People keep on arriving. Truck after truck . . . The prisoners are dumped at the center in groups of fifty . . . The poor boys look at the hall, they all smile. They’re surrounded by repatriation officers. “Come along, boys, get in line!” They get in line and go on smiling . . . These last few days I was at the Gare de l’Est, where one of the women rebuked a soldier from the Legion and pointed to her stripes. “No salute, my boy? Can’t you see I’m a captain?”6
Duras was very much on the left, and had a special loathing for the kind of rank-pulling officials she described. They were reactionaries, who, in the words of Dionys Mascolo (“D.”), her lover and comrade in the left-wing resistance, will “be against any resistance movement that isn’t directly Gaullist. They’ll occupy France. They think they constitute thinking France, the France of authority.”7 They would construct the heroic narrative of “eternal France” to their own advantage.
There is another more harrowing description in Duras’s memoir. Her husband, Robert Antelme, also a left-wing resister, had been arrested and deported to Buchenwald. Although she had already taken up with “D.” during the war, Duras still longed to see her husband alive. That is why she had been going back and forth to the repatriation centers and the Gare de l’Est train station, anxious for any news of his survival. When Antelme was found by chance in a German camp by the later president Fran?ois Mitterrand, he could barely speak, let alone walk. But the longed-for reunion in Paris occurred at last:
Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They’d stopped on the first floor landing. He was looking up.
I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking. I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbor’s apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.
Then, a short while later, she sees him again, still smiling:
It’s from this smile that I suddenly recognize him, but from a great distance, as though I was seeing him at the other end of a tunnel. It’s a smile of embarrassment. He’s apologizing for being here, reduced to such a wreck. And then the smile fades, and he becomes a stranger again.8
My father was not in Buchenwald. Nor did he have a wife in the Dutch resistance who had taken a lover and would soon divorce him. His return home was far less dramatic. But something in this passage from Duras’s memoir hints at the source of his fear of going home too, the fear of being a stranger.
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IF HOMECOMING WAS DIFFICULT FOR FRENCH POWS, this was even more true of Germans or Japanese. Their shoulders bore not just the burden of a national defeat, which would have been hard enough, but they faced the contempt and even hatred of their own people for having been responsible for a calamitous war, for committing unspeakable crimes, for having lorded it over the nation as arrogant warriors, and coming back as abject losers. This was not entirely fair, of course. Other people, including millions of women, had cheered them on their way to war, waving flags, singing patriotic songs, and celebrating their victories, some real, some the fictions of government propaganda. The common soldier in a highly authoritarian state whipped into a frenzy by official hysteria was no more responsible for the consequences than the ordinary civilians who had vociferously cheered him on. In Germany, at least, the Nazis could be blamed for everything. The Japanese, lacking their own version of the Nazi Party, blamed their catastrophe on “the militarists,” and, by extension, on anyone associated with the armed forces. This was also the view promoted in postwar U.S. propaganda, faithfully echoed in the Japanese press.
As the Japanese essayist Sakaguchi Ango wrote, the kamikaze pilots (Tokkotai) “are already black market hoodlums today.”9 This fall from grace, this mass awakening from a national delusion, was blamed squarely on the men who were sent to die for the emperor and had the shameful misfortune of coming back alive. There was a Japanese expression current just after the war, Tokkotai kuzure, “degenerate kamikazes”—young men whose morbid idealism had collapsed into a binge of whoring and drinking.
Resentment against Japanese soldiers’ throwing their weight around was already there before the defeat in 1945, even though voicing it would have been extremely risky. When people saw the quick shift from wartime violence to criminal behavior in peacetime, the proud image of the Imperial armed forces was tarnished even further. At the end of the war military warehouses were still full of goods, anything from weapons to blankets and clothes, essential items for a destitute population. After large-scale organized looting by senior military officers and their civilian cronies, often gangsters with sinister wartime histories, they were empty. Slowly the goods found their way onto the black market, where they went for prices most people could ill afford.
Bringing back millions of young men, trained to kill for their country, into civilian life is never a smooth process. The shameful odor of defeat only makes it harder. It seems entirely fitting that a radio program that was started in the summer of 1946 to provide information about missing persons should have included a special segment, broadcast twice daily, especially for disoriented veterans, called “Who Am I?”10
The demoralized warriors, already emasculated by military failure, faced more blows when they came back to homes that were destroyed, or to marriages gone sour. One of the common themes in German or Japanese films and books about the immediate postwar period is the rift between returning soldiers and wives who had taken lovers in order to relieve loneliness or simply to survive. The theme is as old as war itself: on his return from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered in his own house by his wife, or her lover, or both, depending on which version of the story you read. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is one of the finest German examples: Maria’s husband, fresh from the horrors of the eastern front, literally finds his wife naked in the arms of a black American soldier. In this case, it is the lover who dies. A much less well-known Japanese example is Ozu ’s film A Hen in the Wind (1948). Quite uncharacteristically for Ozu, the movie ends in high melodrama, with the jealous husband throwing his wife down the stairs for having had sex with another man in his absence. Limping from her injury, the wife still pleads for his forgiveness. And finally all ends well in a gush of tears.
The story preceding this overwrought finale is wholly typical of the times. The wife, Tokiko, not knowing whether her husband is still alive, tries to feed herself and their little son with the pittance she earns as a seamstress. When the son becomes seriously ill, she has no money to pay for the hospital, and so decides to sell herself for one night to a stranger. When her husband, Shuichi, finally comes back, Tokiko confesses her one lapse into prostitution. Enraged about his wife’s infidelity, Shuichi becomes obsessed. But fidelity is not really the main point: it is the defeated soldier’s struggle to regain a sense of self-respect that drives his fury. The movie is highly realistic, except that in real life the marriage may not have been saved in a tearful reconciliation.
