Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (68 page)

Hatred was the key to Communist success in Europe, as the innumerable documents urging party activists to promote it make clear. Communism not only fed off animosity towards Germans, Fascists and collaborators; it also nurtured new revulsion for the aristocracy and the middle classes, for landowners and kulaks. Later, as the world war gradually became the Cold War, these passions were easily translated into a revulsion for America, capitalism and the West. In return all these groups also abhorred communism in equal measure.

It was not only the Communists who saw violence and chaos as an opportunity. Nationalists too understood that the tensions ignited during the war could be used to promote an alternative agenda – in their case, the ethnic cleansing of their countries. Many nations exploited the new hatred of Germans in the aftermath of the war to expel the ancient Volksdeutsch communities who had lived throughout eastern Europe for hundreds of years. Poland harnessed the wartime hatred for Ukrainians to launch a programme of expulsion and forced assimilation. Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians embarked on a series of population exchanges and anti-Semitic groups exploited the violent atmosphere to chase the few remaining Jews off the continent. These groups aimed at nothing less than the creation of a series of ethnically pure nation-states across central and eastern Europe.

Nationalists never achieved their aims in the aftermath of the war – partly because the international community would not let them, but also because the needs of the Cold War took priority over everything else. But when the Cold War came to an end, the old nationalist tensions began to resurface. Issues that many thought were long dead were suddenly resurrected with a passion that made the events of fifty years earlier seem like yesterday.

The most spectacular example occurred after the fall of communism in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was the one eastern European nation that had not carried out a programme of ethnic expulsions and deportations after the war. As a consequence, Serbs, Croats and Muslims still lived in mixed communities across the region – a fact that was to have disastrous consequences when civil war broke out in the early 1990s. The perpetrators of this civil conflict used the Second World War and its aftermath as a direct justification for their actions, and resurrected many of the old symbols of ethnic tension from 1945. In a conscious re-enactment of those times they indulged in mass rape, civilian massacres and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.

Other, less dramatic but no less significant incidents have been occurring in many parts of Europe since the fall of communism. In 2006, for example, a student in Slovakia named Hedviga Malinova told police that she had been beaten up for using her Hungarian mother-tongue. The accusation was widely publicized, and reawakened tensions between Slovaks and Hungarians inside the country. The Slovakian Interior Minister accused the student of lying, the police charged her with false testimony, and the uncomfortable relationship between Slovakia and its Hungarian minority seemed just as alive as it ever was in 1946.
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Across the border, Hungary has seen the return of a similar, but even more insidious national hatred: anti-Semitism is on the rise in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1940S. In a letter to the
Washington Post
at the beginning of 2011, an award-winning Hungarian pianist, András Schiff, claimed that his country was being swept by a wave of ‘reactionary nationalism’, characterized by an increasing hatred for Gypsies and Jews.
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As if unaware of the irony, the Hungarian right-wing press immediately responded by claiming that only Jews were capable of accusing Hungary of such crimes. Zsolt Bayer, for example, wrote in the newspaper
Magyar Hírlap:
‘A stinking excrement called something like Cohen from somewhere in England writes that “a foul stench wafts” from Hungary. Cohen, and Cohn-Bendit, and Schiff … Unfortunately, they were not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovány.’
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Such sentiments demonstrate that the recent rise in anti-Semitism across Europe is not merely a product of the relatively new tensions in the Middle East. Traditional forms of hatred towards Jews are also alive and well. The same could be said for the rise in animosity towards Gypsies since the fall of communism, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. In Bulgaria riots broke out in the autumn of 2011, after a series of racist demonstrations against Gypsies.
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The re-emergence of such problems tempts one to consider that perhaps the nationalists of the 1940s were right to attempt the creation of ethnically homogeneous states after all. If there were no national minorities in countries like Slovakia or Hungary, then such issues would never arise. The problem with this idea, apart from the obvious moral implications, is that an ethnically homogeneous state is almost impossible to achieve. Poland came closest in the immediate aftermath of the war by expelling or hounding out its populations of Germans, Jews and Ukrainians. But even here it proved impossible to expel everyone – particularly the Ukrainian minority, which was perhaps the ethnic group most ingrained in Polish society. In the end, the Poles resorted to Operation Vistula, the controversial programme of enforced assimilation that broke up Ukrainian communities and dispersed them across the north and west of the country. This repressive measure was deemed a complete success at the time – and yet, today it is becoming quite obvious that the assimilation programme did not work. Since the 1990s, Łemkos and Ukrainians have increasingly asserted their communal ethnic rights. They have formed political lobbies and pressure groups, and have repeatedly demanded the return of the property that was taken from them after the war. Rather than solving the problem, Operation Vistula merely stored up new problems for the future.

Even the
total
expulsion of a nation’s ethnic minorities has not proved to be a guarantee against such issues. The expulsion of Germans from many countries in the 1940s, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia, was probably the most widespread and complete of all the ethnic deportations after the war. It created a resentment within Germany that has never since dissipated. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the expellees formed one of the most powerful pressure groups in Germany, one that was, in the words of Lucius Clay, ‘largely reactionary and certainly planning to go home’.
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Much like Łemkos and Ukrainians in Poland, these people are continuing to lobby for the return of the lands and property stolen from them in the aftermath of the war. The prospect of having to deal with the claims of these expellees fills most eastern European governments with dread. In 2009, for example, President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic refused to sign the Lisbon Treaty that granted the European Union new powers, because of fears that certain parts of it might open the door for Germans to mount legal claims against his country. Klaus held up the treaty for several weeks until the Czechs were granted an opt-out from the relevant clauses. The expulsion of the Germans in the aftermath of the war did not solve the minorities problem in Czechoslovakia, as it then was – it merely exported it.

One might expect the problem of expellees to fade away as the older generations gradually die out, but unfortunately even this does not seem to be happening. Many of the most vocal ‘expellees’ in Germany and elsewhere are not those who actually experienced the expulsions, but their children and grandchildren. One need only look at what has happened in the Crimea to see how nationalist tensions are transmitted down the generations. In 1944, the Crimean Tatars were deported from their homelands by Stalin, who decreed that they should be dispersed through Soviet central Asia as a punishment for collaborating with the Germans during the war. After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, a quarter of a million Tatars decided to return to their homelands in the Crimea. They moved into derelict houses and renovated them. They formed illegal settlements on vacant land, and constantly pestered the Ukrainian authorities to register them as lawful tenants. When the police threatened to evict them, they protested violently, and some even doused themselves in petrol and set themselves on fire. The striking thing about these ‘returnees’ is that the vast majority of them were not, strictly speaking, ‘returning’ at all: they had been born and raised in central Asia. They had given up reasonably prosperous and secure lives there in order to move to a homeland they had never seen before, and where they were not welcome.
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The Importance of National Myths

The passion that drives such people comes from the stories and myths that they have been exposed to, and which are repeated throughout their communities. Tatars imbibed the agony of their deportation with their mothers’ milk, and have repeated these stories daily for over sixty years. In their minds the Crimea has been elevated to some kind of promised land. In the words of one Tatar, ‘For the Soviet people, the thirties, the forties, the fifties – are history. For Crimean Tatars, they are now … They live history.’
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Likewise, German expellees endlessly reminisce about the horrors of their trek westwards while Ukrainians talk of the brutality of Operation Vistula as if it were yesterday. Such stories are repeated so frequently not merely because they happened, but because they serve a purpose: they are the glue that binds these national groups together.

The West is not immune to such myth-building. Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French and Italians have all built stories around the injustices they suffered during the Second World War, and by endlessly repeating them have managed to build the impression that each people was more or less united against Fascists and Nazi invaders. Thus, for decades, the more messy realities of widespread collaboration were conveniently swept under the carpet. Collaborators themselves have also built myths about the injustices they suffered after the liberation. Stories of extreme violence against innocent members of the political right, if repeated often enough, give the impression that everyone in these countries suffered equally, regardless of their political persuasion.

The victors too have their myths. The Second World War has become something of a national industry in Britain. Films, dramas and documentaries about the war appear on television daily, and books about it perennially grace the bestseller lists. The war is present at all national occasions, whether it is in the chants and songs of English football fans during the World Cup, or the fly-past of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers on state occasions. Like the Americans, the British think back to the Second World War as a time when their ‘greatest generation’ saved the world from the evil of Nazism. Like the Americans, the British prefer to believe that they did this virtually single-handedly. For example, folk memory has it that the British stood alone during the Battle of Britain in 1940—41; there is rarely any acknowledgement that one in five of the fighter pilots who defended the country came from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France or parts of the British Empire.

The problem with such deeply cherished myths is that they inevitably end up conflicting with someone else’s equally cherished myths. One man’s vengeance is another man’s justice. If the Sudeten Germans remember their expulsion from the Czech borderlands as a time of atrocity, the Czechs commemorate it as a time when historic wrongs were finally put right. If some Polish Ukrainians applaud apologies for Operation Vistula in the liberal press, some Ukrainian Poles see them as a national betrayal. And if the British see the Lancaster bomber as a symbol of pride, many Germans remember it only as a symbol of indiscriminate destruction.

A columnist from the Serbian newspaper
Vreme
put it thus, in the aftermath of the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia:

Revenge or forgiveness. Remembrance or oblivion. These postwar challenges are never carried out according to heavenly justice: there will be more unjust vengeance and undeserved forgiveness. Already the policies of remembrance and oblivion are not pursued in a way that will serve peace and stability. The Serbs would like to forget exactly those things that the Croats or Bosniaks would like to remember and vice versa. If by chance any of the sides remember the same event, it is a crime for one and a heroic deed for the other.
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The sentiments apply equally to the aftermath of the Second World War, and to most other nations across the eastern half of Europe.

Another problem with the constant repetition of national myths is that they inevitably become so mixed up with half-truths, and even downright lies, that it is often impossible to disentangle them. What is important to people who feel aggrieved is not the factual content of their stories, but their emotional resonance. Almost every statistic quoted in this book is contested by some national group or another. For example, German expellee organizations still claim that two million Germans were massacred during the expulsions from eastern Europe, when even a glance at the government statistics they claim to quote shows this to be a gross distortion of the facts. Words like ‘Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ are bandied about without thought for their actual meaning, and Polish prison camps like Lambinowice and
wi
tochłowice are labelled ‘extermination camps’ as if the hundreds of people who died in them are somehow equivalent to the millions shovelled into ovens at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.