BY KEITH LOWE
At Powayen near Königsberg, for example, the
bodies of dead women were strewn everywhere: they had been raped and then
brutally killed with bayonets or rifle butt blows to the head. Four women here
had been stripped naked, tied to the back of a Soviet tank and dragged to their
deaths. In Gross Heydekrug a woman was crucified on the altar cross of the
local church, with two German soldiers similarly strung up on either side. More
crucifixions occurred in other villages, where women were raped and then nailed
to barn doors. At Metgethen it was not only women but children who were killed
and mutilated: according to the German captain who examined their corpses,
‘Most of the children had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt
instrument,’ but ‘some had numerous bayonet wounds to their tiny bodies.’
(p.75)
No summary can really do justice to the
cumulatively devastating effect of reading the hundreds and hundreds of
vignettes like this which Keith Lowe has assembled in his excoriating book
about the moral, economic, social and psychological collapse of an entire
continent into bottomless savagery and barbarism at the end of the Second World
War.
Savage continent
There are countless books about the origins of
the Second World War – histories of the alliances and invasions, biographies of
Hitler and Mussolini, cultural studies of the 1930s, blah blah blah- but
comparatively few about how the war ended or its long-drawn-out aftermath. This
book sets out to fill that gap and is a fascinating, well written, and
traumatising account which aims to cover every element of the catastrophe.
And it really was a catastrophe beyond
comprehension. The book starts with hard-to-grasp facts about the numbers of
people killed, soldiers and civilians, before going on to describe the physical
destruction which touched every corner of the continent.
Death
Up to 40 million people died in the Second
World War, an estimated 27 million of them Russians. About a third of all women
born in the 1930s never married because there were no men – just a huge gap
where all those dead men should have been.
Every schoolchild is taught that around 6
million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust, but the scale of other losses
were comparable: Germany lost an estimated 4.5 million soldiers and 1.5 million
civilians, roughly the same number. Poland also lost about 6 million dead
(including nearly 2 million Jews); Ukraine between 7 and 8 million killed, a
fifth of the country’s population. A quarter of Belarusians died. By 1945 huge
areas of the East were nothing but smoking rubble and ruined fields and
landscapes emptied of human beings.
Destruction
Hitler lost patience with the Poles after the
Warsaw Rising and ordered the city to be razed to the ground. In the event some
93% of buildings were destroyed, along with the National Archive, Financial
Archive the Municipal Archive, all libraries, art galleries and museums. Factor
in Hitler and Stalin’s joint efforts to wipe out the entire professional class
of Poland and the mass murder of all its army officers at Katyn, and it’s a
surprise Poland still exists.
Coventry was devastated as was London, and
most German cities were severely damaged – though few as thoroughly as Dresden
or Hamburg, where the notorious fire storm bombing killed some 40,000 in one
night. About a fifth of all German living space was destroyed. Some 20 million
Germans were rendered homeless.
Maybe 70,000 villages across Russia were
destroyed along with their entire rural infrastructure. Some 32,000 Russian
factories were destroyed. In Hungary, the Germans flooded or destroyed every
single mine. In Holland, the Germans deliberately opened the dykes that kept
out the sea and flooded half a million acres of land. From one end of the
continent to the other, the scale of the conscious and deliberate destruction
of all signs of civilisation is breath-taking. Primo Levi is quoted as saying,
as he travelled across postwar Europe back to Italy, that there was something
supernatural, superhuman, about the scale of the devastation the Germans had
unleashed.
The more you read of villages, towns and
landscapes obliterated, and historic towns razed to the ground, the more you
realise that we latecomers live amidst the ruins of a once great civilisation.
How did we ever survive?
Four parts
The book is divided into four big parts, each
of which contains 6 or 7 sections. The quickest way to convey the breadth of
subject matter is simply to list them.
The Legacy of War – Physical destruction. Absence. Displacement.
Famine. Moral destruction. Hope. Landscape of Chaos.
Vengeance – The thirst for blood. The camps liberated. Vengeance
restrained: slave labourers. German prisoners of war. Vengeance unrestrained:
Eastern Europe. The enemy within. Revenge on women and children. The purpose of
vengeance.
Ethnic cleansing – Wartime choices. The Jewish flight. The ethnic
cleansing of Ukraine and Poland. The expulsion of the Germans. Europe in
microcosm: Yugoslavia. Western tolerance, Eastern intolerance.
Civil war – Wars within wars. Political violence in France and Italy. The Greek civil war. Cuckoo in the
nest: communism in Romania. The subjugation of Eastern Europe. The resistance
of the ‘forest brothers’. The Cold War mirror.
Some themes
The subject matter, the scale of the disaster,
is too big to grapple with or try to summarise. Lowe’s book itself is only a
summary, a flying overview of a vast and terrifying continent of savagery,
peppered with just a tiny sample of anecdotes describing the endless torture,
rape, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, persecution, murder and violence which
was unleashed across Europe.
Some of the thoughts or ideas struck me more than others:
The myth of national unity
After the liberation the whole continent began constructing myths
of unity in adversity. (p.196)
After the war every country wanted to think well of itself. France
is the most glaring example. In all his broadcasts General de Gaulle emphasised
that La France was united in its fight against Fascism, the spirit of gloire
and liberté etc etc was shared by all good Frenchmen. This ignored the fact
that France, of course, enjoyed a right-wing government which enthusiastically
co-operated with the Nazis from 1940 onwards, dutifully rounded up French Jews
and shipped them off to death camps, helped by collaborators at every level of
French society.
De Gaulle’s success was that during the war and, especially, after
the Liberation, he helped the French gloss over this shameful fact, and to
promote the myth of the heroic Resistance. There were a lot of French
resistance fighters (around 100,000), but the figure went up fourfold once the
Allies landed and victory became certain (p.168). In later years almost every
Frenchman turned out to have helped the Resistance in one way or another.
But the wish to gloss over inconvenient truths wasn’t particularly
French. In Yugoslavia Marshal Tito appealed to the spirit of unity and
brotherhood in an attempt to unite the fractious factions of his made-up
country. Stalin’s speeches invoked a united Russian
people, and so on.
Reading about the foreign comparisons shed
light on the strongly patriotic writings and especially movies of my own
country, England, during and after the war, and made me realise that the
national pride evinced in all those classic war movies was just the local
expression of a feeling which nations all across Europe wanted to feel, and
allowed themselves to feel, with a greater or lesser distorting of the truth.
Victimhood
As a reader of modern newspapers, it’s often
easy to think that modern 21st century society is made up entirely of victims –
black victims of racism, Muslim victims of Islamophobia, women victims of
sexism, LBGT victims of prejudice, and so on and so on. Even bankers felt
persecuted after the 2008 crash, it’s time to stop blaming us for everything,
the head of Barclays whined. Everyone in the modern world seems quick to have a
grievance, a permanent readiness to feel hard-done-by or unfairly treated.
It is very interesting to discover that this
is not a new phenomenon – to read Lowe’s examples of the way entire countries,
and groups within countries, competed in the aftermath of the war to appear the
bigger victims.
It is an eye-opener to learn that – after the
hammering their cities took from Allied bombers, and then especially after the
forced relocation of millions of ethnic Germans from the surrounding countries
into the borders of a reduced Germany, combined with the industrial raping of
German women by the invading Red Army – that a lot of Germans managed to
present themselves as the victims of the Second World War. ‘We are only
civilians. We never shot anyone’ etc. They never really supported that crazy
Hitler and his stupid Nazi party.
Similarly, many of the collaborators, the
police and militias who co-operated with the occupying Germans in countries all
across Europe, later, after the Liberation, were themselves subject to attacks
or arrest and trial. This led many to work up a sense of grievance that they
were the ones who were the true victims. They had only been obeying orders. If
they hadn’t done it someone else would have. And by sacrificing themselves,
they managed to restrain the wilder savagery of the Nazis. And so on and so on.
Thus Lowe points out how right-wing French
historians and politicians have exaggerated the massacres of collaborators
carried out by the Resistance immediately following the Liberation, claiming
they indiscriminately murdered 100,000 loyal, noble, patriotic French men and
women.
