The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (44 page)

The military planners had anticipated that there would be a time lag between liberation and repatria- tion efforts; they were wrong. Homeward treks were uncontrolled and massive, in part because the relief personnel that were supposed to conduct DP opera-

tions were completely absent. UNRRA had almost no staff or equipment in Germany yet, and in any case the destruction in Germany meant that there were insuf- ficient holding facilities to pen in the DPs. All the army groups in Germany had called for more personnel. “Re- peated instances are encountered,” noted SHAEF’s DP Branch, “where a few persons are running large camps with 10,000 or more displaced persons. For example, when the camp at Wiesbaden was visited on April 11, a lieutenant and a sergeant were dealing with 12,000 persons.”
10
Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune vividly described the scene in Frankfurt a week after the Allies had moved into and beyond the city. “ The displaced person situation in large cities such as Frankfurt and Heidelberg has been in a state of near- chaos for the past week,” she wrote, “and military gov- ernment officials themselves will admit that facilities for caring for the freed Russians, Polish, French and other slave laborers are so inadequate as to produce extremely grave and often tragic results.” Military offi- cials, despite “valiant” efforts, had been overwhelmed: in Frankfurt, twenty-one military government officers tried to care for 40,000 DPs, and not a single Russian or French liaison officer was present to assist. “Crowds of laborers…, not knowing that camps were being set up for them, did the natural thing and set out post-haste for France.” In an airplane factory outside of Frankfurt,

3,000 laborers awaited some direction from military officials; none arrived. Nor were there any officials available who could speak any of the dozen European languages spoken by the DPs. Had they been informed, they would have been disheartened, for usually the camps in which DPs were supposed to be housed were the same ones the Germans had used. “It is sometimes quite a job,” Higgins laconically observed, “to per- suade the laborers who check in at the main receiving center in the town to return to their former quarters.” Not surprisingly, many tried to get home on their own, by whatever means possible.
11

Despite these impressions of widespread chaos, SHAEF did manage to organize the mass movement of almost six million people out of its control area of Ger- many, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The overall rapid- ity of this repatriation process is stunning, as the chart below reveals. In the months of May and June, 80,000 people each day were being struck off the rolls of DPs, and by early fall, one of the largest and fastest migra- tions in European history was nearly over.

The three largest national groups of DPs, as this chart shows, were Russians, French, and Poles; together, these accounted for three-quarters of all DPs. Yet each of these national groups had starkly varying experi- ences as they faced the problem of returning home.

Behind the numbers there lie countless stories of dis- oriented, hungry, exhausted people, most of whom yearned for home, some of whom looked with anxiety on the prospect of returning home, and some of whom did not wish to go home at all.

* * *

P

RIMO LEVI, THAT keen-eyed observer of hu- man nature, was among the huge multitude of DPs flowing out from Germany. Liberated from

Auschwitz in January 1945, he had been borne along in unknown directions on intermittent trains across Po- land and western Ukraine for months, in search of a way home. His destination, he hoped, was Odessa, the Black Sea port that had served as an embarkation point for POWs and DPs being repatriated to the west by ship; but getting there proved an enormous challenge and for Levi consumed many months. His wandering allowed him to observe firsthand the great Babel of humanity that the war had dumped out onto the lands of Eastern Europe. In one hastily erected way station, “there were men, but also a good number of women and children. There were Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians and Muslims; there were people with white and with yel- low skins and Negroes in American uniform; Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Dutch, Italians, and others; and

in addition, Germans pretending to be Austrians, Aus- trians declaring themselves Swiss, Russians stating that they were Italians, a woman dressed as a man and finally, conspicuous in the midst of this ragged crowd, a Magyar general in full uniform, as quarrelsome, motley and stupid as a cock.” Amidst this anthill of assorted peoples, there was a multitude of tragedies. Levi noted, for example, “trainloads of Ukrainian women return- ing from Germany.” These were women who, during the German occupation of their country, had been shipped to work in the Reich. “ Women aged sixteen to forty, hundreds of thousands of them, had left the devastated fields, the closed schools and bombarded factories for the invader’s bread…. In Germany, they had found bread, barbed wire, hard work, German or- der, servitude and shame.” Now they were being sent home. But “victorious Russia had no forgiveness for them.” They were grouped into open cattle cars, and they were frightened: “their closed and bitter faces, their evasive eyes displayed a disturbing, animal-like humiliation and resignation.”
12

These women that Levi so poignantly described could have been found on board hundreds of eastbound trains in the summer of 1945. The Soviet Union was calling its people back: and many went, against their will, to an uncertain but darkly imagined fate. In truth,

the western Allied powers, Britain, France, and the United States, did everything in their power to speed this vast repatriation of Soviet citizens from central and western Europe, knowing full well that for many of the men and women caught in the German web of war- time labor and imprisonment, a return home to Stalin’s Russia might well be a death sentence.

