Europe: A History (217 page)

The Nuremberg Trials were the source both of huge quantities of valid historical information and of manifest historical distortions. Bolstered by the public attitudes which they encouraged in the West, and by the Soviet censorship, which used the findings as gospel, they became the bastion of a particular ‘Allied Scheme of History’ that would prevail for fifty years (see Introduction). Not until Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, and
Glasnost’
in the 1980s, did public opinion begin to realize that the Nuremberg prosecutors were masters no less of concealment than of unmasking. Andrei Vyshinsky demonstrated the fact when, in a rare moment of honesty, he proposed a toast at a Nuremberg reception: ‘Death to the Defendants!’.
¹³⁷
As usual, his Western partners did not understand Russian. They drank the toast without hesitation, then asked what it meant afterwards.

Map 28.
Europe Divided, 1949–89

*
Fred Carno was the owner of a popular circus company of the time.

DIVISA ET INDIVISA

Europe Divided and Undivided, 1945–1991

T
HERE
is a strong sense of futility about Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. The vast sacrifices of the Second World War did not generate security: the Continent was soon divided into rival political and military blocs whose energies were squandered for nearly fifty years. Immense resources were poured into unproductive tasks, especially in the East; there were few countries who could maintain a neutral stance; and the construction of European unity was repeatedly postponed.

The mood of futility was well caught in the post-war circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophers of existentialism. It faded soon enough in most Western countries, but surfaced again with the peace movement and the anti-nuclear protesters of later decades. In Eastern Europe it belied the optimism of official propaganda, and remained a dominant note in people’s inner lives until the ‘Refolution’ (revolution by reform) of 1989–91.

Fortunately, for those who wished to heal the wounds, the division of Europe helped to stimulate the strong European movement which had been planted before the war, and which now grew up in the West. First as a moral campaign for reforming international relations, and later in the realm of economic cooperation, it fostered a new sense of community. In the Council of Europe (from 1949) and in the EEC and its associated bodies (from 1956), it founded a complex of institutions, which were designed to expand as more and more European countries were welcomed into the fold. Even so, the alternative prospect of an all-European communist camp was not effaced for many decades.

In the event, the West proved itself to be immeasurably more dynamic than the East. With the assistance of the USA, Western Europe rapidly emerged from the post-war ruins and set a course for unrivalled prosperity. Inspired by the example of West Germany’s
Wirtschaftswunder
, the original members of the European Economic Community had little difficulty in publicizing the benefits of their cause. Membership doubled from six in 1956 to twelve in 1983, with many applications pending. Whilst the Kremlin coped ever more ineptly with its
muscle-bound empire, the rapid process of decolonization in Asia and Africa liberated West Europe’s imperial powers for a new future in an integrated Europe. Under the leadership of NATO, West Europe’s defences held firm against a Soviet threat that grew ever less credible. By the late 1980s the European movement seemed to be moving towards maturity at the very time that Soviet communism was climbing onto its death-bed.

Despite the divisions, however, the concept of Europe was no less alive in the East than in the West. Soviet tyranny was very effective in promoting the European ideal by default. Citizens of the former Soviet bloc were mightily impressed by Western Europe’s food mountains; but there is every reason to believe that their aspirations to rejoin ‘Europe’ had a spiritual as well as a material dimension. ‘Europe has two lungs,’ declared a Slavonic Pope; ‘it will never breathe easily until it uses both of them.’
¹

Europe’s wasted years fall neatly into three periods. They began in the immediate post-war era (1945–8), when Allied unity was lost. They continued through four decades of the Cold War (1948–89); and they drew to a close with the astonishing reign in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–91). Overall, they may be said to have begun on VE Day, 9 May 1945, and to have ended with the final disband-ment of the Soviet Union in December 1991. By that time, almost all of Europe’s peoples were free to determine their own destiny.

The End of the Grand Alliance, 1945–1948

The division of Europe was implicit in the state of affairs at war’s end. As Stalin correctly predicted, the social and political systems of East and West were destined to follow the positions of the occupying armies. Yet the division of Europe did not crystallize immediately. At first the victorious Allies were preoccupied with the immediate problems of refugees, resettlement, and reparations; and they were obliged to co-operate in the joint administration of Germany and Austria. Stalin acted cautiously, following different policies in different capitals. The Americans, too, were very slow to reveal their intentions.

