XI

TENEBRAE

Part IV

Europe in Eclipse, 1914–1945

KATYN

ON 5 March 1940, Stalin signed an order authorizing the NKVD to shoot over 26,000 Allied prisoners-of-war. The prisoners, who had been captured during joint German-Soviet operations in Poland the previous September, were being held in three separate Soviet camps—at Kozielsk, Oshtakovo, and Starobielsk. They were nearly all Polish reserve officers—doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, policemen, priests, and one woman—who had been separated out from a much larger pool of POWs in the USSR. They were driven in small groups to secret killing-grounds, bound and blindfolded, shot in the head, and buried in mass graves. The operation was concluded on 6 June.

During those same months, in pursuance of a secret clause in the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Demarcation, the Nazi SS and Soviet NKVD were co-operating closely. Hidden from the outside world, both occupying powers conducted a series of parallel massacres and deportations.2 Whilst the West was transfixed by the ‘Phoney War’, their Polish allies were being systematically and cynically murdered.

In 1941, when the Nazi-Soviet Pact collapsed and Stalin signed an alliance with the exiled Polish Government, the Poles sought news of their missing officers. In one exchange in the Kremlin, Stalin told General Sikorski that they must have fled. ‘But where could they flee to?’ ‘Well, to Manchuria for instance.’

In April 1943, during the outbreak of Warsaw’s Ghetto Rising, the Nazi authorities in Poland released a newsfilm showing the bodies of c.4,500 murdered Polish officers unearthed in the Katyh Forest near Smolensk (they had found the victims taken from Kozielsk). They said it was a Soviet crime. The Soviets said that it was a Nazi provocation. The exiled Polish Government appealed to the International Red Cross for an enquiry. For this, they were denounced as ‘Fascist collaborators’ by the Kremlin, which promptly withdrew diplomatic recognition. One international commission which visited the site in 1943 under German auspices supported the German claims. A second commission in 1944, under Soviet auspices, supported Soviet claims.4

The Katyń Massacres presented a major embarrassment for British policy. Whilst playing host to the Polish Government, London was deeply committed to the alliance with Stalin. An official but unpublished British report had concluded that Soviet guilt was a ‘near certainty’. But the superior moral purpose of the Allied cause could be put at risk. So every effort was made to suppress the facts. Official agencies encouraged belief in the Soviet version. War censorship kept contrary accounts out of circulation.5 The situation was summarized in confidential SOE files: ‘The official line in the UK has been to pretend that the whole affair was a fake … Any other view would have been distasteful to the public, since it could be inferred that we were allied to a power guilty of the same sort of atrocities as the Germans.’

More surprisingly, little honest information was forthcoming in peacetime. The Katyń murders were raised by Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal; but the charges against Germans were soon dropped, and the case was not pursued. Throughout the Cold War, Polish emigres in London were prevented from erecting a public memorial; and British officers were forbidden to attend the annual services of remembrance. Despite the unequivocal findings of a US Congressional Committee in the 1950s, a British Foreign Office minister was still proclaiming in 1989 that the rights and wrongs were unclear. In 1990–1, when Soviet responsibility was confirmed by President Gorbachev in part, and then by President Yeltsin in full, the British War Crimes Act was carefully designed to exclude Allied criminals from its purview. Several of the alleged NKVD murderers were reported alive and well in Russia.7

In the USSR and in communist-ruled Poland, ‘Katyń’ remained a non-subject for exactly fifty years.8 A major Soviet memorial to Nazi barbarity was erected at a nearby Byelorussian village called Khatyń, to which millions of visitors were taken in a calculated policy of disinformation.The Black Book of Polish Censorship classed Katyń as an event which could not be mentioned, even to blame the Nazis.9 Possession of the Lista Katyńska, a roll-call of the victims published abroad, was a criminal offence.10

Throughout that half-century, ‘Katyń’ offered a litmus test for the professional honesty of historians and their grasp of the realities of the Grand Alliance. It was by no means the most extreme of Soviet acts of violence. But it was the issue par excellence which forced commentators to choose between the growing weight of evidence and the self-serving statements of the victorious Western and Soviet governments. Those who chose to tell the truth stood to be dismissed as ‘unscientific’.11

By the early summer of 1940 the Nazi war machine was ready for its assault on the Western alliance. It was essential to strike while German morale was high, and before British rearmament delivered results. The campaign was based on three related strategies—an operation in the Low Countries to clear the lines, the major land operation against France, and an air operation against Britain to neutralize the Royal Navy and to keep the Allies apart. Once again, German performance exceeded all expectations. From the merciless bombing of Rotterdam on 10 May to the surrender of Belgium on the 28th, the conquest of the Low Countries took 18 days. From the crossing of the French frontier on 14 May to the fall of Paris on 16 June, the defeat of France took less than five weeks.

The fall of France was one of those bone-chilling events which mark the end of an era. France had been regarded as a major military power for three centuries. The victory of 1918 was supposed to have redeemed the disaster of 1870. Yet the French army, with British and Polish support, was now knocked out by the Nazi Wehrmacht in less time than Germany and Russia together had taken to knock out Poland. 1940 showed that 1870 was no aberration. The German invaders held no overall numerical superiority, not even in armoured vehicles; but their panzer divisions waged this second Blitzkrieg with great dash and vigour. The impregnable Maginot Line, which did not reach into Belgium, was simply bypassed; and the panzers drove a steel column between the British in the north and the main French grouping in the centre. When the outflanked French forces withdrew, they were pursued by an opponent moving with far greater speed and firepower. At Arras, a brigadier called Charles de Gaulle led the only significant armoured counter-attack. But the confusion was universal. The BEF was totally beaten, and stranded on the dunes of Dunkirk. The 51st (Highland) Infantry sold itself dearly on the cliffs of Sainte-Valérie-en-Caux. Death, capture, or evacuation were the only alternatives.

By mid-June, when Paris was facing a repeat of the terrible siege of 70 years before, the French political establishment snapped. Unlike their Polish counterparts, who had refused to treat with invaders, the French leaders took the initiative in proposing a settlement. Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, sent an underling to the symbolic carriage of Compiègne to sign the capitulation. France was to be disarmed; 2 million French soldiers were to be interned for work in the Reich; an autonomous government, based at Vichy in Auvergne, would be allowed to rule the southern half of the country, on condition that Alsace-Lorraine was returned to Germany, and northern France subjected to German military occupation. When Hitler came to receive the salute of his legions on the Champs-élysées, he was master of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Pripet. A few assorted British, Polish, and Free French forces had scrambled back across the Channel; and a new defiant English voice, Churchill’s, speaking in execrable French, crackled over the air waves: ‘Une nation qui produit trois cents sortes de fromage ne peut pas périr.’ General de Gaulle declared: ‘France has lost a battle, but not the war.’ [EMU]

Compared to the mighty conquest of France, the German air offensive against Britain must have seemed a secondary matter. But it proved to be one of the Nazis’ costliest failures. Entrusted to Reichsmarschall Goring, it consisted of a mounting crescendo of nightly bombing raids against ports and factories, the so-called ‘Blitz’, and of accompanying air battles aimed at gaining supremacy over southern England and the Channel. It used a large fleet of 1,330 Heinkel and Junkers bombers, operating from bases in northern France and supported by packs of Messerschmitt and Focke-Wolf fighters. It was planned as the prelude to ‘Operation Sealion’, the invasion of Britain, whose details, including the arrest of some 1,100 prominent personalities, were well advanced. It was opposed by RAF fighter squadrons equipped with Hurricanes and Spitfires, roughly 10 per cent of which were manned by Polish, Czech, and Free French pilots. (The top ace proved to be a Czech pilot flying with the Polish 303 Squadron.) The raid on Coventry, which missed the tank factories but levelled the cathedral and 500 houses, was a minor event compared to the subsequent exploits of the RAF over Germany. But in Allied lore it became one of the prime symbols of Nazi barbarism. The Battle of Britain, which was fought over four months, culminated on 15 September—a day when the RAF’s reserves were almost depleted but when Göring reluctantly decided that the Luftwaffe’s still greater losses could no longer be sustained. The air offensive, and the invasion of Britain, were postponed sine die. ‘Never in the field of human conflict’, Churchill told the Commons, ‘has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ After the débâcle of Dunkirk, this was Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’.

EMU

IN the summer of 1940 the German Reichsbank drew up plans for making the Reichsmark the common currency of an economic union throughout German-occupied Europe. Since the Nazis never succeeded in establishing a stable political order, the plans remained a dead letter.

A second attempt at monetary union was made thirty years later, under the auspices of the European Commission. Post-war arrangements based on the gold-backed US dollar were ailing; and the currencies of the Common Market, especially the Deutschmark, were uncomfortably strong. First the Barre report of 1969, then a committee headed by Pierre Werner of Luxembourg, drew up plans for full EMU (European Monetary Union) by 1980. In the meantime, a mechanism nicknamed ‘the Snake’ was to hold the exchange rates of member currencies in line both with each other and with the dollar. The system was quickly disarmed by the USA’s abandonment of the dollar’s gold standard in 1971 and by the Common Market’s acceptance of Great Britain, which soon left the Snake. Only five of a possible nine currencies held to a much-modified Snake in the 1970s.1

The third attempt was launched in 1977 by a speech from the British President of the European Commission, Roy Jenkins. His initiative bore fruit two years later, with the introduction of the EMS (European Monetary System) together with a new exchange rate mechanism (ERM) and its own supporting currency, the écu (see p. 1086). The system was greatly strengthened in the 1980s by France’s policy of the franc fort linked to the DM, and by the Single European Act (1986), which attracted the pound sterling into the ERM. All seemed to be going well until the reunification of Germany in 1990, and the fateful decision to exchange the worthless East German Ostmark at parity with the Deutschmark. After that, high German interest rates put weaker currencies at a disadvantage, forcing them either to devalue beneath the permitted limits or to float outside the system completely. By August 1993 only the DM and the Dutch guilder remained within the narrow band of the ERM, described by earlier proponents of the Maastricht Treaty as the ‘glide-path to EMU’ (see pp. 1126–7).

In 1940–5, despite Germany’s military victories, a subordinate Reichsbank was never strong enough to put its monetary plans into operation. After 1969, an independent Bundesbank was always strong enough to put its own immediate priorities first. One can only conclude that economic plans conceived in the absence of an effective political framework are always doomed to failure.

Britain’s victory in the air was crucial on three scores. It gave the Allied cause an impregnable base, where the vastly superior land forces of the Continent could never be brought to bear. Secondly, by turning Britain into ‘the world’s most unsinkable aircraft carrier’, it secured a platform for the sensational growth of Allied air power—the decisive element of the war in the West. Thirdly, on the diplomatic front, it gained a breathing-space within which the latent alliance of the English-speaking world could mature. Churchill, who became Prime Minister on 7 May at the height of the French crisis, had strong American connections and a strong determination to involve the Americans as soon as possible. But in autumn 1940 Britain represented the last foothold of the Allied cause in Europe. Without the preservation of Great Britain by the RAF, the USA could never have intervened in the European War. As it was, American assistance kept Great Britain financially and psychologically afloat during ‘the darkest days’. In September 1940, old US destroyers were traded for the American rights to build military bases on British islands in the Caribbean. This was extended in March 1941 in the wider principles of the Lend-Lease Bill. Germany had good reason to complain.

The war at sea was not resolved so quickly. Germany mounted a determined challenge to Britain’s naval supremacy, with a line of ultra-modern ‘pocket battleships’ and a growing fleet of U-boats. The first round saw the British veteran, Royal Oak, sunk at her berth in Scapa flow, and the German GrafSpee harried to her doom in the River Plate. Then the Bismarck and the Tirpitz took to sea. The former, having destroyed her pursuer, HMS Hood, with one spectacular shot, was disabled by an aerial torpedo, then sunk by the pack. The latter was chased into a Norwegian fiord. As in the First World War, however, Germany’s chief effort was put into the submarine campaign. After the French ports of Brest and Nantes fell into Nazi hands, the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ raged for three years (see below).

In the Mediterranean, Allied interests clashed with those of the Axis powers over control of North Africa and the Suez Canal. Matters were brought to a head in May 1940, when Mussolini declared war and invaded the French Alps. The Italian base in Tripoli was surrounded by the British in Palestine and Egypt and by the French in Tunis and Algiers; and it soon required the dispatch of a German Afrika Korps for its sustenance. The 2,000-mile shipping lane between Gibraltar and Alexandria was only protected by Britain’s half-way station at Malta, which heroically survived unending blockade and bombardment. Yet the most tragic action of the early years took place between the Western Powers. When Paris fell to the Nazis, Britain demanded the surrender of the entire French fleet, a large part of which was berthed in the Algerian base of Mers-el-Kabir. When the French admiral declined, on 3 July 1940 the Royal Navy executed a merciless order to destroy all the French ships and their crews at anchor. Attention then turned to the Libyan desert. Faced with the advance of the Afrika Korps on one side and with growing Jewish terrorism in Palestine on the other, Britain’s hold on Egypt remained precarious until the victory at the second battle of El Alamein on 23 October 1942. Anglo-American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria in the following month.

In the mean time, with Hitler preoccupied in the West, Stalin renewed his aggressions in the East. After the Finnish fiasco, he reverted to what the New York ‘Times had aptly described as ‘playing the hyena to Hitler’s lion’. This time his targets lay in the three Baltic States, and in parts of Romania, which he conveniently seized whilst the world was diverted by the fate of France.

In the Baltics, the Soviet Union had mounted a concerted campaign of subversion. Then, in June 1940, communist cells in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were activated to call for Soviet ‘assistance’. Moscow demanded the admission of the Red Army on the pretext of Soviet security interests. In the ensuing uproar, the governments collapsed; the Red Army marched in; pre-packaged plebiscites were staged with foregone results; and the Stalinist Terror set to work with unrivalled ferocity. Amongst the massacres and the deportations, an arrangement was reached to transfer the entire German population of the Baltic States to areas of German-occupied Poland. It is hard for Westerners to grasp, but from the viewpoint of Tallinn, Riga, or Vilnius, the growing possibility of a Nazi advance felt like blessed liberation from Liberation. In the case of Romania, Stalin counted more on direct German help. Romania’s fragile freedom depended largely on the continued export of oil to Germany. So when Moscow made demands and Berlin advised compliance, there was no easy way for Bucharest to refuse. On 27 June 1940, ten days after the Baltic States, the Romanian provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia were grabbed amidst fanfares of their ‘reunion with the Soviet fatherland’. Romania, humiliated, was left smarting for revenge, [MOLDOVA] [TSCHERNOWITZ]

By the autumn of 1940 the benefits of the Nazi-Soviet partnership could be weighed; and it was obvious that Hitler was gaining more than Stalin. The industrial and strategic value of France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia was much greater than that of the Soviet conquests. Though the Führer was held off by the wily Franco, whom he had met at Hendaye, the Fascist bloc commanded the greater part of the Continent. What is more, Germany had made its colossal gains at minimal cost: a protracted contest with the West had been avoided. From Stalin’s point of view, Hitler’s success was beginning to look menacing. After France, there were only two destinations left for German expansion: one was the traditional Russian hunting-ground in the Balkans; the other was the Soviet Union itself.

The tensions surfaced when Molotov visited Berlin in November 1940. He behaved with excruciating crudity, emitting a torrent of tactless demands. One assumes that he had been ordered to test the limits of German tolerance. When the Führer admitted that Germany was engaged in ‘a life and death struggle’ with Britain, Molotov said, ‘Yes, Germany is fighting for its life and Britain for Germany’s death.’ Both sides suspected that the partnership was doomed. It is not known exactly what instructions Stalin gave to the Red Army; but on 18 December Hitler issued Instruction 21 for the preparation of Operation Barbarossa.

The Balkan crisis of April 1941 had its roots in Mussolini’s blunders. The Italian troops who had advanced from Albania into northern Greece were being mauled by the doughty Greeks; and the Duce was in need of another German rescue. Apart from that, the royal Yugoslav Government was being hounded from within and without. After the Regency had tried to sign an agreement with Germany, it’ was deposed by the military. When the Wehrmacht moved in, the country fell apart. After 11 days of fighting, the Germans were left in occupation of a huge and hostile territory. The Yugoslav Government fled into exile in London. Croatia declared itself an independent republic. Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Italians all took chunks of the carcass. Underground armies proliferated. The terrible UstaSi or Croat ‘insurrectionaries’ were set on ethnic cleansing of their Serbian minority, deploying the full fascist repertoire of death camps and mass executions. The royalist Četniks, who led the Yugoslav resistance, were increasingly opposed by a rival communist movement led by Josip Broz, ‘Tito’ (1892–1980). The fierce determination of the Yugoslav partisans to kill the invaders was only exceeded by their proclivity for killing each other, [NOYADES]

Further south, in Greece, the Germans carried all before them. Athens was occupied; a British force which had tried to hold Crete was overwhelmed by the end of May.

Stalin’s reaction to the Balkan crisis showed no signs of solidarity with Hitler. One day before the German attack, on 5 April, he had signed a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia. On 13 April he signed a vital neutrality pact with Japan. The USSR was clearing the decks for major action in Europe. On 15 May, Zhukov is known to have suggested that the Red Army forestall the Wehrmacht by attacking first and disrupting German preparations..

MOLDOVA

FIVE young harvesters are sitting on a rug, eating their lunch on a rise amidst the golden cornfields. A girl in a bright red headscarf has spread out the newspaper on her knees, and is reading to her smiling companions. They are sharing a flagon of wine or water, a bowl of bread or rice, and a huge red water-melon. Acres of standing wheat and sheaves roll down to the green valley and to the wooded hills beyond. In the foreground a gleaming green motorcycle is parked; in the distance a combine is reaping. The location, as indicated by the pattern of the rug, is Moldavia (now Moldova). The date could be any time after 1940, when Moldavia was annexed to the USSR. The painting, by Alexei Vasilev, is called They are talking about us in Pravda’.1 (See Plate 70.)

This is hardly great art. But the technique is competent; and the effect is pleasant to the eye. Without indulging any crude political gesture, Vasilev has succeeded in mobilizing all the main elements of Socialist Realism—or ‘revolutionary romanticism’ as Zhdanov called it—as decreed by the Party authorities in 1934. He produces a picture which, to quote Stalin’s phrase, is ‘national in form, and socialist in content’. The narod-nost’ or national spirit of the work is implicit in the link between these Moldavian peasants and their admirers in Moscow. Its partiinost’ or ‘devotion to the party’ is explicit in their delight at the mention of their work in the Party paper. Its klassovost’ or ‘class-consciousness’ is underlined by their peasant clothes and physical labour. Its ideinost’ or ‘ideological character’ is manifest in their optimistic and politically correct attitudes. Itstipichnost’or ‘representative message’ comes over loud and clear: happy workers plus modern machinery make for high productivity and the welfare of the masses. It is overtly socialist, and it looks quite realistic.

The fact is, all the most important realities of life in the Soviet Union have been systematically falsified. In reality, the Moldavian peasantry had recently been robbed both of its land and its culture. They were forced to live and work in collectives, whose surplus was taken away by the Soviet state. Thousands upon thousands had been driven to their death in the Gulag, or shot as so-called saboteurs. Their language had been arbitrarily transferred to the Cyrillic alphabet, so that Soviet-educated children could no longer read pre-war Romanian or Moldavian literature. They were denied all contact with the western half of their province in Romania, which they were told was a foreign country. They were beaten, beggared, and bullied. And the world was told they were stunningly content.

For the impartial viewer, the question posed is this: how much aesthetic value can art retain when, in human and moral terms, its principal purpose is fraudulent?

TSCHERNOWITZ

THE Soviet army’s entry into northern Bukovina in June 1940 was the first step in the destruction of a civilization. Conquered by Austria from the Ottomans in 1775, this corner of old Moldavia had passed a century and a half as the furthest outpost of the Habsburg realms. It was then taken over for twenty years by Romania. Its capital city, Tschernowitz/Cernati. on the Prut, was the centre of a polyglot, multi-denominational, hierarchical society where the imperial German culture of Mitteleuropa had lain like a transparent sheet over the rich layers of local Jewish, Romanian, Polish, and Ruthenian life. After fifty years of Soviet levelling it has been left, as Chernovtsy, a drab provincial backwater of Ukraine.

Old Bukovina has vanished. But it can still be glimpsed through the nostalgia of an exile who returned in the last months of Soviet rule, having been raised in the 1920s amidst ‘futile attempts to maintain the dignity of a German ruling class in the border marches of a defunct empire’:

The old houses are still painted in an Austrian egg-yolk yellow, alternated with an imperial Russian pea green. But the Bukovinian melting-pot has gone … all have been killed or repatriated, and their places taken by stolid, cabbage-eating Ukrainians. The wild, colorful, murderous variegation … has been replaced by the sub-Stalinist uniformity of Chernovtsy. The market in the city square, where ‘under a fragrant cloud of garlic’ Jews, Armenians, Lipovanians, and Germans haggled for sheepskins, sharp cheese, rotgut, and tobacco, cooking oil and cowdung, is now a concrete-covered parade ground, hung with a gigantic billboard of Lenin. The cosmopolitan border world of Austria-Hungary and tsarist Russia has been transformed into ‘an immense

From Yugoslavia, the German battle divisions were transported to the Reich’s eastern borders. In early June 1941, the backwoods and byways from East Prussia to Romania were filled with the bustle of German bivouacs and the revving of tank engines. Every Polish peasant, and most of the world’s intelligence services, knew that Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union. The only person who didn’t appear to know was Stalin, who ordered that border provocations should be avoided at all costs.

In the absence of the necessary documentation, the circumstances have never been clarified. Conventional wisdom has usually held either that Stalin could not comprehend the depths of Hitler’s treachery or that he was playing for time to complete his defences. Neither seems likely. One did not have to be an expert to realize that the German war machine had nowhere to go but eastwards. Hitler’s earlier thinking had foreseen all-out war in 1942 or 1943; but he had now to decide either to follow the momentum of success or to call a halt and risk losing the initiative. For the ex-corporal and his gang of adventurers there was hardly a moment’s hesitation; their urge was to ride on to glory or to Götterdämmerung.

As for Stalin, the master of secrecy, one can only speculate. However, as the Germans would soon discover, the Soviets had not been idle. Huge military concentrations had been repositioned in vulnerable forward areas; the warplanes of the Soviet air force stood exposed on forward airfields; frontier cordons had been withdrawn; roads and bridges had been repaired to facilitate the movement of heavy traffic. The Red Army’s stance was one of imminent attack. Everything points to the probability that Stalin had been acting dumb in order to conceal his preparations for a surprise offensive against the Reich.76 If so, he was beaten to the draw. The Wehrmacht struck at dawn on 22 June.

The Nazi Supremacy in Europe (June 1941-July 1943). Operation Barbarossa, which took the German army deep into the Soviet Union, launched the central military and political play of the Second World War in Europe. It opened up the front which was to account for 75 per cent of German war casualties, and which must be judged the main scene of Hitler’s ultimate defeat. It came astonishingly close to total success, and for two or three years vastly extended the territory of the Nazis’ New Order. The offensive of 1941 carried the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow; the offensive of 1942 led them to the Volga and the Caucasus (see Map 26).

The initial attack of June 1941 had spectacular results. One hundred and fifty-six divisions, consisting of over 3 million men, crossed the Ribbentrop-Molotov line and caught the Red Army entirely out of position. The Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground in a couple of days. Whole Soviet armies were surrounded, and vast numbers of prisoners taken. Panzer columns raced forward at unprecedented speed. In the Baltic States, in Byelorussia, and Ukraine they were cheered as liberators. German soldiers were greeted by local peasants offering the traditional welcome of bread and salt. In Lwów, where the retreating NKVD had massacred many thousands of its political prisoners, a public demonstration openly declared for Ukrainian independence. By December, despite the lack of winter equipment, forward German units had entered Russia and laid siege to Leningrad. They caught the Moscow Kremlin in their binoculars, before (on the same day as Pearl Harbor) Stalin’s secret reserve of fresh Siberian divisions arrived to drive them back. [SMOLENSK]

In 1942 the German Command chose to direct its advance along the southern steppes. Their priority was to seize the good black earth of Ukraine, and the distant oil of Baku. Yet they were meeting ever more effective resistance; and the retreating Soviets had stripped the land bare. The industrial areas were empty; the factories had been dismantled and removed to points east, and the working population evacuated; the great dam of Dniepropetrovsk, pride of the Five-Year Plans, had been dynamited. German soldiers scaled Mount Elbruz. When the second winter set in, they were approaching the Volga at Stalingrad.

SMOLENSK

IN July 1941 the Wehrmacht captured Smolensk with such speed that the I local Communist Party house and all its contents fell into German hands. The Smolensk archives contained detailed files on all aspects of communist activity since the Revolution, including Stalin’s purges and the Great Terror. Carried off to Germany, they were duly captured for a second time in 1945 by the American army, and taken to the USA. They were far smaller than the vast collections of Nazi documents which fell into American hands and which would form the core of the American-run Document Centre in Berlin. But the Soviet authorities had never granted free access to their state archives, let alone to secret Party records. So the windfall from Smolensk had inestimable value. Historical studies based on its files penetrated the fog of Soviet propaganda and Western theorizing, and provided one of the first authentic glimpses into the true nature of communist rule.1

Many Sovietologists and Soviet apologists, however, were not happy. Having framed their fantasies in the knowledge that little or no primary evidence was available, they had no wish to confront hard facts. Hence, when the scholar who first analysed the Smolensk archives concluded that Stalin had perpetrated ‘an almost continuous purge’ in the 1930s, he was promptly denounced. ‘This view’, the arch-apologist could glibly declare, ‘is weakly supported by the available primary evidence.’ Such sophistry often passed for science until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Archives have always attracted those who wish to manipulate the writing of history. In 1992 the Russian authorities revealed the existence of the so-called Osobii Arkhif or ‘Special Archive’, which the Soviet regime had kept separate from all other records. Its full contents were still to be determined; but in addition to the Goebbels diaries, they certainly included such items as the records from France’s Sûreté Nationale and from Poland’s pre-war Dwójka or ‘Military intelligence’, even the papers of the British Expeditionary Force (1940) and of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It was said to contain all the missing collections of the Nazis’ RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). Apparently, Nazi archive-hunters had put their swag from all over Europe into various castles and cellars in Poland and eastern Germany, only to see it looted in turn by the Red Army. The Soviets repaid the loss of the Smolensk archive many times over. [METRYKA]

Still more intriguing is the possibility that parts of the captured Nazi archives were falsified after they fell into communist hands. In Warsaw, for example, the post-war communist Security Office (UB) inherited the contents of the city’s former Gestapo secretariat. Armed with the appropriate registers, codes, stationery, blank report forms, and official seals, it was a simple matter to amend the records. The UB had little difficulty providing documents to show that Poland’s resistance movement, the Home Army, had been run by Nazi collaborators.3

For fifty years, therefore, historians’ views of the mid-twentieth century have been given a one-sided slant by the one-sided nature of the documentation.4 But in the 1990s the hidden treasures of the ex-communist world were starting to restore the balance. In Germany, as the files of the East German Stasi were yielding their secrets, the Nazi files of the Berlin Document Centre were being prepared for transfer to the Federal Government. In Washington, congressional hearings were held to challenge the move.5 For, as the victors of the Second World War were only too well aware, ‘Power brings knowledge, and knowledge power’.

The German advance to the Volga extended the territory under Hitler’s control by an area equal to all the Nazi conquests in Western Europe. It gave him the Lebensraum of which he had dreamed. The lawless zone beyond the Reich now stretched out for more than 1,ooo miles. The Nazis, it transpired, had no intention of consulting the wishes of the inhabitants. There were to be no independent republics—only military government in the front-line regions, and Reichs-kommissariats run by the SS in the ‘Ostland’ and Ukraine. The national movement in Ukraine, which in 1917–18 had been given full German support, was to be crushed. Through wilful stupidity, the Nazis spurned all the chances to win the population to their side. Through sheer arrogance, they turned their largest asset into an unbearable burden. Their savagery knew no bounds. They gave their new subjects no option but to resist. One hundred peasants were to be executed for every German soldier killed by ‘bandits’. Villages were routinely razed, and their inhabitants murdered. Nazi officials felt free to massacre people at will. As in Poland, the population was screened, assigned to racial categories, and issued with ration cards and work permits according to their classification. Where Jews were not killed outright, they were cast into ghettoes. The Slavonic nations, whose élites were slated for annihilation, were regarded as fit only for a pool of uneducated slave workers. Several million men and women were sent to the Reich for forced labour. With the growth of all categories of ‘undesirables’, the Nazi network of prisoner-of-war and concentration camps was greatly expanded. Since Soviet prisoners of war were granted no rights, some 3–4 million men were allowed to perish in open enclosures. The East was treated as a fund for unlimited human and material exploitation. In three years, the population of Ukraine dropped by 9 million.

Yet the Nazis’ self-styled ‘Crusade for Civilization’ was able to attract considerable support. Large contingents were sent to the Eastern Front by Romania, Hungary, and Italy. Romania took charge of Odessa and the district of ‘Transnistria’. General Franco’s crack ‘Blue Division’ was sent from Spain. In the Baltic States, existing army and police units were transferred to German service. Recruits and volunteers flocked in from almost all the occupied countries. Some of these, especially among Soviet prisoners of war, were volunteers in name only, having been given a choice between service or starvation. But many others, especially from Western Europe, joined willingly. General Vlasov, a former Soviet officer, commanded the million-strong Russian Liberation Army. A Cossack Brigade attracted many pre-war exiles. Even the Waffen-SS recruited large numbers of foreigners, [LETTLAND]

Holocaust. In conjunction with their occupation of the Eastern Lebensraum, the Nazis launched their largest and most systematic campaign of racial genocide. What they characteristically labelled ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ has since been called the ‘Holocaust’ or, in Hebrew, the Shoah. It was an attempt to exploit modern industrial technology to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child in Europe, simply for being Jews. Its starting-point is obscure. No direct order from the Führer has been unearthed, although his ultimate responsibility is incontestable. There is every reason to suppose that Hitler took precautions to conceal his involvement and to avoid the bad publicity which had arisen from leaks about the earlier Euthanasia Campaign.77 Europe’s Jews were to be the prime, though not the sole target for the Nazi programme of racial murders.

After several years of prudent restraint, Hitler had returned in 1938–9 to the extreme language of his early career. In a broadcast on 30 January 1939 he made a ‘prophesy’ that if the Jews precipitated another war, then the effect would be the Vernichtung, destruction, of all Jews. Yet prior to July 1941, despite high mortality in the Nazi-built ghettos of occupied Poland, there had been no move towards wholesale slaughter. Indeed, vague talk had continued about the dispatch of Jews to distant destinations and about the sensitivities of the neutral USA. Yet on 31 July 1941 Goring ordered the chief of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) to prepare ‘the Final Solution’.78 Some time shortly beforehand, he must have received express instructions from the Führer. All hesitations were to be cast aside. The policy was annihilation. ‘Resettlement’ became an official euphemism for genocide. As the German armies advanced into the heart of the former tsarist Pale, the notorious Einsatzgruppen reappeared, rounding up Jews by the thousand, driving them to pits and gulleys and shooting them en masse. One such action, at the chasm of Babi Yar near Kiev, would involve the shooting of 70,000 victims.

