In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

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In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century Page 66

by Geert Mak


  In October 1946, the American Saturday Evening Post noted that only thirty-three out of the hundreds of top Nazi officials in the German steel industry – so vital to the war – had been arrested. The rest had simply remained at their posts. Speer, the brilliant manager of the Third Reich, succeeded in striking precisely the right tone towards his judges and prosecutors: that of the civilised technocrat, intelligent, responsible, contrite. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, served his sentence (unlike many others), and died in 1981 like an upright citizen.

  The practitioners of medicine got off particularly easily, even though doctors and nursing officers had played a central role in the Third Reich. They had helped to establish the criteria for ‘racial purity’, they had selected the handicapped and the malformed children for the euthanasia campaign and then ‘put them to sleep’, and they had carried out large-scale medical experiments in the concentration camps – often with gruesome results. Yet of these hundreds, perhaps thousands, of doctors, only twenty-three were tried at Nuremberg. They pleaded innocent without exception. Four doctors were finally condemned to death, including one of Hitler's private physicians, Karl Brandt, who had also played a role in the Bethel hospital affair. With this verdict, the case was closed for the German medical profession. Within five years, almost all of the SS physicians and euthanasiasts – including the medical inspectors who had been active at Bethel – were back at work as general practitioners, medical examiners, scientific researchers or professors.

  When Ernie Pyle died on 18 April, 1945 – having meanwhile been transferred to the Pacific – he was carrying a few notes with him. They were intended for the column he had hoped to write on the day Germany capitulated. One of them read:

  Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks. But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

  The Second World War claimed the lives of at least forty-one million Europeans: fourteen million soldiers and twenty-seven million civilians, including six million Jews. It was a catastrophe that every day, for six long years, there were an average of 20,000 deaths. By the end of the war, one out of every five former inhabitants of Poland and the Baltic States was dead. In the Soviet Union, the casualties could only be processed by reducing the total population figures at the next census.

  Chapter FORTY-NINE

  Prague

  ALONG THE BANKS OF THE ELBE, NOT FAR FROM DRESDEN, THE AUTUMN leaves swirl down gently, every morning the grass on the campsite is streaked with brown and red. Beautiful antique paddle steamers glide past the cities on the river, every now and then you hear their mournful whistles in the cold morning mist. In the afternoon, when one of them sails by, you feel the urge to wave your cap at gentlemen in straw hats and ladies in white frocks who people the decks, as though nothing has happened for the last century.

  These are lovely, late days of summer, people are gathering rose hip along the roadsides, and from the hills the landscape looks like a vast garden painted by one of the Brueghels, full of farms, fields, white houses along the rivers, here and there a village spire. In the Czech Republic, all that changes. The border crossing at Hžrensko is one huge market of brass-ware, laundry detergents, alcohol, cigarettes, baskets and Third World shopping bags, there are a dozen whores standing beside the highway, and then follows one industrial monument after the other: factories, weathered smokestacks, abandoned railway yards, all of them almost antique. The surroundings must be rich in wildlife: the number of dead animals on the road increases, along the shoulders are dozens of hedgehogs, a hare and even a crushed fox, its head still proudly raised. A shower of rain clatters on the roof, the sun leaves bright spots on the hillsides, and then I am in Prague.

  It is a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. The Vitava is littered with tourist boats criss-crossing back and forth on the current, steered by big-eyed girls in sailor suits. Skaters, the heroes of Europe this year, race up and down the steps of the underground stations. On the Charles Bridge, two young men are playing Bach sonatas, the gulls cry across the water, German and Dutch tourists pass by the hundred, but right below, on the far side, there is suddenly a silent, walled orchard full of apple, pear and nut trees, a place where only a few people are sitting, reading a newspaper or a book in the warm September sun.

