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

by Niall Ferguson

  SLAUGHTERHOUSE ’45

  On January 27, 1945 – three and a half months after an abortive revolt by the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Crematoriums II and VI – the first Soviet troops reached the gates of Auschwitz. Among the 7,000 or so prisoners who had been not been sent to Wodzisław or Blechhammer for transportation to camps in Germany was Primo Levi, the Italian chemist whose scientific skills had saved him from the gas chambers. In unforgettable prose, he described the moment:

  They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well: the shame the Germans did not know; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist… So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled… so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them. We felt that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out the past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain with us forever. No one has ever been able to grasp better than us the incurable nature of the offence.

  Similar scenes were repeated at concentration camps all over the disintegrating Nazi empire: skeletal survivors staggering amid the corpses; incredulous soldiers like beings from another planet.

  Yet there was something deeply paradoxical about the idea of ‘liberation’ by Stalin’s Soviet Union.* For the regime that had produced the Gulag had no serious interest in liberation in any meaningful sense. Returning to what little remained of Dresden, Victor Klemperer was too well attuned to the language of totalitarianism not to detect the uncanny resemblances between the liberators and those from whom he had just been liberated. He could not help but notice that the ‘monotonous’ radio broadcasts and ‘politicized’ newssheets produced by the Soviet occupying authorities had much in common with those of the previous regime. ‘I must slowly begin to pay systematic attention’, he wrote in hisdiary, ‘to the language of the fourth Reich. It sometimes seems to me, that it is less different from that of the third than, say, the Saxon [dialect] of Dresden from that of Leipzig. When, for example, Marshal Stalin is the greatest living man, the most brilliant strategist etc…. I want to study our news sheet… very carefully with respect to LQI [lingua quartii imperii – Language of the Fourth Reich].’ He soon began to spot numerous ‘analogies between Nazistic and Bolshevistic language’:

  The LTI [lingua tertii imperii – Language of the Third Reich] lives on… In Stalin’s speeches, extracts of which regularly appear, Hitler and Ribbentrop are cannibals and monsters. In the articles about Stalin, the supreme commander of the Soviet Union is the most brilliant general of all times and the most brilliant of all men living… It is impossible to say just how often I hear ‘orientation’, ‘action’, ‘militant’. All that’s missing now is ‘fanatical’… the same, the very same words – LTI = LQI!!! ‘align’, ‘militant’, ‘true democracy’ etc. etc.

  Even on the streets there were similarities: ‘On Albertplatz the picture of “Marshal Stalin”… could just as well be Hermann Goering.’ As far as Klemperer could see, Communist rule – and he saw at once that this would be the upshot of Soviet-style ‘true democracy’ – would merely ‘replace the old lack of freedom with a new one’. These were indeed ‘merciless victors… And because I have observed all this in the Third Reich, and because I must now, whether I like it or not, regard everything with respect to its effect on the Jews, I do not feel very happy about it.’ ‘I see a new Hitlerism coming,’ he wrote as early as September 1945. ‘I do not feel at all safe.’ Given the anti-Semitism that characterized post-war Stalinism, this was prescient.

  Nothing illustrated more starkly what was really happening in the summer of 1945 than the fact that, within weeks of taking possession of the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Soviets were using it to incarcerate political prisoners of their own. To be sure, the Holocaust was over; Stalin’s suspicion of the Soviet and East European Jews – denounced in the official press as ‘cosmopolitans’ or ‘passportless vagabonds’ – never portended a return to the gas chambers. At any event, Stalin died before the alleged ‘Doctors’ Plot’ could be worked up into a full-scale wave of persecution. In other ways, however, all that had changed were the criteria whereby certain groups and individuals were deprived of their freedom. The concentration camps of Eastern Europe were merely under new management.

  At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, the victors struck splendidly sanctimonious attitudes. ‘Stern justice’, they promised, would be ‘meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners’. Despite the absence of an appropriate body of international law, the Americans insisted on full criminal prosecutions of a substantial number of Germans and Japanese who had occupied positions of power before and during the war. ‘The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish,’ declared the US Attorney-General Robert H. Jackson, ‘have been so calculated, so malignant and devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.’ The crux of the case at Nuremberg, as agreed by the victorious powers in London in the summer of 1945, was that the leaders of Germany and Japan had premeditated and unleashed ‘aggressive war’ and ‘set in motion evils which [had left] no home in the world untouched’. They were accused, firstly, of the ‘planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression, or war in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. Yet whose side had the Soviet Union been on in 1939? By the same token, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial in Tokyo included ‘the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle… but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields’. But what else had the Allies perpetrated in Germany and Japan in the last months of the war?

