Europe: A History (218 page)

Given the fiasco after the First World War, the Western Powers decided not to press Germany for punitive reparations. The Soviets, in contrast, set out to extract the maximum. The official Soviet demand stood at $20 billion. But they did not wait for inter-Allied negotiations to fail: from the earliest days of occupation, Soviet reparation squads set about dismantling and removing industrial plant, railway lines, power stations, livestock, and rolling stock. The Soviet looters, private and collective, drew no distinction between Germany and lands designated for administration by Poland or Czechoslovakia.

Across Europe, people wanted to settle accounts with wartime collaborators. In some cases, it was undertaken by legal process. Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), and Father Tiso were among those sentenced and executed. The aged Marshal Pétain, though sentenced to death, lived out his remaining years on the Ile d’Yeu. Proceedings were most thorough in the Netherlands, where some 200,000 suspected collaborators were detained, and in Belgium, where, of 634,000 detained, 57,000 were sentenced. This compares with 9,000 trials and 35 death sentences in Austria. Often enough, though, the populace took matters into their own hands. In Italy, thousands of fascists were simply lynched or shot by partisans. In France, in a wild wave of retribution, at leaast 10,000 were killed, often on the flimsiest of accusations. In West Germany, once the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals were over (see pp. 1048–54), denazification proceeded slowly; criminal trials began in the late 1950s. Sporadic trials of SS officers, employers of slave labour, and concentration camp personnel continued through the 1960s. But most of the big fish had swum off: 9 million ex-Nazis were too many to deal with.

In Eastern Europe, the Communists used the purge of collaborators as a pretext
for eliminating their own opponents. A few prominent Nazis and collaborators were made an example of: Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, was tried and hanged in Poland in 1946. On the other hand, many of the rank and file were able to survive if they agreed to change sides. Boleslaw Piasecki, head of the Polish fascist Falanga, for example, emerged from a Soviet jail in 1945 as head of the communist-sponsored pseudo-Catholic organization PAX. Meanwhile the vast majority of East European politicals who were consigned in droves to the Soviet Gulag or to other communist prisons under the label of ‘fascists’ or ‘collaborators’ were nothing of the sort. It was not uncommon for Nazi war criminals to share their cells with the flower of the anti-Nazi resistance.
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Nazi concentration camps, such as Buchenwald, were reopened by the KGB in order to repress a new generation of inmates.

Somehow, amidst the chaos, the ex-Reich had to be administered. Austria was immediately hived off. Germany, disarmed, diminished, and demilitarized, was divided into five parts—four occupation zones, plus Berlin, which was also split into four sectors (see Map 27, p. 1049). Since it was agreed at Potsdam that there should be no central German government, a clutch of ministries required to restart economic life had to be organized under the direct supervision of the Inter-Allied Control Commission (ICC). All aspects of local administration were subordinated to committees chaired by British, American, French, or Soviet officers. For the first two winters priority had to be given to mere survival. Germany’s cities had been reduced to rubble; roads, railways, and bridges had to be rebuilt. Fifty million people, one-fifth of them refugees, had somehow to be fed and housed.

German politics, however, did revive, in the first instance in the Soviet zone. A communist initiative group headed by Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) arrived from Moscow almost before the fighting had stopped. When local elections in December 1945 suggested that the socialists of the Soviet zone held an advantage, the communists openly assaulted them, arresting their leaders and withholding ration cards. The results of the only free election in the Soviet zone were ignored; a forced merger was pushed through between communists and socialists. Already in April 1946 the resultant Socialist Unity Party (SED) was under Ulbricht poised for the creation of a one-party state. In these circumstances, the three nascent all-German parties, which began to operate in 1945 under Allied proposals for Germany’s ‘democratic transformation’—the SPD of Dr Kurt Schumacher, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Dr Konrad Adenauer, and the Free Democratic Union—were only able to function freely in the three Western zones.

Communist machinations were particularly blatant in Poland. Ever since 1943 the Western powers had closed their eyes to the crucifixion of their Polish ally [
KATYŃ
]; and at Yalta they had handed Poland to Stalin on a plate. The results were disastrous. In the wake of the Moscow Trial of June 1945 (see p. 1050–1), members of the wartime Resistance were arrested
en masse
; non-communist parties were mercilessly harassed; a vicious civil war was fought with the remnants of the underground; and the ‘free, unfettered elections’ promised at Yalta were repeatedly postponed. The country was run by an NKVD officer, Boleslaw Bierut
(1892–1956), who was masquerading as a ‘non-party’ leader. The one representative of the London Poles to participate was powerless. The results of a dubious referendum held in June 1946 were drowned amidst news of a dastardly pogrom perpetrated with official connivance at Kielce. The elections, when finally held in January 1947, were so manifestly fraudulent that the US Ambassador in Warsaw promptly resigned in protest.
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Yet Stalin’s overall intentions were far from clear at this stage. If the conduct of the communists was bad in Poland and Yugoslavia—where Tito had crushed his opponents in a bloodbath of revenge—it was not so bad in Czechoslovakia, the West’s favourite son. Beneš and his Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk (1886–1948), were still at the head of affairs. The Czech communists had a popular following; and they seemed to be responsible partners in the ruling coalition. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe the political situation was confused. Republican constitutions were adopted in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania in 1946, and in Romania in 1947. But the disappearance of the last Balkan monarchies, who all had German connections, did not cause much grief. A general increase in communist influence, as in France and Italy, was taken as a natural reaction against the fascist era. There was no sign of a fixed Soviet blueprint.

Stalin’s caution is easily explained. The Soviet Union was still in surprisingly good odour with Western opinion, especially in the USA. It had suffered appalling devastation, and desperately needed an interval of respite. The Soviet Union had annexed 272,500 square miles of foreign territory, with an extra population of 25 millions, and needed time to purge and prepare them for the Soviet way of life. Most importantly, the Soviet Union did not yet possess the atomic bomb. On this score alone, any physical confrontation with the Americans would be premature. The most sensible approach was to wait and see whether the Americans would carry out their promise to withdraw their troops from Europe or not.

American counsels were long divided. There was a strong lobby in Congress which held that the Soviet threat was much exaggerated and that Europeans should be left to sort out Europe’s problems. The contrary view, held by President Truman, agreed with the closing words of Churchill’s Fulton speech: ‘our Russian friends… admire nothing so much as strength.’ For two years, therefore, US policy hung in the balance. The advocates of engagement had to fight every inch of the way. Their determination was gradually strengthened by the insulting nature of Soviet propaganda, by the subversive activities of Soviet sympathizers, by the obstructiveness of Soviet administrators in Germany, by the Soviets’ refusal to accept America’s economic proposals, and by British advice. They finally won the day after the strategic decision forced on President Truman by the crisis in Greece in the spring of 1947. In the background, American concern was heightened by news of communist advances in China.

The communist parties of Western Europe were greatly strengthened by the victory over fascism. They were particularly active in France, Belgium, and Italy, where their role in the Resistance was widely admired and where one-quarter of
the electorate supported them. After the fiasco of a failed communist coup in Brussels in November 1944, their strategy was to participate in parliamentary and governmental coalitions. But then in 1947 a wave of orchestrated strikes in Italy, and in the French mines, destroyed the reigning harmony. Stalin’s Western cohorts were seen to be damaging the progress of democracy and economic recovery. Relations between Western and Soviet administrators in Germany went from moderate to bad, and from bad to worse. There was no common language; Berlin remained split into mutually hostile sectors. In mid-1946 the Western Powers sought to realize the united German economic space as envisaged at Potsdam. The Soviets refused to participate. Thereon the three Western zones went their own way, assisted by a German Economic Council formed under Anglo-American auspices in June 1947.

Until 1947, both Persia and Greece had been managed by the British. But suddenly, pressured by other major crises in India, Egypt, and Palestine, the bankrupt British decided that they could no longer cope. In Persia, the parliament had decided to reject an arrangement which would have seen Soviet forces retire from the northern region in return for huge deliveries of oil. In face of possible Soviet retaliation, American advisers were brought to Teheran. A new source of Soviet-American confrontation was in the making. In Greece, the civil war was reopened in May 1946. Communist rebels pressed southwards from bases in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Britain’s costs for defending the royal government in Athens soared; London appealed to Washington for financial aid. Instead of preparing its withdrawal from Europe, the USA was being asked to shoulder the burden of resistance against communist expansion. A decisive shift in global power was about to occur.

President Truman’s response was unequivocal. In applying to Congress for $400 million economic aid for Greece and Turkey, he spelled out the principles of a firm new policy. ‘It must be the policy of the United States’, he declared, ‘to help free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.’ This Truman Doctrine of 12 March 1947 marked America’s voluntary acceptance of the leadership of the free world. It put an end to prolonged indecision, and ensured that American troops would remain in Europe for the duration. Truman’s stance towards communism came to be known as ‘containment’—a fresh version of the pre-war
cordon sanitaire
. It coincided closely with an analysis entitled ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, anonymously published in July 1947 by the experienced diplomat George Kennan. It called for ‘adroit and vigilant application of counterforce … corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy’. It was purely defensive, and far from the Third World War which some hotheads had advocated.
⁸

At this juncture the USA produced a generous economic scheme to complement its policy of increased political involvement in Europe. On 5 June 1947, at a Harvard Commencement speech, Truman’s Secretary of State, General George Marshall, unveiled plans for a European Recovery Program. ‘It is logical’, he declared, ‘that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the
return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.’ In contrast to the 1920s, the USA was offering to finance Europe’s recovery in the interests of the common good. The Marshall Plan ran for four years, from 1948 to the end of 1951. It dispensed a total of $12,500 million to 16 participating members. To manage the funds, it required the establishment of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which insisted that recipients increase production, expand trade, and make ‘counterpart contributions’ of their own. Although one-quarter of Marshall Aid was earmarked for Britain and one-fifth for France, it was made available to allies, neutrals, and ex-enemies alike. It has no peer in the history of enlightened self-interest.

The USSR condemned Marshall Aid as a capitalist ruse. Moscow refused to participate, and ordered the countries which it controlled to do likewise. As a result, the hardening political divide was reinforced by a marked economic divide. The 16 countries of Western Europe who benefited from Marshall Aid were able to forge ahead; the USSR and its dependants were cast into self-imposed isolation.

The European movement could trace its roots right back to the seventeenth century (see Introduction, p. 10; Chapter XI, pp. 949–51). But the ambitions of the national states had ruined every practical enterprise in that direction. Europeans had to drink the bitter dregs of defeat and humiliation before the dreams of the early idealists could be realized. They had to lose their empires, and their hopes of empire, before governments would give priority to living with their neighbours.

The moral dimensions of the post-war European movement are not always remembered. One strand was centred on the survivors of the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany, for whom international reconciliation assumed prime importance. For them, the Declaration of Guilt formulated by Pastor Martin Niemöller, at the Stuttgart Conference of the German Evangelical Church in October 1945, was an act of great moment. Another strand was centred in France on a number of radical Catholic organizations inspired by the doyen of pacifist protest, Marc Sangnier (1873–1950), whose Gratry Society looked back in direct line to the Abbé Lamennais. Sangnier had been fighting for 30 years for ‘un nouvel état d’âme international’, ‘a new international state of mind’. He was the guru of Robert Schuman, and exerted a strong influence on policy in the French zone of occupation in Germany. A European Union of Federalists held a founding conference for some 50 activist groups at Montreux in August 1947. Other, specifically Anglo-Saxon strands were to be found in the pre-war Oxford Group of Lionel Curtis, founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and in the actively anti-communist Movement for Moral Rearmament.