Inferno - Max Hastings [410]
Among Germans in the summer of 1945 and afterwards, self-pity was a much more prevalent sensation than contrition: one in three of their male children born between 1915 and 1924 was dead, two in five of those born between 1920 and 1925. In the vast refugee migrations that preceded and followed VE-Day, more than 14 million ethnic Germans left homes in the east, or were driven from them. At least half a million—modern estimates vary widely—perished during their subsequent odysseys; the historic problem of central Europe’s German minorities was solved in the most abrupt fashion, by ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile more millions of people of a dozen nationalities, enslaved by Hitler, entered a new dark tunnel of uncertainty in displaced persons camps administered by the Allies, where some remained for years. The least fortunate were summarily consigned to Russia, their homeland, where many were categorised by the NKVD as proven or putative traitors and killed.
In Germany’s cities, half the housing stock had been destroyed, including 3.8 million of 19 million apartments. Richard Johnston of the New York Times wrote from the ruins of Nuremberg: “Like timid ground creatures, a few Germans came up from their shelters, caves and cellars this morning to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbelieving at the awful mess that was their town … Nuremberg is a city of the dead.” Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg were worse. The Thirty Years’ War, three centuries earlier, had inflicted greater proportionate loss on Germany’s population, but the physical devastation of 1945 was unparalleled in history: Europe’s great cities had been spared by the First World War, and even from the rampages of Napoleon.
For two years after VE-Day, the NKVD waged a bloody counter-insurgency campaign in Poland and Ukraine to impose Stalin’s will upon peoples consumed with bitterness at exchanging Nazi tyranny for that of the Soviets. Exiled Poles in the West were dismayed to be denied a place in London’s victory parade, because the new British Labour government declined to upset the Russians. Gen. Władysław Anders wrote, “I felt as if I were peeping at a ballroom from behind the curtain of an entrance door through which I might not pass.” Shortly before Labour took office in July, Anders encountered the U.S. ambassador and the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, at a banquet: “They greet me politely but without enthusiasm. Since our only crime is that we exist and thereby embarrass Allied policy, I do not consider myself obliged to hide or feel ashamed.”
His bitterness was justified: he and almost 150,000 of his compatriots had fought gallantly with the Allied forces, suffering heavy casualties in Italy and northwest Europe. “We, the Poles in uniform integrated into the British armed forces, became an ugly sore on the English conscience,” wrote Pilot Officer B. Lvov. In 1945 such people found themselves pariahs for the crime of rejecting a Stalinist puppet regime in their own country. The Poles ended the war as they began it, human sacrifices to the realities of power. Anders, Lvov and many of their comrades chose exile in the West rather than return home to Soviet subjection and probable execution. The Americans and British had delivered half of Europe from one totalitarian tyranny, but lacked the political will and the military means to save 90 million people of the easterly nations from falling victim to a new Soviet bondage that lasted almost half a century. The price of having joined with Stalin to destroy Hitler was high indeed.
In the victorious nations, simple people greeted the outcome of the struggle as a triumph of virtue over evil, heedless of the fashion in which liberation was blighted in many parts of the world. Painted