Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (48 page)

However, such subtleties were often lost on those who did the killing, as well as their victims. All of the victims I have quoted stress that they were singled out for being Croatian – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the fiercely nationalist views of many of those victims themselves. However, even Communist sources admit that ethnicity was the deciding factor in much of the unofficial violence after the war. In July 1945, the Yugoslav intelligence service in Croatia reported that ‘chauvinistic hatred’ had ‘so flared up between the Serbian and Croatian villages that they are almost fighting each other’. Reports of murder and violence on purely ethnic grounds after the war are commonplace, particularly by Serb nationalists who, returning to their villages, took out their prejudices on their Croatian and Bosnian neighbours. ‘Why don’t you kill all Croats?’ returning Serbs are supposed to have asked their fellow villagers in Banija after the war. ‘What are you waiting for?’
³¹

Yugoslavia as a Symbol of Pan-European Violence

All this killing, on both a small scale and a large one, has helped to create a general perception of Yugoslavia as a uniquely cruel place – a perception that has been reinforced by the ferocious civil war that occurred there during the 1990s. The term ‘Balkan violence’ is used throughout Europe to denote a particularly vicious kind of bloodthirstiness, and various episodes from history are regularly invoked to support this hypothesis.
³²

It is true that the statistics associated with postwar Yugoslavia are worse than in any other country. Some 70,000 collaborationist troops and civilians were killed by the Partisans in the aftermath of the war: when compared to the population as a whole, this is more than ten times as bad as in Italy and twenty times as bad as in France.
³³
At first sight, the anecdotes that emerge from the postwar period also appear to support the stereotype of Yugoslavian cruelty. Dusan Vukovic, who joined the Partisans at the tender age of eleven, claims that he saw a Ustasha skinned alive and then hung on a tree branch with his own skin. ‘With my own eyes I saw the Partisans cut off noses and ears and gouge out eyes. They cut symbols of various kinds into the flesh of the captives, too, especially when they thought they had Gestapo personnel in their hands.’
³⁴
Other eyewitnesses speak of routine sadism, such as guards killing their victims slowly with knives, riding prisoners like horses, or binding men and women together and throwing them into rivers to watch them drown.
³⁵

Numbers aside, however, the violence that occurred in Yugoslavia at the end of the war was no more cruel than that which occurred in other countries. On the contrary, the same themes that pervaded here were present throughout the continent. There is no difference between the anecdotes above and the stories of French
miliciens
who are supposed to have arrested Resistance fighters during the German occupation, ‘ripped out their eyes, put bugs in the holes and sewn up their sockets’.
³⁶
Czech mobs were just as likely to carve Nazi symbols into the flesh of SS men they caught hold of, and Belgian
maquisards
thought nothing of burning collaborators alive.
³⁷
Despite the stereotypes, therefore, the cruelty that took place in this unfortunate part of the Balkans should not be considered unique – rather it was symbolic of a dehumanization that had taken place across the continent.

Neither does the ethnic dimension to the violence set Yugoslavia apart. Such ethnic tension might have been missing in most of western Europe but, as I have shown, it was an integral part of the war and its aftermath in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Ukraine. There were also numerous smaller, more regional conflicts involving minorities across the continent, some of which were every bit as violent on a local scale.

In fact, the only unique thing about Yugoslavia is how well it simultaneously encapsulates
all
of the themes I have discussed so far in this book. As in the rest of Europe, much of the violence in Yugoslavia was motivated by a simple desire for vengeance. As in the rest of Europe, the rifts caused by the war were deliberately concealed beneath a layer of cosy mythology once the war was over. The postwar breakdown of law and order was no different there than in other badly damaged areas of the continent. Lack of trust in the new police force, whom the people feared ‘as they would a plunderous mob’, was no different from the fear that Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Austrians and East Germans felt towards their own militias (or indeed towards Soviet soldiers).
³⁸
Lack of trust in the courts was the same as it was in France and Italy and, as in those countries, often led to people taking the law into their own hands. Clandestine, unofficial prisons were set up for collaborators, just as they were in France and Czechoslovakia; gulags were created for prisoners of war, just as they had been in the Soviet Union. Populations of Germans and Hungarians were expelled, just as they were from other countries across the continent.

It is only the involvement of the Yugoslav state that points the way to a new theme that I have not yet discussed in depth – the idea that much of the violence was politically motivated. Almost all of the events described up to now were brought about by individuals or groups acting outside state control, and who were eventually brought back into line by a combination of the Allied armies and traditional politicians. In Yugoslavia it was the state itself that conducted the violence, the Allies were absent, and traditional politicians had been replaced by revolutionaries. It is perhaps unsurprising that these fighting men took a distinctly unsubtle approach to returning the country to law and order.

Tito’s right-hand man, Milovan Djilas, put their methods succinctly in an interview published in a British magazine in 1979: ‘Yugoslavia was in a state of chaos and destruction. There was hardly any civil administration. There were no properly constituted courts. There was no way in which the cases of 20 – 30,000 people could have been reliably investigated. So the easy way out was to have them all shot, and have done with the problem.’
³⁹
While the French and the Italians tried to rid themselves of collaborators through the courts, and bemoaned the inadequacy of their purge ever afterwards, Tito recognized the shortcomings of his legal system and dispensed with it altogether. ‘We put an end to it,’ he reminisced later, ‘once and for all.’
⁴⁰

There is no doubt that the massacres that occurred in Yugoslavia after the war were, at least in part, politically motivated. Since the Communists were intent on forcing Croatia and Slovenia to rejoin a Yugoslavian federation, it made no sense to allow tens of thousands of staunch Croatian and Slovenian nationalists to put that reunion in jeopardy. Neither could Tito allow the continued existence of Mihailovi
’s royalist Chetniks to jeopardize his vision of a Communist Yugoslavia. Both groups therefore had to be dealt with one way or another. Those who were not shot were imprisoned for years or sometimes decades.

