Exorcising Hitler (13 page)

Mother and children took to the road. They lost two of the boys to diphtheria, but neither Ruth nor her mother was raped again. They heard after the war that the rest of the townspeople had subsequently been deported to Russia; many were never seen again. Ruth still tells herself that if she had not been raped she would never have met the kindly officer, her family would never have left the town and they too might have perished in the Gulag.

She feels that thought helps. A little.
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If the invasion and conquest were bad, they were no worse than many conquered peoples had suffered over the millennia during which human beings have waged war on each other. The Soviets, while brutal and ruthless, and willing, if not eager, to kill and destroy on a massive scale, were not genocidal in their intention – a distinction worth remembering when their conduct in Germany is compared with that of the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union after June 1941.

But there was another difference in this conquest, and the consequences for the almost ten million or more people who lived in the ancient German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia were both drastic and catastrophic. Not only were these provinces subjected to the imposition of foreign rule, they were also, as soon became clear, to be ethnically cleansed. In future these lands were not to be inhabited by Germans but by Poles and Russians. The German border was to be moved hundreds of kilometres to the west. These millions of settled human beings who survived the Russian onslaught were to be uprooted from their homes, farms and businesses and ‘resettled’ in what used to be known as western and central Germany.

However, it was not just the Germans who were to be forcibly moved as the Russians advanced to victory.

Six years earlier, under secret clauses in his agreement with Hitler (the so-called ‘Nazi–Soviet Pact’), Stalin had claimed the eastern half of the soon-to-be-destroyed Polish state. On 17 September 1939, with Poland already near-prostrate under the German assault that had begun on 1 September, the Red Army, accompanied by the Stalinist state’s whole ghastly apparatus of oppression, propaganda and enforcement, moved into the eastern provinces.

Eleven days later, after the Polish surrender in east and west, the Russians and the Germans signed an agreement abolishing Poland – or, as the startlingly mendacious words of the treaty’s text put it: ‘the Government of the German Reich and the Government of the U.S.S.R. have, by means of the treaty signed today, definitively settled the problems arising from the collapse of the Polish state and have thereby created a sure foundation for a lasting peace in Eastern Europe’.
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They had done nothing of the kind, of course. But what did happen in eastern Poland (known thereafter officially as ‘the Polish region’) was in most ways as radical as what happened in the German-occupied west of the country.

In the west, the Germans immediately dismantled Polish state institutions, absorbed large areas directly into the Reich and established a colonial-style regime known as the ‘General Government’ in the remaining part of the country, with its capital at Krakow. Polish landowners, industrialists and intellectuals began to be rounded up and systematically liquidated. Jews were persecuted and ghettoised. Almost a million Poles, Christian and Jewish, were expelled at short notice, without compensation, from the annexed areas and dumped into the General Government. It was a precedent that would not be forgotten five years later.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet-occupied part, a little over half the country’s area and containing a third of its population, landholdings and industries were seized by the state, the Polish administration dissolved and a communist police state instituted. The difference from the German-occupied area was that the majority of the inhabitants in the eastern provinces seized by Stalin, though ruled by a Polish elite, were not Polish-speaking but Ukrainian (more than a third), Belorussian (around 15 per cent) and Jews.

In June 1941, the Soviet-controlled ‘Polish region’ was invaded by the Wehrmacht and subjected to the same Calvary as the rest of German-occupied Russia. The question was, what would happen when the fortunes of war were reversed? Britain and France had intervened in 1939 to preserve the integrity of the Polish Republic (an intention which led to no direct military intervention on the battlefield and should, logically, have also involved a declaration of war against Hitler’s Soviet co-conspirators).

As the tide turned on the Eastern Front, and in early 1944 the Soviet Army approached the borders of pre-war Poland, it became obvious that Stalin had no intention of giving up the territory he had acquired under the Nazi–Soviet Pact. This had been privately clear at least since the Tehran Conference between the ‘Big Three’ Allied nations in November/December 1943.

In fact, as early as March 1943, when British Foreign Secretary Eden met in Washington with Roosevelt and his adviser, Harry Hopkins, they agreed that the Poles should have East Prussia after the war. The Russians were duly informed of this. In return, it was made clear by Soviet Ambassador Litvinov that, while approving the expansion of Poland to the west, Russia would insist on her ‘territorial rights’ on the eastern frontier. This was a statement accepted by all to mean that the territory seized from Poland in 1939 would remain part of the Soviet Union after victory.
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At Tehran, the question of Polish compensation for Stalin’s cynical detachment of almost half their country – giving Russia a greater slice of Poland than she had obtained in 1795, when the country had been divided between the three great regional powers of the time, Russia, Prussia and Austria – was seriously addressed. Now, instead of ‘just’ East Prussia, it was proposed to assuage Polish feelings with the gift of Upper Silesia, Danzig and Pomerania as well. Almost seven million Germans lived in these areas and had done so for centuries.

By January 1945, the Russians had further increased their demands. The grant to Poland was now to include further lands between the two branches of the Neisse River, a rich agricultural area inhabited by an extra 2.8 million Germans.
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East Prussia would now be divided along north–south lines, with the Poles taking the southern and the Russians the northern half. Altogether, a little under ten million Germans would now find their ancestral lands included within the post-war borders of the Soviet Union and Poland.
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The Western Allies protested during the pre-negotiations for the big Yalta Conference in February, and they protested further at the conference itself, but by this time there was not much they could do about it. The realities on the ground included massive Russian occupation forces and also a pro-Soviet Polish puppet government, based since the summer of 1944 in the eastern city of Lublin. The ‘Lublin Poles’ had begun contesting the legitimacy of the London-based Polish government-in-exile, even raising their own army as an auxiliary force for the Russians. The non-communist Poles inside the country had been severely depleted by the Germans’ pitiless suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944. As Churchill and the ailing Roosevelt were forced to realise, Stalin could do with his brother Slavic country (for centuries Russia’s intimate enemy) what he wished.

So, as the Red Army burst over the border into what had been the Greater German Reich in January 1945, it was not just rape and destruction that the German civilian population had to fear, but the longer-term intentions of the Russians (and, it soon became clear, of the Poles and the Czechs). These intentions centred on what at the time was referred to as a ‘population transfer’ and what a later age would call, more brutally and more honestly, ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The mass expulsions of Germans that began shortly before the end of the war were not the first such catastrophe of the twentieth century.

During the First World War and the period of violent dissolution that followed it, the Ottoman Empire, for centuries a patchwork of races and religions living mostly peaceably together, had witnessed massacres and internecine war on a huge scale. Most notorious was the officially sponsored massacre or expulsion of the empire’s Christian Armenian population – with a death toll estimated at between 300,000 (Turkish figure) and 1.5 million (Armenian figure). Hitler himself was reputed to have declared, with reference to his intended brutal treatment of the Polish population in 1939, ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’
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But there was another precedent.

The other large Christian minority in the Turkish sphere of rule was that of the Ottoman Greeks, again totalling around 1.5 million, mostly living near to the west coast of Anatolia, where they had been settled since a millennium before the birth of Christ. Numerous Greeks were to be found also in Istanbul (once, as Constantinople, the capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire), on the Black Sea coast and in the eastern province of Cappadocia, where the long-established but isolated Greek population now spoke a kind of Turkish dialect.

The problem of the Christian Greeks in Anatolia had been simmering away since the turn of the twentieth century, but it reached crisis point after the First World War, when Turkey, its empire rapidly disintegrating, seemed prostrate at the feet of its local rivals. The Greek government – one of the victors of the First World War – seized the opportunity to land troops at Smyrna, the largest city on Turkey’s west coast, a glittering cosmopolitan trading centre with a substantial and vocally nationalist Greek population as well as Turkish, Armenian and other-nationality citizens, including thousands of French, British and American business people and their families.

Emboldened, the Greeks began to pursue a long-harboured notion of the
Megali Idea
(Great Idea), a restoration of all the nation’s ancient lands, including Constantinople (Istanbul). Soon they began to make incursions deep into the Turkish-dominated interior, terrorising the non-Greek inhabitants.

The resulting war between the Greeks and Turks, the latter led by their great national hero, General Mustafa Kemal (later honoured with the name Kemal Atatürk) ended in a definite and tragically bloody Turkish victory. Many thousands of Greeks were massacred or fled (it should be added that, during their own incursions, Greek army and militia units had also slaughtered innocent Turks and laid waste to entire villages and towns). The Greek forces were forced to evacuate Anatolia. On 9 September 1922, in one of the most terrible events of the early twentieth century, the ancient and proud city of Smyrna was laid to waste by an alliance of Turkish soldiery and freebooters and then destroyed by fire.
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George Horton, the American consul, who managed to make it to a waiting boat at the height of this mayhem, saw, as he made his way between the Turkish ranks on the quayside, how terrible had been the slaughter. ‘Then they [the Turkish soldiers] cleared our way . . . and we rushed past in safety. Among the many dead bodies, we saw men, women and children shot to death, bodies drawn up in horribly strained postures, with expressions portraying the endurance of excruciating pain.’
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Describing his feelings as he steamed away from the burning city in the safety of an American naval vessel, Horton recollected:

As the destroyer moved away from the fearful scene and darkness descended, the flames, raging now over a vast area, grew brighter and brighter, presenting a scene of awful and sinister beauty . . . nothing was lacking in the way of atrocity, lust, cruelty and all that fury of human passion which, given their full play, degrade the human race to a level lower than the vilest and cruellest of beasts . . . of the keenest impression which I brought away with me from Smyrna was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.
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Unspeakably cruel as much of their behaviour was, like the Russians in Germany in 1945 the intentions of the Turks in Anatolia a little over twenty years earlier were brutal, ruthless – murderous on an individual level – but not technically genocidal. They had decided that the Greeks, too ambitious, too rich, infidel and disloyal, had to be made to leave, and a great part of the violence was not just the conventionally opportunistic, sadistic and vengeful behaviour of undisciplined soldiers but part of a cold-blooded strategy to ensure that this would happen.

Kemal, the Turkish commander, openly admitted to his aides that he saw the destruction of the cosmopolitan (and largely Christian) city as a part of a ‘purification’ process that would return its shell, at least, to its ‘true and noble Turkish inhabitants’.
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Thousands of Anatolian Greeks died, but tens and hundreds of thousands more escaped of their own volition to the nearby Greek-held islands. Others, if they survived, waited meekly under unspeakable conditions, subjected to continuing harassment and violence, for their fate to be decided.

The appalling situation in Anatolia was finally regulated by the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923. This mandated a compulsory population exchange, with the surviving 1.2–1.5 million Greeks in Anatolia deported to Greece, while 400,000 or so Muslims, often Greek-speakers, from northern Greece and the Greek islands (most notably Crete and Lesvos), were forced to leave for Turkey.