The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Duff Cooper, August 23, 1939

  He had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart… Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.

  Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

  Historically they are both an attempt to get away from an effete civilization which the countries we represent are trying desperately hard to cling to and to revivify. It is indeed a revolutionary war and we are on the side of the past – at the moment.

  Sir Stafford Cripps, September 25, 1940

  PAN AND FIRE

  Henryka Łappo was just twelve years old when she, her mother and her elder brother were deported from Ulanowka. It happened in the middle of the bitterly cold night of February 10, 1940:

  Suddenly… came the rapping at our door… What offences had we committed? Where, what for and why did we have to leave our home and farm at this time and in such weather?… But the insistent ‘quickly’ spurred us into action and onto the sledges with our very sparse possessions which we had packed in just under an hour. Thus we moved off towards the station… Similar loads of families and bundles left from every house…

  In the cattle trucks there huddled together grown-ups and children, men and women, friends and strangers. There was no means of washing or changing for the night, no food but, cold and hungry, we felt like animals caught in a trap, unsure what the next day would bring or when and where this journey would end for no-one knew our destination.

  Their uncertainty was understandable. Although Poland had been invaded by Germany the previous year, Henryka and her fellow captives were not being deported on the orders of Hitler. They were being deported on the orders of his ally, Stalin, and they ended up in a one-room hut near the village of Ivaksha, in the benighted Soviet province of Arkhangel’sk.

  Central Europe had a mirror-image quality after September 1939. For it had not only been Hitler who had ordered his troops to invade Poland. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow that August, Josef Stalin had done the same, on September 17. To conservatives like Duff Cooper or Evelyn Waugh, it seemed a moment of revelation, laying bare the essential identity of the two totalitarian systems, National Socialism and ‘socialism in one country’. The signatories themselves appreciated the irony of their partnership. When he flew to Moscow to sign the pact, Ribbentrop had joked that Stalin would ‘yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact’, Hitler and Mussolini’s anti-Communist alliance. Nevertheless, the partition of Poland did not produce exactly identical totalitarian twins. The Soviet zone of occupation was in many respects a mirror image of the German zone but, as with a true mirror image, right and left were transposed.

  On September 18, several days after the Germans had taken the town, the 29th Light Tank Brigade of the Red Army rolled into Brest. They had seen little action since crossing the frontier, for the Poles had concentrated their efforts on resisting the invasion from the West. Indeed, most of the fighting was over by the time the Soviets arrived on the scene. The demarcation line between the two occupation zones was, under the terms of the Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed ten days later, to pass just to the west of the fortress. After an amicable joint parade, the Germans therefore withdrew back across the River Bug and the Russians took over. On the Soviet side of the line, thirteen million Poles – including 250,000 prisoners of war – were about to discover for themselves the distinctive charms of life in the workers’ paradise.

  The Germans and Soviets had pledged in their latest treaty ‘to assure to the peoples living… in the former Polish state… a peaceful life in keeping with their national character’. Actions on the German side of the new border had already given the lie to those fine words. The Soviet approach was slightly different. At first, attempts were made to woo a sceptical local populace, many of whom remembered all too clearly the last Soviet invasion of 1920, when the Red Army had advanced as far as the Vistula. Soviet soldiers received as much as three months’ salary in advance, with orders to spend it liberally in Polish villages. This honeymoon did not last long, however. Soviet officials lost no time in throwing Poles out of choice apartments in Brest and elsewhere, commandeering them without compensation. Meanwhile, Soviet promises of plentiful jobs in the Donbas region proved to be illusory. Worst of all, Poles soon came to know the Stalinist system of organized terror. ‘There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union,’ people were told: ‘Those who have been in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail.’ Soon Poles began to joke bleakly that the initials NKVD stood for Nie wiadomo Kiedy Wroce do Domu (‘Impossible to tell when I will return home’). Incredibly, a substantial number of Polish Jews who had fled East at the outbreak of war sought to be repatriated to the German zone of occupation, not realizing that it was only Volksdeutsche who were wanted. This speaks volumes for their experience of nine months of Russian rule.

