Crimes and Mercies (24 page)

While the German resistance movement was being treated with contempt by the British and Americans, the Soviets were making considerable efforts to indoctrinate captured Germans with communist ideology. As we saw, they set up a special camp at Krasnogorsk near Moscow where they re-educated willing German prisoners, including the famous Field Marshal, Paulus, who had besieged Stalingrad. The democracies made great efforts to aid every other resistance movement in Europe, none of them able to make a material difference in the fighting, while they refused all help to Hitler’s German enemies, who were the only ones with a chance to end the war immediately. After the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944, which ended in mass executions of resistance leaders by the Gestapo, all Churchill could think to tell the House was that ‘the highest personalities in the German Reich are murdering one another, or trying to, while the avenging armies of the Allies close upon the doomed
and ever-narrowing circle of their power’.
⁶⁰

Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett, a senior Foreign Office advisor, thought that, ‘It is to our advantage therefore that the [Hitler] purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassments of many kinds.’
⁶¹

There was of course a reason for this unreasonable behaviour: the Allies were intent on unconditional surrender, which meant that they would not have to make any deals at all with any Germans, and could then treat the country as they wished. According to this view, all the Germans were so treacherous that no one could trust any of them. It was not just Nazis who were bad, it was all Germans. Any who tried to make peace were simply evil men who had seen the writing on the wall. No one could trust a German who was simply trying to get himself or his country out of a losing war by sacrificing Hitler. There was never any movement on the Western side to a
rapprochement
with any Germans, no matter how opposed they were to Hitler, no matter what they risked in defiance of Nazism, no matter how much they believed in the same ideals as the Allies themselves.

One of the oddities in Western policy was to continue support of Stalin in the USSR and Eastern Europe, while shunning like the plague all Stalinist communists in Germany, who had been by far the strongest of the resisters against the Nazis. Some communist prisoners at the concentration camp at Buchenwald very nearly captured the camp administration; communist and socialist resisters crowded the jails of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Their resistance was on a vastly greater scale than all others. But the Western powers feared them, while they were quite willing to hire ex-Nazis if they seemed useful.
⁶²
These were a few scientists, spies and the like, who were spirited away regardless of their political affiliations. Some of these were taken to the US in 1945–47, then taken by train to the Canadian border at Niagara Falls, where the Canadians allowed them to enter the country illegally, then re-enter the US to comply with American immigration regulations. Some, perhaps many of these people, had been members of the Nazi party. One such was
Dr Herbert P. Raabe of Potomac, Maryland, a radar expert who was illegally brought to the US, then ‘laundered’ along with many others at Niagara Falls, Canada, before being returned to the US as a ‘legal’ immigrant.
⁶³
At the same time, large categories of resisting Germans, easy for the Allies to identify because many were in Hitler’s jails in 1945, were starved along with the rest. These included Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had fiercely resisted Hitler, refusing to fight or salute Nazi symbols, and so on.

The German-born Mennonites also resisted, although many caved in to Nazi pressure to join the armed forces. Some stuck to their pacifist principles, and ended up in jail, or else working in hospitals. But when in 1945 the Mennonite Central Committee in Canada and the US tried to send food over to their co-religionists, the Allied military governments refused the necessary permits. For over a year, thousands of men and women, many of whom had bravely (or not so bravely) resisted Hitler, starved while their co-religionists were prevented from helping them. Only in June 1946 were the Mennonites, Quakers and others finally permitted to send the necessary food to Germany.
⁶⁴
Among the millions of Soviet citizens returned to the USSR were hundreds of thousands of refugees from communist tyranny. These included thousands of Mennonites who were beaten and shot at by British troops trying to force them on to the trains to the Gulag, for example at Liezen in Austria in June 1945.

Thus the democracies went on fighting the Germans long after the war ended, while their leaders promoted the Soviets, lied for them, and aided them in many ways. It has long been assumed that the West was simply too weak to resist the Soviet takeover of Poland and other Eastern European countries, but in fact the West was not helpless in the face of Russian might. At Potsdam, they were not under any threat from the Soviets when they approved the illegal transfers of populations and the seizure of German lands, all actions which were completely against the Atlantic Charter and various UN declarations. The US and Canada went on sending food, machinery and other aid to the Soviets long after their brutal actions in the East were known to Allied leaders.

Herbert Hoover was astonished to find how little UNRRA was doing to feed civilians in ‘the seat of Western civilization’, west of the Iron Curtain. Only 20 per cent of the world’s famine area was being served, and most of UNRRA’s food and other aid went to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.
⁶⁵
The West not only helped them to cover up the war crimes they had committed against Poles at Katyn, the British showed that they apparently approved of Soviet crimes, when they delivered many thousands more victims from their cages into the hands of the same KGB murderers.

Winston Churchill bullied and persuaded the Free Poles who had been his allies in London during the war to return to Poland, assuring them that they would be taken into the new government. In fact, they were immediately arrested by Stalin and never seen free again. It is a fact that the British helped the Soviets to butcher or imprison the Cossacks and White Russians, while they and the Americans were indiscriminately punishing the Christian democratic resisters within Germany.

It has never been explained in the West how it was that their governments could reinforce the regime of mass-murderers like Stalin, Beria, Kaganovich and Molotov, while they were so afraid of truthful, compassionate men like Dietrich Bonhöffer, Cardinal Frings, Helmut von Moltke, Claus von Stauffenberg and hundreds of thousands of other German resisters. Many Western leaders viewed with indifference or approval the starvation of Germans who included friends of democracy and freedom. For instance, when Pastor Martin Niemöller said that he wanted to make a tour of Switzerland and the US in 1946 to ‘appeal to fellow Christians and men of good will’, he was arrested and returned to a concentration camp.
⁶⁶
The Westerners had condemned the Nazis for assigning collective guilt to groups for crimes of individual members, but it would be unrealistic to deny that they did the same thing themselves.

