Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (14 page)

All of this had to be conducted in an atmosphere of resentment and hatred. Germans everywhere were detested for creating the conflict in the first place, but also for the way in which the Nazis had conducted the war. Other national hatreds had been ignited too, or in some cases merely revived, by the events of the previous six years: Greeks against Bulgarians, Serbs against Croats, Romanians against Magyars, Poles against Ukrainians. Fratricidal conflicts were also beginning to flare up within nations, based on differing social and political conceptions of how a new society in the wake of the war should look. This merely added to friction that already existed between neighbours who had kept a close eye on one another’s behaviour during the war. Throughout Europe collaborators and resisters still lived side by side in local communities. Perpetrators of atrocities melted into the population even as Hitler’s victims were returning from captivity. Communists and fascists were inextricably mixed in amongst populations with more moderate political views, as well as those who had lost all faith in politics altogether. There were countless towns and villages where perpetrators lived alongside those they had directly harmed.

The Allied presence in the midst of all this was often resented by locals, many of whom had different priorities from those of their military occupiers. In the aftermath of the fighting it seems gradually to have dawned on the Allies that they were sitting on a time-bomb. The one phrase that repeats itself in the reports and memos of the Allies in 1945 is that while the war might have been won, the peace could still be lost.

In December 1944, while on a visit to Greece, the US Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a brief memorandum to Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s special assistant, warning of the potential bloodbath that awaited Europe if it were not rehabilitated quickly. Liberated peoples, he wrote, ‘are the most combustible material in the world. They are fighting people. They are violent and restless. They have suffered unbearably.’ If the Allies did not strive to feed them, rehabilitate them and actively help to restore the social and moral structures of their countries, then all that would follow would be ‘frustration’, ‘agitation and unrest’ and, eventually, ‘the overthrow of governments’. This scenario was already unfolding in Yugoslavia and Greece. Acheson’s fear was that such scenes would multiply across the continent, bringing about Europe-wide civil war.
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Just a few weeks after the Allied victory, Pope Pius XII also warned how fragile the newly established peace was. In an address to the Sacred College of Cardinals he claimed that the war had created ‘mobs of dispossessed, disillusioned, disappointed and hopeless men’ who were willing ‘to swell the ranks of revolution and disorder in the pay of a tyranny no less despotic than those for whose overthrow men planned’. Although he did not name this despotic tyranny it was clear that he was referring to Stalin’s Soviet regime, which was already in the process of engineering the Communist takeover of several central and eastern European states. The Pope supported the right of small nations to resist the imposition of new political or cultural systems, but recognized that the progression to a true and lasting peace between and within nations would take a long time – ‘too long for the pent-up aspiration of mankind starving for order and calm’.
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Unfortunately, time was one of the many things the Western Allies did not have. Given the huge tasks that faced them they were unable to deal with Europe’s postwar problems with anything like the speed that was required to avoid further bloodshed. Their response to the physical devastation was inadequate – unsurprisingly so, given the extent of the damage – and they were forced in the first instance to confine themselves merely to clearing the roads and rebuilding transport links, in order to re-establish supply lines across the continent. Likewise their response to the humanitarian crisis was lacking: the continent would remain desperately short of food and medical supplies for years to come, and displaced persons, particularly the ‘stateless’ Jews and Poles, would languish in camps of Nissen huts well into the 1950s. But even more inadequate was their response to the moral crisis. It simply was not possible to locate all the war criminals and remove all compromised leaders from positions of power, intern them, gather evidence against them and try them – and to do so promptly – especially given the challenging conditions of 1944 and 1945.

In the violent and chaotic atmosphere that prevailed at the end of the war, it is unsurprising that people decided to take the law into their own hands. They could do nothing to change the physical devastation, nor the human losses – but they believed that it was at least possible to redress some of the moral imbalances. As I shall show in the next section, this belief was generally nothing but a fantasy: it relied on finding convenient scapegoats, and on treating whole sections of the population as communally guilty for the crimes of a few. In this way a new crime would be added to the damaged moral landscape brought about by the war – that of vengeance.

PART II

Vengeance

There are only two sacred words left to us.
One of them is ‘love’; the other one is ‘revenge’.

Vasily Grossman, 15 October 1943
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8

The Thirst for Blood

In October 1944, after more than two years of butchery between the Germans and the Soviets, the Red Army finally crossed the frontier onto German soil. The little village of Nemmersdorf bears the unhappy distinction of being the first populated place they came across, and the name of the village soon became a byword for atrocity. In a frenzy of violence, Red Army soldiers are reputed to have murdered everyone they found here – men, women and children alike – before proceeding to mutilate their bodies. One correspondent for the Swiss newspaper
Le Courrier
, who claimed he came to the village after the Soviets had temporarily been beaten back, was so disgusted by what he saw that he felt unable to relate it. ‘I will spare you the description of the mutilations and the ghastly condition of the corpses on the field,’ he wrote. ‘These are impressions that go beyond even the wildest imagination.’
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As the Soviets advanced, such scenes repeated themselves across all the eastern provinces of Germany. At Powayen near Konigsberg, for example, the bodies of dead women were strewn everywhere: they had been raped and then brutally killed with bayonets or rifle butt blows to the head. Four women here had been stripped naked, tied to the back of a Soviet tank and dragged to their deaths. In Gross Heydekrug a woman was crucified on the altar cross of the local church, with two German soldiers similarly strung up on either side.
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More crucifixions occurred in other villages, where women were raped and then nailed to barn doors.
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At Metgethen it was not only women but children who were killed and mutilated: according to the German captain who examined their corpses, ‘Most of the children had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument,’ but ‘some had numerous bayonet wounds in their tiny bodies.’
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The massacre of women and children had no military purpose – indeed it was a propaganda disaster for the Red Army, and only served to stiffen German resistance. The wanton destruction of German towns and villages was also counter-productive. As Lev Kopelev, a Soviet soldier who witnessed the burning of German villages, pointed out, it was all very well to seek revenge, ‘But where do we spend the night afterward? Where do we put the wounded?’
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But to look at such events in purely practical terms is surely missing the point. The desire for vengeance was perhaps the inevitable response to some of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by man. The soldiers who carried out these atrocities were motivated by a deep and often personal bitterness. ‘I have taken revenge and will take revenge,’ claimed a Red Army soldier named Gofman in 1944, whose wife and two children had been murdered by the Nazis in the Belorussian town of Krasnopol‘ye (Polish Krasnopol). ‘I have seen fields sown with German bodies, but that is not enough. How many of them should die for every murdered child! Whether I am in the forest or in a bunker, the Krasnopolye tragedy is before my eyes … And I swear that I will take revenge as long as my hand can hold a weapon.’
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Other soldiers had similar stories, and a similar thirst for blood. ‘My life is twisted,’ wrote Salman Kiselev after the death of his wife and six children.
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‘They killed my little Niusenka,’ claimed Second Lieutenant Kratsov, a Hero of the Soviet Union who had lost his wife and daughter to the Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine. ‘There is only one thing left for me: vengeance.’
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In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the threat, or promise, of vengeance permeated everything. It formed a thread in virtually every event that took place, from the arrest of Nazis and their collaborators to the wording of the postwar treaties that shaped Europe for the decades to come. Leaders from Roosevelt to Tito happily indulged the vengeful fantasies of their subordinates, and sought to harness the popular desire for vengeance to further their own political causes. Commanders in all the Allied armies turned a blind eye to the excesses of their men; and civilians took advantage of the chaos to redress years of impotence and victimization by dictators and petty tyrants alike.

Of all the themes that emerge in any study of the immediate postwar period, that of vengeance is perhaps the most universal. And yet it is a subject that is rarely analysed in any depth. While there are many excellent studies of its legitimate cousin, retribution – that is to say, the legal and supposedly impartial exercise of justice – there is no general study of the role that vengeance played in the aftermath of the war. Mentions of vengeance are usually confined to superficial, partisan accounts of specific events. In some cases its very existence is deliberately played down by historians, or even flatly denied; in other cases it is exaggerated out of all proportion. There are political and emotional reasons for both of these standpoints, which must be taken into account if an impartial understanding of events is ever to be reached.

Many historians have also taken contemporary stories of vengeance at face value, without stopping to question the motives of those who first drew up these accounts. The story of Nemmersdorf is a perfect example. For almost fifty years, while the Cold War was in progress, Western historians accepted the version of events given in Nazi propaganda. This was partly because it suited them – the Russians were the bogeymen of Europe – and partly because they were unable to access Soviet archives for an alternative version of events. But more recent studies show that the Nazis falsified photographs of Nemmersdorf, and exaggerated both the time-frame over which the massacre took place and the number of people killed. Such distortions of the truth were common in the aftermath of the war, when atrocities by both sides were exploited ruthlessly for their propaganda value. The real story of what happened at Nemmersdorf, which is no less horrific than the traditional accounts, is therefore hidden beneath layers of what we today call ‘spin’.
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In the following pages I shall describe some of the most common forms of vengeance that were carried out in the immediate aftermath of the war, on both an individual and a communal level. I shall show how the
perception
of that vengeance was, and is, just as important as the vengeance itself. I shall demonstrate how a vengeful population was occasionally manipulated by those with ulterior motives who wished to strengthen their own positions. And I shall show how the new authorities in Europe were unable to establish themselves before first bringing the forces of vengeance under control.

Revenge was a fundamental part of the bedrock upon which postwar Europe was rebuilt. Everything that happened after the war, and everything that will be described in the rest of this book, bears its hallmark: to this day, individuals, communities and even whole nations still live with the bitterness born of this vengeance.

9

The Camps Liberated

Of all the symbols of violence and depravity that litter the history of the Second World War, perhaps the most potent is that of the concentration camps. These camps, and all they represented, were used to justify all kinds of vengeance in the aftermath of the war, and so it is important to understand the sense of shock and sheer disbelief that they engendered at the time. There were many kinds of concentration camps, but it was the ‘death camps’ – the places where prisoners were either starved to death, or more deliberately exterminated in gas chambers or by firing squads – that were most publicized.

Discovery

The first Nazi death camp to be discovered was that of Majdanek, near the Polish town of Lublin, which was taken by the Red Army at the end of July 1944. By this point in the war the Russians were well-acquainted with German atrocities. They had heard of Babi Yar, and countless other, smaller massacres across western Russia and Ukraine, but as one newspaper correspondent at the time claimed, ‘all this killing was spread over relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Maidanek, it did not have the vast monumental, “industrial” quality of that unbelievable Death Factory two miles from Lublin’.
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