Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  a whole people could arise from the ovens

  and the world, with God’s help, go on.39

  • • •

  SPEAKING ABOUT FRANCE during the war, Tony Judt wrote that for active resisters or collaborators, “their main enemy, more often than not, was each other: the Germans were largely absent.”40 The same thing could be said about many countries under foreign occupation: Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, China, Vietnam, Indonesia. Occupation forces, like all colonial governments, exploit tensions that existed before. Without the Germans, Vichy’s reactionary autocrats would not have come to power, and neither would Croatia’s murderous Ante Pavelić and his fascistic Ustaša. In Flanders, the Flemish National Union worked with the Nazi occupiers in the hope of emancipating themselves from the Francophone Walloons in a German-dominated Europe. In Italy and Greece, fascists as well as other right-wingers collaborated with the Germans for their own gain, but also to fend off the left.

  And in China? When the Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, in 1972, apologized to Chairman Mao for what his country had done to the Chinese during the war, Mao, who was not without a macabre sense of humor, told his foreign guest to relax: It is us who should thank you, he said; without you we would never have come to power. Mao was right. What happened in China was the most dramatic example of unintended consequences. The Japanese shared with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists a horror of communism; there were even some attempts at collaboration; one faction of the Nationalists did, in fact, collaborate. But by fatally wounding the Nationalists, the Japanese helped the Communists win the civil war which was simmering in 1945 and came to a climax soon after.

  The civil war in China, as in Greece, had begun well before the invasions by foreign armies. In France and Italy civil war was not far under the surface. And the European practice of divide and rule in Asian colonies created enough bad blood for any number of social conflicts to erupt. But by exploiting these divisions, the Germans and Japanese made them lethal.

  Communists and leftists had played a major role in anti-Nazi, or antifascist resistance, while the German and Japanese efforts at empire-building tainted many figures on the right with collaboration. The French Communist Party, proud of its resistance record, called itself “le Parti des Fusillés,” the party of the executed. Even fellow leftists who resisted the Stalinist line adopted by the Party were denounced by communists as unpatriotic or even as collaborators—“Hitlerotrotskyists.” The history of armed resistance of the left, not unreasonably, led to revolutionary demands for a new order. After the war, the Soviet Union exploited these demands, at least in countries within its sphere of influence, while the Western Allies disarmed and helped to crush some of the very forces who had fought on their side against Germany and Japan. Not only that, but it was with Allied help that some members of the old collaborationist elites came back to power. These were the seeds that would later develop into the Cold War.

  Collaboration was not always a straightforward matter, however. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s communist Partisans negotiated in 1943 with the Germans, because Tito wanted a “free hand” to attack the Serbian royalist Chetniks (or ). In the autumn of the same year, the Chetniks collaborated with the Germans to fight off Tito’s Partisans. The Bosnian Muslims cooperated with anyone who would protect them: the Croatian fascists, Serbian Partisans, even the Nazis. And all these temporary alliances were made in opposition to domestic, not foreign, enemies.

  In France, most collaborators did not work directly for the German occupiers, but for a French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. With German help, the Vichyistes thought they would restore France, the true France, of Church, family, and patriotism, shorn of liberals, Jews, Freemasons, and other blots on La France profonde. Italian fascists could not really be called collaborators until 1943, when Italy was occupied by German troops, and the authority of Benito Mussolini’s fascists was reduced to a tiny Nazi puppet state on Lake Garda. But the previous twenty years of Italian fascism had engendered enough loathing for the left to embark on a ferocious campaign of vengeance once the Germans started leaving.

  Harold Macmillan, the later British prime minister, was Churchill’s plenipotentiary for the Mediterranean countries. In April 1945, he was driven to Bologna in an army jeep for a meeting with the Allied military commander, who had just installed himself in the splendid and undamaged Municipio, or town hall. He found the bodies of two well-known local liberals lying in state, with tearful crowds passing by to pay their last respects. The two liberals had been shot by members of the fascist Black Brigade, who had fled town just a day before. “The coffins were open,” Macmillan noted in his diary, “so that friends and admirers could see the faces of their leaders for the last time. They had been shot against the wall of the Municipio—the bloodstains were clear. Above the place where they had stood were already flowers and—pathetically—photographs of men and women of all ages who had been put to death during recent months by the Fascist Black Brigade.”

