IF THE WISH TO OVERCOME humiliation and restore masculine pride is one plausible explanation for the violence of Soviet soldiers in German lands, it might also explain the vengeful behavior of men who had suffered far less than the Soviets. During the so-called wild purge (l’épuration sauvage) in France, which took place in 1944, before the war was even over, about six thousand people were killed as German collaborators and traitors by various armed bands with links to the resistance, often communists. Double that number of women were paraded around, stripped naked, their heads shaven, swastikas daubed on various parts of their anatomy. They were jeered at, spat on, and otherwise tormented. Some were locked up in improvised jails, and raped by their jailers. More than two thousand women were killed. Similar scenes, though not nearly on the same scale, took place in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and other countries liberated from German occupation. Sometimes, the naked women were tarred and feathered in the traditional manner of vengeful mobs.
Female collaboration with the enemy was mostly about sex. Unlike treason, this was not a crime that existed in any legal code before. One could call it tactless, selfish, indecent, an affront, but not a crime. So a new law was devised in France, in 1944, to deal with such cases. People who had undermined the national morale by unpatriotic behavior, such as sleeping with the occupiers, were guilty of “national unworthiness” (indignité nationale) and stripped of their civil rights.
All kinds of people, men and women, were purged, often with extreme violence, after May 1945 in France. About four thousand people lost their lives. Many had been guilty of treason; others were purged for reasons of personal vengeance, or for political reasons, if they stood in the way of the Communist Party, for example. But popular wrath fell disproportionately, and most publicly, on women accused of “horizontal collaboration.” This, too, can be explained at least partly through a common sense of humiliation. The submission of France by superior German force was often described in sexual terms. The rampant German army, representing a powerful, virile nation, had forced weak, decadent, effeminate France to submit to its will. Horizontal collaboration, the giggling young fran?aise perched on the knees of the Boche, swilling fine French champagne, was the most painful symbol of this submission. And so it was the women who had to be punished with maximum disgrace.
Already before national liberation, and the wild purge, Frenchwomen had been given the right to vote for the first time, in April 1944 to be exact. The following sentences, from Le Patriote de l’Eure, a resistance newspaper, published in February 1945, reveal a great deal about contemporary attitudes to the women who had strayed into the wrong arms:
Soon we shall see these women voting side by side with our valiant ordinary French women, good mothers, wives of prisoners of war. But surely we should not allow those who sniggered at us, who threatened us, who swooned in the arms of the Boches, to have any say in the destiny of France reborn.15
Contrast the sniggering, swooning floozies with those virtuous mothers and POW wives, and one senses the shame, as well as the strong puritanical streak. The horizontal collaborators were not only unpatriotic, but also threats to bourgeois family morals. Add to this the always toxic element of economic envy, and righteous indignation becomes truly explosive. From the indictments of the wicked women it is not always clear which was considered worse, the sexual immorality or the material benefits that came with it. Sleeping with the enemy was bad enough, but living better than everyone else made it a far graver crime. The case of one Madame Polge, wife of a well-known football player in Nimes, serves as a grim illustration.
During the occupation, Mme Polge became the mistress of the local German commander, whose French family name was Saint Paul. In exchange for her services, she received all manner of material benefits. In the words of a contemporary newspaper, Le Populaire, Mme Polge “admitted to having two or three liters of milk delivered every day, as well as fresh game, twice or three times a week, from the Boche commandant. She was also able to keep her house nice and warm, as well as having her hair done, and all that without paying a centime . . . And meanwhile working-class people and their children were dying of hunger . . .”16 Mme Polge was sentenced to death. Shaven and stripped, she was driven through the streets to the execution ground. After she was shot, her corpse was displayed to the good people of Nimes, who covered it in spit, and prodded it with a broomstick, the final indignity befitting a modern witch.
The most enthusiastic persecutors of filles de Boches were usually not people who had distinguished themselves in acts of courage during the war. Once Liberation came to formerly occupied countries, all kinds of men managed to present themselves as members of resistance groups, strutting around with newly acquired armbands and Sten guns, disporting themselves as heroes as they hunted for traitors and bad women. Vengeance is one way of covering up a guilty conscience for not standing up when it was dangerous. This too appears to be a universal phenomenon, of all times. As the truly heroic Polish dissident Adam Michnik once put it, when he protested against purging former communists after 1989, he had nothing to be ashamed of before, so he had no need to prove that he was a hero by pointing fingers at others now. This humane attitude, always rare, was not exactly common in 1945.
Greed, prejudice, and a guilty conscience might help us understand the most perverse form of revenge in 1945, the persecution of Jews in Poland. The ancient Jewish community in Poland was almost annihilated. Three million Polish Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation, either shot or gassed, mostly on Polish territory. Ten percent managed to survive, hidden by Polish Gentiles, or living in exile in far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. The physically and mentally wounded survivors who came staggering back to their hometowns and villages, after having lost all or most of their friends and relatives, usually found that they were no longer welcome. Worse than that: they were often threatened and driven out of town. Other people had moved in to their houses. The synagogues were destroyed. What possessions they might have left behind had long ago been stolen by others, frequently former neighbors. And it was a rare person who was willing to give anything back.
This happened in other parts of Europe as well. Quite a number of Jews returning home to Amsterdam, Brussels, or Paris found that they had no home left there, either. But in Poland, especially outside the main cities, Jews were in physical danger. There were cases of families being pulled off trains, robbed of all their possessions, and killed on the spot. More than a thousand Jews were murdered in Poland between the summers of 1945 and 1946. Even in the cities, they were not always safe.
In August 11, 1945, a rumor started in Krakow that Jews had killed a Christian child in the synagogue. This was an updated version of an age-old anti-Semitic canard. People spoke darkly of Jewish survivors using Christian blood to revive their ravaged health. Soon, a mob gathered, led by policemen and militiamen. The synagogue was attacked, Jewish homes were plundered, and men, women, and children were beaten up in the streets. Several people (the exact number is not known) were murdered. It was a bloody pogrom against people who had only just survived a genocide. Badly wounded Jews were taken to the hospital, where some of them were assaulted again while awaiting surgery. One female survivor recalls “the comments of the escorting soldier and the nurse, who spoke about us as Jewish scum whom they had to save, and that they shouldn’t be doing this because we murdered children, that all of us should be shot.” Another nurse promised to rip the Jews apart as soon as surgery was over. A railway man at the hospital remarked: “It’s a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage to hit a defenseless person.”17 This man, true to his word, proceeded to beat a wounded Jew.
Poles, too, suffered horribly under German occupation. Untermenschen, like the Russians, they were enslaved, their capital city was razed, and more than a million non-Jewish Poles were murdered. Poles could not be blamed for the German decision to build the death camps on their soil. And yet it is as though the Poles took out their own suffering on the one people who had suffered even more.
A common account is that Polish vengeance was based on the perception that Jews were responsible for communist oppression. When Soviet troops had occupied different parts of Poland, some Jews hoped that they would protect them from Polish anti-Semites, or from the even more lethal Germans. Communism as an antidote to ethnic nationalism had long had a natural appeal to members of a vulnerable minority. But while many communists were Jews, most Jews were not communists. So vengeance against Jews for what was called “Judeo-Communism” was at best misplaced, and politics may in fact not have been the main source of revenge at all. For most Jews were not attacked after the war for being communists, but for being Jews. And Jews were associated not only with bolshevism in popular anti-Semitic lore, but with capitalism too. They were assumed to have money, to be better off than other people, even privileged. Communists were not above exploiting anti-Semitism themselves, which is why most Jewish survivors in Poland ended up leaving the country of their birth.
Although the majority of Polish Jews were in fact poor, the perception of superior wealth lingered. This had something to do with a guilty conscience, sometimes eased in a bizarre way by communist propaganda against Jewish capitalists. Poles certainly bore no responsibility for the German plan to exterminate the Jews. But many of them did stand by at the edge of the ghetto, with horse carts, waiting for their chance to plunder once the Jews had been conveniently disposed of. Others—like so many European citizens—were also happy to move into houses and apartments, whose rightful owners were taken away to be murdered.
In some places, especially in northeastern villages around Bialystok, Poles did some of the killing themselves. In July 1941, the Jews in Radzilow were locked up in a barn and burned alive while their fellow citizens ran around filling their bags with loot. An eyewitness remembers: “When the Poles started rounding up and chasing Jews, the plundering of Jewish houses began instantly . . . They went mad, they were breaking into houses, tearing up quilts; the air was full of feathers, and they’d just load up their sacks, run home and come back with an empty sack again.” One family, the Finkielstejns, managed to run away. After they returned, they asked the priest to convert them so they might have a better chance to survive. The daughter, Chaja, recalls the village conversations: “They would always talk about one thing: who had plundered how much and how rich the Jews had been.”18
It should never be forgotten that other Polish Gentiles behaved very differently. Hiding or helping Jews to survive carried huge risks, not just for the helper alone, but for his or her family. If caught in a western European country, a person might be sent to a concentration camp for helping Jews. In Poland it could mean death by hanging. Yet some Jews did survive thanks to the bravery of Polish Gentiles. Children were adopted, families hidden. In one famous case, several Jewish families were hidden for more than a year in the sewers of Lvov by a petty thief named Leopold Socha. More than twenty people survived underground, eating Socha’s crusts of bread while fending off rats in the dark, and at least once almost drowning after a heavy rainstorm flooded the sewer. When they emerged from the manhole, pale, emaciated, covered in excrement and lice, the people aboveground were astonished to see a Jew still alive. Several months later Socha died in an accident, run over by a drunken Soviet army truck driver. The neighbors whispered that this was God’s punishment for helping the Jews.19
This is perhaps the most shocking thing about the postwar Polish story. People who had protected Jews from being murdered were well advised not to talk about it. Not only because of God’s wrath for helping “the killers of Christ,” but because of the suspected loot. Since Jews were assumed to have money, and their saviors were expected to have been richly compensated, anyone who admitted to have hidden Jews was vulnerable to plunder.
Even after they were long dead, Jews were still thought to have something worth taking. In the autumn of 1945, the former death camp of Treblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews had been murdered, was a muddy mass grave. Local peasants started digging in search of skulls from which they might still be able to extract some gold teeth overlooked by the Nazis. Thousands worked the site with shovels, or sifted through the mounds of ashes, transforming the mass grave into a huge field of deep pits and broken bones.
The Poles, it must be emphasized again, were not unique. Greed was the common result of barbarous occupation, which affected countless Europeans. The historian Tony Judt observed: “The Nazis’ attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of property may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world.”20 Property up for grabs is a great incitement for brutality. What is unusual about Poland is the scale of plunder. A whole new class had come up from the war which essentially took over the assets of those who had been killed or driven out. A lingering sense of guilt can have perverse consequences.
A contemporary Polish weekly paper, Odrodzenie, put it succinctly in September 1945: “We knew in the country an entire social stratum—the newborn Polish bourgeoisie—which took the place of murdered Jews, often literally, and perhaps because it smelled blood on its hands, it hated Jews more strongly than ever.”21
This explains the sometimes bloody vengeance against the main victims of Hitler’s Reich better than anything. Plundering the Jews, in a way, was part of a larger social revolution. And this type of revenge, too, would not have happened without the sometimes tacit, but often active, connivance of powerful opportunists in the Polish bureaucracy and police. It was not the official policy of the communist-dominated Polish government in 1945 to go after the Jews, but encouragement from the middle ranks was often quite enough.
