by Tony Judt
‘In the space of five years we have acquired a formidable
inferiority complex’.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1945)
‘Nobody in the world can understand what Europeans feel about the Germans until one talks to Belgians, Frenchmen or Russians. To them the only good Germans are dead Germans.’ The author of these words, written to his diary in 1945, was Saul K. Padover, the observer with the American armies whom we met in Chapter Three. His observation should be borne in mind in any account of the post-war division of Europe. The point of the Second World War in Europe was to defeat Germany, and almost all other considerations were set aside so long as the fighting continued.
The Allies’chief wartime concern had been to keep one another in the war. The Americans and British worried incessantly that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler, especially once the Soviet Union had recovered territory lost after June 1941. Stalin, for his part, saw the delay in establishing a Second (Western) Front as a ploy by the Western Allies to bleed Russia dry before coming forward to benefit from her sacrifices. Both parties could look to pre-war appeasement and pacts as evidence of the other’s unreliability; they were bound together only by a common enemy.
This mutual unease illuminates the wartime accords and understandings reached by the three major Allied governments. At Casablanca, in January 1943, it was agreed that the war in Europe could only end with an unconditional German surrender. At Teheran, eleven months later, the ‘Big Three’ (Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill) agreed in principle upon a post-war dismantling of Germany, a return to the so-called ‘Curzon Line’21 between Poland and the USSR, recognition of Tito’s authority in Yugoslavia and Soviet access to the Baltic at the former East Prussian port of Königsberg.
The obvious beneficiary of these agreements was Stalin, but then since the Red Army played by far the most important role in the struggle with Hitler, this made sense. For the same reason, when Churchill sat down with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 and initialed the notorious ‘percentages agreement’, he was merely conceding to the Soviet dictator ground that the latter was already sure to seize. In this agreement, scribbled in haste by Churchill and passed across a table to Stalin who ‘took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it’, Britain and the USSR agreed to exercise control over post-war Yugoslavia and Hungary on a 50:50 basis; Romania would be 90 percent under Russian control and Bulgaria 75 percent, while Greece would be 90 percent ‘British’.
Three points are worth making about this secret ‘deal’. The first is that the percentages for Hungary and Romania were purely formulaic: the real issue was the Balkans. Secondly, the deal was largely upheld on both sides, as we shall see. But thirdly, and however heartless this must seem from the point of view of the countries concerned, it really wasn’t significant. The same applies to the discussions at Yalta in February 1945. ‘Yalta’ has entered the lexicon of central European politics as a synonym for Western betrayal, the moment when the Western Allies sold out Poland and the other small states between Russia and Germany.
But Yalta actually mattered little. To be sure, the Allies all signed the Declaration on Liberated Europe—‘To foster the conditions in which the liberated peoples may exercise those [democratic] rights, all three governments will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state or former Axis satellite state in Europe . . . ’ to form representative governments, facilitate free elections, etc. And it was the postwar cynicism of the Soviet Union with regard to this commitment that would be thrown in the face of the West by understandably aggrieved spokesmen for the imprisoned nations. But nothing was decided at Yalta that had not already been agreed at Teheran or elsewhere.
The most that can be said of the Yalta Conference was that it offers a striking study in misunderstanding, with Roosevelt in particular a victim of his own illusions. For by then Stalin hardly needed Western permission to do whatever he wished in eastern Europe, as the British at least understood perfectly well. The eastern territories ceded to Stalin under the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pacts of 1939 and 1940 were firmly in Soviet hands once again: at the time of the Yalta meeting (February 4th-11th 1945) the ‘Lublin Committee’ of Polish Communists brought west in the Soviet baggage train to run post-war Poland was already installed in Warsaw.22
In fact, Yalta left the truly important issue—arrangements for post-war Germany—off the table precisely because it was so important and intractable. And it is unlikely that the Western leaders could have got a better deal out of Stalin during these last months of the war, even if it had occurred to them to try. The only hope for the Poles and others was that Stalin would be generous to them in return for Western goodwill. But he had the latter in any case, and long after the defeat of Hitler it was the Western Allies who sought Stalin’s cooperation, not the other way around. The Soviet Union had to be kept in the war against Germany (and later, as it was then supposed, Japan); the problem of central Europe could wait upon the peace. Had it been otherwise Roosevelt and Churchill might have protested more strongly in August 1944, when 200,000 Poles were killed by the Germans in a hopeless uprising in Warsaw while the Red Army looked on from the other side of the Vistula.
Western leaders may not have shared Stalin’s view of the Poles’ underground Home Army as ‘a handful of power-hungry adventurers and criminals’, but they were certainly not about to antagonize their major military ally just six weeks after the D-Day landings in Normandy. For Poles then and since this was a betrayal of the very purpose of the war—after all, Britain and France had declared war on Hitler in September 1939 over his violation of Poland. But for the Western Allies the case for leaving Stalin a free hand in the east was self evident. The point of the war was to defeat Germany.
