Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (76 page)

Prcela, John and Stanko Guldescu (eds.),
Operation Slaughterhouse: Eyewitness Accounts of Postwar Massacres in Yugoslavia
(Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1970)

Robinson, Austin,
First Sight of Germany May – June 1945
(Cambridge: Cantelupe Press, 1986)

Roosevelt, Elliott,
As He Saw It
(New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946)

Ruhl, Klaus-Jörg (ed.),
Unsere verlorenen Jahre: Frauenalltag in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit 1939 – 1949, in Berichten, Dokumenten und Bilden
(Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985)

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de,
Flight to Arras,
trans. Lewis Galantière (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961)

Schuetz, Hans A. D.,
Davai, Davai!: Memoir of
a
German Prisoner of World War II in the Soviet Union
(Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Co., 1997)

Sington, Derrick,
Belsen Uncovered
(London: Duckworth, 1946)

Smith, Lyn,
Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust
(London: Ebury Press, 2005)

Toth, Zoltan,
Prisoner of then Soviet Union,
trans. George Unwin (Woking: Gresham Press, 1978)

Truman, Harry S.,
Memoirs,
vol. II:
Years of Trial and Hope
(New York: Signet, 1965)

Vachon, John,
Poland 1946 : The Photographs and Letters of John vachon,
ed. Ann Vachon (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995)

von Einsiedel, Count Heinrich,
The Shadow of Stalingrad: Being the Diary of a Temptation
(London: Alan Wingate, 1953)

Voute, Peter,
Only a Free Man: War Memoirs of Two Dutch Doctors (1940 – 1945)
(Santa Fe, NM: The Lightning Tree, 1982)

Wilson, Francesca,
Aftermath: France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, 1945 and 1946
(London: Penguin, 1947)

Wolff-Mönckeberg, Mathilde,
On the Other Side: To My Children from Germany 1940 – 1945
(London: Peter Owen, 1979)

Woodhouse, C. M.,
Apple of Discord
(London: Hutchinson, 1948)

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1

Dean Acheson memorandum to Harry Hopkins, 26 December 1944,
Foreign Relations of the United States
(
FRUS
), 1945, vol. II, pp. 1059—61. Pope Pius XII’s address to the Sacred College of Cardinals,
New York Times,
3 June 1945, p. 22.

2

‘Europe: The New Dark Continent’,
New York Times
magazine, 18 March 1945, p. 5.

PART 1 – THE LEGACY OF WAR

1

Samuel Puterman, quoted in Michal Grynberg (ed.),
Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto
(London: Granta, 2003), p. 440.

2

Acheson, p. 231.

CHAPTER 1 — PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION

1

Baedeker, pp. 85—94.

2

Davies,
Rising ’44
, p. 556.

3

Ibid., pp. 666—7.

4

Ibid., p. 439.

5

Ministry of Culture & Art,
Warsaw Accuses,
pp. 19—24; and Davies,
God’s Playground,
p. 355.

6

Ministry of Culture & Art,
Warsaw Accuses,
pp. 19—24.

7

Vachon, p. 5, letter of 10 January 1946.

8

Hastings,
Armageddon.

9

HM Government,
Statistics,
p. 9; see also The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) CAB 21/2110 and
Daily Express,
29 November 1944.

10

Ray, pp. 95—6.

11

Hitchcock, p. 44.

12

Florentin, p. 430.

13

Gaillard, p. 113.

14

Rioux, p. 471.

15

According to Ferenc Nagy, p. 129.

16

See Judt, p. 16; and Werth, p. 864.

17

Werth, p. 709.

18

See Kondufor, p. 239; and Krawchenko, p. 15.

19

Valentin Berezhkov, quoted in Beevor,
Stalingrad,
p. 418.

20

Werth, p. 837.

21

Kennan, pp. 280—82.

22

United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS),
Over-all Report (European War),
1945, p. 72. Tooze has 3.8 million, p. 672; and the German Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden calculated 3.37 million — see Hastings,
Bomber Command,
p. 352.

23

The 202,000 British homes damaged beyond repair represented just over 1.5 per cent of the total: HM Government,
Statistics,
pp. 31—2; see also TNA: PRO CAB 21/2110.

24

See Rumpf, pp. 128—9. The British Bombing Survey Unit has Berlin 33 per cent, Hanover 60 per cent, Hamburg 75 per cent, Duisburg 48 per cent, Dortmund 54 per cent, Cologne 61 per cent; see Webster and Frankland, vol. IV, pp. 484—6. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey has other figures again: e.g. Hamburg at 61 per cent – see Lowe, p. 318.

25

Robinson, diary entry for Monday, 28 May 1945.

26

Philip J. C. Dark, IWM Docs 94/7/1, typescript account, ‘Look Back This Once: Prisoner of War in Germany in WWII’.

27

Herbert Conert, quoted in Taylor, p. 396. For Dresden as moonscape see Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse 5
(London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 130—31.

28

Klemperer, p. 596, diary entry for 22 May 1945.

29

Colonel R. G. Turner, IWM Docs, 05/22/1, letter to his mother, 11 July 1945.

30

Janet Flaner quoted in Sebald, p. 31.

31

USSBS,
Over-all
Report, p. 95. For prewar populations, see Maddison, pp. 38—9.

32

Taras Hunczak, ‘Ukrainian—Jewish Relations during the Soviet and Nazi Occupations’, in Boshyk, p. 47; and Kondufor, p. 239. The prewar population of Hungary was 9,227,000: see Maddison, p. 96.

33

Lane, p. 26.

34

Werth, p. 815.

35

Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘Europe’s Five Black Years’,
New York Times Magazine,
3 September 1944, p. 42.