  After quoting this passage from his diary, Macmillan goes on to say: “The Prefect—a Fascist—had failed to make his escape in time. He had been shot by the partisans next to his last victim. You could see the brains spattered against the brick and the blood on the ground.”41 Macmillan then went off to have lunch, and observed that the Italian cooks who had previously served Italian food to German officers now served American food to the Allied officers. “There was a moral in this,” he wrote, without quite divulging what that moral might have been.

  Among the victims of the partisan reprisals in April 1945 were Mussolini himself, with his mistress, Clara Petacci. They were caught while attempting to escape to Austria with German soldiers from an antiaircraft unit. When they were stopped at a roadblock manned by partisans, the Germans were told to go on their way; the partisans had no more interest in them. But the Italians had to stay behind. Mussolini, despite wearing a German army greatcoat over his red-striped Italian general’s riding trousers, was recognized. On April 28, he, Clara, and fifteen fascists picked at random were machine-gunned in front of a country villa on Lake Garda. The following day, they were hung, like game, upside down from a girder at an Esso gas station on a shabby square in Milan, exposed to the wrath of the mob. Soon their faces were barely recognizable.

  Edmund Wilson was shown the spot where it happened a month later. The names of the executed were still daubed in black on the girder of the now abandoned Esso station. Wilson wrote: “Over the whole city hung the stink of the killing of Mussolini and his followers, the exhibition of their bodies in public and the defilement of them by the crowd. Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”42

  But this was just one instance of possibly twenty thousand killings of fascists and collaborators in the north of Italy between April and July. Eight thousand in Piedmont. Four thousand in Lombardy. Three thousand in Emilia. Three thousand in Milan province.43 Many were summarily executed by partisans, dominated by communists. Others were quickly tried in makeshift people’s courts, the so-called justice of the piazza. The killings were swift and sometimes involved innocents. Known fascists were gunned down together with their wives and children. Most recipients of rough justice were police officers and fascist government officials. Even those already in prison were not safe. On July 17, the Schio prison near Vicenza was raided by masked partisans, who murdered fifty-five incarcerated fascists. Some of these avengers were hardened resistance fighters. Some were the kind of last-minute heroes who swelled the ranks of the resistance everywhere, once the real fighting was over. Some were criminals who used their new “patriotic” status to blackmail rich businessmen or landowners, or loot their properties.

  In Italy, too, however, revenge often had a political agenda; it was a revolutionary settling of scores. Communist partisans saw the purges as a necessary struggle against capitalism. Since big corporations, such as Fiat in Turin, had worked with Mussolini’s regime, they
were seen as legitimate targets. Even though the most powerful businessmen from Turin or Milan had usually managed to save their skins by crossing the Swiss border, or buying potential killers off with black market goods, the corpses of lower-ranking figures did have a way of ending up dumped in front of the gates of local cemeteries.

  Seriously worried about a communist revolution in Italy, the Allied Military Government quickly tried to disarm the partisans, many of whom had fought bravely against the Germans. Conservative Italian politicians supported this effort, not surprisingly, since some of them had been close to the fascists themselves. Indeed, the slowness of the provisional Italian government in Rome to punish the fascists was one reason why the “justice of the piazza” came about in the first place.

  As a sop to the pride of former partisans, parades were organized in various cities, with Allied commanders, flanked by Italian notables, taking the salute of partisan military units decked out in scarves denoting their different allegiances: red for the leftists, blue for the Christians, green for the autonomi, mostly deserters from the Italian army. Many had given up their weapons, but by no means all. The radical left remained strong, and sometimes armed. Still, as it turned out, conservatives needn’t have worried. There was to be no revolution in Italy. In return for extending his empire to central Europe, Stalin agreed to leave the Mediterranean to the Western Allies. But murderous reprisals still went on, and the fear of communism in Italy, as well as a bitter sense of betrayal on the left, would continue, in some cases well into the twenty-first century.