  I'm sitting in the Hanged Coffee café, not far from the castle. Here you can order two cups of coffee and have one – empty – ‘hanged’ from the ceiling. When a penniless student comes in, she can ask for a ‘hanged cup’ and receive coffee for free. My Czech acquaintances are telling me the story of their families. Elisabeth comes from a village in the Sudetenland. Her mother and her grandfather were German, they were allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia because they were married to natives. The rest of the village fled to Germany. ‘You can still see that on the houses, even after two generations. The village is dead, it has no soul.’ Olga's grandfather died in the middle of the war by ridiculous chance: he was standing at the front of a line to hand in his rifle when the city hall was blown up by partisans. Her grandmother was driven almost mad with sorrow; whenever there was a bombardment she would run out onto the street in the hope of being struck down. Her mother was thirteen at the time. Later her grandmother became wealthy by reading cards for the Russian officers garrisoned in the town. Her mother married: two children, six abortions.

  ‘If you want to know how a country is doing, you need to look at the oldest people and at the youngest,’ Veronika says calmly. ‘The oldest, that's my grandmother. She wouldn't be able to survive if we didn't help her. She still receives the same pension she did before 1989, and that's not enough to buy anything. She really doesn't want our help, but at Christmas we always buy her a new coat. Things like that. That whole generation is having a hard time of it now. And as far as the youngest go … it's almost impossible to have children here. It's simply too expensive, no one can afford it.’ Suddenly she grows tearful. As it turns out, she's pregnant. ‘My mother says: “It's okay, we'll be all right.”’

  On 26 January, 1946, The Economist described the situation in Europe as though talking about an African famine: ‘The tragedy is enormous. The farmers are reasonably well off, and the rich can afford to use the black market, but the poor population of Europe, perhaps a quarter of the continent's 400 million inhabitants, is doomed to starve this winter. Some of them will die.’

  The particular problem areas were Warsaw and Budapest – where tens of thousands of victims were anticipated – Austria, northern Italy and the large German cities – where an average per capita allowance of no more than 1,200 calories a day was available – as well as the western Netherlands and Greece, although the situation improved there.

  Upon his return from the United States, Bertolt Brecht described Berlin as ‘the pile of rubble behind Potsdam’. Amid the ruins of his old, beloved Alexanderplatz, Alfred Döblin spoke emotionally of ‘the verdict of history’. The Dutch journalist Hans Nesna, who made an initial tour of Germany in an old Model-T Ford in spring 1946, lost his way in what had once been a wealthy residential neighbourhood in Hamburg. It had become a dusty flatland, not a living soul in sight. ‘Most of the streets are unrecognisable and untraceable. You have to pick your way around piles of rubble and debris. All of it sunk in deathly silence.’ Nesna's Swedish colleague, Stig Dagerman, made a similar journey six months later. In the Hamburg U-Bahn he saw people in rags, ‘with faces white as chalk or newsprint, faces that cannot blush, faces that make you feel as though they couldn't bleed even if wounded.’

  Meanwhile, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to a lesser extent in Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia, campaigns of ethnic cleansing were being carried out. Almost twelve million ethnic Germans were deported by way of retaliation. It was the largest exodus in human history. Hundreds of thousands of those deportees ‘disappeared’, probably
having died along the way. In this way, the starving German population grew by an additional sixteen per cent.

  In some villages in the Soviet Union not a single man returned from the war: of the men born in 1922, precisely three per cent survived the war. The number of kolkhoz workers sank to almost a third of the prewar level. In Siberia, the surviving men were sometimes asked to circulate through the neighbourhood and impregnate women and girls, to ensure that at least a few babies would be born. A Russian author wrote that the first time he experienced not being hungry was in 1952, when he entered the army. Another reported that bread was back on the table again in his village only in 1954. Before that, the people had fed themselves with acorns, leaves, weeds and aquatic snails.