In January 1942 SS chiefs, including Adolf Eichmann, the head of the RSHA’s IV-B-4 Jewish Section, held a one-day conference at a villa on the Wannsee near Berlin to co-ordinate technical and organizational arrangements. Decisions were taken to accelerate experiments with Zyklon-B gas; to create a number of dedicated death camps, at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka; to expand the Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland, notably KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau; to consult the best German firms regarding crematorium design and ‘surplus disposal’; to draw up the timetables and rolling-stock for international railway transports; and to recruit auxiliary formations. If one did not know the object of the exercise, one could be forgiven for mistaking it for the AGM of German abattoirists: 7–8 million ‘units’ were designated for processing. The problem was to collect them, transport them, and dispose of them as quietly and as efficiently as possible, [NOYADES] From then on, the Final Solution proceeded without interruption for three years—town by town, ghetto by ghetto, district by district, country by country. In 1942–3 it concentrated on the largest single category—the 3 million Jews of occupied Poland. In 1943–5 it spread to the Balkans, to the Low Countries, to France, and to Hungary. In the end it achieved perhaps 65 per cent of its target. It was only brought to a halt when the facilities were overrun by the Allied armies.

LETTLAND

LATVIANS had no special love for Germany. Germans had formed a ruling , caste in the Baltic States since medieval times, and had been loyal servants of tsarist Russia. Yet such was the effect of the massacres and deportations of Soviet rule in 1940–1 that the arrival of the Wehrmacht promised blessed relief.

The Germans encountered little opposition, therefore, when they started to raise Latvian military formations as soon as they entered Riga on 1 July 1941. At first, ex-Latvian army and police units and ex-Soviet Army deserters were reorganized under German command. ‘Auxiliary Security Police’, later renamed Schutzmannschaft or ‘Schuma’, were used for front-line service, for guard, labour, and fire-fighting duties, and for ‘special operations’. (The last euphemism turned out to include the murder of Jews under SS-guidance.) In 1942 a conscription decree greatly increased the numbers, whilst facilitating the formation both of low-grade Hilfswillige or ‘Hiwi’ units and of a regular ‘Latvian Legion’. From 1943, swelled by volunteers, the Legion was to feed the main recruitment drive for three Latvian divisions of the Waffen-SS (see Appendix III, pp. 1326–7). The men swore an oath ‘to struggle against Bolshevism’ and ‘to obey the commander-in-chief of the German armed forces, Adolf Hitler’. Their language of command was Latvian, and they wore arm-shields bearing the name Latvija, They fought at Leningrad, and in the German retreat all the way to Berlin.1

At a meeting with the Reichsfuhrer-SS in 1944, the chief of staff of the Latvian Legion recorded Himmler’s updated vision of the Nazi Order:

The present demands that every SS-offlcer, regardless of nationality … must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations. [He then singled out those nations which he regarded as belonging to the German family: the Germans, the Dutch, the Flemish, the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians, and the Baltic peoples.] To combine all those nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality… [Later] this family … has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture could be saved from the danger of the yellow race.

At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organisation is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units … fighting in close togetherness. Therefore it is of great importance that every Waffen-SS officer gets his training at the same military college… .2

Nazi internationalism only came to the fore in the final phase of the war when Germany was standing on the brink of defeat. It does not feature prominently in accounts of Fascist ideology. Nor do the reasons why so many Europeans fought for it. One forgets that the Nazis published a journal called Nation Europa.

In due course the horrific dimensions of humanity in extremis have become well known through a mass of memoirs and documentary material. A bright young Jewish girl recorded her daily thoughts as she lay in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.79 The head of the Judenrat or Jewish Council in Warsaw recorded the agonizing dilemmas which he faced trying to serve both his own people and the Nazis.80 The death-cell autobiography of a former death-camp commandant revealed a conscientious and sentimental man completely impervious to moral reflection:

In Auschwitz, I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored… I had only one end in view, to drive everyone and everything forward so that I could accomplish the measures laid down.

I had to watch coldly as mothers with laughing or crying children went to the gas-chambers … I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench… I had to look through the peep-holes … and watch the process of death itself.

My family, for sure, were well provided for at Auschwitz. When I saw my children playing happily, or observed my wife’s delight in our youngest, the thought would often come over me, how long will our happiness last?81

Some have used the imaginative insights of fictional literature to approach these lower realms.82 But the most moving testimony comes from those who simply sought to preserve their humanity, [RESPONSA]

Discussions about contemporary attitudes have centred on the alleged passivity of Jews and the alleged complacency of Gentiles. Both accusations are overstated. Mindful of the inspiring example of Janusz Korczak, a well-known Polish writer who calmly accompanied a group of orphans on their last journey from the Ghetto, a surviving combatant has said: ‘To go quiedy was also heroic.’ Another recalls the inaction of his own Jewish family when neighbours were removed for the gas-chambers.84 Jews participated in the underground partisan movement, sometimes in separate units; and armed risings took place in several ghettos. In Warsaw, the heroic Ghetto Rising erupted on 19 April 1943 to oppose the final clearance. It lasted for three weeks, until all but eighty of the fighters were killed. Its leader, Mordecai Anielewicz, committed suicide with the last group of friends in the final redoubt on Mila Street.85 At Treblinka, a determined break-out led to the successful escape of 300 inmates, [KATYŃ]

RESPONSA

ON 3 October 1943 a boy was saved from a Kinderaktion, which killed large numbers of Jewish children in the Nazi-built ghetto of Kaunas (Kowno) in Lithuania. The man who had saved the boy asked his rabbi whether the boy might be brought up as his own son. The rabbi offered words of comfort, but the answer was ‘No’. The boy must always be taught to honour his own father and mother.

In the vast literature of the Jewish Holocaust, few items can compare in their moral grandeur to the rabbinical responsa from the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. Answering queries about the religious dilemmas of their flock was one of the rabbis’ central duties; and it was their custom to keep a register of the questions asked and the replies given. Several such registers exist, but none more moving than that of Rabbi Ephraim Oshry of Kaunas, a survivor, who pieced it together after the war. Even the briefest selection of contents reveals a community on the brink of extinction that was still intent on leading a principled existence:

• Can Jews try to save themselves by obtaining a forged certificate of (Christian) baptism? It is absolutely forbidden.

• Is it permissible for a pregnant woman to seek an abortion in the ghetto? Yes, because without the abortion both mother and child will be killed.

• Is a woman in the ghetto, whose husband has disappeared, entitled to be released from the usual rules governing remarriage? No.

• May a Jew in the ghetto commit suicide? It is better to receive burial after suicide than to be cremated after extermination.

• Can an apostate Jew wearing a cross be buried in holy ground? Yes, but at a little distance from the other burials.

• Can a child born from extramarital fornication receive \hepidyan haben ritual of the first-born? Yes.

• What should be done with the garments of murdered Jews? According to religious law, blood-stained garments must be buried; but unstained garments may be given to the children of the victims.2

It has been said that responsa issued under the duress of the Holocaust exhibit undue lenience. That is a matter for expert judgement. But anyone can recognize a desire to combine the rigour of the Jewish law with the duty of compassion. In August 1941, for example, German soldiers had filled the synagogue at Slobodka with dead cats and dogs, before ordering a group of Jews to tear up the Torah scrolls on top of the carcasses and to set fire to the building. When Rabbi Oshry was asked how atonement might be obtained, the persons concerned were starving. His response was clear but gentle: ‘they should fast in atonement, if they can.’

Much comment has been expended on the charge of the alleged ‘passivity’ of Europe’s condemned Jews. In some circles Jews driven to collaborate have even been branded as ‘war criminals’.4 The Hasidic view certainly was that ‘God’s face is covered’ during times of persecution, and that devout Jews should accept their fate.5 Non-Hasidic rabbis did not follow such a firm rule, although there was a long tradition of respecting the law of the land. The Chief Rabbi of Athens destroyed the membership lists of his congregation, enabling many to survive. The Chief Rabbi of Salonika did not do so, and most of his flock were killed.

The real point is that decisions, whether to co-operate or to resist, were taken on the basis of positive moral principle. Even where no action was taken, the evidence does not lie on the side of moral passivity or indifference. It is impossible to deny that individuals could commit all manner of treachery. But the counter-examples are legion. A team of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw ghetto determined to turn their misery to good use and to conduct a scientific study of the symptoms and progress of their own starvation. Hidden in a buried milk churn, their study survived to be published in post-war Warsaw.6

In the Nazi death-camp at Sachsenhausen, a Jewish member of a Sonderkommando, which was carrying out the physical work of extermination, recognized the rabbi of his own congregation on the ramp. The rabbi’s one request was that the luz, the top vertebra of his backbone, be salvaged. (In Jewish belief, the luz is the core round which the body will reform in the afterlife.) So the man cut the bone from the rabbi’s corpse, and was last seen vowing to bury it in holy ground in Jerusalem after the war.7

Gentile attitudes were not uniform. Most people, living themselves in the shadow of terror, did nothing; a few assisted in the genocide. Yet many showed compassion. A poet felt anguish at the sight of a children’s playground beside the Ghetto Wall in Warsaw which reminded him of the lonely death of Giordano Bruno:

I thought of the Campo di Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky carousel
one clear Spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

…
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo di Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet’s word.86

A thoughtful Catholic intellectual has written of the moral involvement even of those who took no practical part.87

Europe’s response to the Holocaust touched the depths of depravation and the heights of heroism. In the eye of the storm, in occupied Poland, the chances of saving the segregated Jews were never very great. Critics from more fortunate countries do not always realize how a totalitarian regime drives everyone in its power to varying degrees of complicity. Unfree people should not be judged by the criteria of free societies. Even so, there were individuals, the so-called szmal-cownicy or ‘greasers’, who did sell fugitive Jews (and members of the Resistance) to the Gestapo. There were others who risked their lives, and those of their families, to hide and protect the fugitives. In 1943 the Polish Resistance set up the Zegota organization to help save Jews.88 Perhaps 150,000, or 5 per cent, survived by hiding in barns and cellars, in convents, on false papers, or in the woods.89 [BATT-101]

Elsewhere, in less extreme circumstances, Europeans showed everything from noble sacrifice to apathy. In Copenhagen, where King Christian rode out into the streets in sympathy wearing a Star of David armband, most of Denmark’s 300 Jews were able to escape. In Romania, where the army and police killed hundreds of thousands of Jews on their own account, the government none the less jibbed at handing over Romanian Jews to the Nazis. In France, where the Vichy regime operated its own execrable concentration camps, as at Le Vernet, the local milice took the lead in collecting Jews. They made a distinction between ‘alien’ Jewish refugees and ‘native’ French Jews, only 8 per cent of whom lost their lives. The French Protestant Churches registered their protest, and the French Resistance took steps to disrupt the deportation trains. In Holland, despite a determined Resistance movement, most Jews were lost. In Hungary, which stayed free of Nazi occupation until 1944, a resourceful Swedish diplomat, Ralph Wallenberg, organized many Jewish escapes. He was due to disappear, for his pains, under Soviet detention. Local Zionist leaders were charged with striking deals at others’ expense. Even in the German-occupied Channel Islands, Jews were handed over. Jews were generally safest in Fascist Italy, in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia, in Fascist Spain or Portugal.90 [TAIZÉ]

The lack of demonstrative protest from the Vatican was the subject of much subsequent controversy. Pius XII’s detractors believe that he was indifferent to the Jewish tragedy. His defenders claim that he was torn by fears of reprisals against German Catholics, and by a desire to maintain ‘impartiality’ between the evils of Fascism and Communism.91 He certainly did little for the millions of Catholics killed by the Nazis.

The exact Jewish death-toll will never be known. An estimate’ of 5.85 million was made for the Nuremberg Tribunal. It is unlikely to be very inaccurate. In round terms, the total was made up of c.3 million Jews from pre-war Poland, c.i million from the USSR, and c.i million from other countries. There may be some overlap between the Polish and the Soviet categories, since in 1939 the eastern part of Poland was annexed to the USSR. But no responsible estimates have brought the total below 5 million.92 In quantitative terms, this figure may be compared with estimates of c.8.7 million Soviet and c.3.5 million German military losses, and of civilian losses among Ukrainians, non-Jewish Poles, Byelorussians, and Russians each of which ran into several millions.93 [BUCZACZ]

BATT-101

IN the early hours of 13 July 1942, the men of the German Reserve Police I Battalion 101 were roused before dawn at the Polish village of Józefów, and driven to the nearby town of Otwock. They were not told what awaited them. On arrival, they were ordered by their SS officers to seize all the able-bodied Jewish males in the town, and to shoot all the Jewish women, children, and elderly. That day, they killed about 1,500 persons, the first instalment of the Battalion’s estimated total of over 83,000 victims.

In 1962–72, 210 ex-members of Battalion 101 were examined by West German prosecutors, who prepared detailed files on them. They had all been non-Party, middle-aged, largely working-class conscripts from Hamburg, one of the least Nazified cities in Germany. They were the most ordinary of Germans. Almost all expressed revulsion at their wartime duties; and many claimed to be innocent of direct killing. But the great majority took part. ‘It was easier for them to shoot’:

In every modern society, bureaucratisation and specialisation attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. The peer group exerts tremendous pressure on behaviour and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?1

For obvious reasons, little is known about Jews who were placed in a similar moral position to that of Battalion 101. Very few survived. Yet it was standard practice for the SS to employ Jewish policemen in the ghettos and to recruit Jewish Sonderkommandos for the worst tasks in the death-camps. Carel Perechodnik was one such recruit. He was an educated man, who joined the Jewish police force in the Otwock ghetto in the hope of avoiding death and feeding his family. He obeyed Nazi orders, and lived quite well. With the help of non-Jewish friends, he escaped to ‘the Aryan side’, where he lived long enough to write his memoirs. The memoirs are called Am I a Murderer?2

For anyone unfamiliar with Eastern Europe, the activities of the communist political police which flooded Poland in 1944–5 are still harder to believe. Popular knowledge in the country has always insisted that the notorious communist Security Office (UB) contained a disproportionate number of Jews (or rather ex-Jews), and that their crimes were heinous. But few hard facts were ever published, and the stories remained unsubstantiated. Recent disclosures, however, have broken the taboo. They are all the more convincing since they were made by a Jewish investigator on evidence supplied by Jewish participants, and in the spirit of Jewish redemption. The study deals with the district of Upper Silesia, and in particular with the town of Gliwice (Gleiwitz). It concludes that in 1945 every single commander and three-quarters of the local agents of the UB were of Jewish origin; that ex-Nazi camps and prisons were refilled with totally innocent civilians, especially Germans; and that torture, starvation, sadistic beatings, and murder were routine. The number of deaths inflicted by the communist regime on the German population is estimated at 60–80,000. In this light, it is difficult to justify the widespread practice whereby the murderers, the victims, and the bystanders of wartime Poland are each neatly identified with specific ethnic groups.3

For many years after the War, two round figures enjoyed wide circulation: ‘six million’ Holocaust victims overall, and ‘four million’ dead in Auschwitz. The first figure, though somewhat high, is likely to stand. The second figure was impossible. Auschwitz received two people who were later proclaimed Christian saints. The Blessed Edith Stein was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, captured by the Nazis in Holland. Father Maximilian Kolbe was a Catholic priest who gave his life to save a married inmate from death. Fifty years later, pain was still being caused by attempts to find appropriate ways of commemorating the multinational and multi-confessional character of the victims.94

At the time, one of the main problems lay in the fact that the outside world could not be made to grasp the enormity of what was happening. As early as September 1940 a courageous officer of the Polish Underground, Witold Pilecki (1901–48), had succeeded in penetrating Auschwitz I. He spent two years organizing secret resistance cells inside the camp, before escaping.95 Yet the information gathered was not judged credible outside Poland. When the Polish Government in Exile in London published a report on the fate of Poland’s Jews, a leading Jewish member of the Government committed suicide in desperation at the feeble response.96 When a Polish courier visited Washington to give an eye-witness account of the death camps, he was countered by the chilling words of Chief Justice Frankfurter: ‘We don’t say that you’re lying, but…’ American Jews were no more spurred to action than anyone else.97 When the proposal was eventually made to bomb the approaches to Auschwitz, the Allied Powers found reasons to refuse.98 Stalin had killed his millions in the 1930s without significant world reaction. Hitler was able to do the same in the 1940s until outsiders saw the evidence with their own eyes. [AUSCHWITZ]

The Holocaust has inspired a vast corpus of literature. Its leading historians are nearly all Jewish scholars who believe fervently in its uniqueness. They reject ‘the oecumenical nature of evil’ just as they reject the old question: ‘Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?’ Even so, much variety of emphasis prevails. Elie Wiesel is credited with turning the term ‘Holocaust’ to its present usage.101 Lucy Dawidowicz argued for the premeditated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal programme.102 Raul Hilberg saw the Holocaust as the culmination of two millennia of Christian antisemitism.103 Yehudah Bauer constructed a stark landscape of Nazi ‘murderers’, Jewish ‘victims’, and Gentile ‘bystanders’.104 Martin Gilbert compiled a heart-rending compendium of individual experiences.105

TAIZÉ

ONE day in August 1940, soon after the fall of France, a 25-year-old theology student from Switzerland wandered into the little Burgundian town of Cluny. He was writing a thesis on pre-Benedictine monasticism. He was less interested in the ruins of the monastery than in the vague possibility of founding a monastic community himself. He was the son of a Protestant pastor from the district of Neuchâtel, until recently a confused agnostic. He saw a sign ‘House for Sale in Taizé’, cycled the 10 km up the valley, and bought the house in the half-empty village. He was Roger-Louis Schutz-Marsauche.1

Wartime Taizé lay close to the demarcation line between the German-occupied and the Vichy zones. The self-appointed monk lived there intermittently and alone. For two years he devoted himself to sheltering Jewish refugees until the Gestapo carried his guests away. In September 1944, after the Liberation, he returned again, and took to sheltering German prisoners of war. The villagers reacted violently, and one of the prisoners, an ailing Catholic priest, was killed. At the war’s end Roger was joined by his sister, Genevieve, and together they provided a home for twenty rural orphans. Seven more ‘brothers’ arrived. As non-Catholics, they had to apply for special permission to use the deserted parish church. When permission was granted in 1948, it bore the signature of the Papal Nuncio, Cardinal Roncalli.

The Community of Taizé defies classification. It has no formal rule, and belongs to no denomination. It is inspired by the Beatitudes in their purest form—Joy, Simplicity, Mercy, by the service of youth, by the mission of reconciliation, and by a powerful idea, which is the subject of Brother Roger’s book, The Dynamic of the Provisional (1965). It is instantly recognizable from the unique ‘Taizé Sound’—the sound of energetic young voices singing the simplest of words and melodies in rhythmic, incanta-tory, four-part harmony.

Once the Church of Reconciliation was built on the nearby hill in 1962, it became the focus of a world-wide movement, of two-way traffic devoted to the perpetual ‘Council of Youth’, and the ‘pilgrimage of trust on earth’. Eighty white-robed brothers manned a spiritual generator which reached out to all continents. Missions set out for Asia, Africa, Latin America, New York. Wherever there were human divisions, the spirit of Taizé sought to heal them. Initially shunned both by the World Council of Churches and by the Vatican, it won them both over. In Europe it found the support of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople and of the then Archbishop of Cracow. In the 1980s it breached the Iron Curtain, when its European meetings moved on from St Peter’s and St Paul’s to East Berlin and to Warsaw.

Contemporary European Christianity has produced a number of inspirational figures who have transcended all existing barriers. One was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (b. 1910, Skopje), an Albanian nun better known as Mother Teresa of Calcutta.2 Another was a Dutchman, Father Werenfried van Straaten, founder of ‘Aid to the Church in Need’.3 A third such person, of simple heart and unsimple name, is without doubt Brother Roger. ‘One passes through Taizé’, said John Paul II, ‘as one passes a spring of water.’

Dissentient voices betray little uniformity. Non-Zionist witnesses, such as Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Rising, have been pilloried for opposing the dominant Zionist viewpoint.106 One scholar maintained that the Holocaust arose from unforeseen circumstances in 1941.107 Another tried to show that the Jewish tragedy should be judged within the wider context of the Nazi Terror in general.108 A group of dubious publicists centred on the Journal of Historical Review has sought to maintain either that the ‘gas chamber stories’ were a hoax, or that the statistics were vastly inflated. The liveliest debate which they provoke concerns their own right to be tolerated.109 Other critics complain that ‘the Holocaust industry’ has exploited Jewish suffering for political ends.110 The film-maker Claude Lanzmann won less than universal acceptance for his evocative film Shoah (1984), which many people mistook for documentary history.111 For passions still rage. The last word has still to be spoken.

No European country was more scarred by the Holocaust than Poland. Jewry’s thousand-year Polish abode virtually came to an end. An important element in Poland’s population and culture had been torn out. Future generations of Polish citizens would have to bear not only the degrading memory of atrocities perpetrated in their homeland but also a humiliating legacy of recrimination, misinformation, and moral confusion. Only those who were both Polish and Jewish could fully comprehend the trauma. ‘The paths of the two saddest nations on this earth have parted for ever.’[BUCZACZ]

The German attack on the USSR rapidly transformed the world’s diplomatic alliances. Since August 1939 the Centre and the East of Europe’s threefold power structure had been partners. They were now mortal enemies. This opened the way for the remnant of the third power centre, Great Britain, to join the Soviet Union and to rebuild a new version of the diplomatic system of the First World War. The West would now combine with the East to hold the Centre, before bringing in the USA to tip the balance. The Great Triangle was resurrected. For Churchill, a lifelong anti-communist, this meant ‘speaking well of the Devil himself’. For Stalin, it offered the only possible source of assistance. An Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was signed in Moscow on 12 July 1941. The German-Soviet pact was formally annulled. Stalin was even persuaded to swallow his pride over Poland, and to sign an alliance with Britain’s other ally, the Polish Government in London. The Soviet-Polish military convention of July 1941 was followed by a political treaty. An ‘Amnesty’ was to be granted for the millions of innocent Polish deportees and prisoners in the USSR; and a new Polish army was to be formed in the depths of Russia. The command was given to General Anders, freshly released from the dungeons of the Lyubianka. It was the start of a famous Odyssey.113

AUSCHWITZ

ON 31 May 1944, a British ‘Mosquito’ reconnaissance plane of 60 Photo Squadron took off from an airbase at Brindisi in southern Italy. Its mission was to fly some 900 miles to German-occupied Poland and to photograph a synthetic fuel factory in the town of Oéwiwcim (Auschwitz). By chance, since the South African crew left the camera running, the final frames of their film shot at 27,000 feet caught the first ever bird’s-eye view of the two nearby SS-concentration camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.1

Many such pictures were subsequently obtained by Allied reconnaissance flights. One photograph taken over Auschwitz-Birkenau from a lower altitude on 25 August 1944 was sharp enough to show a line of new arrivals being marched under guard from the railway ramp towards the open gate of Crematorium No. 2. The trains in the siding, the roof vents of the gas chamber, the chimneys of the furnaces, and groups of prisoners are all visible.2 Later pictures, in December, showed that the dismantling of the crematoria had already begun.

Aerial photography is a valuable tool in several branches of historical research. It is widely used by archaeologists, by urbanologists, and by landscape analysts. In this case, it supplied a convincing item in the proof of a genocidal campaign that post-war ‘revisionists’ have sought to deny.

Partial knowledge of the Nazi death-camps had been available in the West since late 1942, when the exiled Polish Government in London published information supplied by its underground couriers. Despite this, the Allied Powers did not see fit to take action.3 The identification of Auschwitz II as the ‘unknown destination’ to which Jews from all over Europe were being deported, was only confirmed from the accounts of five escapees in July 1944.4

From then on, repeated appeals were made by Zionist groups who hoped that the murders might be disrupted by bombing the camp installations and railway tracks. The appeals fell on deaf ears. Air force officers insisted on the priority of their military and industrial targets. One official of the British Foreign Office minuted: ‘a disproportionate amount of time … is wasted … on these wailing Jews.’

The fate of the aerial intelligence pictures is no less instructive than their contents. The films were flown back from Italy for processing and interpretation at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. There, since the directors of the operation were only interested in the synthetic fuel factory, the last frames on the reels were not checked out. The historic photographs of 31 May and 25 August 1944 were found thirty years later in the archives of the US Defense Intelligence Agency—unprinted.6

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army on 27 January 1945. Yet the Western Governments’ urgent requests for detailed information brought no further news until an ambiguous telegram arrived from Moscow on 27 April. It mentioned ‘investigations at Auschwitz’ which showed that ‘more than four million citizens of various countries had been killed’.7 This figure, if applied to the victims of Auschwitz alone, was not compatible with statistics produced by Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg.8 But it was allowed to pass into conventional wisdom. Not until the collapse of Communism in 1990 did the State Museum at Oéwiwcim feel free to release a more credible estimate of 1.2–1.5 million victims,9 of whom probably c.800,000–1.1 million were Jews.

Between the extremes of credulity and incredulity, it took exactly fifty years for an approximation of the truth to emerge about one of contemporary history’s most intensively researched topics. ‘After Auschwitz’, Theodor Adorno said, ‘poetry is no longer possible’. It seems that historians, too, lost their faculties.

The crucial step, however, was still to come. Without the USA, the Allied Powers amounted to little more than a club for invalids. Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Adantic Charter on 11 August, establishing eight common principles. These included:

First—their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other… . Third—they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live … Eighth—they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.114

But the US Congress was still unwilling to enter the war. The Soviet Government had retired to Kuybyshev on the Volga; its first service to the Allied cause was to join the British in a joint occupation of Persia. Fortunately for London and Moscow, the Japanese proved more persuasive than the Allies. When Japanese bombers attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on Hawaii on 7 December 1941, they ‘awoke the slumbering giant’. Their action had no direct connection with the war in Europe; yet it changed American attitudes overnight. America’s war-shyness evaporated; the Congress voted lavish war credits; and the hands of the President were untied. It was not part of the Japanese plan; but they had unwittingly unlocked the doors of the Grand Alliance. ‘The Big Three’—the war-winning trio of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt—were in business.

The Germans, of course, felt cheated. They had sought no quarrel with the USA, if only the President would stop helping the British. In any case, they were counting on finishing the war before the Americans could intervene. So Berlin opted for bravado: Hitler declared war on the USA in a speech to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941.

In its way, the emergence of the Grand Alliance was every bit as shocking as that of the Nazi-Soviet partnership two years earlier. Every principle of the Anglo-Saxon democracies was contradicted by the Soviet system. Nor was it just a matter of forgetting Stalin’s past crimes. The Western leaders had to close their minds to the fact that Stalin continued to kill perhaps a million of his own people every year throughout the war. But when Stalin was weak and Hitler was strong, Stalin had to be helped. By Stalin’s standards, the Western democracies were every bit as nauseating and ‘anti-socialist’ as the Führer. But with the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, the helping hand of the West had to be accepted; ideological niceties did not enter the reckoning. Though the anti-Nazi alliance was to be wrapped in the verbiage of freedom, democracy, and justice, the Big Three were bound together by cynical convenience.

For the time being, the Grand Alliance could do little to challenge German hegemony in Europe. The immediate tasks were to secure their lines of communication, to limit Germany’s further advance, to damage Germany’s war industries, and to construct the basis for offensive action in the future. To these ends the Anglo-Americans combined to fight the Battle of the Atlantic; they planned a vast campaign of aerial bombing; and they undertook to supply the Soviet Union with war material. Everything depended on the Red Army’s ability to avoid collapse, on Britain’s ability to preserve its island fortress, and on the Americans’ ability to muster their colossal resources for simultaneous wars in the Pacific and in Europe, [OXFAM]

The Battle of the Atlantic secured the sea lanes which guaranteed Britain’s lifeline to the USA and the USA’s gateway to Europe. 21,194,000 tons of Allied shipping, 77,000 British sailors, and 70 per cent of all German U-boats were to be lost before the seas would be cleared of raiders. The U-boats’ bases were invulnerable: the abortive British raid on St Nazaire in March 1942 highlighted the contrast between the Allies’ mastery of the sea with Germany’s supremacy on land. Anti-submarine measures, including the convoy system, aerial patrols, and sonar, took months and months to be deployed. Allied shipping losses peaked in March 1943, immediately before the U-boats met their own catastrophe. The sinking of 41 U-boats in conjunction with Convoy ONS-5 forced Admiral Dönitz to withdraw his submarines from the Atlantic for good.

OXFAM

THE Oxford Committee for Famine Relief began its career in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin on 5 October 1942. Its immediate purpose was to alleviate distress caused by the war in Greece. It was by no means the sole agency devoted to international humanitarian relief: the International Red Cross had been operating out of Geneva since 1863, when it was formed by Henri Dunant as a result of horrors witnessed at the Battle of Solferino. In the First World War campaigns had been organized to assist war victims in Belgium, Serbia [FLORA], and Galicia. In 1918–21 the American Relief Administration (ARA) provided enormous assistance, especially in Eastern Europe, as did UNRRA after 1945. Almost all the combatant countries, including Germany, had operated some form of relief agency. Yet Oxfam had several advantages. Like the IRC, it was independent of government policy. Also, being based in one of the Allied states, it did not cease to function at war’s end. Thirdly, being British, it had ready access via the Empire to all the continents. It was well placed when the focus for international relief shifted away from Europe.1

The history of the relief agencies inevitably reflected Europe’s changing position in the world. Post-war affluence created a huge economic discrepancy between ‘North’ and ‘South’ at the very time that the ‘West’ was confronting ‘the East’. The USA was more preoccupied with politics than previously; the Soviet bloc was not involved in humanitarian issues; and the UN was somewhat constricted by member governments. So an important role was left to private organizations from post-imperial Europe such as Oxfam, Save the Children, CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development), and Médecins Sans Frontières. The North-South Commission (1978–83) and the associated Brandt Report established the target figure of 1 per cent of GNP whereby the wealthier nations should aim to assist the ‘Third World’. But in 1992–3 the disasters in ex-Yugoslavia emphasized the fact that Europe’s own agonies were far from finished.

As from the first 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne on 31 May 1942, the Allied bombing offensive rose steadily to a mighty crescendo. It has been strongly criticized both on practical and on moral grounds. Precision bombing, such as the famous ‘Dam-Buster Raid’ on the reservoirs of the Ruhr Basin or the elimination of the Nazis’ heavy-water plant at Telemark in Norway, had clear objectives. But the wholesale destruction of German cities by fire-bombing, and the attempt to terrorize the civilian population, did not achieve the expected results. In the years between 1941 and 1945,1.35 million tons of high explosive were dropped on the Reich by the endless waves of Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Flying Fortresses. Counter-measures absorbed a great deal of Germany’s dwindling resources. But the Nazis’ war industries were never halted; and German civilians, like their British counterparts under the Blitz, rallied to the national cause. One enormous raid on Hamburg in May 1943 caused a fire-storm that killed 43,000 innocents. Another on Dresden may have wreaked destruction approaching that of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, [ALTMARKT]

Western operations to supply the Soviet Union, which gathered pace from 1941, were rarely acknowledged by the beneficiaries. The Royal Navy took on the hazardous assignment of leading Arctic convoys to Murmansk. Many seamen and ships and the best part of one whole convoy, the PQ17, were lost without trace. The USA organized huge overland transports into Russia from the Persian Gulf. American aid to the USSR under the Lend Lease Scheme was estimated at 7 per cent of Soviet military production and $2.8 billion in non-military supplies.

Allied political plans took shape round the Atlantic Charter and the Washington Pact of 1 January 1942, whereby the twenty-six states at war with the Axis Powers undertook not to sign a separate peace. These states formed the kernel which grew in the space of four years into the United Nations, the successor to the League.

