The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (67 page)

Facile comparisons between British rule in India and Hitler’s empire in Europe, or for that matter Stalin’s Soviet Union, are sometimes drawn. Indeed, as we shall see, Hitler drew them himself (see
Chapter 14
). To be sure, the British had no illusions about their position in wartime India. ‘For the duration of the war and probably for some time after,’ wrote the Military Secretary of the India Office in 1943, ‘India must be considered as an occupied and hostile country.’But there is a profound difference between, for example, the famine that struck India in 1943 and the systematic mass murder of civilians that was
undertaken as a deliberate policy by the Nazis in Europe after 1939. It is undeniable that a combination of incompetence, complacency and indifference, tinged with resentment of the previous year’s riots, ensured that the official response to the 1943 famine was woefully inadequate. Yet the famine began with a cyclone and the loss of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, not with an order from Churchill to starve Bengalis. Hitler’s imperialism, as we have seen, was quite different in character. Ashe had already explained to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in 1937, his approach to the problem of Indian nationalism would have been to ‘shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established’. Even Mussolini, whose imperialism was in some respects more old-fashioned than Hitler’s, not only enthusiastically ordered the use of mustard gas in the conquest of Abyssinia but also bombarded his Viceroy there, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, with instructions to shoot ‘all rebels made prisoner’, to ‘finish off rebels’ with gas and to ‘initiate and systematically conduct [a] policy of terror and extermination against rebels and populations in complicity with them’.

Historians have sometimes represented the Nazi empire as if its extreme violence had an ultimately self-defeating character. This is not how it appeared at the time. From a British vantage point, the ruthlessness of German imperialism was at once appalling and deeply impressive. So enfeebled did their own colonial imperium seem by comparison that relatively few Englishmen consciously considered themselves to be fighting to preserve it. Rather, they imagined themselves fighting for an idealized England. On leave, Geoffrey Wellum, an eighteen-year-old Battle of Britain pilot, yearned to go away ‘deep into the country and get lost, to the type of place I sometimes dream about, somewhere with sun-drenched water meadows and grazing cattle, hedges, meandering streams and so forth’. As he flew, he looked down on ‘the rolling colourful countryside, English countryside, surely a green and pleasant land [with] small cars on small roads passing through small villages’. The difference in scale with the grandiose visions of the Nazis could scarcely have been more complete. J. R. R. Tolkien always denied that his
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, conceived during the First World War and largely written during the Second,
was an allegory of contemporary events. Yet, as he conceded, it was certainly applicable to them. ‘The Shire’, with its thatched cottages, dappled sunlight and babbling brooks, was England precisely as she imagined herself in 1940 – not a mighty world empire, but an innocent rural backwater, albeit one acutely vulnerable to contamination from outside. Mordor was the totalitarian antithesis, a blasted industrial hell, ‘bored and tunnelled by teeming broods of evil things’, spewing forth monstrous hordes and devilish weaponry; a realm of slaves and of camps. Like Tolkien’s hobbits, the English considered themselves the plucky little underdogs pitted against an all-knowing, all-powerful foe.
The Lord of the Rings
is a fairy story, in its author’s own phrase, but one that was ‘quickened to full life by war’ – indeed, Tolkien himself also referred to the work as ‘a history of the Great War of the Ring’ and a homage ‘to England; to my country’. It is a celebration of ‘the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds’ – and in that respect a quite different kind of Ring saga from the Wagnerian version revered by Hitler.

The odds did indeed look well-nigh impossible. By the spring of 1941 the best encouragement Alan Brooke could give himself was that Hitler might abandon his efforts to defeat Britain and ‘thrust into Russia’ instead. Strikingly, however, in his diaries Brooke did not expect even this to give Britain much relief: ‘Whatever the next thrust may be on the continent it is certain that the process of attempted strangulation will continue full blast with attacks on trade routes, Western Approaches, Western Ports and industry. If these attempts are sufficiently successful eventually invasion will be attempted.’ He did not expect the Soviets to hold out against a German invasion for longer than ‘3 or 4 months’. Others in London put the likely duration of Russian resistance at three or four weeks; the expectation was that the Wehrmacht would go through the Red Army ‘like a knife through butter’. Churchill himself expected that the Soviets would ‘assuredly be defeated’. Those now seem excessively pessimistic judgements. Given the staggering negligence of the man running the Soviet Union, however, it was far from unreasonable. Empires, it has already been noted, rely on collaboration as much as on coercion. One of the supreme ironies of the Second World War was that in its first two years Hitler’s empire found no more loyal collaborator than Josef Stalin.

[There are] two breeds of Bolshevism… there is nothing to choose between the philosophies of Moscow and Berlin.

Duff Cooper, August 23, 1939

He had opened his morning newspaper on the headlines announcing the Russian-German alliance. News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart… Now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.

Evelyn Waugh,
Sword of Honour

Historically they are both an attempt to get away from an effete civilization which the countries we represent are trying desperately hard to cling to and to revivify. It is indeed a revolutionary war and we are on the side of the past – at the moment.

Sir Stafford Cripps, September 25, 1940

Henryka Łappo was just twelve years old when she, her mother and her elder brother were deported from Ulanowka. It happened in the middle of the bitterly cold night of February 10, 1940:

Suddenly… came the rapping at our door… What offences had we committed? Where, what for and why did we have to leave our home and farm at
this time and in such weather?… But the insistent ‘quickly’ spurred us into action and onto the sledges with our very sparse possessions which we had packed in just under an hour. Thus we moved off towards the station… Similar loads of families and bundles left from every house…

In the cattle trucks there huddled together grown-ups and children, men and women, friends and strangers. There was no means of washing or changing for the night, no food but, cold and hungry, we felt like animals caught in a trap, unsure what the next day would bring or when and where this journey would end for no-one knew our destination.

