Most accounts of the invasion and occupation of Germany and Austria in 1945 paint a broadly peace ful picture of the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the Allied-run west of the countries.

Giles MacDonogh’s shocking new book gives a very different alternative view – and all the more sobering for being written in a style that betrays no hint of the author’s anger at the appalling atrocities he relates.

Briefly stated, it is Mac Donogh’s thesis that peace did not follow the silencing of the guns in Berlin in May 1945 as the Second World War ended in Europe, but that the end of open hostil ities ushered in a new era of suffering for the German – and, to a lesser extent, Austrian – people.

The ruined and defenceless Reich was systematically raped and robbed, and a large pro portion of its survivors, military and civilian, either slaughtered in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or sheer starvation.

Some of the suffering documented by MacDonogh is familiar, but much is not. We know about the mass and repeated rape by the Russians of nearly all females between the ages of eight and eighty in Berlin and eastern Germany from books like A Woman in Berlin or Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945.

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