This remained the primary impulse to the very end. In April 1945, with Germany already beaten in all but name, Roosevelt could still declare that, even with regard to post-war arrangements for Germany itself, ‘our attitude should be one of study and postponement of final decision.’ There were good reasons for taking this stance—the search for a settlement of the German Question was going to prove horribly difficult, as perceptive observers could already see, and it made sense to sustain for as long as possible the anti-German alliance that bound the wartime partners together. But as a result, the shape of post-war Europe was dictated in the first instance not by wartime deals and accords but rather by the whereabouts of occupying armies when the Germans surrendered. As Stalin explained to Molotov, when the latter expressed doubts over the wording of the well-meaning ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’: ‘We can fulfill it in our own way. What matters is the correlation of forces.’
In south-east Europe the war was over by the end of 1944, with Soviet forces in full control of the northern Balkans. By May 1945, in central and eastern Europe, the Red Army had liberated and re-occupied Hungary, Poland and most of Czechoslovakia. Soviet troops were through Prussia and into Saxony. In the West, where the British and Americans were fighting virtually separate wars in north-western and south-western Germany respectively, Eisenhower certainly could have reached Berlin before the Russians but was discouraged by Washington from doing so. Churchill would have liked to see a Western advance on Berlin but Roosevelt was conscious both of his generals’ concern for loss of life (one fifth of all US troop losses in World War Two were sustained at the Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes in the previous winter) and of Stalin’s interest in the German capital.
As a result, in Germany and in Czechoslovakia (where the US army initially advanced 18 miles short of Prague and liberated the Pilsen region of western Bohemia, only to hand it over to the Red Army shortly afterwards), the line dividing what were not yet ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Europe fell a little further west than the outcome of the fighting might have suggested. But only a little: however hard Generals Patton or Montgomery might have pressed forward, the final outcome would not have been significantly altered. Meanwhile, further south, on May 2nd 1945 the Yugoslav
Army of National Liberation and the British Eighth Army came face to face in Trieste drawing through that most cosmopolitan of central European cities a line that would become the first true frontier of the Cold War.
Of course the ‘official’ Cold War still lay in the future. But in certain respects it had begun long before May 1945. So long as Germany remained the enemy it was easy to forget the deeper disputes and antagonisms separating the Soviet Union from its wartime allies. But they were there. Four years of wary cooperation in a life or death struggle with a common foe had done little to obliterate nearly thirty years of mutual suspicion. For the fact is that in Europe the Cold War began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First.
This point was perfectly clear in Poland, which fought a desperate war with the new Soviet Union in 1920; in Britain, where Churchill built his inter-war reputation in part upon the Red Scare of the early 20s and the theme of anti-Bolshevism; in France, where anti-Communism was the Right’s strongest suit in domestic affairs from 1921 until the German invasion of May 1940; in Spain where it suited Stalin and Franco alike to play up the importance of Communism in the Spanish civil war; and above all, of course, in the Soviet Union itself, where Stalin’s monopoly of power and his bloody purges of Party critics relied heavily on the charge that the West and its local associates were plotting to undermine the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist experiment. The years 1941-45 were just an interlude in an international struggle between Western democracies and Soviet totalitarianism, a struggle whose shape was obscured but not fundamentally altered by the threat posed to both sides by the rise of Fascism and Nazism at the heart of the continent.
It was Germany that brought Russia and the West together in 1941, much as it had succeeded in doing before 1914. But the alliance was foredoomed. From 1918-34 the Soviet strategy in central and western Europe—splitting the Left and encouraging subversion and violent protest—helped shape an image of ‘Bolshevism’ as fundamentally alien and hostile. Four years of troubled and controversial ‘Popular Front’ alliances did something to dispel this impression, despite the contemporary trials and mass murders in the Soviet Union itself. But the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, and Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler in his dismemberment of their common neighbours the following year, considerably undermined the propaganda gains of the Popular Front years. Only the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet citizens in the years 1941-45, and the unprecedented crimes of the Nazis, helped dispel these earlier memories.
As for the Soviets, they never lost their distrust of the West—a distrust whose roots go back far beyond 1917, of course, but which were well irrigated by Western military intervention during the civil war of 1917-21, by the Soviet Union’s absence from international agencies and affairs for the next fifteen years, by the well-founded suspicion that most Western leaders preferred Fascists to Communists if forced to choose, and by the intuition that Britain and France especially would not be sorry to see the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany engage in mutually destructive conflict to others’ advantage. Even after the wartime alliance was forged and the common interest in defeating Germany was clear, the degree of mutual mistrust is striking: there was, revealingly, very little wartime exchange of sensitive intelligence between West and East.
The unraveling of the wartime alliance and the subsequent division of Europe were thus not due to a mistake, to naked self-interest or malevolence; they were rooted in history. Before the Second World War relations between the US and the UK on the one hand, and the USSR on the other, had always been tense. The difference was that none of them had had responsibility for large tracts of the European continent. Moreover they had been separated by, among other considerations, the presence of France and Germany. But with French humiliation in 1940 and German defeat five years later, everything was different. The renewed Cold War in Europe was always likely, but it was not inevitable. It was brought about by the ultimately incompatible goals and needs of the various interested parties.
Thanks to German aggression the United States was now, for the first time, a power in Europe. That the US had overwhelming strength was self-evident, even to those mesmerized by the achievements of the Red Army. US GNP had doubled in the course of the war, and by the spring of 1945 America accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. The United States had put 12 million men under arms to fight Germany and its allies, and by the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined. What would the US do with its power? In the aftermath of the First World War Washington had chosen not to exercise it; how different would things be after the Second World War? What did America want?
So far as Germany was concerned—and 85 percent of the American war effort had gone on the war against Germany—the initial American intent was quite severe. A directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS 1067, was presented to President Truman on April 26th 1945, two weeks after Roosevelt’s death. Reflecting the views of, among others, Henry Morgenthau, the US Secretary of the Treasury, it recommended that:
‘It should be brought home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance has destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation’. Or, as Morgenthau himself put it, ‘It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation.’
The point, in short, was to avoid one of the major mistakes of the Versailles Treaty, as it seemed in retrospect to the policy makers of 1945: the failure to bring home to Germans the extent of their sins and the nemesis visited upon them. The logic of this initial American approach to the German question was thus demilitarization, denazification, deindustrialization—to strip Germany of her military and economic resources and re-educate the population. This policy was duly applied, at least in part: the Wehrmacht was formally dissolved (on August 20th 1946); denazification programs were set in place in the US-occupied zone especially, as we saw in Chapter Two; and strict limits were placed upon German industrial capacity and output, with steel-making particularly severely restricted under the March 1946 ‘Plan for the Level of the Post-War (German) Economy’.
But from the outset the ‘Morgenthau strategy’ was vigorously criticized within the US Administration itself. What good would be served by reducing (American-controlled) Germany to a virtually pre-industrial condition? Most of pre-war Germany’s best agricultural land was now under Soviet control or else had been transferred to Poland. Meanwhile western Germany was awash in refugees who had access neither to land nor food. Restrictions on urban or industrial output might keep Germany prostrate but they wouldn’t feed it or rebuild it. That burden, a very considerable one, would fall on the victorious occupiers. Sooner or later they would need to offload this responsibility onto Germans themselves, at which point the latter would have to be allowed to rebuild their economy.
To these concerns, American critics of the initial US ‘hard’ line added a further consideration. It was all very well forcibly bringing Germans to a consciousness of their own defeat, but unless they were given some prospect of a better future the outcome might be the same as before: a resentful, humiliated nation vulnerable to demagogy from Right or Left. As former President Herbert Hoover expressed it to Truman himself, in 1946, ‘You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.’ If, in American treatment of Germany, the balance of advantage swung increasingly to ‘peace’ this was largely due to the darkening prospect for US-SOVIET relations.
Among a restricted circle of Washington insiders, it was obvious from the outset that the incompatibility of Soviet and Western interests would lead to conflict and that clearly delimited zones of power might be a prudent solution to post-war problem
s. This was the view of George Kennan. Why, he wrote on January 26th 1945, ‘could we not make a decent and definite compromise with [the USSR]?—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and the Russians out of ours? . . . And within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least . . . (try) to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.’
Six weeks later a more pessimistic and implicitly confrontational response to Soviet actions in eastern Europe was proposed to President Roosevelt in a memo from Averell Harriman, the US ambassador in Moscow: ‘Unless we wish to accept the 20th century barbarian invasion of Europe, with repressions extending further and further in the East as well, we must find ways to arrest the Soviet domineering policy . . . If we don’t face the issues squarely now, history will record the period of the next generation as the Soviet age.’
Harriman and Kennan differed implicitly on how to respond to Soviet actions, but they did not disagree in their account of what Stalin was doing. Other American leaders were much more sanguine, however, and not just in the spring of 1945. Charles Bohlen, another US diplomat and the recipient of the Kennan letter quoted above, believed in the possibility of a post-war settlement based on broad principles of self-determination and Great Power cooperation. Recognising the need to maintain Soviet cooperation in working out a solution in Germany itself, Bohlen and others—like the post-war Secretary of State James Byrnes—placed their faith in Allied military occupation of the former Axis states and their satellites, together with free elections along the lines adumbrated at Yalta. Only later—after observing the workings of Soviet power under the auspices of Allied Control Councils in Romania and Bulgaria especially—did they accept the incompatibility of these goals and come to share Kennan’s preference for the realpolitik of separate spheres.