Armageddon - Max Hastings [371]
When Ursula Salzer escaped from Pillau on a hospital ship in March 1945, her fifty-seven-year-old father remained to serve with his Volkssturm unit. He shrugged indifferently: “It can’t be that bad. The Russians are only human beings.” When he returned from Soviet captivity three years later, Herr Salzer was unrecognizable. His teeth had been smashed with a rifle butt when he was found scavenging in the camp rubbish dump. He was suffering acute malnutrition. He said simply to his daughter: “Thank God you weren’t there. You would never have survived.”
There has been bitter criticism of the manner in which the Allies permitted many Nazis to escape justice in 1945. It is undoubtedly true that all manner of evil men were allowed to disappear into the undergrowth of post-war Europe, South America or even the United States, by neglect or wilful indulgence. But consider the circumstances: by the war’s end, most of those who had taken part were suffering from a profound moral, as well as physical and mental, exhaustion. Those who had fought in the American and British armies suffered no doubts about the virtue of their cause, yet most felt compromised by their experiences. That is the fate of all thoughtful men who take part in all wars. “Is there any place that is free from evil?” the novelist Evelyn Waugh reflected, expressing a British officer’s view of Europe in 1945. “It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war . . . Even good men thought that their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardship in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege.”
Waugh’s was an elitist vision, shared by only the most thoughtful Allied soldiers. Most American and British soldiers had simply seen a job to be done, which they were profoundly grateful now to have completed. Yet, in the course of the war, many had also come to share the novelist’s disbelief in moral absolutes. Few, if any, of Eisenhower’s soldiers were responsible for acts of wickedness remotely comparable to those of Hitler’s armies. But most had seen prisoners casually killed, towns levelled, civilians reduced to destitution in a manner which made them instinctively reluctant to pass judgement upon others, even if these wore German uniforms. The Western allies reserved their anger, and commitment to retribution, for those Germans who had been concerned in the most monstrous evils of all, the concentration-camp system and the destruction of the Jews.
Only the Russians, driven by personal suffering and Stalin’s insatiable appetite for vengeance against enemies real and imagined, sustained policies of absolute ruthlessness in all the regions of Europe which they occupied. Ironically, the NKVD showed its willingness selectively to indulge former Nazis if these were willing to assist in the subjection of their country to its new masters. Beria’s men reserved the most savage rewards for their own countrymen who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans, irrespective of the degree of culpability involved. Heroes who had been shot down in flames in 1944 were subjected to the same humiliations and lasting disgrace as those who had surrendered in 1941 because they lacked rifles with which to defend the motherland.
Around 1.68 million Russian prisoners were returned to the Soviet Union in 1945, out of the 4,059,000 captured by the Germans. Of these, 930,287 were liberated from camps, while the remaining 740,000 were found elsewhere, acting as slave labourers. These totals do not include men captured while serving in Hitler’s forces, many of whom were shot out of hand. By 1953, some 5,457,856 Soviet citizens had been returned to their grateful motherland—this figure includes great numbers of people who had fled west, rather than be captured in arms by the Germans. Russian historians estimate that 20 per cent of all those repatriated were either executed