Letters submitted to the newspapers show how deep the problems of repatriation were. The celebrated novelist Shiga Naoya published a letter in the Asahi newspaper on December 16, 1945, in which he suggested that the government had a duty to reeducate former kamikaze pilots. How could young men, taught how to commit suicide for the glory of the nation, possibly be equipped to rebuild their lives in the cynical, dog-eat-dog world of 1945? The only way to prevent them from sinking into despair and being called degenerates was for the state to initiate a special education program. A letter in response agreed, but pointed out that Japanese society itself was badly in need of reeducation. One letter writer, a man who had been trained to be a suicide pilot himself, stated that the wartime training and spirit of the Tokkotai were precisely what was needed in the degenerate culture of postwar Japan.
One of the most poignant letters to the Asahi was by another ex-soldier, published on December 13:
Fellow veterans! Now we are free. We returned from the dark and cruel military life, from the bloody fields of battle. But awaiting us back home were the sharp eyes of civilians filled with loathing of the militarists, and we found our home towns destroyed by the fires of war . . . The bloody battles are over, but life’s real battle has only just begun . . .11
In fact, he writes, his youthful illusions had already been dashed by life in the army, with its selfish and bullying officer corps whose pompous preening about loyalty to the nation and other high-flown ideals was shown to be utterly vapid. The common soldier was reduced to a machine. And now, he writes, “the veteran soldier has become synonymous with the bad guy . . .”
“What are the true feelings of the people towards us veterans?” asks another writer on the same day. “People think a soldier is the same thing as a militarist. Of course, the militarists should take responsibility for our defeat in war. But the ordinary soldier was not like that. He was just a patriot fighting for his country. Do you really believe that we cast away our young lives to fight on the battle fields or in the Pacific just for our own profit or desire? I would really like people to show more warmth towards us veterans.”12
Such sentiments would surely resonate with American veterans of the Vietnam War. But even the victors in a war that was almost universally regarded as just had problems readjusting to civilian life when they came back home. William “Bill” Mauldin was the most popular cartoonist in the U.S. Army. His irreverent drawings in the Stars and Stripes of Willy and Joe, two GIs coping with army life on the European front, made him a hero among the GIs, or “dogfaces.” Willy and Joe talk like regular soldiers, and think like them too. What they thought was often not flattering to superior officers, which earned Mauldin a dressing down from General Patton, who threatened to have his “ass thrown in jail.” In June 1945, Willy was on the cover of Time magazine, looking tired, unshaven, disheveled, a cigarette dangling from the left corner of his mouth, far from the heroic image of the warrior.
Back Home (1947) is Mauldin’s account in words and cartoons of Willy and Joe’s homecoming. The troubles they face, shown in Mauldin’s drawings, and the attitudes they convey are softer versions of some of the sentiments expressed by veterans in the letters to the editor of Japanese newspapers. The resentment of the upper ranks, for example: Willy and Joe in loose-fitting civilian suits are standing at a hotel desk waiting to be checked in as a sullen-looking porter in an outfit of striped trousers, cap, epaulettes, and gold buttons is carrying their suitcases. Joe: “Major Wilson, back in uniform, I see.”
Willy and Joe’s ill feeling does not burn quite as fiercely as the hatred felt by Japanese soldiers toward the officers who sent tens of thousands on suicide missions, or killed them to consume their flesh when food ran out under enemy fire in New Guinea or the Philippines. But Mauldin’s point that a bad soldier mostly does damage to himself while “a bad officer can cause a considerable amount of misery among his subordinates” would have rung equally true.13
Closing the gulf between military and civilian life was a painful process, for battlefield heroes as much, if not more, as it was for men of no great fighting distinction. To wives and girlfriends, the returned soldiers did not always seem heroic enough. In one cartoon, Willy is shown dressed in a scruffy business suit, rather awkwardly carrying the wartime baby he had never seen before. His wife, in dressy hat and gloves, remarks: “I was hoping you’d wear your soldier suit, so I could be proud of you.” In Mauldin’s words: “Mrs Willie, who had been in college when Willie met her, had shared with her feminine classmates a worship of fancy uniforms during the early and glamorous stages of the war. She had always felt a little disappointed in Willie because he hadn’t become an officer with a riding crop and pink trousers.” He didn’t even have medals. So, Mauldin continues, not only “was she deprived of the pleasure of strutting with his medals, but she suddenly realized that she had never seen him in civvies before, and he did look a little baggy and undistinguished.”14
It is not surprising that some veterans, disillusioned or unequipped for civilian life, or traumatized by battlefield brutality, would commit violent acts. This happens after all wars. But in the first year after World War II these acts were given exaggerated attention in the press. Willy’s wife is shown reading a newspaper, headlined “Veteran Kicks Aunt,” while a dejected Willie sits in his armchair nursing a glass of whiskey. The caption reads, “There is a small item on page 17 about a triple ax murder. No veterans involved.”15 Mauldin points out the sad fact that such lurid headlines “gave added impetus to the rumor that always appears in every country after a war—that the returning soldiers are trained in killing and assault and are potential menaces to society.”
