Europe: A History (211 page)
No European country was more scarred by the Holocaust than Poland. Jewry’s thousand-year Polish abode virtually came to an end. An important element in Poland’s population and culture had been torn out. Future generations of Polish citizens would have to bear not only the degrading memory of atrocities perpetrated in their homeland but also a humiliating legacy of recrimination, misinformation, and moral confusion. Only those who were both Polish and Jewish could fully comprehend the trauma. ‘The paths of the two saddest nations on this earth have parted for ever.’
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[
BUCZACZ
]
The German attack on the USSR rapidly transformed the world’s diplomatic alliances. Since August 1939 the Centre and the East of Europe’s threefold power
structure had been partners. They were now mortal enemies. This opened the way for the remnant of the third power centre, Great Britain, to join the Soviet Union and to rebuild a new version of the diplomatic system of the First World War. The West would now combine with the East to hold the Centre, before bringing in the USA to tip the balance. The Great Triangle was resurrected. For Churchill, a lifelong anti-communist, this meant ‘speaking well of the Devil himself’. For Stalin, it offered the only possible source of assistance. An Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance was signed in Moscow on 12 July 1941. The German-Soviet pact was formally annulled. Stalin was even persuaded to swallow his pride over Poland, and to sign an alliance with Britain’s other ally, the Polish Government in London. The Soviet-Polish military convention of July 1941 was followed by a political treaty. An ‘Amnesty’ was to be granted for the millions of innocent Polish deportees and prisoners in the USSR; and a new Polish army was to be formed in the depths of Russia. The command was given to General Anders, freshly released from the dungeons of the Lyubianka. It was the start of a famous Odyssey.
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AUSCHWITZ
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N
31 May 1944, a British ‘Mosquito’ reconnaissance plane of 60 Photo Squadron took off from an airbase at Brindisi in southern Italy. Its mission was to fly some 900 miles to German-occupied Poland and to photograph a synthetic fuel factory in the town of Oéwiwcim (Auschwitz). By chance, since the South African crew left the camera running, the final frames of their film shot at 27,000 feet caught the first ever bird’s-eye view of the two nearby SS-concentration camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
1
Many such pictures were subsequently obtained by Allied reconnaissance flights. One photograph taken over Auschwitz-Birkenau from a lower altitude on 25 August 1944 was sharp enough to show a line of new arrivals being marched under guard from the railway ramp towards the open gate of Crematorium No. 2. The trains in the siding, the roof vents of the gas chamber, the chimneys of the furnaces, and groups of prisoners are all visible.
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Later pictures, in December, showed that the dismantling of the crematoria had already begun.
Aerial photography is a valuable tool in several branches of historical research. It is widely used by archaeologists, by urbanologists, and by landscape analysts. In this case, it supplied a convincing item in the proof of a genocidal campaign that post-war ‘revisionists’ have sought to deny.
Partial knowledge of the Nazi death-camps had been available in the West since late 1942, when the exiled Polish Government in London published information supplied by its underground couriers. Despite this, the Allied Powers did not see fit to take action.
3
The identification of Auschwitz II as the ‘unknown destination’ to which Jews from all over Europe were being deported, was only confirmed from the accounts of five escapees in July 1944.
4
From then on, repeated appeals were made by Zionist groups who hoped that the murders might be disrupted by bombing the camp installations and railway tracks. The appeals fell on deaf ears. Air force officers insisted on the priority of their military and industrial targets. One official of the British Foreign Office minuted: ‘a disproportionate amount of time … is wasted … on these wailing Jews.’
5
The fate of the aerial intelligence pictures is no less instructive than their contents. The films were flown back from Italy for processing and interpretation at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. There, since the directors of the operation were only interested in the synthetic fuel factory, the last frames on the reels were not checked out. The historic photographs of 31 May and 25 August 1944 were found thirty years later in the archives of the US Defense Intelligence Agency—unprinted.
6
Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army on 27 January 1945. Yet the Western Governments’ urgent requests for detailed information brought no further news until an ambiguous telegram arrived from Moscow on 27 April. It mentioned ‘investigations at Auschwitz’ which showed that ‘more than four million citizens of various countries had been killed’.
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This figure, if applied to the victims of Auschwitz alone, was not compatible with statistics produced by Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg.
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But it was allowed to pass into conventional wisdom. Not until the collapse of Communism in 1990 did the State Museum at Oéwiwcim feel free to release a more credible estimate of 1.2–1.5 million victims,
9
of whom probably c.800,000–1.1 million were Jews.
Between the extremes of credulity and incredulity, it took exactly fifty years for an approximation of the truth to emerge about one of contemporary history’s most intensively researched topics. ‘After Auschwitz’, Theodor Adorno said, ‘poetry is no longer possible’. It seems that historians, too, lost their faculties.
The crucial step, however, was still to come. Without the USA, the Allied Powers amounted to little more than a club for invalids. Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Adantic Charter on 11 August, establishing eight common principles. These included:
First—their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other… . Third—they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live … Eighth—they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force.
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But the US Congress was still unwilling to enter the war. The Soviet Government had retired to Kuybyshev on the Volga; its first service to the Allied cause was to join the British in a joint occupation of Persia. Fortunately for London and Moscow, the Japanese proved more persuasive than the Allies. When Japanese bombers attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on Hawaii on 7 December 1941, they ‘awoke the slumbering giant’. Their action had no direct connection with the war in Europe; yet it changed American attitudes overnight. America’s war-shyness evaporated; the Congress voted lavish war credits; and the hands of the President were untied. It was not part of the Japanese plan; but they had unwittingly unlocked the doors of the Grand Alliance. ‘The Big Three’—the war-winning trio of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt—were in business.
The Germans, of course, felt cheated. They had sought no quarrel with the USA, if only the President would stop helping the British. In any case, they were counting on finishing the war before the Americans could intervene. So Berlin opted for bravado: Hitler declared war on the USA in a speech to the Reichstag on 11 December 1941.
In its way, the emergence of the Grand Alliance was every bit as shocking as that of the Nazi-Soviet partnership two years earlier. Every principle of the Anglo-Saxon democracies was contradicted by the Soviet system. Nor was it just a matter of forgetting Stalin’s past crimes. The Western leaders had to close their minds to the fact that Stalin continued to kill perhaps a million of his own people every year throughout the war. But when Stalin was weak and Hitler was strong, Stalin had to be helped. By Stalin’s standards, the Western democracies were every bit as nauseating and ‘anti-socialist’ as the Führer. But with the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, the helping hand of the West had to be accepted; ideological niceties did not enter the reckoning. Though the anti-Nazi alliance was to be wrapped in the verbiage of freedom, democracy, and justice, the Big Three were bound together by cynical convenience.
For the time being, the Grand Alliance could do little to challenge German hegemony in Europe. The immediate tasks were to secure their lines of communication, to limit Germany’s further advance, to damage Germany’s war industries, and to construct the basis for offensive action in the future. To these ends the Anglo-Americans combined to fight the Battle of the Atlantic; they planned a vast campaign of aerial bombing; and they undertook to supply the Soviet Union with war material. Everything depended on the Red Army’s ability to avoid collapse, on Britain’s ability to preserve its island fortress, and on the Americans’ ability to muster their colossal resources for simultaneous wars in the Pacific and in Europe, [
OXFAM
]
The Battle of the Atlantic secured the sea lanes which guaranteed Britain’s lifeline to the USA and the USA’s gateway to Europe. 21,194,000 tons of Allied shipping, 77,000 British sailors, and 70 per cent of all German U-boats were to be lost before the seas would be cleared of raiders. The U-boats’ bases were invulnerable: the abortive British raid on St Nazaire in March 1942 highlighted the contrast between the Allies’ mastery of the sea with Germany’s supremacy on land. Anti-submarine
measures, including the convoy system, aerial patrols, and sonar, took months and months to be deployed. Allied shipping losses peaked in March 1943, immediately before the U-boats met their own catastrophe. The sinking of 41 U-boats in conjunction with Convoy ONS-5 forced Admiral Dönitz to withdraw his submarines from the Atlantic for good.
