Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  In the end this choice too was decided by force. Harold Macmillan, the British plenipotentiary in the Mediterranean, put it like this: “By December 1943, the most informed British opinion was that the Partisans would eventually rule Yugoslavia and that the monarchy had little future and had ceased to be a unifying element. At the same time the area was of the greatest military importance; for Tito’s forces, adequately supported, were capable of detaining a very large number of German divisions, greatly to the advantage of the Italian and later the French front.”23 The Chetnik royalists had the misfortune of being on the losing side of the civil war.

  If Tito was considered an important Western ally in 1945, then so was Stalin, still fondly known to many people in Britain and the United States as “Uncle Joe.” So it was not such a stretch for the British foreign secretary Anthony Eden to promise his Soviet counterpart at a Moscow conference in September 1944 that all Soviet citizens would be returned “whether they were willing to return or not.”24 Not only was it thought to be essential to maintain good relations with wartime allies, but Britain did not wish to do anything to jeopardize the fate of thousands of British POWs in territories occupied by the Soviets.

  Other members of the British government, including Winston Churchill, felt some scruples about a policy the consequences of which they were well aware of. Lord Selbourne, minister of economic warfare, wrote to Churchill that handing these people back to Russia “will mean certain death for them.” But Eden wrote to the prime minister that “we cannot afford to be sentimental about this.” After all, he said, the men had been captured “while serving in German military formations, the behavior of which in France has often been revolting.” He added something else, something more to the real point of the matter: “We surely don’t want to be permanently saddled with a number of these men.”25 And so it was formally confirmed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 that they would all be handed back.

  The fact that many Russians had worn German uniforms under duress, that the women and children, brought to Germany as slaves or lowly workers, had never worn German uniforms, or that a large number of Cossacks had never even been citizens of the Soviet Union and thus were not legally obliged to be “returned” at all, bothered neither Eden nor the Soviet leadership. In the latter case, this had something to do with heroic narratives too, though not quite in the same way as in France or the Netherlands. The idea that so many Russians and other Soviet citizens had fought the Soviet Union, some quite willingly, and that others might have chosen to work in Germany just to survive, was an embarrassment. In the official story, all citizens of the Soviet workers’ paradise had resisted the fascist enemy. To surrender was a crime. Those who fell into German hands had to be traitors, and would be dealt with as such.

  There was one other complication. Tito’s Partisans may have been allies against the Nazis, much romanticized in the British imagination as noble peasant heroes, but their claims on parts of Italy and southern Austria were becoming a serious nuisance. The last thing the Western Allies needed was a war with old comrades in arms. But to make absolutely sure that a Titoist advance could be thwarted, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, already burdened with a million POWs, demanded the right to first “clear the decks” in Austria. This meant handing over Yugoslavs back to Yugoslavia, and Russians back to the Soviet Union as swiftly as possible.

  Terrible scenes were the direct result of this deck-clearing. If trickery was not sufficient to lull people into acquiescence, battle-hardened British soldiers, sometimes in tears themselves, had to force them onto cattle cars and trucks, prodding, beating, and sometimes using bayonets. Wailing women would throw themselves at their feet, children got trampled by terrified mobs, some people got shot, and some people, rather than face deportation, preferred to stab themselves in the neck, or jump into the Drau River.

  The Cossacks were perhaps the saddest case. Their delusions—of being sent to Africa as soldiers of the British Empire, or to Asia to fight the Japanese—were deliberately fostered; anything to keep them calm before their inevitable fate was sealed. They entertained themselves, and their British captors, with great displays of horsemanship. Even their disarmament was a form of trickery; the soldiers were promised newer, better arms if they gave up their old ones. The British realized that Cossacks were less likely to resist their orders in the absence of their officers. At the end of May, the officers, fifteen hundred of them, were told to attend a “conference” to decide their future. They would be back with their families in the evening. In reality, they were never seen again. After being handed over to the Soviet army, those who were not executed immediately were sent to the gulag, where very few survived.

  The other Cossacks, frantic with worry about the officers who failed to come back, were getting more suspicious of the British. Time had come for harsher measures. The unpleasant task to force unarmed people to give themselves up to their mortal enemies was given to the Royal Irish Inniskilling Fusiliers, because Major-General Robert Arbuthnot decided that they were less likely to object than English troops. In fact, the soldiers were so disturbed that they came close to mutiny. Their commanding officer, David Shaw, related: “The men moaned like anything, but in the end they obeyed orders too. It was terrible. I remember these women—some of them pregnant—lying on the ground rolling and screaming. My men were putting their rifles on the ground and lifting the women onto the train, then locking the doors and standing there as the train pulled out with women screaming out of the windows.”26

  At another Cossack camp on the banks of the River Drau, on June 1, after being ordered to board the train, thousands of people were gathered together in a massive huddle by their priests in full Orthodox regalia, praying and singing psalms. Inside the human mass, kneeling and locking arms, were the women and children; outside were the younger men. All around were pictures of religious icons, black flags, and an altar with a large cross. The idea was that soldiers would surely not assault people at prayer. Something had to be done. Major “Rusty” Davies, who had befriended many Cossacks, remembers: “As individuals on the outskirts of the group were pulled away, the remainder compressed themselves into a still tighter body, and, as panic gripped them, started clambering over each other in frantic efforts to get away from the soldiers. The result was a pyramid of screaming, hysterical human beings under which a number of people were trapped.”27