Compared to veterans in Germany or Japan, the problems of returning GIs, though similar in certain respects, might appear to be minor. They were heroes coming back to the richest country on earth, basking in their victory, soon to benefit from government-sponsored education programs made possible by the magnificent GI Bill. But even in America, the men in uniform often failed to live up to the heroic narrative. There was one important difference, however, between the victorious nations and the defeated, the effect of which lasted much longer than the hardships that follow any devastating war. Germans and Japanese were disenchanted with the heroic ideal. They wanted nothing more to do with war. British and Americans, on the other hand, could never quite rid themselves of nostalgia for their finest hours, leading to a fatal propensity to embark on ill-advised military adventures so they and their nations could live like heroes once more.
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WHAT ABOUT THOSE MEN who didn’t want to go home?
The Drau Valley in Carinthia, a rural part of Austria known for its stunning Alpine scenery of cool mountain lakes and lush green meadows covered in pine trees and flowers, must have looked like a vision of Eden to the Slovene refugees from Yugoslavia who emerged from a pitch-dark, waterlogged mountain tunnel dug by slave workers for the German army. Others arrived after slogging across rocky, freezing mountain passes. One of them recalled: “It seemed, in this wonderful region, that the majestic, glittering word LIFE shone out and resounded on all sides.”16
A closer look, in the beautiful spring of 1945, at this blessed landscape of picturesque villages and country churches, would have revealed something stranger and more disturbing. The Drau Valley was filled with camps and shantytowns, the makeshift quarters of tens of thousands of people, former soldiers, as well as women and children, together with their horses, oxcarts, and even camels. There were proud Cossacks in tall sheepskin hats; Slovenian peasants; Serbian Chetniks, some royalist, some fascist, some a bit of both; Croatian fascists from the dreaded Usta?a; Ukrainians; Russians; ex-POWs from various European countries; and even a few Nazi mass murderers hiding in mountain shacks, such as Odilo Globocnik (“Globus” to his comrades), a Slovenian German who had been responsible for, among other things, setting up the extermination camps in Poland. A reporter from the Times of London compared this crowd of exhausted refugees, mostly fleeing from Tito’s communist Partisans, or from the Soviet Red Army, to “a mass migration like that of the Ostrogoths 1,500 years earlier.”17 In the words of Nigel Nicolson, a British intelligence officer and later a well-known London publisher, Carinthia was “the sump of Europe.”18
Carinthia, occupied by the British Army, was a fitting venue, in a way, for the miseries of mass migration, since its own recent politics had been so typical of the kind of ethnic nationalism that had caused a human and cultural catastrophe in Europe. Much of the population in the south of Carinthia was Slovenian. The Gauleiter (Nazi regional governor) during the war, a German-speaking Carinthian named Friedrich Rainer, had tried to “Germanize” the south by forcing people to speak German, or by simply deporting the Slovenes and replacing them with people of Germanic stock. At the end of the war, Tito’s Partisans invaded the area and claimed it for Yugoslavia, until they were pushed back by the British Army.
But this was just a small part of the problem in “the sump of Europe,” filled with people, civilians, and soldiers who either did not wish to return to their countries, or had no home to go back to. Nigel Nicolson observed:
There seemed to be no limit to the number of nationalities which appealed to us for our protection. The Germans wanted to be safe-guarded against Tito, the Cossacks against the Bulgarians, the Chetniks against the Croats, the White Russians against the Red Russians, the Austrians against the Slovenes, the Hungarians against everybody else, and vice versa throughout the list . . . Not only was [Carinthia] the last refuge of Nazi war-criminals, but of comparatively inoffensive peoples fleeing from the Russians and Tito, unwanted and all but persecuted wherever they went.19
Worse than persecuted, in many cases. The Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs who had fought Tito’s communists, sometimes on the side of the Germans, sometimes not, expected torture and death if they were delivered to their archenemy in Yugoslavia. Cossacks, many of whom had already fought the communists once in the civil war after 1917 and spent their lives since then as waiters, taxi drivers, or writers for obscure émigré journals in various European capitals, knew that execution or slow death in the gulag awaited them in the Soviet Union. Similar fears haunted Ukrainians who had foolishly—but not inexplicably—latched on to Hitler in the hope of getting rid of Stalin. These fearful expectations would all come true. What they hadn’t expected was that the British, whom they thought of as the most gallant, decent, generous people in Europe, would force them on their way.
In the Austrian town of Bleiburg, on the Yugoslav border in southern Carinthia, Brigadier T. P. Scott, commander the 38th (Irish) Brigade, received a report on May 14 that two hundred thousand men from the Croatian army, accompanied by half a million Croatian civilians, were approaching the British lines. Meeting their representatives, Scott, by all accounts a compassionate man, had to tell them that they could not possibly be allowed to enter Austria. There was no room for them. They would starve. All right, some replied, then they would starve. Others wondered whether they might not be able to move to Africa, or America. No, that would not be possible, either. Then they “would rather die where they were, fighting to the last man, than surrender to any Bolsheviks.”20
It took a lot of persuasion, but eventually the Croats, thirsty, unfed, at the end of their tether, agreed to surrender to the Titoists (or “Tits” as the British called them). They were promised that the men would be treated properly as POWs, and the women would be returned to their homes in Croatia. Brigadier Scott could rest assured.
