Iron Curtain (6 page)

Above all, Eastern Europe is where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they began the war as allies, Hitler had always wanted to fight a war of
destruction against the USSR, and after Hitler’s invasion Stalin promised the same. The battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were therefore fiercer and bloodier in the east than those that took place further west. German soldiers truly feared the Bolshevik “hordes,” about whom they had heard many terrible stories, and toward the end of the war they fought them with particular desperation. Their scorn for civilians was especially profound, respect for local culture and infrastructure nonexistent. A German general defied Hitler’s orders and left Paris standing out of sentimental respect for the city, but other German generals burned Warsaw to the ground and destroyed much of Budapest without thinking about it. Western air forces were not especially concerned about the ancient architecture of this region either: Allied bombers contributed to the toll of death and destruction too, conducting aerial bombardment not only
of Berlin and
Dresden but also of
Danzig and Königsberg, Gdańsk and Kalinińgrad—among many other places.

As the eastern front moved into Germany itself, fighting only intensified. The Red Army focused on its drive to Berlin with something approaching obsession. From early on in the war,
Soviet soldiers bade farewell to one another with the cry, “See you in Berlin.” Stalin was desperate to reach the city before the other Allies got there. His commanders understood this, and so did their American counterparts. General
Eisenhower, knowing full well that the Germans would fight to the death in Berlin, wanted to save American lives and decided to let Stalin take the city. Churchill argued against this policy: “If they [the Russians] … take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?”
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But the American general’s caution won out, and the Americans and British advanced slowly to the east—
General George C. Marshall having once declared he would be “loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes,” and
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke arguing that “the advance into the country really had to coincide to a certain extent with what our final boundaries would be.”
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Meanwhile, the Red Army charged directly toward the German capital, leaving a trail of
destruction in its wake.

When the numbers are added up, the result is stark. In Britain, the war took the lives of 360,000 people, and in
France, 590,000. These are horrific casualties, but they still come to less than 1.5 percent of those countries’ populations. By contrast, the
Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive. Even in countries where the fighting was less bloody, the proportion of deaths was still higher than in the west. Yugoslavia lost 1.5 million people, or 10 percent of the population. Some 6.2 percent of Hungarians and 3.7 percent of the prewar Czech population died too.
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In Germany itself, casualties came to between 6 million and 9 million people—depending upon whom one considers to be “German,” given all of the border changes—or up to 10 percent of the population.
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It would have been difficult, in Eastern Europe in 1945, to find a single family that had not suffered a serious loss.

As the dust settled, it also became clear that even those who were not dead were often living somewhere else. In 1945, the demographics, population distribution, and ethnic composition of many countries in the region were actually very different from what they had been in 1938. To a degree still not well understood in the West, the Nazi
occupation of Eastern Europe had brought about major population shifts, following waves of deportation and resettlement. German “colonists” had been moved into occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, with the deliberate goal of changing the ethnic composition of particular regions, while natives were expelled or murdered. Poles and Jews were evicted from their homes in the better districts of Łódź to make way for German administrators as early as December 1939. In subsequent years some 200,000 Poles were sent out of the city to become forced laborers in Germany, while the Jews were herded into the Łódź Ghetto, where most died.
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The German occupation regime installed Germans in their place, including ethnic Germans from the
Baltic States and Romania, some of whom believed they were receiving abandoned or neglected property.
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Many of these changes would be reversed or revenged in the postwar period. The years 1945, 1946, and 1947 were years of refugees: Germans moved west, Poles and Czechs returned east from forced labor and
concentration camps in Germany, deportees came back from the Soviet Union, soldiers of all kinds returned from other theaters, escapees came back from British or French or Moroccan exile. Some of these refugees returned home but, upon discovering that home was no longer what it had been, struck out for new territories.
Jan Gross reckons that between 1939 and 1943 some 30 million Europeans were dispersed, transplanted, or deported. Between 1943 and 1948, a further 20 million were moved as well.
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Krystyna Kersten notes that between 1939 and 1950 one Pole out of every four changed his place of residence.
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The vast majority of these people arrived home with nothing. Immediately, they were forced to seek help from others—from churches, charities, or the state—in whatever form it took. Whole families, self-sufficient before the war, found themselves queuing in government offices, trying to be assigned a house or apartment. Men who had once had independent jobs and salaries were begging for ration cards, hoping to get a job in a state bureaucracy. The mentality of a refugee, forcibly expelled from his home,
is not that of an emigrant who leaves to seek his fortune: his very circumstances fostered dependency and a sense of helplessness he might never have known before.

