Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  This was the moment sometimes called zero hour, Stunde Null: the end of the war, the retreat of Germany, the arrival of the Soviet Union, the moment the fighting ended and life started up again. Most histories of the communist takeover of Eastern Europe begin at precisely this moment, and logically so.7 To those who lived through this change of power, zero hour felt like a turning point: something very concrete came to an end, and something very new began. From now on, many people said to themselves, everything would be different. And it was.

  Yet although it is logical to begin any history of the communist takeover in Eastern Europe with the end of the war, it is in some ways deeply misleading. The people of the region were not faced with a blank slate in 1944 or 1945, after all, and they were not themselves starting from scratch. Nor did they emerge from nowhere, with no previous experiences, ready to start afresh. Instead, they climbed out of the basements of their destroyed homes, or walked out of the forests where they had been living as partisans, or slipped away from the labor camp where they had been imprisoned, if they were healthy enough, and embarked upon long, complicated journeys back to their homelands. Not all of them even stopped fighting when the Germans surrendered.

  As they crawled out of the ruins, they saw not virgin territory but destruction. “The war ended the way a passage through a tunnel ends,” wrote the Czech memoirist Heda Kovály. “From far away you could see the light ahead, a gleam that kept growing, and its brilliance seemed ever more dazzling to you huddled there in the dark the longer it took to reach it. But when at last the train burst out in the glorious sunshine, all you saw was a wasteland full of weeds and stones, and a heap of garbage.”8

  Photographs from across Eastern Europe at that time show scenes from an apocalypse. Flattened cities, acres of rubble, burned villages, and smoking, charred ruins where houses used to be. Tangles of barbed wire, the remains of concentration camps, labor camps, POW camps; barren fields, pockmarked by tank tracks, with no sign of farming, husbandry, or life of any kind. In the recently destroyed cities, the air was suffused with the smell of corpses. “The descriptions I’ve read always use the phrase ‘sweetish odour,’ but that’s far too vague, completely inadequate,” wrote one German survivor. “The fumes are not so much an odour as something firmer, something thicker, a soupy vapour that collects in front of your face and nostrils, too mouldy and thick to breathe. It beats you back as if with fists.”9

  Provisional burial sites were everywhere, and people walked through the streets gingerly, as if traversing a cemetery.10 In due course exhumations began, as bodies were removed from courtyards and city parks to mass graves. Funerals and reburial ceremonies were frequent, though in Warsaw one was famously interrupted. In the summer of 1945, a funeral march was slowly wending its way through Warsaw when the black-clad mourners saw an extraordinary sight: “A living, red Warsaw tram,” the first to run through the city since the war’s end. “The pedestrians on the sidewalks stopped, others ran alongside the tram clapping and cheering loudly. Extraordinarily, the funeral march stopped too, the mourners accompanying the dead, captivated by the general mood, turned to the tram and began to clap too.”11

  This too was typical. At times a weird euphoria seemed to grip the survivors. It was a relief to be alive; sorrow was mixed with joy, and commerce, trade, and reconstruction began immediately, spontaneously. Warsaw in the summer of 1945 was a bustling hive of activity, Stefan Kisielewski wrote: “In the ruins of the streets, there’s commotion like never before. Trade—buzzing. Work—booming. Humor—everywhere. The mob, teeming life, flows through the streets, nobody would think that these are all victims of a massive disaster, people who have scarcely recovered from a catastrophe, or that they are living in extreme, inhuman conditions …”12 Sándor Márai described Budapest in one of his novels at this same period:

  Whatever remained of the city, of society, sprang to life with such passion, fury, and sheer willpower, with such strength and stamina and cunning, it seemed as if nothing had happened … out on the boulevard there were suddenly stalls in gateways, selling all kinds of nice food and luxury items: clothes, shoes, everything you could imagine, not to mention gold napoleons, morphine, and pork lard. The Jews who remained staggered from their yellow star houses and within a week or two you could see them bargaining, surrounded as they were by the corpses of men and horses … People were quibbling over prices for warm British cloth, French perfumes, Dutch brandy, and Swiss watches among the rubble …13

  This enthusiasm for work and renewal would last for many years. The British sociologist Arthur Marwick once speculated that the experience of national failure might have given the West Germans an incentive to rebuild, to regain a sense of national pride. The very scale of the national collapse, he argued, might have helped contribute to the postwar boom: having experienced economic and personal catastrophe, Germans readily threw themselves into reconstruction.14 But Germany, both East and West, was not alone in this drive to recover and to become “normal” again. Over and over, Poles and Hungarians in memoirs and conversations about the postwar period speak of how desperately they sought education, ordinary work, a life without constant violence and disruption. The communist parties were perfectly poised to take advantage of these yearnings for peace.