The precise facts of what actually happened might never be known. Accounts from the few survivors are bitter, and possibly exaggerated. But they offer a flavor of how they were treated. On May 15 and 16, according to some accounts, ten thousand soldiers and officers were gunned down on the Yugoslav side of the border and thrown into ditches. On May 17 a “death march” began along the Drau (or Drava) River towards Maribor in Slovenia. In one version of the story, “tens of thousands of Croatians were grouped in a number of columns, their hands tied with wire . . . Then starved, thirsty, emaciated, disfigured, suffering and agonizing, they were forced to run long distances alongside their ‘liberators,’ who were riding on horses and in carts. Those who could not endure such a running ‘march’ were stabbed, beaten to death or shot, then left on the roadside or thrown into a ditch.”21 Another account estimates that “about 12,000 Croatians” were buried in the ditches. “Because the blood started to soak through the ground, and the ground itself started to rise due to the swelling of dead bodies, the partisans covered the soil with an alkaline solution, more soil, and then leveled the ground with tanks.”22
Even if these stories are discolored by hatred, there is no doubt that large numbers of people were murdered by Tito’s Partisans, not just Croats on their death marches, but Serbs and Slovenes, too, who were machine-gunned in the dense and beautiful forest of , where the wild boar, lynx, and red deer still roam. They had arrived there, as prisoners of the communists, because the British had put them on trains to Yugoslavia, telling them they were bound for Italy. Revealing their real destination would have created the kind of pandemonium that the British troops tried everything to avoid.
The British justified their policy of handing Russian and other anticommunists back to their enemies, by subterfuge if necessary, and sometimes by force, by telling themselves that these Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, White Russians, and Ukrainians were, after all, traitors, men who had fought on the side of the Germans. In short, they were enemies not just of the Soviet Allies, but of the British too. Aside from the fact that women and children could hardly be classified as enemy combatants, things were never quite so simple.
It is true that up to 10 percent of the soldiers in German uniform captured in France after the Normandy invasion were Russians. But these Russians, most of whom didn’t speak a word of German, and were happy, indeed relieved, to surrender to the British, had rarely been motivated by any enthusiasm for Hitler’s cause. Many had been POWs captured on the eastern front. Those who had survived the deliberate German policy of starving Soviet prisoners to death were given a brutal choice in 1943, when the Germans were desperately short of manpower: either join the German army in special foreign battalions or die.
The case of the Cossacks was more complicated. Their senior officers, veterans of the Russian Civil War, now in their sixties, saw the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union as their last chance to reclaim traditional Cossack lands, where they could live as their grandfathers did, as a kind of eighteenth-century warrior caste. The Germans promised to help them if they would fight on the German side, and so they did, as a ferocious band of soldiers, bearing the bejeweled daggers and curved swords of their forebears. It was a romantic, misguided, and often savage quest to restore a way of life that was probably lost forever. They fought in the Soviet Union, and when forced to retreat, in Yugoslavia, they were accompanied by thousands of civilian refugees who could no longer stand to live under Stalin. At the end of the war, when the Germans—like the Japanese in Southeast Asia—were handing out territories to collaborating regimes as last-minute bribes to keep fighting, the Cossacks were told they could establish “Cossackia” in the Italian Alps. Once the British arrived, the Cossacks, declaring that the Soviet communists were their enemies and not the British, decided to abandon Cossackia and cross into the idyllic valleys of Carinthia.
It is claimed that the behavior of the Croatian fascists, led by the stony-faced Ante , was so atrocious that even the Germans were shocked. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, whose accounts were often colored by a vivid imagination, reported an interview with during which he spotted a wicker basket on the dictator’s desk, filled with small, round, slimy objects, juicy mussels perhaps, or oysters. Asked whether these were indeed the famous Dalmatian oysters, replied with a thin smile that they were forty pounds of Partisans’ eyes gifted to him by his loyal Usta?a.
The Usta?a were extraordinarily brutal, as were Tito’s Partisans, the Slovenian Home Guard, and the Serbian Chetniks. But their war cannot be neatly slotted into a war between Allies and Germans, democrats and fascists, or even communists and anticommunists. They were parties in several civil wars going on at the same time fought along ethnic, political, and religious lines: Croatian Catholics versus Orthodox Serbs versus Muslim Bosnians versus Serbian royalists versus communist Partisans versus Slovenian Home Guardsmen versus Slovenian communists. Ideology—fascist, communist, Nazi—was only part of the story. All sides made deals with outside powers, including the German invaders, as long as it suited their domestic purposes. How was a British soldier, faced with former Chetniks and Partisans, both of whom had been allies against the Germans at one point or another, to know whom to treat as a friend or enemy?
In the end this choice too was decided by force. Harold Macmillan, the British plenipotentiary in the Mediterranean, put it like this: “By December 1943, the most informed British opinion was that the Partisans would eventually rule Yugoslavia and that the monarchy had little future and had ceased to be a unifying element. At the same time the area was of the greatest military importance; for Tito’s forces, adequately supported, were capable of detaining a very large number of German divisions, greatly to the advantage of the Italian and later the French front.”23 The Chetnik royalists had the misfortune of being on the losing side of the civil war.
If Tito was considered an important Western ally in 1945, then so was Stalin, still fondly known to many people in Britain and the United States as “Uncle Joe.” So it was not such a stretch for the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden to promise his Soviet counterpart at a Moscow conference in September 1944 that all Soviet citizens would be returned “whether they were willing to return or not.”24 Not only was it thought to be essential to maintain good relations with wartime allies, but Britain did not wish to do anything to jeopardize the fate of thousands of British POWs in territories occupied by the Soviets.
Other members of the British government, including Winston Churchill, felt some scruples about a policy the consequences of which they were well aware of. Lord Selbourne, minister of economic warfare, wrote to Churchill that handing these people back to Russia “will mean certain death for them.” But Eden wrote to the prime minister that “we cannot afford to be sentimental about this.” After all, he said, the men had been captured “while serving in German military formations, the behavior of which in France has often been revolting.” He added something else, something more to the real point of the matter: “We surely don’t want to be permanently saddled with a number of these men.”25 And so it was formally confirmed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that they would all be handed back.
The fact that many Russians had worn German uniforms under duress, that the women and children, brought to Germany as slaves or lowly workers, had never worn German uniforms, or that a large number of Cossacks had never even been citizens of the Soviet Union and thus were not legally obliged to be “returned” at all, bothered neither Eden nor the Soviet leadership. In the latter case, this had something to do with heroic narratives too, though not quite in the same way as in France or the Netherlands. The idea that so many Russians and other Soviet citizens had fought the Soviet Union, some quite willingly, and that others might have chosen to work in Germany just to survive, was an embarrassment. In the official story, all citizens of the Soviet workers’ paradise had resisted the fascist enemy. To surrender was a crime. Those who fell into German hands had to be traitors, and would be dealt with as such.
There was one other complication. Tito’s Partisans may have been allies against the Nazis, much romanticized in the British imagination as noble peasant heroes, but their claims on parts of Italy and southern Austria were becoming a serious nuisance. The last thing the Western Allies needed was a war with old comrades in arms. But to make absolutely sure that a Titoist advance could be thwarted, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, already burdened with a million POWs, demanded the right to first “clear the decks” in Austria. This meant handing over Yugoslavs back to Yugoslavia, and Russians back to the Soviet Union as swiftly as possible.
Terrible scenes were the direct result of this deck-clearing. If trickery was not sufficient to lull people into acquiescence, battle-hardened British soldiers, sometimes in tears themselves, had to force them onto cattle cars and trucks, prodding, beating, and sometimes using bayonets. Wailing women would throw themselves at their feet, children got trampled by terrified mobs, some people got shot, and some people, rather than face deportation, preferred to stab themselves in the neck, or jump into the Drau River.
The Cossacks were perhaps the saddest case. Their delusions—of being sent to Africa as soldiers of the British Empire, or to Asia to fight the Japanese—were deliberately fostered; anything to keep them calm before their inevitable fate was sealed. They entertained themselves, and their British captors, with great displays of horsemanship. Even their disarmament was a form of trickery; the soldiers were promised newer, better arms if they gave up their old ones. The British realized that Cossacks were less likely to resist their orders in the absence of their officers. At the end of May, the officers, fifteen hundred of them, were told to attend a “conference” to decide their future. They would be back with their families in the evening. In reality, they were never seen again. After being handed over to the Soviet army, those who were not executed immediately were sent to the gulag, where very few survived.
The other Cossacks, frantic with worry about the officers who failed to come back, were getting more suspicious of the British. Time had come for harsher measures. The unpleasant task to force unarmed people to give themselves up to their mortal enemies was given to the Royal Irish Inniskilling Fusiliers, because Major-General Robert Arbuthnot decided that they were less likely to object than English troops. In fact, the soldiers were so disturbed that they came close to mutiny. Their commanding officer, David Shaw, related: “The men moaned like anything, but in the end they obeyed orders too. It was terrible. I remember these women—some of them pregnant—lying on the ground rolling and screaming. My men were putting their rifles on the ground and lifting the women onto the train, then locking the doors and standing there as the train pulled out with women screaming out of the windows.”26
At another Cossack camp on the banks of the River Drau, on June 1, after being ordered to board the train, thousands of people were gathered together in a massive huddle by their priests in full Orthodox regalia, praying and singing psalms. Inside the human mass, kneeling and locking arms, were the women and children; outside were the younger men. All around were pictures of religious icons, black flags, and an altar with a large cross. The idea was that soldiers would surely not assault people at prayer. Something had to be done. Major “Rusty” Davies, who had befriended many Cossacks, remembers: “As individuals on the outskirts of the group were pulled away, the remainder compressed themselves into a still tighter body, and, as panic gripped them, started clambering over each other in frantic efforts to get away from the soldiers. The result was a pyramid of screaming, hysterical human beings under which a number of people were trapped.”27
A young woman, whose legs were badly cut by broken glass when she was pushed through a window by the crush, describes what happened when the fence on one side of the human mass gave way:
People were rushing past . . . , scared out of their wits. Everything was mixed up: the singing, the prayers, the groans and screams, the cries of the wretched people the soldiers managed to grab, the weeping children and the foul language of the soldiers. Everyone was beaten, even the priests, who raised their crosses above their heads and continued to pray.28
In the end the job got done. Some drowned themselves with their children in the river. A few people hanged themselves from pine trees outside the camp. But most of the remaining Cossacks ended up in sealed cattle wagons, with one small window and one bucket for all to use as a toilet. Brigadier T. P. Scott had told his commander that the whole thing “was a damned bad show.” Major “Rusty” Davies said: “I still regard it with horror.”29
The Cossacks were just one of the orphaned peoples, battered and in the end decimated by history. In fact, “history” is too abstract. They were destroyed by men, who acted on ideas, of revolution, of purified ethnic states. There were others who fell victim to these ideas, some of whom may have been among the believers themselves.
