The German exodus was only part of a vast displacement of peoples that followed in the wake of the war, though it was the most important part. In all, between 1944 and 1948, an estimated 31 million people all over Central and Eastern were uprooted from their homes, in one of the largest and most brutal mass movements of population in all history. In the Balkans there was yet more ethnic cleansing, as Bulgarians left eastern Macedonia and western Thrace, and Serbs settled wartime scores with Croats. With the westward shift of Poland’s boundaries agreed at Tehran, Poles and the country’s few remaining Jews went west, while Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Lithuanians went east. Czechs and Slovaksquit Subcarpathian Rus’ and Volhynia rather than endure Soviet rule. Magyars were expelled from southern Slovakia and were exchanged for Serbs and Croatsliving in Hungary.
Did the British and the Americans feel no unease as the crimes of the Nazi regime were repaid with new crimes by their Soviet allies? If so, they did not say so very loudly. The mood in London was anything
Table 16.2: The involuntary exodus of the Germans
but magnanimous towards the vanquished foe. In the House of Lords, the former Foreign Secretary Lord Simon spoke for many when he attributed the rise of Hitler to a deep-rooted deformity of the German national character. A. J. P. Taylor’s The Course of German History, published in 1945, remains a monument to the post-war cast of mind. Long before West German historians themselves began to ponder the German Sonderweg – a peculiarly German route to perdition, stretching back into the nineteenth century and beyond – the idea was a commonplace in Britain. Churchill himself viewed the deportation of ‘the Austrians, Saxons and other German or quasi-German elements’ from Romania to Russia with equanimity:
Considering all that Russia has suffered, and the wanton attacks made upon her by Roumania, and the vast armies the Russians are using at the front at the present time, and the terrible condition of the people in many parts of Europe, I cannot see that the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage.
The de facto partition of Germany had already begun as early as November 1943, when Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to hand over the Prussian port of Königsberg to the Soviet Union and to move the Polish border westwards. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Big Three agreed vaguely to divide the rest of Germany up into zones of occupation and this duly happened. From the new Polish frontier on the Oder-Neisse line to the River Elbe – what had once been Central Germany – became the Soviet zone of occupation. Western Germany was divided up between Britain, the United States and France; Berlin became a four-power island in the Soviet zone. Austria too was divided into zones of occupation. The expulsion of the Germans from territory east of the Oder-Neisse line was ratified – largely ex post facto – at Potsdam. After the First World War, slices had been removed from the periphery of the German Reich. After the Second, the Reich itself was rent asunder. Germany did not cease to exist, since the Americans in particular made it clear from the outset that they intended a swift transition to German self-government. But the German Reich was finished, as was Prussia, its begetter.
It was not only the Germans who bore the brunt of the Red Army’s westward advance, however. By the end of 1944 most of Eastern and much of Central Europe – including Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia – was in the hands of the Red Army. All this had been envisaged by the Big Three at Tehran. It was also a reflection of military reality; the American Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall, and the Allied Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, simply had no interest in racing the Russians to Berlin, much less to Prague, nor in competing with them for control of the Balkans. ‘Personally,’ declared Marshall, ‘and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.’ No such inhibitions held Stalin and Zhukov back from throwing yet more Soviet soldiers’ lives away in over-hasty offensives. But no one could pretend that Russian occupation was the outcome hoped for by the subject peoples of the Nazi empire. While Tito’s Communist Partisans were only too happy to welcome the Russians to Belgrade, the mood elsewhere – where the numbers of committed Communists were pitifully small – was hostile and resentful. Few Poles, aside from those who fought on the Soviet side under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Zygmunt Berling, welcomed ‘liberation’ at Russian hands. Stalin had shed no tears when the Polish resistance forces, known as the Home Army, were annihilated after staging a doomed rising in Warsaw against the Germans between August 1 and October 2, 1944. (How far the Red Army had been in a position to intervene decisively on the Home Army’s side is debatable. But Stalin would not have acted even if it had been; it was too convenient to have the Germans get rid of the most committed nationalists in the Polish capital.) Only the most halfhearted efforts were made by the Western powers to press the claims of the non-Communist Polish government-in-exile. ‘Not only are the Russians very powerful,’ explained Churchill to Harold Nicolson in February 1945, ‘but they are on the spot; even the massed majesty of the British Empire would not avail to turn them off that spot.’ In his diary Nicolson added that ‘it seemed to him [Churchill] a mistake to assume that the Russians are going to behave badly. Ever since he had been in close relations with Stalin, the latter had kept his word with the utmost loyalty.’ But the commitment Churchill probably had in mind – the notorious ‘percentagesagreement’ he and Stalin had jotted down to carve up the Balkans in 1944 – was little better than a blueprint for the partition of Europe. ‘Do you intend’, Churchill had asked Fitzroy Maclean, who had been sent to Bosnia to assist Tito, ‘to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?’ ‘No, Sir,’ replied Maclean. ‘Neither do I,’ returned the Prime Minister. ‘And, that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of Government they set up, the better. That is for them to decide.’ But was it for the Yugoslavs to decide? At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill had secured a commitment from Stalin that the liberated peoples would be free to choose their form of government. Not even Roosevelt expected Stalin to abide by it; the Russians, he told the economist Leon Henderson, would ‘suit themselves’. ‘Do not worry,’ Stalin reassured his Foreign Minister Molotov. ‘We can implement it in our own way later.’ All across the Eastern half of Europe Stalin lost no time in erecting a new network of camps, numbering very nearly 500 by the time of his death. Stalag gave way to Gulag.