  A young woman, whose legs were badly cut by broken glass when she was pushed through a window by the crush, describes what happened when the fence on one side of the human mass gave way:

  People were rushing past . . . , scared out of their wits. Everything was mixed up: the singing, the prayers, the groans and screams, the cries of the wretched people the soldiers managed to grab, the weeping children and the foul language of the soldiers. Everyone was beaten, even the priests, who raised their crosses above their heads and continued to pray.28

  In the end the job got done. Some drowned themselves with their children in the river. A few people hanged themselves from pine trees outside the camp. But most of the remaining Cossacks ended up in sealed cattle wagons, with one small window and one bucket for all to use as a toilet. Brigadier T. P. Scott had told his commander that the whole thing “was a damned bad show.” Major “Rusty” Davies said: “I still regard it with horror.”29

  The Cossacks were just one of the orphaned peoples, battered and in the end decimated by history. In fact, “history” is too abstract. They were destroyed by men, who acted on ideas, of revolution, of purified ethnic states. There were others who fell victim to these ideas, some of whom may have been among the believers themselves.

  • • •

  THE WORDS DECIDED UPON by the three victorious Allies—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—at the Potsdam Conference in the oppressive heat of July 1945 sounded reasonable enough, even a trifle anodyne. On the matter of expelling the German inhabitants from eastern and central Europe, they conclu
ded the following: “The three governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”

  This sounded fair enough. The agreement, following decisions already made by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin two years earlier at a conference in Teheran about shifting a large slice of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, was in keeping with an atmosphere of peculiar bonhomie, especially between U.S. president Harry Truman and Stalin. (Truman liked Churchill less; the British prime minister had tried to “soft-soap” him with unwelcome flattery.) When Truman played Paderewski’s Minuet in G for Stalin and Churchill at the presidential “Little White House” in Potsdam, Stalin declared, “Ah, yes, music is an excellent thing, it drives out the beast in man.”30

  Truman’s warm sentiments towards Stalin seem to have been shared by many American soldiers at the time. Stalin, the U.S. Army paper Yank reported about Potsdam, “was easily the greatest drawing card for soldiers’ interest that this galaxy of VIPs presents. And this was so before the rumor that Joe had Japan’s surrender in his hip pocket. Cpl. John Tuohy of Long Island, NY, who used to be a booker for Paramount Pictures and who now stands guard in front of the celebrity-packed Little White House, describes Stalin as ‘smaller than I expected him to be, but an immaculate man who wears beautiful uniforms.’”31 In the New York Times, the three victorious leaders conferring in the ruins near the German capital were described as “three men walking in a graveyard; they are the men who hold in their hands most of the power in the world.”32 And this included, of course, the fate of more than eleven million German-speaking peoples, many of whom had deep roots in areas now claimed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

  Behind the bland rhetoric of Potsdam were sentiments expressed in far more brutal terms. Millions of Germans had already been driven from their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and East Prussia. Just before the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had reassured the Czechoslovak prime minister Fierlinger: “We won’t disturb you. Throw them out.”33

  When Churchill told Stalin at Yalta that he was “not shocked at the idea of transferring millions of people by force,” Stalin reassured the British prime minister too: “There will be no more Germans [in Poland], for when our troops come in the Germans run away and no Germans are left.” Whereupon Churchill said: “Then there is the problem of how to handle them in Germany. We have killed six or seven million and probably will kill another million before the end of the war.” Stalin, who liked precise figures, wanted to know: “One or two?” Churchill: “Oh I am not proposing any limitations on them. So there should be room in Germany for some who will need to fill the vacancy.”34

  A number of these Germans had been ardent Nazis, even war criminals. Many, perhaps even most, German civilians in the fringes of the German Reich had been well disposed towards the Nazi Party and its local affiliates, especially in the Sudetenland, where Germans, despite their superior wealth, felt that they had been treated by the Czechs as second-class citizens before 1938. Even so, many had held no truck with the Nazis. Some had been actively anti-Nazi. But neither Churchill nor Stalin was inclined to make such fine distinctions. All Germans had to go: criminals, Nazis, anti-Nazis, men, women, and children.

  Population transfers, mass expulsions, and shifting borders were commonplace in the policies of Stalin and Hitler. But Churchill had a different precedent in mind: the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, when it was agreed to move Greek Muslims to Turkey and Greek Orthodox Turkish citizens to Greece. In fact, much of the exchange had already taken place by 1923, as it were spontaneously, as a consequence of the Greco-Turkish War. The official exchange was a relatively bloodless affair. But what happened in eastern and central Europe in 1945 and 1946 was on a wholly different scale. There was an exchange of a kind, to be sure: Poles from eastern Poland, which became part of the Ukraine, moved to Silesia, once part of Germany and now vacated by the Germans. But what really happened is that around eleven million people were kicked out of their homes, only very rarely in an orderly or humane manner.