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THE WORDS DECIDED UPON by the three victorious Allies—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—at the Potsdam Conference in the oppressive heat of July 1945 sounded reasonable enough, even a trifle anodyne. On the matter of expelling the German inhabitants from eastern and central Europe, they concluded the following: “The three governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”
This sounded fair enough. The agreement, following decisions already made by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin two years earlier at a conference in Teheran about shifting a large slice of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, was in keeping with an atmosphere of peculiar bonhomie, especially between U.S. president Harry Truman and Stalin. (Truman liked Churchill less; the British prime minister had tried to “soft-soap” him with unwelcome flattery.) When Truman played Paderewski’s Minuet in G for Stalin and Churchill at the presidential “Little White House” in Potsdam, Stalin declared, “Ah, yes, music is an excellent thing, it drives out the beast in man.”30
Truman’s warm sentiments towards Stalin seem to have been shared by many American soldiers at the time. Stalin, the U.S. Army paper Yank reported about Potsdam, “was easily the greatest drawing card for soldiers’ interest that this galaxy of VIPs presents. And this was so before the rumor that Joe had Japan’s surrender in his hip pocket. Cpl. John Tuohy of Long Island, NY, who used to be a booker for Paramount Pictures and who now stands guard in front of the celebrity-packed Little White House, describes Stalin as ‘smaller than I expected him to be, but an immaculate man who wears beautiful uniforms.’”31 In the New York Times, the three victorious leaders conferring in the ruins near the German capital were described as “three men walking in a graveyard; they are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world.”32 And this included, of course, the fate of more than eleven million German-speaking peoples, many of whom had deep roots in areas now claimed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania.
Behind the bland rhetoric of Potsdam were sentiments expressed in far more brutal terms. Millions of Germans had already been driven from their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and East Prussia. Just before the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had reassured the Czechoslovak prime minister Fierlinger: “We won’t disturb you. Throw them out.”33
When Churchill told Stalin at Yalta that he was “not shocked at the idea of transferring millions of people by force,” Stalin reassured the British prime minister too: “There will be no more Germans [in Poland], for when our troops come in the Germans run away and no Germans are left.” Whereupon Churchill said: “Then there is the problem of how to handle them in Germany. We have killed six or seven million and probably will kill another million before the end of the war.” Stalin, who liked precise figures, wanted to know: “One or two?” Churchill: “Oh I am not proposing any limitations on them. So there should be room in Germany for some who will need to fill the vacancy.”34
A number of these Germans had been ardent Nazis, even war criminals. Many, perhaps even most, German civilians in the fringes of the German Reich had been well disposed towards the Nazi Party and its local affiliates, especially in the Sudetenland, where Germans, despite their superior wealth, felt that they had been treated by the Czechs as second-class citizens before 1938. Even so, many had held no truck with the Nazis. Some had been actively anti-Nazi. But neither Churchill nor Stalin was inclined to make such fine distinctions. All Germans had to go: criminals, Nazis, anti-Nazis, men, women, and children.
Population transfers, mass expulsions, and shifting borders were commonplace in the policies of Stalin and Hitler. But Churchill had a different precedent in mind: the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, when it was agreed to move Greek Muslims to Turkey and Greek Orthodox Turkish citizens to Greece. In fact, much of the exchange had already taken place by 1923, as it were spontaneously, as a consequence of the Greco-Turkish War. The official exchange was a relatively bloodless affair. But what happened in eastern and central Europe in 1945 and 1946 was on a wholly different scale. There was an exchange of a kind, to be sure: Poles from eastern Poland, which became part of the Ukraine, moved to Silesia, once part of Germany and now vacated by the Germans. But what really happened is that around eleven million people were kicked out of their homes, only very rarely in an orderly or humane manner.
Hans Graf von Lehndorff, the doctor from K?nigsberg who believed that humans behaved like savages because they had turned away from God, tried at one point to leave his bombed, burned-out, thoroughly looted native city by foot. He reckoned that squeezing himself into a westbound train, usually a coal or cattle car, was too dangerous. And so he walked in the cold rain through “a land without people”:
[past] unharvested fields . . . bomb craters, uprooted trees, army vehicles in ditches, and burned out villages. I looked for some shelter from the rain and the wind in a broken down house. I felt something moving. There was a sound of scraping on the brick floor. A few people in tatters were standing about staring into space. Among them were three children, who scrutinized me with some hostility. Apparently they had tried to get away from K?nigsberg too and got stuck here. Seized by the Russians, they weren’t allowed to go anywhere, neither forward nor back. The last thing they ate were a few potatoes from a Russian truck that made a temporary halt. I didn’t ask what price had been extracted. From the way they talked, it was clear that the women had to pay once again. My God, who can still derive any satisfaction from such ghosts?35
Far worse things happened. But this story, more than many other tales of sadistic violence, murder, and starvation, tells us something about the sense of helplessness of people who suddenly have no home. They could go neither forward, nor back; they were stuck in limbo in a depopulated land which was no longer theirs.
Lehndorff was right to be wary of trains. Not only would one be stuck for days in overloaded goods wagons, pressed together with many others, with no food, drink, or sanitary facilities, exposed to all weather, but one was liable to be taken away to forced labor camps, or at the very least to be robbed on the way. Paul L?be, a social democrat journalist arrested before by the Nazi regime, described what this was like on a trip through Silesia:
After the Russians disconnected the locomotive, we were detained for twenty-two hours. Similar stoppages happened several times . . . The train was plundered four times, twice by Poles, twice by Russians. This was a simple procedure. As soon as the train slowed down because of rail damage, the robbers climbed onto the wagons, snatched our suitcases and rucksacks, and threw them onto the embankment. After half an hour they jumped off and collected the spoils.36
In this time of lawlessness, when policemen and other officials often joined the looters, railway stations were the most dangerous places to be. Gangs of robbers preyed on anyone unfortunate enough to have to spend the night there. Women of all ages were also liable to be raped by drunken soldiers in search of diversion. One of the horrors of homelessness and the total loss of rights is that others are given the license to do anything they wish with you.
