Andrew Beattie's book provides the first systematic comparison of policies and practices of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France with respect to the internment of Germans during the Allied occupation of the country. The Allies detained more than four hundred thousand of their defeated enemies in camps between 1945 and 1950, when the last camps shut down. Beattie argues persuasively that “internment was a central element of the Allies’ efforts to secure their presence in Germany, to destroy Nazism and punish those deemed responsible for it, and to allow the construction of a new Germany” (23). Although the victors thus shared common goals for internment, Soviet practices diverged sharply from the other powers’ approaches. Beattie finds that the Soviets applied Stalinist methods that proved more lawless and deadly than the milder, but still coercive, internment camps in the three western zones.

Beattie begins by examining wartime planning. He shows that the Allies shared important priorities and plans for the denazification and democratization of Germany as the conflict drew to a close. The Big Three found only rare occasion at Potsdam in July 1945 to debate whether to implement internment policies because all three anticipated detaining substantial numbers of Germans in order to protect their own forces, to punish wrongdoers, and to facilitate reforms in the defeated country.

The second chapter explores internment practices from the end of the war through 1950. All of the victors targeted fairly broad categories of people for detention, but the Soviets were less discriminating than the others. The Western powers also tended to release internees more rapidly than the Soviets, so that by late 1948, few detainees remained in the western zones, while the Soviets still interned around 13,500 people even after the German Democratic Republic's founding. In the three western zones, quasi-judicial processes examined internees and facilitated their release, whereas the Soviets mostly held onto their detainees, a result mainly of “inertia” (99).

The questions of who exactly was interned and their degree of responsibility for Nazi crimes occupy chapter 3. Beattie provides a nuanced analysis of the question of responsibility and the Allies’ efforts to grapple with it. Internment entailed arbitrariness, and some detainees, who included small numbers of women and even smaller numbers of children, were unreasonably swept up in the net. Internment was neither a narrowly tailored prehearing detention, nor a sweeping assertion of undifferentiated German collective guilt. Beattie soundly estimates that “most internees, especially but not only in the western zones, should be seen neither as victims of misplaced security fears nor as (rightly or wrongly) suspected criminals but as administrative detainees who were targeted because they had been apparatchiks of the Nazi state” (105, emphasis in the original).

The book's fourth chapter examines the treatment of internees, which varied but tended to improve over time. Although all of the camps were avowedly coercive, manned by armed guards who on occasion shot and killed internees attempting to escape their Soviet, British, and American captors, the Soviet camps proved the most lethal. Beattie finds that in the isolated, secretive Soviet camps, approximately forty-four thousand internees died, about 29 percent of the people detained in the eastern zone. By contrast, the death rate among internees in the western zones was less than 1 percent. Beattie convincingly argues that the catastrophic death rates in the Soviet camps resulted not from deliberate killings or physical abuse but were due mainly to poor food supply and “Soviet indifference” (186).

Beattie argues that, in the end, internment “facilitated democratization in the western zones and Stalinization in the Soviet zone” (192). The claim is plausible, and the book is persuasive that the confinement of thousands of Germans indeed signaled the Allies’ power and resolve to stamp out Nazism. Beattie makes the excellent point that internment's temporary character cleared the way for a new political class to shape Germany's future in the immediate postwar period, while still leaving open opportunities for reintegrating internees, including compromised individuals more generally, into a new order. The key question of how Germans perceived internment and the broader program of democratization, however, receives less attention than the priorities and practices of the Allies.

Comparative histories are inherently challenging because they require the historian to master multiple case studies. This monograph examines four different zones of occupation and gives significant attention to Austria under four-power occupation. Beattie rises to the challenge. He shows excellent command of the history of all four zones. The French case receives the least attention. Beattie conducted research in several German archives, including church archives, as well as the Archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In addition, the only Allied archive he consulted was the National Archives of the United Kingdom. The British sources are rich. Research in French, Soviet, and American archives might afford an even fuller account of the story Beattie offers.

Beattie's book will interest all historians of the postwar occupation of Germany. The author successfully engages with the historiography of the wider phenomenon of camps. It may be fruitful to consider Beattie's comparative study in light of an exemplar from that body of research, Nicolaus Wachsmann's magisterial opus (KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps [2015]). Beattie's history, like Wachsmann's, is nuanced and balanced, but it is not as detailed and dense as Wachsmann's lengthier narrative. Beattie's history of the postwar camps affords a sense of the diversity within and across particular zones, but it does not plumb comprehensively the workings of all the many, individual camps over time. The perspective of the Germans—both those inside the wire and those outside it—receives comparatively little space. Beattie, thus, does not offer the final word on the subject, and the history of the Allies’ internment camps may still profit from further inquiry. Any subsequent study will have to engage with Beattie's impressive contribution.