To make matters worse, the extraordinary physical
destruction in Eastern Europe was also matched by extraordinary economic destruction, and on an equally incomprehensible scale. Not every Eastern European nation was wealthy before the war, but neither was the region as far behind the western half of the continent in 1939 as it was by 1945. Though some groups had profited during the war from the demand for guns and tanks—several economic historians have commented on the expansion of the industrial working class in those years, especially in
Bohemia and
Moravia—the
second half of the war was a catastrophe for almost everybody.
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In 1945 and 1946, Hungary’s gross national product was only half of what it had been in 1939. According to one calculation, the final months of the war had destroyed about 40 percent of the country’s economic infrastructure.
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Budapest, the capital, suffered damage to three-quarters of its buildings, of which 4 percent were totally destroyed and 22 percent uninhabitable. The population was reduced by a third.
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The Germans took much of the country’s railway rolling stock with them when they left the country; the Soviet army, in the guise of
reparations, would take much of the rest.
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In Poland, a figure close to 40 percent is also used as a general estimate for damage, but certain areas were even more thoroughly devastated. The country’s transportation infrastructure was especially hard-hit: more than half of the country’s bridges were gone, along with ports, shipping facilities, and two-fifths of the railways. Most major Polish cities were heavily damaged, meaning that they had lost apartments and houses, ancient architectural monuments, works of art, universities, and schools. In the city center of Warsaw, some 90 percent of the buildings were partly or completely destroyed, having been systematically blown up by the retreating Germans.
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Germany’s cities were also badly destroyed, thanks both to the Allied aerial bombardment, which resulted in huge firestorms, and to Hitler’s insistence that his soldiers fight until the very end, street by street. Even in Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria, and Romania, where the devastation was not so broad and there had been no aerial bombing, the damage was still deep. Romania lost
its oil fields, for example, which had contributed one-third of the national income before 1938.
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The war had also altered the region’s economies in other ways that were harder to quantify. In two justly celebrated essays on the social consequences of the war, Jan Gross and
Bradley Abrams point out that in much of the region—certainly in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, as well as Germany itself—the expropriation of private property on a large scale actually began
during
the war, under Nazi and fascist regimes, and not afterward under communism. Mass confiscation of Jewish property and businesses in Central Europe, either by the state or by the German occupiers, was followed by a broader Germanization during the later years of occupation. Sometimes this happened by stealth: in the Czech lands, German banks controlled Czech banks and thus could often “dictate whether or not a Czech bank or firm was solvent or not, and, in cases of insolvency, rescue operations were put in hand by German banks or firms which thereby gained control.”
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Sometimes control was imposed outright. In Poland, it often happened that German managers and directors were simply put in charge of factories and businesses that technically still belonged to Poles.

The occupation had also reoriented regional economics. Exports to Germany doubled and tripled between 1939 and 1945, as did German investment in local industry. Since the early 1930s, German economists had argued for the establishment of economic colonies in Eastern Europe; during the occupation German businesses began to create them, often by appropriating Jewish, or even non-Jewish, factories and businesses.
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The region became an autonomous, closed market, which had never been the case in the past.
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This meant that when Germany collapsed, the region’s international trade links collapsed as well—a circumstance that eventually helped make it easier for the Soviet Union to take Germany’s place.

For similar reasons, the collapse of Germany also created an ownership crisis. At the end of the war, German entrepreneurs, managers, and investors fled or were killed. Many factories were simply abandoned, left ownerless. Sometimes they were taken over by workers’ councils. Sometimes local authorities took control. Most of these abandoned properties were eventually nationalized—if they had not already been packed up and moved, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Soviet Union, which considered all “German” property legitimate war reparations—with surprisingly little opposition.
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By 1945, the
idea that the ruling authorities could simply confiscate private property without providing any compensation whatsoever was an established principle in Eastern Europe. When larger-scale nationalization began, nobody would be remotely surprised.

Of all the different kinds of damage wrought by the
Second World War, the hardest to quantify is the psychological and emotional damage. The brutality of the
First World War created a generation of fascist leaders, idealistic intellectuals, and expressionist artists who twisted the human form into inhuman shapes and colors in an attempt to convey their disorientation. But because it involved occupation, deportation, and the mass displacement of civilian populations as well as fighting, the Second World War entered far more deeply into everyday life. Constant, daily violence shaped the human psyche in countless ways, not all of which are easy to articulate.

This, too, was different from what happened in the West, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The Polish poet
Czesław Miłosz, attempting to explain the mental differences between postwar Europe and postwar America, wrote of how war shatters a man’s sense of the natural order of things: “Once, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions.”

During the occupation, respectable citizens ceased to regard banditry as a crime, Miłosz wrote, at least if it was in the service of the underground. Young boys, from respectable, law-abiding, middle-class families, became hardened criminals: “The killing of a man presents no great moral problem to them.” During the occupation, it became normal to change one’s name and profession, to travel on false papers, to memorize a fabricated biography, to watch all of one’s money lose its value overnight, to see people rounded up in the street like cattle.
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Taboos about property broke down and theft became routine, even patriotic. One stole to keep one’s partisan band alive, or to feed the resistance, or to feed one’s children. One watched with resentment as others stole—the Nazis, the criminals, the partisans. As the war drew to an end, the epidemic of theft grew even worse. In Sándor Márai’s novel
Portraits of a Marriage
, one of the characters marvels at the entrepreneurship of the thieves who combed the
ruins of bombed buildings: “They thought there was time enough, if they hurried, to save whatever hadn’t already been stolen by the Nazis, our local fascists, the Russians, or such Communists as had managed to make their way home from abroad. They felt it their patriotic duty to lay their hands on anything still possible to lay hands on, and so they set about their work of ‘salvaging.’ ”
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In Poland, as
Marcin Zaremba has written, the interval between the retreat of the Nazi occupiers and the arrival of the Red Army was marked by waves of plunder in Lublin,
Radom, Kraków, and Rzeszów, as Poles broke into empty German homes and shops, as one explained, “not even to find something, or to get something, but just to rob the Germans themselves, to take German property after they had taken everything from us.”
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