Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (36 page)

As to the revival of international law, the realization of wartime dreams was also patchy and unsatisfying. The United Nations’ commitment to human rights was as weak as its overall position in power politics. From the doctrinal point of view, human rights were given priority over economic and social rights in the Charter. But in terms of the protection of minorities the UN Charter represented a step backwards from the League. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 did symbolize the new status of the individual in international law, and lasting mistrust of the Nazi doctrine of state supremacy, but it contained no provisions for enforcement and remains little more than a pious wish.
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More far-reaching in its implications was the Genocide Convention of the same year—passed after a remarkable one-man crusade by Raphael Lemkin, who had been disappointed at the refusal of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to judge acts committed by the Nazis before 1939. Lemkin and others had seen the war-crimes
trials as an opportunity to secure world peace by increasing the powers under international law to take action against individuals as well as states. The Genocide Convention added an important new crime to those recognized under international law, and imposed obligations upon ratifying states to act to prevent or punish its commission. But the Convention’s potential has been entirely ignored by the international community and there has been little evidence to back the UN’s confident assertion that “the feeling will grow in world society that by protecting the national, racial, religious and ethnic groups everywhere in the world we will be protecting ourselves.” For four decades, a series of genocides went unpunished outside Europe; in 1992 that indifference extended to Europe itself.
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SEVEN

A Brutal Peace, 1943–9

Now that the United Nations are beginning to reconquer Europe from the Nazis, the “democratic” phase of colonial policy comes into effect … What [the Europeans] used to refer to with a certain disdain as “native politics” is now being applied to them
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—DWIGHT MACDONALD, “NATIVE POLITICS,” 1944
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The Second World War—the culmination of nearly a century of growing violence between the European powers inside and outside the continent—was really several wars in one. It was, first and foremost, a military conflict, fought out by armed forces, prompted by Hitler’s imperial ambitions. But it was also a war between races, religions and ethnic groups—a bloody reopening of accounts by extreme nationalists wishing to revise the Versailles settlement by force. Thirdly it was, in many areas west and east, a class war in the broadest sense, whether of landless
braccianti
against pro-Fascist landowners in northern Italy, or poor hill farmers against the urbanites. Finally, as resistance movements burgeoned in 1943–4 and provoked bitter reprisals by collaborationist militias, the war became a civil war of extraordinary ferocity stirred up by German arms and funds, whose roots stretched back to 1919, and even—in France—to 1789. This polarized atmosphere was intensified by the approach westwards of the Red Army and eastwards of the Allies.
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The death toll of approximately forty million easily outweighed not only the thousands killed in the Franco-Prussian, the Boer or the Balkan wars, but even the millions killed in the First World War and the Russian civil war. The proportion of civilian dead—perhaps half
of the total—was far higher than ever before. They included, apart from between five and six million Jews, millions of Poles, Germans, Russians and Ukrainians. The war of annihilation in the East was the scene of the greatest slaughter; this was destruction on a different scale, and conducted according to different rules, from that experienced in western Europe. British and French military casualties, for instance, were less than one tenth of the enormous German losses. But even these were dwarfed by the Soviet Union, which lost—in addition to well over ten million civilians—three million POWs through starvation, and another 6.5 million men on the Eastern Front.
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The intensity of suffering and destruction which struck civilians over six years profoundly transformed European societies. Nazi extermination policies had threatened entire ethnic and national groups; much of Poland’s military and intellectual elite had perished at German and Russian hands. Policies of genocide were but the most extreme forms of a war which targeted civilians, and the very structure of pre-war society. Reconstruction after 1945 was, therefore, a very different enterprise from that of the 1920s: this time, there could be no thought of going back. Wartime losses tore gaping holes in the social and physical fabric; they provoked bitter memories and angry emotions, but also new challenges and opportunities.
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How could conflicts of such intensity stop suddenly in 1945? The German surrender is a convenient marker for historians, but little more. Indeed it is positively misleading in so far as it suggests the ending of one epoch and the start of another. There was, in reality, no Year Zero, no clean break between hot and cold war, and the post-war regimes which emerged in the latter had their roots in the social experiences of wartime. The transition to the post-war era may be said to have begun in 1943, when the Allies invaded Italy and the problems of occupation and reconstruction began. Six years later the division of Europe was almost complete (only Austria and Scandinavia holding out against the tide) and wartime enmities had been transmuted under the pressure of the Cold War.

As Nazi occupation gave way to more enduring modes of subordination—in the East to the Soviet Union, in the West to the United States—the post-war reinvention of democracy in Europe ceased to
be a project defined against the threat of fascism and became instead an arena for Cold War competition. By 1950, the winners had emerged: in the West, anti-communist Social and Christian Democrats, in the East, communist People’s Democracies. Each saw the other as the successor to Hitler, themselves as his true opponents. Stalin turned out to have been right. “This war is not as in the past,” he remarked as the war came to an end. “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
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DISPLACEMENT AND SOCIAL CRISIS: 1944–8

Wars invariably displace populations. But this war had been waged specifically to establish a New Order through extermination, incarceration, deportation and transfer. Hitler had wanted to redraw the ethnographic map of Europe, while Stalin, for his part, also deported hundreds of thousands of class and ethnic “enemies,” including Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Chechens. Germany’s defeat brought imprisonment to German POWs and liberation for millions of camp inmates, slave labourers and foreign workers. Although there had been some wartime planning to deal with refugees, the sheer scale of the humanitarian problem took the Allies aback. Those uprooted—through flight, evacuation, resettlement, use as forced labour—numbered some forty-six million in east central Europe alone between 1939 and 1948, dwarfing the refugee movements of the First World War. Some of these movements were temporary and voluntary, but the majority were not. The main reason for them, in retrospect, is clear enough: after the inter-war era’s unsatisfactory experience with minorities in the new nation-states, people were being moved in order to consolidate political boundaries.
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Liberation revealed that there were over eleven million Displaced Persons, ten times as many as after the First World War. Some wreaked their revenge on the Germans, looting freely and threatening civilians. On 4 May 1945, for example, Elena Skrjabina watched a group of fellow-Russians loot the German house she was staying in. They burst in and threatened the owner with a revolver, accusing him of being a Nazi and a “Hitlerite.” “They dispersed through the house,
telling us that German property by right should go over to them … In about half an hour it was impossible to recognize the house. All the trunks and suitcases had been smashed, the closets were wide open, and our countrymen were disappearing down the path with huge sacks on their backs.” The DPs had borrowed a Nazi phrase for this sort of behaviour: they called it “organizing.”
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Having been forcibly removed from their homes and exploited and humiliated in Germany, these
Ostarbeiter
were not inclined to show much respect for property or person. In time, they were to become a considerable headache for the occupation authorities. Yet there were surprisingly few acts of revenge. The overriding priority of most DPs was to return quickly to home and family. In the summer of 1945 the roads of Europe were packed with long lines of civilians straggling out of Germany in all directions. By the autumn most had left Germany; UNRRA alone had helped some six million. Yet 1.5 million remained in DP camps and as late as June 1947 the camps still housed around half a million who were unwilling for various reasons to go back.

Some repatriations, however, were far from voluntary. Under the terms of the Yalta agreement, the Allies were bound to hand over all Soviet citizens to Stalin. It is arguable that they had little choice in this matter, since they were anxious to secure those of their own POWs who had fallen into Russian hands during the Red Army’s advance. Indeed, this was the main reason why Russian NKVD personnel were permitted to establish interrogation centres to screen Soviet repatriates. As fears of post-war communism spread, increasing numbers of east Europeans in Allied-occupied Germany resisted repatriation. One year after VE-Day these included 380,000 Poles, 125,500 Yugoslavs and 187,000 Baits, among them collaborators and former members of Waffen-SS and other German detachments. Eventually, they would profit from the anti-communist mood of the late 1940s and be allowed under special programmes to emigrate to Britain, the Commonwealth and the USA.
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As for Jewish survivors, they too by and large proved unwilling or unable to go back: their pre-war homes were generally occupied by others, their possessions gone. In fact the numbers of Jewish refugees swelled after the war, as around 220,000 Jews from eastern Europe moved westwards. Anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland during 1946, with
dozens of dead, accelerated this movement; Zionist organizations assisted it. West European anti-Semitism barred doors to Jewish DPs that were opened to Baits and East Europeans. Thus the numbers of Jewish refugees on the continent continued to increase until 1948 when the creation of the state of Israel and the US Displaced Persons Act allowed most of them to leave Europe. Half a million Palestinian Arab refugees during the 1948 Israeli-Arab War paid the price for Europe’s reluctance to absorb its diminished Jewish population. Europe itself became less central to Jewish life, and the striking intensification of anti-Semitism after 1945 suggested that while the Germans might have carried out the genocide, its socio-economic and cultural repercussions were exploited more widely across the continent.
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Not surprisingly, feelings of intense bitterness and “morbid hatred” against the Germans were widespread when the war ended. As late as 1948, a traveller to Holland observed that “the Dutch do not even want to hear the word ‘Germany,’ since the Germans had caused them so much grief during the war.” In eastern Europe, where the threat posed by sizeable German minorities to the new nation-states had just been amply demonstrated, the mood was vengeful. The two largest minorities in inter-war Europe had been the Germans and the Jews, and their fates turned out to be intertwined in more ways than one. Once, the Jews had been important transmitters of German culture in eastern Europe; now, their mass murder became the prelude to the destruction of German life outside Germany. For the war did not only lead to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question; it led, in a different way, to the ending—or at least the transformation—of Europe’s German Question too.

This too was Hitler’s legacy. His dream of consolidating
Deutschtum
was realized in a nightmarish fashion, and tolerated by the Allies in the interests of ethnic homogeneity and future security in Europe. The issue which had triggered off the Second World War was definitively, if brutally, solved through the largest single refugee movement in European history. In 1944–5, five million Germans fled from the eastern parts of the Reich in the face of the Red Army. Between 1945
and 1948, post-liberation regimes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary expelled another seven million members of their German minorities. It would not be too much to say that in western no less than in eastern Europe, the memory of this violent convulsion has, until very recently, been almost entirely repressed. Yet its effect upon Germany’s place in Europe was at least as profound as that country’s division, and perhaps—in the long run—more important still.
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