The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (64 page)

at center stage.

By contrast, this book has drawn upon the testimony of many ordinary people, civilians as well as soldiers, to offer an alternative way of looking at the events of 1944–45. These voices have spoken of the indetermi- nate nature of liberation, its paradoxical joys and mis-

eries, and the heavy toll that liberation and its after- math took upon the liberated peoples themselves. For them, the liberation was truly a time of limbo, a time without structure or form, a time of uncertainty, fear, and loss. The untold joy of seeing the war come to an end was diluted by the almost unbearable sufferings that so many had endured. No one has described these contradictory emotions more clearly than Primo Levi, who in October 1945 finally made it home to Turin, Ita- ly. Arrested and deported in December 1943, Levi spent thirteen months in Auschwitz, then another ten months trying to get home. This return journey, along miles of railways, in countless boxcars, carried him through Poland, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Romania, Hungary, Germany, Austria, and finally into Italy. On the last leg of his trip, through the Brenner pass between Austria and Italy, Levi traveled with two companions, the only survivors of his original cohort of 650 Italians sent to the Nazi camps. “ We knew,” he wrote about this home- ward journey, “that on the thresholds of our homes, for good or ill, a trial awaited us, and we anticipated it with fear.” On October 19, Levi arrived in Turin. He brought the war home with him. “No one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story…. But

only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat.”
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Levi was not alone in finding his liberation a time of trial. As we have seen, thousands of French and Bel- gians paid for their liberation with their lives, and many Dutch people dropped dead in the streets in the last weeks of the war while Allied war planners dith- ered over sending airborne food drops behind enemy lines. We have seen that living with the liberators pre- sented its own difficulties; American, British, and Ca- nadian soldiers could be both cruel and kind in equal measure to the civilians they freed from Hitler’s grasp. For millions of Europeans, liberation came in the form of displacement. Long after the guns fell silent, forced laborers, prisoners of German camps, as well as ethnic Germans from Eastern European lands, tramped the roads of liberated Europe, victims of renewed hostil- ity, stalked at every turn by hatred, hunger, and illness. Meanwhile, liberated Europeans watched, bemused, as the German people, who perpetrated unspeakable crimes for over a decade, wallowed in self-pity and condemned the violent bombing that had devastated their citadel-cities. And the Jews of Europe—those few who managed to escape Germany’s genocidal war— found little freedom on the morrow of their liberation.

Many survivors remained in camps for months and even years, safe from extermination to be sure, but compelled to dwell inside temporary shelters in the land of their tormentors, far from a home they could as yet only dimly imagine.

These are the grim realities of liberation. Why have they gone missing from the historical record of World War II and postwar European history? Americans and Europeans share the blame for sanitizing the history of liberation. In the United States immediately after the war, political leaders and the public took justified pride in having defeated Hitler and restored sovereign- ty to Europe. Americans came to see great nobility in their war against Nazi Germany. There was no place in the national story for awkward questions about civil- ian deaths, or mass bombing of cities, or looting and sexual assault by occupying troops, or a too-swift rec- onciliation with unashamed Germans, or Jews still liv- ing in camps in Germany. The liberation of Europe had been a great crusade, in General Eisenhower’s words. And so it was. Yet its tragedies and paradoxes proved too dangerous to find a secure place in postwar Ameri- can thinking about the war. By 1946, Americans began to mobilize for a new global contest, a battle of ideolo- gies with Soviet Russia, and they had little inclination to dig deeply into some of the darker dimensions of the

recent victories over Nazi Germany and imperial Ja- pan. For half a century, therefore, the American public has been fed a steady diet of triumphalist narratives in which great generals and visionary politicians placed the burden of freedom onto the willing shoulders of the anonymous American GI, who carried out his du- ties with determination and honor. In the early cold war, Americans needed a story about World War II that stressed the essential purity of the fight, the decency of American men at arms, and the inevitability of vic- tory. These themes, made secure through decades of cinematic treatments as well as popular historical ac- counts, have resulted in a kind of American myopia that only sees a select portion of the war, while the broader view has become fuzzy and indistinct. This book has offered a new perspective for American readers, one that brings into focus the European experience of lib- eration. It has shown that for every triumph at arms, for every act of heroism on the battlefield, there was also a home set alight, a child without food, a woman cower- ing in an unheated barn amid filth and squalor. This is the human face of war and liberation in Europe.

Europeans too have done their share of cleansing the history of their own liberation, though not out of nos- talgic reverence for the “good war.” Rather, Europeans did not wish to emphasize that they owed their free-

dom to others. The embarrassing truth is that few of the European resistance movements had been able to inflict much damage on the occupying Germans; only the Yugoslavs and perhaps the Greeks had done much to free their own soil. Yet in the immediate aftermath of liberation, European states needed to restore their own legitimacy, and this required founding new na- tional myths. In the first postwar decade in Western Europe, the sordid history of wartime collaboration, the participation in Germany’s New Order, the military weakness of underground resistance movements, all this was deliberately obscured. With it went the brutal- ity of the liberation itself. Instead, a new set of ideas took root. These stressed widespread, popular resis- tance to Germany, the solidarity of Allied nations in war, a large role for resistance movements in the liber- ation, and the triumphant restoration of order and de- mocracy. The needs of the moment called for simplic- ity. At a time of fragile national unity, with contending political parties vying for power, in a climate of sim- mering hatred between former collaborators and their victims, any emphasis on the personal, human losses of the war, or on the violence that the liberators had visited upon Europe, could find no traction. Whereas local communities ravaged by war had emphasized their own martyrdom at the hands of the liberators, the image that the national governments wished to proj-

ect in 1945 was of unity and a stalwart common effort of reconstruction. “Retroussons nos manches,” blared posters pasted up by the new French government: “Let us roll up our sleeves.” Beneath this slogan, a brawny, smiling laborer grasped his tools and strode forward. The message was clear: victims make poor heroes.

The nations liberated by Soviet arms had no choice in the matter of public memory. Their national memories were prepared for them in Moscow. The party line was straightforward: the Red Army liberated Eastern Eu- rope from fascism and offered a new antifascist, Com- munist order to the peoples of the liberated eastern states. Local peoples were depicted as victims of Ger- many’s rapacious imperialism, which they had been, but other elements of the war in the east were excised from public memory: the Hitler- Stalin pact of 1939 that had divided Poland between Germany and the USSR; the massive local collaboration in Eastern Europe and indeed inside the USSR itself with the German occupi- ers; the Soviet Union’s open war against noncommu- nist local resistance movements in eastern and south- ern Europe; and of course the atrocities committed by Red Army “liberators” as they swept through eastern Germany. In the new postwar Communist mythology, all war crimes were committed by Fascists, all East- ern Europeans had opposed German occupation, all

had wished for and welcomed liberation by the Soviet Union. Remarkably, this nonsense was deployed even in East Germany, where it was used to suggest that Na- zism had been imposed by a capitalist, elitist clique upon the socialist workers of Germany. For obvious political reasons, then, there was to be no room in the Communist bloc for a discussion about the paradoxes and brutality of the liberation era. Liberation instead was depicted as the first act in a new era of freedom and renewal.

Not all Europeans shied away from discussing their own suffering. Postwar West Germany readily adopted an exculpatory identity of victimhood. The reasons are easy to divine. In the last stages of the war, the German people, who had mercilessly persecuted others, came to experience themselves the genuine horrors of war. The extensive bombing of Germany, the heavy fight- ing across the country, the Soviet onslaught in East Prussia and the uprooting of millions of eastern Ger- mans as well as Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe, all contributed by the end of the war to an atmosphere of chaos and suffering. But context is all, and Ger- mans in 1945 proved unwilling to accept the relation- ship between cause and effect. Instead, the people of western Germany who fell under U.S. or British occu- pation used their evident suffering as a shield against

further punishment. Germans also sensibly deployed their own anticommunism as a bridge to the Allies, knowing full well that this shared ideological fixation would serve to bind victor and vanquished. The results worked better than anyone could have predicted. Even before the war was officially over, Allied occupation in the western part of Germany had softened, soldiers were making friends with Germans, and the occupiers committed themselves to shelter, feed, and clothe the once-despised enemy. In the German case, the defeat opened the way to pity and self-pity, and laid the foun- dations for a paternalistic relationship between the United States and West Germany that has survived for half a century.

