Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (22 page)

Some lucky prisoners of war were sent home as early as 1947, but most remained in Soviet gulags until 1950, when Stalin issued an ‘amnesty’ for those Germans who had been ‘good workers’.
³⁹
Some of those who had not managed to keep out of trouble, however, had been redesignated as political prisoners, and were not released until Khrushchev granted further amnesties after Stalin’s death in 1953. The last ones to return to Germany did so in 1957, some twelve years after the war was over. After years of working in remote Soviet mines, forests, railways, tanneries, collective farms and factories, many of them were broken men. Count Heinrich von Einsiedel later described the people he returned home with on one of the earliest transports. ‘But the cargoes those trains carried! Starved, emaciated skeletons; human wrecks convulsed with dysentery due to lack of food: gaunt figures with trembling limbs, expressionless grey faces, and dim eyes which brightened up only at the sight of bread or a cigarette.’ Einsiedel, once a devout Communist, found his faith well and truly shaken by the sight. Each of these prisoners, he said, was ‘a living indictment of the Soviet Union, a death sentence to Communism’.
⁴⁰

The Cost of Bad History

The treatment of German prisoners of war was exponentially worse under the Soviets than it was under the Americans – a fact that is confirmed not only by the internationally accepted casualty figures but also by the testimonies of hundreds of former prisoners themselves. However, this has not deterred some writers from claiming otherwise. When James Bacque published
Other Losses
in 1989 he tried to convince the world that it was the Americans rather than the Russians who had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German prisoners. He placed responsibility for these supposed deaths firmly at the feet of the American leadership, whom he accused of pursuing a deliberate policy of revenge, and then concealing the ‘truth’ beneath layers of creative accounting. Bacque’s claims not only called into question the strongly held American belief that they had fought a moral war, but effectively accused American leaders of crimes against humanity.

This was a classic conspiracy theory, and would not be worth mentioning were it not for the controversy the book caused when it was published. Academics from around the world queued up to rubbish Bacque’s historical methods, his misrepresentation of documents, his dismissal of a vast body of methodical research, and above all his complete misunderstanding of statistics.
⁴¹
On the other hand some American veterans who had worked as prison guards after the war came to Bacque’s defence. Conditions in their camps
were
abysmal, they pointed out, and a culture of neglect, even of passive revenge, did exist at many of them. Even Bacque’s detractors were obliged to admit that such points were valid.

If an air of controversy still lingers around this subject, decades after it should have become one of history’s footnotes, it is because there always has been a small seed of truth in Bacque’s claims. Perhaps what Bacque should be most criticized for is not his misreading of the facts, but that he distracted attention away from the real story. This might not have been as sensational as the story that he wanted to find, but it is nevertheless shocking.

From the official figures drawn up by the Maschke Commission, set up by the German government in 1962 to investigate the fate of German prisoners of war, it appears that the American military government, as well as that of the French, does indeed have a case to answer. The loss rate in American camps, though not as high as in the Soviets’, was still more than four times as bad as that in POW camps run by the British (see
Table 1
). Worse still were the camps run by the French, where, despite housing fewer than a third as many prisoners as the British camps, almost twenty times the number of deaths (24,178 in total) were recorded. We must remember that these are conservative figures: even the official historians concede that thousands of deaths probably went unrecorded.

Table 1
: Deaths amongst prisoners of war
⁴²

The high losses in French camps can at least be explained by the food crisis in France at the time. By the autumn of 1945 the supply situation was so bad that the International Committee of the Red Cross were warning of a possible 200,000 deaths amongst prisoners if the situation did not change. As a consequence a relief operation was launched: American supplies were diverted to French camps to raise the rations above starvation levels, and further disaster was averted.
⁴³

The discrepancy between British losses and American ones, however, is more difficult to explain. There is no reason the Americans should not have been able to supply their prisoners of war at least as well as the British did – indeed, the Americans were easily the best supplied of all the Allied armies. Some have suggested that the Americans lost more prisoners because they were the ones in charge of the infamous
Rheinwiesenlager,
but it is not clear why these camps should have been substantially more difficult to supply than any of the others, and in any case some of them were turned over to British control shortly after the end of the war.
⁴⁴
During the critical period in the war’s immediate aftermath the Americans were in charge of more prisoners than the British, but not excessively so: 2.59 million, as opposed to 2.12 million. If one compares this to the relative sizes of the British and American armies, the British were actually responsible for proportionally more prisoners.
⁴⁵

The only substantial difference between the British and American figures is in the speed with which their prisoners were released. While the British had released more than 80 per cent by the autumn of 1945, the Americans held on to most of theirs through that winter.
⁴⁶
The reason for this was that Roosevelt had insisted on trying German soldiers for war crimes all the way down to the lowest ranks: American-held prisoners therefore had to stay longer in the camps so that they could be screened.
⁴⁷

