Crimes and Mercies (31 page)

As it was in the beginning in 1945, so it was at the end in 1990, our governments and their clients dealt away rights that normally we expect them to uphold. Hardly anyone in the Western democracies even noticed what was being done. Here was German guilt sealing off discussion of the issues of the expellees and other Allied crimes. The only government that could protect their rights signed them away.

There is an astonishing contrast right now between Russia and the West. We condemned them for many decades precisely because they denied democracy and suppressed discussion. Now, they have reduced suppression, opened their archives, and published the truth about their crimes. They have even admitted that some of their allegations of German crimes were never true. Public discourse is better informed on all those topics. And we say, ‘Good for you, democracy now has a chance with you.’ But in the West, the archives are managed in order to present a view of history acceptable to the established authority. Photographs and documents of Allied atrocities have ‘disappeared’ from archives, and this goes on to the present day. ‘In my thirty years as a scholar of American history,’ said one American professor, ‘I have never known the archives to appear to be so much of a political agency of the executive branch as it is now. One used to think of the Archivist of the United States as a professional scholar. Now he has become someone who fills a political bill.’
⁹
Many people who have cast doubt on German crimes have been fired from
their jobs, vilified, deported, jailed or censored, while anyone who denies our post-war crimes against the Germans is published and praised by press, academe, army and government.

Freedom is diminished when discussion is suppressed, dissidents are jailed, when in fact history is genetically altered, as Stalin showed every time he hid public documents or altered history in the books. If we are to regain the freedoms that we fought for in the war, the official sanctioning against authors must stop, the arrogant abuse of public trust in the archives must end, and full disclosure prevail.

Democracy is generally believed to be the best government because it expresses the public opinion that is normally free, wise and kind. If this were not so, who would defend democracy? If the general belief were that public opinion were normally slavish, stupid and cruel, no one would think democracy was worth defending. And without that faith, democracy dies. Hitler’s brilliant propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels said of the German people, ‘You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.’ Contemptuous of their forgetfulness, he said anything he liked because he believed they were always unaware of what he had said before.
¹⁰
We shudder to think that Goebbels’ observation might be even slightly true in the Western democracies; on the other hand, our pleasing assumption about democratic public opinion has never been rigorously tested.

Public opinion can be discerned but dimly, in primitive jousts such as elections, in referendums or in the tiny samplings passing grandly as public opinion polls. None of these has ever tested us for our freedom, wisdom or kindness. The goodness of public opinion is by and large an article of faith.

But it is a faith that was justified in 1946. Herbert Hoover made many public appeals by radio to the decency, compassion and common sense of the American and Canadian people and was never disappointed. Can anyone in his right mind imagine Henry Morgenthau going on radio with a forthright appeal to the viciousness, vengefulness and hatred of the American people?

To do their good deeds in the post-war period, men like Marshall and Hoover, Gollancz and Mackenzie King walked in the open, but their opposites like Morgenthau, Buisson and Eisenhower had to operate under camouflage. Surely this can only be because the widely-based institutions of Western democracy – parliament, literate education, a free press, the rule of law – foster the normal human sympathies that make mass crimes abhorrent. This is why freedom of discussion in democracy is so important; it is a constant corrective to the cruel tendencies in people. Without freedom of discussion, democracy collapses. The discussion of Allied war crimes has been circumscribed by lies, propaganda and suppression for fifty years. So the crimes go on.

On no subject is the Western cover-up more profound and tragic than the refusal of Western public opinion-makers to incorporate the fate of the German expellees into the history of the Second World War and its consequences. This of course effectively denies redress not just to the German state, but especially to the millions of robbed and maimed individuals who are still alive. The cover-up is definitely part of that series of misdeeds which Adenauer condemned roundly in 1949, and which continue to haunt ‘the uneasy conscience of the West’. Speaking to the Swiss Parliament in Bern, Switzerland, in March 1949, Adenauer compared the expulsions to the misdeeds of the Nazis, and concluded, ‘The expulsions resulted from the Potsdam Agreement of 2 August 1945. I am convinced that one day world history will pronounce a very harsh verdict on this document.’
¹¹

For a long time it puzzled me that we scarcely honour those who implemented our noblest ideals after the Second World War. As nations, we showed wonderful generosity and great skill. But memory of this has almost disappeared, except in the minds of a few survivors, and even they do not usually remember much.

Mackenzie King’s kindly assistant Norman Robertson was right about the brief life of gratitude: I interviewed two Polish generals in Moscow in 1993, and asked them what they remembered about
Hoover. They said he was a great policeman – they meant J. Edgar Hoover, of the FBI. Yet their lives had been saved by Hoover food when they were young in 1946, and probably their fathers’ lives before them, during Hoover’s relief campaigns in 1919–21.

The post-war era was not the only time that the Western democracies have aided the unfortunate in far parts of the world.

While doing the research for this book, I visited a friend who lived near a village called Durham, in Ontario, where I encountered one of those humble books that are sold even in hardware stores because they are local history by a local author. This was a history of Durham County. I normally buy such books, because there is usually something interesting in them, so I took it back to the farmhouse where we were staying, intending to present it to my hostess, and then to skim through it. In the book, I read of the sermon given by a local Protestant minister in about 1890, appealing for funds to help the starving people of a province in British India.

Durham at that time was many days by sea from London, plus several days by train via Toronto. India was almost beyond imagining to the pioneer farmers of Durham. We can be sure that not one of them had the least intention of going there. Nobody in Durham knew any Indians. Why then did anyone appeal to them? In this remote part of the Empire there were human beings giving help to distant strangers to whom they had no connection except human sympathy. Sympathy, and a common bond of Empire. They gave – and all of this has disappeared from history. Except in Durham.

Similarly, the French today remember the race crimes of the Vichy government, and pay no attention to the heroic sacrifices of millions of French people as they saved scores of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi death camps.
¹⁵

Why do we not remember the heroes of love as well as the heroes of hate? Partly because we love heroes, and heroics itself has come to mean bravery in battle. Still, it is puzzling that those who crowned world-wide defeat of the Axis with the world-wide victory of compassion, who validated our war by carrying out our
wartime aims, are not honoured like wartime heroes. Hoover estimated that the food relief campaign after the war saved 800,000,000 lives. Even if he over-estimated by ten times – impossible for this extremely intelligent and informed man – that is many millions more lives saved from immediate death than were lost to untimely death. In that post-war campaign, peoples who had been divided were re-united, ideals for which millions died in war were finally implemented, making the victory not just a triumph of arms but the coronation of civilization. Without the work of millions of people after the war, the victory itself would have been turned into a gross and tragic failure. Yet as we can see by a computer check in one of the world’s great libraries
*
roughly 850 books about Hitler have been published in English, but only 80 about Hoover. Killer Hitler outsells saviour Hoover ten to one in the West.

I have thought about this for years, trying to find the answer to this question, and it has always evaded me. I thought I was going to have to finish this book without even suggesting an answer. The reason I could not understand was simple: I was a young and therefore idealistic person during the Second World War. I saw my brothers and sister and father go off to fight the Hun for great reasons. They were defending democracy, Canada, the British Empire, self-determination and fair treatment for all peoples. We were the just of the world, arrayed in a death struggle against the cruel barbarian.

For many years, until I began to study the post-war period, I really believed that these were the reasons we fought Hitler. Therefore I took it for granted that we were forgetting our most important ideals when we neglected the heroes who had enacted them. Now at last I think I understand: the reason for our forgetfulness is not that we forget the ideals that we value. The ideals that we remember are those we value. But they are not the ideals I thought – democracy, self-determination for all peoples, and so on. No, the ones we remember are the ones we
do
believe in – victory, strong leadership, courage, hard work in the common
cause, self-sacrifice for the common good, and so on. What we remember is what we value. The rest is a noble sham.

But not quite.

After all, if we had not believed the noble ideals, we would not have fed the starving after the Second World War, would not have helped Europe. We do believe in them, but not much. Our leaders tell us we believe in these things to mask in lovely high-mindedness our pursuit of our normal self-interest. Where there is no evidence demonstrating our high-mindedness, we may make it look better by contrasting it with the crimes of others.

The world does not lack for dreadful criminals – the Japanese under the Empire, the Soviets, the Iraqis. And of course the Germans.

And we accept all this with shy eyes, because our leaders are encouraging us in the happiest of human pursuits, creating a good opinion of ourselves.

We have still to learn that our ideals will inspire no one if they do not inspire us. Nobody pays any attention to a teacher who has not learned his own lesson.

The struggle between crimes and mercies is not won, or lost, or over. As Solzhenitsyn said of the Russian guards round the Gulag – inside each one of us sits the soldier with his eye on the good woman, and his finger on the trigger.

*
At Canossa in 1077, King Henry IV knelt in the snow for three days as he begged Pope Gregory to release him from excommunication. The phrase was first used by Paul Boytinck in conversation with the author in 1995.

*
The Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

A
PPENDICES

1: T
HE
D
EATH
R
ATE AND THE
T
OTALS

NOTE:
The double percentage point sign at the end of a number, e.g. 23.5%%, indicates per thousand.

We can establish the death rate used by Robert Murphy for 1946 in Germany starting with several well-known facts: that emigration was forbidden at the time, and that immigration was compelled, in the form of expellees and prisoners arriving. But Murphy anticipated that the population of Germany would decline by two million despite immigration and births. His prediction means that in a period of two to four years, German deaths would outnumber births by two million.

As we have seen, the official death rates for Germany have been falsified, but Murphy’s statistics make it easy to determine the true rate. We begin with the birth rate since this rate does not directly reveal statistics that, like deaths, are dangerous in themselves, so we can be fairly sure that it was reported reliably. The rate for west Germany was 16.1%% in 1946, and for east Germany it was 10.4%%.
¹
Pro-rating for population size, we see that the overall German average was therefore 14.47%%. Thus there were born each year in Germany around 940,000 people. For Murphy’s prediction to have come true in one year, the
deaths would have had to have been 2,000,000 plus 940,000 equals 2,940,000, producing a rate of 45%%. For two years, the rate would have had to have been 29.8%%, for three years 24%%, for four years 22%%, and so on. It is clear that no one participating in the 1947 CFM meetings thought that it would take more than four years to bring back all the expellees and prisoners, so we will stop the calculations there.

It is clear that the death rate when Murphy was writing was between 22%% and 45%%. We have found no evidence anywhere that a death rate as high as 45%% had ever prevailed for long in a major part of Germany, except for Königsberg for a few months in 1945–46. The highest rate we have found was the city of Berlin at around 41%%. Furthermore, to have used such a high rate, Murphy must have thought that all the expellees and prisoners would be home in one year, i.e. by 1948, which was clearly not the case, if only because the French and Russians, the major holders of POWs in 1947, said they had no intention of returning all their prisoners that year. Since that high rate of 45%% is nearly impossible, we should give great weight to the fact that the Soviets, British and French all said that they would return their prisoners by 1949. And nearly all were returned.

We should also give great weight to the fact that the rate of inflow of expellees when Murphy was writing in 1947 meant that nearly all of them would be in Germany by 1950. And the Allies expected the situation in Germany to stabilize sufficiently by 1950 so that a further small flow of expellees would have no material effect on the economy. And this is what happened.