Armageddon - Max Hastings [2]
After she spoke, another woman said darkly: “You shouldn’t talk about things like that in front of a foreigner.” In Russia, there is no tradition of pursuing objective historical truth. Even in the twenty-first century it remains difficult to persuade a fiercely nationalistic people to speak frankly about the bleaker aspects of their wartime history. Almost all important research on the wartime era is being done by foreigners rather than Russians who—led by their president—prefer to draw a veil across Stalin’s years. Some twenty-seven million Soviet citizens died in the war,* 1 while combined U.S., British and French combat fatalities amounted to less than one million. Yet respect for the achievement of the Red Army does nothing to diminish repugnance towards Stalin’s tyranny, entirely as evil as that of Hitler, and towards the deeds that were done in Russia’s name in eastern Europe. The Americans and British, God be thanked, inhabited a different universe from that of the Russian soldier.
As for the Germans, a few years ago I stood in front of a television camera on Hitler’s rostrum at Nuremberg and said how much I admired the courage with which the post-war generation had confronted the Nazi legacy. After we finished filming our researcher, a young German woman who has worked on many documentaries about the period, intervened. “Excuse me,” she said. “I think you are wrong. I believe our people are still in denial about the war.” I have since thought a great deal about what she said, and concluded that she is partly right. Many young Germans are extraordinarily ignorant about the Nazi period. Some older ones seem less troubled by historic guilt today than when I first began meeting their generation, a quarter of a century ago. It is as if the horrors of the Nazi years were committed by people quite unrelated to the law-abiding pensioners who now occupy comfortable urban and suburban homes in Munich or Stuttgart, Nuremberg or Dresden, citizens in good standing of the European Union.
A woman described to me how, in May 1945, she stood with her terrified mother and siblings in a villa on the Baltic when two Russian officers burst in. One began to harangue them in fluent German about the crimes of their country in the Soviet Union. “It was so awful,” she said, “having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong.” It was hardly surprising that she felt this, as a teenager back in 1945. It seems surprising that her view was unchanged in 2002. There is a growing assertiveness in Germany about the war crimes of the Allies. I share the view of German historians, such as Jorg Friedrich, that the British and Americans should more honestly confront their undoubted lapses, some of them serious. For instance, more than a few Germans were hanged in 1945 for killing prisoners. Such behaviour was not uncommon among Allied personnel, yet it seldom, if ever, provoked disciplinary action. New Zealanders massacred medical staff and wounded men at a German aid station in North Africa in June 1942. No one was ever called to account, though the episode is well documented. The British submarine commander “Skip” Miers systematically machine-gunned German survivors after sinking their ships in the Mediterranean