In some respects, what was done to the Germans in Silesia, Prussia, and the Sudetenland was a grotesque mirror image of what Germans had done to others, particularly to the Jews. They were barred from many public places; they had to wear armbands with the letter N (for Niemiec, German); they were not allowed to buy eggs, fruit, milk, or cheese; and they could not marry Poles.
Of course, this parallel has its limits. A friend of Ernst Jünger, the conservative writer and diarist, wrote to him from her prison in Czechoslovakia: “The tragedy of what is happening in the German, as well as the Hungarians parts of Czechoslovakia can only be compared to what happened to the Jews.”37 This is nonsense. There is still much dispute about the number of Germans who died in the deportations. Some German historians have claimed that more than one million died. Counterclaims have been made for roughly half that number.38 Which is bad enough. There was, however, no systematic plan to exterminate all Germans. And sometimes, native Silesian or Sudeten Germans were given the choice to become Polish or Czech citizens, not an option that was ever open to Jews under Nazi rule.
German women, subjected to random sexual assaults from Soviet troops, Poles, or Czechs, described themselves as “Freiwild,” fair game. That is pretty much what all homeless people without any rights become. Silesia was known in the summer of 1945 as “the wild west.” The provisional head of the new Polish administration of , formerly the German city Danzig, spoke of a “gold rush”: “On all roads and with all means of transport, everyone from all regions of Poland is heading for this Klondike, and their sole aim is not work but robbery and looting.”39 German houses, German firms, German assets of any kind, including the Germans themselves, were ripe for the plucking.
The ethnic cleansing of 1945 went further, however, than deportations, or turning people into slaves. Herbert Hupka, a half-Jewish inhabitant of Ratibor (Racibórz) in Upper Silesia, recalls being marched in the rain past his old school, where his father had taught Latin and Greek. He noticed a heap of torn and soggy books, by Thomas Mann, Alfred D?blin, Franz Werfel, and other authors who had been banned by the Nazis. The books had been confiscated by the Nazi government and tossed into the Jewish cemetery. Somehow they ended up in the street, in Hupka’s words, “ownerless, lying in front of the Gymnasium.”40
What was being systematically destroyed in 1945 was German culture, along with many of the people who lived it. Old parts of the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some of whose great cities—Breslau, Danzig, K?nigsberg, Lemberg, Brünn, Czernowitz, Prague—were centers of German high culture, often carried by German-speaking Jews, now had to be “de-Germanized.” Streets and shop signs were painted over, place names changed, German libraries pillaged, monuments demolished, inscriptions, some of them very old, erased from churches and other public buildings; the German language itself had to be abolished. A report from Prague in Yank noted:
If you ask directions in German (in case you don’t speak Czech), you’ll get nothing but a fishy stare . . . It’s not that the Czechs don’t understand. German has been practically a second language with them for years. A Czech who was forced to work for the Germans in a Prague factory . . . puts it this way: “Please do not speak German here. That is the language of the beast.”41
There were various motives for erasing not just Germans and their culture from eastern and central Europe, but even memories of their presence. For communists it was a revolutionary project to get rid of a hated bourgeoisie. For noncommunist nationalists, such as President Edvard Bene?, it was a revenge for treachery: “Our Germans . . . have betrayed our state, betrayed our democracy, betrayed us, betrayed humaneness, and betrayed mankind.”42 A highly placed cleric in the Czechoslovak Catholic Church declared: “Once in a thousand years the time has come to settle accounts with the Germans, who are evil and to whom the commandment to love thy neighbor therefore does not apply.”43 But the sentiment all shared was articulated by Poland’s first communist leader, W?adis?aw Gomu?ka, at a Central Committee meeting of the Polish Workers’ Party: “We must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multi-national ones.”44
In this way Hitler’s project, based on ideas going back to the first decades of the twentieth century, or even well before, of ethnic purity and nationhood, was completed by people who hated Germany. Even if we take all the horrors of postwar ethnic cleansing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania into account, we shouldn’t forget that the real destroyers of German culture in the center of Europe were the Germans themselves. By annihilating the central European Jews, many of whom were fiercely loyal to German high culture, they started the process. Kicking the Germans out after the war was the quickest way for Poles and Czechs to finish the job.
? ? ?
IT WAS NOT OUT OF LOVE for Germany that so many Jewish survivors found themselves in German DP camps in the summer and fall of 1945; it was because they felt safer in Germany, the country that had just done its best to murder them all—safer, at any rate, than in some of their native countries, such as Lithuania and Poland. At least they were unlikely to be persecuted in the DP camps under American and British guard. Tens of thousands of Jews who had survived the camps in Poland, fought with the partisans, or returned from exile in the Soviet Union, streamed into Germany during the summer. Naturally, even if the DP camps in Germany offered a temporary refuge, they were still far from home. But what was “home” anymore? Most survivors had no home, except perhaps in the imagination. Home had been destroyed. As some DPs put it: “We are not in Bavaria . . . we are nowhere.”45
The remnants of European Jewry were in many cases too battered to take care of themselves, and too frightened and angry to accept the help of others, especially if the helpers were Gentiles. The DP camps, which Jews usually shared with non-Jews to begin with, and even with former Nazis in some notorious cases of bureaucratic muddle and indifference, were squalid beyond belief. How could people who had been treated worse than the lowest of beasts suddenly recover their self-respect? It was one thing for General Patton, not known for his philo-Semitism, to call the Jewish survivors “lower than animals.” But even tough Palestinian Jews who arrived in Germany to help them could not hide their shock. In Hanoch Bartov’s autobiographical novel Brigade, a soldier of the Jewish Brigade remarks: “I kept telling myself that these were the people we had spoken of for so many years—but I was so far removed from them that the electric wire might have separated us.”46 An American soldier wrote a letter home about his encounter with a Polish Jew “fresh out of Dachau.” The man “was crying like a child,” cowering in the corner of a public toilet in Munich. “I didn’t have to ask him why he cried; the answers were all the same anyway, and go like this: parents tortured to death; wife gassed to death and children starved to death, or any combination of such three.”47
If any people were in desperate need of a heroic narrative, it was the Jews, the worst victims among many victims—something, by the way, that was not yet widely acknowledged. The full horror of the Jewish genocide was still incomprehensible even to many Jews themselves. Dr. Salomon Schonfeld, chief Orthodox rabbi of England, reporting on the conditions of Jewish survivors in Poland in December 1945, could still come up with the following sentence: “Polish Jews agree that death at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] (with bathrooms, gas and some Red Cross services) was more humane than anywhere else.”48 Humane!