The irony was not lost on Churchill that it was now his policy to appease Stalin; whereas many of the anti-Communist Tories who had once been the staunchest appeasers of Hitler were now violently hawkish in their denunciations of Soviet conduct. Only The Times was consistent. Jesuitically, the newspaper pointed out that the 1939 guarantee to Poland had only pledged its defence in the event of a German invasion; it did not commit Britain to restore Poland to her pre-war borders against Stalin’s wishes. In keeping with the power-worshipping realism of E. H. Carr, The Times counselled that Stalin, like Hitler before him, had legitimate claims to ‘security’ which it was the job of British diplomacy to divine and to fulfil. Nicolson, meanwhile, tried to justify himself as best he could:
People say to me, ‘But why, when you cursed us for wishing to appease Hitler, do you advocate the appeasement of Stalin?’ I reply, ‘For several reasons. First, because the Nazi system was more evil than the Soviet system. Secondly, because whereas Hitler used every surrender on our part as a stepping-off place for further aggression, there does exist a line beyond which Stalin will not go.’
In May 1945 such confidence in the self-restraint of Stalin was no more than a pioushope.
Nothing revealed more clearly the nature of the pact the Allies had struck with Stalin than the way Soviet prisoners of war were treated. At Yalta, it had been agreed that all Soviet citizens in Axis hands should be returned to the Soviet authorities, including not only prisoners of war and slave labourers but also those Russians who had fought on the Axisside, like the 150,000 troops who had trained under the leade
rship of the turncoat General Andrei Vlasov or the 20,000 Cossacks who had joined the Germans to fight against their Soviet oppressors. In 1945 alone 1.7 million Soviet prisoners and slave labourers were returned, but this was only the beginning of a vast process of repatriation which by 1953 had sent nearly five and a half million people back to the Soviet Union. Of these around a fifth were either executed or sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years in labour camps. Shamefully, British troops used deception and brute force to implement this agreement, despite glaring evidence of the fate that awaited those handed back to Stalin. Even those who were not shot or exiled after their interrogation by the NKVD lived the rest of their lives under a cloud, excluded from respectable employment.
Of course, not all the murder, the rape and the pillage that devastated Central and Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945 should be blamed on Stalin. The dance of death that played itself out in the ruins of the Third Reich was only partly choreographed in Moscow. Much of the violence against ethnic Germans was local and spontaneous. Poles and Ukrainians continued their savage border war for several years after 1945, even as the border itself moved beneath them. On Palm Sunday 1945 a band of Ukrainians dressed in NKVD uniforms drew up outside a Polish church in Hrubieszów and threw grenades at the congregation. Meanwhile, the civil war that the Axis powers had sponsored in the Balkans raged on, to the advantage of the Communists in Yugoslavia, to their disadvantage in Greece. As a cruel reminder that the Holocaust had not been an exclusively German undertaking, violence continued to be directed against the surviving Jews in Poland. There was a fully fledged pogrom in Kielce in July 1946, aimed at Jews who were attempting to return to their old homes.
Nevertheless, by the end of 1947, if not earlier, the net effect of the war in Europe was clear. In 1939 Britain had gone to war with Germany ostensibly to prevent Poland being overrun by Germany, as Czechoslovakia had been the year before. By the end of 1945 neither country was any nearer freedom and with each passing month that prospect grew more distant. Central and Eastern Europe as far as the banks of the River Elbe was in Stalin’s iron fist. If the war had been about the fate of that region, then he had won it.
WAR WITHOUT END?
Who, moreover, had really won the war in Asia? It is true, the West European empires were not wholly broken up. Although the price of India’s loyalty turned out to be its independence (and partition) Britain regained control of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya. French power was restored in Indo-China. The experience of Japanese occupation had no doubt weakened the notions of European superiority on which colonial rule in some measure rested. On the other hand, local elites in Malaya and elsewhere had good reasons to welcome back European forces, if the alternative was to surrender power to more popular political forces within their own societies.
Yet the main beneficiary of victory in Asia, as in Europe, was once again the Soviet Union. At Tehran, Stalin had pledged to enter the war against Japan after the defeat of Germany, and at Yalta he had been promised an ample remuneration: the Kuril Islands, South Sakhalin, Outer Mongolia, Dairen, Port Arthur and the Manchurian railways. He had kept his word. On August 9, 1945, he had sent a vast force of 1.7 million troops into Japanese controlled Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin and the Kurils. Fighting in this forgotten campaign had been heavy; the Japanese suffered very heavy casualties as they fought tenaciously against Soviet amphibious landings along the Korean coast. This, perhaps, was the war the Japanese should have fought; one which, had it broken out in 1941, might have dealt the Soviet Union a fatal blow from behind. But by 1945 their forces lacked the material means to prevail. The logical next step for Stalin was to make the Russian presence in Manchuria and Korea permanent – the pre-revolutionary Russian strategy that had been thwarted by the Japanese forty years before. The hasty American response was to divide the country into two provisional zones of occupation, leaving Stalin all the territory north of the somewhat arbitrarily selected 38th parallel. Thus, as in Europe, the end of the war in Asia meant an improvised partition of contested territory. It also represented a triumph of Russian foreign policy beyond the fondest imaginings of the Tsars.
