The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (74 page)

* The official estimate is that Allied bombing killed 593,000 in Germany (Keegan,
Second World War
, p. 590). Both the United States and Britain share responsibility, so I’ve given them each half.

Revisionism

No aspect of World War II is without controversy, but some debates burn more energy than others. For a previous generation of scholars, the hottest debate was whether Hitler had a strategy of world conquest and genocide all planned out, or did he merely seize whatever opportunities presented themselves. That was a more polite era. Nowadays, people are willing to challenge fundamental features of the war.

Everywhere you look, Holocaust deniers simply refuse to admit that the Nazis tried to eradicate the Jews of Europe. In some Muslim countries, this is actually taught in schools as the mainstream view. On the other hand, in some European countries, it is forbidden to express this view in public. Emotions over the issue have grown so polarized that, for all practical purposes, the Holocaust has been removed as a topic for constructive disagreement worldwide.

Because you would be hard-pressed to find a historical event with stronger documentation than the Holocaust,
*
you might wonder how
anyone
can doubt it. Well first, you have to
want
to doubt it. After that, it’s easy. If your ideology fails to arouse support because it sounds too much like Nazism, then you will want to rewrite history to make the Nazis less frightening. You acknowledge that some Jews died—disease swept ghettos and labor camps, German troops executed partisans, and so on—but war is hell, and such things were happening everywhere. Holocaust deniers argue that there was no
systematic
effort directed at Jews, and that the death toll was no worse than, say, the bombing of German cities. The deniers are assisted by the fact that retreating Germans deliberately destroyed much of the forensic evidence—gas chambers, bodies, witnesses, for example.

In Germany, the big controversies center around how much support the Nazis had among ordinary German citizens. Most Germans would like to be able to blame the Holocaust on a narrow clique of fanatics, but pesky facts keep showing that a disturbing number of ordinary citizens—from civil servants to common soldiers—assisted in the process. Every prominent person who has emerged from the German-speaking world in the past half century—whether rocket scientist, secretary-general of the United Nations, governor of California, Nobel literature laureate, or pope—has faced awkward revelations about past associations with Nazism.

The big controversies in the English-speaking world challenge the Allies/good, Axis/bad stereotypes of official history, either by minimizing the sins of the Axis (the Holocaust, starting the war, for example) or maximizing the sins of the Allies (Stalinism, Dresden, for example). In fact, a significant minority openly suggests that the Western democracies fought on the wrong side.

Patrick Buchanan, a ubiquitous American commentator, wrote in his 1999 book,
A Republic, Not an Empire
, that the Western democracies should have stood by and let Hitler and Stalin duke it out. “By redirecting Hitler’s first blow upon themselves, Britain and France bought Stalin two extra years to prepare for Hitler’s attack—and thus saved the Soviet Union for Communism. . . . Had Britain and France not given the guarantee to Poland, Hitler would almost surely have delivered his first great blow to Russia. . . . [H]ad Hitler conquered the USSR at enormous cost, would he then have launched a new war against Western Europe, where his ambitions never lay?”
⁶³

Even George W. Bush denounced his predecessors’ decision to ally with Stalin: “The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”
⁶⁴

In this case, revisionists seem to forget that the world went to war against Hitler because he was
dangerous
, not because he was
evil
. This is an important distinction in international relations. You can do whatever you want inside your own country, but when you start invading your neighbors, the rest of the world gets jumpy. No matter how brutal Stalin may have been to his own people, he was content to stay inside the borders of the Soviet Union. By the time Stalin began grabbing small countries for himself, the West was already committed to war with Hitler. The choice wasn’t between fighting Hitler or Stalin. The choice was to fight Hitler or both of them.

Furthermore, the Soviets beat the Germans fair and square. They produced 96 percent of their own munitions and 66 percent of their own vehicles, while inflicting 80 percent of all German fatalities in the war.
⁶⁵
They had already turned the tide at Stalingrad at a time when Britain was stalemated and America was still mobilizing. It was a close call, and Western assistance tipped the balance, but the West needed Stalin more than Stalin needed the West. Without the Soviets, the Western allies would have had to face several million more Germans all by themselves. This gave Stalin a better negotiating position throughout the war.

EXPULSION OF GERMANS FROM EASTERN EUROPE

Death toll:
2.1 million
¹

Rank:
36

Type:
ethnic cleansing

Broad dividing line:
Poles and Czechs vs. Germans

Time frame:
1945–47

Location:
Eastern Europe

Major state participants:
Poland, Czechoslovakia

Minor state participants:
Soviet Union, United States, Britain, France

Who usually gets the most blame:
Poland, Czechoslovakia

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Can you really blame them?

P
OLAND SUFFERED THE MOST DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR. IT WAS
the first nation to be conquered; then it was partitioned, then subjected to massacres, which escalated to genocide; then the war returned from the other direction and plowed over Poland yet again. When it was all over, one-sixth of the Polish people—three million Jews, three million others—were dead. The victors sensed that Poland deserved some compensation for all of its troubles, especially since Stalin was keeping the eastern territories of Poland for himself, where local Ukrainian and Belorussian majorities were being incorporated into the Soviet Union.

After the war, the border between Germany and Poland was shifted westward, to the Oder River. Unlike the border changes after World War I, in which Germany was stripped only of districts with a non-German majority, these new border changes were clearly punitive. Lands that had been German for centuries—East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia—were handed over to Poland, and the local inhabitants were kicked out.

A small sliver of East Prussia containing the port of Konigsberg was attached to Russia. Under the new name of Kaliningrad, it became the forward base for the Soviet Baltic fleet. Russians so completely replaced the Germans that today this district is more Russian than Russia itself.

This was happening everywhere. Hitler had used alleged mistreatment of German minorities across Eastern Europe as an excuse to invade, so everyone decided to get rid of their Germans once and for all. The second largest German minority was in Czechoslovakia, a country that Germany had dismantled and occupied even earlier than Poland. German villages and urban minorities in Hungary, Romania, and Croatia remained from the days when the Austrian Empire sprawled across Eastern Europe. These had to go as well.

The expulsions went through three phases. In the first phase, 5 million Germans fled the Soviet advance during the war, often with only a few hours’ preparation. Of the nearly 2.4 million Germans in East Prussia, 1.9 million abandoned this outlying enclave of Germany and fled westward. Probably 20 percent of these refugees died along roads and in villages—in air raids, shipwrecks, artillery barrages, and gang rapes—as the war caught up and rolled over them.

Breslau, the capital of Silesia and the largest city to change hands in the postwar reduction of Germany, had already seen huge shifts in population under Nazi rule as Polish and Jewish minorities were shipped out. Then the Red Army arrived in January 1945, while the Wehrmacht dug in to defend it. The German government ordered all noncombatants to leave immediately. Half a million civilians were forced to flee through snow and ice toward collecting centers many miles away. Eighty thousand died in the cold.

The second phase saw the “wild” expulsions. After the fighting stopped, angry mobs spontaneously and brutally drove away the local German minorities. They stripped the Germans of their property and forced farmers to abandon their houses, crops. and livestock. They lynched suspected collaborators and their families, and the occupying Soviet soldiers ignored all of it.

In July 1945, a mysterious explosion at a factory in the Czech town of Usti nad Labem was rumored to be sabotage, and the townspeople attacked their German neighbors. In the first assault, the mob swarmed over a German family on the bridge and tossed their baby into the river. By the time the riots were over, anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 Germans had been shot dead, beaten to death, or drowned.
²
In June, 2,000 Sudeten Germans in Postoloprty were rounded up and shot or beaten to death in a few days. Two years later, in August 1947, Czech authorities quietly dug up the mass graves and burned all of the bodies so that “Germans [would] have no memorials to which they could point as a source of suffering by their people.”
³

The third phase entailed the formal resettlement by the governments of Europe. While in exile during the war, the past and future Czech president Edvard Benes submitted his plan for clearing the Sudeten Germans out of the mountainous borders of Czechoslovakia. “We must get rid of all those Germans who plunged a dagger in the back of the Czechoslovak state in 1938,” Benes declared. The Churchill government had officially endorsed this policy by August 1942, and the Americans and Soviets followed in 1943.
⁴

The major powers authorized final action at the postwar Potsdam Conference among the Allies in August 1945. Within weeks, Benes stripped ethnic Germans of their Czech citizenship unless there were mitigating circumstances, such as marriage to a Slav or a record of fighting the Nazi occupation. In November 1945, the Allied Control Council in charge of postwar Europe ordered the 3 million Germans living in Czechoslovakia and the 3.5 million inside Poland’s pre-war borders to be resettled in Germany. Then 6 million Poles were removed from the 70,000 square miles in the east taken by the Soviet Union and resettled in the 48,000 square miles that Poland got from Germany.

Eventually Churchill would have second thoughts. In his 1946 speech that gave the world the phrase “iron curtain,” he now denounced the brutality of the policy. “The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place.”
⁵

Meanwhile, the expulsion and transit were only half the problem. These eastern German deportees were being dumped into the middle of a major famine. Forced to abandon their original livelihoods back home, they found themselves in a bombed-out and ravaged land swarming with cripples, vagrants, and refugees. Because the German cities were in ruins, the newcomers were stashed on farms, in army barracks, and even in former concentration camps. Anyone with a spare room was ordered to take in a refugee. Unfortunately, the Germans from the East spoke alien dialects that sounded almost foreign to West German ears, and they were insulted with the name
Polacken
. Natives resented immigrants as competitors for scarce housing and food; the displaced were often left to fend for themselves and likely starve.

When it was all done, 12 to 14 million Germans had been expelled from the East. So many Germans arrived from the East that West Germany’s population in 1950 was 20 percent higher than it had been before the war, despite war casualties. The population boost was especially noticeable in rural areas, which rose by as much as 60 percent in some districts.
⁶

In 1967, Germany’s federal statistical office estimated that 267,000 of the Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia had died in those harsh years.
⁷
An estimated 1,225,000 of those expelled from Poland and 619,000 from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic nations died. All in all, the total number of deaths among the eastern refugees is estimated as 2,111,000.
⁸