An attempt had already been made during the war in the Jewish press in Palestine to equate the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 with Masada, hallowed place of the suicidal last stand of the Jewish Zealots against the Romans in 73 CE. The headline of Yediot Ahronot on May 16, 1943, read: “The Masada of Warsaw Has Fallen—the Nazis Have Set Fire to the Remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto.” In fact, the Ghetto Uprising only really came into its own as a founding myth of the new state of Israel in the 1970s. Yet there were attempts immediately after the war to restore Jewish morale with heroic gestures. And they were all tightly connected with Zionism, a dream of a home promoted to inspire a broken people. Mention has already been made of the Jewish Brigade rolling into Germany from Italy with trucks announcing: “Achtung! Die Juden kommen!” (“Watch out! The Jews are coming!”). On July 25 Jewish representatives from camp committees all over western Germany issued a proclamation demanding entry to Palestine. The place they chose for this stirring event was the same Munich beer hall where Hitler had staged his failed coup in 1923.
The link between Jews in the Holy Land and the Diaspora was still tenuous, hence the need to compare Warsaw and Masada, as though Mordechai Anielewicz and the others had died in the ghetto for the good of Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel). But Zionist youth groups had actively forged those links during the war, and afterwards too, in the camps, where Jewish survivors were quickly organized in kibbutzim. Major Irving Heymont, the U.S. official in charge of the Landsberg DP camp, was Jewish himself. Even so, he was unsure what to make of the kibbutzniks in his camp: “To add to my problems, I learned today that the young and best elements in the camp are organized into kibbutzim. It appears that a Kibbutz is a closely knit, self-disciplined group with an intense desire to emigrate to Palestine. There . . . they intend to organize their lives along the lines of idealistic collectivism. Each Kibbutz is very clannish and little interested in camp life.”49
Quite a few survivors actually dreamed of the United States as a new home. The streets in F?hrenwald, one of the largest Jewish DP camps in Bavaria, were given such alluring names as “New York,” “Michigan,” or “Wisconsin Avenue.”50 But however attractive, the United States did not welcome what was left of European Jewry, certainly not straight after the war. And it was the youth, the relative fitness, the discipline, the high morale, the idealism, the stress on sports, agricultural work, and self-defense, that gave the young Zionists from central Europe such cachet among the survivors. Ten days after the German defeat, Rabbi Levy, the British army chaplain, wrote a letter to the London Jewish Chronicle praising the Zionists in Belsen: “Shall I ever forget . . . those meetings within the huts when we sat and sang Hebrew songs? Will the world believe that such a spirit of obstinacy and tenacity is possible? Two days ago I met a group of young Zionists from Poland. They were living in one of the filthiest of the blocks but their own corner was spotless.”51
The toughest of the tough guys in Belsen was a small, wiry man named Josef Rosensaft. He fit the image of the Jewish hero. Born in 1911 in Poland, he rebelled as a young man against the religious strictures of his Hasidic family and became a left-wing Zionist. In July 1943, he was rounded up with his wife and stepson in the ghetto and shoved into a train bound for Auschwitz. Somehow he managed to escape from the train and jumped into the Vistula River under machine-gun fire. Rearrested in the ghetto, he managed to escape once more, only to be caught again and sent to Birkenau, the death camp connected to Auschwitz. After two months of slave work in a stone quarry, he was transported to another camp, from which he escaped in March 1944. Captured again in April, he was tortured for several months in Birkenau, without revealing who had helped him to escape. By way of a stint in Dora-Mittelbau, where prisoners were worked to death in dank underground tunnels constructing V-2 rockets for the German military, he ended up in Bergen-Belsen.
Rosensaft was not a member of the educated urban Jewish elite. He could only speak Yiddish, but that was not the only reason why he insisted on Yiddish as the language of negotiation with the Allied authorities—much to the annoyance of his British interlocutors. It was a matter of pride. As the leader of the Central Committee of liberated Belsen Jews, he wanted Jews to be treated as a distinct people with a common home, which in his mind could only be Palestine. Jews needed to be separated from prisoners of other nationalities, should be allowed to run their own affairs, and should get ready to move on to the land of the Jews.52
Similar sentiments were voiced in other camps too. Major Irving Heymont was often irritated by the demands of the Jewish committee in Landsberg. But in a letter home, he quotes from a speech by one of the camp representatives, an agronomist from Lithuania named Dr. J. Oleiski, which he finds “very illuminating.” Dr. Oleiski recalls his time in the ghetto when the Jews, “looking through the fences over the Vilna to Kovno and other Lithuanian towns,” sang “I Want to See My Home Again.” But today, Oleiski continued,