Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (49 page)

Unfortunately, most nationalists were not quite so easily harnessed to the Soviet cause. While they were happy to have a superpower to sponsor their deportation policies, they were not willing to allow the Soviets a free hand. Nor were they willing to relinquish power to local Communists - whom they rightly regarded as Soviet stooges – without putting up a fight.

The Western Allies were equally difficult to convince. After seeing the way that Soviet power was exercised in eastern Europe, they were beginning to suspect that it was not only deported Germans whose ‘freely expressed wishes’ the Soviets were willing to ignore.

Thus, while the aftermath of the war saw a depressing increase in ethnic violence, a new, bigger conflict was also brewing. On a local scale it would involve a series of power struggles between nationalists and communists in individual countries. But on a European scale it would involve the clash of superpowers, and herald a new era of continent-wide civil war.

PART IV

Civil War

We who saw Europe liberated know that the Communistic fear that men will cling to freedom is well-founded. It is possible that this truth may be the reason for what appears to be an aggressive intent on the part of the Communists to tear down all governmental structures based upon individual freedom.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1948
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22

Wars within Wars

In the autumn of 1943 a group of Italian partisans was hiding out in the Alpine forests of the Upper Veneto when an event occurred that would severely test their loyalties. The unit was part of a Communist brigade, and was committed to fighting not only the Germans but the Fascist ruling classes who were nominally in charge of northern Italy. The brigade had only recently formed, and was still inexperienced as a guerrilla force.

One day the unit stumbled across three German soldiers who had been convalescing in the area, and who had gone out for a walk in the woods, completely unaware of the danger of ‘bandits’. The partisans were obliged to take them captive, and would have been pleased with their catch were it not for the fact that they now found themselves in a dilemma. What should they do with their prisoners? In the normal course of things they would have interned them in some kind of prison camp, but the realities of guerrilla warfare made this impossible. After much debate it was decided that they had no alternative but to shoot them.

The decision immediately threw the unit into turmoil. None of the partisans wanted to carry out this gruesome task, and there were many who voiced serious concerns over the sentence. During interrogation the three Germans had revealed that they had all been ordinary workers during peacetime. Surely it was not right for Communists to kill fellow workers, even if they were German? Furthermore, they were all conscripts, and therefore fellow victims of capitalist forces that had compelled them to fight against their will. After much argument, and further interrogations, the unit held another vote, and it was decided that they would set the German prisoners free.

This story might have been a rare and refreshing example of empathy between enemies, were it not for what happened next. Three days later, acting on intelligence from the freed Germans, the Wehrmacht descended on the entire area and began a comprehensive search. In granting the German prisoners their lives the partisans had not forwarded the cause of international communism, but merely risked their own annihilation. They would never again make the same mistake: from that day on they shot all prisoners without compunction.
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From the safety of the twenty-first century, we tend to imagine the Second World War as a single, unambiguous conflict between the Allies on one side and the Axis on the other. In our collective memory the motives and allegiances of each side are transparent: the Nazis and their accomplices fought for the domination of Europe, while the Allies fought for a ‘free world’. It was a war of right against wrong or, even more simplistically, good against evil.

The reality was, of course, much more complicated. For the Italian partisans in this story there were at least three simultaneous reasons for fighting: firstly, to drive the Germans out of the peninsula; secondly, to defeat the Fascists, who had been in control of the country since the 1920S; and, lastly, to bring about a social revolution, which would oust their capitalist rulers and institutions and return power to the ordinary workers and peasants of Italy. Just like Tito’s Partisans in neighbouring Yugoslavia, therefore, they were fighting three separate wars in parallel: a national war, a civil war, and a class war.
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As the story demonstrates, it was sometimes difficult for partisan groups to recognize which of these three wars should take priority.

Similar situations were occurring all across Europe both during and after the Second World War. Hidden within the main conflict were dozens of other, more local wars, which had different flavours and different motivations in each country and each region. In some cases they were conflicts over class or other political differences. In other cases, as I have already shown, they were conflicts over race or nationalism. These alternative, parallel conflicts have received little attention in the past because they upset so many of our neat assumptions about the Second World War.

I have mentioned several times that our memories of the war are built upon myths of national unity: it is opportune at this point to explain exactly how flimsy those myths are. France, for example, was in no way unified during and after the war. Physically it was split between those areas in the north and south-east that were liberated by the Allies, those areas in the centre and south-west that liberated themselves and, for a time, various pockets in the east and along the Atlantic coast that remained under German occupation. Politically it was split between those groups who wanted only to restore France to its prewar status quo and those, like the Communists, who wanted a full-blown social revolution. The national force of the Resistance – the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – was cobbled together out of various disparate groups who had nothing in common beyond their mutual wish to see Vichy ousted. Once this was achieved there was no longer any strong reason to keep the organization together, and different elements of the Resistance soon returned to fighting amongst themselves.