Their uncertainty was understandable. Although Poland had been invaded by Germany the previous year, Henryka and her fellow captives were not being deported on the orders of Hitler. They were being deported on the orders of his ally, Stalin, and they ended up in a one-room hut near the village of Ivaksha, in the benighted Soviet province of Arkhangel’sk.

Central Europe had a mirror-image quality after September 1939. For it had not only been Hitler who had ordered his troops to invade Poland. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow that August, Josef Stalin had done the same, on September 17. To conservatives like Duff Cooper or Evelyn Waugh, it seemed a moment of revelation, laying bare the essential identity of the two totalitarian systems, National Socialism and ‘socialism in one country’. The signatories themselves appreciated the irony of their partnership. When he flew to Moscow to sign the pact, Ribbentrop had joked that Stalin would ‘yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact’, Hitler and Mussolini’s anti-Communist alliance. Nevertheless, the partition of Poland did not produce exactly identical totalitarian twins. The Soviet zone of occupation was in many respects a mirror image of the German zone but, as with a true mirror image, right and left were transposed.

On September 18, several days after the Germans had taken the town, the 29th Light Tank Brigade of the Red Army rolled into Brest. They had seen little action since crossing the frontier, for the Poles had concentrated their efforts on resisting the invasion from the West. Indeed, most of the fighting was over by the time the Soviets arrived on the scene. The demarcation line between the two occupation zones was, under the terms of the Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed ten days
later, to pass just to the west of the fortress. After an amicable joint parade, the Germans therefore withdrew back across the River Bug and the Russians took over. On the Soviet side of the line, thirteen million Poles – including 250,000 prisoners of war – were about to discover for themselves the distinctive charms of life in the workers’ paradise.

The Germans and Soviets had pledged in their latest treaty ‘to assure to the peoples living… in the former Polish state… a peaceful life in keeping with their national character’. Actions on the German side of the new border had already given the lie to those fine words. The Soviet approach was slightly different. At first, attempts were made to woo a sceptical local populace, many of whom remembered all too clearly the last Soviet invasion of 1920, when the Red Army had advanced as far as the Vistula. Soviet soldiers received as much as three months’ salary in advance, with orders to spend it liberally in Polish villages. This honeymoon did not last long, however. Soviet officials lost no time in throwing Poles out of choice apartments in Brest and elsewhere, commandeering them without compensation. Meanwhile, Soviet promises of plentiful jobs in the Donbas region proved to be illusory. Worst of all, Poles soon came to know the Stalinist system of organized terror. ‘There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union,’ people were told: ‘Those who have been in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail.’ Soon Poles began to joke bleakly that the initials NKVD stood for
Nie wiadomo Kiedy Wroce do Domu
(‘Impossible to tell when I will return home’). Incredibly, a substantial number of Polish Jews who had fled East at the outbreak of war sought to be repatriated to the German zone of occupation, not realizing that it was only
Volksdeutsche
who were wanted. This speaks volumes for their experience of nine months of Russian rule.

From Stalin’s point of view, the Nazi vision of a Germanized western Poland, denuded of it social elites, seemed not menacing but completely familiar. Stalin had, after all, been waging war against the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union for far longer and on a far larger scale than anything thus far attempted by Hitler. And he regarded few minorities with more suspicion than the Poles. Even before the outbreak of war, 10,000 ethnic Polish families living in the western border region of the Soviet Union had been deported. Now the entire
Polish population of the Soviet-occupied zone was at Stalin’s mercy. Beginning on the night of February 10, 1940, the NKVD unleashed a campaign of terror against suspected ‘anti-Soviet’ elements. The targets identified in a set of instructions subsequently issued in November of the same year were ‘those frequently travelling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel [owners] and restaurant owners’. Like Hitler, in other words, Stalin wished to decapitate Polish society.

By the spring of 1940, around 14,700 Poles were being held in prisoner of war camps, of whom the majority were officers of the vanquished army. But there were also police officers, prison guards, intelligence personnel, government officials, landowners and priests. In addition, 10,685 Poles were being held in the western region of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, including not only ex-officers but also landowners, factory owners and government officials. At the suggestion of Lavrenty Beria, who had replaced Nikolai Yezhov as head of the NKVD in November 1938, Stalin ordered that these ‘sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system’ be tried by special tribunals. Their physical presence would not be required, nor would evidence need to be heard, since the verdicts had already been reached: death. In the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk, more than 4,000 of them were tied up, shot in the back of the head and buried in a mass grave, a crime the Soviets subsequently sought to blame on the Nazis. This was only one of a series of mass executions. All told, more than 20,000 Poles were killed. Further ‘liquidations’ followed, notably the emptying of the prisons of Lwów, Pińsk and other towns in the summer of 1941. Between September 1939 and June 1941 the Germans killed approximately 100,000 Jewish Poles and 20,889 non-Jewish Poles in their occupation zone; the NKVD came close to matching that body-count in just two operations. Yet these murders were only a part of Stalin’s plan for Poland. By February 1940 the Soviet authorities were also ready to undertake the wholesale deportation of Poles they had been preparing since October.

The peace of Polish family life was shattered, without any preliminary announcement or warning, by a knock at the door, usually just as dawn was breaking. Armed Soviet militiamen burst in, read out a deportation order and gave those present as little as half an hour to pack up whatever possessions the militia did not take for themselves. These incursions were often accompanied by gratuitous violence and vandalism. Janusz Bardach, a Jewish teenager in the town of Włodzimierz-Wołyński, watched in amazement as one NKVD man, evidently the worse for drink, smashed the mahogany desk of the doctor he was arresting, shouting: ‘Capitalist swine! Motherfucking parasites! We need to find these bourgeois exploiters!’ One peasant woman described her own traumatized reaction: