Inferno - Max Hastings [421]
Many other nations suffered large numbers of fatalities, though all statistics should be considered suggestive rather than exact, because they remain disputed: 769,000 Romanians, many of them Jews; up to 400,000 Koreans; 97,000 Finns out of a population of less than 4 million; 415,000 Greeks from a population of 7 million; at least 1.2 million Yugoslavs from a population of 15.4 million; more than 343,000 Czechs, 277,000 of them Jews; 45,300 Canadians; 41,200 Australians; 11,900 New Zealanders from a population of 1.6 million—the highest proportionate toll of any Western ally. The most noteworthy aspect of these statistics is that the heaviest burden fell upon nations which suffered enemy occupation, or whose territories became battlefields. One in four of the world’s 20 million military dead perished in German or Japanese captivity, most of them Russians or Poles.
Combatants fared better than civilians: around three-quarters of all those who perished were unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle. The peoples of western Europe escaped more lightly than those of eastern Europe. The best recent research suggests that 5.7 million Jews of all nationalities—out of a prewar Jewish population of 7.3 million in lands occupied by Hitler—were killed by the Nazis in their attempt to achieve a “Final Solution.” Hitler’s agents also murdered or allowed to die some 3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, 5 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 150,000 mentally handicapped people, and 10,000 homosexual men.
MOST GERMANS considered that their shattered cities, wrecked industries and millions of dead paid their dues for the crimes of Nazism. The young felt mingled bewilderment and rage that their elders whom they trusted had brought them to such a pass. “I wasn’t quite sure what I ought to feel,” said Helmut Lott, a teenager in 1945. “A certain world—a world I’d grown up in and believed in—was destroyed.” Many Germans colluded in allowing former Nazis to meld unpunished into their postwar society. “No one believes a decent German nowadays,” said the former SS officer’s wife Hildegard Trutz bitterly in 1947, “but anything those dirty Jews say goes for gospel.” South America became a popular destination for irreconcilables and the most heinous war criminals, some of whom were given sanctuary by the Catholic Church during their passage from Europe.
Only a tiny fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the victors had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundred thousands, that would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis murderer. Less than 1,000 retributive executions took place in the Western zones of occupation. Some 920 Japanese were executed, more than 300 of them by the Dutch for crimes committed in the East Indies. The Allies chose to treat Austria as a victim society rather than a partner in German war guilt, so that no serious denazification process took place there. The former Wehrmacht officer Kurt Waldheim was one of many Austrians who had been complicit in war crimes—in his case, the murder of British prisoners in the Balkans. In full knowledge of this, his countrymen eventually elected him as their chancellor.
Many German convicted mass killers served jail sentences of only a few years, or even escaped by paying a fine of fifty almost worthless Reichsmarks. The Germans and Japanese were not entirely mistaken in regarding the international war crimes trials which took place in 1945–46 as “victors’ justice.” Some British and Americans, and many Russians, were guilty of offences under international law, the killing of prisoners notable among them, yet very few faced