Book Alert / After the Reich

After the Reich -- The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, Basic Books '07, $32, 618 pages, ISBN #0465003370. Index, further reading, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

For more than a half-century, American schoolchildren have been taught that one of their country's finest hours came in the wake of the German defeat in World War II, when the Allied forces united in the rebuilding of Europe. British journalist Giles MacDonogh attempts to stand that proposition on its head in a tendentious new book that argues Germans bore the brunt of horrific war crimes perpetrated by the Allies, to wit:

" *  2.3 million German civilians died violent deaths after the cessation of hostilities, and 1.4 million German POWs died in captivity.

   * Nearly all of the famous extermination and concentration camps -- Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt and Dachau -- were reused after May 1945 by the Allies. German prisoners died here in droves.

   * The Americans used torture to extract confessions in their prison in Schwabisch Hall. Of 139 prisoners examined later, 137 had their testicles destroyed.

   * On April 17-18, 1945, French soldiers raped at least 600 women in the small Black Forest town of Freudenstadt, before going on to Stuttgart where they raped another 3,000 women and eight men. Additionally, it is estimated that the Russians raped 20,000 women in Berlin."

MacDonogh, author of biographies of Kaiser Wilhelm and Frederick the Great, claims to have drawn from "a vast array of contemporary first-person accounts" in his revisionist narrative. He argues that the postwar experience in Germany bears "deep parallels" to the present situation in Iraq.