[back] Mass Starvation of Germans, 1945-1950

After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation

a book by Giles MacDonogh

2007

REVIEW  His best estimate is that some three million Germans, military and civilians, died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities.....Most of the two million German civilians who perished after the end of the war were women, children and elderly -- victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide, and mass murder.....perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots......We are ceaselessly reminded of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps. But few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz stayed in business after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.

MacDonogh informs us that 1.8 million German civilians had perished by the end of the war.