Crimes and Mercies (21 page)

Clearly the military camouflaged all this as best they could because they knew their reputations would be damaged if the truth came out. Love of reputation is a minor guarantor of good behaviour but a great source of hypocrisy in any society. The cover-up illustrates another feature: that the perpetrators of the crimes were in profound conflict with people in the West who saw a much better solution than vengeance – like Hoover, Gollancz, Senators Langer and Wherry, along with Dorothy Thompson, thousands of nameless aid workers and a very few honest reporters. Theirs was the conflict between crime and mercy – or good and evil if you will.

Many people representing the West in Germany were deeply distressed at what they saw. People such as Murphy and Behnke reveal in their uneasy words their uneasy conscience. Many such people were quite prepared to hang a Nazi, but it was repugnant to them to starve his child to death without a trial. They were disgusted by Allied co-operation in forcing the expellees out of the east. It might be thought that the Nazis’ aggressions and crimes against civilians were the unique cause of this terrible vengeance, but nothing like this was visited on Japan. The Japanese had been waging a war of conquest, enslavement and near-extermination against civilian Chinese and Koreans for far longer, but General Douglas MacArthur, when he was Military Governor of Japan, demanded enough food from Washington to keep civilians alive. ‘Give me bread or give me bullets,’ he told Washington, and they gave him bread.

At heart the Westerners appear to have reacted in 1945 against the Germans much as they had in 1918, except that their fury was magnified by the desire to have done with the German problem once and for all. This anger went on so long, cut so deep, that it endangered the whole continent, while it exposed the West to ever-increasing danger from the Soviets. While the
Soviets pillaged, menaced and murdered in Eastern Europe, while they stole Canada’s atomic secrets, subverted democratic governments and spread hatred of the West round the world, the Western democracies fed, protected and befriended them. But the democracies would scarcely recognize those in Germany who had proven at the risk of their lives that they too were enemies of Hitler.

Those few people in the West today who do admit to allied crimes excuse them on the ground of the ferocious hatred roused by the race crimes of Hitler. But the truth is, the Western nations had already inflicted a similar vengeance on the Germans when there was no question of Nazi racism. What happened before happened again.

The pattern began long before 1914. For centuries, various powers in Europe had attempted to dominate or destroy the Germans. In one of Heinrich von Treitschke’s classic passages, he describes the result of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. ‘Then at length the last and decisive war of the epoch … broke out. All the powers of Europe took part in the war … In a disturbance without parallel, the old Germany passed away. Those who had once aimed at world domination were now by the pitiless justice of history, placed under the feet of the stranger. The Rhine and the Ems, the Oder and the Vistula, all the ways to the sea became captive of the foreign nations … The entire life of Germany lay open without defence to the superior civilization of the foreigner … Never was any other nation so forcibly estranged from itself and from its own past …’
⁵²
These words might have been written about the Germany of 1945, which was also captive of the foreign nations, after Hitler’s attempt at world domination was ended by the last and decisive war of our epoch.

The similarities between the events immediately following the First and Second World Wars, are uncanny. After the First World War, Allied promises of just treatment for all peoples after the war were immediately broken; food lay rotting on the docks in European ports while Germans starved to death;
⁵³
German soldiers were accused of atrocities such as bayonetting babies, of
burning libraries, massacring civilians; a pogrom against 6,000,000 Jews was reported, and vast reparations were imposed on the Germans while the economy of the nation collapsed, millions of people starved and communist Russia threatened the whole of Europe. All this happened after 1918, and it happened again, only far worse, after 1945.

There was thus in 1945 among the Allies another motive to secrecy. It was important to hide the punishment because it had already been demonstrated that the earlier punishment had not been a deterrent. In fact, the only lesson of Versailles was that it had helped Hitler to goad the Germans to re-arm in the 1930s.

Two characteristics distinguished the victors of 1945 from nearly all others in modern European history. One is that they refused to allow the vanquished any treaty at surrender. Everything was imposed. The other was that they did not end the killing at the end of the war, but increased it. Above all, what was expected of the Allies, even by their own people, was to end the killing. But in fact, far more civilian Germans died in five years of ‘peace’ than soldiers in six years of war.
⁵⁴

At the Nuremberg trials of the German war criminals, the Soviets saw an opportunity to pin the blame for the Katyn massacre on German scapegoats, to hang them and have done with it. But their case was so patently bogus that the Western Allies objected. All the Allied lawyers and judges knew perfectly well that the Germans were not guilty, but not one of them told the truth: that the only other nation that could have committed the crime was the USSR.

One of the chief objections the Allies had to Nazi policies from the beginning was that, in true totalitarian fashion, the Nazis had persecuted many innocent Germans, beginning with their political opponents, especially communists and Jews, liberal academics, priests, pastors, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally retarded, and so on. More than three million Germans had been in Nazi prisons at one time or another between 1933 and 1945. Of these,
some 800,000 were imprisoned for active resistance to the Nazis.
⁵⁵
Many others had fled the country. These Germans were the only significant internal indigenous resistance movement in the whole world during the war. Many Soviet citizens resisted the Stalinists, but not at the highest levels, and not until the Germans had taken over their areas. Only in Germany were there any attempts on the life of the leader; only German senior officers secretly delivered important intelligence to the enemy during wartime; only in Germany did senior officers such as admirals and generals risk their lives and their families to bring down the regime. The second-in-command of the Nazi party, Rudolf Hess, defected to the British in an attempt to bring the war to an end in 1941. The British made no attempt to use him to bring down Hitler. They judged him mad and imprisoned him for the rest of his life. The most famous general of the war, Erwin Rommel, was ordered by Hitler to choose between execution and suicide for his part in the resistance. The head of German military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, ‘took breathtaking risks to advance the cause of resistance to Hitler’
⁵⁶
by passing secret information to the Allies. He was hanged by Hitler in April 1945.

Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury. His Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of German industry led to the deaths of millions of Germans years after the war’s end.

The Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, where the transfers of millions of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were approved. Truman is in the foreground, with his back to camera; Stalin is seated further to the right and Churchill is across the table on the left.

US President Harry Truman (left) greets Herbert Hoover on 28 May 1945, before a 45-minute meeting during which they discussed world food relief.

In September 1945, US Secretary of War Robert Patterson and President Harry Truman controlled the most powerful military machine in human history. They soon used it for a huge food-relief campaign.

Norman Robertson, Under-Secretary of External Affairs for Canada, led the Canadian food aid programme from 1945. Later he became Ambassador to the United States.

William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada. He worked with Norman Robertson and Herbert Hoover to bring Canadian wheat to starving people around the world.