Similarly, modern right-wing forces in Italy
where partisans and collaborators openly fought after the Liberation, claim
that the (generally communist) partisans killed up to 300,000 (in this version
of the story, heroic and patriotic) collaborators. In both cases history is twisted
to exonerate those who collaborated with the Germans, and to create a permanent
sense of grievance which right-wing politicians can still appeal to, in our
time.
Rape
On a mass, on an industrial, scale. All sides
committed rape but it was the Russian army, invading west into Germany, which
wins first prize. As many as two million German women were raped by Red Army
soldiers, but it’s the number of times they were violated which is really
sickening, with some women being raped 60 or 70 times, sometimes scores of
times on the same day, during the same horrific night. Every female from eight
to 80 was at risk. As many as 100,000 women were raped and raped again in
Berlin alone.
Rape during the occupation of Germany
Wikipedia article
We can take it as read that rape is an instrument of war and/or
terror, and occurs in almost all war zones. Soldiers can justify it because a)
they despise the enemy and their women b) they may die at any moment and regard
sex as their due c) it is a form of psychological warfare, humiliating a
nation’s menfolk for being unable to defend their women.
Lowe goes further to point out that rape seems to occur where there
is a significant ethnic difference between groups – thus the Russian forces
which fought across Bulgaria committed relatively few rapes because of the
close cultural similarities between the countries. Whereas, in the West,
several Arab battalions became well known as mass rapists, for example the
Moroccan Goumier battalions, because the cultural gulf between them and
European women who they despised. At least part of the atrocity, Lowe claims,
due to cultural difference.
Moroccan Goumier atrocities Wikipedia article
Shearing women collaborators
A surprising number of women in occupied
countries fell in love with the German invaders. Lowe shocks me a little by
claiming that surveys at the time and later revealed this was because they
found the Germans more ‘manly’ than their own, defeated and humiliated, menfolk
(p.166). Well, maybe Sylvia Plath wasn’t being ironic when she reported that
‘Every woman adores a Fascist.’
One of the features of the Liberation from
German rule everywhere was the punishment not only of collaborator administrators
and police, but of the women who had slept with the enemy. Lowe describes in
grisly detail, and includes photos of some of the tens of thousands of women
who found themselves attacked by lynch mobs who often stripped them naked,
shaved all the hair off their head as a mark of ‘shame’, tarred and painted
them with swastikas.
Where he adds an insight which is typical of
the book, typical of its way of shedding new light in a sober, empirical way on
appalling behaviour, is when he points out the psychological role these
humiliations took. Many bystanders, including horrified British officers, realised
that there was something medieval or even pagan about the ceremonies. The women
were shaved with mock ceremony by the community barber, sometimes daubed with
swastikas etc, but rarely really hurt, and never beaten or killed.
And this is because, witnesses report, the shavings had something
of a festival spirit, often accompanied by heavy drinking and folk or patriotic
songs. By nominating one scapegoat to bear all the sins of the community, the
taunting crowds could forget their differences, bury the hatchet, and renew
themselves.
Witnesses report a marked reduction in communal tension in places
where the ceremony had taken place, and where shaved women could be seen in the
streets. The angry, the potentially violent, could see that at least some
justice had been done, goes the argument – and so more overt violence was
avoided.
Weird, persecutory, grotesquely unfair? Yes – but that’s human
nature. This book shows you who we are, the fierce, frightened animals which
lie just beneath the thin veneer of ‘civilisation’.
Jewish restraint
No need to reprise the horrors of the Holocaust here. Dealing with
the aftermath, Lowe devotes some pages to the revenge taken by camp inmates on
their guards and tormentors. Generally the Allies, taken by surprise by the
scale and atrocity of the camps, allowed the inmates – or the few who were well
and healthy enough to do it – to take what revenge they wanted. Very often American
or British supervisors gave the victims 2 or 3 days to get it out of their
systems, then reimposed order.
The surprising thing (for someone who has such a low opinion of
humanity as myself) is the relative restraint. Some victims and camp inmates went
made with revenge. But a surprising number didn’t, and even made eloquent
speeches saying they refused to lower themselves to the bestial barbarism of
the Germans, epitomised by the address of Dr Zalman Grinberg to his fellow
inmates of Dachau in May 1945, when he told them not to sink to the level of
their German tormentors. Hard not to be moved and impressed.
