In Europe (85 page)

Just as unexpectedly, the voters banished Winston Churchill to Chartwell. (But not for good: in 1951 he once again became prime minister and stayed on until 1955, when he retired for reasons of health.) During the war years, Britain had been ruled by a cabinet drawn from all the major political parties, the ‘Grand Coalition’, and regular elections were held again for the first time on 5 July, 1945. A landslide of opinion seemed to have taken place among the British voters: Labour, led by Clement Attlee, won 393 seats in the House of Commons, while Churchill's Conservatives made an astounding fall from 585 to 213 seats. The blow took all parties by surprise. Attlee – whom Churchill had once called ‘a sheep in sheep's clothing’ – was a man seemingly devoid of charisma. As second in charge within Churchill's wartime cabinet, however, he had gained great popularity: he toured the entire country, unfolding extensive plans on housing, education, health care and industry, setting the tone, in short, for reconstruction even while the war was still in progress.

Churchill, on the other hand, had seen only cheering masses during the election campaign, without realising that the British people were cheering him as a war hero, not as a politician. His own daughter, Sarah,
clearly expressed the tenor of popular opinion:‘Because socialism as practised in the war did no one any harm, and quite a lot of people good. The children of this country have never been so well fed or healthy; what milk there was, was shared equally; the rich didn't die because their meat ration was no larger than the poor; and there is no doubt that this common sharing and feeling of sacrifice was one of the strongest bonds that unified us. So why, they say, cannot this common feeling of sacrifice be made to work as effectively in peace?’

The official settling of accounts took place in the hall of the war tribunal at Nuremberg. Starting in November 1945, the first trials were those of the twenty-one principal suspects – including Göring, Papen, Frank, Ribbentrop, Seyss-Inquart and Speer – followed later by other, lesser gods. Since 1960 the famous tribunal hall has become part of the regular courtroom, a place where everyday theft and divorce is weighed in the balance. The hall was closed when I came through Nuremberg in the spring, but an old porter was kind enough to allow me a glimpse. The space seemed smaller, more human than I had imagined. Sunlight streamed through the high windows and fell on the judge's bench. The clouds were all that could be seen from the witness stand. ‘Nothing here is original,’ the porter said. ‘The Americans took everything as souvenirs, the furniture is now spread all over California, Arizona and the rest of the United States.’ Only the enormous table at which the magistrates conferred is still standing in a side room, because ‘it was too big to drag away’.

It is often said of Nuremberg that here the ultimate truth finally came to light. That is true in so far as it applies to the belligerence and criminality of the Nazi regime, but many important questions remained unsolved years after the tribunal was closed. This has to do with the availability of information – a treasure trove of new historical material emerged in the 1990s in particular, after the opening of the DDR and Soviet archives – but also with the strictly judicial character of the investigation: all attention was focused on the role of the defendants and of Germany in general.

Furthermore, the trials consistently suggested that the war had been a purely moral matter, that the Germans had stood only for Evil and the Allies only for Good. Yet the events between 1939–45 are impossible to explain with such a simplistic scheme. Ideology and morality played a
subordinate role with the Allies as well. The ‘moral bombings’ instigated by Bomber Harris were emphatically aimed, in violation of all the moral conventions of war, at maximising the number of civilian casualties. Troop movements were speeded up, slowed down or rerouted for considerations of prestige, to seize an important city or sever the enemy's supply lines, but never to liberate a concentration camp more swiftly. A war leader like Churchill was driven by a fervent anti-communism and an iron determination to save the British Empire; Stalin and his generals wanted to destroy the Western enemy at all costs; Roosevelt watched over America's hegemony, and de Gaulle was less an anti-fascist than an authoritarian French patriot. States go to war primarily to serve their own national interests, and this war was no different. ‘The Nuremberg trials were the source both of huge quantities of valid historical information and of manifest historical distortions’ Norman Davies and other European historians rightly concluded.

In October 1946, the American
Saturday Evening Post
noted that only thirty-three out of the hundreds of top Nazi officials in the German steel industry – so vital to the war – had been arrested. The rest had simply remained at their posts. Speer, the brilliant manager of the Third Reich, succeeded in striking precisely the right tone towards his judges and prosecutors: that of the civilised technocrat, intelligent, responsible, contrite. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, served his sentence (unlike many others), and died in 1981 like an upright citizen.

The practitioners of medicine got off particularly easily, even though doctors and nursing officers had played a central role in the Third Reich. They had helped to establish the criteria for ‘racial purity’, they had selected the handicapped and the malformed children for the euthanasia campaign and then ‘put them to sleep’, and they had carried out large-scale medical experiments in the concentration camps – often with gruesome results. Yet of these hundreds, perhaps thousands, of doctors, only twenty-three were tried at Nuremberg. They pleaded innocent without exception. Four doctors were finally condemned to death, including one of Hitler's private physicians, Karl Brandt, who had also played a role in the Bethel hospital affair. With this verdict, the case was closed for the German medical profession. Within five years, almost all of the SS physicians and euthanasiasts – including the medical inspectors who had been
active at Bethel – were back at work as general practitioners, medical examiners, scientific researchers or professors.

When Ernie Pyle died on 18 April, 1945 – having meanwhile been transferred to the Pacific – he was carrying a few notes with him. They were intended for the column he had hoped to write on the day Germany capitulated. One of them read:

The Second World War claimed the lives of at least forty-one million Europeans: fourteen million soldiers and twenty-seven million civilians, including six million Jews. It was a catastrophe that every day, for six long years, there were an average of 20,000 deaths. By the end of the war, one out of every five former inhabitants of Poland and the Baltic States was dead. In the Soviet Union, the casualties could only be processed by reducing the total population figures at the next census.

ALONG THE BANKS OF THE ELBE, NOT FAR FROM DRESDEN, THE AUTUMN
leaves swirl down gently, every morning the grass on the campsite is streaked with brown and red. Beautiful antique paddle steamers glide past the cities on the river, every now and then you hear their mournful whistles in the cold morning mist. In the afternoon, when one of them sails by, you feel the urge to wave your cap at gentlemen in straw hats and ladies in white frocks who people the decks, as though nothing has happened for the last century.

These are lovely, late days of summer, people are gathering rose hip along the roadsides, and from the hills the landscape looks like a vast garden painted by one of the Brueghels, full of farms, fields, white houses along the rivers, here and there a village spire. In the Czech Republic, all that changes. The border crossing at Hžrensko is one huge market of brass-ware, laundry detergents, alcohol, cigarettes, baskets and Third World shopping bags, there are a dozen whores standing beside the highway, and then follows one industrial monument after the other: factories, weathered smokestacks, abandoned railway yards, all of them almost antique. The surroundings must be rich in wildlife: the number of dead animals on the road increases, along the shoulders are dozens of hedgehogs, a hare and even a crushed fox, its head still proudly raised. A shower of rain clatters on the roof, the sun leaves bright spots on the hillsides, and then I am in Prague.

It is a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. The Vitava is littered with tourist boats criss-crossing back and forth on the current, steered by big-eyed girls in sailor suits. Skaters, the heroes of Europe this year, race up and down the steps of the underground stations. On the Charles Bridge, two
young men are playing Bach sonatas, the gulls cry across the water, German and Dutch tourists pass by the hundred, but right below, on the far side, there is suddenly a silent, walled orchard full of apple, pear and nut trees, a place where only a few people are sitting, reading a newspaper or a book in the warm September sun.

I'm sitting in the Hanged Coffee café, not far from the castle. Here you can order two cups of coffee and have one – empty – ‘hanged’ from the ceiling. When a penniless student comes in, she can ask for a ‘hanged cup’ and receive coffee for free. My Czech acquaintances are telling me the story of their families. Elisabeth comes from a village in the Sudetenland. Her mother and her grandfather were German, they were allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia because they were married to natives. The rest of the village fled to Germany. ‘You can still see that on the houses, even after two generations. The village is dead, it has no soul.’ Olga's grandfather died in the middle of the war by ridiculous chance: he was standing at the front of a line to hand in his rifle when the city hall was blown up by partisans. Her grandmother was driven almost mad with sorrow; whenever there was a bombardment she would run out onto the street in the hope of being struck down. Her mother was thirteen at the time. Later her grandmother became wealthy by reading cards for the Russian officers garrisoned in the town. Her mother married: two children, six abortions.

‘If you want to know how a country is doing, you need to look at the oldest people and at the youngest,’ Veronika says calmly. ‘The oldest, that's my grandmother. She wouldn't be able to survive if we didn't help her. She still receives the same pension she did before 1989, and that's not enough to buy anything. She really doesn't want our help, but at Christmas we always buy her a new coat. Things like that. That whole generation is having a hard time of it now. And as far as the youngest go … it's almost impossible to have children here. It's simply too expensive, no one can afford it.’ Suddenly she grows tearful. As it turns out, she's pregnant. ‘My mother says: “It's okay, we'll be all right.”’

On 26 January, 1946,
The Economist
described the situation in Europe as though talking about an African famine: ‘The tragedy is enormous. The
farmers are reasonably well off, and the rich can afford to use the black market, but the poor population of Europe, perhaps a quarter of the continent's 400 million inhabitants, is doomed to starve this winter. Some of them will die.’

The particular problem areas were Warsaw and Budapest – where tens of thousands of victims were anticipated – Austria, northern Italy and the large German cities – where an average per capita allowance of no more than 1,200 calories a day was available – as well as the western Netherlands and Greece, although the situation improved there.

Upon his return from the United States, Bertolt Brecht described Berlin as ‘the pile of rubble behind Potsdam’. Amid the ruins of his old, beloved Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin spoke emotionally of ‘the verdict of history’. The Dutch journalist Hans Nesna, who made an initial tour of Germany in an old Model-T Ford in spring 1946, lost his way in what had once been a wealthy residential neighbourhood in Hamburg. It had become a dusty flatland, not a living soul in sight. ‘Most of the streets are unrecognisable and untraceable. You have to pick your way around piles of rubble and debris. All of it sunk in deathly silence.’ Nesna's Swedish colleague, Stig Dagerman, made a similar journey six months later. In the Hamburg U-Bahn he saw people in rags, ‘with faces white as chalk or newsprint, faces that cannot blush, faces that make you feel as though they couldn't bleed even if wounded.’

Meanwhile, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia, campaigns of ethnic cleansing were being carried out. Almost twelve million ethnic Germans were deported by way of retaliation. It was the largest exodus in human history. Hundreds of thousands of those deportees ‘disappeared’, probably having died along the way. In this way, the starving German population grew by an additional sixteen per cent.

In some villages in the Soviet Union not a single man returned from the war: of the men born in 1922, precisely three per cent survived the war. The number of kolkhoz workers sank to almost a third of the prewar level. In Siberia, the surviving men were sometimes asked to circulate through the neighbourhood and impregnate women and girls, to ensure that at least a few babies would be born. A Russian author wrote that the first time he experienced not being hungry was in 1952, when
he entered the army. Another reported that bread was back on the table again in his village only in 1954. Before that, the people had fed themselves with acorns, leaves, weeds and aquatic snails.

In August 1945, two months before committing suicide, the Nazi leader Robert Ley penned a letter to his dead wife from his Nuremberg cell about the Germany he had dreamed of: ‘Kraft durch Freude, leisure time and recreation, new houses, we had planned the loveliest cities and villages, acts of service and fair pay, a fantastic, unique public health programme, social security for the elderly and invalids, new roads and streets, ports and settlements – how wonderful Germany could have been, if, if, and always if …’