NOBODY ESCAPES THE BRUTALITY OF WAR!

NOBODY ESCAPES THE BRUTALITY OF WAR

ANOTHER THEME OF “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007

“The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.”

William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), American Unitarian minister

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We all know war is hell, and we all feel when we are engaged in war we are on the right side, fighting for peace and freedom. This implies that we are different than our enemies. We have a higher purpose and that purpose is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. War is ugly, however, and it makes people enmeshed in war ugly for the attention, as brutality can, often does possess the victors as well as the vanquished, as part of the spoils of war.

Our fourth president, James Madison (1751 – 1836), perhaps the least known of the Founding Fathers, and a framer of the Federal constitution along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, once said:

“Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influences in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

These words and those of Reverend Channing come to mind in reading of another war, the cruel Allied occupation of Giles MacDonogh’s carefully researched book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books 2007).

We have had a scattering of reported brutalities by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but this study of the Allied occupation of Germany immediately following World War II has the leavening effect of more than sixty years. It indicates that to the victors may go the spoils, but often the brutality differs little with that perceived as formerly germane only to the enemy, in this case, the Nazis.

In the spring of 1945, Germany went down into chaos and defeat, and became an occupied territory by its enemies. Many Germans were consigned to slave labor, concentration camps, starvation, or imprisonment without charge. Nor did executions disappear with the defeat of the Nazis. Jews and others so incarcerated were liberated, but such prisons as Bergen-Belsen now housed German citizens and former German soldiers.

As early as 1943, the Allies had set their sights on unconditional German surrender, but on June 5, 1944, when it was administered with much military pomp, there was no German government, making the document of doubtful legality.

It went beyond that. The United States, Great Britain and Russia summarily divided Germany into occupied territories or military governance zones, eventually including France. At the same time, Germans, who had lived for generations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, were to be repatriated in an orderly and humane manner back into Germany over a five-year period. It didn’t happen like this, as Giles MacDonogh documents in this stunning story.

The innocent always experience the collateral damage of war. The native population turns on its former German masters by committing rape, murder and pillage of its German-speaking neighbors who are now persona non grata. The natives do this with impunity while failing to realize their neighbors are as much victims as they are. Entire communities of Germans, who had lived outside the Reich, often for generations, were uprooted at gunpoint. In the end, 16 million people were expelled from their homes.

Robbed, beaten, starved, old men, women, and children were forced to march westward, or crammed into cattle cars in which they sometimes froze to death. MacDonogh takes the reader along on these fearful journeys, village by village, describing the hideous migration.

These displaced German-speakers arrived in their “homeland” already swollen with millions of rootless people. At the same time, the Wehrmacht, the beaten German army of millions, were forced to wait in literally cages to be discharged.

During the war, 11 million German soldiers had been captured. Seven and half million were in the hands of the Western Allies, five million of whom were released within a year. One and a half million disappeared in Soviet Russia and countries of the East. In the spring of 1945, some 40,000 prisoners died of hunger and exposure in twelve open camps that Americans set up to contain a million men.

Almost immediately after the war, the Cold War commenced with Soviet Russia. Direct Interrogation Centers were set up throughout the American and British zones to drill ex-POW, where appalling brutality was justified to extract critical information regarding Russian espionage, mirroring in many cases practices formerly used by the Nazis.

As these notorious methods started to leak to the press, however, especially of the Bad Nenndorf Center in the British Zone, pressure was put to desist with such practices. Eventually, Bad Nenndorf and other like centers were closed. Attempts to bring charges against personnel guilty of brutality in these centers fizzled, as the media tired of the reporting.

The US Army did not want to hold on to prisoners of war, or for it to get out that they were being used as forced labor. That would not be well received in the United States. The British, however, were convinced this was fair reparation for the incessant Nazis V-2 rocket attacks on England during the war. Besides, England needed about half a million former German prisoners to work mainly in agriculture.

Before being transferred to Great Britain, these “POW’s,” even though the war was over, were held in “POW” camps in Germany and Belgium to await deportation. Conditions in these camps were appalling. German ex-soldiers, who knew how to run such camps, were put in charge. They were brutal to their former mates-in-arms. They hoarded the food, the bedding, blankets and even clothes the British dispense for the camps. Men slept on straw and shivered some literally to death. Only four electric light bulbs were in one entire camp with no soap or towels with as many as five hundred men having to share a single washroom.

To give you a sense of the paranoia at the time, Stalin thought the Four Powers were creating a new German army to fight against the Soviet Union, and so he opposed any capitulation.

Once the Allies adopted a blueprint for occupied governance, the first order of business was to erase Nazi government and Nazi law from the books, and exclude Nazi Party members from any chance of power in public office or top positions in finance, industry, commerce, agriculture, education, publishing, and the press. The Allies soon realized that “nominal members of the Party” should not be excluded because with such exclusion, few were qualified or experienced to run operations. So, from the very beginning, a wink and a promise as well as expediency became the order of the day.

In this fractured society, decimated and demoralized, the haves and haves nothing spawned corruption, looting, the black market, false documents and an endless noir worthy of spy fiction. Moreover, the absence of so many men for so long by death or imprisonment created a social and moral vacuum. Women, now the chief breadwinners for their families, would do whatever was necessary to keep their families intact. It became common for women to exchange a PX package for sex or cigarettes without any compunction or social alarm.

The German population was not only homeless but also hungry. The near starvation of the German people was not deliberate, although many Germans thought it was. It was part of a pattern. The area controlled by the Soviets possessed the rich farmlands. Under the reparation arrangements, Russia was obliged to send food to the West. It never did.

The Allies were on the horns of a dilemma. They had to feed the Germans or get out, and getting out now was thought to mean letting the Russians in. Then the bitterest winter in a hundred years hit Germany in 1946 – 1947. Northern German waterways were frozen for months. With little food or fuel, freezing to death became common. Yet the Allies, especially Great Britain, considered it “not our problem.” The British were bitter. They felt Germany deserved the punishment, and unlike the Americans, they had no intentions of rebuilding German industry.

This did not make sense to Germans. Heavy machinery vital to reconstruction was being demolished. Men were thrown out of industrial work with no prospect for reemployment. It appeared that the Allies were bent on reducing Germany to an agrarian society. Winston Churchill, who was at first not opposed to such draconian measures, was finally appalled at what he saw:

“We cannot afford, nor can the United States, to let chaos and misery continue indefinitely in our Zones of Germany. The idea of keeping millions of people hanging about in a sub-human state between earth and hell, until they are worn down to a slave condition or embrace Communism, will only breed at least a moral pestilence and probably an actual war. Let Germany live!”

Following this, the Americans and British fused their two zones economically and issued a new currency. The Russians retaliated by blockading supplies to the Western sector of Berlin. The famous “Berlin Airlift” followed. It not only provided food and staples through the air for the suffering Berliners, but also turned the focus to the intrinsic spirit of goodness of both countries. It was their finest hour as many have said, and has proven a bonding of the German spirit to the West to this day.

As MacDonogh explains in this book:

“Friends of mine have often told me that the Germans deserved what they got in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behavior in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers, and that when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.”

It is unsettling to read that countries can carry grudges and vengeance in their hearts the same as individuals; that man’s inhumanity to man is not isolated to one people, but part of the fabric of mankind. The reader may be numbed by such an account, or he may be incredulous to its veracity. It is offered here in my continuing reminder of my own book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which closes here with the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952), who reminded us “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back to See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007). See www.authorhouse.com.