After the Reich:
The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
Giles MacDonogh
New York: Basic Books, 2007
If ever the history of our times comes to be written by scholars free of national prejudices, the “crimes against humanity” committed by the victors of the Second World War of the twentieth century A.D., will appear as equal to those committed by the Nazis. For an objective observer of the “crimes, follies, and cruelties of mankind” cannot deny that the expropriations and expulsion from their homes of millions of people for the sole crime of belonging to the German “race” was an atrocity comparable with the extermination of the Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis. The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful.
So wrote the irrepressible Freda Utley in her The High Cost of Vengeance published in 1949. [1]
While many of the “national prejudices” of 1949 no longer exist for the bulk of the American and European populations, an objective presentation of what happened during World War II and its aftermath is still a taboo subject. In fact, it might even be more difficult to present a truthful picture today than it was in the early postwar era. For in the more than half-century that has transpired since Miss Utley penned these words, the Nazi genocide against the European Jews, now given the name “Holocaust,” has become interpreted as the greatest crime in history-a uniquely evil event, overshadowing everything else that took place in that conflagration. To imply that whatever suffering the German people underwent in the aftermath of World War II was in any way similar to the Holocaust is now designated as the great evil of “moral equivalence”-an actual crime in many European democracies.