Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (27 page)

The same dispute occurred over the
total
number of deaths during the year when the camp was open. According to Heinz Esser’s figures, 6,488 prisoners died there in 1945 and 1946. The Communist administration in Poland again dismissed this, claiming that only 4,000 prisoners had ever been interned at Lamsdorf, and that Esser’s figures were therefore impossible.
⁸⁰
According to the latest Polish research, it seems likely that there were about 6,000 prisoners, and that about 1,500 of them died. The names of 1,462 of them are known.
⁸¹

This bickering over numbers is not merely an academic disagreement - there are intense emotions involved, both on a personal and a national level. Nine people killed accidentally in a fire is an unfortunate event, but scores, perhaps hundreds, deliberately burned and buried alive is an atrocity. A few hundred deaths from typhus is perhaps an unavoidable tragedy, but the deliberate starvation and denial of medical care to thousands is a crime against humanity. The numbers are all-important, because they themselves tell a story.

When one looks at this issue on a national scale, the disparity between the German figures and the Polish ones becomes vast. In a study by the Ministry of Expellees, Refugees and War Victims that was presented to the German parliament in 1974, it was claimed that 200,000 people had been imprisoned in Polish labour camps after the war, including Lamsdorf, Zgoda, Mysłowice and the NKVD prison at Toszek. The overall death rate was estimated to be between 20 and 50 per cent. This meant that somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people died in such camps, although the report claimed that ‘certainly more than 60,000 people perished there’.
⁸²
By contrast, a Polish report by the Ministry for Public Security (Minsterstwo Bezpiecze
stwa Publicznego) claimed that only 6,140 Germans died in labour camps – a number that the report’s compilers must surely have known was far too low, even at the time.
⁸³
The German figure was therefore almost ten times the Polish figure.

Once again, the numbers are important to both sides. For the Poles it was a matter of retaining the moral high ground. The Second World War was the culmination of decades of tension between Germany and Poland: after the devastation and dismemberment of their country at the hands of the Nazis (and later the Soviets), the Poles were understandably indignant about being expected to accept any guilt for the brief period of chaos that occurred during the aftermath. It was therefore in their interest to keep these embarrassing figures as low as possible. There are some blatant examples of manipulation in the official documents of the time, where mortality rates are impossibly low.

Germany, by contrast, had a vested interest in exaggerating the figures. Not only did stories of Polish crimes against humanity feed into all the racial prejudices that some Germans had held during the war, but they also helped to alleviate some of the sense of national guilt: such stories showed that Germans were not only perpetrators but also victims of atrocity. The greater the tragedy that Germany had itself endured, the further it could distance itself from its own guilt – in a sense, the wrongs that were done to the eastern European Germans partly ‘cancelled out’ the wrongs that they themselves had done to the Jews and Slavs. While this has never been the mainstream view in Germany, there are still political groups there today who refuse to acknowledge the Holocaust on the grounds that what Germans in eastern Europe suffered was ‘exactly the same’.
⁸⁴
This is an extremely dangerous point of view. While it is true that the Polish labour camps contained some repugnant examples of extreme sadism towards Germans, there is absolutely no evidence to show that this was part of an official policy of extermination. Indeed, the Polish authorities sent strict orders to their camp commanders stressing that beating or otherwise abusing prisoners was illegal, and anyone found guilty of doing so would be punished.
⁸⁵
Those who were found to have mistreated prisoners were disciplined (albeit lightly), and removed from their posts. To equate the atrocities in Lamsdorf or Zgoda with the Holocaust is a nonsense, in terms of both quality and scale.

One of the main reasons this subject cannot be laid to rest is that so few of those responsible for crimes in the postwar prison camps have ever been brought to trial. Czesław G
borski, the commandant of Lamsdorf, was tried in 1956 by the Communist administration, but found not guilty. After the fall of communism in 1989, the investigation of events at Lamsdorf resumed, and G
borski was due to be tried in 2001, in Opole. However, the trial was repeatedly postponed due to the poor health of both G
borski and the witnesses against him, and was finally called off in 2005. G
borski died a year later.

Salomon Morel, the commandant of Zgoda/
wi
tochłowice, has likewise managed to avoid coming to trial. After the fall of communism he moved to Israel, where he has lived ever since. The Polish Ministry of Justice applied for his extradition, but Israel was obliged to turn the application down because, according to their statute of limitations, too much time had elapsed since the crimes were committed.
⁸⁶

Both men should have been prosecuted in the 1940s, along with hundreds of others, but they were not, because the authorities had other things on their minds. The Poles, like every other nation that had endured Nazi occupation, were more concerned with restoring their own power than with looking after the rights of German civilians. This might make us indignant, but it should not surprise us. Justice in the aftermath of the war was in any case a highly subjective affair, and rarely exercised within what we would now consider a normal legal framework.

None of these events were unique to Poland or eastern Europe. As I shall show next, the same themes exist throughout the continent: the only difference is that elsewhere it was not Germans who were punished, but rather those who had collaborated with them.

13

The Enemy Within

At the height of the war, Germany directly or indirectly controlled more than a dozen countries across Europe, and exercised enormous influence in half a dozen more. For all their military might, the Nazis could not have done this without the help of tens of thousands, perhaps
hundreds
of thousands, of collaborators in those countries. No matter how much the people of Europe hated Germans in the immediate aftermath of the war, they hated collaborators more. Germans at least had the excuse that they were part of a foreign culture, a foreign power: collaborators, by contrast, were traitors to their own countries, and in the fiercely patriotic atmosphere that permeated Europe at the end of the war, this was an unforgivable sin.

The dehumanization of collaborators in the aftermath of the war is difficult for modern generations to understand. In the European press they were portrayed as ‘vermin’, ‘mad dogs’, or ‘inferior’ elements that needed to be ‘cleansed’ from society.
¹
In Denmark and Norway they were depicted in popular art as rats, while in Belgium the collective animosity towards them, according to British observers, was akin to ‘a religious fervour’.
²
In such an atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that some people became violent towards them. As Peter Voute, a doctor who worked with the Dutch Resistance, noted after the war,