From one evil to another
For many Eastern Europeans, Hitler’s death merely meant Nazism was replaced by Stalinism, says Ian Thomson
It is much easier to kill people once they have been deprived of their humanity: all modern dictatorships have known this. The Jews deported to Auschwitz from the ghettos of Eastern Europe were often so starved and ragged that they were no longer considered menschen – human beings – but animals to slaughter. Most historians agree Auschwitz was the outcome of the most murderous legislative document known to European history: the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Overnight, the laws turned German Jews into biological heretics and vermin to be removed from the Aryan state. From there it was a short step to the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe. The Soviet troops who liberated Auschwitz 70 years ago were embarrassed, even revolted, by what they saw. The Jews before them were casualties of starvation, and had the furtiveness of hunted animals. To the Soviet Union’s astonishment, Auschwitz was not a single camp: 39 satellite camps formed a malignant universe. Numerous German companies used Jewish slave labour at Auschwitz, among them Bayer, Agfa, BASF and Pelikan (which provided the ink for prisoners’ tattoos). So Auschwitz operated as an industrial, as well as an extermination, centre. Incredibly, the synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz III is still in operation. A railway carrying 7,000 Polish workers to the factory runs daily from Oswiecim (Auschwitz) station, just as it did during the war. Half of Britain’s teenagers have reportedly never heard of Auschwitz, or do not understand its significance. Nevertheless the Second World War continues to fascinate both young and old alike. Several excellent accounts of the conflict’s aftermath have appeared in recent years. Savage Continent by Keith Lowe explored lingering anti-Semitism, while Ben Shephard’s The Long Road Home looked at the eight million displaced persons for whom the war’s end brought no joy. After Hitler, by the British historian Michael Jones, covers much the same ground, though it pays greater attention to East-West antagonisms and the beginnings of the Cold War. According to Jones, “defeating the Nazi menace was a victory worth achieving”, but this hardly needs to be said. Nazi Germany departed from the community of civilised human beings. Aided by the indifference of most Germans, Hitler and his race engineers might have flushed Slavs, Jews and Romani from Europe, had they won the war. The war, as Jones demonstrates, did not end with Hitler’s suicide in the bunker. The liberation of Eastern Europe from Nazi tyranny was only rarely a heroic prelude to healing and renewal. In future Soviet territories, one tyranny was merely substituted for another: Hitler’s for Stalin’s. My mother, a refugee from Stalinist oppression in the Baltic states, fled her home in Tallinn in September 1944 to make her way on foot through the catastrophically razed Third Reich to a Displaced Persons camp near Bremen in the British zone of Germany. From there, in 1947, she was able to reach safe haven in London. Her story is not untypical of the many accounts of displacement and homelessness chronicled by Jones. By “creating” the war in the east, says Jones, Hitler had brought the Soviet Union into an unlikely alliance with imperialist Britain and capitalist America. At the war’s end, a minority on the British Left argued that an Anglo-Russian alliance was key to the future peace of Europe. Living so far from Moscow, they were unable or perhaps unwilling to understand the reality of Stalin’s postwar Soviet Union. Exemplary of these “useful idiots”, Jones relates, was Dr Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean” of Canterbury cathedral, who claimed Uncle Joe Stalin as a “kindly man of geniality” and founded the Anglo-Soviet Medical Aid Fund. It was generally assumed by pro-Stalinists like Johnson that Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states had become giant pawns in a game of political brinkmanship between Hitler and the Soviet Union, and had gone over gratefully to the Stalin camp. Arguments over borders, occupations, immigration and dictatorships were impenetrable to most Britons in those depressed, postwar years. My mother’s own objections to going back to the Soviet Union were scarcely understood. Few refugees from the Soviet bloc wanted to admit to having been a Soviet citizen, initially out of fear of forced repatriation, later because (from the British proStalin standpoint) the only Displaced People who had an acceptable reason to refuse repatriation were Jews and Spanish Republicans; the rest were reckoned, wrongly in the majority of cases, to be traitors, collaborators or war criminals. In an excellent chapter, Jones considers the Prague uprising of May 1945, which ended in a German victory and ceasefire – until the Red Army forced a German surrender one day later. Prague was the last major European capital to be liberated from Hitler, but immediately afterwards it was occupied by Stalin. In this truth lies the sad fate of most east Europeans following the end of the Second World War. After Hitler, an absorbing history, communicates the pity of the war and its aftermath with a proper sympathy. Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage