Year Zero (21 page)

The Ustaša were extraordinarily brutal, as were Tito's Partisans, the Slovenian Home Guard, and the Serbian Chetniks. But their war cannot be neatly slotted into a war between Allies and Germans, democrats and fascists, or even communists and anticommunists. They were parties in several civil wars going on at the same time fought along ethnic, political, and religious lines: Croatian Catholics versus Orthodox Serbs versus Muslim Bosnians versus Serbian royalists versus communist Partisans versus Slovenian Home Guardsmen versus Slovenian communists. Ideology—fascist, communist, Nazi—was only part of the story. All sides made deals
with outside powers, including the German invaders, as long as it suited their domestic purposes. How was a British soldier, faced with former Chetniks and Partisans, both of whom had been allies against the Germans at one point or another, to know whom to treat as a friend or enemy?

In the end this choice too was decided by force. Harold Macmillan, the British plenipotentiary in the Mediterranean, put it like this: “By December 1943, the most informed British opinion was that the Partisans would eventually rule Yugoslavia and that the monarchy had little future and had ceased to be a unifying element. At the same time the area was of the greatest military importance; for Tito's forces, adequately supported, were capable of detaining a very large number of German divisions, greatly to the advantage of the Italian and later the French front.”
²³
The Chetnik royalists had the misfortune of being on the losing side of the civil war.

If Tito was considered an important Western ally in 1945, then so was Stalin, still fondly known to many people in Britain and the United States as “Uncle Joe.” So it was not such a stretch for the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden to promise his Soviet counterpart at a Moscow conference in September 1944 that all Soviet citizens would be returned “whether they were willing to return or not.”
²⁴
Not only was it thought to be essential to maintain good relations with wartime allies, but Britain did not wish to do anything to jeopardize the fate of thousands of British POWs in territories occupied by the Soviets.

Other members of the British government, including Winston Churchill, felt some scruples about a policy the consequences of which they were well aware of. Lord Selbourne, minister of economic warfare, wrote to Churchill that handing these people back to Russia “will mean certain death for them.” But Eden wrote to the prime minister that “we cannot afford to be sentimental about this.” After all, he said, the men had been captured “while serving in German military formations, the behavior of which in France has often been revolting.” He added something else, something more to the real point of the matter: “We surely don't want to be permanently saddled with a number of these men.”
²⁵
And so it
was formally confirmed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that they would all be handed back.

The fact that many Russians had worn German uniforms under duress, that the women and children, brought to Germany as slaves or lowly workers, had never worn German uniforms, or that a large number of Cossacks had never even been citizens of the Soviet Union and thus were not legally obliged to be “returned” at all, bothered neither Eden nor the Soviet leadership. In the latter case, this had something to do with heroic narratives too, though not quite in the same way as in France or the Netherlands. The idea that so many Russians and other Soviet citizens had fought the Soviet Union, some quite willingly, and that others might have chosen to work in Germany just to survive, was an embarrassment. In the official story, all citizens of the Soviet workers' paradise had resisted the fascist enemy. To surrender was a crime. Those who fell into German hands
had
to be traitors, and would be dealt with as such.

There was one other complication. Tito's Partisans may have been allies against the Nazis, much romanticized in the British imagination as noble peasant heroes, but their claims on parts of Italy and southern Austria were becoming a serious nuisance. The last thing the Western Allies needed was a war with old comrades in arms. But to make absolutely sure that a Titoist advance could be thwarted, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, already burdened with a million POWs, demanded the right to first “clear the decks” in Austria. This meant handing over Yugoslavs back to Yugoslavia, and Russians back to the Soviet Union as swiftly as possible.

Terrible scenes were the direct result of this deck-clearing. If trickery was not sufficient to lull people into acquiescence, battle-hardened British soldiers, sometimes in tears themselves, had to force them onto cattle cars and trucks, prodding, beating, and sometimes using bayonets. Wailing women would throw themselves at their feet, children got trampled by terrified mobs, some people got shot, and some people, rather than face deportation, preferred to stab themselves in the neck, or jump into the Drau River.

The Cossacks were perhaps the saddest case. Their delusions—of
being sent to Africa as soldiers of the British Empire, or to Asia to fight the Japanese—were deliberately fostered; anything to keep them calm before their inevitable fate was sealed. They entertained themselves, and their British captors, with great displays of horsemanship. Even their disarmament was a form of trickery; the soldiers were promised newer, better arms if they gave up their old ones. The British realized that Cossacks were less likely to resist their orders in the absence of their officers. At the end of May, the officers, fifteen hundred of them, were told to attend a “conference” to decide their future. They would be back with their families in the evening. In reality, they were never seen again. After being handed over to the Soviet army, those who were not executed immediately were sent to the gulag, where very few survived.

The other Cossacks, frantic with worry about the officers who failed to come back, were getting more suspicious of the British. Time had come for harsher measures. The unpleasant task to force unarmed people to give themselves up to their mortal enemies was given to the Royal Irish Inniskilling Fusiliers, because Major-General Robert Arbuthnot decided that they were less likely to object than English troops. In fact, the soldiers were so disturbed that they came close to mutiny. Their commanding officer, David Shaw, related: “The men moaned like anything, but in the end they obeyed orders too. It was terrible. I remember these women—some of them pregnant—lying on the ground rolling and screaming. My men were putting their rifles on the ground and lifting the women onto the train, then locking the doors and standing there as the train pulled out with women screaming out of the windows.”
²⁶

At another Cossack camp on the banks of the River Drau, on June 1, after being ordered to board the train, thousands of people were gathered together in a massive huddle by their priests in full Orthodox regalia, praying and singing psalms. Inside the human mass, kneeling and locking arms, were the women and children; outside were the younger men. All around were pictures of religious icons, black flags, and an altar with a large cross. The idea was that soldiers would surely not assault people at prayer. Something had to be done. Major “Rusty” Davies, who had
befriended many Cossacks, remembers: “As individuals on the outskirts of the group were pulled away, the remainder compressed themselves into a still tighter body, and, as panic gripped them, started clambering over each other in frantic efforts to get away from the soldiers. The result was a pyramid of screaming, hysterical human beings under which a number of people were trapped.”
²⁷

A young woman, whose legs were badly cut by broken glass when she was pushed through a window by the crush, describes what happened when the fence on one side of the human mass gave way:

People were rushing past . . . , scared out of their wits. Everything was mixed up: the singing, the prayers, the groans and screams, the cries of the wretched people the soldiers managed to grab, the weeping children and the foul language of the soldiers. Everyone was beaten, even the priests, who raised their crosses above their heads and continued to pray.
²⁸

In the end the job got done. Some drowned themselves with their children in the river. A few people hanged themselves from pine trees outside the camp. But most of the remaining Cossacks ended up in sealed cattle wagons, with one small window and one bucket for all to use as a toilet. Brigadier T. P. Scott had told his commander that the whole thing “was a damned bad show.” Major “Rusty” Davies said: “I still regard it with horror.”
²⁹

The Cossacks were just one of the orphaned peoples, battered and in the end decimated by history. In fact, “history” is too abstract. They were destroyed by men, who acted on ideas, of revolution, of purified ethnic states. There were others who fell victim to these ideas, some of whom may have been among the believers themselves.

•   •   •

THE WORDS DECIDED UPON
by the three victorious Allies—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—at the Potsdam Conference in the
oppressive heat of July 1945 sounded reasonable enough, even a trifle anodyne. On the matter of expelling the German inhabitants from eastern and central Europe, they concluded the following: “The three governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”

This sounded fair enough. The agreement, following decisions already made by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin two years earlier at a conference in Teheran about shifting a large slice of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, was in keeping with an atmosphere of peculiar bonhomie, especially between U.S. president Harry Truman and Stalin. (Truman liked Churchill less; the British prime minister had tried to “soft-soap” him with unwelcome flattery.) When Truman played Paderewski's Minuet in G for Stalin and Churchill at the presidential “Little White House” in Potsdam, Stalin declared, “Ah, yes, music is an excellent thing, it drives out the beast in man.”
³⁰

Truman's warm sentiments towards Stalin seem to have been shared by many American soldiers at the time. Stalin, the U.S. Army paper
Yank
reported about Potsdam, “was easily the greatest drawing card for soldiers' interest that this galaxy of VIPs presents. And this was so before the rumor that Joe had Japan's surrender in his hip pocket. Cpl. John Tuohy of Long Island, NY, who used to be a booker for Paramount Pictures and who now stands guard in front of the celebrity-packed Little White House, describes Stalin as ‘smaller than I expected him to be, but an immaculate man who wears beautiful uniforms.'”
³¹
In the
New York Times
, the three victorious leaders conferring in the ruins near the German capital were described as “three men walking in a graveyard; they are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world.”
³²
And this included, of course, the fate of more than eleven million German-speaking peoples, many of whom had deep roots in areas now claimed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

Behind the bland rhetoric of Potsdam were sentiments expressed in far more brutal terms. Millions of Germans had already been driven from their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and East Prussia. Just before the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had reassured the Czechoslovak prime minister
Fierlinger: “We won't disturb you. Throw them out.”
³³

When Churchill told Stalin at Yalta that he was “not shocked at the idea of transferring millions of people by force,” Stalin reassured the British prime minister too: “There will be no more Germans [in Poland], for when our troops come in the Germans run away and no Germans are left.” Whereupon Churchill said: “Then there is the problem of how to handle them in Germany. We have killed six or seven million and probably will kill another million before the end of the war.” Stalin, who liked precise figures, wanted to know: “One or two?” Churchill: “Oh I am not proposing any limitations on them. So there should be room in Germany for some who will need to fill the vacancy.”
³⁴

A number of these Germans had been ardent Nazis, even war criminals. Many, perhaps even most, German civilians in the fringes of the German Reich had been well disposed towards the Nazi Party and its local affiliates, especially in the Sudetenland, where Germans, despite their superior wealth, felt that they had been treated by the Czechs as second-class citizens before 1938. Even so, many had held no truck with the Nazis. Some had been actively anti-Nazi. But neither Churchill nor Stalin was inclined to make such fine distinctions. All Germans had to go: criminals, Nazis, anti-Nazis, men, women, and children.