Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (34 page)

The issue of vengeance has always been an extremely controversial part of the aftermath of the Second World War, and is still used as a political football today. The most graphic indication of this is the repeated use that has been made of bogus statistics. Exaggerated and emotional claims have been made both by people who genuinely suffered in the aftermath of the war and by certain groups who wish to capitalize on that suffering. For example, writers from the French political right claimed for decades that over 100,000 suspected collaborators were murdered by the Resistance during and after the liberation – a figure that is on a par with the number of
résistants
killed during the war. The true number of collaborators killed was probably a tenth of that, and only one or two thousand can realistically be categorized as revenge attacks. The French right wing was effectively trying to deflect attention from its own role during the war, and perhaps even gain absolution for it, by fiddling the figures.

Likewise, Germans who were expelled from their homelands at the end of the war often make exaggerated claims about the most famous atrocities that occurred in eastern Europe. They say that 2,000 civilians were killed in Aussig, and 6,500 at Lamsdorf prison camp (when in fact the figures are more likely to be 100 and 1,500, respectively). Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ are deliberately used in an attempt to reclaim the concept of victimhood for Germany. And to drive the point home, the most gruesome stories are repeated again and again, despite the fact that some of them are little more than hearsay. Such exaggerations are unnecessary and counter-productive: the true figures, and the verifiable stories, are terrible enough without having to embellish them.

To our collective discredit, historians have sometimes failed to question these claims, either because of a dearth of reputable source material or, in some cases, because the exaggerations happen to suit our own political points of view. This is a problem that plagues postwar history, just as it plagues the history of the Second World War itself. (As another example, books and articles are regularly published today claiming that as many as 100,000 people died during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, despite the fact that most reputable sources of the past ten or fifteen years, including an official German government commission in 2009, have put the figure at around 20,000.) The issue of such exaggerated numbers will come up again and again in the following chapters.

However, if some people overstate the extent of postwar vengeance, then sometimes the opposite is also true. Many Jews are quick to point out that vengeance was actually fairly uncommon. ‘We couldn’t take vengeance, or we’d be the same as them,’ claims Berek Obuchowski, who was liberated at Theresienstadt. ‘Out of all those people who survived I doubt there was more than five per cent that took vengeance on the Germans.’
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Even at the time Jews made such claims. ‘We do not want revenge,’ declared Dr Zalman Grinberg, in a speech delivered to an assembly of his fellow Jews at Dachau at the end of May 1945. ‘If we took this vengeance it would mean we would fall to the depths and ethics and morals the German nation has been in these past ten years. We are not able to slaughter women and children! We are not able to burn millions of people! We are not able to starve hundreds of thousands!’
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Most historians would agree with such claims – vengeance
was
only the path of a minority. There were many areas across Europe where soldiers, partisans and ex-prisoners showed remarkable restraint, and the rule of law was more or less intact. In Norway and Denmark, for example, there was very little violence after the war. But even in these countries, which had not suffered nearly as much physical and moral destruction as other areas further south and east, vengeance did take place, especially against women who had slept with German soldiers. The fact that it was a relatively mild form of vengeance does not make it any less present.

It is also true that Jews were probably far less guilty of vengeance than any other group in postwar Europe. But those who did choose the path of vengeance embraced it wholeheartedly, to the point where they were willing to risk both their own lives and those of innocent people. The fact that Dr Grinberg spoke so forcefully about the subject in his speech at Dachau shows that the desire for revenge was very much alive amongst Jews there. And, as we know, this desire was acted upon at Dachau, both by camp inmates and by American troops.

The issue of Jewish vengeance is still an extremely sensitive subject. At the time, most Jews were quick to reject the temptation for the reasons spelled out in Dr Grinberg’s speech – they did not want to sink into the same moral cesspool as the Nazis themselves. Today, however, Jews play down the existence of vengeance for slightly different reasons: they are worried about how the world might
perceive
their actions. People of other faiths cannot possibly understand this anxiety that Jews feel about their image. Having suffered centuries of anti-Semitic slurs and conspiracy theories, of which the Nazi hate campaign between 1933 and 1945 was merely the apogee, Jews are understandably determined to avoid any kind of unnecessary controversy. Studies show that whenever any controversy does arise, such as over the issue of Israel, the traditional anti-Semitism immediately surfaces once again throughout Europe, as is evidenced by the spate of attacks on Jews that occurred after the Israeli war in southern Lebanon in 2006.
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It is unsurprising, therefore, that when journalist John Sack published a book about Jewish vengeance in the 1990s it caused an uproar in the Jewish community, particularly in America. Sack interviewed several Jews who became prominent in Poland’s prison camp system after the war, and who admitted to torturing German prisoners. His work, though sensational in style, was backed up by documentary evidence, and all his interviews were taped and made publicly available. Nevertheless his agent refused to represent the book, and his American publishers, having paid Sack an advance, belatedly decided to cancel it. Likewise, a magazine that had bought serial rights pulled their article two days before publication. Despite being Jewish himself, Sack was accused both in print and on television of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. There was similar controversy over his book in Europe, where Sack’s Polish publisher cancelled publication for fear of bad publicity, as did his German publisher. Sack’s book was insensitive and badly written – and, like James Bacque’s book about German POWs, was considered dangerous precisely because it contained seeds of truth.

The acknowledgement of postwar vengeance is an extremely uncomfortable issue for any historian, even when it is not clouded by national or religious sensitivities, and it is probably impossible to discuss it without stepping on somebody’s toes. Firstly, there is the worry that by characterizing an action as retributive, the historian partially legitimizes it. So, for example, when the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers is described as revenge, it thereby becomes more understandable, and perhaps to a degree more acceptable. German women, so the argument goes, were part of the Nazi regime just as much as German men, and rape was therefore something that they had brought upon themselves. This was the argument that many Soviets used at the time.