OXFAM
T
HE
Oxford Committee for Famine Relief began its career in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin on 5 October 1942. Its immediate purpose was to alleviate distress caused by the war in Greece. It was by no means the sole agency devoted to international humanitarian relief: the International Red Cross had been operating out of Geneva since 1863, when it was formed by Henri Dunant as a result of horrors witnessed at the Battle of Solferino. In the First World War campaigns had been organized to assist war victims in Belgium, Serbia [
FLORA
], and Galicia. In 1918–21 the American Relief Administration (ARA) provided enormous assistance, especially in Eastern Europe, as did UNRRA after 1945. Almost all the combatant countries, including Germany, had operated some form of relief agency. Yet Oxfam had several advantages. Like the IRC, it was independent of government policy. Also, being based in one of the Allied states, it did not cease to function at war’s end. Thirdly, being British, it had ready access via the Empire to all the continents. It was well placed when the focus for international relief shifted away from Europe.
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The history of the relief agencies inevitably reflected Europe’s changing position in the world. Post-war affluence created a huge economic discrepancy between ‘North’ and ‘South’ at the very time that the ‘West’ was confronting ‘the East’. The USA was more preoccupied with politics than previously; the Soviet bloc was not involved in humanitarian issues; and the UN was somewhat constricted by member governments. So an important role was left to private organizations from post-imperial Europe such as Oxfam, Save the Children, CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development), and Médecins Sans Frontières. The North-South Commission (1978–83) and the associated Brandt Report established the target figure of 1 per cent of GNP whereby the wealthier nations should aim to assist the ‘Third World’. But in 1992–3 the disasters in ex-Yugoslavia emphasized the fact that Europe’s own agonies were far from finished.
As from the first 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne on 31 May 1942, the Allied bombing offensive rose steadily to a mighty crescendo. It has been strongly criticized both on practical and on moral grounds. Precision bombing, such as the famous ‘Dam-Buster Raid’ on the reservoirs of the Ruhr Basin or the elimination of the Nazis’ heavy-water plant at Telemark in Norway, had clear objectives. But
the wholesale destruction of German cities by fire-bombing, and the attempt to terrorize the civilian population, did not achieve the expected results. In the years between 1941 and 1945,1.35 million tons of high explosive were dropped on the Reich by the endless waves of Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Flying Fortresses. Counter-measures absorbed a great deal of Germany’s dwindling resources. But the Nazis’ war industries were never halted; and German civilians, like their British counterparts under the Blitz, rallied to the national cause. One enormous raid on Hamburg in May 1943 caused a fire-storm that killed 43,000 innocents. Another on Dresden may have wreaked destruction approaching that of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, [
ALTMARKT
]
Western operations to supply the Soviet Union, which gathered pace from 1941, were rarely acknowledged by the beneficiaries. The Royal Navy took on the hazardous assignment of leading Arctic convoys to Murmansk. Many seamen and ships and the best part of one whole convoy, the PQ17, were lost without trace. The USA organized huge overland transports into Russia from the Persian Gulf. American aid to the USSR under the Lend Lease Scheme was estimated at 7 per cent of Soviet military production and $2.8 billion in non-military supplies.
Allied political plans took shape round the Atlantic Charter and the Washington Pact of 1 January 1942, whereby the twenty-six states at war with the Axis Powers undertook not to sign a separate peace. These states formed the kernel which grew in the space of four years into the United Nations, the successor to the League.
As soon as the Grand Alliance started its work, the Anglo-Americans were pressed by Stalin to open a second front in Europe. Almost the whole of the German war machine was concentrated in the East; and it was entirely reasonable for Stalin to ask his allies to share the burden. He himself possessed larger reserves of trained manpower than he revealed to anyone—which is one reason why the Red Army consistently exceeded German estimates of its capacity. Even so, there was a huge disproportion between the 150 German divisions which the Red Army had to face and the 4 assigned to the only other front then operating, in North Africa. The Anglo-Americans, however, had no easy means to oblige. Their air power drew the Luftwaffe away from the Volga at a crucial moment; and they eventually took a larger number of Axis prisoners in Africa than were taken at Stalingrad. But they could not project their strength onto the European mainland. Every single Continental port was in enemy hands, and a vast Atlantic wall of coastal defences was under construction in northern France. An abortive raid on Dieppe showed what fearsome obstacles awaited any major Allied landing force. Neither the British nor the Americans possessed trained reserves. Stalin was told that a major offensive would be launched in the West in 1943; it did not materialize until June 1944. Before that, the only relief which the Anglo-Americans could bring to the main land war was on the southern periphery, in Italy.