Nor did the war crimes trials, held with considerable fanfare across Europe soon after the conclusion of hos- tilities, help matters much. Despite the genuine and earnest efforts of military and civil authorities, post- war trials tended to serve the interests of the prosecu- tors, not the plaintiffs. As we have seen in the case of the Belsen trial, Jews who had survived Auschwitz or Belsen cared little about Josef Kramer’s fate; they felt their suffering could not be made good by the convic- tion and hanging of one man. Yet the British authorities used the Belsen trial as a stage on which to exhibit Brit- ish “fair play” and the rule of law: the trial was about

their own eagerness to denounce Nazism, establish the moral righteousness of the war, and then put the war away. The same dynamic defined the postwar purge tri- als in France and Italy. There, the new postwar demo- cratic states put on display a small number of leading malefactors, condemned them in most cases to light punishment for injuring the interests of the state, and quickly shut down the proceedings. The brief outbursts of anger in 1944 and 1945 that had led to drumhead jus- tice and considerable bloodletting in France and Italy were suppressed. In the end, only a very few Fascist or Vichy leaders were punished; the rest were encouraged to slip quietly into obscurity.

In Germany, war crimes trials briefly played a visible and important role in illuminating and condemning the actions of the Third Reich. Opened in November 1945 and presided over by the four major Allied pow- ers—the United States, Britain, the USSR, and France— the International Military Tribunal held in Nuremberg charged twenty-two defendants with a variety of hate- ful acts, from criminal conspiracy to crimes against humanity. The Allied prosecutors presented millions of pages of detailed evidence and eyewitness testimony to make their case that the German leaders bore per- sonal responsibility for atrocious crimes, including the genocide of the Jews. Eleven of the accused, including

Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, were condemned to a death they richly deserved. Twelve additional trials, focusing on other institutions inside the Third Reich, from industry to banking, the courts, the foreign min- istry, and the military, all unearthed mountains of doc- umentation and left no doubt about the facts of Ger- many’s culpability for war crimes. Finally, further trials of camp commanders and guards, like the one held at Belsen, led to further convictions. These proceedings, which continued until 1949, burnished the reputation of the occupiers and made them feel that they had de- livered a stern verdict on Nazism. Yet Nuremberg and the associated trials also closed the books on the war. The defendants in these trials were saddled with the crimes of all Nazis, all Fascists, even all the collabora- tionists and opportunists across Europe who had in some way aided and abetted the German wartime im- perium. The number of those punished was tiny: in the end, only 5,025 persons were convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity by the three Western occu- pying powers. The trials, in rendering verdicts on this handful of big fish, released millions of small fry from culpability, who swam away on the warm currents of anonymity and forgetting.
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Instead of guilt, German people preferred to stress their own suffering and the troubled fate they now faced—their nation shattered, occupied, and divided, their people hungry and worn. The new Federal Re- public of Germany embraced the task of reconstruc- tion with a certain manic zeal, as if to clean up the wartime rubble might also lead to a rapid healing of the diseased German soul. The Americans lent a hand, scaling back the once-bold denazification efforts and economic dismantling of Germany in favor of restora- tion and forgiveness. By the start of 1946, American policy openly embraced the task of restoring to “liber- ated” western Germany its freedom and its sovereignty once some semblance of democratic rule could be es- tablished. In this environment of reconciliation and the shared geopolitical aim of German recovery, there was no room to discuss the tragedies of the war itself, and certainly no desire to return to the bloodied fields of Normandy, or the shattered ravines of the Ardennes, or the hunger-ravaged streets of Amsterdam and the Hague, or the blackened fields of East Prussia, and ask for a detailed accounting of why liberation had taken so many civilian lives and left such a devastating legacy of destruction. The war years were allowed to slip away into the past, willfully forgotten.