Reddit reviews After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

To those who croon about how the German POW's had it made and how life was a paradise for them.

Well, there is history and then there is what really happened.

http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Mercies-Civilians-Occupation-1944%C2%961950/dp/0889225672/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419322289&sr=1-1&keywords=james+bacque

http://www.amazon.com/OTHER-LOSSES-Shocking-Civilians-Eisenhowers/dp/1559580992/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419322289&sr=1-3&keywords=james+bacque

http://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/dp/0465003389/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419322289&sr=1-5&keywords=james+bacque


http://www.amazon.com/Morgenthau-Plan-Influence-American-Postwar/dp/1892941902/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419322574&sr=1-1&keywords=morgenthau+plan

http://whale.to/b/walsh11.html

It's OK to have not known this before - the victors get to write history, after all.

This is not to excuse the German and other Axis nations atrocities (especially the Ukrainians). On the East Front, wholesale murder of whole towns, never mind villagers, was normal (for example the much celebrated and admired, because it was a great military achievemtn by Manstein, the retaking of Kharkov in 1943, ended in the wholesale execution of the WHOLE TOWN in revenge for resisting).

The savagery of Russians has been told many times (in my family, my grandma flatly stated that "When the Russians came, they first stole everything and then raped everything that moved"... And no, we were Russian allies at that point).

But the Western Allies not only shot POWs in Germany as a matter of course, but starved the whole German population as an act of revenge. The Morgenthau Plan was in full force right after WW2, and only after Mr. Hoover and some Mormons and Red Cross (and others) actually visited Germany and saw what the Allies were doing there was it cut back a bit.

Due to the Cold War, both the Russians and the West tried to woo the Germans - in fact, the first mass feeding of the Berliners was done by the Soviets, to demonstrate how much better they were than the Western Allies who starved the whole population and took hundreds of thousands for slave labor!

There's a book called After The Reich that talks about what happened to Germans after the war
http://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/dp/0465003389

>When Hitler’s government collapsed in 1945, Germany was immediately divided up under the control of the Allied Powers and the Soviets. A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs, was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. According to recent estimates, as many as two million German women were raped by Soviet occupiers. General Eisenhower denied the Germans access to any foreign aid, meaning that German civilians were forced to subsist on about 1,200 calories a day. (American officials privately acknowledged at the time that the death rate amongst adults had risen to four times the pre-war levels; child mortality had increased tenfold). With the authorization of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, over four million Germans were impressed into forced labor. General George S. Patton was so disgusted by American policy in post-war Germany that he commented in his diary, “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defense of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles"
>
>Although an astonishing 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed in the post-Reich era, few know of this traumatic history. There has been an unspoken understanding amongst historians that the Germans effectively got what they deserved as perpetrators of the Holocaust. First ashamed of their national humiliation at the hands of the Allies and Soviets, and later ashamed of the horrors of the Holocaust, Germans too have remained largely silent – a silence W.G. Sebald movingly described in his controversial book On the Natural History of Destruction.
>
>In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh has written a comprehensive history of Germany and Austria in the postwar period, drawing on a vast array of contemporary first-person accounts of the period. In doing so, he has finally given a voice the millions of who, lucky to survive the war, found themselves struggling to survive a hellish “peace.”*

German peoples were enslaved post war, and hundreds of thousands were killed in Soviet prison camps, while tens of thousands more were starved in Germany. It was a pretty horrific time. Black people were treated awful, bit that comparison is inept.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/125003356X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1465062768&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=savage+continent&dpPl=1&dpID=51k2a1PIkBL&ref=plSrch
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465003389/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=14HX9JJS52CG9W2MZ6ME

These are a few you want if you're focused on the European Theater:

Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford
http://www.amazon.com/Endgame-1945-Missing-Final-Chapter/dp/0316035998


After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0465003389/ref=pd_aw_sims_1?pi=SL500_SY115&simLd=1


Germany 1945: From War to Peace by Richard Bessel
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0060540370/ref=pd_aw_sims_3?pi=SL500_SY115&simLd=1


There are of course a few more but this should get you started. One thing I like to do is if you find a good, comprehensive book on a topic you like, be sure to check out the reference/source pages in the back. Most good history books that's aren't direct novelizations will have references to direct sources that are usually pretty good themselves. Good luck and happy reading!

There are many including Savage Continent Europe and After the Reich. There are many many books written on the subject. Google book post ww2.

Russia wasn't alone in raping German women.

There are some serious accusations against US soldiers in liberated Frane as well.

And then there's the denial of aid, starvation and forced labor of Germans.

Whoever said there are no good guys in war were more right than they knew.

Highly educated opinions in that post. real edifying stuff.

Clearly the steady diet of racism and tabloid newspapers is rotting your "communist" brain. The post WW2 era refers to the first decade after the war. Take a step back from FOX news and look at one of these papery things commonly known as a book.

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X

https://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/dp/0465003389

http://www.amazon.com/After-Reich-Brutal-History-Occupation/dp/0465003389/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1334889666&sr=8-4

After the Reich