the growing divide between east and west, too few questions were asked about the participation of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in government, industry, education, and the judiciary...

...up to two million of them died in the process of expulsion, transport, and detention...

...Twelve to 15 million Germans were driven from their homes in the east, primarily Poland and Czechoslovakia...

...The last were released from the Soviet Union only in 1957...

...By almost any indicators, the Federal Republic of Germany is one of the most successful industrial democracies in the world...

...He examines the brutality perpetrated against the Germans and the suffering that they endured up close and personal...

...Some fi ve million Germans died during World War II, including 1.8 million civilians...

...It was as if Germans could not be both victims and victimizers...

...His portrayal of the terrible hunger, cold, and homelessness that plagued Germany during the fi rst two years of occupation provides few surprises, especially for a German audience...

...Similarly, they need to develop a realistic appraisal of American occupation policies...

...American soldiers sometimes shot Germans, usually SS and other uniformed Nazis, where they were found, and executed others without trial in detention camps...

...No American (or German) should have any illusions about the violence carried out by GIs and their offi cers against disarmed and interned German soldiers, policemen, and even civilians at the end of the war...

...But the narrators displayed little understanding of their responsibility for the havoc wreaked on the continent and its peoples by the Third Reich...

...Stalin asked: “One or two [million...

...Intense public discussions of Nazi crimes overlapped with growing German embarrassment about the culpability of the wartime generation, some of whom continued to occupy prominent roles in the economy, universities, and government...

...In 2005, the German government itself recognized this fact by building the Holocaust Memorial in the center of Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, making it clear that German national consciousness cannot be separated from responsibility for the mass murder of the Jews...

...What makes MacDonogh’s book so effective is the sheer breadth of his vision, including the full panoply of German victimization together in a single volume...

...Others, like the harsh destiny of German POWs in Soviet hands, and the humiliating, even silly, travails endured by Germans during de-Nazifi cation, have also been described in scholarly monographs...

...MacDonogh starts his narrative of suffering at the end of the war and ends it with the Berlin Blockade: with Germans as victims both of Allied occupation and of the Cold War...

...In a subsequent discussion between Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta about the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe, the British prime minister remarked that the Allies had killed six or seven million Germans during the war “and probably [we] will kill another million before the end of the war...

...Stalin explained that what the American president had seen was nothing in comparison to the devastation in Ukraine: The Germans “were savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings...

...The “greatest generation” committed crimes against captured Germans that make Abu Ghraib look like child’s play...

...The East German regime, established in 1949 under Soviet auspices, forbade open discussion of German suffering, save for that of the Communists and leftist resistance, emphasizing instead Nazi crimes against the Soviet Union and its Slavic East European dependencies...

...When Erika Steinbach, a Bundestag deputy and president of the Federation of Expellees, began a campaign in 2001 to establish a museum in Berlin about forced deportations in Europe, the left rose in protest and the right defended her initiative...

...As Alexander and Margareta Mitscherlich wrote in their famous 1967 study of the Germans’ “inability to mourn,” there was simply no time and no interest on the part of the Germans to grieve their own fate, much less contemplate the horrors their nation had imposed on the peoples of Europe, including the Holocaust...

...The same holds for the harsh fate of German POWs under the Americans and French...

...It would be surprising if Germans did not buttress their claims to sovereignty by throwing off any residual notions about the pure goodness of the American occupation...

...After the Reich provides poignant descriptions, often in the Germans’ own words, of what they endured and overcame, including the initial denial of their own culpability for Nazi crimes, in order to get to this point...

...For different reasons, neither the East Germans nor the West Germans gave much thought or attention to the deep moral implications of the Holocaust...

...The devil of occupation is in its details, and these he provides in colorful prose...

...In the fervor of rebuilding their lives and incomes, Germans turned their back on the Nazis and the war, as well as their culpability for crimes against others...

...A politicized zerosum game was at work...

...He draws extensively from the hundreds of memoirs and diaries of Germans who experienced the horrors of the war and its aftermath...

...Thousands died or committed suicide as a result...

...A realistic view of the occupation on the part of both parties may well help...

...At the end of the war, nearly 11 million German soldiers were in prisoner of war camps...

...1.5 million of them never returned home...

...The Americans were the foster fathers of German democracy, but Germans are looking for partnership with Washington, not a parental relationship...

...The tendency to ignore the past and focus on building a new and shining future in both the Bonn Republic and the East German Communist state meshed well with the interests of the mutually hostile alliances that emerged with the sharpening of the Cold War...

...Politics continue to infl uence public discussions of the forced expulsions from Eastern Europe...

...Arguments have not ceased about the appropriate balance between portraying the Germans as victims and as victimizers...

...Some of the subjects he explores—such as the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers and the brutality of the expulsion of Germans from the east—have been discussed elsewhere at length...

...Younger Germans forced their society and polity to grapple collectively with moral responsibility for fascism and genocide...

...Many hundreds of thousands of German women of all ages were raped, gang-raped, molested, and subjected to various forms of sexual exploitation by the invading and occupying Allied forces...

...He added that Stalin should propose again “a toast to the execution of 50,000 offi cers of the German army...

...His is a sprawling and undisciplined, yet deeply engaging, history of German suffering at the end of the war and beginning of the peace...

...If one talked about Germans as victims—of rape, of bombing, of expulsion, or of Allied exploitation—then one was accused of diminishing the Germans’ responsibility for the Holocaust and crimes against humanity, of being a “right-winger”— even worse, of being an apologist for Nazism...

...The untold and unassimilated history of Nazism and the Holocaust was a critical component of the generational upheaval of the late 1960s and ’70s in West Germany...

...No one would deny that there were instances of rape in the Western zones, but the problem assumed nowhere near the extent and signifi cance of mass rape in the Soviet zone...

...With the universities, the media, and public forums overwhelmingly dominated by the left, it was hard for anyone but groups on the relative fringes of German society—expellees from Eastern Europe, members of former landholding families, and virulent anti-Communists—to write about the victimization of Germans...

...He is also one of the rare historians to include the fate of the Austrians with that of the Germans throughout Europe, and to look at postwar Germany from the perspectives of all four occupied zones...

...Contemporary Germans continue to perform complicated balancing acts with historical memory...

...Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich will be an important addition to this combustible mixture of memory politics...

...These are the stories that Germans told to their relatives and friends, that they swapped on treks and in refugee camps, that they sometimes suppressed and wrote, or at least published, much later, when German society was ready to listen...

...This very healthy history of confrontation with the Nazi past took place at the expense of a serious understanding of what happened to the Germans themselves at the end of the war and beginning of the peace...

...These divisions in the politics of memory began to break down in the mid-1980s, and were breached for good, if not completely overcome, in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unifi cation of Germany...

...The American occupation was sometimes brutal and mean, as portrayed by MacDonogh...

...Churchill answered Stalin that he was “not proposing any limitation” on the numbers...

...But none of this even approached the violence of the Soviet occupation in the east: The millions of Germans who fl ed to the west before 1961, when the Wall cut off the exodus, are witnesses enough to this fact...

...The Federation mounted a modest, if controversial, exhibit last year...

...In a period when the United States has reached rock bottom in German public opinion polls, MacDonogh’s revelations about the harsh, even murderous, American occupation may well strike respondent chords among many German readers...

...Fierce Allied bombing campaigns, including the fi rebombing of Dresden and Hamburg, destroyed German cities and killed hundreds of thousands of their inhabitants, among them 75,000 children under 14...

...MacDonogh’s historical method fi ts his writing strategy...

...They have a lot to be proud of in this connection...

...But German democracy and prosperity owe an enormous debt to the goodwill, good sense, persistence, and self-interest of the Western Allies, the Americans in particular...

...In the fi rst decade after the war’s end, the Germans did tell each other stories about their own experiences in the war...

...MacDonogh tries to demonstrate that the French and American occupations (less so the British, or so he maintains) were sometimes as brutal as the Soviet...

...others were beaten and horribly tortured...

...J?rg Friedrich’s 2002 Der Brand (The Fire) was widely praised for its stark and realistic, if emotionally laden, treatment of the fi rebombing of Dresden and Hamburg...

...Among the signs of a new integrated approach to the postwar past was the success of G?nter Grass’s 2002 novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), which portrayed a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the packed German refugee ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, in the icy waters of the Baltic in late January 1945...

...These groups, in turn, tended to be less interested in writing about German crimes...

...By implicating average German soldiers and offi cers in the despicable Nazi crimes in the east, the exhibit, and the scholarship and commentaries that followed, hammered home to the Germans that very few of the wartime generation could claim complete innocence and lack of knowledge about what had happened, even if the circles of actual perpetrators were more limited...

...Many thousands of Germans starved to death, especially in the American Rheinwiesen lager (Rhine Meadow camps...

...The dictator responded: “Everyone was more bloodthirsty than they had been a year ago...

...By the early 1980s, there was a rush to come clean, a socio-psychological passion to document and discuss the crimes of the Third Reich, starting with the Holocaust, but including the murder of Roma and Sinti and the mass starvation of nearly two million Soviet POWs...

...Books&Arts Germans as Victims Recovering from the Third Reich BY NORMAN NAIMARK After the Reich The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh Basic Books, 618 pp., $32 Franklin Roosevelt told Stalin that he was shocked by “the extent of the German destruction of the Crimea” he saw on his way to the Yalta conference in February 1945...

...They walk the tightrope of accepting historical responsibility for the Holocaust and the inhuman policies of the Third Reich, while coming to terms with their own victimization at the end of the war and beginning of the peace...

...The Wehrmacht exhibition, which opened in 1995, can be considered the culmination of this trend...

...Especially in Western Germany, there was remarkable frankness about rape, expulsion, Allied bombing, imprisonment, and deprivation of various sorts...

...In some ways, the Allied occupation of Germany was lifted only in 1989-90, when the Wall came down and Germany was united...

...Hungry, cold, and desperate, the Germans did what they could to survive the deprivations of the immediate postwar period...