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THAT POLES WOULD WISH to direct their revenge against Germans is more comprehensible. But that, too, was partly driven by class warfare. For centuries Germans had lived in areas such as Silesia and East Prussia that are now part of Poland. Major cities, like Breslau (Wroc?aw) or Danzig (), were largely German. German was the language of the urban elites, the doctors, bankers, professors, and businessmen. In 1945 more than four million Germans were still living in former German lands invaded by Soviet troops. Roughly the same number, terrified of what they had been told about Russian behavior, had fled to the west. Plans to expel the rest of the German population were already clear well before May 1945. In 1941, General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister exiled in London, declared that “the German horde, which for centuries had penetrated to the east, should be destroyed and forced to draw back far [to the west].”22
This policy had been endorsed by the Allied leaders. Even worse, Stalin advised the Polish communists to “create such conditions for the Germans that they would want to escape themselves.” And Churchill had told the House of Commons in December 1944, “Expulsion is the method, which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”23
As long as the Red Army was in control, the Poles more or less held themselves back. Libussa Fritz-Krockow, scion of a noble Pomeranian landowning family, remembered how they had actually felt protected by the Russians at times, even though those same Russians “were responsible for the vast majority of the rapes and the lootings.” Yet, she observed, “their violence was somehow comprehensible to us, whether we explained it as the principle of an eye for an eye, sheer exuberance, or conquerors’ rights. The Poles, on the other hand, were merely camp followers. Their seizure of power had a different character. There was something cold and furtive about it, almost sneaky, which made it seem far more sinister than naked force.”24
The Krockows were not Nazis. Christian von Krockow, who wrote up his sister Libussa’s memoirs, was a liberal who understood very well that their suffering was “the result of our own German madness.”25 But there may be a hint of anti-Polish bias or bitterness in Libussa’s statement, even perhaps a sense of betrayal. This was not an unusual sentiment. A German Protestant minister, Helmut Richter, expressed the same thing. He had always expected the Poles to be good people. After all, hadn’t Germans treated them well in the past? But now he realized “the awful nature of these eastern peoples.” For a long time, they had behaved themselves as long as they felt “a fist hovering over their heads,” but they turned “barbaric when they have the chance to wield power over others.”26 This is the way colonizers always talk about the natives. The difference with most European colonies in Africa or Asia, however, is that in this case many of the former colonizers had been natives themselves, albeit natives of a privileged class.
In any case, the Poles did not want Soviet troops to spend a moment longer than necessary in the conquered lands that were now officially part of Poland. And the cruelties that went with massive expulsions and population transfers decided by the Big Powers at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 were not just the result of Polish vengeance. More than two million “Congress Poles” from the east of the Polish Soviet border, now part of Ukraine, were moved to Silesia and other areas that had been more or less swept clean of the Germans. So they took German homes, German jobs, and German assets, a process that was rarely gentle.
Of course, ethnic cleansing did not begin in 1945. Hitler had expelled Poles and murdered Jews to make room for German immigrants in Silesia and other border areas. But bitterness over disputed homelands went back further than that. As so often with bloody ethnic revenge, a history of civil war preceded it. With the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the fate of their holdings in Silesia had to be decided. Bits went to Austria, bits to Czechoslovakia, and bits to Poland and Germany. Upper Silesia, however, remained in dispute. There was a strong Upper Silesian independence movement, supported by local Poles and Germans. But the Allies decided in 1919 that a plebiscite should decide whether the territory should go to Poland or Germany. This decision led to serious violence. Armed Polish nationalists assaulted Germans, especially in the industrial area around Kattowitz (Katowice), not far from Auschwitz (). These attacks provoked even bloodier reprisals by thuggish German adventurers in the ultranationalist, paramilitary Freikorps, a breeding ground for the future Nazi movement that was formed in late 1918 after Germany’s defeat. “Black-Red-Gold! Smash the Poles!” was one of their charming slogans. The majority voted for Germany to govern Upper Silesia, a decision that caused more violence. In the end, part of Upper Silesia went to Poland after all. But memories were still raw in 1945, all the more so because of the treatment of Poles under Nazi occupation.
The family of Josef Hoenisch had lived in Upper Silesia for many generations. Because he had never joined the Nazi Party, he decided that it would be safe to stay home in 1945. A bad decision. He was arrested by the Polish Militia, which had replaced Soviet troops. Asked by Militia interrogators whether he had been a Nazi, Hoenisch replied that he had not, and was booted in the face. This went on for some time, until he was dragged, covered in blood, into a six-by-nine-foot cell filled with nine other German prisoners who had barely enough room to stand, let alone sit. Polish militiamen, he recalls, had their fun by making prisoners, men as well as women, strip and beat one another. After eight days of this, Hoenisch was confronted by a former schoolmate, a Polish wheelwright named Georg Pissarczik, who had fought against the Germans over the fate of Upper Silesia in 1919. This was Pissarczik’s chance for revenge. Now, at last, the German would get his just deserts. The story has a further Silesian twist, however. The two men met again, and Pissarczik was reminded by his former schoolmate that Hoenisch’s father had helped Pissarczik’s father get a job in the early 1920s, when no German would employ him. Could Pissarczik not help him in return? Four weeks later, Hoenisch was released.