Politically motivated violence by the state was not unique to Yugoslavia. Other Communist groups across Europe were perhaps more subtle in their pursuit of power, but equally ruthless, and just as willing to resort to violence when they believed it necessary. For countless millions of people throughout the eastern half of the continent, therefore, the end of the war did not signal ‘liberation’ at all, it merely heralded a new era of state repression. The Nazi terror was over: the Communist terror was about to begin.

21

Western Tolerance, Eastern Intolerance

The Second World War and its aftermath ushered in a new and disturbing contrast between the eastern and western halves of Europe. In the west, the atmosphere had become far more cosmopolitan than the prewar population could ever have imagined. London had been transformed into the diplomatic hub for all Europe’s expatriate governments, and the meeting point for the world’s armed forces. The cafés of Paris or Berlin had always been frequented by customers from all over Europe: after the war they also thronged with Australians, Canadians, Americans and Africans, black faces and white. Rural parts of Germany that had rarely seen foreigners before the war were now awash with Poles and Ukrainians, Balts, Greeks and Italians. Austrians who had never before seen black faces now had to get used to mixing with black Americans, Moroccans, Algerians and Senegalese tribesmen. Despite some inevitable racism, and much grumbling about ‘drunken Poles’ or ‘lawless Ukrainians’, this new cosmopolitanism was generally tolerated.
¹

In the east, by contrast, the cosmopolitanism that had existed for centuries was partly – and in many areas entirely – destroyed. The war had wiped out most of the region’s Jews and Gypsies. It had set neighbours against one another to an unprecedented degree – Slovaks against Magyars, Ukrainians against Poles, Serbs against Croats, and so on across the region. As a consequence of these events, entire communities were scapegoated after the war, or designated as collaborators and fascists, simply by virtue of their race or ethnicity. Minorities who had become integrated into eastern European society over the course of centuries were now weeded out and expelled, sometimes over the course of just a few days.

The difference between the two halves of Europe is partly a result of long-term historical processes. The problem of ethnic minorities had always been more of an issue in the east, especially since the breakdown of the old Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires: even before 1939 there were alarming outbreaks of nationalist violence in many parts of eastern Europe. But these problems were brought to a head by the arrival of war. The Nazis and their allies not only brought a new, murderous quality to racial attitudes, but they promoted hatred between rival ethnic groups as a means of dividing and conquering them. Thus groups like the UPA in Ukraine or the Ustashas in Croatia were not only taught how to conduct large-scale massacres through witnessing the Holocaust at close quarters, but were given the opportunity to conduct genocides of their own. None of these things happened in western Europe. Nazi brutality in the west was milder by far, the genocide of the Jews occurred well out of sight of the population, and competing nationalist tensions were rarely an issue.

However, differences in the way the war was conducted are not the only reason why ethnic tension was so much worse in the east than in the west. The
postwar
regimes in each region were also very different, and they too must take their share of responsibility. In the west, the Allies not only imposed a system that required harmony between different ethnic groups, but provided an example of that harmony in action. The Allied armies in the west contained people from dozens of countries and all six continents. Their military governments contained representatives from four of the world’s great powers, all of whom were obliged to try to get on with one another. There is also a suggestion that the very cosmopolitanism of the authorities in the west provided a distraction for people’s prejudices. The Walloons in Belgium, for example, were far too worried about their daughters being taken advantage of by American soldiers to concern themselves with the much less alarming question of their relationship with their Flemish neighbours.
²

One would expect the Soviets to have imposed similar attitudes on the eastern half of Europe: their internationalist doctrine required the workers of all nations to unite in pursuit of their common goals. But in fact they promoted the persecution of minorities both within the Soviet Union itself, and within the eastern European countries that would soon become Soviet satellite states. It was the Soviets who pushed through the population exchange between Poland and Ukraine. It was the Soviets who supported Poland’s expulsion of Germans from the ‘Recovered Territories’, and who insisted on similar expulsions of Germans from the rest of eastern Europe. When the British and Americans refused Czechoslovakia the right to expel its Hungarian minority during the Paris Peace Conference, the Soviet delegation were deeply in favour of it, and they supported similar ethnic deportations in all the countries where they had become the dominant power.
³

Rather than fighting against racial and ethnic hatred in the areas they controlled, the Soviets sought to harness it. There are many ways in which the nationalist and racist policies that swept eastern Europe after the war suited the Soviets. To begin with, displaced people were far easier to control than people who were entrenched in their homelands and traditions. The chaos created by the deportations was also the ideal atmosphere for preaching revolution. The lands and businesses left behind could be parcelled out and redistributed amongst the workers and the poor, thus furthering a Communist agenda. It also created a new loyalty amongst those who received land, who saw the Communist Party as their benefactors. By promoting communism throughout Europe, the Soviets were also promoting loyalty to Moscow, the home of international communism.