  From Stalin’s point of view, the Nazi vision of a Germanized western Poland, denuded of it social elites, seemed not menacing but completely familiar. Stalin had, after all, been waging war against the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union for far longer and on a far larger scale than anything thus far attempted by Hitler. And he regarded few minorities with more suspicion than the Poles. Even before the outbreak of war, 10,000 ethnic Polish families living in the western border region of the Soviet Union had been deported. Now the entire Polish population of the Soviet-occupied zone was at Stalin’s mercy. Beginning on the night of February 10, 1940, the NKVD unleashed a campaign of terror against suspected ‘anti-Soviet’ elements. The targets identified in a set of instructions subsequently issued in November of the same year were ‘those frequently travelling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel [owners] and restaurant owners’. Like Hitler, in other words, Stalin wished to decapitate Polish society.

  By the spring of 1940, around 14,700 Poles were being held in prisoner of war camps, of whom the majority were officers of the vanquished army. But there were also police officers, prison guards, intelligence personnel, government officials, landowners and priests. In addition, 10,685 Poles were being held in the western region of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, including not only ex-officers but also landowners, factory owners and government officials. At the suggestion of Lavrenty Beria, who had replaced Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD in November 1938, Stalin ordered that these ‘sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system’ be tried by special tribunals. Their physical presence would not be required, nor would evidence need to be heard, since the verdicts had already been reached: death. In the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk, more than 4,000 of them were tied up, shot in the back of the head and buried in a mass grave, a crime the Soviets subsequently sought to blame on the Nazis. This was only one of a series of mass executions. All told, more than 20,000 Poles were killed. Further ‘liquidations’ followed, notably the emptying of the prisons of Lwów, Pińsk and other towns in the summer of 1941. Between September 1939 and June 1941 the Germans killed approximately 100,000 Jewish Poles and 20,889 non-Jewish Poles in their occupation zone; the NKVD came close to matching that body-count in just two operations. Yet these murders were only a part of Stalin’s plan for Poland. By February 1940 the Soviet authorities were also ready to undertake the wholesale deportation of Poles they had been preparing since October.

  The peace of Polish family life was shattered, without any preliminary announcement or warning, by a knock at the door, usually just as dawn was breaking. Armed Soviet militiamen burst in, read out a deportation or
der and gave those present as little as half an hour to pack up whatever possessions the militia did not take for themselves. These incursions were often accompanied by gratuitous violence and vandalism. Janusz Bardach, a Jewish teenager in the town of Włodzimierz-Wołyński, watched in amazement as one NKVD man, evidently the worse for drink, smashed the mahogany desk of the doctor he was arresting, shouting: ‘Capitalist swine! Motherfucking parasites! We need to find these bourgeois exploiters!’ One peasant woman described her own traumatized reaction:

  He tells us to listen what he will read and he read[s] a mortal decree that in half an hour we must be ready to leave, wagon will come… I immediately went blind and I got to laugh terribly, NKVD man screams get dressed, I run around the room and laugh… children are crying and begging me to pack or there will be trouble, and I have lost my mind.

  Once removed from their homes, the unfortunate captives were then marched or driven in carts to the nearest railway station and herded into cattle trucks, with sometimes as many as sixty or seventy people in each. In the sub-zero winter temperatures many babies and young children died before the trains had even departed. In four major operations, between February 1940 and June 1941, around half a million Polish civilians were rounded up in this fashion. Sometimes the militiamen lied about where the victims were being sent, claiming their destination was Germany or another part of Poland. In fact, most were deported to the camps and collective farms of Siberia and Kazakhstan, the most remote and least hospitable regions of the Soviet Union. It seemed like a journey through purgatory to hell. ‘We are being carried through this endless space,’ recalled Zofia Ptasnik, ‘such a flat and huge land with only a few scattered human settlements here and there. Invariably, we see squalid mud huts with thatched roofs and small windows, dirty and dilapidated, with no fences or trees.’ Many of the younger and older deportees did not survive to disembark at their destination. For those who did, there was seldom anything approaching adequate food or shelter. They died in their tens of thousands of cold, hunger and disease. By 1942, according to some estimates, barely half the deportees were left alive.