  In any case, damage to property was easier to repair than the demographic damage in Eastern Europe, where the scale of violence had been higher than anything known on the western half of the continent. During the war, Eastern Europe had experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. By 1945, most of the territory between Poznań in the west and Smolensk in the east had been occupied not once but twice, or even three times. Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, Hitler had invaded the region from the west, occupying western Poland. Stalin had invaded from the east, occupying eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and Bessarabia. In 1941, Hitler once again invaded these same territories from the west. In 1943, the tide turned again and the Red Army marched back through the same region once more, coming from the east.

  By 1945, in other words, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of not one but two totalitarian states had marched back and forth across the region, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. To take one example, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów; it was no longer in eastern Poland but in the western part of Soviet Ukraine; and its Polish and Jewish prewar population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside.

  Eastern Europe, along with Ukraine and the Baltic States, was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe. “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, the definitive history of the mass killing of this period, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”15 Stalin and Hitler shared contempt for the very notion of national sovereignty for any of the nations of Eastern Europe, and they jointly strove to eliminate their elites. The Germans considered Slavs to be subhumans, ranked not much higher than Jews, and in the lands between Sachsenhausen and Babi Yar they thought nothing of ordering arbitrary street killings, mass public executions, or the burning of whole villages in revenge for one dead Nazi. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, considered its western neighbors to be capitalist and anti-Soviet strongholds whose very existence posed a challenge to the USSR. In 1939, and again in 1944 and 1945, the Red Army and the NKVD would arrest not only Nazis and collaborators in their newly conquered territories but anyone who might theoretically oppose Soviet administration: social democrats, antifascists, businessmen, bankers, and merchants—often the same people targeted by the Nazis. Although there were civilian casualties in Western Europe, as well as incidents of theft, misbehavior, and abuse perpetrated by the British and American armies, for the most part the Anglo-Saxon troops were trying to kill Nazis, not potential leaders of the li
berated nations. And, for the most part, they treated the resistance leaders with respect and not suspicion.

  The East is also where the Nazis had most vigorously pursued the Holocaust, where they set up the vast majority of ghettoes, concentration camps, and killing fields. Snyder notes that Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many of those managed to flee. Hitler’s vision of a “Jew-free” Europe could only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States, and eventually Hungary and the Balkans, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, the vast majority were from Eastern Europe. Most of the rest were taken to the region to be murdered. The scorn the Nazis held for all Eastern Europeans was closely related to their decision to take the Jews from all over Europe to the East for execution. There, in a land of subhumans, it was possible to do inhuman things.16

  Above all, Eastern Europe is where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they began the war as allies, Hitler had always wanted to fight a war of destruction against the USSR, and after Hitler’s invasion Stalin promised the same. The battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were therefore fiercer and bloodier in the east than those that took place further west. German soldiers truly feared the Bolshevik “hordes,” about whom they had heard many terrible stories, and toward the end of the war they fought them with particular desperation. Their scorn for civilians was especially profound, respect for local culture and infrastructure nonexistent. A German general defied Hitler’s orders and left Paris standing out of sentimental respect for the city, but other German generals burned Warsaw to the ground and destroyed much of Budapest without thinking about it. Western air forces were not especially concerned about the ancient architecture of this region either: Allied bombers contributed to the toll of death and destruction too, conducting aerial bombardment not only of Berlin and Dresden but also of Danzig and Königsberg, Gdańsk and Kalinińgrad—among many other places.

  As the eastern front moved into Germany itself, fighting only intensified. The Red Army focused on its drive to Berlin with something approaching obsession. From early on in the war, Soviet soldiers bade farewell to one another with the cry, “See you in Berlin.” Stalin was desperate to reach the city before the other Allies got there. His commanders understood this, and so did their American counterparts. General Eisenhower, knowing full well that the Germans would fight to the death in Berlin, wanted to save American lives and decided to let Stalin take the city. Churchill argued against this policy: “If they [the Russians] … take Berlin, will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to our common victory be unduly imprinted in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?”17 But the American general’s caution won out, and the Americans and British advanced slowly to the east—General George C. Marshall having once declared he would be “loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes,” and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke arguing that “the advance into the country really had to coincide to a certain extent with what our final boundaries would be.”18 Meanwhile, the Red Army charged directly toward the German capital, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

  When the numbers are added up, the result is stark. In Britain, the war took the lives of 360,000 people, and in France, 590,000. These are horrific casualties, but they still come to less than 1.5 percent of those countries’ populations. By contrast, the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews. In total, some 20 percent of the Polish population, one in five people, did not survive. Even in countries where the fighting was less bloody, the proportion of deaths was still higher than in the west. Yugoslavia lost 1.5 million people, or 10 percent of the population. Some 6.2 percent of Hungarians and 3.7 percent of the prewar Czech population died too.19 In Germany itself, casualties came to between 6 million and 9 million people—depending upon whom one considers to be “German,” given all of the border changes—or up to 10 percent of the population.20 It would have been difficult, in Eastern Europe in 1945, to find a single family that had not suffered a serious loss.

