Crimes and Mercies (6 page)

Somewhere between half a million and a million Germans starved after the war. These deaths were largely caused by the
British blockade, or so the Germans believed. But they also had been deceived by their own Kaiser. Early in the planning for the war, the Kaiser’s Cabinet, foreseeing a food shortage, decided that to preserve the potato crop essential to feed the population, the harvest should be stored not in clamps
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in the field as was the custom, but in the basements of schools and other public buildings across the nation, to reduce the losses caused by rain, frost and animals. So in 1914 and in 1915, the potatoes were stored in basements. The basements were too warm, and the potatoes rotted, spreading a disease known as
phytophthora infestans
(the terrible plant destroyer). The cure for this was known, copper sulphate, invented in Germany several decades before. But Germany’s supply of copper was scarcely enough for munitions. The Cabinet decided for the munitions. Uncontrolled, the disease infected seed potatoes, spreading devastation across the countryside. Civilians began to starve en masse, and soldiers home on leave in 1917 and 1918 saw their relatives dying. They began to doubt their leaders, and the war.

The doubt spread through the army like the terrible destroyer through the fields. In the summer of 1918, the collapse of the soldiers’ morale caused General Erich Ludendorff to advise the Kaiser to make peace.

The mass deaths from starvation became part of the culture of resentment fomented and exploited by Hitler, as the communists had done. Most Germans came to believe that the army had not been defeated at the front in 1918, as Hitler repeatedly said in his speeches during his campaigns for power from 1919 onwards. Largely victorious during the war, holding enormous tracts of enemy territory at the Armistice in 1918, the army, and corporal Hitler with it, felt betrayed by ‘plutocrats, Jews, profiteers and communists’ on the home front. It can scarcely be believed that the people who eventually voted for Hitler were indifferent to the memory of their own hunger and those who caused it, or to the deaths of millions of people, and those who starved them.

So, although Hoover was right to criticize the British for
attempting to starve German women and children, even he was not aware that infesting the lies and errors that caused the war, and prolonged it to 1945, there was a terrible destroyer spread by Germany’s own leaders.

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Shallow trenches filled with root crops, then covered with earth.

II
T
HE BEGINNING OF
W
ISDOM
?

For Britain, the most important aim of diplomacy in the 1930s had been to maintain in Europe a balance of power so that no nation would be strong enough to threaten her interests. In 1939, Britain hoped to achieve this partly by threatening Germany with war if Germany attacked Poland. Germany was seen as the only threat, and Poland was the place to end her aggressions. But, in fact, Poland was attacked in 1939 by two European aggressors, Germany and the USSR. Six years later, Poland was free of Germans, but the USSR was still in ugly possession of eastern Poland and other territories it had first taken with the help of Hitler. The British guarantee to Poland had not been fulfilled. And the Soviet threat to Europe in 1945 was great.

A decision was made in 1945 that shaped modern history. The last battle of the Second World War was not to be fought. As the Polish Minister Babinski in Ottawa said to the Prime Minister of Canada Mackenzie King in July 1945, ‘Poland has lost the war she fought, and the Allies have lost the war … Russian communism has won the day.’
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The weakness of the British
vis-à-vis
the Soviets is often assumed to be the cause, but the ‘weak’ British of 1939 had gone to war against Hitler; and in 1940, when they were even weaker, the British had continued to defy him. Now
the victorious British of 1945 were meekly collaborating in the Soviet takeover of all eastern Europe. Why?

The answer begins with one of the dominant international facts of the twentieth century, the strength of Germany. The Axis alliance in 1941–42 seemed so strong that our leaders believed that it was imperative to ally ourselves whole-heartedly with the dictator Stalin against the dictator Hitler.

This was one of the more astonishing reversals in history, for the British, French, Canadians and Americans had all fought against communism during the first days of the Russian revolution. They had failed to suppress communism in Russia, but their old enemy Germany had secretly begun to co-operate with Soviet Russia to re-arm in the 1920s. The Germans under the Weimar Republic had begun to rebuild their air force and army, which was illegal under the Treaty of Versailles. In Kazan, German tank units under General Heinz Guderian were secretly trained, and helped to train Red Army units; at Lipetsk airbase nearby, the Germans tested ‘a whole new generation of German fighters and heavy bombers.’
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And in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed in a secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, to conquer Poland together and then split the spoils. Assured of a speedy victory in Poland, Hitler courted the risk that Britain and France would declare war on Germany. Thus started the Second World War.

Hitler continued the war against the British and French with the help of the Soviets, who delivered oil, rubber, wheat and strategic metals in return for some machinery and for Hitler’s compliance in their takeover of the Baltic states. Thus for almost two years, the UK and British Commonwealth – with a little help from France – fought against German armies fuelled and fed in part by the Soviets.

Desperate for help after the fall of France in 1940 and Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941, the British and Canadians began to revise public opinion about the tyrannical Soviet regime. It was clearly ludicrous to pretend that the Soviets were helping the democracies, but the Western Allies did it anyway,
manufacturing public opinion through their control of press, film and radio. The major thrust of this propaganda was to demonize Germany and later Japan, while praising the Russians for their heroic struggle to defend their homeland. On the June day in 1941 that marked the beginning of Hitler’s assault on Russia, Churchill said with a smile, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’
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Pondering how to conduct the war from 1941 on, Western leaders did not choose the democratic way, to obey the public will. Instead, having determined their policy in secret, they deceived the public. They suppressed the brutal truth, that they believed the West was so weak that they had to support one criminal regime in order to beat another. So the Western leaders pretended that the greatest mass-murderer of all time, Joseph Stalin, was a wise and heroic leader resolutely defending Mother Russia against the fascist hordes. And it was the democracies’ duty to help defend him.

Soon after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941, the American government, with the willing co-operation of the press, created a vast propaganda machine to dupe their people about the Soviets. This was necessary for several reasons, one being that the American public, even nine months after the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, was still confused as to why they were in the war at all. According to a Gallup Poll in September 1942, almost 40 per cent of Americans had no idea ‘what this war was all about’. The pollsters concluded that ‘this large minority of the population has not been adequately sold on the war’.
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There was such a widespread indifference or opposition to government policies that their report had to be marked confidential, and circulated only among the top echelons of the media, with recommendations on how to change public opinion to favour the war.

As the war progressed, the Allies gradually extended their military co-operation with the Soviets, championing their cause against all kinds of critics. The mass killer Stalin was pictured in
the Western press with a benign smile over the caption ‘Uncle Joe.’
Life
magazine stated unequivocally in 1943 that the Russians ‘look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.’ The
New York Times
took the long view, saying that ‘Marxian thinking in Russia is out.’
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No mention was ever made of the vast atrocities committed before and during the war by the Soviets.

Then Roosevelt and Churchill took the next step: they began to cover up Soviet war crimes against their allies, the Poles. And finally, after the war, they helped the Soviets commit new crimes, against the democratic leaders of Poland, and against former allies of the West. These were White Russians who had fought first with Western troops against the communists in the Russian Civil War, then later sided with Hitler against Stalin. Victory over Germany justified for some people in the West the totalitarian means that had gained the end, so these people were sent by force to Stalin, although they had never been Soviet citizens. Finally, the Western democracies co-operated in the bloody Soviet-Polish expulsions from eastern Germany, maintained camps where about one million German prisoners of war died of starvation, exposure or disease, and countenanced or contributed to the starvation of millions of German civilians from 1946 to 1950.

