Read Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Online
Authors: Keith Lowe
Unsurprisingly, Lewis was not tempted to indulge himself, and five minutes later he was on his way again. ‘The tins collected by my fellow travellers were thrown to passers-by who scrambled wildly after them. None of the soldiers travelling on my truck had felt inclined to join actively in the fun.’
1
What makes this story interesting is not so much the obviously desperate plight of the Italian housewives, but rather Lewis’s description of the soldiers’ reaction to it. On the one hand they cannot believe their luck: they can do anything they want to these women, and with a truck full of supplies outside, their power over them is seemingly unlimited. On the other hand, the reality of the situation leaves the majority of them profoundly uneasy. There is an understanding that to take part in this transaction is degrading not only to the women but also to themselves, and even to the very act of sex itself. It is also significant that at no point is there even a hint of empathy for these housewives. They are merely objects, as inanimate as ‘graven images’.
According to Norman Lewis, such behaviour became increasingly common in the aftermath of southern Italy’s liberation. He records being visited by an Italian prince who wanted to know if his sister might be allowed to work in an army brothel. When Lewis explained that the British army did not have any official brothels the prince and his sister left disappointed. On another occasion, when investigating the serious sexual assault of a young Italian girl, her father tried to press the traumatized girl’s favours upon him. All he expected in return was a good square meal for his daughter.
2
Desperation like this was by no means confined to Naples, nor to Italy. A whole generation of young women in Germany learned to think it quite normal to sleep with an Allied soldier in return for a bar of chocolate. In the Dutch town of Heerlen, US rifleman Roscoe Blunt was approached by a young girl who ‘matter-of-factly asked me if I wanted to “ficken” or just “kuszen”. It took me a few moments for my brain to click into gear and realize what she was asking.’ When he asked her age she told him she was twelve.
3
In Hungary there were scores of girls as young as thirteen admitted to hospital for venereal disease. In Greece VD was recorded in girls as young as ten.
4
Such degradation affected the
Daily Express’s
war correspondent Alan Moorehead far more than the physical devastation he had seen. When he arrived in Naples in the immediate wake of its liberation he wrote despairingly about how he had seen men, women and children beating each other as they scrambled for handfuls of sweets thrown to them by the arriving soldiers; he had seen pimps and black marketeers offering fake brandy and child prostitutes as young as ten; and boys of six selling obscene postcards, their sisters’ favours, even themselves.
In the whole list of sordid human vices none I think were overlooked in Naples during those first few months. What we were witnessing in fact was the moral collapse of a people. They had no pride any more, or any dignity. The animal struggle for existence governed everything. Food. That was the only thing that mattered. Food for the children. Food for yourself. Food at the cost of any abasement and depravity. And after food a little warmth and shelter.
5
What Moorehead recognized was that food was no longer just a physical issue but a moral one. Across Europe millions of starving people were willing to sacrifice all moral values for the sake of their next meal. Indeed, years of scarcity had changed the very nature of food. What in Britain was regarded as an everyday right had become in the rest of Europe an expression of power, so that a British soldier was able to say of the German woman who slept with him, shopped for him and mended his clothes, ‘She was just like my slave.’
6
When considering stories like these, two things become immediately apparent. Firstly it appears that the moral landscape of Europe had become every bit as unrecognizable as the physical landscape. Those who had grown used to living amidst ruins no longer saw anything unusual about the rubble that surrounded them – likewise for many of Europe’s women after the war there was no longer anything unusual about having to sell one’s body for food. It was left to those coming from outside continental Europe to express surprise at the wreckage they were witnessing.
Secondly it is obvious that, for the majority at least, sexual morality took a back seat when it came to matters of survival. Even a
perceived
threat to one’s survival seemed to be enough for some to justify the abandonment of virtue – but in an atmosphere where threats were both real and abundant, such notions seem to have become almost an irrelevance.
The search for food was also a factor in another phenomenon of the war and its aftermath, the huge surge in the crimes of theft and looting. Many Greeks looted their local shops and stores in 1941 because they were hungry, and because they assumed that if they did not steal the food themselves it would only be requisitioned by the occupying troops.
7
Partisans in Belarus requisitioned food from local peasants in order to survive – and peasants who were reluctant to supply them were robbed.
8
In the final days of the war Berlin housewives ransacked stores despite ubiquitous warnings that looting was punishable by death.
9
Since they appeared to be facing starvation anyway they did not have much to lose.
However, it was not only necessity that drove the high rates of theft and looting during and after the war. One of the most important factors in the phenomenon was that the war provided greater opportunities to steal, and also greater temptations. It is far easier to enter a property whose doors and windows have been blown in by bombs than it is to break those doors or windows oneself. And when a property has been abandoned by its owners in a war zone it is easy to convince oneself that the owners are never coming back. The looting of vacant property therefore began long before the war had created any scarcity. In the villages around Warsaw people looted the homes of their neighbours almost as soon as the war began. Andrzej C.’s family, for instance, fled the fighting in September 1939; when they returned a few weeks later they found that even structural parts of their house itself had been dismantled – his parents had to pay their neighbours a series of visits to reclaim their rafters and other bits of their property.
10
As war spread across the continent, theft and looting spread with it, and not only in those countries that were directly affected by the war. In neutral Sweden, for example, 1939 saw a sudden surge in convictions, which remained high for the rest of the war. In Stockholm cases of theft almost quadrupled between 1939 and 1945.
11
This is worse even than, say, France, where cases of theft tripled during the war.
12
Similarly, in parts of Switzerland, such as the canton of Basle, rates of juvenile delinquency doubled.
13
Why the neutral countries should have suffered a rise in crime during the war has long puzzled social scientists. The only credible explanation seems to lie in the deep sense of anxiety created throughout Europe at the onset of war: social instability appears to have spread across the entire continent like an infection.
In much of occupied Europe theft became so normal that it ceased to be regarded as a crime at all. Indeed, since many of the local gendarmes, policemen and civil authorities had been replaced by Nazi stooges, theft and other crimes were often elevated to acts of resistance. Partisans stole goods from peasants in order to continue the fight on behalf of those same peasants. Farmers sold food on the black market in order to deny that food to the occupiers. Local stores were looted to prevent German soldiers from doing so first. It was possible to justify all kinds of theft and profiteering, especially in retrospect, because there was often a ring of truth to such claims. In effect, the moral world had been turned on its head: acts that had once been immoral had now been elevated to a moral duty.
When the advancing Allies finally began to liberate Europe, the opportunities to steal and loot increased. Many of the local gendarmes and mayors fled. Those who remained were often removed from office almost as soon as the Allies arrived, and replaced with a skeleton staff of inexperienced military officials who had little understanding of local issues. In the resulting chaos all semblance of law and order vanished: the crime wave that swept Europe dwarfed that which had occurred during the war, and has never been equalled since. The old German provinces of Pomerania and Silesia were so lawless that they were known to the incoming Polish administration as the ‘Wild West’. Zbigniew Ogrodzinski, one of the first Polish officials to be appointed in Stettin (or Szczecin, as it would come to be known), routinely carried a pistol to protect himself from muggers and bandits, and regularly had to draw it. According to a British medical officer stationed in the same city, ‘Murder, rape, robbery with violence were so usual that nobody paid any attention.’
14
Naples, which after the liberation briefly became the biggest supply port in the world, also became one of the world’s centres of organized theft. ‘Army cigarettes and chocolates were stolen by the hundredweight and resold at fantastic prices,’ wrote Alan Moorehead in 1945. ‘Vehicles were stolen at the rate of something like sixty or seventy a night (not always by the Italians). The looting of especially precious things like tyres became an established business.’
15
Makeshift stalls throughout the city openly sold stolen military articles supplied by corrupt officials, mafia gangs, bandits and groups of army deserters who vied with one another to pillage Allied supply trains.
16
Gangs of children would jump onto the backs of army lorries to pilfer anything they could snatch – Allied soldiers resorted to chopping at their hands with bayonets to deter them, resulting in a spate of children seeking medical help for severed fingers.
17
Postwar Berlin, according to one historian, became the ‘crime capital of the world’. In the aftermath of the war 2,000 people were arrested in the city each month, an increase of 800 per cent on prewar figures. By the beginning of 1946 there was an average of 240 robberies each day, and dozens of organized gangs terrorized the city day and night.
18
One Berlin woman recorded in her diary that ‘all notions of ownership have been completely demolished. Everyone steals from everyone else, because everyone has been stolen from.’
19
Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, another woman in Berlin, called life there‘a swapping game’, where objects passed from one person to another with no one knowing who the owners were.
20
Similar sentiments were felt across Europe, as a Hungarian woman made clear: ‘Sometimes the Russians stole from us, sometimes we helped ourselves to this and that of theirs. Or the other way around …’
21
The whole concept of private property had become meaningless.
Necessity undoubtedly played a large part in this crime wave, but there were other equally important factors. To start with, once the taboo on stealing had been broken it became much easier to steal again, and again. After six years of war such behaviour had become a way of life for some people: those who had managed to survive by pilfering or illegally trading were not about to stop just because the war was over, particularly when the hardship was still worsening.
However, there is much to suggest that the widespread theft after the war answered a deeper need in many of those who committed it. Many appear to have experienced the desire to steal as a compulsion, even when the items they were taking were of no conceivable use to them. Former displaced persons (DPs) tell frequent stories of stealing restaurant table cloths, or ‘something absolutely stupid like a big flower pot’.
22
Maria Bielicka, a Polish woman who had survived four years of prisons and work camps, claims that she experienced the compulsion to take something almost as a physical urge. After the war the Americans housed her and her sister for a while in a German villa, not far from the porcelain factory where she had been forced to work.
I was sitting with my sister, and Wanda said, ‘You know what, I like this picture on the wall. I think I’ll take it. For all I’ve suffered, I think one picture will do.’ And I said, ‘There is some porcelain there. I like it very much. We slaved so many years to make that porcelain in that factory. I’ll take it.’
23
The next morning, ashamed of themselves, both girls put their loot back.
The most common misdemeanour after the war was buying or selling goods on the black market. Once again, illegal trading during the war had been elevated in the minds of the people to an act of resistance: any goods, and particularly foods, that were sold on the black market were effectively denied to the German occupiers. In France, for example, 350,000 fewer animals were delivered for slaughter each year than were officially recorded: these animals ended up on the tables of French people rather than those of the occupier.
24
Dairy farmers were often forced onto the black market in order to survive: in a continent where the transport systems were so badly damaged they could not rely on daily milk collections, and so were obliged to develop unofficial local networks to make sure they sold their produce. Across western Europe the unofficial networks became almost as comprehensive as the official market. In eastern Europe, where the Nazis were intent on requisitioning as much food as possible, the same was true. Here more than anywhere the black market was essential for survival, and became almost a moral duty for farmers and traders: without it, hundreds of thousands more Poles, Ukrainians and Balts would have starved.