36

Ibid., pp. 42—3.

37

Judt, p. 17. Early estimates by SHAEF (15 December 1944) are slightly lower at 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares); see Coles and Weinberg, p. 826.

38

Nøkelby, p. 315.

39

Mazower,
Inside Hitler’s Greece,
p. 155; Judt, p. 17; and Hitchcock, p. 228, has a larger estimate of 1,700 villages.

40

Tomasevich, p. 715.

41

Judt, p. 17. In Ukraine alone 28,000 villages were destroyed: see Krawchenko, p. 15.

42

Stalin,
War Speeches,
p. 7.

43

Quoted in Andrew Gregorovich, ‘World War II in Ukraine’,
Forum: A Ukrainian Review,
no. 92 (Spring 1997), available online at http://www.infoukes. com/history/ww2/page-26.html.

44

Order to SS-Obergruppenführer Prützmann on 3 September 1943, quoted in Dallin, p. 364.

45

See Glanz, pp. 170 and 186.

46

Judt, p. 17.

47

Tomasevich, p. 715.

48

For Finland and Norway see Nokelby, p. 315; for Poland see Jan Szafra
ski, ‘Poland’s Losses in World War II’, in Nurowski, pp. 68—9; for Holland, France and the USSR see Judt, p. 17; for Greece see Judt, p. 17 and Hitchcock, p. 228; for Italy see UNRRA statistics quoted in Hitchcock, p. 234, and Vera Zamagni, ‘Italy: How to Lose the War and Win the Peace’, in Harrison, p. 212; for Yugoslavia see Tomasevich, p. 715; for Ukraine see Kondufor, p. 239.

49

Philip J. C. Dark, IWM Docs 94/7/1, typescript account, ‘Look Back This Once: Prisoner of War in Germany in WWII’, entry for 19 April 1945.

50

Levi, pp. 288—9.

51

Ibid., p. 367.

CHAPTER 2 — ABSENCE

1

Nossack, p. 67.

2

Ibid., p. 98.

3

Ibid., p. 68. Lowe,
passim.

4

Working out statistics for war deaths is an extremely difficult matter, complicated by lack of proper data, changes in territory, problems over what constitutes a ‘war death’, huge population movements, and so on. For complicating factors in each country see Frumkin,
passim.

5

Based on prewar Polish territory: see Frumkin, pp. 60 and 117. For comparison, see Maddison, pp. 38 and 96.

6

Frumkin (p. 168) and Dupuy and Dupuy (p. 1309) give vastly differing figures; but Britain’s Central Statistical Office (pp. 13, 37 and 40) gives 63,635 civilians killed by the war, and 234,475 in the armed services – so I have assumed these figures to be the most reliable. Milward gives 611,596 deaths including those from the Commonwealth – see his
War, Economy and Society,
p. 211.

7

France: Frumkin gives 600,000, as does Rioux, p. 18; but Milward gives 497,000 deaths in
War, Economy and Society,
p. 211, and, like Rioux, mentions a possible further 300,000 indirect war casualties (from malnutrition etc.). Holland: Frumkin gives 210,000, p. 168, as does the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, p. 749, and possibly 70,000 indirect war casualties. Belgium: Frumkin gives 88,000, p. 168, and estimates 27,000 of these were Jews; Martin Gilbert gives 24,387 Belgian Jews,
Atlas of the Holocaust,
p. 231. Italy: Frumkin gives 410,000, p. 103; but official Italian government statistics show 159,957 military casualties and 149,496 civilian casualties, making a total of 309,453 — see Istituto Centrale di Statistica, pp. 3—11.

8

Estimates vary wildly, depending on definitions of German borders, German nationality, cut-off dates for war dead, estimates for deaths in Soviet prison camps, etc. Frumkin inaccurately gives 4.2 million German deaths (p. 83); Overmans gives over 6 million, of which 4,456,000 are military deaths – see
Deutsche militärische Verluste,
pp. 333—6. Milward also gives 6 million,
War, Economy and Society,
p. 211. According to the USSBS
Over-all Report,
p. 95, 305,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing; but the more comprehensive Statistisches Bundesamt in 1962 gives 570,000 – see their
Wirtschaft und Statistik,
1962, p. 139.

9

Frumkin has 160,000 deaths, plus 140,000 from famine, pp. 89 – 91. However, the number of famine deaths was actually far higher: 250,000 according to a Red Cross study; see Mazower,
Inside Hitler’s Greece,
p. 41. Many historians put famine deaths at 350,000: see Hionidou, pp. 2, 158. Maddison, p. 44, has the prewar Greek population at 7,156,000.

10

Frumkin has 430,000 war deaths (p. 94); Glanz estimates between 420,000 and 450,000, p. 169. Maddison has the prewar Hungarian population at 9,227,000 (p. 96).

11

The most reliable figure is 1,027,000: see discussions in Tomasevich, pp. 718 – 50, and Croatian State Commission, pp. 19 – 26. According to Maddison, p. 96, the prewar population of Yugoslavia was 16,305,000.

12

This percentage is an educated guess by Misiunas and Taagepera, p. 356.

13

Frumkin has Polish deaths at 5.8 million, including 3.2 million Jews (p. 122), but official Polish statistics in 1947 put the figure at 6,028,000 (which, unofficially, includes 2.9 million Jews) – see Biuro Odszkodowa
jennych przy Prezydium Rady Ministrów. See also Davies,
God’s Playground,
p. 344 and Jan Szafra
ski, ‘Poland’s Losses in World War II’, in Nurowski, p. 44. The prewar population of Poland was 34.8 million – see note 5.