Starved, raped and made to eat pictures of Hitler
The war may have ended, but an orgy of revenge against the Germans was just beginning
HISTORY YEAR ZERO: A HISTORY OF 1945 by ian Buruma (Atlantic £25 % £20 ) CHRISTOPHER HUDSON
VE DAY, what comes to mind? Churchill’s t wo- f i ngered victory salute; the Royal Family waving from the balcony; the Princesses escaping to join the crowds dancing in the streets; the pealing of bells from country churches to mark the longed-for benison of peace.
Yet, for the defeated, peace was a dirty word, a bitter shrug of laughter. Throughout Europe and beyond, the reality was not peace but hunger, despair and revenge.
Ian Buruma’s wonderful book is about a time, immediately after the end of the war, which has somehow fallen between the cracks of history, and which the author has now devastatingly brought to light.
He was prompted to write it, he tells us, by his father’s wartime experience of forced labour in a concentration camp. How, he wondered, could the world return to normality after such horrors? How could the starving survivors be stopped from exacting bloody revenge? How could societies be mended and ‘civilisation’ put together again?
Buruma’s first three chapters are headed Exultation, Hunger and Revenge, three obsessions among the displaced and newly liberated that made their lives especially difficult to cope with.
At first, naturally, there was exultation that, after such carnage, there were any survivors at all. Their Allied liberators were hailed as saviours. Well-fed, broad-shouldered and well-paid, the newly arrived GIs and Canadians effortlessly o ut s hone t he exhausted and traumatised men of Occupied Europe.
Sexual neediness — something to hold on to — was everywhere, even among the survivors of the death camps. One could not blame the young girls, wrote a French doctor. They had been through hell and were ‘now seized by an irresistible desire for affection and forgetfulness’.
To be a German national was a very different experience. In the Soviet zone, rape was encouraged by Stalin as a reward for the fighting troops. In Berlin, women prowled the ruins, trying to pick up GIs.
SEXUAL hunger and hunger for food became indistinguishable, one Berliner observed. After going ‘American-hunting’ and bagging a fighter-pilot, her reward was Spam, eggs, Hershey bars and ripened corn. She devoured it all.
‘The Mistress Army’ was the popular name for Allied troops in 1945 Berlin — a reference to the countless officers bedding German mistresses. They were mostly American; the British officers preferred drink.
Japan, of course, was part of the Axis, and as a historian fluent in Japanese, Buruma uncovers quite stupefying material about Hitler’s allies in the Far East. China and Japan had always been at odds, especially after the sacking of Nanking in 1937, when tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped and mutilated, most of them dying of the ordeal.
Terrified that the same dishonour would befall their women, the Japanese built ‘comfort facilities’ for the conquering Allies, exhorting those they recruited to ‘sacrifice their bodies’ to save their fellow countrywomen.
In Okinawa and the Pacific Islands, women were told to blow themselves up with hand-grenades or j ump off cliffs to escape ravishment by the invaders. Lots did, writes Buruma.
Having been f ed all t his propaganda, many Japanese women were greatly relieved to come across the ‘courteous and carefree’ GIs. Ninety thousand births to unmarried Japanese girls in 1946 were the result.
As a child in Holland, Buruma witnessed loaves being dropped from the sky by RAF and U.S. pilots. Yet in Rotterdam a starvation hospital was treating ‘wasted humans’ with sunken eyes, yellowed skin and horribly swollen limbs.
As with the survivors of Belsen, to have given them too much food would have resulted in burst stomachs. Only extraordinary dedication from doctors, many of them British, led to discovering the right combination of food and fluids in order to nurse these starving citizens back to life.
Across the globe there was hunger. Millions starved to death in parts of the Soviet Union.
While in Japan and Germany, famine was followed by outbreaks of disease. Returning German soldiers huddled in ruined underpasses. Tokyo’s Ueno Station was crammed with the hungry and homeless.
NOT surprisingly, it was an uphill battle for Britain and America to win public sympathy for aiding their former enemies. That the fact that the Allied occupation of Japan and Germany would last even longer if nothing was done helped to make the case for sending famine relief. A Daily Mirror headline summed up the public mood: ‘Feed the Brutes?’
Once physically strong enough, the victors turned to revenge — a desire, says Buruma, as human as the need for sex or food. More than 8 million Soviet soldiers had died during the war at the hands of the Germans, of whom 3.3 million were deliberately starved and kept outside all year in open-air camps.
Revenge started early. At Dachau, American soldiers stood by while SS guards were drowned or
lynched by their former prisoners. In Bergen-Belsen, a group of German civilian nurses drafted in to help care for the sick was set upon by vengeful inmates.
In the Red Army, revenge was not only sanctioned but compulsory. Road signs in Russian instructed the troops: ‘Soldier, you are in Germany; take revenge on the Hitlerites.’
In France, 6,000 people were killed as collaborators with the Nazis. Women who consorted with the Germans were stripped naked, paraded, tarred and feathered in an orgy of revenge far worse than in other Occupied countries. What is less well known is that after Liberation, more than 1,000 Jews were murdered in Poland, as Polish Catholics acted on a long-standing enmity with the Jewish people. Poland itself had suffered dreadfully in the war. It was Reinhard Heydrich’s boast t hat he had exterminated all but 3 per cent of Poland’s intelligentsia.
And it was here — and also in Czechoslovakia — that some of the worst revenge was exacted. Militiamen roamed the streets, molesting and stoning German immigrants. German women were forced to eat pictures of Hitler. Hair shaved from their heads was stuffed into their mouths.
Suspected SS men were strung up, without trial, from lamp-posts. More than 10,000 German-speaking civilians were incarcerated in a football stadium and machinegunned for sport.
This was Hitler’s legacy and, as Buruma shows, it took a long time to drain the poison and recreate a civilised Europe. Gradually, the frenzied aftermath of war died down. Once the blood-letting had finished, it was time to take stock. Ian Buruma’s father was one of millions stuck in Germany and waiting to go home. Another 3 million were stuck further afield — including my father, as it happens, somewhere on the Burma railroad. Economic austerity, for Britain as for others, would last for years, but the building blocks of a new world were lowered into place.
What remains, indelibly, are the memories. This book is a compelling and astounding addition to the literature of the war, reminding us, as Buruma writes, ‘Never Again’.