  Edmund Wilson, whose sympathies were always on the left, viewed these proceedings with distaste. The main American contribution to Italy’s postwar democracy, he noted, was “calling one of our telephone exchanges Freedom; and, after our arming and encouragement of the Partisans through the period when they were serving our purpose, we are now taking their weapons away from them, forbidding them to make political speeches, and throwing them in jail if they give any trouble.” He was aware that the hands of the left, too, were bloody, but, he argued, “the new Italian revolution was something more than a savage vendetta, and it is hardly, I believe, a movement whose impetus can be curbed at this point.”44

  The leftist impetus, however, was curbed, just as it was in southern Korea, in France, in southern Vietnam, in Japan, and in Greece, where Wilson arrived in the summer of 1945. He stayed in Athens at the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Constitution Square. The service was surly, to the point of hostility, and Wilson noticed bullet holes in the walls of his room. There was a reason for the surliness, for there was a stink hanging over Athens too, the stink of another betrayal.

  The bullet holes need some explaining. There had been a large demonstration the previous December held by supporters of the National Liberation Front, or EAM, the partisan organization controlled by communists. The British Army was formally in charge of liberated Greece. Athens was held by a Greek provisional Government of National Unity which contained conservatives and royalists, as well as some leftists. Much of the rest of the country was still in the hands of the EAM, and its armed forces, ELAS. Having fought the Germans, EAM/ELAS had expected to take over the government and revolutionize Greece. Conservatives, backed by the British, wanted to stop this at all costs, and this is what sparked the demonstration of December 3, 1944, the day, according to Harold Macmillan, when “the civil war began.”45

  Actually, as Macmillan surely must have known, the civil war had already started a long time before. Greece was deeply split during World War I, when the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, wanted to back the Allies, while King Constantine I and his military commander, Ioannis Metaxas, did not. Years of bitter opposition between royalists and “Venizelists” followed. In 1936, Metaxas became a dictator with the face of a banker and the brutality of a fascist caudillo. An admirer of Hitler’s Third Reich, Metaxas “united” Greece, as the Father of the Nation, by banning all political parties, and throwing communists and other opponents of his regime in jail. To the relief of most Greeks, Metaxas died in 1941.

  Then the Germans invaded. Supporters of the old Metaxas regime mostly collaborated, and the resistance was led by communists who had emerged from Metaxas’s jails. Greek fascist battalions, egged on by the Germans, fought left-wing guerrillas who were helped initially by the Allies. There was much brutality on both sides. Many of the victims were innocent people caught in the crossfire.

  But Macmillan was right: as far as the British were concerned, the real action began only in 1944, when British soldiers, reinforced by extra troops from Italy, fought the left-wing partisans who had fought the Germans just months before. Edmund Wilson’s disapproval of this was widely shared, especially in the United States, where it was seen as another typically British imperialist intervention. But many people in Britain felt the same way; Churchill, though revered for his leadership against the Germans, was distrusted for his bellicosity against the communist partisans.

  Harold Macmillan noted that in Greece, as in other places, “the resistance movements had been presented by our propaganda as bodies of romantic idealists fighting with Byronic devotion for the freedom of their country.”46 The most Byronic hero was a man named Aris Velouchiotis. Aris rode through the mountains with his black band of partisans—black berets, black jackets, black beards. The romantic hero, who broke with the communists in 1945, was also a killer. Mass graves have subsequently been dug up in his areas of operation and have been found to contain the scattered bones of his political enemies.

