Alan Allport
The Homecoming
The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War
By Ben Shephard
Jonathan Cape 42pp £25 order from our bookshop
One of the great ironies of Hitler’s catastrophic twelve-year rule from 1933 to 1945 – an irony no doubt lost on the Führer himself – was that a regime so fixated with racial purity ended up making Germany the ethnic dumping ground of Europe. By the summer of 1944, a quarter of the German workforce were non-citizens; there were nearly eight million of them from at least twenty countries, either prisoners of war conscripted for corvée labour or else Hilfswillige, ‘volunteers’ imported, with varying degrees of coercion, to work for the Reich. Most of the Hiwis were Poles and Russians, often female, often very young: the typical worker was said to be an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl from Kiev. Half a million concentration camp inmates, Jewish and non-Jewish, were churning out Messerschmitts and machine guns in the Reich’s armament factories and toiling on the Pharaonic construction projects of Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Germany was the hub of a vast and polyglot slave empire.
The Allies inherited this dazed and half-starved sea of humanity when they entered Germany in the spring of 1945. What to do with the ‘Displaced Persons’ or ‘DPs’ of Europe was to occupy the minds of statesmen
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553