Brutality didn't end when World War II did

Americans' image of the end of World War II in Europe is of GIs parading on happy streets. But that was not the case in Germany, as author Giles MacDonogh demonstrates in "After the Reich," a history of the conquest and occupation of the Reich, including what is now Austria.

The reader may find the subtitle, "The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation," startling. But war is brutal, and brotherhood did not come overnight. Nor were all occupiers the same.

The first part of "After the Reich" is about the conquest, and is the most grossly violent. The description of the Red Army in eastern Germany is a flood of pillage and rape. And it wasn't only the Russians. In Stuttgart, French troops raped "perhaps 3,000 women and eight men," writes MacDonogh.

Many felt the Germans deserved it. But this is collective guilt — and in Western thought, guilt is individual. You might call the Nazi leaders criminals, but in most cases, MacDonogh notes, "it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men."

For historic German territories in what is now Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic, conquest was followed by confiscation and expulsion. Today we call this "ethnic cleansing."

The occupier's hand was lighter in the American zone, but GIs did a considerable amount of looting and were not greeted as liberators, the author says.

America had not been conquered or bombed by the Wehrmacht, but American soldiers "had been fed a good deal of propaganda at home," writes MacDonogh. They tended to see all Germans as guilty.

"Public opinion," he reminds us, "favoured punishment and Eisenhower had made it clear that there was to be no billeting of American soldiers with German families, no mixed marriages, no joint church services, no visits to German homes."

The "no frat" policy didn't last — GIs eventually married 14,000 German women — but the first impression was not friendly.

German civilians did not resist. They tended to think of themselves as victims — first of Hitler's National Socialists and then of the Allied bombing. The Americans saw them as collaborators at best. They famously paraded civilians in their zone through the extermination camps and required them to fill out a 12-page de-Nazification form: How did you vote in 1932? Did you ever hope for a German victory in the war?

Germans thought these questions unreasonable. MacDonogh quotes one who saw the Americans as a nanny "who gets on our nerves with her bony index finger and her shrill old maid's voice."

The Americans tried 169,282 war-crimes and de-Nazification cases — far more than the British, whose efforts, this British historian says, were, at best, feeble. But what was right? In dismembering a totalitarian state, how far down should you affix responsibility? After a war, should you put your enemies on trial for things your soldiers did also? Should outrage at the past trump needs in the present? MacDonogh does not answer these questions, but he shows how people did, in fact, answer them.

"The Allies' fury," he writes, "was quickly spent." Most of the harsh sentences were commuted.

Readers may recall Stanley Kramer's 1961 movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," about the trial of four Nazi judges accused of war crimes. In the movie they were found guilty, and this book does not argue with that. MacDonogh notes, though, that four-fifths of the Nazi-era judges in the western zone ended up working for the West German government. And it was a decent government.

This is a sometimes violent and often disturbing history that prods the reader to think about the choices of conquerors.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times

editorial writer.