Unlike 1918, there were no urgent demands for a general Peace Conference. There was no German government with whom a new Treaty might be signed; and Stalin in particular had no wish to renegotiate the massive gains which he had already secured. In consequence, the only Peace Conference to be held was the one which met at Paris in July-October 1946 to settle the affairs of five lesser defeated states—Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Finland. Proceedings were fixed by the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers, who virtually dictated the terms of the settlement. All the defeated states were obliged to cede territory. Italy lost the whole of her African empire, but not South Tyrol. All had to pay enormous indemnities, totalling $1,250 million, mainly to the USSR and to Yugoslavia. In the teeth of Soviet opposition, the Conference insisted on
establishing the Danube as an international waterway, and Trieste as a free port under the United Nations.

Trieste, the sole European territory to be openly disputed after the Second World War, remained in a high state of tension for seven years. Zone A, including the port and city, was secured by British troops; Zone B, to the east, was held by the Yugoslavs. This partition was finally accepted by Italo-Yugoslav agreement in October 1954. (See Appendix III, p. 1313.)

Post-war Europe was faced with tidal waves of refugees. Both the Nazis and the Soviets had resorted to mass deportations and slave labour. Many survivors were now set free. There were 9 million such displaced persons (DPs) in Germany alone. They lived in primitive, overcrowded camps, often in barracks recently vacated by prisoners of war. The largest numbers came from countries recently occupied by the Red Army, to which, fearing retribution, they steadfastly refused to return. They were administered by UNRRA (the UN Refugee Relief Administration) and slowly dispersed, first as European Voluntary Workers to various industrial centres in Western Europe and later by emigration schemes to Canada, USA, Australia, and South America. The last emigrants did not leave until 1951–2.

Military personnel were also stranded in huge numbers. The Western Powers had difficulty making provision even for units that had fought on the Allied side. General Anders’s Polish army, for example, which had fought its way into northern Italy, contained several hundred thousands of men, and dependants, whose homes had been seized by the USSR. In 1946 they had all to be brought to Britain, where they were added to the Polish Resettlement Corps (PKRP) for retraining and assimilation.
²
Ironically enough, they were joined in Britain by ex-members of the Waffen SS
Galizien
, who had also found their way to Italy and who, as citizens of pre-war Poland, were not handed over to the mercies of the Soviet authorities. Most ex-Wehrmacht personnel were not so lucky. German prisoners of war captured by the Soviets were transported to the Gulag, where they shared the fate of ex-Soviet prisoners of war from Germany. (The remnants were repatriated in 1956.)

The Western Allies were aware of communist barbarities towards people returning from abroad. But they generally held to a policy of forcible expulsion for all persons, both civilian and military, whose return was demanded by Stalin. The first transports of ex-slave labourers captured by the British Army in Normandy sailed in secret from Liverpool to Murmansk in October 1944. Serious resistance was provoked in Austria in the Spring of 1945 when many Soviet citizens chose mass suicide before repatriation. Hundreds of thousands, notably the Cossack Brigade and large numbers of Croats, were handed over to almost certain death before the practice was stopped.
³
[
KEELHAUL
] Not that the Anglo-Americans could necessarily boast about the treatment of POWs in their own charge. One study of American policy in 1945–6 has claimed that German prisoners held in western Europe were administratively reclassified in order to bypass the Geneva Convention, and that a significant proportion may have died from neglect.
⁴

The population exchanges envisaged at Potsdam took effect from the autumn of 1945. At least 9 million German expellees were driven from their homes in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Defenceless refugees became the prey of local revenge. The Communist security services used former Nazi camps as collection centres. Maltreatment was routine. The death toll was counted in tens of thousands. Miserably overcrowded transports were sent straight through to the British and American zones of Germany. The resultant
Vertriebene verbände
or provincial ‘associations of expellees’ were to become a potent anti-communist force in post-war politics. Their successful absorption was the first of West Germany’s many miracles.
⁵

Compensatory population movements took place further East. The empty city of Königsberg, renamed Kaliningrad, was repopulated by the Soviet military as an enclave of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Some 2–3 million Poles were allowed to migrate westwards from provinces annexed by the USSR. The empty city of Breslau, for example, renamed Wroclaw, was largely taken over by Poles driven out of the city of Lwów, who arrived complete with their university, their mayor and corporation, and their national museum. Both in Poland and in Czechoslovakia, the former German territories provided a ready source of housing and employment for the poorest internal migrants.