  Those who did not perish could only listen incredulously to the attempts by Soviet instructors to ‘re-educate’ them. Antoni Ekart recalled how one camp lecturer ‘address[ed] the prisoners on the nobility of putting all their effort into work. He would tell them that noble people are patriots, that all patriots love Soviet Russia, the best country in the world for the working man, that Soviet citizens are proud to belong to such a country, etc. etc. for two solid hours – all this to an audience whose very skins bore witness to the absurdity and the hypocrisy of such statements.’ Elsewhere the language was harsher. A villager in Pałusza, who had seen his own neighbours carted off eastwards, was told:

  This is how we annihilate the enemies of Soviet power. We will use the sieve until we retrieve all bourgeois and kulaks… You will never see again those that we have taken from you. They will disappear over there, like a field-mouse.

  Not everyone was worse off under Soviet rule. The Jews of Grodno were positively relieved by the arrival of Soviet forces, since they shut-down the pogrom that had broken out when the Polish army capitulated to the Germans. Elsewhere, Jews welcomed Soviet rule as an improvement on the increasingly bigoted Polish regime of the post-Piłsudski era. In the village of Brańsk, which initially had been occupied by the Germans, some Jews welcomed the Red Army with flowers and banners. Many who found themselves on the German side of the demarcation line hastened across to the Soviet side, little realizing that some of their co-religionists were fleeing in the opposite direction. Only a minority were as unlucky as Julius Margolin, a visitor from Palestine, who moved from western Poland to Pińsk, but was arrested by the Soviets for not possessing the correct papers and sentenced to five long years in the Gulag. To many Jews, who had endured mounting persecution during the 1930s, Soviet rule was an opportunity. Many willingly joined the new institutions established to administer the Soviet zone. There was remarkably little resistance to the aggressive policy of secularization adopted by the Soviet authorities, which aimed ‘to uproot religious beliefs and customs as well as Jewish nationalism’. Particularly in the eyes of many younger Polish Jews, this seemed a tolerable price to pay for being treated on an equal footing with Gentiles. In some areas, former Polish officials claimed they were told by local Jews: ‘Your time has passed, a new epoch begins.’

  The apparent affinity between the Soviets and the Jews would not be forgotten by Poles, who were quick to discern proof of the alleged affinity between Judaism and Bolshevism. ‘The relations between the Poles and Jews are at present markedly worse than before the war,’ noted one Polish observer in Stryj in June 1940. ‘The entire Polish population adopted a negative attitude towards the Jews because of their blatant cooperation with the Bolsheviks and their hostility against the non-Jews… The people simply hate the Jews.’ Memories of symbolic acts of betrayal lingered long after the war was over. One man remembered a Jewish boy whom he knew from school ‘reaching for our white and red national flag and… ripping it in half, tearing the white part off the red one’. The boy told him, ‘Your bloody Poland is finished.’ A woman from Wilno recalled ‘a Jew, with a red [arm]band, [taking] a sabre out of the sheath and read[ing] out “honour and fatherland”’. He laughed ‘like mad’, she recalled: ‘Ha! Ha! They stood up for their fatherland with honour.’ Such recollections were no doubt embellished with the passage of time. Nevertheless, they indicate the divisive effect of the Soviet rule on Poland’s already fractured society. In other parts of the country, the Soviets gave preferential treatment to Ukrainians and Byelorussians. They deliberately encouraged Ukrainian violence against Poles with slogans like Poliakam, panam, sobakam – sobachaia smert’! (‘To Poles, landowners and dogs– a dog’s death!’). Ethnic divisions widened in a similar way when the Red Army occupied Lithuania in June 1940. Whereas Jews had played a minimal role in the public life of the country during its independence, two members of the Soviet-installed People’s Government were Jews. When Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, five members of the Supreme Soviet and two of the fifteen members of its Presidium were Jews, as were two members of the Council of Commissars and two of the nine Supreme Court justices.