  In August 1945, two months before committing suicide, the Nazi leader Robert Ley penned a letter to his dead wife from his Nuremberg cell about the Germany he had dreamed of: ‘Kraft durch Freude, leisure time and recreation, new houses, we had planned the loveliest cities and villages, acts of service and fair pay, a fantastic, unique public health programme, social security for the elderly and invalids, new roads and streets, ports and settlements – how wonderful Germany could have been, if, if, and always if …’

  The amazing thing is that out of the ruins of 1945 it was precisely that German dreamland which arose within the next ten years. In 1958 many German cinemas were showing the film Wir Wunderkinder, the story of two students who sold newspapers on Alexanderplatz in the 1930s, fell in love, married, survived the war and the bombardments and finally, in the 1950s, found respectable jobs and a certain prosperity. Their polar opposite was Bruno Tieges, an ambitious Nazi careerist who lived high off the hog during the war, sold goods on the black market afterwards, and became a respected entrepreneur in the 1950s. When Tieges is finally unmasked by the young couple, he falls in his rage into a lift shaft. And everyone lived happily ever after. That young couple was still only in their late thirties.

  The Wirtschaftswunder, the economic upturn, was not limited to West Germany, but took place all over Western Europe. The ravaged countries recovered with astonishing speed, and during the 1950s the West actually experienced an explosion of welfare unlike any other in its history. By 1951 all the countries of Western Europe had recovered their pre-war production levels. After 1955, Austria was able to take part fully as well: the Soviets had suddenly withdrawn their occupational forces in exchange for the promise of neutrality, and hoped to solve the German issue in the same fashion.

  Was this explosion of prosperity really, as is so frequently claimed, due primarily to the American Marshall Plan, that brilliant combination of aid and enlightened self-interest intended to help Europe to its feet while opening new markets for America? Clearly, generous American humanitarian assistance in the first post-war years made the difference between life and death for many Europeans. But the economic impact of the Marshall Plan was probably less decisive than is often claimed. Statistics showed a sharp revival of the Western European economies even before mid-1948, when the first dollars began pouring in. By late 1947 British and French production was already back at pre-war levels; the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium followed suit in late 1948. At that point, the Marshall aid had only just begun.

  There must, therefore, have been other reasons for this unexpected boom: during the war, Europe had become acquainted with countless new – and largely American – technologies and production methods; many young people had gained a wealth of organisational experience in the army; Germany and Italy were able to replace their ruined industries with the newest of the new; the traditional and predominantly agricultural Netherlands was forced to catch up quickly, and become industrialised on an unparalleled scale. The welfare state took shape: all Dutch citizens above the age of sixty-five received a government pension after 1947, the French began their enormous HLM (affordable social housing) projects, and in Britain the National Health Service was launched in 1948. In June 1948, the Deutschmark was introduced in Germany's British and American zones, a drastic monetary reform which took an almost immediate effect: the black market vanished from one week to the next, shops became well stocked and, to their amazement, the Germans began to realise that life would go on after the demise of the Third Reich.

  In 1959, the Conservative leader Harold Macmillan won the British elections with the unimaginable slogan ‘You've never had it so good!’

  Interestingly, along with all this, there was also a decline going on: the old, imperial Europe was being rapidly dismantled. During the war, powerful independence movements had arisen in almost all the colonies, the period saw both peaceful revolutions and violent wars of liberation, and in under two decades the sometimes centuries-old ties had been cut between Europe and the subcontinent, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, North Africa, the Congo and other colonies. In 1958 the British dropped the word ‘Empire’: from then on,‘Empire Day’ became ‘Commonwealth Day’. Following the Japanese occupation, the Netherlands proved unable to restore its authority over the Dutch East Indies. France, so humiliated during the war, attempted to regroup overseas: an eight-year war was fought in Indochina, until the French were decisively defeated by the nationalist rebels at Dien Bien Phu. Something similar happened in Algeria. The Belgian Empire in Africa collapsed in 1960. And in 1975, the ancient Portuguese Empire dissolved at last after a long, drawn-out war in Angola and Mozambique.