  As the dust settled, it also became clear that even those who were not dead were often living somewhere else. In 1945, the demographics, population distribution, and ethnic composition of many countries in the region were actually very different from what they had been in 1938. To a degree still not well understood in the West, the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe had brought about major population shifts, following waves of deportation and resettlement. German “colonists” had been moved into occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, with the deliberate goal of changing the ethnic composition of particular regions, while natives were expelled or murdered. Poles and Jews were evicted from their homes in the better districts of Łódź to make way for German administrators as early as December 1939. In subsequent years some 200,000 Poles were sent out of the city to become forced laborers in Germany, while the Jews were herded into the Łódź Ghetto, where most died.21 The German occupation regime installed Germans in their place, including ethnic Germans from the Baltic States and Romania, some of whom believed they were receiving abandoned or neglected property.22

  Many of these changes would be reversed or revenged in the postwar period. The years 1945, 1946, and 1947 were years of refugees: Germans moved west, Poles and Czechs returned east from forced labor and concentration camps in Germany, deportees came back from the Soviet Union, soldiers of all kinds returned from other theaters, escapees came back from British or French or Moroccan exile. Some of these refugees returned home but, upon discovering that home was no longer what it had been, struck out for new territories. Jan Gross reckons that between 1939 and 1943 some 30 million Europeans were dispersed, transplanted, or deported. Between 1943 and 1948, a further 20 million were moved as well.23 Krystyna Kersten notes that between 1939 and 1950 one Pole out of every four changed his place of residence.24

  The vast majority of these people arrived home with nothing. Immediately, they were forced to seek help from others—from churches, charities, or the state—in whatever form it took. Whole families, self-sufficient before the war, found themselves queuing in government offices, trying to be assigned a house or apartment. Men who had once had independent jobs and salaries were begging for ration cards, hoping to get a job in a state bureaucracy. The mentality of a refugee, forcibly expelled from his home, is not that of an emigrant who leaves to seek his fortune: his very circumstances fostered dependency and a sense of helplessness he might never have known before.

  To make matters worse, the extraordinary physical destruction in Eastern Europe was also matched by extraordinary economic destruction, and on an equally incomprehensible scale. Not every Eastern European nation was wealthy before the war, but neither was the region as far behind the western half of the continent in 1939 as it was by 1945. Though some groups had profited during the war from the demand for guns and tanks—several economic historians have commented on the expansion of the industrial working class in those years, especially in Bohemia and Moravia—the second half of the war was a catastrophe for almost everybody.25 In 1945 and 1946, Hungary’s gross national product was only half of what it had been in 1939. According to one calculation, the final months of the war had destroyed about 40 percent of the country’s economic infrastructure.26 Budapest, the capital, suffered damage to three-quarters of its buildings, of which 4 percent were totally destroyed and 22 percent uninhabitable. The population was reduced by a third.27 The Germans took much of the country’s railway rolling stock with them when they left the country; the Soviet army, in the guise of reparations, would take much of the rest.28

  In Poland, a figure close to 40 percent is also used as a general estimate for damage, but certain areas were even more thoroughly devastat
ed. The country’s transportation infrastructure was especially hard-hit: more than half of the country’s bridges were gone, along with ports, shipping facilities, and two-fifths of the railways. Most major Polish cities were heavily damaged, meaning that they had lost apartments and houses, ancient architectural monuments, works of art, universities, and schools. In the city center of Warsaw, some 90 percent of the buildings were partly or completely destroyed, having been systematically blown up by the retreating Germans.29

  Germany’s cities were also badly destroyed, thanks both to the Allied aerial bombardment, which resulted in huge firestorms, and to Hitler’s insistence that his soldiers fight until the very end, street by street. Even in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, where the devastation was not so broad and there had been no aerial bombing, the damage was still deep. Romania lost its oil fields, for example, which had contributed one-third of the national income before 1938.30

  The war had also altered the region’s economies in other ways that were harder to quantify. In two justly celebrated essays on the social consequences of the war, Jan Gross and Bradley Abrams point out that in much of the region—certainly in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, as well as Germany itself—the expropriation of private property on a large scale actually began during the war, under Nazi and fascist regimes, and not afterward under communism. Mass confiscation of Jewish property and businesses in Central Europe, either by the state or by the German occupiers, was followed by a broader Germanization during the later years of occupation. Sometimes this happened by stealth: in the Czech lands, German banks controlled Czech banks and thus could often “dictate whether or not a Czech bank or firm was solvent or not, and, in cases of insolvency, rescue operations were put in hand by German banks or firms which thereby gained control.”31 Sometimes control was imposed outright. In Poland, it often happened that German managers and directors were simply put in charge of factories and businesses that technically still belonged to Poles.