All this is scarcely known to the major participants. A whole nation was maimed in peacetime, but when the events are even
mentioned by the German survivors, they are immediately hushed up by their own government. No one is allowed to dig for the corpses of the murdered prisoners in Germany.
⁶⁷
The criminals go free. To defend them, lies are told by historians who also defame the injured. Free expression of historical opinion is curbed by legislation that grows ever more stringent as time passes. No denial of history has ever been so successful.

Never was any other nation so forcibly estranged from itself and from its own past.

Which goes for the democracies too.

*
Of course, many Germans from the seized territories who evaded expulsion died as well, but figures for them are not available.

*
There are so many examples of important omissions, evasions and callous indifference in the reports that it is impossible to believe they are all the result of sloppy writing.

*
These results differ from those based on the Proudfoot figures largely because the time period is different.

*
See note 27, Chapter 6.

VII
T
HE
V
ICTORY OF THE
M
ERCIFUL

‘Erst kommt das Fressen,
dann kommt die Moral.’
*

BERTOLT BRECHT,
The Threepenny Opera

We now turn our eyes away from criminals to men of the same nations but not of the same kind. These were the saviours, who came in the wake of war to help others.

There were two extraordinary events in the summer of 1945, apart from the atomic explosions. The first was the imposition of Allied vengeance on all Germans regardless of guilt, and the second was the organization of the greatest act of compassion the world had ever known. All around the world in 1945 there were areas of food poverty, as there have always been and are now. But in 1945, for the first time in human history, there was a concerted attempt by some nations to deal with food poverty around the world. This had never happened before. This was the real news, not the eternal pockets of food poverty. The nations leading this effort were the United States and Canada, helped by Australia and Argentina.

The relief of hunger around the world lay in the hands of a few men in Ottawa and Washington during the spring of 1945. These were the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King; one of his chief advisers, Norman Robertson, under-secretary in the
Department of External Affairs; the new American President Harry Truman; and a man with no office, Herbert Hoover.

In the spring of 1945, Herbert Hoover stood aloof from the many people in Washington who were imposing starvation on Germany. This was why Truman needed him. He was never vindictive. Hoover appealed to a huge constituency of decent, moderate Americans who could not be satisfied by anyone less. Any world relief effort under his command would be effective and credible. Anyone else would begin with a handicap: not being Hoover. In 1945, as before, Hoover was the conscience of the West.

Harry Truman shared Herbert Hoover’s generous impulse to feed the starving, whether they were ex-enemy or not. In May 1945, both were caught in the conflicting forces of politics in Washington. Truman needed Hoover’s wisdom and experience because starvation threatened both ally and enemy in Europe, but it was difficult for Truman the Democrat to call on Hoover, who was not only a famous Republican but also a political hasbeen. Roosevelt had cast him into the outer darkness, a policy that remained in force under Steve Early, the press secretary inherited by Truman from Roosevelt. Steve Early and Roosevelt were so opposed to Hoover’s efforts to bring relief to starving Belgians and Poles that Early had once given orders over his White House phone to Norman Davis, Chairman of the American Red Cross, to ‘Stop that fellow Hoover. We don’t want him to get anywhere.’
¹

Hoover was by far the most knowledgeable person in the world on international food relief, but he had been kept entirely out of the allied planning for post-war aid. The planning had been initiated by the British in September 1941, then gradually expanded to include the Americans, Soviets, Canadians and Chinese. It was the Chinese delegate to the Inter-Allied Committee meeting in Washington in December 1942 who asked that Hoover be called in to advise on some difficult voting procedures, but the Roosevelt administration was so prejudiced against Hoover that it refused.
²

The State Department also opposed Hoover. This combination made it so difficult for Truman that the preliminary negotiations in spring 1945 to get Hoover’s help, through Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and others, went on for weeks, while both the principals fretted. Truman wanted Hoover to offer his services publicly, so he would not have the onus of inviting him; Hoover needed the President’s public invitation in order to be effective once he did accept. This would demonstrate to the recalcitrant Democrats and others that he was not seeking office, but had responded to his country’s needs. So many advisers became involved that Truman finally escaped by a simple method: he wrote by hand a letter to Hoover which he posted himself, inviting Hoover to come. The ice was broken. Hoover accepted eagerly and finally went to Washington for a meeting in the White House with Truman in May.

Truman asked Hoover for advice on several subjects, but especially food relief for foreigners, excluding Germans. At that time, the occupied countries were exclusively the province of the occupying armies. All of the relief discussions among the Western Allies had had a meagre result – the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Hoover had a derisive opinion of it, because it was dominated by power politics and lacking in authority. He told Truman that it was ‘incapable of administering the larger economic problems of Europe’.
³
Part of the trouble was that the organization was more interested in itself than in its mission. Truman was probably shocked to hear from this expert that UNRRA was grossly inefficient. By the end of its life in Europe in 1947, it had administered the supply of some 24 million tons of food and equipment worth some $2.9 billion, and had paid substantial salaries, whereas the American relief work Hoover had administered during and after the First World War supplied almost twice as much food and equipment, worth more than double the amount sent by UNRRA. And all the principal officers of the American Relief Administration under Hoover were volunteers.
⁴
When Truman met Hoover in May 1945, UNRRA was then gearing up to its maximum effort, which by
spring 1946 still covered less than 20 per cent of the famine areas of the world. And most of the food was going to areas controlled by the communists. Germany was totally omitted, and Western Europe received a relatively small share.
⁵