  The real issue after liberation, as in Italy (and China, and many other places), was the monopoly on the use of force. The National Liberation Front (EAM/ELAS) in Greece had agreed, after much negotiation, to lay down their arms, as long as right-wing armed militias such as the notorious Security Battalions, set up under Nazi occupation, did the same. The government’s aim was to incorporate the best elements from both sides in a national army. According to EAM/ELAS, the government failed to stick to its bargain; even as the left demobilized (up to a point), the right was allowed to retain its firepower. Quite understandably, this is remembered by many former ELAS fighters as a rank betrayal. One partisan recalled rounding up a group of collaborators in 1944. Instead of killing them, however, they were handed over to the police. A bad move, as the police proceeded to give them guns and let them go. For the partisans, defeated in 1945, the moral was clear: “Those who had said ‘kill them’ were able to point out that the second round of fighting, the Civil War, wouldn’t have happened if we had killed all the fascists.”47

  This, then, was the febrile atmosphere in Athens, whose traces Edmund Wilson still noticed in his hotel room in 1945. On December 3, 1944, crowds on Constitution Square, with women and children marching in front, approached the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the provisional government was holed up. It is claimed that they were about to storm the hotel. The view Wilson received from left-wing sympathizers, shared by most Greeks at the time, is that the majority of peaceful protesters kept marching on while the royalist police opened fire and killed and wounded about a hundred people. The next day, when the protesters filed past the hotel again, in a funeral procession this time, royalists killed up to two hundred more unarmed citizens by firing guns from the hotel windows.

  Macmillan had a somewhat different take, as one might expect. The “so-called civilian crowd,” he recalled, “contained many fully-armed ELAS guerillas,” and the fatal shots were probably fired by a communist agent provocateur.48

  Even if the truth of the tragic event remains elusive, two things are hard to dispute. The communist-led partisans were very ruthless operators who had already killed a large number of real or alleged collaborators and “class enemies” before Greece was freed from the Germans in October 1944, and continued to purge and kill for some time after that. The second truth is that the Greek left had ample reason to feel betrayed.

  Communists and leftists were the backbone of anti-Nazi and antifasci
st resistance in many countries. In Greece they monopolized the resistance by violently purging everyone else. In the countryside, EAM/ELAS had set up a kind of guerrilla state, with people’s courts to deal with all enemies of the revolution. A British officer stationed in Greece in September 1944 wrote about the communist “reign of terror” in Attica and Boeotia. “Over 500 have been executed in the last few weeks. Owing to the stench of rotting corpses, it is impossible to pass near a place by my camp. Lying unburied on the ground are naked corpses with their heads severed. Owing to strong reactionary elements among the people [ELAS has] picked on this area.”49

  So there was a good reason to fear the consequences of a revolution in Greece. Bringing back King George II, a pet project of Churchill, whose monarchist lectures irritated even some Greek conservatives, was not the best idea. George II’s short reign in the late 1930s coincided with the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, and there was little popular nostalgia for that.

  But given the fear of communism, the British felt that they had no choice but to help the government in Athens fight the leftist partisans. The fighting lasted five weeks at the beginning of 1945. Up to twenty thousand “class enemies” were deported by ELAS, and often murdered after forced marches into the mountains. On the other side, many suspected leftists were deported by the British to camps in Africa. The fighting was so vicious on all sides that a negotiated peace in February was greeted with great public relief. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, with the archbishop of the Orthodox Church, and spoke to a huge, cheering crowd: “Greece for ever! Greece for all!”50

  It was but a lull in the action. The Greek civil war would resume the following year and last for another three years. But even before that, almost as soon as Churchill had finished his rousing speech, another form of revenge began, a counter-revenge, this time against the left. Right-wing paramilitary forces and gendarmes went on a rampage. Communists, or suspected leftists, were arrested without warrants, beaten up, and murdered or locked up in huge numbers. The National Liberation Front issued an appeal drawing the world’s attention to “a regime of terror even more hideous than that of the Metaxas dictatorship.”51 By the end of 1945, almost sixty thousand EAM supporters were in prison. These included women and children, so many indeed that special detention camps for women had to be built. The common charge was crimes committed during the occupation. But crimes committed by former Nazi collaborators, or the right-wing security battalions, went largely unpunished.