Recommended book WWII : "Berlin The Downfall" by Antony Beevor

[barante]

Here's is Jonathan Yardley's take on Breevor's D-Day book:
washingtonpost.com

[Indurain]

Originally Posted by John Walmsley

There is a little-known, or at least little-discussed corollary to this story, and that is the subject of John Sack's book titled An Eye for An Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 (ISBN 0-465-04214-7). Sacks, himself a descendant of Polish-born Jews, spent seven years documenting the story through careful research and dozens of interviews in Poland, Germany, Israel and the United States.

In 1945 there were 10 million Germans living in Poland and part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union. The Russians established an Office of State Security, which sought out survivors of the Holocaust to administer their policies of de-Nazification. As would be expected, revenge was much on the minds of survivors of the horrific events of the Holocaust. During this period of "de-Nazification," tens of thousands of Germans, men, women and children, were incarcerated in very harsh conditions, where "between 60,000 and 80,000 thousand Germans died in the Office's custody."

Sack's stated purpose in writing this book is to document how a people, provoked by the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust, could, in turn, become oppressors themselves.This isn't a pretty story, but it shows how any people, given certain conditions, might behave in less than a humane manner.

John : thanks a lot for this reference.

I had never heard of this publication before.
It sounds like a really interesting read.
Thanks for this.