  Poland had been partitioned between German and Russian empires before, but never like this. Both Hitler and Stalin subjected the population to a horrific reign of terror. Their shared aim was quite simply to obliterate the political and cultural life of the Polish people for ever, so that Poland would cease to exist not merely as a place, but also as an idea. It would become simply a frying pan and a fire. Looking in the mirror that was occupied Poland, Stalin had good reason to believe he had met his match – a match made in Hell, perhaps, but one that had every reason to endure.

  TWO FACES OF TOTALITARIANISM

  Their maltreatment of the Poles was only one of many ways in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes had grown to resemble one another. Not only was German National Socialism looking more and more like Soviet ‘socialism in one country’. Hitler increasingly resembled a kind of apprentice Stalin, rather like some sort of junior devil.

  When Iosif Dzhugashvili, the son of a Georgian shoemaker, looked at Adolf Schicklgruber, the son of an Austrian customs clerk, he seemed to see in the younger man a kindred spirit. As schoolboys, each had regarded the world with the same clenched-jawed defiance. Hitler was a failed artist, Stalin a dropout seminarian. Both men had been revolutionaries who had gone to jail under the regimes they had later overthrown. Both had come to power as members and then leaders of anti-capitalist workers’ parties. Both worked erratically, favouring late nights and summer retreats(Stalin’s equivalent of Ober-salzberg was his villa at Sochi on the Black Sea). Both had difficulties with women. Hitler’s niece Geli Raubal, on whom he had jealously doted, had shot herself in September 1931; Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva had done the same thing just fourteen months later, also driven to suicide by the attentions of an obsessive
older man – twenty-two years older in each case. Both girls were replaced by more robust types: the wholesome receptionist Eva, the plump housekeeper Vatcheka. Moreover, although ten years his junior, Hitler seemed be learning fast from Stalin’s example just what it took to be a dictator. On the Night of the Long Knives he had shown that he too could purge his own party of potential rivals; Stalin was impressed. (‘Did you hear what happened in Germany?’ he remarked to Anastas Mikoyan. ‘Some fellow that Hitler! Splendid! That’s a deed of some skill!’) In the SS and Gestapo Hitler had created a secret police system that looked and functioned a good deal like Stalin’s NKVD. He had openly modelled his Four-Year Plan for the German economy on Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, breaking with his Economics Minister Schacht to impose something more like a command system. Now, in Poland, Hitler was demonstrating a promising propensity for mass murder – though at this stage he still seemed unlikely to catch up with Stalin, who had already been responsible for at the very least six million deaths by the end of 1938.

  The two regimes even looked the same. This had been obvious since the Paris World Exposition of 1937, when the Nazi and Soviet pavilions had confronted one another like totalitarian obelisks on the right bank of the River Seine. The German pavilion, designed by Hitler’s pet architect, Albert Speer, was a 500-foot tower crowned with a giant eagle and swastika, surrounded by nine pillars decorated with gold mosaics and more swastikas. At its foot stood the sculptor Josef Thorak’s Comradeship, two 22-foot-high nude supermen, hand in hand. The Soviet pavilion, by Boris Iofan, was an equally monolithic tower, supporting Vera Mukhina’s stainless steel statue Worker and Collective Farm Girl. To be sure, the pavilions were not identical. The Germans sneered at the ‘barbaric formalism’ of the Soviet pavilion, while the Russians decried the ‘sterile and false… fascist neoclassicism’ of the Nazi pavilion. Nevertheless, as the Italian artist Gino Severini noticed, the exhibits had much in common – particularly ‘their obvious intention of making size, making immense pompous size’. This was not accidental. According to Speer, while looking over the site before the Exposition he had ‘stumbled into a room containing the secret sketch of the Soviet pavilion’: