Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (10 page)

The problem with illegal trading was that it was an inherently unfair system. While rationing was designed to provide a balanced diet for all, and a richer diet for those who did harder physical work, the black market catered only for those who could afford it. Just before the liberation of France, the black market price of butter was five and a half times the official price, and eggs were four times as expensive on the black market.
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As a consequence, eggs and butter rarely made their way onto the official markets, and everyone but the wealthy was priced out of buying them. Some farmers and traders were ruthless in exploiting this market and made themselves extremely rich, much to the disgust of their countrymen. In Greece, food speculators hoarded supplies and only sold them in quantity when rumours of an improvement in the situation sent food prices plummeting. ‘While the entire world anguished over the fate of the Greek people,’ one foreign observer wrote bitterly, ‘the Greeks got rich on the blood of their brothers.’
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In Czechoslovakia the postwar government was so scandalized by such behaviour that the crime of enriching oneself at the expense of the state or its citizens during the war carried a sentence of five to ten years’ imprisonment.
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While illegal trading might have been inevitable, and even sometimes justifiable in wartime, it proved a hard habit to break once hostilities came to an end. Indeed, after the collapse of all the administrative and transport systems, as well as the collapse of law and order, the problem actually became much worse. By the autumn of 1946 black marketeering was so common that for most people it was not even regarded as a crime. ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every man, woman and child in Western Europe is engaged to a greater or lesser degree in illegal trading of one kind or another,’ claimed the chief of UNRRA for western Germany in a letter to the British Foreign Office. ‘In large areas of Europe, in fact, it is hardly possible to support existence without so doing.’
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It was impossible to maintain a respect for the law when the entire population was flouting it on a daily basis. This inevitably had moral consequences. Even in Britain there was a perception that moral standards had declined because of such activities. In the words of Margaret Gore, an Air Transport Auxiliary in 1945, ‘in Britain the black market had undermined people’s honesty, and I think as a society we were much less honest afterwards … That was when it started.’
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Violence

If theft and illegal trading were a serious problem throughout Europe, the ubiquitous threat of violence was a crisis. As I have already mentioned, extreme violence was for many an everyday occurrence. By the end of the war, the people of Germany had become accustomed to being bombed day and night: the sight of dead bodies in the rubble was quite normal. To a lesser extent the same could be said of Britain, northern France, Holland, Belgium, Bohemia and Moravia, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy. Further east, the population had seen their cities pulverized by artillery, and human beings pulverized along with them. For millions of soldiers, too, this was an everyday experience.

Away from the battle zone the violence was equally brutal, and unending, if on a more personal scale. In thousands of forced labour camps and concentration camps across Europe inmates were savagely beaten on a daily basis. Throughout eastern Europe Jews were hunted out and killed. In northern Italy the shooting of collaborators would be followed by an endless cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals that sometimes took on the atmosphere of vendettas.
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Across the Reich gossipers were arrested and beaten, deserters were hanged, and anyone whose opinions or whose ethnic background did not match those of the majority of their neighbours could expect to be beaten, imprisoned or even killed. By the end of the war, all of this was a matter of routine. As a consequence, far from being shocking, acts of extreme violence became quite unremarkable across much of the continent.

It does not take much imagination to realize that those who have been the victims of routine violence become much more likely to commit acts of violence themselves, and there are countless psychological studies which demonstrate this. In 1946 Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the former director of UNRRA for western Germany, expressed his fears regarding some of the leaders amongst the Jews who had been freed from concentration camps: ‘[T]hese Jewish leaders are desperate men who will stick at nothing. Practically everything that can happen to a surviving human being has already happened to them and they place no value on human life whatsoever.’
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The same was true of Germany’s slave labourers. According to an UNRRA study into the psychological problems of displaced persons it was quite normal for DPs to exhibit ‘lawless aggressiveness’, along with a host of other psychological problems, including a ‘sense of unworthiness … bitterness and touchiness’. A high proportion of DPs showed signs of extreme cynicism: ‘nothing that is done even by helpful people is regarded as genuine or sincere’.
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If the victims of violence were everywhere, to a certain extent so were the perpetrators. By the end of the war, partisans involved in an increasingly vicious war against the Germans were now in control of most of Greece, the whole of Yugoslavia, Slovakia, much of northern Italy, substantial areas of the Baltic States and vast swathes of Poland and Ukraine. In France the Resistance had liberated at least fifteen
départements
on their own, and were in control of most of the south and west of the country even before the Allies had reached Paris.
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In many of these places – particularly in Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece – much of the violence of the war had been directed not against Germans but against fascists and collaborators within their own population. The people who had presided over this violence were now in charge.

As for those who had committed atrocities on behalf of the Nazis and their allies, many of them became prisoners of war, but many more either passed themselves off as DPs or simply melted back into civilian life. These people numbered in their tens of thousands, and were in many ways just as psychologically damaged as their victims. It is important to remember that most of the soldiers who committed atrocities had not been psychopaths, but had started the war as ordinary members of society. According to a psychological study of such individuals, in the beginning most had experienced extreme revulsion at the acts they were required to carry out, and many had found themselves unable to continue with their duties for very long. With experience, however, this revulsion at the taking of human life subsided and was replaced with a perverse delight, even euphoria, at their own breaking of moral codes.
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For some of these people killing became an addiction, and they carried out their atrocities in ever more perverse ways. In Croatia the Ustashe not only killed Serbs but also took the time to hack off the breasts of the women and castrate the men.
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In Drama, in north-eastern Greece, Bulgarian soldiers played football with the heads of their Greek victims.
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At Chelmno concentration camp German guards would kill babies who survived the gas vans by splitting their heads against trees.
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In Königsberg Soviet soldiers tied the legs of German women to two different cars and then drove off in opposite directions, literally tearing the women in half.
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Ukrainian partisans tortured Volhynian Poles to death by hacking them with farm implements.
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In response Polish partisans also tortured Ukrainians. ‘While I never saw one of our men pick up a baby or a small child with the point of a bayonet and toss it onto a fire, I saw the charred corpses of Polish babies who had died that way,’ said one such partisan. ‘If none of our number did that, then it was the only atrocity that we did not commit.’
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Such people were now a part of Europe’s everyday communities.

As a side note it is worth mentioning that Himmler himself recognized that committing atrocities could cause adverse psychological effects in his men. He therefore issued instructions to his SS commanders to ensure that the stress of continued killing did not lead their men to become ‘brutalized’.
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It is a measure of how completely the moral order had been inverted that Himmler was able to regard his SS men as the ‘victims’ of their own atrocities, without ever sparing a thought for the people they were killing.

Rape

There is one subject that ties together many of the themes I have discussed so far, and also anticipates many of those I will go on to explore. The committing of rape in wartime epitomizes the abuse of military power and the gratuitous use of violence against defenceless civilians. In the Second World War it was a phenomenon that grew beyond any previously known proportions: more rapes occurred in this war, particularly in its final stages, than during any other war in history. The prime motivating factor, especially in the immediate wake of battle, was revenge – but the problem was allowed to get out of hand because of institutional failings on the part of each of the belligerent armies. The consequences for the moral and physical health of the people, particularly in central and eastern Europe where rape was most widespread, were dire.

Rape has always been associated with warfare: in general, the more brutal the war, the more likely it is to involve the rape of enemy women.
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In the closing stages of the Second World War the worst instances of rape certainly happened in the areas where the fighting was the most intense, and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that even the women themselves noticed that they were in more danger during and just after periods of heavy fighting.
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Some witnesses at the time even suggested that rape was inevitable, given the ferocity of the battles these soldiers found themselves in: ‘What can you do?’ claimed one Russian officer. ‘It’s war; people become brutalized.’
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The worst instances occurred in eastern Europe, in those areas of Silesia and East Prussia where Soviet soldiers first set foot on German soil. But rape was not confined to the areas around where the fighting took place. Far from it – in fact rape increased everywhere during the war, even in areas where there was no fighting. In Britain and Northern Ireland, for example, sexual crimes, including rape, increased by almost 50 per cent between 1939 and 1945 – a fact which caused huge concern at the time.
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There are no easy explanations for the huge increases in rape that occurred in Europe during the final stages of the war and its aftermath, but there are some definite trends that are common to the whole continent. As always, the problem was far, far worse on the eastern front than it was in the west. While civilian men were occasionally responsible for committing the crime, it was overwhelmingly a military problem: as the Allied armies converged on Germany from every direction, a wave of sexual violence, along with other crimes, accompanied them. Rape tended to be worst where chaotic conditions existed, for example in the aftermath of heavy fighting, or amongst troops with poor discipline. And, importantly, it was incomparably worse in countries that were conquered rather than liberated. This suggests that revenge and a desire to dominate were important factors – indeed, probably the main factors – behind the mass rapes that occurred in 1945.

Studies suggest that wartime rape is particularly brutal, and particularly widespread, where there is a greater cultural divide between the occupying troops and the civilian population, and this theory is certainly borne out by the events of the Second World War.
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French colonial troops in Bavaria were particularly notorious. According to Christabel Bielenberg, an English woman who lived in a village near the Black Forest, Moroccan troops ‘raped up and down our valley’ as soon as they arrived. Later they were replaced with other troops from the Sahara who ‘came at night and surrounded every house in the village and raped every female between 12 and 80’.
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In Tübingen girls as young as twelve and women as old as seventy were raped by Moroccan troops.
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The terror of the women concerned was increased by the foreign appearance of these men, especially after years of racial propaganda by the Nazis.
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This cultural divide was also a factor on the eastern front. The contempt that many German soldiers felt for eastern
Untermenschen
when they invaded the Soviet Union certainly contributed to the vicious treatment Ukrainian and Russian women received at their hands. Vasily Grossman interviewed one teacher who had been raped by a German officer who threatened to shoot her six-month-old baby.
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Another Russian schoolteacher called Genia Demianova described her gang rape by more than a dozen German soldiers after one of them had lashed her with a horse whip: ‘[T]hey have torn me to pieces,’ she wrote,‘ … I am just a corpse.’
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When the tide turned and the Red Army advanced on central and south-eastern Europe, they too were influenced by racial and cultural motives. Bulgaria, for example, suffered hardly any rape compared with its neighbours, partly because the army that entered Bulgaria was far more disciplined than some of the others, but also because Bulgaria shared a similar culture and language with Russia, and the two countries had enjoyed a century of friendly relations.
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When the Red Army arrived here they were genuinely welcomed by the majority of Bulgarians. Romania, by contrast, had a very different language and culture from the Soviets, and had until 1944 been engaged in a very savage war against them. As a consequence, Romanian women suffered more than Bulgarian women.