Perhaps here we have a clue as to why the Americans recorded higher losses amongst their prisoners than the British did. As I have already hinted, the official attitude towards Germans was always much harsher in America than it was in Britain. At the Tehran conference, while the British advocated the splitting of defeated Germany into three administrative regions, Roosevelt wanted to break up the country even further. ‘Germany,’ he said, ‘was less dangerous to civilization when it was in 107 provinces.’
⁴⁸
During the Anglo-American conference in Quebec in 1944, the US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau put forward a plan to dismantle Germany’s entire industrial infrastructure, effectively returning the country to the Middle Ages. While Roosevelt approved this plan, the British only went along with it under duress.
⁴⁹
And while both nations agreed to use prisoners as forced labour long after the war was over – the British actually for rather longer than the Americans – it was only the Americans (and the French) who proposed using them for clearing minefields.
⁵⁰

Such policies were bound to result in a higher death rate, but for the most part they were never implemented: in the end, British and American policy towards prisoners was very similar. However, official attitudes can affect conditions just as much as official policies. A constant stream of bitter words from above can give the impression at the lower levels that harshness towards prisoners will not only be tolerated but encouraged. If a culture of active hostility is allowed to flourish then prisoners will end up being badly treated. In extreme circumstances this can lead to atrocity, but even in milder circumstances it can lead to unnecessary hardship for prisoners who might already be exhausted by defeat.

Whether there is any correlation between American attitudes towards German prisoners and their death rate is a moot point, and requires much more extensive research. The same applies to the French. If James Bacque had confined himself to investigating this, rather than inventing more elaborate theories, his book might have been rather better received by the academic community. But until such research is carried out it remains a very real possibility that when Roosevelt joked about killing prisoners of war, his words, however humorously meant, ended up having exactly that effect.

12

Vengeance Unrestrained: Eastern Europe

If vengeance is a function of power, then true vengeance is achieved only when the power relationship between perpetrator and victim is completely inverted. The victim must become the perpetrator. The powerless must become all-powerful; and the misery inflicted must in some way be equivalent to that suffered.

This did not happen on a large scale inside Germany, because the presence of the Allies prevented it. Released slave labourers could not preside over the enslavement of their former masters. Concentration camp survivors did not find themselves in charge of German prisoners. But there were other countries where such circumstances did indeed arise, at both an individual level and a communal one.

In Poland and Czechoslovakia especially, but also in Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States and even Russia, there were large and long-established populations of expatriate German speakers, collectively known as the Volksdeutsch. These people, who had received all kinds of privileges during the war, now found themselves the target of popular fury. They were forced to flee their homes, denied rations and humiliated in direct emulation of Nazi measures during the war. Hundreds of thousands were conscripted as slave labour in factories, coal mines and farms across the region, just as their former neighbours had been by the Nazis. The remainder were either sent to prison or herded into transit camps pending expulsion to Germany.

This chapter is about the millions of German-speaking civilians who refilled the prison camps, transit camps and concentration camps of Europe once they had been emptied of their wartime inmates. Some of these places have been compared with the most notorious Nazi camps. While it is important to make it clear at the outset that the atrocities that took place here were on nothing like the scale of the Nazi war crimes, it is equally important to acknowledge that they did occur, and that they were barbarous enough.

Extremes of sadism are always difficult to stomach, no matter who the victims are, but the fact that the victims in this case were
German
provides another layer to our discomfort. In every country in Europe, and indeed across the world, the Germans have always been regarded as the perpetrators, not the victims, of atrocity. The world likes to believe that if there was some small measure of vengeance after the war this was no more than the German people deserved – and furthermore, we like to believe that the vengeance that was meted out upon Germans was in any case fairly mild, especially given the circumstances. The notion that the Germans were also treated to some horrific forms of torture and degradation – not only practising Nazis but ordinary men, women and children – and the realization that our own countrymen were also capable of such crimes – these are subjects that mainstream Allied culture has always instinctively shied away from.

Such stories must be confronted if we are ever to learn the truth about the past, or gain a proper understanding of the world we live in today. In recent decades extremists and conspiracy theorists have thrived on the fact that this subject is still treated by the rest of us as something of a guilty secret. New myths and exaggerations have begun to take root, some of which are quite dangerous. Uncomfortable though it is, therefore, it is important to shine a light on both the unpleasant truth and the myths that have fed off it.

Germans in Czechoslovakia

The parts of Europe that saw the greatest levels of enmity towards German civilians were those where Germans and other nationalities lived side by side. The Czech capital of Prague was a paradigm case. Prague had been home to both Germans and Czechs for hundreds of years, and resentments between the two communities dated back to the time of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
¹
Not counting Vienna, Prague was the first foreign capital to be taken by the Nazis, and the last to be liberated – its Czech citizens therefore suffered the occupation longer than any in Europe. Many of them regarded their German neighbours as traitors who had paved the way for the German invasion in 1938.