  Hans Graf von Lehndorff, the doctor from Königsberg who believed that humans behaved like savages because they had turned away from God, tried at one point to leave his bombed, burned-out, thoroughly looted native city by foot. He reckoned that squeezing himself into a westbound train, usually a coal or cattle car, was too dangerous. And so he walked in the cold rain through “a land without people”:

  [past] unharvested fields . . . bomb craters, uprooted trees, army vehicles in ditches, and burned out villages. I looked for some shelter from the rain and the wind in a broken down house. I felt something moving. There was a sound of scraping on the brick floor. A few people in tatters were standing about staring into space. Among them were three children, who scrutinized me with some hostility. Apparently they had tried to get away from Königsberg too and got stuck here. Seized by the Russians, they weren’t allowed to go anywhere, neither forward nor back. The last thing they ate were a few potatoes from a Russian truck that made a temporary halt. I didn’t ask what price had been extracted. From the way they talked, it was clear that the women had to pay once again. My God, who can still derive any satisfaction from such ghosts?35

  Far worse things happened. But this story, more than many other tales of sadistic violence, murder, and starvation, tells us something about the sense of helplessness of people who suddenly have no home. They could go neither forward, nor back; they were stuck in limbo in a depopulated land which was no longer theirs.

  Lehndorff was right to be wary of trains. Not only would one be stuck for days in overloaded goods wagons, pressed together with many others, with no food, drink, or sanitary facilities, exposed to all weather, but one was liable to be taken away to forced labor camps, or at the very least to be robbed on the way. Paul Löbe, a social democrat journalist arrested before by the Nazi regime, described what this was like on a trip through Silesia:

  After the Russians disconnected the locomotive, we were detained for twenty-two hours. Similar stoppages happened several times . . . The train was plundered four times, twice by Poles, twice by Russians. This was a simple procedure. As soon as the train slowed down because of rail damage, the robbers climbed onto the wagons, snatched our suitcases and rucksacks, and threw them onto the embankment. After half an hour they jumped off and collected the spoils.36

  In this time of lawlessness, when policemen and other officials often joined the looters, railway stations were the most dangerous places to be. Gangs of robbers preyed on anyone unfortunate enough to have to spend the night there. Women of all ages were also liable to be raped by drunken soldiers in search of diversion. One of the horrors of homelessness and the total loss of rights is that others are given the license to do anything they wish with you.

  In some respects, what was done to the Germans in Silesia, Prussia, and the Sudetenland was a grotesque mirror image of what Germans had done to others, particularly to the Jews. They were barred from many public places; they had to wear armbands with the letter N (for Niemiec, German); they were not allowed to buy eggs, fruit, milk, or cheese; and they could not marry Poles.

  Of course, this parallel has its limits. A friend of Ernst Jünger, the conservative writer and diarist, wrote to him from her prison in Czechoslovakia: “The tragedy of what is happening in the German, as well as the Hungarians parts of Czechoslovakia can only be compared to what happened to the Jews.”37 This is nonsense. There is still much dispute about the number of Germans who died in the deportations. Some German historians have claimed that more than one million died. Counterclaims have been made for roughly half that number.38 Which is bad enough. There was, however, no systematic plan to exterminate all Germans. And sometimes, native Silesian or Sudeten Germans were given the choice to become
Polish or Czech citizens, not an option that was ever open to Jews under Nazi rule.

  German women, subjected to random sexual assaults from Soviet troops, Poles, or Czechs, described themselves as “Freiwild,” fair game. That is pretty much what all homeless people without any rights become. Silesia was known in the summer of 1945 as “the wild west.” The provisional head of the new Polish administration of , formerly the German city Danzig, spoke of a “gold rush”: “On all roads and with all means of transport, everyone from all regions of Poland is heading for this Klondike, and their sole aim is not work but robbery and looting.”39 German houses, German firms, German assets of any kind, including the Germans themselves, were ripe for the plucking.

  The ethnic cleansing of 1945 went further, however, than deportations, or turning people into slaves. Herbert Hupka, a half-Jewish inhabitant of Ratibor (Racibórz) in Upper Silesia, recalls being marched in the rain past his old school, where his father had taught Latin and Greek. He noticed a heap of torn and soggy books, by Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Franz Werfel, and other authors who had been banned by the Nazis. The books had been confiscated by the Nazi government and tossed into the Jewish cemetery. Somehow they ended up in the street, in Hupka’s words, “ownerless, lying in front of the Gymnasium.”40

  What was being systematically destroyed in 1945 was German culture, along with many of the people who lived it. Old parts of the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some of whose great cities—Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg, Lemberg, Brünn, Czernowitz, Prague—were centers of German high culture, often carried by German-speaking Jews, now had to be “de-Germanized.” Streets and shop signs were painted over, place names changed, German libraries pillaged, monuments demolished, inscriptions, some of them very old, erased from churches and other public buildings; the German language itself had to be abolished. A report from Prague in Yank noted: