The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (91 page)

Marinesko’s torpedoes encapsulated the vengeful frame of mind in which the Soviet forces closed on Germany for the kill. When they reached Berlin, sections of the Red Army – generally not the front-line troops – ran amok in scenes reminiscent of the Rape of Nanking. German women were treated not merely as the sexual spoils of war, but as targets for brutal retribution. In the Haus Dahlem orphanage and maternity hospital in the leafy suburb of Dahlem, Mother Superior Cunegundes and the other sisters could only cower in the cellar and pray as the fighting raged around them between front-line Red Army units and the last desperate remnants of the German
Volkssturm
. Shells landed within feet of the orphanage. For days the nuns and their wards lived ‘like the first Christians in the catacombs’. On April 26, ten Russians burst into the house and demanded their crosses, rings and watches. It was the first of many intrusions and very far from the worst. On the night of the 29th, Soviet officer sand their men ransacked the wine cellar of a nearby villa (it had belonged to Ribbentrop) and then proceeded to hunt down women to rape. The nunstried their best to conceal the pregnant women and new mothers in the orphanage, as well as the younger lay sisters. But it was far from clear that the inebriated Soviet troops would respect even the nuns themselves. The Mother Superior herself was shot at when she tried to protect the Ukrainian cook. Late on the 30th a group of drunk officers broke into the maternity ward. They raped even the women who were in labour or who had just given birth. To the nuns it was all too clear: ‘Our people have sinned greatly. The time for atonement is upon us.’ ‘That’s what the Germans did in Russia,’ Ilse Antz was told after a Russian had raped her. As at Nanking, sexual desire was mingled with bloodlust. Hannelore von Cmuda was shot three times by the drunk Russians who gang raped her. Others had their heads battered in. The two main Berlin hospitals estimated the number of victims in the capital at between 95,000 and 130,000. Such behaviour
had already been experienced by Germans further east, in Posen, Danzig and Breslau. According to one British prisoner of war in Pomerania, ‘Red soldiers… raped every woman and girl between the ages of twelve and sixty.’ Altogether it seems likely that Soviet soldiers raped over two million German women. Thisshould be compared with the 925 sentences for rape passed by US Army courts martial in all theatres of war between 1942 and 1946.

In this atmosphere, with Goebbels’s blood-curdling propaganda prophecies being fulfilled almost to the letter, it is not entirely surprising that a wave of suicides swept Berlin and other parts of Germany. Hitler was not the only Nazi to follow Brünnhilde’s example. Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler all committed suicide, as did the Minister of Justice Otto-Georg Thierack and the Minister for Culture Bernhard Rust, as well as eight out of 41 regional party leaders, seven out of 47 senior SS and police chiefs, fifty-three out of 553 army generals, fourteen out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and eleven out of 53 admirals. (To escape the hangman’s rope, Göring would follow them when the Nuremberg judges denied him the firing squad he requested.) This suicidal impulse was not confined to the Nazi elite, however. Ordinary Germans in untold numbers responded to the prospect of defeat in the same way. Many of those who equipped themselves with potassium cyanide capsules – or were given them, like the audience at the Berlin Philharmonic’s last concert – opted to swallow them rather than face the retribution that was bearing down upon them. In April 1945 there were 3,881 recorded suicides in Berlin, nearly twenty timesthe figure for March. The most common motivation was ‘fear of the Russian invasion’. In villages like Schönlanke and Schivelbein in Pomerania, ‘whole, good churchgoing families took their lives – drowned themselves, hanged themselves, slit their wrists or allowed themselves to be burned up along with their homes.’ On March 12 the advancing Russians opened the doors of a shed just outside Danzig to find sixteen bodies with their throats and wrists slashed – all that remained of three families murdered by Irwin Schwartz, who believed it was ‘better to die than live with Russians’. Untold numbers of rape victims also committed suicide. In her diary, Ruth-Andreas Friedrich, a Berlin schoolgirl, recorded how her teacher had told the class: ‘If a Russian soldier violates you, there remains nothing but death.’ In the days that
followed, her classmates ‘kill[ed] themselves by the hundreds. The phrase “honour lost, everything lost” had been the words of a distraught father who press[ed] a rope into the hand of his daughter who had been violated twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself.’ Critics of National Socialism had sometimes referred to it as ‘the brown cult’. Like other more recent cults, the Hitler cult ended with mass suicide.

The Red Army was not alone in meting out collective punishment to the entire German people. All over Eastern Europe there were brutal reprisals against both Reich German and ethnic German populations. As early as February 5, 1945, a Polish radio broadcast made it clear that there could be no reconciliation now: ‘Through their bestiality and the enormity of their crimes, the Germans have created between themselves sand the Polesan abyss which cannot be bridged… It is our wish that there should not be any German minority in Poland.’ Demonstrators in Katowice declared that ‘the Polesshould treat the Germans in the same way as the German invaderstreated the Poles.’ The position of Polish Communist leader Władysław Gomułka was that ‘countriesare built on national lines and not multinational ones.’ This had profound implications, given Stalin’s decision, more or less sanctioned at the Tehran Conference (November 27–December 1, 1943), to move the Polish border westwards as far as the Rivers Oder and Neisse, so that East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, Posen and Silesia all ceased to be German territory. The tables were turned as Germans in Silesian towns like Bad Salzbrunn were confronted with proclamations ordering their enforced ‘resettlement’ westwards. Now it was Germans, not Poles, who were given just hours to leave their homes; who were restricted to just 20 kilograms of baggage; whose remaining property was seized without compensation; who were marched at gunpoint in wretched columns. Western journalists in Prague encountered the same uncompromising antipathy. As Dorothy Thompson reported in the Washington
Evening Star
on June 22, 1945: ‘The people’s hatred of all Germans, including those native to Prague, is 100 per cent and, indiscriminately, they wish to expel from the country everyone whose native tongue is German.’ There was a wave of murderous violence directed against the German occu-piersand Sudeten Germans.

The story was similar all over Central and Eastern Europe: retributive ethnic cleansing, which the Allied leaders formally sanctioned at the Potsdam Conference. In Hungary the villages of the Danube Swabians became ghost towns, though the expulsions from Hungary were suspended in February 1946 at the request of the American and Soviet occupation authorities in Germany, who could no longer cope with the flow of refugees. Those who stayed had good reason to abandon their German identity. By the time of the Hungarian census of January 1949, only 22,453 people still gave German as their mother tongue, though the actual number of ethnic Germans remaining there was probably much larger. ‘Law Number 1’ in Yugoslavia expropriated all Germans and removed their civil rights; in the immediate post-war period, tens of thousands of Germans were murdered or interned in concentration camps. Around 100,000 Romanian Germans had retreated with the Wehrmacht. Many of those who remained behind came to regret it. Beginning in January 1945, around 73,000 ethnic Germans – women as well as men, Communists as well as Nazis – were transported from Romania to perform ‘reparations labour’ in the mines of the Donets Basin and the Urals. In all, around 400,000 Germans from all over Soviet-occupied Europe suffered the same fate. Around 200,000 formerly Soviet Germans who had attempted to reach Germany from what had briefly been ‘Transnistria’ never completed their trek; the Red Army overtook them and sent them back and beyond the Urals in sealed freight cars. They were joined there later by tens of thousands more former Soviet Germans whom the Western Allies handed over for repatriation from their zones of occupation in Germany. The
Volksdeutsche
had staked everything on Hitler’s
Volksgemeinschaft
. It had brought them scant reward even in the halcyon days of Greater Germany, when around three-quarters of a million of them had been resettled in one way or another. Now the problem that had once been posed by their minority status in the post-1918 nation states was solved once and for all. Romania was the only East European state that did not aim at a complete obliteration of its ethnic German communities; even so, its population of ethnic Germans was reduced by nearly half. In all, then, around seven million ethnic Germans were expelled or deported from their homes in Czechoslovakia, Poland (including the former Eastern provinces of the Reich),
Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, following on the heels of the 5.6 million who had already fled westwards to elude the Red Army. Add the Germans thus removed to the number of
Volksdeutsche
the Nazis themselves had resettled priorto1944, and the total figure for Germans removed either westwards or eastwards from Central and Eastern Europe comes to around13million (Table 16.2). The number of people who died in this great upheaval may have been as high as two million.

The German exodus was only part of a vast displacement of peoples that followed in the wake of the war, though it was the most important part. In all, between 1944 and 1948, an estimated 31 million people all over Central and Eastern were uprooted from their homes, in one of the largest and most brutal mass movements of population in all history. In the Balkans there was yet more ethnic cleansing, as Bulgarians left eastern Macedonia and western Thrace, and Serbs settled wartime scores with Croats. With the westward shift of Poland’s boundaries agreed at Tehran, Poles and the country’s few remaining Jews went west, while Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Lithuanians went east. Czechs and Slovaksquit Subcarpathian Rus’ and Volhynia rather than endure Soviet rule. Magyars were expelled from southern Slovakia and were exchanged for Serbs and Croatsliving in Hungary.

Did the British and the Americans feel no unease as the crimes of the Nazi regime were repaid with new crimes by their Soviet allies? If so, they did not say so very loudly. The mood in London was anything

Table 16.2: The involuntary exodus of the Germans

but magnanimous towards the vanquished foe. In the House of Lords, the former Foreign Secretary Lord Simon spoke for many when he attributed the rise of Hitler to a deep-rooted deformity of the German national character. A. J. P. Taylor’s
The Course of German History
, published in 1945, remains a monument to the post-war cast of mind. Long before West German historians themselves began to ponder the German
Sonderweg
– a peculiarly German route to perdition, stretching back into the nineteenth century and beyond – the idea was a commonplace in Britain. Churchill himself viewed the deportation of ‘the Austrians, Saxons and other German or quasi-German elements’ from Romania to Russia with equanimity:

Considering all that Russia has suffered, and the wanton attacks made upon her by Roumania, and the vast armies the Russians are using at the front at the present time, and the terrible condition of the people in many parts of Europe, I cannot see that the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage.

The
de facto
partition of Germany had already begun as early as November 1943, when Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to hand over the Prussian port of Königsberg to the Soviet Union and to move the Polish border westwards. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Big Three agreed vaguely to divide the rest of Germany up into zones of occupation and this duly happened. From the new Polish frontier on the Oder-Neisse line to the River Elbe – what had once been Central Germany – became the Soviet zone of occupation. Western Germany was divided up between Britain, the United States and France; Berlin became a four-power island in the Soviet zone. Austria too was divided into zones of occupation. The expulsion of the Germans from territory east of the Oder-Neisse line was ratified – largely
ex post facto
– at Potsdam. After the First World War, slices had been removed from the periphery of the German Reich. After the Second, the Reich itself was rent asunder. Germany did not cease to exist, since the Americans in particular made it clear from the outset that they intended a swift transition to German self-government. But the German Reich was finished, as was Prussia, its begetter.

It was not only the Germans who bore the brunt of the Red Army’s westward advance, however. By the end of 1944 most of Eastern
and much of Central Europe – including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia – was in the hands of the Red Army. All this had been envisaged by the Big Three at Tehran. It was also a reflection of military reality; the American Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, and the Allied Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, simply had no interest in racing the Russians to Berlin, much less to Prague, nor in competing with them for control of the Balkans. ‘Personally,’ declared Marshall, ‘and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.’ No such inhibitions held Stalin and Zhukov back from throwing yet more Soviet soldiers’ lives away in over-hasty offensives. But no one could pretend that Russian occupation was the outcome hoped for by the subject peoples of the Nazi empire. While Tito’s Communist Partisans were only too happy to welcome the Russians to Belgrade, the mood elsewhere – where the numbers of committed Communists were pitifully small – was hostile and resentful. Few Poles, aside from those who fought on the Soviet side under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Zygmunt Berling, welcomed ‘liberation’ at Russian hands. Stalin had shed no tears when the Polish resistance forces, known as the Home Army, were annihilated after staging a doomed rising in Warsaw against the Germans between August 1 and October 2, 1944. (How far the Red Army had been in a position to intervene decisively on the Home Army’s side is debatable. But Stalin would not have acted even if it had been; it was too convenient to have the Germans get rid of the most committed nationalists in the Polish capital.) Only the most halfhearted efforts were made by the Western powers to press the claims of the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile. ‘Not only are the Russians very powerful,’ explained Churchill to Harold Nicolson in February 1945, ‘but they are on the spot; even the massed majesty of the British Empire would not avail to turn them off that spot.’ In his diary Nicolson added that ‘it seemed to him [Churchill] a mistake to assume that the Russians are going to behave badly. Ever since he had been in close relations with Stalin, the latter had kept his word with the utmost loyalty.’ But the commitment Churchill probably had in mind – the notorious ‘percentagesagreement’ he and Stalin had jotted down to carve up the Balkans in 1944 – was little better than a
blueprint for the partition of Europe. ‘Do you intend’, Churchill had asked Fitzroy Maclean, who had been sent to Bosnia to assist Tito, ‘to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?’ ‘No, Sir,’ replied Maclean. ‘Neither do I,’ returned the Prime Minister. ‘And, that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of Government they set up, the better. That is for them to decide.’ But was it for the Yugoslavs to decide? At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill had secured a commitment from Stalin that the liberated peoples would be free to choose their form of government. Not even Roosevelt expected Stalin to abide by it; the Russians, he told the economist Leon Henderson, would ‘suit themselves’. ‘Do not worry,’ Stalin reassured his Foreign Minister Molotov. ‘We can implement it in our own way later.’ All across the Eastern half of Europe Stalin lost no time in erecting a new network of camps, numbering very nearly 500 by the time of his death. Stalag gave way to Gulag.