As soon as the Grand Alliance started its work, the Anglo-Americans were pressed by Stalin to open a second front in Europe. Almost the whole of the German war machine was concentrated in the East; and it was entirely reasonable for Stalin to ask his allies to share the burden. He himself possessed larger reserves of trained manpower than he revealed to anyone—which is one reason why the Red Army consistently exceeded German estimates of its capacity. Even so, there was a huge disproportion between the 150 German divisions which the Red Army had to face and the 4 assigned to the only other front then operating, in North Africa. The Anglo-Americans, however, had no easy means to oblige. Their air power drew the Luftwaffe away from the Volga at a crucial moment; and they eventually took a larger number of Axis prisoners in Africa than were taken at Stalingrad. But they could not project their strength onto the European mainland. Every single Continental port was in enemy hands, and a vast Atlantic wall of coastal defences was under construction in northern France. An abortive raid on Dieppe showed what fearsome obstacles awaited any major Allied landing force. Neither the British nor the Americans possessed trained reserves. Stalin was told that a major offensive would be launched in the West in 1943; it did not materialize until June 1944. Before that, the only relief which the Anglo-Americans could bring to the main land war was on the southern periphery, in Italy.

The hard-fought Italian campaign developed from the Allies’ growing strength throughout the Mediterranean. Contrary to expectations, the British held on to Malta and the sea route to Suez; and Anglo-American landings on the western extremities of North Africa spelled mortal danger for theAfrika Korps. Operation Torch soon had the Axis bottled up in Tunisia, whence in May 1943 they were obliged to withdraw completely. Thereafter it was a relatively simple step for the Allies to cross the Sicilian Straits, and to attack the toe of the Fascist boot.

The invasion of Sicily began on 10 July 1943, when British and American troops landed simultaneously on the southern and eastern shores. German reinforcements arrived too late to prevent the rapid conquest of the whole island. From Sicily, the Allies jumped across to Calabria in September and began the arduous task of pushing northwards up the mountainous peninsula; in all, the task was to take them nearly two years. Yet the Allied toehold in southern Italy was to have important consequences. Once a major base was established at Brindisi, it permitted the projection of Allied air power onto a wide range of destinations throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland and Yugoslavia. It forced the German Command to commit ill-spared divisions to the occupation of southern France. Most importantly, it provoked the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. On 25 July 1943 Marshal Badoglio persuaded the King of Italy to dismiss the Duce and to accede to Allied overtures. The Duce was saved from arrest on the Gran Sasso in a sensational rescue by German paratroopers, and lived again to rule a German-sponsored Republic of Northern Italy from Milan. But the first major crack in the Axis fortress could not be concealed.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the gigantic German-Soviet War was moving to its climax. Having survived the disaster of 1941, the Soviet regime moved to tap the great reservoir of Russian patriotism. Stalin reopened the Orthodox churches which he had all but annihilated, and appealed like Lenin before him for the defence of Holy Russia. What seemed impossible at any time before 1941, millions of men went willingly to their deaths with ‘Za Stalina’ (For Stalin) on their lips. The Red Army’s prodigal use of its expendable manpower amazed and, to a degree, demoralized the German soldiery. Waves of infantry were used to assault fixed positions with no sign of artillery support. Through fields of mounting corpses, the hordes of ill-clothed and ill-armed ‘Ivans’ kept coming and coming, till the German machine-guns overheated and the gunners lost stomach for the slaughter. It was an accepted fact of the contest that the Soviet side could sustain casualties of three or four to one and still carry the day. The Red Army’s sacrifices were helped by the wilderness and the weather, and by the T-34, the best tank of the war. A brilliant military team led by Marshal Zhukov maximized the advantages of space and numbers.

In 1942 the Wehrmacht was drawn on and on. The constant series of local German successes concealed the fact that the elusive Soviet enemy was not now being trapped or encircled, and that the long lines of communication were growing ever longer. By the early autumn, as the weather deteriorated, neither the Volga nor the Caspian had been reached; and a dangerous salient was developing on the approaches to Stalingrad. A tactical withdrawal might have remedied the situation. But the Führer adamantly refused. Hitler must take the sole blame for the fateful order which told General von Paulus to hold his ground at all costs. The Germans’ momentum eventually took them to the right-bank suburbs of ‘Stalin’s city’. Yet they were entering the head of a noose. Day after day, Zhukov’s forces inched round the German flanks, until, in one sudden movement, von Paulus was finally surrounded. Three months of desperate hand-to-hand fighting in icy, deserted ruins preceded von Paulus’s surrender on 2 February 1943. Stalingrad cost over one million lives. It was the largest single battle of world history. The invincible Nazi colossus was shown to be fallible.

News of Stalingrad flashed round the world, giving heart to anti-Nazi resistance movements all over Europe. Before Stalingrad, Resistance leaders had only been able to indulge in small-scale sabotage, or to run the clandestine escape lines for Allied airmen and prisoners. After Stalingrad, they began to dream of liberation.

In Western Europe, resistance was relatively uncomplicated. Prompted by the broadcasts of the BBC, and by the skulduggery of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), devoted cells of courageous men and women planned the sabotage and diversions which would eventually help the advance of the Allied armies. In Denmark, where the Nazis had hoped to create a model protectorate, the Resistance forced the Germans in August 1943 to declare martial law. In Norway, too, the Nazis abandoned the attempt to rule through the pro-Fascist government of Vidkun Quisling. Their one and only shipment of heavy water from the Norsk-Hydro Plant was sunk in the Tinnsjo fiord by Norwegian saboteurs. In ‘the Netherlands they were less disturbed, having penetrated the Dutch Resistance in a brilliant project called the Englandspiel, the ‘English Game’. In Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece, the resistance was increasingly influenced by communist elements. The French resistance came to life after 1942 with the German occupation of the Vichy Zone, where large numbers of patriots took to the maquis. At the same time the Italian partisans, whose achievements were still greater, concentrated their activities in the northern zone ruled by Mussolini, whom they eventually captured and killed.

Yet nowhere was popular defiance more determined than in tiny Luxemburg. In the plebiscite of October 1941, only 3 per cent of Luxemburgers voted for joining the Reich. Later, they organized the only effective general strike against Nazi rule, whilst sustaining a ceaseless campaign of obstructions and propaganda.

In Eastern Europe, Resistance was more problematical. German policies there were far harsher. Despite very different political colorations, the leading formations of the Underground—the democratic Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army, AK), the undemocratic Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA), and the Serbian Četniks—were all caught in a painful political trap, where the pursuit of national freedom demanded resistance to Stalin as well as to Hitler. Co-operation with the advancing Red Army, or with communist partisans, who did not recognize the principle of ‘bourgeois independence’, involved at best abject surrender, more usually imprisonment and death, [BUCZACZ]

In Poland, for example, the largest and most senior of Europe’s Resistance movements faced an almost impossible task. It came into being in late 1939, when it treated both the Nazis and the Soviets as occupation forces. Its main formation, the Armia Krajowa (AK), was a loose federation of ill-assorted groups. Its authority was respected by the numerous Peasant Battalions (BCh), but not by the semi-fascist (but violently anti-German) National Armed Forces (NSZ) or by the communist People’s Guard (GL). It had proper, if slight, relations with the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) in the ghettos—and bloody confrontations with the Ukrainians, the Soviet partisans, and the gangs of deserters, fugitives, and bandits with whom it shared the woods. It organized and ran an impressive ‘Secret State’—with clandestine intelligence, diversionary, educational, judicial, and political branches. But it did not survive the Soviet ‘Liberation’. Its democratic leaders ended up in a Moscow show trial. Honourable men, like the unbroken General Okulicki, the AK’s last Commander, deserve to stand amongst the heroes of the Allied cause. Instead, amidst the shameful silence of their comrades in the West, they were consigned to obscurity, dishonour, and an early grave.115

In Yugoslavia, the problem was solved by a controversial and, some would say, disreputable decision of the Anglo-Americans. Yugoslavia, unlike Poland, layout-side the sphere of direct Soviet influence. But in 1943 it came within range of Allied support from Italy. London and Washington chose to back Tito’s communists. Thereafter, Tito’s rivals, the Četniks, were heaped with every form of calumny. Their leaders, including Mihajlovi, would eventually be executed by Tito’s courts for ‘treason’.

Such developments well illustrate the facile definitions of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ which prevailed in Anglo-American circles. Nations who have never experienced foreign invasion rarely comprehend its complications. Of course, some people in continental Europe chose to serve the invaders from base motives of personal gain. Others, like Leon Degrelle’s Rexist Movement in Belgium, acted in accordance with principles developed before the war. But many were moved to collaborate in order to exert a moderating influence and to limit the harm done. In France, after Pétain’s fateful meeting with Hitler, the policy of collaboration may or may not have been misguided. But it was coined for reasons of patriotic necessity.

In the broad expanse of Europe that was successively occupied both by Soviets and by Nazis, the element of choice was largely absent. Both totalitarian regimes sought to enforce obedience through outright terror. For most ordinary civilians, the prospect of serving the Soviets posed the same moral dilemmas as serving the fascists. The only course of principled action for patriots and democrats was the suicidal one of trying to oppose Hitler and Stalin simultaneously.

After Stalingrad, the news from the Eastern Front continued to be disheartening for Berlin. In the spring of 1943, the Red Army moved to the general offensive for the first time in two years. In the opening stages of five mighty campaigns that would carry them all the way to Berlin, Stalin’s confident marshals began to roll back the Nazi enemy. On the open steppe near Kursk in July, the Germans’ strategic tank-force was smashed. Their capacity for large-scale attack was broken. The tide, to use Churchill’s metaphor, had turned.

BUCZACZ

THE DEACONRY OF BUCZACZ. In 1939, this district was inhabited by 45.314 Poles. Among its 17 parishes, Barycz numbered 4,875, Buczacz 10,257. Koropiec 2,353, Kowalówka 3,009, Monasterzyska 7,175 … In Barycz, a couple of Polish families were murdered by Ukrainians in 1939 … One of the Biernackis had a leg severed … But the main attack took place on the night of 5–6 July 1944, when 126 Poles were killed. Men, women and children were shot, or hacked to death with axes. The “Mazury” ward of the town was burned down. The attackers were armed with machine guns and shouted “Rizaty, palyty” (kill, burn). The survivors fled to Buczacz, where they survived the winter in terrible conditions, in ex-Jewish houses without doors or windows…

The [Catholic] parish of Nowostawce, though sparsely inhabited, contained three Greek-Catholic parishes within its bounds. The ratio of Poles to Ukrainians was 2 : 3. In 1939 co-existence was still possible. But conditions worsened after the German Occupation. In 1944, when the German-Soviet front line passed through, nothing but ruins remained …

The vicar of Korościatyn reported an attack on his village on 28 February 1944. 78 persons were shot, smothered or axed in the vicarage cellar… Some ninety people had perished in an earlier attack in 1943. Then typhus carried off a further fifty. A curious thing occurred. The village had thirteen so-called “wild marriages”. All of them died except one.

In Koropiec, no Poles were actually murdered. But it was reported that the Greek-Catholic pulpits resounded to calls regarding mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages: “Mother, you’re suckling an enemy—strangle it.’”1

Forty years after the event, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland was still trying to document the wartime ‘ethnic cleansing’ perpetrated in the former eastern provinces of Galicia and Volhynia. Estimates of casualties range from 60,000 to 500.000.2

Buczacz, or Buchach, was one of scores of districts which shared a similar fate. It lay in the Archdiocese of Lwow which covered all of Red Ruthenia (East Galicia) and beyond. Its pre-war population was made up of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. All three communities were scourged by Soviet repressions at the start of the war. Then the Jews were killed by the Nazis and their local collaborators. After that, the Poles were attacked by Ukrainians. Finally, the returning Soviets destroyed anyone and everyone connected with independent organizations.

Ethnic cleansing in wartime Poland was started in 1939–41 both by the Nazis, who cleared several western regions for German resettlement, and by the Soviets, who deported millions from the East. After 1941, it was taken up by small factions of the Polish underground, who sought to drive out Ukrainians from central Poland, and on a far larger scale by the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA), who terrorized Poles. In 1945, the communists completed the cleansing of Poles from Ukraine and, through ‘Operation Vistula’, of Ukrainians from their homes in ‘People’s Poland’. At Potsdam, Allied policyapproved the expulsion of all Germans f rom east of the Oder (see p. 1047).

The UPA came into being in October 1942 to initiate an exclusive, nationalist Ukraine and to oppose the growing bands of Soviet partisans infiltrated behind German lines. (Its commander, General Roman Shukevich, ‘Chuprynka’, fought on until captured in 1950.) However, when the rising communist tide had been stemmed neither by the Wehrmacht nor by the formation of the SS Galizien, the Ukrainian underground adopted desperate solutions. Western Ukraine was heading for the return either of Soviet or of Polish rule. The more radical elements then decided to wipe out their most vulnerable adversaries, namely Polish civilians.3 They had no compunction in killing anyone who opposed them:

11 March 1943. In the Ukrainian village of Litogoszcz (Volhynia), Ukrainian nationalists murdered a Polish school teacher whom they had abducted. Together with this Pole they murdered several Ukrainian families who opposed the massacre.4

In a conflict with strong religious undercurrents, the clergy were selected for bestial treatment:

Revd Ludwik Włodarczyk from Okopy was crucified; Revd Stanistaw Dobrzanski from Ostrówka was beheaded with an axe: Revd Karol Baran was sawn in half in Korytnica; Revd Zawadzki had his throat slit…5

In post-war Eastern Europe, all war crimes were officially ascribed to the Nazis. Victims from areas like Buczacz were lumped together in the ‘Twenty Million Russian War Dead’, or otherwise hidden by silence.6 The multinational dimensions of the tragedy were not appreciated. All nationalities have been guilty of publicizing their own losses, and of ignoring others, although one sometimes meets accounts of shared suffering:

Between May and December 1942, more than 140,000 Volhynian Jews were murdered. Some who had been given refuge in Polish homes were murdered together with their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when, of 300,000 Poles living in Volhynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukrainian ‘bandits’. In many villages, Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe.7

But no overall, even-handed survey of wartime genocide has been undertaken. Attempts to establish Polish or Catholic losses, for example, inevitably sideline Jewish and Ukrainian losses. They stress the role of Jewish and Ukrainian collaborators in the Soviet service, or of Ukrainian units under German command. They are not concerned with the activities of Silesian Poles in German Schupo units, nor with the Polish co-operation with the Soviet Army. It is not part of their brief to count the UPA’s Jewish and Ukrainian victims. Any exercise which looks at one side alone is bound to generate distortions.

Buczacz, incidentally, was the home town of Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter extraordinary.8

The Triumph of the Grand Alliance (July 1943-May 1945). From mid-1943 the Grand Alliance held the upper hand in almost every sphere. The Reich, though fighting hard, was under siege. The Soviets held the initiative on land. The Anglo-Americans held mastery of sea and air. The combined resources of American industrial strength, of Russian manpower, and of the British Empire could not be matched by Hitler’s shrinking realm. There was still no Second Front beyond Italy, and no sign of serious opposition inside Germany. Save for the Wunderwaffen or ‘wonder weapons’ which were supposed to reverse the Führer’s fading fortunes, the demise of the Reich grew ever more likely.

Despite exaggerated rumours, the intense competition over weapon development was real enough. It focused on jet engines, on rocketry, and on the atomic bomb. German scientists won two of the three contests outright. A prototype of the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 flew in 1942. TheVergeitung or ‘revenge’ rockets, the Vi and V2, were developed at Peenemunde on the Baltic, and targeted on London from June 1944. But the race for the atomic bomb was won by the Allies’ Manhattan Project in distant New Mexico. Its success, in July 1945, came too late for the European war.