Unfortunately, Hoenisch’s story, like many recollections of German victims, is marred by a peculiar obtuseness about the suffering of others. He remarks how lucky he was not to have been sent to Auschwitz after his release, one of those “famous Polish death camps [after the war], from which no German came out alive.”27 This same language creeps into other accounts by German conservatives. In his diary of 1945, the soldier-writer Ernst Jünger mentions Russian “extermination camps” and compares “anti-Germanism” to anti-Semitism. Newspapers, he notes, are “indulging” in anti-German sentiment, “like an orgy.”28
There is little evidence even in the most self-pitying of German accounts that many Poles indulged in collective retaliation spontaneously. But clearly many innocent German civilians were falsely accused of having been Nazis, or in the SS, and suffered horribly. The detention camps, often in former Nazi concentration camps, were very brutal. And Germans in Silesia lost their civil rights if they opted not to be citizens of Poland, which was in any case impossible if they could not speak Polish. Without rights, people were at the mercy of any militiaman or petty official. Simply being unable to follow a roll call in Polish in a camp could mean a rain of fists, clubs, or worse.
Libussa Fritz-Krockow was about to sell a carpet from her family home to the Polish mayor’s wife, who had paid her a pittance on several occasions before for valuable items. She was caught in the act by a militiaman. Germans were not allowed to sell their possessions. For this crime, Libussa was shackled in a pillory so people could spit in her face. But, she relates, “the Poles generally just cleared their throats, or spat on the ground, while the Germans crossed to the other side of the street.”29
The worst cases of anti-German violence were no doubt committed by the Militia. They ran the concentration camps, tortured prisoners, killed at random, and put people in pillories, sometimes for no reason at all. Hastily pulled together, the Militia found many of its recruits among the most unsavory Poles, often very young criminals. One of the most notorious killers, Cesaro Gimborski, the commandant of the Lamsdorf camp, was just eighteen. More than six thousand people, including eight hundred children, were murdered under his command. Like a child amusing himself by tearing wings from a fly, Gimborski, by all accounts, took pleasure in his power.
Some of the most ferocious militiamen had survived German camps, so vengeance was surely a factor. But once again, bloodlust was inflamed by material and class envy. Teachers, professors, businessmen, and other members of the upper bourgeoisie were popular targets. The Polish guards, ably assisted by German turncoats, found particular enjoyment in torturing prisoners of high status. A professor imprisoned in Lamsdorf was beaten to death for the simple reason that he wore “intellectual glasses.” One is reminded, both by the guards’ youth and their favored victims, of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, or the Red Guards in China. Setting teenagers upon teachers and other authority figures is never very difficult. In this case, a history of ethnic conflict made the sadism even keener.
More or less the same things happened in other parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, filled with German-speaking citizens who were first handed to non-Germanic governments in 1919, then became privileged citizens of Hitler’s Reich, and finally were kicked out by former neighbors, employees, or sometimes even friends. Germans subjected to the full force of revenge in Czechoslovakia agreed that the greatest menace came from teenage boys, encouraged by the adults, some of whom had good reasons to be vengeful. Many Czechs and Slovaks had suffered after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938; some had survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and other German concentration camps. As was true in Upper Silesia, the bad blood had a history, going back as far as the seventeenth century when the Protestant Bohemian nobility was wiped out by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. Since then, Germans had had the upper hand over Czechs and Slovaks. Non-Germans were the servant class and the peasants. So there, too, the summer of 1945 was the time for class, as well as ethnic, revenge. And there too, encouragement came from the top.
The Czech president in exile during the war, Edvard Bene?, a Czech nationalist who once had had dreams of a harmonious multiethnic Czechoslovakia, now decided that the German problem should be solved once and for all. In a radio broadcast in 1945, he declared: “Woe, woe, woe, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate you!”30 In April, May, and June, various decrees deprived Germans of their property rights. “Extraordinary People’s Courts” were created to judge Nazi criminals, traitors, and supporters. In October, all those who had acted against “national honor,” which might almost have applied to all Germans, were to be punished as well.
Czechs, like other human beings, will do their worst if they are officially set upon defenseless people. Torture prisons were established in Prague and other cities. Suspected SS men were strung up from lampposts. More than ten thousand German civilians were packed into the Strahov football stadium, where thousands were machine-gunned just for sport. The Revolutionary Guards (RG) were the Czech equivalent of the Polish Militia, young hoodlums given official license to act out their violent fantasies. They led the mobs, stoning Germans in the streets, and otherwise molesting citizens who had once been privileged, or wore “intellectual glasses.” But they had the support of the army, and the newly liberated country’s top officials, too.
