Part I

The long and the short of it is no. An Eye for an Eye was part of a larger subset of books produced in the 1990s that claimed to have uncovered evidence of Allied malfeasance and recrimination against the German population during the postwar period. Most famously, James Bacque's 1989 book Other Losses contended that Eisenhower engaged in a deliberate policy to starve and kill German POWs to ensure a pliant and peaceful German. This crop of works often had sloppy research that stood poorly in comparison to other historical accounts- both academic and popular- and hewed towards embellishing already known facts about the chaotic end of the war and occupation. Much of this genre also dovetailed uncomfortably close to the Holocaust denialism and narratives of unfair German victimization pioneered by the likes of David Irving in the 1970s and 80s.

An Eye for an Eye falls in line with much of this type of shoddy research. Sacks, a journalist, not a trained historian, often flubbed several key details. Like Bacque, An Eye for an Eye is geared towards having a thesis and twisting the evidence to support it. In a trend common to other works from this era, Sacks bangs at open doors and makes much of rediscovering an allegedly hidden past. For example, the expulsions of German and Volksdeutsche populations from Eastern Europe were quite well-known and discussed in the literature on postwar Germany. Anyone familiar with the early political history of West Germany would undoubtedly be familiar with expellee associations and their constant harping on the injustices and collective punishment of the postwar era. The expellees produced a volumes literature on the lost territories and were a strong anti-communist power bloc within Adenauer’s CDU/CSU coalition. Although Adenauer recognized that these territories were forever lost (and as a good Rhinelander, there is evidence that he likely thought good riddance to these largely Prussian areas), he had to placate the expellee organizations and their votes. Likewise, notions of unfair treatment of detained prisoners and the collective punishment on the part of the Allies was also a staple of early West German political culture, so excesses and violence was not exactly covered up. The publisher's blurb that "Not for sixty years has a book been so brutally (and, in the end, unsuccessfully) suppressed as An Eye for an Eye" could only be true if one does not read German and is unfamiliar with the massive outpouring of specialty books on the deportations and destruction of the German communities in Eastern Europe printed by these expellee organizations.

One of the key problems of An Eye for an Eye is that it assumes that Jews were the chief motive force behind the expulsions and other postwar recriminations against the German population. In fact, much of the impetus for the expulsions emanated not from the direct victims of Nazi aggression, but the victorious Allies. There emerged in 1945 a tentative consensus that the political future of Eastern Europe necessitated a more or less ethnically-homogeneous population and that the Germans had forfeited their claims to this land. Even in cases when expulsion came at the impetus of the state, it was Allied diplomats who created the preconditions for mass ethnic cleansing. Poland, for example, now had to incorporate vast swaths of Prussian and Silesian Germany and its attending German population because the Allies had agreed to move the borders of Poland westwards. Although the Allies did not share the same enthusiasm for forced homogeneity as the Soviets, they did sanction the removal of troublesome population groups and the Potsdam Declaration did claim such transfers would be “orderly and humane.”

The problem was there was next to no real infrastructure for this population transfer and no overarching organization for it either. This in turn gave the vast network of work and concentration camps Germany built both inside the Reich and occupied territories a new lease on life. These centers were already designed to hold and control large numbers of people and the last thing the Allies wanted was to add to an already overburdened German infrastructure. Furthermore, a number of the camps themselves had been repurposed in the summer of 1945 to accommodate individuals that were either under suspicion for war crimes or whose backgrounds could pose a risk to the establishment of a peaceful occupation. Operation Tally-Ho in July 1945 rounded up some 80000 German suspects in a two-day period in the American zone and they were housed in the preexisting camp structures.

Overall, the Allies reemployed some of the major concentration camps as detention centers such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Esterwegen, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen. These centers were a clearing house for denazification and regulated control of suspected Nazi stalwarts. Conditions at the camps were harsh, but were not outside of the pale for the rest of Germany at this period. The period of 1945-47 was a period of great dearth and material hardship for Germany at this time (as well as the rest of Europe) and the military occupation governments often did not have the resources, political capital, or the manpower to adequately supply the needs of the country. Rations at the camps were lean, but only the Soviet-run camps had problems with overcrowding and malnutrition that approached the camps’ wartime levels.

But the detentions became something of a minor political cause for the emerging governments of both Germanies and there was much concern in the licensed press about maltreatment of innocent Germans. Churches and veterans’ groups argued for clemency for those Germans incarcerated or awaiting trial for the national military tribunals (the truncated successors of the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg) and weighed against the continued operation of the camps as a sign of collective punishment of the German population. Nor was this condemnation of the camps limited to just Germans. News of alleged torture of German prisoners at Dachau reached US shores and led to Senator Joseph McCarthy attacking the “Gestapo tactics” of the American military government in 1949. Although Senate hearings cleared much of the US military personnel, McCarthy’s attack, which was really part of a wider Republican attack in the Senate against the Truman administration, was in line with a wider walking away by the Western Allies from the postwar investigations and trials.

Once the most of the camps became cleared out of detainees, they became part of the infrastructure for the expellees to make their way into Germany. The facilities were always quite rudimentary and they were enfolded into a larger process of popular violence and ritualized humiliation that attended many of the expulsions. Contrary to Potsdam’s claim that the expulsions would be “ordinary and humane,” they were often anything but that. There were a number of “wildcat expulsions” in which local authorities took it on their own initiative to remove the German or Volksdeutsche population. Violence and degradation often mixed in not only recent wartime memories of German actions, but also blended into contemporary frustrations with the postwar order which was a time of great dearth and hardship for many Europeans. The newly-installed Communist governments did little to discourage these actions as they recognized that social anger could be targeted against the Germans as a useful means to bind the population together. State authorities were either indifferent to the fate of the expellees, or in some case, participated in the violence. The Allied military governments likewise were ill-prepared to accommodate the influx of more refugees and their temporary accommodations became for the duration.

Within this context of violence, and reliable estimates peg the death toll at some 300000 expellees, it was not surprising that a number of Germans blamed Jews as the source of their collective punishment and misfortune. There was an erroneous rumor that the security forces of the Communist governments were comprised mostly of Jews and this assertion enjoyed wide currency both in expellee circles and within the wider Eastern European population. Wartime propaganda of Jews behind the Allied governments had a postwar resuscitation as it dovetailed with the anticommunism of the expellees. The chaos and chronic disorganization of the occupation gave these rumors some weight as logistical shortfalls did not fit the image of military powers that had previously crushed the Axis under a massive weight of arms. Allied interrogators also sometimes used the tactic of telling their prisoners “I am Jewish,” as a means to force an uncooperative prisoner to talk. This fed into a larger sentiment that Jews were behind Germany’s misfortune and collective punishment. Otto Striegel, who was executed for his actions at the Mauthausen camp blamed Jews for his sentence and rough treatment stating before his hanging:

I am no war criminal, but the revenge and hatred against the Jews will never end, for they are guilty of the suffering and hardships here in Landsberg. I am greeting my poor Fatherland. May God bless my wife and children. Now perform the order which was given to you by the Jews.

This antisemitic conspiracy was not limited just to Germans. The North Dakota Catholic Bishop Aloisius Muench argued in 1947 that the unfair tribunals and executions were the result of Jewish influence. In his capacity as the Catholic liaison to the American military government, he published a pastoral letter in 1947 in Germany contrasting “Christ’s law of love,” to the “Mosaic idea of an eye for an eye.” Aloisius’s diary entries show he genuinely believed that the primary instigator of the tribunals and punishment were Jews, and not the Allied wartime promises to hold Germans accountable for their behavior.