For the Allies, the most acute problems lay in the realm of political and strategic co-ordination. To this end, three personal meetings of the ‘Big Three’ were organized—at Teheran (December 1943), at Yalta (February 1945), and at Potsdam (June 1945). Three major issues underlay their discussions—the definition of war aims, the priorities of the Pacific and the European War, and the plans for post-war Europe. On war aims, the Grand Alliance decided to insist on the unconditional surrender of the Reich. This was done partly in deference to Stalin’s suspicions about a Second Front, partly in recognition of the mistakes of 1918. The effect, whilst binding the Alliance together, was to give the Soviet Union a licence for its totalitarian designs in the East. Once the Western leaders had renounced the possibility of withdrawing from the conflict, they surrendered the strongest lever for moderating Soviet conduct.

The clash of priorities between the war against Germany and the war against Japan was especially acute for the Americans, who alone were carrying a major share in both conflicts. It was to come to a head at Yalta. The Soviets had observed strict neutrality towards Japan since 1941, and were not likely to change their position until the European war was over. The British, in contrast, were deeply involved in the Japanese war. Their fragile lines to the Far East were stretched very thin, and great reliance had to be placed on the independent war effort of the dominions, especially of Australia and New Zealand. Singapore had fallen, dramatically, at an early stage. Thereafter, Britain’s participation was confined to Burma (where the Japanese sphere lapped the borders of British India) and to auxiliary support for the Americans.

Plans for the future of Europe never reached full agreement. The Western Allies excluded Stalin from considerations about Western Europe, starting with Italy, and Stalin pressed on regardless with his own dispositions in the East. An important exception lay in the so-called ‘Percentages Agreement’ which Churchill discussed with Stalin during his visit to Moscow in October 1944. It was never formally adopted; but there is some reason to think that both sides regarded it as a working guideline for the Balkans. Pulling half a sheet of paper from his pocket, Churchill is said to have written down a short list of countries and alongside it a series of percentages representing the expected balance of Western and Russian influence. After puffing on his pipe, Stalin is said to have placed a neat blue tick against the following:

	Russia	Others
Romania	90%	10%
Greece	10%	90%
Yugoslavia	50%	50%
Hungary	50%	50%
Bulgaria	75%	25%116

The ‘naughty document’, as Churchill called it, has not survived in the public section of Britain’s Public Record Office, and its existence has been questioned. What it meant in practice, however, is that Greece was marked down as the sole country on the list where Western influence was supposed to prevail. And that is what happened.

Poland was the one country whose future could not be agreed even in unofficial outline. Its plight is often seen as the source of the later Cold War. Poland, like France, was a member of the original alliance of 1939. Its Government in London was fully recognized, its soldiers, sailors, and airmen were serving with distinction under both British and Soviet command. In April 1943 Stalin used the pretext of the Nazis’ revelations about Katyń to sever relations with the Polish Government. At the same time, in Moscow, he recognized the ineptly named Union of Polish Patriots, the core of a Soviet puppet regime. In July the Polish Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, General Sikorski, the one Polish politician enjoying universal confidence, was killed in an air crash at Gibraltar. From then on the Polish tragedy moved to its nemesis. Soviet propaganda was demanding a return to the Ribbentrop-Molotov frontier, now conveniently referred to as the Curzon Line. On no sound authority, the population of eastern Poland were said to be clamouring for union with the USSR; and a Polish Government ‘friendly’ to Soviet interests was said to be essential. These claims bore no close examination; but Western opinion, whose admiration for the magnificent Soviet war effort knew no bounds, was well disposed to believe them. So, as the Red Army rolled ever deeper into Poland, the Western powers pressed their wretched Polish allies to concede.

Teheran lay at the mid-point of the wartime air route between London and Moscow; and it was there from 28 November to 1 December 1943, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held their first meeting. They made sufficient progress to ensure the continued prosecution of the war. They agreed on the urgency of opening the Second Front in France, and on the post-war independence of Iran. But they disagreed quite violently over Poland. During a blazing row between Eden and Molotov, President Roosevelt ‘slept in his chair’. The Western leaders conceded that Poland’s territory should be moved bodily to the West at Germany’s expense, to compensate for Stalin’s claims; but they kept it secret from the Poles. The occasion was hardly auspicious—but it achieved enough to restore confidence in the prospect of a joint Allied assault on the Reich in the coming year.

The Red Army’s offensives of 1943–5 sustained a masterly drum-beat that kept the Wehrmacht constantly reeling. They began in the middle of the Baltic States, Byelorussia, and Ukraine and ended with the siege of Berlin. They were organized in a series of huge forward leaps, in which colossal concentrations of men and material would be massed in front of the Germans’ over-stretched lines, then unleashed in an irresistible flood. The second such offensive, after Kursk, was aimed at the Dnieper, which was defended by the Germans with a wide zone of scorched earth. The third, launched in January 1944, was aimed at the distant Vistula. The fourth, beginning in August 1944, turned south into the Balkans and was aimed at the Danube. The fifth, in January 1945, was aimed at the Oder and beyond.

In each of these movements, the basic tactic was to surround and to envelop the points of resistance. Once a defensive fortress was cut off and isolated, it could safely be left for destruction at a later date. In this way, several German armies were cut off in Courland and left undefeated till the end of the war. Major German fortresses in the East, such as Breslau, were still intact when Berlin fell. The main thing was to prevent the Wehrmacht from preparing a counter-blow, and hence to harry, to harass, and to maul. The Russians knew war on the steppes: aggression usually paid off, fixed defence could usually be outflanked. As the Plain narrowed, the Wehrmacht’s temptation to stand and fight grew stronger. Three such choke-points occurred at the Dukla Pass in the Carpathians, in the battle for Budapest, and at the line of the Pomeranian Wall. Here Soviet and German blood was spilled in profusion.

The reputation of the Red Army—renamed the Soviet Army in 1944—went before it. Given the memories of 1939–41, it was often regarded as an alien force even in the Soviet Union. In the Balkans, it was received at best with mixed feelings. In Germany, where the troopers were encouraged to murder and rape, it provoked panic. The first German village to be freed from the Nazis was martyred. Pictures of German women crucified on barn doors were circulated by the Nazis to stiffen resistance. Instead, in the winter of 1944–5, the mass of the German population took flight.

The Soviet drive into central Europe was one of the grandest and most terrible military operations of modern history. One of the soldiers in its ranks, who was himself arrested at the front, wrote of’the Juggernaut of Comintern’ crushing all beneath its wheels.117 For, if the Soviet Army brought liberation from the hated Nazis, it also brought subjugation to Stalinism. With it came looting, rape, common violence, and official terror on a horrific scale. For those who saw it, it was an unforgettable sight. As the battered German formations pulled back, wave after wave of liberators passed through. First came the front-line troops, alert, well-clothed, heavily armed. Next came the second-class units and punishment battalions, who marched with ammunition but no food. Behind them the flotsam of the front—stragglers, camp followers, walking wounded, refugees trapped between the lines. At the back rolled the cordon of the NKVD in their smart uniforms and American jeeps, shooting all who failed to keep going. Finally there came ‘the hordes of Asia’, the endless supply columns riding on anything that would move westwards—broken-down trucks, hijacked peasant carts, ponies, even camels. The contrast between the red-eyed, bandaged, and weary German soldiery and the endless truck-loads of fresh-faced Slavonic and Asiatic lads told its own story. The Soviet advance into the Balkans in August 1944 had important political consequences. Romania changed sides, and took the field against her erstwhile Nazi patrons; Hungary was occupied by the German army to prevent Budapest from following Bucharest’s example. In Bulgaria, the royal government was toppled in September. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s partisans joined up with Soviet troops and freed Belgrade in October. In Greece and Albania, both of which lay beyond the line of Soviet occupation, the communist underground made preparations to take over. At which point, in December, the Soviets ran into the obstinate defence of Budapest; and the advance came to a halt until the New Year.

In the West, the Second Front was finally opened on 6 June 1944, D-Day, when British, Canadian, Polish, and American troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. Operation Overlord undoubtedly involved the greatest technical feat of the war. It demanded the safe disembarkation of hundreds of thousands of men and their weapons on a heavily fortified coast, whose defenders had been preparing the reception for four years. It succeeded because good planning was matched by good luck. Deception measures, which included the bombing of false targets in the Pas-de-Calais, confused the German Staff about the location of the landings. Hitler, whose hunch about Normandy had been correct, was overruled. Air supremacy ensured close support on the beaches and, still more importantly, the interdiction of the Germans’ powerful armoured reserve. The technological marvels included the huge floating dockyards called ‘Mulberry Harbours’ that were towed into position off the Normandy coast, and Pluto (Pipeline Under The Ocean) which guaranteed an unlimited supply of petrol. A change in the weather, which produced the biggest Channel storm for 25 years, ensured that the German commander, General Rommel, went home for the vital weekend.

Rommel’s opponent, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, knew that he would only be allowed one throw of the dice. The start was twice postponed. With the favourable moon fast on the wane, 156,000 men, 2,000 warships, 4,000 landing craft, and 10,000 warplanes were held on the alert for days. But then, amidst great trepidation, the order was given. In the middle of the night, in the subsiding gale, American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions jumped into the middle of the German lines. One of them, from Kansas, feigned death as he hung suspended from the spire of the Sainte-Mère Eglise. Further west, at ‘Pegasus Bridge’, the first British soldier on French soil, Sgt. Jim Wallwork, silently landed his Horsa glider at 00.16 hrs within 30 yards of the target, knocking himself unconscious on impact. D Company of the 2nd Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry then shot their way across the bridge, captured the lock on the Orne Canal, entered the café of M. et Mme. Gondrée, and spoke the words of Liberation: ‘It’s all right, chum.’

Then, in the grey dawn, the steel doors of the landing craft were thrown open and the main force waded ashore onto five code-named beaches. Seventy-three thousand men of the US 1st Army hit Utah and Omaha; 83,000 men of the Second British and First Canadian armies stormed on to Gold, Juno and Sword. The shocked German defenders lay low in their bunkers, bombarded by heavy shells from unseen warships and mercilessly strafed from the air. Only at ‘bloody Omaha’ did they manage to raise a screen of fire to pin the attackers down. There, the Texas Rangers heroically scaled the cliff under fire, only to find that the gun position on the top had been dismantled. But the setback was local. D-Day worked. In addition to their toehold in Italy, the Allies had won their fingerhold in France. The Reich could now be pincered from all sides.

Overlord, however, was slow to develop. When the Wehrmacht recovered from its surprise, resistance was fierce. The Americans could not take Cherbourg, the principal port of the invasion coast, for three weeks. The British, who should have entered Caen on the evening of D-Day, fought their way in on D + 34 (9 July). But the logistics outmatched anything that was seen in the East. Reinforcements poured into the Mulberries; the petrol flowed smoothly through Pluto. When the Americans finally broke through to the rear, the Germans had nothing to do but run. Caught at Falaise in an ever-shrinking gap, they ran the gauntlet amidst scenes of slaughter. After that, the Allies’ road was clear for the race to Paris and the drive for the Rhine.

After two years of defeats, the German Army finally reacted against Hitler. On 20 July 1944, at the Führer’s eastern HQ, his Wolfschanze near Rastenburg in East Prussia (now Kçtrzyn in Poland), an attempt was made to assassinate him. A bomb was left in a briefcase under the heavy oak table of the conference room. It exploded in the Führer’s presence; he escaped, badly shaken, with a damaged arm. It had been planted by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a member of the Moltkes’ aristocratic Kreisau Circle. Its failure, and the horrible fate of the plotters, whose slow deaths on meat-hooks were filmed for the Führer’s enjoyment, discouraged other attempts. Large volumes are written about the German Resistance. The role of noble individuals and small groups, such as Pastor Bonhoeffer or the ‘White Rose’, is beyond question. But the fact is that they did not achieve their goals.119

By the time of the bomb plot, Germany’s immediate neighbours in Poland and France were both eagerly awaiting their freedom. The Soviet army was approaching the eastern suburbs of Warsaw. The American army was working its way round the western suburbs of Paris. Both cities were filled with various groups of resistance fighters directed mainly from London; both were straining at the leash to rise against the Nazi oppressor. In Warsaw they were led by the underground AK, in Paris by the Free French.

Paris rose on 19 August. Despite poor intelligence, the idea was to mount attacks inside the city and accelerate the Americans’ final push. Parts of the French Resistance worked with the American Command, which had recognized their value in the battles since the Normandy landings. Assailed from all quarters, the German garrison pulled back—and the Americans struck. General Leclerc’s French armoured division, fighting under American command, was given the honour of spearheading the advance. The German garrison surrendered, having ignored the Führer’s order to leave no stone standing. On 25 August, with snipers still active, General de Gaulle walked magnificently erect down the Champs-élysées. The cathedral of Notre-Dame celebrated a great Te Deum. Despite the heavy loss of civilians, the population rejoiced. France’s pre-war Third Republic was restored; Paris was free.

Warsaw had risen on 1 August, almost three weeks before Paris. The plan was to co-ordinate attacks inside the city with the Soviets’ final push. But the Varsovians were not to share the Parisians’ success. The intelligence of the Polish Resistance was poor; and they found too late that the Soviet Command was not going to help. The Soviet generals had used the Polish Underground in all the battles since crossing the Polish frontier. But Stalin did not recognize independent forces; and he had no intention of letting Poland regain its freedom. Assailed from all quarters, the German garrison had began to withdraw. But then the Soviets suddenly halted on the very edge of the city. Foul treachery was afoot. Moscow Radio, which had called on Warsaw to rise, now denounced the leaders of the rising as ‘a gang of criminals’. Two German panzer divisions moved forward; and the garrison was given time to receive massive reinforcements from the most vicious formations of the Nazi reserves. General Berling’s Polish army, which was fighting under Soviet Command, was withdrawn from the Front for defying orders and trying to assist the rising. Berling himself was cashiered. Western attempts to supply Warsaw by air from Italy were hamstrung by the Soviets’ reluctance to let their planes land and refuel. Street by street, house by house, sewer by sewer, the insurgents were shelled, gunned, and dynamited on one bank of the Vistula, whilst Soviet soldiers sunbathed on the opposite bank. In one of several orgies of killing, in the suburb of Mokotów, Nazi troops massacred 40,000 helpless civilians in scenes reminiscent of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in the previous year. Weeks after the liberation of Paris, the Warsaw insurgents were still fighting on. They surrendered after sixty-three days, on 2 October, when their commander, General Bór, walked into German captivity.2 Their only consolation was to be granted combatant status. Despite the sacrifice of 250,000 of its citizens, Warsaw remained unfree. Poland’s pre-war Republic was not restored. There was no Te Deum in the destroyed cathedral of St John. The remaining population was evacuated. In his fury, Hitler ordered that no stone of the rebel city was to be left standing. The demolition proceeded for three months, whilst the Soviet army, with its committee of Polish puppets in tow, watched passively from across the river. They did not enter Warsaw’s empty, silent, snowbound ruins until 17 January 1945.

Despite the Normandy landings, the Western Allies encountered many setbacks. In Italy, Rome fell the day before D-Day, but only after the Allied armies had been bottled up for months at Monte Cassino. One week after D-Day the London blitz was resumed, with the dispatch first of the Vi flying bombs, the ‘doodlebugs’, and in September of the V2. An American landing on the French Riviera in August was poorly conceived and developed slowly. In the north, Brussels was freed amidst great rejoicing on 3 September. But the British scheme, under Operation Market Garden, to jump ahead and seize the Rhine bridges at Arnhem was a costly disaster. In the centre, in December, in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’, the Americans had to absorb the weight of the Wehrmacht’s last major armoured counter-attack in the Ardennes. At Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne was called on to surrender, the resources of the German Staff and their translators were finally overpowered by the American reply of ‘Nuts’. In the Mediterranean, the British army re-entered Greece in October, only to find itself with a civil war on its hands. Churchill did not hesitate to assist the government in Athens against communist attacks. Before it fell, the Reich was allowed to totter on the brink.

The terminal conquest of Germany in January to May 1945 took place amidst scenes never before experienced. In the West, British and American bombers were steadily reducing every major German city to hecatombs of rubble and corpses. Nazi officials vainly planned their last stand in the Alpine redoubts of Austria and Bavaria. In the East, millions of desperate German refugees were trekking westwards through the winter. Tens of thousands perished in the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and other mercy ships, or on the deathly trail across the icebound waters of the Frisches Haff. The Führer’s last throw was to draft all German males above 14 into the so-called Volkssturm. Most of those schoolboys, invalids, and veterans were to die from the Soviet policy of killing anyone in German uniform. The compulsory evacuation of major cities such as Danzig or Breslau, and of concentration camps such as Auschwitz, were accompanied by death marches. German life in the East was coming to an end. [DONHOFF]

Zhukov’s offensive against Berlin was launched on 12 January 1945 from a range of some 400 miles. The Red Army cleared Poland when the Western allies were still well short of the Rhine. The fall of Budapest in mid-February permitted a two-pronged lunge which had Vienna as well as Berlin in its sights. In early March the Americans had a fortunate break, when German sappers failed to blow the last remaining bridge across the Rhine, at Remagen. Soon General Patton would come riding triumphantly out of this Western bridgehead even faster than Zhukov out of the East; his men would eventually meet up with the Soviets in the Torgau in Saxony on 23 April. The British, with Canadian and Polish support, had liberated the Netherlands, and were far advanced along the northern Plain. Berlin was cut off by a ring of Russian steel. From his bunker beneath the bomb-blasted debris, the Führer watched the Reich’s defences crumble.

When the Big Three met again at Yalta in Crimea from 4 to 11 February 1945, the end was already close. Regarding Germany, they agreed on the establishment of four separate Allied occupation zones, on the destruction of the Reich’s military-industrial capacity, on the prosecution of war criminals, and on the need to guarantee Germans no more than ‘minimum subsistence’. Regarding Poland, they agreed that there should be ‘free and unfettered elections’, and that a Provisional Government should draw its members both from Stalin’s Lublin Committee and from the London Poles. On Japan, which worried the ailing Roosevelt most, they agreed that the USSR should enter the Pacific war two to three months after the end of hostilities in Europe. A secret protocol empowered the Soviets to reoccupy the Kurile Islands. These arrangements did not have the force of an international treaty; they were the private working guidelines of the Allied Powers, [KEELHAUL]

DÖNHOFF

MARION, Countess Dönhoff was bom in 1909 at the family palace of Friedrichstein, twenty miles from Königsberg in East Prussia. The seventh child of a numerous brood, she followed the timeless routine of the semi-feudal East European aristocracy, unaware that their time was running out.

Friedrichstein in the 1900s still offered its residents all the beauties of nature and the benefits of privilege. Set amidst the lakes and forests and the sharp seasons of the East, it drew its children into a blissful round of horses, picnics, and libraries, of tutors, loving nannies, and distinguished guests. Marion’s mother, once a lady-in-waiting to the Empress at Potsdam, ran the house with a taste for the rigid etiquette and social hierarchy of the Kaiser’s court. She trained the servants to address her with ‘Most humbly, good morning, Your Excellency’. Marion’s father, Karl August, an easy-going globetrotter and sometime diplomat at the German embassies at St Petersburg and Washington, was a member of both the hereditary Prussian Senate and the elected German Reichstag. The style was one of public opulence, private austerity, and Lutheran piety.

The Dönhoffs, like many German noble families, had moved to the East in the Middle Ages. Their original home was at Dunehof on the Ruhr in Westphalia. Their second, also Dunehof. was set up in 1330 near Riga in Livonia, where they remained for eighteen generations. That senior Livonian branch of the family, usually known as Denhoff, became prominent Polish magnates—palatines, hetmans, starostas, and cardinals. The Prussian, Protestant Dönhoffs were descended from the Livonian Magnus Ernst von Dönhoff, sometime Polish ambassador to Saxony and Brandenburg, who settled near Königsberg in 1620. His son, Friedrich, bought the main estates by the Pregd in 1666. His grandson, Otto Magnus, governor of Memel and Prussian ambassador at the Treaty of Utrecht, built the pile of Friedrichstein in 1709–14.

Wars and disasters were taken in their stride on the Prussian frontier. In the Great Northern War, 40 per cent of East Prussia’s population died of plague. The revolutionary wars saw the entailing of the estate in 1791, the arrival of the French in 1807, the emancipation of the serfs in 1810, and the arrival of Kutuzov in 1813. In the First World War, having escaped from the Russian advance of August 1914, it greeted its saviour, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, in person.

At first the war of 1939 looked just like any other. Yet by the winter of 1944–5 it was clear that some final and total nemesis was at hand. Unlike any of its predecessors, the advancing Soviet army was intent on eradicating the Germanity of East Prussia once and for all. With all the adult males of her family dead, either killed on the Eastern Front or executed after the bomb-plot against Hitler, Marion Dönhoff had been left administering the estates of Friedrichstein and Quittainen alone. One night in January 1945 she mounted her horse, joined the flood of westbound refugees, and rode 1,000 miles in two months, all the way to Westphalia. (She paused only once, to stay with Bismarck’s daughter-in-law at Varzin in Pomerania.) The 600-year Eastern adventure of the Dönhoffs had come full circle. Friedrichstein, deserted, was annexed to the RSFSR.

The fate of Friedrichstein and of the Dönhoffs was repeated hundreds of times over right across Europe. The destruction which the Bolsheviks meted out to Russia’s own aristocracy in 1918–21 awaited the landed proprietors of every country which the Red Army entered, either in 1939–40 or in 1944–5. The old German families of Prussia, Bohemia, and the Baltic States were cast into the same abyss which engulfed the Polish families of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, and the Magyars of Slovakia and Croatia. Indeed, not just the aristocrats but entire populations of all classes were removed. The Soviet scourge destroyed not just privilege but centuries of culture.1

At least Marion Dönhoff survived. After the war she worked as a journalist in Hamburg, becoming editor of Die Zeit in 1968 and its publisher in 1973. When she wrote her memoirs, she mused on the futility of revenge:

‘I also do not believe that hating those who have taken over one’s homeland … necessarily demonstrates love for the homeland. When I remember the woods and lakes of East Prussia, its wide meadows and old shaded avenues, I am convinced that they are still as incomparably lovely as they were when they were my home. Perhaps the highest form of love is loving without possessing.’

Just as doctors will debate the exact moment of human death, in heart, brain, lungs, or limbs, so it is with bodies politic. In the case of the Third Reich, the siege of Berlin ensured suffocation; the suicide of the Führer on 30 April prevented all chance of recovery; the general surrender of 8/9 May marked the last twitch. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 may be likened to the coroner’s court.

The siege of Berlin, as foreseen at Yalta, was left to the Soviet Army. The terminal phase lasted for three weeks from 20 April. Zhukov poured in reserves without counting the cost; he was probably to lose more men in this one operation than the US army lost in the whole of the war. As the noose tightened, various Nazi officials slipped out. Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, left—never to be seen again. One of the last planes to take off disappeared with a cargo of Nazi archives. Berlin sold itself dearly: it was the Warsaw Rising in reverse. Eventually, Soviet soldiers hung the Red flag atop the shattered Reichstag.

In his bunker at the junction of the Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden, the Führer lost all contact with outside events. ‘If the war is to be lost,’ he had remarked, ‘the nation will also perish.’ His orders were transmitted into an unresponsive vacuum. On 29 April he went through a form of marriage with Eva Braun, who had declined the offer of escape. On the 30th the newly-weds died in a poison and pistol-shot suicide pact. They thereby avoided the fate of Mussolini and his mistress, who the previous day had been strung up by the feet in Milan. When the Hitlers died, the Russians were 200 yards away. The Führer left orders for the burning of the bodies in a petrol pit, and a brief will and testament:

It is untrue that I, or anyone in Germany, wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated solely by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or who worked for Jewish interests … I die with a happy heart, aware of the immeasurable deeds of our soldiers at the front… Above all, I charge the leaders of the nation … to scrupulous observation of the laws of race, and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.121

The last remains of the Führer and his wife were buried by the KGB in east Germany, and eventually incinerated by them in 1970. Two fragments of a skull said to be Hitler’s were produced from the ex-Soviet archives in 1993.

‘Victory in Europe’, or VE Day, followed in the second week of May. For the Nazis it meant annihilation, the vengeance of their gods; for the German nation it spelled total defeat. General Montgomery accepted the submission of a German delegation in his tent on the Lüneburg Heath; General Eisenhower accepted the formal capitulation at his base near Reims; Marshal Zhukov did the same at his HQ at Karlshorst. The moment of Germany’s unconditional surrender was fixed for midnight on the 8th (GMT). This was 5 a.m. on the 9th (Moscow Time).

As always, the declaration of peace did not quite match the reality. The Allied Powers were still at war in the Pacific. In the desert of New Mexico, the scientists were still working feverishly for the first atomic test. In Europe, pockets of fighting continued. A German army cornered in Prague was finished off by elements of Vlasov’s RLA, who had vainly changed sides in the hope of a reprieve. Pockets of local resistance against the Soviet takeover continued in Eastern Europe and the western USSR until the 1950s.

KEELHAUL

IN February 1945, Major Denis Hills, an officer of the British Eighth Army I in Italy, was given command of a POW camp at Taranto containing 8,000 men of the 162 Turkoman Infantry Division, classified as ‘repatriates’. His charges had been conscripted into the Red Army, been captured on the Eastern Front by the Germans, and had endured starvation and cannibalism under arrest before volunteering for service with the Wehrmacht. Having sailed with them to Odessa, whither they were transported under the terms of the Yalta Agreement, he had no doubts that all such Soviet repatriates were being sent home to be killed.1

In subsequent assignments, Hills repeatedly faced the age-old dilemma of a soldier whose conscience did not match his order. In the case of the SS Fede, which was trying to leave La Spezia for Palestine with an illegal shipload of Jewish emigrants, he advised his superiors that regulations should be waived to let them sail—which they did. ‘I had wished to extinguish a small glow of hatred before it grew into a flame.’

During Operation Keelhaul (1946–7), Hills was given 498 ex-Soviet prisoners for screening in a camp at Riccione. His orders were to repatriate to the USSR (1) all persons captured in German uniforms, (2) all former Red Army soldiers, and (3) all persons who had aided the enemy. By inventing spurious categories such as ‘paramilitaries’ and by privately urging people to flee, he whittled down the number of repatriates to 180. When they left, the Russian leader of the group told him: ‘So you are sending us to our deaths … Democracy has failed us.’ ‘You are the sacrifice’, Hills replied; ‘the others will now be safe.’

In the case of Ukrainians from the Waffen-SS Galicia Division held at Rimini, Major Hills was one of several British officers who personally rebuffed the demands of the Soviet Repatriation Commission. When the Division was reprieved, he was sent a letter from the division’s CO, thanking him ‘for your highly humane work … defending the principles in the name of which the Second World War has been started’.4 According to international law, the Galicians were Polish, not Soviet citizens.

Hills admitted that he ‘bent the rules’.5 Shortly afterwards, he was court-martialled and demoted on a charge of unseemly conduct, having been caught doing cartwheels and handsprings at dawn in the city square of Trieste.

The Allied policy of forcibly repatriating large numbers of men, women, and children for killing by Stalin and Tito has been called a war crime. In the Drau Valley in Austria, where in June 1945 British troops used violence to round up the so-called Cossack Brigade and their dependants, it provoked mass suicides. But it was well hidden until a report written by Major Hills came to light in the USA in 1973, and the opening of British archives. Solzhenitsyn called it ‘The Last Secret’. It only reached the wider public through books published thirty and forty years after the event.6

More recently, an unusual libel trial in London awarded £1.5 million damages against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, author of The Minister and the Massacres, who had written of an official British conspiracy and cover-up. The plaintiff was not the minister accused of ordering the handover of the Cossacks, but a British officer who, faced with the same problem as Hills, had pursued a different policy. He did not receive a penny of his award, as the defendants fought on in the European courts.7

Individual responsibility is always hard to prove. But the moral principle is unequivocal. If ‘obeying orders’ could be no defence for Adolf Eichmann, it can be no defence for Allied officers.

Six weeks later, at Potsdam, from 17 July to 2 August, the Big Three met for the last time. Of the wartime leaders Stalin alone survived, suspicious that the capitalist powers might turn against him. Contrary to all predictions, Churchill was defeated in Britain’s post-war election, and replaced in the middle of the conference by the socialist Clement Attlee. Roosevelt had died before the fall of Germany; he was succeeded by his no-nonsense Vice-President, Harry Truman. Differences among them were so great that the original idea of organizing a Peace Conference was shelved. When Truman arranged for a melodramatic announcement of the successful American A-bomb test, Stalin did not even blink.

So Potsdam stuck to practical matters. Germany was to be given an Interallied Council to co-ordinate the administration of its four occupation zones. Austria was to be restored to its independence. France was to be given back Alsace-Lorraine, and Czechoslovakia the Sudetenland. Poland was to be given a frontier on the Oder-Neisse line, whether the Poles wanted it or not. All Germans living east of the new frontiers were to be expelled. All the Nazi leaders who had fallen into the Allied net were to stand trial before an International War Crimes Tribunal. Beyond that, the Allies could agree on little; and they did not try.

By which time, the processes of reconstruction and forgetting were in full swing:

After every war
someone has to clear up.
For things won’t find their right place
on their own.

Someone has to heave
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts piled high with corpses
can pass by.

Photogenic it certainly isn’t;
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone off
to other wars.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little, or less than a little,
or simply nothing.

Friday, 19 October 1945, Nuremberg. The city was occupied by the US Army. An American colonel had taken command of the city prison which stood immediately behind the Palace of Justice on the Fürtherstrasse. Of the 24 named defendants in the ‘Trial of German Major War Criminals’, 21 were locked in their cells. It was the day when they were due to be served with their indictments.

The task of serving the indictments had fallen to a young British major, a former prisoner of war, who spoke fluent German. As he entered the cell-block just before 2 p.m. he saw three tiers of cells, each with a small window grille in the door. A guard was lolling at every door, peering through the grille. On the upper floors the open balconies were covered with wire netting. The twenty-second defendant had recently committed suicide. The event was to be witnessed by a dozen men. The major was shown into the block by the commandant of the prison and by a master-sergeant who carried the keys. Behind them walked the General Secretary of the International Military Tribunal with his interpreter, two American soldiers carrying documents, an officer of the US security staff, the prison psychologist, notebook in hand, and the prison’s Lutheran chaplain. A handful of ‘snowdrops’—American military policemen in their characteristic white helmets—brought up the rear.

The indictments, freshly translated from English into German, were bulky documents. The cover-page read: ‘The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics against …’, followed by a column of 24 names, headed by that of Goering. There were four counts—conspiracy in common, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Each of the accused was to receive two copies, which outlined both the general charges and the particular counts on which he was accused. Anglo-American practice required that the indictments be served in person.

The young major, though a law graduate, had no particular experience of such duties. When he saw the wire netting his thoughts turned to one of his wartime companions, a Belgian airman captured by the Gestapo, who had leapt to his death from exactly such a balcony in the prison at Suresnes. Though he had been working for the Tribunal for several months, the major had only just arrived in Nuremberg, and he had never met any of the prisoners face to face:

Map 27. Post-War Germany, after 1945

‘I looked towards the high window at the far end of the prison. The spiral stairs to the upper rows of cells were in silhouette against the bright autumn sun. There was that eternal silence, only the menacing sound of keys…

The silence continued until we reached a cell near the end of the row. The guard on duty saluted. I noticed that he was armed with a revolver and a blackjack … As the cell was unlocked, I braced myself to meet [the prisoner, who] rose unsteadily to his feet….

I was surprised to find my voice.

‘Hermann Wilhelm Goering?’

‘Jawohl.’

‘I am Major Neave, the officer appointed by the International Military Tribunal to serve upon you a copy of the indictment in which you are named as a defendant.’

Goering’s expression changed to a scowl, the look of a stage gangster, as the words were interpreted. I handed him a copy of the indictment which he took in silence. He listened as I said, ‘I am also asked to explain to you Article 16 of the Charter of the Tribunal.’

A copy in German was handed to him.

‘If you will look at paragraph (c). You have the right to conduct your own defence before the tribunal, or to have the assistance of counsel.’

My words were correct and precise. Goering looked serious and depressed as I paused.

‘So it has come,’ he said…

‘You can have counsel of your own choice, or the tribunal can appoint one for you.’

It was evident that Goering did not understand … Then he said, ‘I do not know any lawyers. I have nothing to do with them.’…

‘I think that you would be well advised to be represented by someone.’…

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘It all seems pretty hopeless to me. I must read this indictment very carefully, but I do not see how it can have any basis in law.’…

Some hours after I left Goering’s cell, Dr. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, asked him to autograph a copy of the indictment. Goering wrote, ‘The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’

In this way, the fundamental dilemma of the Nuremberg Trials found expression even before the trials began.

Europe in the autumn of 1945 was functioning at the lowest level of subsistence. The victorious Allies had divided a devastated Germany into four zones of occupation, and were struggling to maintain a united front. The Western countries liberated by the Anglo-Americans—France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands—were picking up the strands of their pre-war existence. The Eastern countries liberated by the Soviets were finding that liberation was joined to a new form of subjugation. Great Britain, the only combatant country to have avoided occupation, had recently chosen a socialist government which was realizing that victory was no safeguard against a marked decline in status. There was no single state in Europe, like the USA, which was both victorious and unscathed. A handful of neutrals, from Spain to Sweden, were free to exercise a degree of real independence.

Several countries had already staged trials to punish wartime acts that were now considered criminal. In Oslo, Quisling was tried and executed in September: in Paris, Laval suffered the extreme penalty on 9 October. In Moscow, the trial of Polish underground leaders had taken place in June; public opinion in the West was not fully aware that the defendants in this case were neither fascists nor collaborators, but heroic allies whose only crime had been to fight for their country’s independence. Western governments had preferred to press privately for lenient sentences rather than protest publicly.

Nurnberg (Nuremberg), one of Germany’s most ancient and most German cities, had been reduced to a sea of rubble, having been subjected to eleven mass bombing raids. Then, when two SS divisions decided to make it the scene of their last stand, it had been mercilessly shelled into submission by American heavy artillery. Home of the medieval Meistersingers and of Tannhãuser, of Albrecht Diirer and of Veit Stoss, it had been chosen in the previous century as the home of the German Museum, a magnificent collection of German national art and history. In the 1930s it had been chosen as the venue for Hitler’s most dramatic Nazi rallies. It had now been chosen for the Trials partly for its symbolic value, partly because its imposing Palace of Justice had miraculously survived the bombing. To hold the trials in Nuremberg was to emphasize the Allied view that the root of Germany’s evil lay not in Prussian militarism (as was the view in 1918) but in the very nature of the Germans’ national identity. The setting of the trial seemed designed to teach a history lesson far deeper than the offences of the individual defendants.

Nuremberg’s special contribution to the Trials, however, was to be found in the person of defendant no. 8, Julius Streicher (b. 1885), who had ruled the city as Nazi Gauleiter from 1933 to 1940. He was serving his second time in the cells behind the Palace of Justice, having once been arrested for molesting a boy prisoner during one of his official visits. He was a blatant sexual pervert, as his jailers were able to observe, and a lifelong Jew-baiter whose speciality lay in linking sex with anti-semitism. In his crusade against ‘race pollution’ he had invented a spurious biochemical theory, whereby the albumen of Jewish semen was capable of permanently ‘infecting’ any woman with whom it came into contact. As the editor of Der Stürmer he waged a constant campaign to protect German maidens from Jewish seducers—a cause which he later gave pseudo-scientific cover in the journal Deutsche Volksgesundheit aus Blut und Boden. He was the main instigator of the Nuremberg Laws which forbade all sexual intercourse in Germany between Jews and non-Jews. In 1938, on Kristallnacht, he had made a speech urging the rioters to follow the glorious example of the medieval pogroms that had been perpetrated in the city. As an early recruit to the NSDAP, he was one of the few Nazi leaders to address the Führer as du. But he overstepped the mark when he publicly asserted that Göring’s daughter had been conceived by artificial insemination. The infuriated Reichsmarschall had instigated a commission of inquiry that uncovered such gross corruption that Hitler himself could not save his Gauleiter from instant retirement.

The Allied decision to stage a war crimes trial had not been lightly reached. Churchill had been against it, as had Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the US Treasury. In the absence of legal precedents, they argued that it would be better to shoot the Nazi leaders by summary execution. Their opinion was overruled: the Allied governments had committed themselves to the principle of war crimes trials by the Declaration of St James (January 1942) and the Moscow Declaration (November 1943); and the established policy had too much support to be discarded. Of the Big Three, Roosevelt and Stalin were both in favour. As a result, the trial had to take place. They were necessary both as ‘a sincere but naive attempt to apply the rule of law’ and to demonstrate the limitless power of the victors. Stalin had used show trials as an instrument of his political victory inside the Soviet Union; and there is no reason to think that he would have missed the opportunity for a similar show of strength after his great international victory. Stalin, after all, was the chief beneficiary, since in any equitable settlement he might easily have found himself in the dock.

The International Military Tribunal was created in consequence of the Potsdam Agreements. Its Charter was published on 8 August 1945, two days after the Hiroshima bombing. The Nuremberg Trials were planned as the European counterpart to similar trials against Japanese leaders that were due to take place in Tokyo.

Once the indictments were served, the opening of the Nuremberg Trials was set for 20 November 1945. From then, the Trials proceeded through 403 open sessions in the main courtroom of the Palace of Justice until the final sentences of the judgment were read more than ten months later, on 1 October 1946. The four Allied judges, under their Chairman, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence QC, sat on one side with their deputies. The 21 defendants present, who all pleaded not guilty, filled the benches of the dock opposite, under strict military guard. The four Allied prosecutors—an American, a Briton, a Frenchman, and a Soviet—shared the middle ground with their deputies and assistants, with the crowd of defending German counsel, and with a mass of clerks, translators, and interpreters. A raised public gallery had been built in one lateral wing of the courtroom. The proceedings were conducted and recorded in English, German, French, and Russian. At any one time, therefore, the majority of participants would be listening to simultaneous translations on headphones.

In addition to those present, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, was tried in absentia, as were eight defendant organizations charged with collective criminality: the SS, the SD, the SA, and the Gestapo: the ‘leadership corps of the NSDAP’, the Reich Cabinet, the General Staff, and the High Command of the German Armed Forces. Proceedings against Gustav Krupp, the industrialist, were dropped on account of the defendant’s incapacity. In all, the prosecution produced over 4,000 documents, 1,809 affidavits, and 33 live witnesses. They also showed films, and introduced a number of grisly exhibits including ‘human lampshades’ and the heads of men mounted on wooded stands like those of stags. The defence produced 143 witnesses, together with hundreds of thousands of affidavits. The corpus of the Trials, published in 1946, ran to 43 volumes.126

The opening speeches of the prosecution made lofty appeals to the highest moral principles, whilst betraying some sensitivity to the legal uncertainties. Justice Robert H. Jackson admitted that the Tribunal was ‘novel and experimental’. Sir Hartley Shawcross appealed to the ‘rule of law’, M. de Menthon to ‘the conscience of the peoples’. General Rudenko spoke of‘the sacred memory of millions of victims of the fascist terror’… and ‘the conscience of all freedom-loving peoples’. Jackson probably made the best case by arguing from the inadmissibility of inaction. ‘Civilisation asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude …’

Within their limited terms of reference, the Trials were conducted with great decorum and circumspection. Lord Justice Lawrence set an example to the judges by extending every courtesy to the defence, and by acidly reprimanding the prosecution where necessary. The only time when the proceedings became unruly was when Jackson lost control of Goring during cross-examination. Blanket verdicts were never likely, acquittals always possible.

The strongest testimony was presented on the counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Here the evidence against the Nazi party men was damning, especially when derived from their own records. The death-camps of the Final Solution, the unspeakable horrors of pseudo-medical experiments, mass atrocities of unprecedented proportions were comprehensively documented in a manner leaving little margin for error. The weakest testimony was offered on the counts of common conspiracy, and on points where it was easy for the defence to plead normal practice of sovereign states. It was hard to prove that Hitler’s ‘secret meetings’ with his colleagues constituted evil intent, or that rearmament was in itself inspired by aggressive motives. Direct comparisons with Allied conduct, however, were not permitted. The defence could not raise the failings of the Versailles settlement or of the Allied bombing offensive, nor the subject of Soviet atrocities. ‘We are here to judge major war criminals,’ Lord Justice Lawrence insisted, ‘not to try the prosecuting powers.’ Attempts to discuss conditions in Allied internment camps or the forcible expulsion of Germans, which was in progress at the time, were cut short. ‘The Defence is attempting to introduce breaches of International law by the Allies,’ reported The Times on 8 May 1946, ‘but [the prosecutor] made the point that if this were accepted, he would be obliged to bring evidence of rebuttal, which would needlessly prolong the trial.’

The subject of the Katyń massacres was initially raised by the Soviet prosecutor. When the defence lawyers were able to show that many of the prosecutor’s facts were false, the Soviet team promptly dropped the accusations. [KATYKI]

Eyewitnesses to the Trials recalled many moments of drama and irony. There was the symbolic scene of the wild-eyed Hess sitting in the dock reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Another minor sensation occurred in November when the Soviet prosecution team was joined unannounced by Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief Soviet delegate to the United Nations, best remembered as Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the Purge trials of the 1930s. Many observers commented on the eerie contrast between the fate-laden climate of the courtroom and the merry flow of pink gins in the bar of the Grand Hotel next door.

The American security staff provided two psychiatrists and one psychologist for the defendants’ welfare. As part of his duties, the psychologist prepared tests for the defendants’ IQ ratings:

Schacht, 143; Seyss-Inquart, 140; Goring, 138; Dönitz, 138; von Papen, 134; Raeder, 134; Frank, 130; Fritzsche, 130; von Schirach, 130; Ribbentrop, 129; Keitel, 129; Speer, 128; Jodl, 127; Rosenberg, 127; von Neurath, 125; Funk, 124; Frick, 124; Hess, 120; Sauckel, 118; Kaltenbrunner, 113; Streicher, 106.129

The sentences, when they came, caused some surprise. Schacht, the banker, Fritzsche, the propagandist, and von Papen, the sometime Vice-Chancellor, were acquitted on all counts. So, too, were the Reich Cabinet, the General Staff, and the High Command. Dönitz, von Neurath, von Schirach, Speer, and Hess received prison sentences varying from 10 years to life. Goring was branded ‘the leading war aggressor’ and convicted on all four counts. He and ten others were sentenced to death by the rope. The Soviet prosecutor entered a dissenting opinion on all the acquittals and prison sentences. Each of the prisoners reacted in his own way to the prospect of hanging. Jodl said bitterly ‘That, I didn’t deserve.’ Ribbentrop said, ‘I won’t be able to write my beautiful memoirs.’ Hans Frank said, ‘I deserved it and expected it.’ When the psychologist asked Hess what sentence he had been given, Hess replied ‘I’ve no idea. Probably the death penalty. I didn’t listen.’ Goring cheated the hangman by killing himself with a cyanide pellet concealed in a dental crown.

Ten executions were carried out in the gymnasium of the prison block on 16 October 1946. Most of the condemned died with patriotic words on their lips. Frank shouted, ‘Deutschland über alles’. Streicher said, ‘Heil Hitler. Purim 1946. The Bolsheviks will hang you all,’ then commended himself to his wife. Rumour held that the US army executioner botched his job, causing lingering deaths, and that the bodies were cremated at Dachau. The five remaining convicts were transported to Spandau Jail in Berlin, where the four-power administration was to continue until the strange death of Hess in 1987.

A wide range of criticisms was levelled against the trials from the outset. On the purely political front, fears were expressed that the defendants would be turned into martyrs. This did not happen, either in Germany or elsewhere. The head of repugnance built up by the Trials’ revelations was large enough to offset any counter-currents of sympathy. If there was a general consensus, it held that the crimes of the Nazis outweighed any element of rough justice that was meted to individuals. Many lawyers, however, were gravely worried by the ex post facto nature of the indictments.Nulla poena sine lege. Dissenting voices did not accept Jackson’s contention that the Tribunal was contributing to ‘the growth of international law\132 They were also scandalized by the court’s lack of independence. For the Allied Powers to supply both the judges and the prosecutors on terms and in an arena dictated by themselves made for bad legal practice, and for poor publicity. ‘While clothed with forms of justice,’ objected Senator Robert Taft, ‘[the trials] were in fact an instrument of government policy, determined months before at Yalta and Teheran.’ A widespread opinion, especially among the Allied military, held that honourable German officers like Admiral Dönitz should not have been put in the same dock as active Nazis like Goring or Streicher. When Dönitz was released in 1956, several hundred distinguished Allied veterans, headed by US Admiral Nimitz, contributed to a volume of regrets.134

To those who could resist the emotions of the times, it was scandalous that the Western press and government agencies often encouraged the notion of collective guilt. All the defendants were routinely labelled as ‘criminals’ long before the verdicts were pronounced. Most seriously of all, the fact that the Nuremberg trials were limited to offences committed by the defeated enemy erected an insuperable obstruction to any general and impartial investigation into war crimes or crimes against humanity. It created the lasting impression in public opinion that such crimes could not by definition be committed by agents of the Allied Powers.

For historians, the Nuremberg Trials are of interest both as a historical event in their own right and as an exercise in examining the past through legal methods. Their advocates were convinced that ‘we discovered the truth’.135 Their critics maintain that less than half the truth was discovered. To be precise, the Nuremberg Trials confirmed beyond all reasonable doubt the reality of Nazi crimes. They also documented the role played by Germany in the origins and conduct of the Second World War, not always in the light demanded by the prosecutors. At the same time, by isolating the German factor from all others, they were bound to construct a biased and, in the last resort, an untenable analysis. Equally, by knowing omissions, they encouraged the erroneous view that there was little more to discover. The historical material which was marshalled in the indictments, and then in the preamble to the final judgment, was intended for ‘throwing light on matters of interest to the International Military Tribunal’. Yet it was so blatantly selective that even the most fervent opponents of Nazism could despair. To mention the Nazi-Soviet pact, for example, but only in the category of treaties violated by the German Reich, was grossly misleading. ‘The published indictment’, wrote a leading historian on the day that the document was served in the cells, ‘reads like history written by non-historians.’

The Nuremberg Trials were the source both of huge quantities of valid historical information and of manifest historical distortions. Bolstered by the public attitudes which they encouraged in the West, and by the Soviet censorship, which used the findings as gospel, they became the bastion of a particular ‘Allied Scheme of History’ that would prevail for fifty years (see Introduction). Not until Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, and Glasnost’ in the 1980s, did public opinion begin to realize that the Nuremberg prosecutors were masters no less of concealment than of unmasking. Andrei Vyshinsky demonstrated the fact when, in a rare moment of honesty, he proposed a toast at a Nuremberg reception: ‘Death to the Defendants!’.137 As usual, his Western partners did not understand Russian. They drank the toast without hesitation, then asked what it meant afterwards.

Map 28. Europe Divided, 1949–89

* Fred Carno was the owner of a popular circus company of the time.