There’s a fascinating description page about Abba Kovner’s
‘Avengers’, an organisation of Jews which explicitly set out to murder one
German for every Jew. They massacred garrisons of German soldiers where they
could, and were only just foiled in a grand plan to put poison into the
drinking water of five German cities.
But by and large Lowe emphasises the restraint which Jews
exercised. There’s a telling quote from the US General Lucius Clay, that the
restraint of the liberated Jews and their respect for law and order were one of
the most remarkable things he saw in his two years in Europe (p.89). All the
more striking, given that virtually every other social group seems to have been
hell-bent on some kind of revenge, revenge against collaborators which
sometimes escalated into overt civil war, as in Greece (1946 to 1949), or was
only just contained, either by Allied forces (as in Italy) or by the brutal
crackdown of communist authorities (as in Tito’s Yugoslavia).
All the more striking given Lowe’s pages devoted to highlighting
the way vicious anti-Semitism continued and even increased after the war in
various countries, where civilians were by and large indifferent to the
sufferings of the Jews, told them to their face it was their own fault, or
explicitly blamed them for the start of the whole war (p.191).
Ethnic cleansing
Part three of the book is devoted to this subject in all its
disgusting variations. 11 million Germans were forced to move, kicked out of
western Poland and northern Czechoslovakia, often at short notice, often forced
to march carrying all their possessions. Lowe gives harrowing details of the
old and sick dying early on, then Polish or Soviet soldiers with rifles picking
off the walkers, sometimes just for kicks, firing at random at anyone who was
too tall or too slow, or just firing into the columns of shuffling refugees
and, of course, routinely pulling any pretty woman out of the crowd and raping
her, often in sight of everyone, and shooting anyone who tried to interfere. In
Europe as a whole an estimated 40 million people were displaced – on the roads
– at one point or another. One eyewitness said it was like the biggest antheap
in history.
Many people were surprised by the ferocity of the small wars which
broke out in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but this book makes quite clear
that they were just the continuation of feuds and enmities stretching way back
into the 1930s, and which flared up with particular horror all through the
Second World War and well into the post-war period.
Even worse was the mass expulsion of Poles from Ukraine and Ukrainians
from Poland, as Stalin and the Polish leaders each sought to ‘purify’ their
lands. Defence organisations, bandits and partisans sprang up, one atrocity
sparked reprisals and all sides adopted a general policy of terror i.e. not
just the killing but the torture, rape, looting and destruction of completely
‘innocent’ communities.
Again and again, all across the continent, as soon as you had
successfully ‘dehumanised’ your opponents, you could do what you liked with
them.
In Croatia the Ustashe not only killed Serbs but also took the time
to hack off the breasts of women and castrate the men. In Drama, in
north-eastern Greece, Bulgarian soldiers played football with the heads of
their Greek victims. In Chelmon concentration camp German guards would kill
babies who survived the gas vans by splitting their heads against trees. In
Königsberg Soviet soldiers tied the legs of German women to two different cars
and then drove off in opposite directions, literally tearing the women in half.
(p.50)
The book pullulates with examples of the most grotesque atrocities.
No sadistic cruelty the human mind could devise went unexampled, uncarried-out,
in this grotesque era.
Western civilisation and Eastern barbarism
One theme Lowe repeats again and again is that whatever barbarity
you can think of, it was ten times, or a hundred times, worse in the East.
Everything here reinforces the horror depicted in Tim Snyder’s terrifying book,
Bloodlands, which gives figures for the mind-boggling scale of murders,
executions, holocausts, pogroms, persecutions, and deliberate starvation which
devastated the region from the Baltic states down through Poland and the
Ukraine from the later 1920s until well after the war.
It is fashionable to ridicule the kind of old-fashioned English patriotism
exemplified in Cecil Rhodes’ quote: ‘Remember that you are an Englishman, and
have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.’ That’s certainly
silly if it’s interpreted to mean an Englishman has some innate superiority
over other races. But in a context like this, bombarded with details of the
atrocities almost every group on the continent carried out against everyone
within reach, you realise it’s a simple statement of fact.