  Even so, during this period, the economies of Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands blossomed as never before. Some historians explain this phenomenon by noting that the occupation of many colonies had less to do with economic gain than with rivalry between the great European powers themselves. Until 1919, Germany was present in Africa, in modern-day Namibia and Tanzania, because the British and the French had colonies there as well. The British were in South-East Asia because of the French, and in order to defend India. That is how things were everywhere. Until the start of the twentieth century, empires were profitable, or at least cost-effective. From the 1920s, however, the balance of costs and assets became increasingly unreliable: in 1921, the management of Iraq alone was costing the British an annual £21 million – more than their entire health-care budget – and they were receiving very little in return. As Great Britain reached the verge of bankruptcy, as independence movements began spreading everywhere and many of the old European rivalries lost their relevance after 1945, the European empires soon expired. By the mid-1950s the countries of Western Europe were trading more with each other than they ever had with their colonies.

  Italy in particular profited in many ways from these new forms of cooperation. The country began producing for customers all over Europe: refrigerators, scooters, washing machines, cars, typewriters, spin dryers, televisions, the first luxury goods for the masses. The number of cars sold in Europe rose from just over 1.5 million in 1950 to more than 13 million by 1973. In 1947, the Italian Candy washing-machine manufacturer was producing one machine a day; by 1967 it was producing one every fifteen seconds. In 1959 the New Statesman published a cartoon showing an old man staring blankly at moving images on a round screen. ‘No, grandpa,’ a little girl is telling him, ‘that's the washing machine, not the TV.’

  In 1948 most Europeans looked a great deal alike. In the countryside especially, they lived and worked in more or less the same way their parents and grandparents had. Ten years later, Western and Eastern Europeans had grown far apart, both materially and intellectually, and another ten years later the alienation was complete.

  While giant sunbeams enter his old, spacious Prague apartment, Hans Krijt (b.1927) tells me the story of a life ruled by dissent. Krijt was the son of a plumber in the city of Zaandam, a normal Dutch boy who found a job after the war in the packaging department of a factory that made flavourings for puddings. In early 1946 he decided to include a few letters along with the rum flavourings, in the hope of finding a pen pal. He received two replies: one from Berlin, from a ‘sehr hübschen Verkehrspolizistin’, the other from Czechoslovakia, from a seri
ous boy who had thought Hans was a girl. He ignored the traffic policewoman from Berlin, but became friends with the boy. And now he has been living in Prague for almost half a century, his wife Olga Krijtova is a translator, and their sideboard is covered with photographs of all his Czech children and grandchildren. That is how things go sometimes for the son of a plumber from Zaandam.

  ‘I came here in February 1948, as a deserter,’ he tells me. ‘Holland was carrying out its last colonial police action in the Far East. My army comrades thought that was quite the thing, a war in the Indies, it would give them a chance to see something of the world. But the officers confiscated my copies of the left-wing weekly De Groene, that's the kind of guy I was, and Czechoslovakia was the only country where I knew people.’

  He found work with a farmer. Less than two weeks later the Czechoslovakian communists seized power and arrested a great many non-communists. On 10 March, the popular minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk, was found lying dead in the square in front of ćernín Palace, which still houses the country's ministry of foreign affairs. The communists claimed that Masaryk had committed suicide ‘because of the many false accusations in the Western press’. For most people, however, it was clearly a case of ‘defenestration’, a method used more than once in Prague to solve a political problem.

  For the second time in ten years, the promising Czechoslovakian democracy had been brutally crushed. The reactions in the West bordered on panic. Now ‘Ivan’ had shown his true colours. New security alliances were forged, the start of NATO (1949). America stopped its withdrawal from Western Europe and would continue to watch over the security of the Western European countries for more than half a century. The Soviet Bloc reacted in 1955 by setting up the Warsaw Pact.

 

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