The Allied governments had struggled with the ques- tion of Soviet DPs ever since their armies had landed in France. In the summer of 1944, American and British units in Normandy reported that among the German prisoners they were taking appeared a significant num- ber of Russians, serving in German uniform; and there were also large numbers of Soviet laborers, shipped to France to build defensive fortifications. In July 1944, the British Foreign Office asked the Soviet govern- ment how it would like to have these men “disposed of.” The Soviet government replied that it wanted these Soviet nationals repatriated immediately. The prob- lem presented a moral quandary: as Foreign Minister Anthony Eden put it, “if we do as the Soviet govern- ment want and return all these prisoners to the Soviet Union, whether they are willing to return to the Soviet Union or no, we shall be sending some of them to their death.” But Eden was not unduly troubled. These were men who had served a foreign master and in fact were

traitors of a kind; the British government had “no legal or moral right to dictate to any allied government what steps they should or should not take in dealing with their own nationals” and perhaps most decisive from the British point of view, any delay in returning Soviet nationals could imperil British efforts to secure the speedy release and humane treatment of British pris- oners liberated by the Red Army in eastern Germany. Eden called on the cabinet to approve the Soviet re- quest: all citizens of the Soviet Union must be returned immediately, regardless of what lay in store for them.
13

Yet in the chaotic conditions of newly liberated France, it proved rather easy for Soviet nationals to evade the authorities; many went on the lam, to be tracked by in- trepid Soviet liaison officers, raking through towns and villages to distribute leaflets that promised good treat- ment, such as this one:

Comrades! The hour of your liberation is near.

Everyone knows that through lies, abduction and ter- rorism you have been forced to put on the German uni- form, to fire on your brothers and your friends. Do not believe the flagrant lies put out by the enemies of the USSR that your Soviet Fatherland has forgotten you, and has abandoned you and no longer considers you

as being one of its citizens…. Even though Soviet citi- zens, under the yoke and terrorism of Germany have acted against the interests of the USSR, they will not be considered as responsible if they return to our country and honestly fulfill their duty.
14

These appeals did not work. By January 1945, SHAEF had 21,000 such Russians on their hands, which Gen- eral Eisenhower characterized as “a serious problem”; in March the number had risen to 78,000 and the Allies were not even on German soil yet, where the bulk of the Soviet POWs were being held. The French certainly did not want these wayward Russians remaining in their country. In January 1945, alarmed reports from the hills of south-central France told tales of Russian DPs “roving about, stealing food,” even shooting at farmers and burning farmhouses. Many “were armed with pis- tols, carbines and rifles.” In March, the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, prevailed upon the British for help in getting these men home. He felt they could no longer be lodged in safety in France, which had no supplies to feed them; and any delay in getting them home only delayed the repatriation of Frenchmen in Soviet custody. In short, the Russian DPs were, for the Allies, the most undesirable of guests.
15

This helps to explain why, at the Yalta meeting in the

Crimea in February 1945, the British and American gov- ernments were ready to accede to Soviet demands that all Soviet nationals in Allied hands—whether POWs, la- borers, refugees, men or women, willing or unwilling— be returned to Soviet hands immediately. The matter hinged on the need to get American and British prison- ers freed by the Russians back home safely. Article One of the agreement laid out these reciprocal terms clear- ly: “All Soviet citizens,” the agreement said, “liberated by the forces operating under United States command and all United States subjects liberated by the forces operating under Soviet command will, without delay after their liberation, be separated from enemy pris- oners of war and will be maintained separately from them in camps or points of concentration until they have been handed over to the Soviet or United States authorities.” Soviet and American representatives were to have “the right of immediate access into the camps,” and in the meantime all such personnel were to be treated well, fed and clothed, and looked after. It seemed an agreement filled with advantages for the Soviets, for it was known that as many as five million Soviets might be inside Germany, while only 75,000 American POWs were thought to be in German hands. Nonetheless, in the interest of getting these men home, the Americans willingly made the deal; an identical agreement was signed between the USSR and Britain.

There followed detailed instructions to U.S. command- ers in the field on how to treat, identify, and repatriate any Soviet nationals uncovered in Germany.
16

Of the two million men and women who were now collected and shipped back to Russia by British and American forces, some surely wanted to go home. Their consciences were clear: perhaps they had been taken prisoner by the Germans after strenuous fighting, or perhaps they had been compelled to work for the Ger- mans under severe duress. Surely they would find some forgiveness and compassion upon their return home. Yet in Stalin’s devious mind, any person who had given himself up on the battlefield or, worse, volunteered to serve under German command, was a traitor and pos- sibly a spy. These people, upon their return to the So- viet Union, were uniformly imprisoned, interrogated, and often sent to the gulag, that notorious nationwide system of labor camps. One resident of the Soviet prisons—a former artillery officer who was himself ar- rested in February 1945 while fighting the Germans, for the offense of criticizing Stalin in a private letter to a friend—has described the arrival of these forlorn So- viet repatriates in unforgettable terms: “ That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the spring of the Russian prisoners of war. They passed through the prisons of the Soviet Union in vast dense gray shoals,