The main internal conflict in France was between the forces of the left, particularly the powerful Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), and those of the centre-right followers of de Gaulle. But even within these groups there were violent splits. The left, for example, was riven by competing factions – Communists against Anarchists, Stalinists against Trotskyites, and so on – who often accused each other of spying for the Vichy authorities. To this day it is impossible to tell whether some of those shot as informers were genuine Vichy agents or merely victims of a local internal Communist purge.
³
The Spanish Communists, who had fled to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War, were supposed to be particularly ruthless in this respect. According to one source, about 200 Spanish refugees were assassinated in the last three months of 1944 – not for reasons linked to the occupation, but because Stalinists saw the liberation as a convenient moment to get rid of their non-Stalinist rivals.
⁴

Despite the semblance of unity at a national level, therefore, in the regions of France this unity was lacking at every level. The same was true in Italy, where the coalition between Communist partisans and more moderate anti-Fascists quickly broke down as soon as the war was over. It was also true in Greece, where the various resistance groups were violently opposed to each other right from the beginning and even made local pacts with the Germans in order to concentrate on their own private war. It was true again in Slovakia, where the uprising against German forces in 1944 drew a distinctly mixed response from a population that was not sure if it wanted to throw in its lot with the Soviets, the Nazis or the Czechs, or to oppose them all. And so the list goes on.

To acknowledge the parallel nature of these local wars-within-the-war has always been controversial, because it has such huge consequences - not only for historians but for the wider world in general. Firstly, there is a political dimension to our stories and myths about the Second World War. If we remember the war as a simplistic battle between good and evil then we do so for a reason. Any change in the way it is remembered also changes our perception of ourselves: not only does it tear apart some of our most cherished notions of who was right and who was wrong, but it also, for better or worse, allows former ‘villains’ an opportunity to rehabilitate themselves. Neo-fascist groups across Europe have always justified their actions during the war by claiming that they were merely fighting against the ‘greater evil’ of international communism. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990S their arguments have been gaining ground.

Secondly, and more immediately, the acknowledgement of these parallel wars challenges our whole concept of what exactly the Second World War
was.
If the international war against Germany was only one strand of this conflict, then it stands to reason that the defeat of Germany did not necessarily bring about a cessation of the fighting. Just because the main war was over, it did not mean that the various sub-wars had also come to an end. Far from it – sometimes the absence of an external enemy simply meant that local people could concentrate their efforts more effectively on killing each other. We have already seen how this was true on a regional level where there were specific conflicts between different ethnic groups. But it was also true on a more general level in the Europe-wide battle between right and left.

In the following chapters I will outline some of the most violent episodes of postwar history, and show how they were not really ‘postwar’ at all. Some of them were merely the continuation of political struggles born during the Second World War but yet to come to a head. Others were the culmination of tensions that had been simmering for decades, and which would continue to do so after the war was over.

In each case, to a degree at least, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Once Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had outlined the broad brush strokes of their separate spheres of influence at Moscow, Yalta and Potsdam, none of the Big Three powers was inclined to tolerate any major deviation from the political systems they themselves represented. This was now the age of the superpower, and local political differences were obliged to take second place behind superpower politics. Civil wars in individual countries would become mere expressions of a new continent-wide battle between the forces of communism, supported by the USSR, and those of capitalism, supported by the USA. Those idealists who truly hoped that ‘free peoples’ would be allowed to ‘work out their own destinies in their own way’ were about to be sorely disappointed.
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23

Political Violence in France and Italy

At the end of the Second World War, after the dust had settled a little, the people of Europe began to look about themselves for ways to explain the events that they had just experienced. Questions that had lain dormant throughout the war years were now voiced openly. How had the world allowed itself to be dragged into a second devastating conflict so soon after the first? Why had Hitler not been stopped sooner? Why had their politicians not protected them from occupation, exploitation, devastation? Who was responsible, and why were they not being brought to account?

Unsurprisingly, many people now regarded the old establishment with contempt. Attempts were made to purge the continent’s institutions, but for some people this was not enough. They argued that the entire political system was at fault, and that if people wanted to avoid future wars and injustices they should find new, more inclusive ways of governing themselves. A radical wind had begun to blow, that would bring with it some of the most violent and tragic episodes of the postwar period.

If the Allies needed a demonstration of just how much people’s attitudes had changed, they were given one almost as soon as they set foot on the mainland. In September 1943, as they were busy driving the Germans out of southern Italy, British and American troops were surprised to discover that many of the villages they had liberated were now rising up in rebellion – not against the Allies, nor even against the Germans, but against the Italian state itself. After more than twenty years of Fascist rule, and generations of exploitation by absentee landlords, many of these villages had had their fill of outsiders. A perfect example was the village of Calitri, in the Campania. After liberation, the people of Calitri held a meeting in which they unanimously declared their intention to govern their own affairs in future. To signify their determination, they renamed the area around the village the Republic of Battocchio, after their leader, and declared their independence from the rest of Italy.
¹

In the grand scale of things this would have been a fairly insignificant event, had it been unique, but actually it was just one village amongst many in southern Italy, Sicily and Sardinia to take such an action. In each case, almost the first thing the villagers did was to set about occupying pieces of uncultivated land that belonged to local aristocrats, the state or the church. They had sound reasons for doing so. The villagers were hungry and regarded uncultivated land as a waste of resources that could be used both to feed themselves and to make a little money for the community. In many areas peasants still remembered the seizure of common land by greedy aristocrats during the Risorgimento – as far as they were concerned they were merely righting historic wrongs by taking back what was theirs.