Britain was the only region not occupied by the Nazis or the
Soviets, the only area which didn’t experience systematic terror and the
creation of bandit and partisan groups outside the law, which didn’t suffer
from collaborators and then experience the utter breakdown of civil society
which led to civil war and mass atrocities.
To be born an Englishman in the first half of the 20th century
really was a lucky fate compared to being born Polish, Ukrainian, Greek,
Russian, German or Jewish.
The Iron Curtain
Partly this is because the East was closer to the monstrous Russian
bear, in its even-more-brutal-than-usual Soviet incarnation. Lowe’s book gives
heart-breaking accounts of how communist parties in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary,
Poland and Czechoslovakia conspired to intimidate or murder opponents, make
false promises to peasants and workers, fake election results, bribe and
threaten their way to key ministries and then engineer communist takeovers of
power which led in a few short years to the attainment of a completely
communist Eastern Europe under Stalin’s iron control.
What I didn’t know was that partisans who had learned their trade
resisting Germans during the war, continued in some of these countries a heroic
anti-communist resistance, pathetically hoping for intervention and liberation
from the West, well past the end of the war, sometimes into the 1950s.
Apparently, the last anti-communist partisans
in Lithuania weren’t completely stamped out (i.e. killed) until 1956 (p.356).
Lowe describes how the memory of their stand against communism, led them to
become folk heroes, subjects of songs and poems and books, and then, when the
Baltic states gained independence in the 1990s, heroes of the new nations.
Nationalism
Lowe doesn’t draw out this point, but I would:
Nationalism is probably the most vicious belief ever to grip the human mind. It
emerged from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and spawned a century in
which ‘nations’ across Europe decided they needed to be ‘free’.
It was Serbian ‘nationalists’ who kicked off
the Great War which led to the final collapse of Europe’s multicultural
empires, and the world we find ourselves in today is still dictated by the
fragmentation of these empires into so-called ‘nations’, each one of which
wants to represent one ‘national’ spirit, one language, one religion, one army,
strong and proud etc etc.
The murdering, raping, torturing, crucifying,
throwing from buildings and beheadings which we see in Iraq and Syria are the
long-term consequence of the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the failure
of the Allied attempts to draw lines and define new ‘nations’ in a world
plagued by ‘nationalism’.
The French and British imperial authorities
are routinely ridiculed for drawing neat lines on the map of the Middle East
during the Great War, creating ‘nations’ which arbitrarily separated some
ethnic or religious groups and just as arbitrarily pushed others together,
storing up ‘trouble’ for the future.
But what lines would be better? What lines
would prevent Sunni and Shia, Alawite and Sufi, Druze and Maronite, Jew and
Arab, spending so much time and effort trying to murder each other in order to
‘purify’ their territory, once the poison of nationalism had taken hold – once
the delusion that you should live in ‘nations’ made up of ‘your own’ people
takes hold among political leaders?
The Sykes-Picot Agreement Wikipedia article
Closer to the terrain described in Lowe’s book, we in the West
celebrated when the East European countries threw off the shackles of communism
30 years ago. But they have experienced a steady drift to the right over the
past decade, under governments which have responded to economic difficulties
and geopolitical uncertainty (Islamic terrorism, the refugee crisis) with stock
appeals to national unity and pride etc, swiftly followed by nationalism’s
ever-present zombie twin – threats against ‘the enemy within’, against
‘subversives’, against anyone who undermines the ‘glorious values of the heroic
fatherland’ etc etc, in practice against gypsies, Jews, gays, religious and
ethnic minorities of any description, against anyone who can be safely bullied and
persecuted.
Hungary’s politics of hate (New York Times)
Poland’s political crisis (note the ‘national narrative of
victimhood’)
Rassenkrieg
Reading the book made me reimagine the entire Second World War as a
Race War to an extent I hadn’t previously realised. At first in Germany and
then in all the countries they conquered, the Nazis compelled the entire
population to carry identity cards which specified precisely which race they
belonged to, and created vast bureaucracies to manage the rights and permissions
of every citizen based on the complex hierarchy of racial definitions.
In Poland, for example,
a racial hierarchy was devised which put Reich Germans at the top,
ethnic Germans next, then privileged
minorities such as Ukrainians, followed by Poles, gypsies and Jews.
Each group was then sub-categorised, for example Ethnic Germans
broken down into Germans racially pure enough to join the Nazi Party, pure
enough for Reich membership, those tainted by Polish blood, and finally Poles
who could be considered German because of their appearance or way of life
(p.188).
In Western Europe this fed into the rounding up of Jews and to a
lesser extent gypsies (and socialists, liberals, political opponents and
homosexuals). But in Eastern Europe the race basis of the
war makes it lunatic. I am still reeling from reading about the Generalplan Ost
whose headline intention was to exterminate some 30 million Slavs in Poland and
western Russia, laying waste entire regions which could then be occupied by
good Aryan farmers, who would use the remaining Slavs as slaves.
This isn’t dealt with directly in Lowe’s book.
Instead he deals in
detail with the political, psychological and social consequences of this way of
thinking. He shows how after the war was over nationalist groups across eastern
Europe blamed the Jews for much of the suffering, how anti-semitism rose, how
this convinced many Jews to flee to Palestine.
But gives an extended passage describing the ethnic cleansing of
Germans in Czechoslovakia but especially from Poland. Poland was also the scene
of horrible civil conflict between ethnic Poles and Ukrainians in the disputed
south-east part of the country, which led to terrifying, bestial atrocities.
And all so Ukrainians could have a ‘Ukraine for the Ukrainians’ and the Poles
could have a ‘Poland for the Poles’. Their new communist masters stood back and
let them massacre each other.
The real point of Lowe’s book is that the evil of the Nazis’
obsession with Race Identity lived on long after the regime was destroyed.
The fascist obsession with racial purity, not only in those areas
occupied by Germany, but elsewhere too, had a huge impact on European values.
It made people aware of race in a way they never had been before. It obliged
people to take sides, whether they want to or not. And, in communities which had
lived side by side more or less peacefully for centuries, it made race into a
problem that needed solving. (p.188)
Two years after the end of the war regions of Europe were still
being racially cleansed. Thus the Slovak government not only set a bout expelling
the 40,000 or so Hungarians who had settled in their country after the Germans
invaded, but expelling the entire pre-war Hungarian community of some 600,000
souls in order to have a ‘final solution’ to the Hungarian Problem (p.247).
It took a while, and it happened under post-war nationalist and
then communist governments, but the savage irony is that many parts of Europe
really did eventually become what the Nazis had worked for – Judenfrei. And the
toxin of race identity they had unleashed continued to infect the politics of
entire nations for decades to come…
Conclusion
The rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany is such a well-worn
story – both my children had to study it at school and could recite it like a
fairy tale, ‘the Reichstag fire, blah blah blah’ – that it seems to me to have
been almost emptied of content and relevance.
All those textbooks and documentaries didn’t stop the Bosnian Serb
Army from rounding up and exterminating more than 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica
or bombarding Sarajevo, or the Hutus slaughtering 800,000 Tutsis and Hwa in
Rwanda, or the inter-communal violence in post-war Iraq, or post-Gaddafi Libya,
or the sudden genocidal attack of the Myanmar military against the Rohynga
Muslims, and so on.
By contrast with the time-honoured clichés about the Nazis and
Holocaust Memorial Day and so on, which tend to limit the threat and the lesson
to a specific time and place long ago, Lowe’s judicious overview of the chaotic
forces unleashed by the Second World War, and which lingered on in violence,
hatred, blame and revenge for years afterwards, has much to teach us about
human nature everywhere.
It is a history book but it is also a sort of compendium of the
thousand and one ways humans can justify to themselves and their communities,
the most inhuman bestial behaviour.
Far more than yet another tome about Krystallnacht or the Wansee
Conference, Lowe’s book is a far broader study of the pathological forces at
work in each and every one of us, in our communities and nations, which need to
be identified and guarded against at all times, if we are to live in something
like peace with each other.
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/savage-continent-keith-lowe/
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