Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  But British arguments were not always practical, and frequently disingenuous. If Zionism was formulated as a battle for Jewish identity, the British put forward an alternative idea of identity. In response to the special U.S. report on DPs in Germany by Earl G. Harrison, American envoy to the Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees, the British Foreign Office argued that it was wrong not only to segregate Jews from other DPs, as the report recommended, but also to conclude that there was no future in Europe for Jews. After all, “it would go far by implication to admit that [the] Nazis were right in holding that there was no place for the Jews in Europe.” It was up to the Allies “to create conditions in which [the Jews] will themselves feel it natural and right to go home rather than to admit at this stage that such conditions are impossible to create.”63

  Quite how the British Foreign Office proposed to create those conditions in such countries as Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine was not spelled out. Not that Jews were all agreed on the proper route to Zion. There was an intense rivalry between the Jewish Agency, incorporating all Zionist groups in Palestine, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, JDC, or “Joint” for short. Joint officials, trying to help Jewish refugees and DPs as best they could with money, food, and other necessities, disliked the Zionist indoctrination, which they found authoritarian and counterproductive. There were even cases of children being obstructed by the Jewish Agency from finding homes in Europe or the United States, since this might discourage “ascent” to the Jewish homeland.

  It would take a few more years, but in the end, the Zionists got their way. The state of Israel was founded (1948) and millions of Jews found refuge there. Most countries in Europe, as well as the Soviet Union and the United States, were sympathetic, out of guilt perhaps, or because of the lingering nineteenth-century notion that every race needs its nation, or from recognition that for many Jews a state of Israel was the only plausible option. What Eden said about the Cossacks applied just as much to the European Jews: “We don’t want them here.”64

  CHAPTER 5

  DRAINING THE POISON

  Nations are not only physically damaged by war, occupation, or dictatorship but are morally corrupted too. Political legitimacy is lost. Civic sense is corroded by cynicism. Those who do well in tyrannies are often the least savory and most easily corrupted people. Those who carry most legitimacy, when the transition comes, are very often the most marginal while dictatorship lasts. In World War II this came down to the small number of men and women who joined the active resistance, perilously in countries under occupation, more safely in London, where the various “free” governments continued their pro forma existence in exile.

  Resistance, quite deliberately romanticized after the war, played a tiny role in the military defeat of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Violent acts of rebellion, followed by vicious reprisals against innocent citizens, frequently caused more trouble than they were worth, hence the common resentment among more cautious people towards the heroic figures whose actions led to even more savage repression. Of course, resistance has a symbolic value, as a demonstration that all is not lost, that the tyranny can be dented. But the real importance of resistance becomes clear only once the fighting is over. That some people stood firm against all the odds provides a heroic story to societies poisoned by collaboration or simple acquiescence in murderous regimes. Restoration of democracy rests on such stories, for they help to rebuild a sense not just of civic morale but also of political legitimacy for postwar governments. They are the foundation myths of national revival in postwar Europe.

  In parts of central and eastern Europe the role of the resistance was more complicated, because there were two tyrannies to resist. Those who saw Stalin as the main enemy sometimes collaborated with the Germans. The most famous resistance hero in Ukraine was Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. When Ukraine finally became independent (1991) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was built up as the father of the fatherland, a kind of Ukrainian George Washington. Bandera statues were erected all over the place, along with Bandera monuments, Bandera shrines, and Bandera museums. But Bandera is hardly a unifying hero, for he came from western Ukraine, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Russian Orthodox eastern Ukraine, Bandera is still regarded as a fascist for siding with the Nazis in 1941. Bandera’s nationalists were also responsible for murdering roughly forty thousand Poles in 1944. The hero himself, after having declared independence from the Germans as well as the Soviets, was in a Nazi concentration camp when this happened. In 1959, living in exile in Munich, he was murdered by an agent of the Soviet KGB.

  Things were less complicated in western Europe. The heroic myth was especially important in a country like France, whose bureaucracy, police forces, judiciary, industrial elites, and even many artists and writers were all deeply compromised by the collaborationist regime in Vichy. When General de Gaulle made his defiant radio broadcast from London on June 18, 1940, he was unknown to most people in France. The great father figure of the French patrie was still Marshal Pétain. Few people even heard de Gaulle on the radio declaiming in his halting, but strangely moving delivery: “Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”

  There was, in fact, little resistance in France during the first few years of the war. But de Gaulle came back to France in 1944 as the undisputed symbol of national rectitude, walking tall, in his uniform, at the head of French troops “liberating” Paris after the Allies had overwhelmed the Germans in Normandy. He was actually shot at by pro-Nazi snipers, but he marched on as though nothing was amiss. And so this seemingly untouchable figure was able to form a provisional government until the first postwar elections in October 1945, a government still manned by many Vichyistes and at odds with resistance groups, often led by communists, who distrusted de Gaulle’s aims with some reason, just as he, with equal reason, distrusted theirs. But General de Gaulle bore the proud face of resistance, and so his leadership was regarded as legitimate. He was the man to lift his nation from moral bankruptcy.