  Death came not only from the sky. As the Soviets advanced inexorably, around five million Germans fled their homes, trudging westwards with carts piled high with their possessions. German ports along the Baltic were jammed with refugees. By January 1945 the scenes in Gdynia – renamed Goten hafen by the Nazis – were next to apocalyptic. Tens of thousands of people thronged the waterfront, desperate to secure evacuation by sea to Western Germany. This was their only hope of escaping from the marauding Red Army, whose artillery could be heard drawing ever nearer. The 4,400 refugees who managed to scramble aboard the former pleasure cruiser Wilhelm Gustloff must have thought themselves fortunate. In all, including soldiers, marines, wounded and crew, there were more than 6,000 people crowded on board when she set off on January 30 – four times the number she was designed to carry. With only a minimal escort (a single aged torpedo boat), the captain was relying on the blizzard conditions for protection. As they ploughed westwards through heavy seas, Hitler’s last broadcast was relayed to the exhausted passengers over the public address system. Reassured by their progress and the warmth emanating from the ship’s straining engines, many of them settled down to sleep in the crowded cabins. Shortly before 8 p.m. the ship was sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, commanded by Captain Aleksandr Marinesko. Under the cloud of a disciplinary investigation after going AWOL on a drinking binge in Finland, Marinesko waseager to make amends. The Wilhelm Gustloff seemed a heaven sent opportunity. ‘I was sure,’ Marinesko later said, ‘that it was packed with men who had trampled on Mother Russia and were now fleeing for their lives.’ He ordered all four torpedoes to be fired at it. Each of the three that hit the ship bore a painted inscription: ‘For Leningrad’, ‘For the Motherland’ and ‘For the Soviet People’. The first torpedo struck its target at 9.16 precisely. Only 964 of those on board were picked up by German rescuers; at least some of them later died of exposure. It was one of the worst shipping disasters in history, with a death toll five timesthat of the Titanic.

  Marinesko’s torpedoes encapsulated the vengeful frame of mind in which the Soviet forces closed
on Germany for the kill. When they reached Berlin, sections of the Red Army – generally not the front-line troops – ran amok in scenes reminiscent of the Rape of Nanking. German women were treated not merely as the sexual spoils of war, but as targets for brutal retribution. In the Haus Dahlem orphanage and maternity hospital in the leafy suburb of Dahlem, Mother Superior Cunegundes and the other sisters could only cower in the cellar and pray as the fighting raged around them between front-line Red Army units and the last desperate remnants of the German Volkssturm. Shells landed within feet of the orphanage. For days the nuns and their wards lived ‘like the first Christians in the catacombs’. On April 26, ten Russians burst into the house and demanded their crosses, rings and watches. It was the first of many intrusions and very far from the worst. On the night of the 29th, Soviet officer sand their men ransacked the wine cellar of a nearby villa (it had belonged to Ribbentrop) and then proceeded to hunt down women to rape. The nunstried their best to conceal the pregnant women and new mothers in the orphanage, as well as the younger lay sisters. But it was far from clear that the inebriated Soviet troops would respect even the nuns themselves. The Mother Superior herself was shot at when she tried to protect the Ukrainian cook. Late on the 30th a group of drunk officers broke into the maternity ward. They raped even the women who were in labour or who had just given birth. To the nuns it was all too clear: ‘Our people have sinned greatly. The time for atonement is upon us.’ ‘That’s what the Germans did in Russia,’ Ilse Antz was told after a Russian had raped her. As at Nanking, sexual desire was mingled with bloodlust. Hannelore von Cmuda was shot three times by the drunk Russians who gang raped her. Others had their heads battered in. The two main Berlin hospitals estimated the number of victims in the capital at between 95,000 and 130,000. Such behaviour had already been experienced by Germans further east, in Posen, Danzig and Breslau. According to one British prisoner of war in Pomerania, ‘Red soldiers… raped every woman and girl between the ages of twelve and sixty.’ Altogether it seems likely that Soviet soldiers raped over two million German women. Thisshould be compared with the 925 sentences for rape passed by US Army courts martial in all theatres of war between 1942 and 1946.

  In this atmosphere, with Goebbels’s blood-curdling propaganda prophecies being fulfilled almost to the letter, it is not entirely surprising that a wave of suicides swept Berlin and other parts of Germany. Hitler was not the only Nazi to follow Brünnhilde’s example. Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler all committed suicide, as did the Minister of Justice Otto-Georg Thierack and the Minister for Culture Bernhard Rust, as well as eight out of 41 regional party leaders, seven out of 47 senior SS and police chiefs, fifty-three out of 553 army generals, fourteen out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and eleven out of 53 admirals. (To escape the hangman’s rope, Göring would follow them when the Nuremberg judges denied him the firing squad he requested.) This suicidal impulse was not confined to the Nazi elite, however. Ordinary Germans in untold numbers responded to the prospect of defeat in the same way. Many of those who equipped themselves with potassium cyanide capsules – or were given them, like the audience at the Berlin Philharmonic’s last concert – opted to swallow them rather than face the retribution that was bearing down upon them. In April 1945 there were 3,881 recorded suicides in Berlin, nearly twenty timesthe figure for March. The most common motivation was ‘fear of the Russian invasion’. In villages like Schönlanke and Schivelbein in Pomerania, ‘whole, good churchgoing families took their lives – drowned themselves, hanged themselves, slit their wrists or allowed themselves to be burned up along with their homes.’ On March 12 the advancing Russians opened the doors of a shed just outside Danzig to find sixteen bodies with their throats and wrists slashed – all that remained of three families murdered by Irwin Schwartz, who believed it was ‘better to die than live with Russians’. Untold numbers of rape victims also committed suicide. In her diary, Ruth-Andreas Friedrich, a Berlin schoolgirl, recorded how her teacher had told the class: ‘If a Russian soldier violates you, there remains nothing but death.’ In the days that followed, her classmates ‘kill[ed] themselves by the hundreds. The phrase “honour lost, everything lost” had been the words of a distraught father who press[ed] a rope into the hand of his daughter who had been violated twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself.’ Critics of National Socialism had sometimes referred to it as ‘the brown cult’. Like other more recent cults, the Hitler cult ended with mass suicide.

  The Red Army was not alone in meting out collective punishment to the entire German people. All over Eastern Europe there were brutal reprisals against both Reich German and ethnic German populations. As early as February 5, 1945, a Polish radio broadcast made it clear that there could be no reconciliation now: ‘Through their bestiality and the enormity of their crimes, the Germans have created between themselves sand the Polesan abyss which cannot be bridged… It is our wish that there should not be any German minority in Poland.’ Demonstrators in Katowice declared that ‘the Polesshould treat the Germans in the same way as the German invaderstreated the Poles.’ The position of Polish Communist leader Władysław Gomułka was that ‘countriesare built on national lines and not multinational ones.’ This had profound implications, given Stalin’s decision, more or less sanctioned at the Tehran Conference (November 27–December 1, 1943), to move the Polish border westwards as far as the Rivers Oder and Neisse, so that East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, Posen and Silesia all ceased to be German territory. The tables were turned as Germans in Silesian towns like Bad Salzbrunn were confronted with proclamations ordering their enforced ‘resettlement’ westwards. Now it was Germans, not Poles, who were given just hours to leave their homes; who were restricted to just 20 kilograms of baggage; whose remaining property was seized without compensation; who were marched at gunpoint in wretched columns. Western journalists in Prague encountered the same uncompromising antipathy. As Dorothy Thompson reported in the Washington Evening Star on June 22, 1945: ‘The people’s hatred of all Germans, including those native to Prague, is 100 per cent and, indiscriminately, they wish to expel from the country everyone whose native tongue is German.’ There was a wave of murderous violence directed against the German occu-piersand Sudeten Germans.

  The story was similar all over Central and Eastern Europe: retributive ethnic cleansing, which the Allied leaders formally sanctioned at the Potsdam Conference. In Hungary the villages of the Danube Swabians became ghost towns, though the expulsions from Hungary were suspended in February 1946 at the request of the American and Soviet occupation authorities in Germany, who could no longer cope with the flow of refugees. Those who stayed had good reason to abandon their German identity. By the time of the Hungarian census of January 1949, only 22,453 people still gave German as their mother tongue, though the actual number of ethnic Germans remaining there was probably much larger. ‘Law Number 1’ in Yugoslavia expropriated all Germans and removed their civil rights; in the immediate post-war period, tens of thousands of Germans were murdered or interned in concentration camps. Around 100,000 Romanian Germans had retreated with the Wehrmacht. Many of those who remained behind came to regret it. Beginning in January 1945, around 73,000 ethnic Germans – women as well as men, Communists as well as Nazis – were transported from Romania to perform ‘reparations labour’ in the mines of the Donets Basin and the Urals. In all, around 400,000 Germans from all over Soviet-occupied Europe suffered the same fate. Around 200,000 formerly Soviet Germans who had attempted to reach Germany from what had briefly been ‘Transnistria’ never completed their trek; the Red Army overtook them and sent them back and beyond the Urals in sealed freight cars. They were joined there later by tens of thousands more former Soviet Germans whom the Western Allies handed over for repatriation from their zones of occupation in Germany. The Volksdeutsche had staked everything on Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft. It had brought them scant reward even in the halcyon days of Greater Germany, when around three-quarters of a million of them had been resettled in one way or anot
her. Now the problem that had once been posed by their minority status in the post-1918 nation states was solved once and for all. Romania was the only East European state that did not aim at a complete obliteration of its ethnic German communities; even so, its population of ethnic Germans was reduced by nearly half. In all, then, around seven million ethnic Germans were expelled or deported from their homes in Czechoslovakia, Poland (including the former Eastern provinces of the Reich), Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, following on the heels of the 5.6 million who had already fled westwards to elude the Red Army. Add the Germans thus removed to the number of Volksdeutsche the Nazis themselves had resettled priorto1944, and the total figure for Germans removed either westwards or eastwards from Central and Eastern Europe comes to around13million (Table 16.2). The number of people who died in this great upheaval may have been as high as two million.