Conversely, the act of vengeance might be deemed so terrible that it overshadows the original offence: so, to use the same example, the mass rapes in Germany might be considered so repugnant that modern readers will forget that many of the women who were raped were also part of an evil regime. In our minds the atrocities that were committed in the name of Nazism – even crimes as vast as the Holocaust – might be at least partially ‘cancelled out’ by the suffering that German people endured once the war was over. This is certainly the worry that many academics in Germany have. When a groundbreaking documentary about the mass rape was broadcast in 1992, for example, it caused a furore in the German press: outraged commentators argued that the documentary should never have been broadcast, because if Germans began to see themselves as victims of atrocity, they would lose sight of the fact that they were also perpetrators.
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In order to avoid weaving a path between these two extremes, many historians cheat. Most histories of the Second World War, for example, make no mention of the revenge that came after the war was over; likewise, most books that describe the rape and murder of Germans after the war do so without so much as a peep about the wartime atrocities in eastern Europe that first created this seemingly unquenchable desire for revenge. The problem with divorcing vengeance from its wider context is that it makes it impossible to understand
why
people acted the way they did in the aftermath of the war. From a modern, political point of view it also creates a competition over victimhood.

Sooner or later the arguments tend to break down along national or political lines. Poles and Czechs understandably feel aggrieved when historians begin to speak about the suffering of ethnic Germans, since they themselves were forced to endure years of savage occupation at the hands of many of those Germans. French Communists become indignant when right-wingers highlight their excesses, since it was the French right that presided over the capture, torture and execution of tens of thousands of Communist Resistance fighters. Russians dismiss the anger over how Romanian and Hungarian civilians were treated after the war by arguing that Romania and Hungary should never have gone to war against the Soviet Union in the first place. And so on.

The truth is that the moral morass produced by the war spared nobody. All nationalities and all political persuasions were – to vastly differing degrees, of course – both victims and perpetrators simultaneously. If historians still struggle to see these issues in the many varying shades of grey that are necessary to understand them properly, then perhaps it is inevitable that most people at the time, still raw from the events of the war, were usually only able to see things in black and white. The political and national polarization we still occasionally see today was, in 1945, both intense and ubiquitous.

But the fact that the arguments about postwar violence so often get bogged down in issues of race or politics is not an accident. It points to some of the deeper themes that lay behind both the war itself and its immediate aftermath. Regardless of how prominent vengeance was in the thoughts and motivations of people across Europe, it is not on its own an adequate explanation of the violence that occurred in the aftermath of the war. There were also other, more ideological forces at play. Sometimes the violence was not a
reaction
to the sweeping changes that had been brought about by the war, but a continuation of them. Sometimes vengeance was not an end in itself, but merely a tool for achieving more radical goals.

The pursuit of these goals, and the intense racial prejudice that often lay behind them, are the subject of the next section.

PART III

Ethnic Cleansing

You should create such conditions … that they want to escape themselves.

Josef Stalin
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16

Wartime Choices

The Second World War was never merely a conflict over territory. It was also a war of race and ethnicity. Some of the defining events of the war had nothing to do with winning and maintaining physical ground, but with imposing one’s own ethnic stamp on ground already held. The Jewish Holocaust, the ethnic cleansing of western Ukraine, the attempted genocide of Croatian Serbs: these were events that were pursued with a vigour every bit as ardent as the military war. A vast number of people – perhaps 10 million or more – were deliberately exterminated for no other reason than that they happened to belong to the wrong ethnic or racial group.

The problem for those pursuing this racial war was that it was not always easy to define a person’s race or ethnicity, particularly in eastern Europe where different communities were often inextricably intermingled. Jews who happened to have blond hair and blue eyes could slip through the net because they did not fit the Nazis’ preconceived racial stereotype. Gypsies could and did disguise themselves as members of other ethnic groups just by changing their clothes and their behaviour - as did Slovaks in Hungary, Bosniaks in Serbia, Romanians in Ukraine, and so on. The most common way of identifying one’s ethnic friends or enemies – the language they spoke – was not always an accurate guide either. Those who had grown up in mixed communities spoke several languages, and could switch between one and the next depending on whom they were speaking to – a skill that would save many lives during the darkest days of the war and its aftermath.

In an effort to categorize the population of Europe, the Nazis insisted on issuing everyone with identity cards, coloured according to ethnicity. They created vast bureaucracies to classify entire populations by race. In Poland for example, a racial hierarchy was devised which put Reich Germans at the top, ethnic Germans next, then privileged minorities such as Ukrainians, followed by Poles, Gypsies and Jews. The classifications did not stop there. Ethnic Germans, for example, were broken down into further sub-categories: those who were so pure that they were eligible to join the Nazi Party, those who were pure enough for Reich citizenship, those who were tainted by Polish blood or Polish influences, and finally those Poles who were to be considered as ethnically German only because of their physical appearance or way of life.
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Those who did not have their ethnicity chosen for them had to make the decision for themselves. This was not always easy. Many people had multiple options, either because they had mixed-race parents or grandparents or because they saw no contradiction in being simultaneously, say, Polish by birth, Lithuanian by nationality and German by ethnicity. When forced to make a choice, their decision was often naively random at best, perhaps inspired by a parent, a spouse, or even a friend. The more calculating chose an identity according to what benefits it might offer. Claiming German ethnicity, for example, could confer exemption from labour round-ups and eligibility for special rations and tax breaks. On the other hand, it could also mean liability for military conscription: the decision sometimes boiled down to whether the Russian front was preferable to a slave-labour camp.