It was not so much that Stalin had a premeditated plan for Asian empire; rather, the Americans under estimated the extent to which nationalist movements in East Asia would run out of their control. The notion that Korea could be placed in some kind of international trusteeship proved completely unrealistic as indigenous politics burst into life after the Japanese defeat. Both Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee were, first and foremost, nationalists, and it was their ambitions more than the superpowers’ that set Korea on course for partition. At the same time, the Americans overestimated the stability of the Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, whose value both to the war effort and to the future stability of East Asia was always much less than Roosevelt had hoped. Chiang, the President had said, was an ‘unconquerable man… of great vision [and]… great courage’. He had been given the red-carpet treatment at the Cairo Conference of November 1943. Post-war China, Roosevelt insisted, would be one of the Big Four, along with the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. It turned out that Stilwell’s low opinion of ‘Peanut’ had been the right one. With the Japanese gone, the miseries suffered by the Chinese peasantry since the 1930scould no longer be blamed on a foreign invader. Increasingly, the Communists’ criticisms of Chiang’s regime as corrupt and incompetent won converts in the countryside. Even with American support, Chiang’s position began to crumble as the Communist forces – even without Russian support – advanced southwards and the civil war resumed. The Truman administration relaxed when Stalin recognized Chiang’s government and with drew Soviet troops from Manchuria in March 1946. So low was Truman’s estimation of Chiang’s regime that he seemed in different to the possibility that Chiang might be ousted altogether by an indigenous (but Soviet backed) Communist revolution. This relaxation was unwarranted.
In one of his last political musings, dictated to Martin Bormann on April 2, 1945, none other than Hitler, in a rare moment of percipience, had foretold the coming Cold War:
Between the defeat of the Reich and the rise of nationalist movements in Asia, Africa and perhaps also South America there will be only two powers in the world that can face each other on the basis of equal strength: the USA and Soviet Russia. The laws of history dictate that these two colossuses will test their strength, whether militarily, or just economically and ideologically.
In this he was surely right. The Second World War had undoubtedly ended in the summer of 1945 – on May 7 in Western Europe, on May 8 in Eastern Europe and on August 15 in Asia (or perhaps on September 2, when the Japanese belatedly signed the document confirming their surrender). Yet the War of the World was very far from over. For what had begun in the European border lands of Poland and in the Asian borderlands of Manchuria continued more or less unabated in the years after 1945.
Churchillian appeasement of Stalin was short-lived. It was on May 13, 1945 – less than a week after VE Day – that Churchill alarmed Brooke with the vehemence of his view son the future of Yugoslavia; so ‘delighted’ was the Prime Minister by ‘a telegram from Truman, full of bellicose views and ready to be rough with Tito’, that he gave Brooke the feeling he was ‘already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting Russia!’ The Chiefs of Staff had actually considered the possibility of a future confrontation with the Soviets as early as October 1944, though Brooke regarded the idea as ‘fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible’. Churchill, however, countered that the atomic bomb ‘would redress the balance with the Soviets’, as an appalled Brooke recorded in his diary:
The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was a drift since the defeat of Germany! Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, Sebastapol etc. etc. And now where ar
e the Russians!!!
This was prophetic indeed, before the Bomb had even been dropped on Hiroshima. In July 1945 Churchill asked the defence chiefs to work out the viability of a surprise attack on the Soviet Union – using, if necessary, German troops. With good reason this notion was given the name ‘Operation Unthinkable’.
Yet the most puzzling thing about the origins of the Cold War is that Churchill proved to be wrong. The Bomb did not redress the balance – or, rather, did not tip the balance decidedly in favour of the Western powers– as it should have. Stalin was without question impressed by it. ‘War is barbaric,’ he had declared on hearing details of the destruction of Hiroshima, ‘but using the A-bomb is a superbarbarity.’ It was ‘a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!’ If he were to act in such a way that a Third World War broke out, he told a Chinese delegation to Moscow, ‘the Russian people would not understand us. Moreover, they would chase us away. For underestimating all the wartime and post-war efforts and suffering. For taking it too lightly.’ Yet Stalin was careful to conceal his anxiety, insisting in an interview that ‘atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves’. He refused to appear intimidated, despite the fact that the first successful Soviet test did not take place until August 1949; despite the fact that throughout the 1950s the balance of nuclear advantage was overwhelmingly in favour of the United States. Moreover – and perhaps Stalin divined this – Truman was deeply reluctant to use atomic weapons again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Bomb might be ‘powerful’, but not if its owners were bluffing.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 71