Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (20 page)

And yet, for all its failings, UNRRA is often remembered with fierce affection by the DPs themselves. UNRRA workers were usually the first non-violent foreigners these people encountered, and they provided the one thing that many DPs craved above all else: compassion. The organization understood, perhaps in a way that the military did not, that kindness and empathy were sometimes also an effective way to prevent former forced labourers from taking their revenge.

The people who understood this most instinctively were probably the children, many of whom were given their first taste of a brighter future in UNRRA’s DP camps. In a continent where many children were afraid of men in uniform, the reaction of one French child on seeing an UNRRA uniform speaks volumes. Yvette Rubin was a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who had been deported to Germany in 1942. After witnessing many horrors, including the brutal murder of her mother, she returned to Paris three years later. Back home, she recounted her terrible story to her family, but her eyes only lit up when she suddenly noticed the clothing her uncle was wearing:

Tonton,
you are not a soldier. You are UNRRA. I know them. I was with them for more than two weeks after I was liberated by the British armies. They are wonderful. They have saved my life. They saved me from typhus, which I was still sick with. They fed me and gave me this dress I am now wearing … I love them so much. They were the first people to be nice to me.
⁵¹

The Issue of Personal Power

It is difficult to know how best to characterize the behaviour of former forced labourers in Germany after the war. To a degree, their conduct was merely an extreme form of the same lawlessness that was sweeping the whole of the continent. However, their motivations were not merely criminal. After years of pent-up frustration, they saw violence, drunkenness and sexual licence as a legitimate and long-overdue form of self-expression. There was also a strong element of anger in their actions. Many believed that a certain amount of looting and even violence was justified as a way to put right what had been done to them. They were thirsty for what they saw as collective retribution, but what might more accurately be described as revenge.

All of these motivations were tangled up in a chaos of conflicting emotions that even the DPs themselves did not properly understand. The genius of humanitarian organizations like UNRRA was to recognize that what much of it boiled down to was an issue of personal power. During their wartime ordeal many forced labourers had been abused and dehumanized: they had had every aspect of their lives brutally regulated, sometimes for years. Having been denied
any
form of power for so long, at liberation the pendulum had swung the other way: for a brief time they were not only free, but allowed to act with utter impunity. If they lost control of themselves at this time it was often simply because they
could,
and the new-found sense of power was intoxicating. In the words of UNRRA’s psychological report, ‘the brakes have been taken off’.
⁵²

While some military agencies sought to curb this violent energy by reintroducing harsh constraints, UNRRA officials wanted to return these people to some sort of equilibrium. Their policy of giving DPs a measure of control over their own lives was undoubtedly the more enlightened approach: given unlimited time, and an unlimited budget, it was far more likely to rehabilitate individuals than mere discipline. But in the chaotic conditions of the war’s aftermath it was also hopelessly idealistic. Camp populations were often too transient to see any benefits from such a programme, individuals too traumatized and UNRRA staff too overstretched. In too many cases, particularly in the early days after the war, returning power to DPs simply increased their opportunities for revenge. As a consequence, UNRRA staff were obliged to walk a difficult line between granting DPs responsibility and keeping them in check.

If, after the initial days of the liberation were over, vengeance by former slave labourers did not occur on a large scale, this is largely because DPs in Germany never found themselves in a position of real power. Had they been put in charge of camps in which the Germans had become prisoners – as occurred elsewhere in Europe – the situation might have been different.

As it was, the only people to achieve real domination in Germany – indeed, whose power in some circumstances could be said to be
absolute
- were the Allied military. The occupying armies had far greater opportunities for revenge in the aftermath of the war than DPs ever did.

How Allied soldiers and their leaders reacted to these opportunities has been the subject of controversy ever since.

11

German Prisoners of War

In wartime the worst atrocities do not generally occur in battle, but after the battle is over. A soldier might be able to avenge his fallen comrades by fighting ferociously, but he is in a much better position to do so once his enemy is defeated, disarmed and at his mercy. It is when a soldier finds himself in charge of prisoners of war that he is at his most powerful, and his enemy is at his most impotent.

It was to prevent the abuse of this power differential that the international community drew up the Third Geneva Convention in 1929. The convention not only forbade the violent or humiliating treatment of prisoners of war, but stipulated the conditions under which they should be housed, fed and cared for. During the Second World War, however, these rules were flouted with such regularity by all sides that they very soon became a nonsense. The German army executed, degraded and starved their prisoners of war, particularly on the eastern front – and when the tables turned, it is not surprising that there was a desire to treat captured Germans in much the same way.

In his multi-volume history of the conflict, Winston Churchill told a story that demonstrates the prevailing attitude towards prisoners of war at the time, which reveals a tendency to vengeance even at the very highest levels. The episode occurred at the first conference of the ‘Big Three’ in Tehran at the end of 1943. Churchill was having dinner with Stalin and Roosevelt on the second day of the conference when Stalin proposed a toast to the liquidation of ‘at least 50,000, and perhaps 100,000, of the German Command Staff’. Churchill, who knew all about the mass shootings of Polish officers at Katyn at the beginning of the war, was disgusted by this remark, and stated baldly that the British people would never tolerate mass executions. When Stalin still insisted that 50,000 ‘most be shot’, Churchill could stand it no longer. ‘I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself,’ he said, ‘than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.’

In an ill-judged attempt to lighten the tone, Roosevelt interjected at this point with a suggestion that they compromise on a smaller number to be shot, say, 49,000. It appears he meant this as a joke, but given what he also knew about Stalin’s past it was in very poor taste. Churchill was unable to make a reply before Roosevelt’s son Elliott, who was also present at the dinner, added his twopenn‘orth. ‘Look,’ he said to Stalin, ‘when our armies start rolling in from the West, and your armies are still coming on from the east, we’ll be solving the whole thing, won’t we? Russian, American and British soldiers will settle the issue for most of those fifty thousand in battle, and I hope not only those fifty thousand war criminals will be taken care of but many hundreds of thousands more Nazis as well.’

At this, Stalin rose to his feet, embraced Elliott and clinked glasses with him. Churchill was dismayed. ‘Much as I love you, Elliott,’ he said, ‘I cannot forgive you for making such a dastardly statement. How dare you say such a thing!’ He got up and stormed out of the room, leaving Stalin and his Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to hurry after him with claims that he was taking things too seriously – they had all only been ‘playing’.
¹

This anecdote has been repeated by many historians, and has been interpreted variously as proof of Stalin’s ruthlessness, a demonstration of Roosevelt’s naivety and an illustration of Churchill’s growing powerlessness in the shadow of the other two.
²
It is certainly President Roosevelt’s comments that are the most revealing, since they are the most unexpected. He does seem to have been taken with the idea of executing 50,000 German prisoners, since it was virtually the first thing he mentioned when the three men met again at their second conference, in Yalta just over a year later.
³
If one takes Roosevelt’s comments at face value, and factor in the President’s well-known anti-German prejudice, then he begins to appear every bit as ruthless as Stalin.

The treatment of German prisoners of war in 1945 has always been controversial because it calls into question the very values that the Allies claimed to be fighting for. What Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were discussing was the necessary flip side of the liberation: a process in which millions of Europeans would not be set free, but incarcerated; and many thousands not saved, but led to their deaths. Churchill, who always had an eye for posterity, understood that this was not a subject to be taken lightly. It was one thing for released slaves to be seen pursuing vengeance, but quite another for powerful world leaders.

In the aftermath of the war, the fate of German prisoners rested entirely on the whims of their captors. Whether their helplessness invited pity, contempt or merely indifference was not just a matter of luck – it would depend on the prevailing attitudes that existed in the different Allied armies, at every level of command.

American-held Prisoners of War

During the course of the war more than 11 million German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Allies. Given the vast scale of the battles that took place on the Russian front, one would expect the most prisoners to have been taken by the Soviets, but in fact under a third of the total – only about 3,155,000 – were captured by the Red Army. More prisoners were taken by the Americans (some 3.8 million) and by the British (3.7 million). Even the French managed to capture almost a quarter of a million men despite only being involved in the business of taking prisoners for less than a year and having a comparatively tiny army.
⁴

This disparity in numbers says less about the relative prowess of the Soviets than it does about the German fear of them. In the final days of the war German soldiers did whatever they could to avoid being taken prisoner by the Red Army. Many units continued fighting long after it was sensible to surrender simply because they were afraid of what might happen to them if they fell into Soviet hands; others did their best to disentangle themselves from the eastern front so that they might be able to give themselves up to the British or Americans instead. In the run-up to the capitulation this became a priority at all levels of the German army: when the German Chief of Staff, General Alfred August Jodl, arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters to sign the capitulation agreement he deliberately stalled for two days in order to give German troops as much time as possible to fight their way westwards.
⁵
In Yugoslavia, Germans and Croatians defied orders to surrender on 8 May and continued fighting their way towards the Austrian border for another whole week.
⁶
Thus, while there was an explosion in the numbers of soldiers surrendering to the Western Allies at the very end of the war – the Americans took some 1.8 million men in April and May 1945 alone – there was no corresponding increase in the east.
⁷

The sheer number of German soldiers giving themselves up to the Western Allies seems to have taken the British and Americans by surprise. As a temporary measure they corralled these prisoners into sixteen vast enclosures just inside western Germany, collectively known as the
Rheinwiesenlager
(‘Rhine meadow camps’). Most of these camps were capable of holding 100,000 men, but by the time of the capitulation many of them were forced to take significantly more. For example, over 118,000 prisoners were crammed into the enclosure at Sinzig, and the number at Remagen quickly exceeded 134,000. Some of the smaller camps were even more overcrowded. Böhl, for example, had a capacity of 10,000 but was housing more than three times that number.
⁸
It soon became obvious that the Allies were struggling to cope, and a flurry of memos passed between Allied commanders requesting the urgent supply of extra resources.
⁹

Contemporary photographs and eyewitness reports gathered by academics and German government agencies after the war give an idea of the kinds of conditions these prisoners were subjected to.
¹⁰
The camps were not ‘camps’ in the traditional sense, because they contained few if any tents or huts: they were simply areas of countryside enclosed within a barbed-wire cordon. Prisoners had no shelter, and were subjected to the elements all day and every day. ‘I usually lie on the ground,’ wrote one prisoner, who kept a diary written on toilet paper during his time at the vast Rheinberg enclosure.

During the heat I crawl into a hollow in the ground. I wear a coat and boots, with my forage-cap pulled down over my ears; my field bag, in which I have a silver spoon and fork, serves as my pillow. During a thunderstorm one wall of my hollow falls in on me. My coat and socks are wet through and through … How long will we have to be without shelter, without blankets or tents? Every German soldier once had shelter from the weather. Even a dog has a doghouse to crawl into when it rains. Our only wish is finally after six weeks to get a roof over our heads. Even a savage is better housed.
¹¹