The influential American columnist Dorothy Thompson clearly saw and eloquently warned against the danger that Western democratic leaders would continue to adapt some totalitarian methods to their own use after the war. She was joined by Harvard President Conant and many others. Herbert Hoover condemned the whole process in 1948: ‘I felt deeply that … we were aligning ourselves with wicked processes and that the old biblical injunction that “the wages of sin are death” was still working. We see the consequences today.’
⁶

The democracies accommodated the Soviets in 1945 partly because they still feared and hated the Germans. The democracies were also indifferent to the Soviets’ totalitarian cruelties. They were co-operating with the Soviets in hiding atrocities in
the east, and in the murderous expulsions from the seized territories of Germany. But their refusal to fight the Soviets was more fundamental. A fascinating change had begun that is still going on in the English-speaking democracies: the peacemakers were beginning to win their struggle with the militarists.

In most crises in the Anglo-Saxon nations before 1945, the victors had usually been the militarists. And with good reason, for Anglo-Saxon military power was by far the most successful that the world has ever known. Neither England nor the United States had ever lost a war against non-Anglo-Saxons in over five centuries of struggles with the greatest military powers on every continent, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, on land, under every kind of regime.

After the United States, Britain in 1945 was probably the most powerful nation on the face of the devastated earth, with the biggest empire in the history of the world. The Soviets had to remember that in any confrontation with Britain, huge resources might be available to Britain from Canada and the USA, who were able to pour billions of dollars in food, munitions, and advanced equipment into her ports. The Royal Navy was the strongest on earth, after the American fleet; the Royal Air Force enormous and highly skilled; the armies numbering millions of men, well-equipped and flush with victory.

There was recent and powerful precedent for the British to resist Russian influence in Europe. Britain had actually sent troops and ships against Russia twice before in recent times, once against the Tsar in the Crimea, and once again during the Russian Civil War. To assist them in a land battle, the British could call on more than two million German captives in their possession in the summer of 1945. The warlike spirit was still strong in the land. Churchill in May 1945 was keeping many German prisoners ready for battle, in their original formations, with all their guns and other equipment intact.
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For the British of yore, personified in Churchill, the commitment to Poland would have been a matter of Britain’s national honour, and her ancient pride – a test of British mettle. To fulfil it by driving out
Russia would have been a stern duty. But the Empire’s power depended largely on the willingness of the Canadians and Americans to go on subsidizing the British. Billions of Canadian dollars had already been sent, billions more were on their way to shore up the British economy. How long would it last?

Mackenzie King, the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, who had been arrested and jailed for leading a Canadian rebellion against the British in 1837, was opposed to an Empire dominated by the British. On a visit to Downing Street in September 1945 to receive British petitions for food and money, he wrote: ‘It is strange that Mackenzie [his grandfather] should have gone to Downing Street to try and get self-government, Canada’s grievances remedied and that Downing Street today should be asking me to come to help Britain with her difficult problems.’
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By King’s decision, Canada would not send the troops Churchill had wanted to help the British reconquer south-east Asia. But his objections went deeper than that. ‘I was thinking a day or two ago, that I had first my grandfather’s work to carry on; then Mulock’s work, Laurier’s work, and now my own work. All on this one theme, seeking to have the organization of Empire such that it will hold together by its several supports rather than all fall asunder through the efforts of Tory imperialists to create a vaster Empire than has been, thereby sowing the seeds of another world war.’
⁹

Bankrupt, short of food, weary of war, lacking warlike allies, the British made no threats against the Russians. Most of the imperial grandeur was swept overboard like cannon from the deck of a listing ship. The guarantee to Poland was ignored by all but the Poles.

The Americans had made no guarantee to Poland, but they felt strong sympathy for her people, and the politicians were keenly aware of the large Polish vote in the USA. Herbert Hoover had toured the US raising millions of dollars for relief to Poland in both the wars. By March 1945, even Roosevelt, invincibly credulous about Stalin, was beginning to wonder if the Soviets had any intention of accepting Anglo-Saxon ideas for sharing world power, or of making the United Nations work. By
September 1945, when the Japanese war was over and the atomic cloud had spread around the world, no one could doubt that the Soviets were already breaking all their promises about Poland. The Western sympathizers in Poland were being arrested and murdered, the communist Lublin Poles controlled Poland in the interests of the Soviets.