Book Review: Life after the Third Reich

Paul Roland’s Life after the Third Reich is a brisk overview of life in Germany in the aftermath of World War II - and to a lesser extent throughout Europe, as it’s impossible to discuss the situation in Germany without reference to wider events. It’s a workmanlike book that does what it says it will do, but it never goes beyond that, which makes it oddly unsatisfying.

I think the trouble is that, going by the facts presented here, you come away with the impression that denazification was basically a failure, and I suppose depending on your standards in some ways it was. It didn’t manage to expel all former Nazis from public life or even put everyone personally involved in atrocities on trial, because there were simply too many of them, because it’s the nature of a totalitarian regime to demand active complicity from as many people as possible. The Allies could neither process that many people through the legal system, nor staff the schools and hospitals and industrial plants without them.

(Having said this, the industrialists still got off infuriatingly lightly. Maybe they couldn’t get every single floor manager, but you’d think they could at least snag the top bosses at the companies that used slave labor.)

But by the standard of “Did Germany go on yet another rampage twenty years later?” then denazification was a resounding success. In fact, it’s been nearly eighty years and Germany still hasn’t tried to conquer anyone! And if your only source of information was this book, it would be a total mystery as to why, because the Germans sound just about as sullen and unrepentant as they at the end of World War I.