Armageddon - Max Hastings [374]
In 1945, by contrast, every man, woman and child in Germany was brought face-to-face with the price of Hitler, the consequences of the dreadful lunge for greatness upon which he had led his people, and which so many supported until its failure was manifest. A few noble souls, of the stamp of Adam von Trott, recognized Hitler from the outset as an absolute evil. Yet most of the July 1944 bomb plotters turned against the Nazis only when it became plain that they were leading Germany to defeat. The German officer corps bore almost as great a responsibility for Germany’s fate as their Führer. The scope of Hitler’s ambitions for world domination was matched in May 1945 by the depth of Germany’s abasement. In Russian eyes, justice was thus done. For the Western allies, who had suffered much less at the hands of the Nazis, and for whom humanity ranked higher in the scale of virtues, the spectacle of Germany’s devastation gave rise to more complex emotions. In the midst of the revelations about the concentration camps, the evidence accumulating from every corner of occupied Europe about the bestiality of the Nazi record, it seemed possible to find pity for some Germans as individuals, but very little for their society as an entity.
The nation’s fate prompted a revulsion among its people against Germany’s historic militarism which persists to this day. “I grew up in a world in which the only thing that all of us cared about was that there should be no more war,” said Anita Barsch, who as a child endured the flight from East Prussia. “I wasn’t angry—just sad. It was Germans, after all, who refused to allow us to flee in time to save ourselves.” It is possible to be appalled by the behaviour of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, and by the excesses of the Anglo-American air bombardment, without seeing reason to transfer blame for these horrors from Hitler and those who made his European rampage possible.
Insofar as any conflict in history has been waged between the forces of virtue and those of evil, it was the Second World War. Dwight Eisenhower could justly entitle his memoirs Crusade in Europe. Yet Soviet involvement in the Grand Alliance posed greater moral issues than the Western allies found it convenient to recognize at the time, and than some historians have acknowledged since. Degrees of evil are never easily measured, yet Stalin seems at least as great a monster of the twentieth century as Hitler. The Soviet dictator’s crimes have incurred less popular censure only because most people in the West know less about them, and have never seen films and photographs of Soviet mass murders, of the kind hideously familiar in the case of Nazi crimes. Allied victory in 1945 was deeply compromised by Anglo-American dependence upon one tyranny to encompass the destruction of another. This was not merely a political and moral issue, but a military one also. The democracies found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin’s citizens to bear a scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations’ sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept. Marshall’s note to Stimson in May 1944, cited above, almost explicitly acknowledges as much.
The Western allies indulged the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards because they perceived its indispensability. Washington’s deference to Stalin in the last months of the war reflected a delusion, understandable at the time, that Soviet military assistance would be needed in the Far East after Germany was defeated, to encompass the swift defeat of Japan. Even given the demands of statesmanship, it is chilling to read the words of Truman’s 1945 testament to Stalin, in the hour of victory. Stalin,