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The Allied Occupation of Germany: The Refugee Crisis, Denazification and the Path to Reconstruction. By Francis Graham-Dixon. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Pp. xii + 348. Cloth £68.00. ISBN 978-1780764658.
The United Kingdom played a key role in creating what became the Federal Republic of Germany. As early as 1945, the Attlee government contemplated abandoning the "Potsdam formula" for a unified Germany; by the next spring, it openly envisioned a zonal merger in the west. It subsequently advocated extending generous political, although not economic, freedoms toward what became the new West German state. Moreover, the British occupation zone itself is of historical interest for the simple fact that it arguably faced the worst overall economic situation, including food and housing shortages, of any of the Allied zones. All of these challenges were in turn exacerbated by a massive influx of refugees. Yet compared to other aspects of the Allied occupation of Germany between 1944 and 1949, the British zone, along with its French counterpart, has received relatively little scholarly attention. This oversight is especially true in terms of the policies pursued on the ground by British occupation authorities. Given the obvious interest in the occupation period, it seems strange that the standard works on the British occupation-including essay collections edited by Ian D. Turner (1989) and Birke and Mayring (1992) as well as Anne Deighton's The Impossible Peace (1990)-are now at least two...