  Germany and Japan had no heroic symbols or leaders to build on (although something like a heroic myth of “anti-fascism” was cooked up in the communist zone of eastern Germany). The officers who had tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, and paid with their lives, were not yet regarded as heroes by most Germans. And since many of them came from the Prussian military aristocracy, they would have been associated by non-Germans, and many Germans too, with a militarist tradition (“Prussianism”) that was widely blamed for the war. There were some Japanese who had resisted the wartime regime, but they were mostly communists or radical leftists who had spent the war in prison. Opponents of Hitler’s Reich and Japan’s Imperial government had by and large kept their thoughts to themselves, or, in the case of Germany, fled abroad.

  But there were some active resisters in Germany, tiny groups of people who risked their lives in almost total isolation. One of them was Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who joined the “Uncle Emil” resistance group in Berlin. She and her courageous friends had hidden Jews and others from Nazi persecution and secretly distributed anti-Nazi leaflets. Few people who did this kind of thing managed to stay alive. There were certainly not enough people like Andreas-Friedrich to create a national myth of resistance. Yet, once the fighting was over and danger was gone, people still felt a need for some kind of moral redemption. On May 15, 1945, barely surviving in the Russian-occupied ruins of Berlin, Andreas-Friedrich wrote the following words in her diary:

  Everywhere feverish political activity. As if there were a rush to make up for twelve years’ lost time. “Antifascist” groups are shooting up like mushrooms. Banners and posters. Notices and signs. At every streetcorner some political group has been formed . . . Not all of these anti-Hitler groups can look back at a long struggle. With some of them resistance began only as Hitler’s ended.1

  Alth
ough not quite so blatant, similar hypocrisy could be observed in countries liberated from German occupation. But heroic narratives, even in those countries, let alone in Germany or Japan, were not enough to cope with moral collapse. For a postwar order to gain legitimacy, there had to be a purge in the ranks of Nazis, Japanese militarists, and their collaborators. The people responsible for the war, the dictatorships, persecution, slave labor, and mass murder, had to go. But where to start? How to go about it? How to define guilt? Was complicity enough reason to be purged? How to find the guilty? And what were the limits? If every German official who had been a Nazi, or worked with the Nazis, were to be purged, German society, already in tatters, might easily have disintegrated. There had been too many. In Japan, a complete purge of the wartime bureaucracy and political establishment would have left very few Japanese with either the knowledge or the skill to keep a country on the verge of starvation going. Yet something had to happen to make people feel that justice was done.

  The oldest and simplest solution to a society gone wrong—apart from just killing the wrongdoers—is banishment. This was suggested by a conservative Christian senator in Belgium when wondering what to do with former collaborators: “If there really is no place in our country to reintegrate these people, wouldn’t it be possible to let them go somewhere else? . . . There are countries, in Latin America, for example, where they could start new lives.”2 This option was indeed taken, albeit secretly, by a number of Nazi mass murderers, but it was hardly a viable government policy. And the idea of expelling all the collaborators of Europe, let alone all the Nazis in Germany, to Latin America was fanciful.

  Nevertheless, at the July 1945 conference in Potsdam, the Soviet, British, and American leaders agreed that something radical had to be done to cleanse the defeated nations of their poisonous legacies and rebuild them as democracies that would never go to war again. Both Germany and Japan would be “demilitarized,” and “democratized.” Nazi organizations and police forces would be banned, naturally, but also “all military organizations and all clubs and associations which serve to keep alive the military tradition in Germany.” And, as part of German democratization, “all members of the Nazi party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes shall be removed from public and semipublic office and from positions of responsibility in important private undertakings.”

  Where the Soviets and their Western allies differed, of course, was on their idea of what constituted democracy. The other thing left unclear was the distinction, if there was any, between having been a Nazi or a “militarist,” and being “hostile to Allied purposes.” One can, after all, imagine a former Nazi who was quite prepared to work for Allied purposes, or a former anti-Nazi who fiercely disagreed with Allied policies—a communist, say, in the Western zones, or a liberal democrat in the Soviet zone. How to go about the purges also depended on how one viewed the German catastrophe. On this there was more agreement among the great powers. Prussian militarism, or Prussianism, was seen as the main problem; that is what needed to be uprooted. That this was somewhat off the mark became common knowledge only later.

  The wording on Japan in Potsdam was a little different: “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.”

  This, too, was a bit vague and indeed misleading. Is there such a thing as “responsible militarism”? And who exactly had misled whom? General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers (SCAP), who was for the time being the highest authority in Japan, did not accept Emperor Hirohito’s offer to take responsibility for the war. SCAP, the acronym by which MacArthur was generally known, was convinced that the emperor was needed to avoid chaos, so he was exempted from any guilt.

  As the most powerful man in Japan, as well as a consciously contrived great white father figure, MacArthur received many letters from Japanese citizens, some addressing him with a bizarre reverence. The Supreme Commander’s intention was to play the all-powerful shogun to the symbolic Japanese emperor. In a way, however, it was as if he had become a sacred figure himself. “Dear Sir,” went one letter, “when I think of the generous measures Your Excellency has taken instead of exacting vengeance, I am struck with reverent awe as if I were in the presence of God.”3

  To many Japanese during the war, the emperor had been a sacred figure. But not to Japanese of a liberal or leftist bent. One letter writer to SCAP, possibly a Christian, wondered why the emperor had not been arrested as a war criminal: “To achieve true legal justice and human righteousness without shame before the world and before God, we ask you to strictly punish the present emperor as a war criminal. If you leave the emperor untouched simply to manipulate the people, then I believe that all the well-meaning policies of the Allied forces will come to naught after you leave.”4

  But there were other letters too, which warned of dire consequences should the emperor be touched: “This would obviously bring about the world’s greatest tragedy. It would succeed only after the complete annihilation of the eighty-million Yamato [Japanese] people.”5 The phrase “Yamato” suggests an unreconstructed nationalist. MacArthur decided that this was the type of voice he should heed. As a result, the emperor, in whose name every wartime act, including the most atrocious, was committed, was supposedly “misled” himself. To depart from this narrative in public could lead to serious trouble, and on occasion still can.*

  Since Japan had had no equivalent of the Nazi Party, let alone a Hitler, or a coup d’état comparable to what happened in Germany in 1933, instead “militarism,” “ultranationalism,” even “feudalism” were the poisonous weeds that needed to be eradicated. And so, in the words of a U.S. military directive: “Persons who have been active exponents of militarism and militant nationalism will be removed and excluded from public office and from any other positions of public and private responsibility.”6 When it came to propagandists, war criminals, and military leaders, this would be a fairly straightforward enterprise, but it would prove far more challenging to purge the bureaucrats, whose careers went back long before the Pacific War, or businessmen and industrialists who had certainly cooperated with and benefited from Japan’s wartime governments, but in many cases could not be described as militarists or ultranationalists.

  The idea that one can cut out “militarism,” “feudalism,” or “Prussianism,” as though they were cancer cells in a human organism, had a wider appeal among Allied officials on the left than among conservatives. This was true also of Germans, Japanese, and citizens in former occupied countries. Since the left, including the communists, had played a dominant role in the resistance in many countries, leftist members of the resistance insisted that postwar societies should be shaped according to their wishes. To them, 1945 was the perfect opportunity for a final reckoning with the military, financial, and political establishments which had collaborated with fascism.

  General MacArthur, although a conservative Republican himself, was surrounded in the early years of the Japanese occupation by idealistic lawyers and New Deal reformers who strongly pushed for purges as part of their efforts to democratize Japan. They were not experts with prewar ties to the Japanese elites. There was, in their view, no special need for cultural expertise. Any country could be remade into a democracy, provided it was equipped with the right constitution and helped along by setting up independent trade unions and other progressive measures. The early purges in Japan were supervised by such figures as Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kades, a New Dealer working in SCAP’s Government Section. His boss was Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, a former lawyer in Manila who had the same taste for bombastic rhetoric as his beloved boss: “MacArthur’s philosophy, without precedent in the annals of military occupations of the past, will
live as a standard and a challenge to military occupations of the future.”7 Their enemy in SCAP’s byzantine Tokyo court was Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief.

  MacArthur liked to refer to Willoughby, born in Germany as Karl von Tscheppe und Weidenbach, as “my pet fascist.” With good reason. A hunting man with a soft voice, silky manners, and a nasty temper, Willoughby had a tendency to see Jewish and communist conspiracies everywhere, including inside the U.S. military administration itself. The French ambassador, too, fell under his suspicion because he happened to have a Russian name. Willoughby enjoyed warmer relations with the conservative courtiers around Emperor Hirohito than with SCAP’s New Dealers. After his retirement in the 1950s, Willoughby moved to Madrid to advise General Francisco Franco, a man he much admired. However, since he was formally in charge of the occupation police, it was Willoughby’s duty to see to the dismissal of public figures he privately approved of. After listening to one of Willoughby’s interminable rants against the purges, Whitney remarked: “I submit that anyone who is so opposed to a program is the wrong man to implement it.”8 And that, it turned out, was that, at least for the time being.

  In Germany, the main thinker behind the purges of former Nazis was Franz Neumann, a Marxist who ended up working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Neumann was a Jewish refugee from Germany, where he had made a name before the war as a political theorist and labor lawyer. During his exile in the U.S., he prepared a denazification guide for the U.S. government together with Herbert Marcuse, one of several refugee Marxist scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. The Third Reich, according to their thesis, was a typical case of “totalitarian monopolistic capitalism.”9 Behind the Nazi movement stood the industrialists. Persecution of the Jews had been a maneuver to deflect popular discontent about monopoly capitalism.