One story—by no means the most horrific—will have to suffice to give an impression of what it was like during those wild summer months, before the violent orgy, like the sexual abandon in other parts of Europe, petered out, and a new order was imposed. It is the story of a German actress named Margarete Schell. Born in Prague, Schell was famous before the war for her performances in the theater and on the radio. On May 9, she was arrested by four Revolutionary Guards, one of whom was her local butcher. Along with other German women, she was taken to the railway station to sweep away the rubble left by an air raid. Made to carry heavy paving stones, she was struck with rifle butts and kicked with heavy army boots. The mob cried: “You German pigs! Fattening yourselves all those years, well, you have your Führer to thank for this!”
Things escalated quickly from there: “I had nothing to cover my head, and my hair seems to have annoyed the crowd . . . Some recognized me and screamed: ‘She was an actress!’ Unfortunately I had manicured and lacquered nails, and my silver bracelet put the mob into an even greater frenzy.”31
German women were made to eat pictures of Hitler. Hair hacked off their own heads was stuffed into their mouths. Schell was sent to a slave labor camp where she was flogged by Revolutionary Guards for no reason she could discern. Yet, she was less obtuse than some other Germans in central and eastern Europe. Not all the Czech guards behaved badly. One Guard, seeing that she could barely walk anymore, let alone work in her ruined shoes, offered to find her a pair of sandals. And Schell noted: “When I hear this RG man’s description of spending seven months in a German concentration camp, we really shouldn’t be surprised by the way we are treated.”32
Schell understood the true nature of Czech resentment too. Still wondering why she was singled out for a specially savage beating one day, she remembered how people had told her that the commandant found her “too refined.” In the diary entry of the same day, August 8, she mentions a vicious female guard in the camp kitchen. “The women,” she observes, “are the worst everywhere. It clearly has to do with their rage, because they can see perfectly well that, despite our current labor as servants, we still remain what we always were.”33
Edvard Bene? was not a communist. But he tried to be friendly with Stalin, and, mindful of the way his country had been let down by the Western democracies before, he unwisely forged an alliance with the Soviet Union. This devil’s pact would end in a Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. But the seeds of revolution had already been sown, in the kind of rage so acutely observed by Margarete Schell in the kitchen of her concentration camp. The year 1945 in Czechoslovakia, especially in those areas that had been dominated by Germans for centuries, was like the Terror, except that, unlike in France two centuries before, it came before the Revolution.
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ONE OTHER THING IN SCHELL’S DIARIES is worth mentioning. She describes how she was taken to a house that used to be occupied by Gestapo agents. Her group of prisoners was ordered to clean up after the house painters and move in new furniture. The man overseeing their labor happened to be a Jew. Yet he treated Schell and her fellow German prisoners decently. “Having spent five years in a concentration camp, he said, where he lost both his parents and his sisters, he didn’t wish to abuse anyone. He knew what being a prisoner was like. Although he had a perfectly sound reason to hate all Germans, he didn’t take it out on us.”34
This may be untypical, a rare instance of compassion at a time of licensed inhumanity. But in fact, while vengeance was being taken all over Europe, on Germans, on traitors, on women who had offended against national dignity, on class enemies, and on fascists, the people who had suffered most showed extraordinary restraint. This was not because Jews lack the base instincts that drive other people to revenge. It was certainly not because Jews in 1945 had any fond feelings for the people who had tried to exterminate them. To be sure, most survivors of the camps were too sick, or too numb, to feel up to any act of vengeance. But there were cases of crude justice in some of the camps. And some Jewish-American interrogators of suspected Nazis might have shown more than professional enthusiasm for the task. An inquiry investigating rather severe treatment of German SS officers in a prison near Stuttgart revealed that 137 of them “had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation Team.”35 Most of the interrogators had Jewish names.
But these were individual cases. There was no organized attempt by Jews to get their eye for an eye. The reason, again, was not for the lack of desire; it was political. The desire in 1945 was very much alive. In 1944, a Jewish Brigade was formed inside the British Army. After the German defeat, the Brigade was stationed in Tarvisio, on the border of Italy and Austria, and then added to the occupation forces in Germany. To stop individual acts of revenge on Germans, a natural temptation among men who had lost their families in the Holocaust, the Brigade issued a commandment: “Remember the blood feud is everyone’s, and every irresponsible act causes everyone to fail . . .” Another commandment reminded the troops that the display of the Zionist flag in Germany was a sweet enough revenge.36
Instead of allowing individuals to exact rough justice, the Brigade formed its own group of avengers, known as the Lick My Ass Business, or Tilhaz Tizi Gesheften (TTG), led by a man named Israel Carmi. Acting on information extracted from prisoners or military contacts, members of TTG would leave Tarvisio at night on missions to assassinate notorious SS officers and others who were thought to be responsible for murdering Jews. Once the British Army caught on to these activities, the Brigade was moved out of Germany to less inflammatory territories in Belgium and the Netherlands. We don’t know exactly how many Nazis they killed, but the number was probably not more than a few hundred.
One man who refused to give up on his desire for vengeance was Abba Kovner, a Lithuanian Jew whose soulful eyes and long curly hair made him look less like a killer than a romantic poet, which he also was. Indeed, in Israel he is still known chiefly for his poetry. Born in Sebastopol, Kovner grew up in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he joined the socialist wing of the Zionist movement before the war. In 1941 he managed to escape from the Vilna ghetto and hid in a convent before joining partisans in the forest. After Germany’s surrender, Kovner and some other survivors, mostly Polish and Lithuanian Jews, were convinced that the war was not actually over, indeed should not be over. They formed a group named Dam Yehudi Nakam, Jewish Blood Will Be Avenged, Nakam for short. One of their principles, devised by Kovner, was: “The idea that Jewish blood can be shed without reprisal must be erased from the memory of mankind.” Without proper vengeance, Kovner believed, someone would attempt to annihilate the Jews again. “It will be more than revenge,” he wrote. “It must be the law of the murdered Jewish people! Its name will be DIN [Hebrew acronym for ‘The blood of Israel is vengeful’] so that posterity will know that in this merciless, uncompassionate world there are both judges and judgment.”37
Kovner’s bleak Old Testament view in 1945 went far beyond secret assassinations to get rid of a few SS men. This would be a score settled between nations. Only the death of six million Germans would be a sufficient price for what the Germans had done to the Jews. Years later, living on a kibbutz, Kovner admitted that his scheme showed signs of derangement. As he said, “it was an idea that any sensible person could see was mad. But people were almost mad in those days . . . and perhaps worse than mad. It was a terrible idea, born of despair, with something suicidal about it . . .”38 What is interesting is how and why Kovner’s notion of “an organized, unique vengeance” failed.
The plan was to put deadly chemicals into the water supplies of several major German cities. To secure the poison, Kovner visited Palestine. There was some sympathy for his feelings, but he found little enthusiasm for mass murder, even of former Nazis. The priority of Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders was to build a new state for the Jews, and they needed the goodwill of the Allies. Rescuing the remnants of European Jewry and transforming them into proud citizens of Israel was the goal. There was no chance of going back to normal life in Europe. Europe represented the past. Getting caught up in schemes to murder Germans was a waste of time at best. And so, even though Kovner never divulged the full scale of his plans, the paramilitary arm of the Zionist movement, the Haganah, had no interest in helping him.
The rest of the story was almost farcical. Despite the lack of official cooperation, Kovner did manage to procure poison from a chemical laboratory at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Two brothers, named Katzir, one of whom, Ephraim, later became Israel’s fourth president, worked as laboratory assistants there. Thinking that Kovner would only use the poison to kill SS officers, an objective few people would have quarreled with, they gave him a particularly lethal substance; one milligram could kill a substantial number of people.
Carrying a duffel bag filled with the cans of poison labeled milk powder, in December 1945 Kovner and a comrade named Rosenkranz boarded a ship bound for France. They had forged identity papers and posed as British army soldiers, even though Kovner spoke no English. Kovner was seasick for much of the time. Just as they were nearing Toulon, Kovner’s name was announced on the ship’s public address system. Thinking that he had been identified and his mission was compromised, Kovner threw half the “milk powder” cans overboard and told Rosenkranz to destroy the rest if things should go wrong.
In fact, Kovner had not been identified at all, nor was his mission detected. He was arrested on the correct assumption that he was travelling on forged papers. But the poison never reached Europe. In a fit of panic, Rosenkranz had thrown the rest overboard. The water supplies of Nuremberg, among other places, were safe, and hundreds of thousands of German lives were spared. There was a halfhearted attempt by some of Kovner’s friends to poison the food in a detention camp for Nazis. Even this came to nothing much. A few men got ill; no one died.
Jewish revenge, then, was never carried out, because there was no political support for it. The Zionist leadership sought to create a different kind of normality, of heroic Israelis tilling the desert land and fighting their enemies as proud citizen-soldiers, far from the war-bloodied lands of Europe. They looked self-consciously to the future. That, too, would be full of bloodshed, and ethnic and religious conflict, but it would not be German blood. Abba Kovner never could adapt to a life of the future. Haunted by the past, he wrote tragic poems, and woke up screaming most nights.
He wrote about his sister:
From the promised land I called you,
I searched for you
among heaps of small shoes.
At every approaching holiday.
And about his father:
Our father took his bread, bless God
forty years from the same oven. He never imagined
a whole people could arise from the ovens
and the world, with God’s help, go on.39
? ? ?
SPEAKING ABOUT FRANCE during the war, Tony Judt wrote that for active resisters or collaborators, “their main enemy, more often than not, was each other: the Germans were largely absent.”40 The same thing could be said about many countries under foreign occupation: Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, China, Vietnam, Indonesia. Occupation forces, like all colonial governments, exploit tensions that existed before. Without the Germans, Vichy’s reactionary autocrats would not have come to power, and neither would Croatia’s murderous Ante Paveli? and his fascistic Usta?a. In Flanders, the Flemish National Union worked with the Nazi occupiers in the hope of emancipating themselves from the Francophone Walloons in a German-dominated Europe. In Italy and Greece, fascists as well as other right-wingers collaborated with the Germans for their own gain, but also to fend off the left.
And in China? When the Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, in 1972, apologized to Chairman Mao for what his country had done to the Chinese during the war, Mao, who was not without a macabre sense of humor, told his foreign guest to relax: It is us who should thank you, he said; without you we would never have come to power. Mao was right. What happened in China was the most dramatic example of unintended consequences. The Japanese shared with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists a horror of communism; there were even some attempts at collaboration; one faction of the Nationalists did, in fact, collaborate. But by fatally wounding the Nationalists, the Japanese helped the Communists win the civil war which was simmering in 1945 and came to a climax soon after.
The civil war in China, as in Greece, had begun well before the invasions by foreign armies. In France and Italy civil war was not far under the surface. And the European practice of divide and rule in Asian colonies created enough bad blood for any number of social conflicts to erupt. But by exploiting these divisions, the Germans and Japanese made them lethal.
Communists and leftists had played a major role in anti-Nazi, or antifascist resistance, while the German and Japanese efforts at empire-building tainted many figures on the right with collaboration. The French Communist Party, proud of its resistance record, called itself “le Parti des Fusillés,” the party of the executed. Even fellow leftists who resisted the Stalinist line adopted by the Party were denounced by communists as unpatriotic or even as collaborators—“Hitlerotrotskyists.” The history of armed resistance of the left, not unreasonably, led to revolutionary demands for a new order. After the war, the Soviet Union exploited these demands, at least in countries within its sphere of influence, while the Western Allies disarmed and helped to crush some of the very forces who had fought on their side against Germany and Japan. Not only that, but it was with Allied help that some members of the old collaborationist elites came back to power. These were the seeds that would later develop into the Cold War.
Collaboration was not always a straightforward matter, however. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s communist Partisans negotiated in 1943 with the Germans, because Tito wanted a “free hand” to attack the Serbian royalist Chetniks (or ). In the autumn of the same year, the Chetniks collaborated with the Germans to fight off Tito’s Partisans. The Bosnian Muslims cooperated with anyone who would protect them: the Croatian fascists, Serbian Partisans, even the Nazis. And all these temporary alliances were made in opposition to domestic, not foreign, enemies.
In France, most collaborators did not work directly for the German occupiers, but for a French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. With German help, the Vichyistes thought they would restore France, the true France, of Church, family, and patriotism, shorn of liberals, Jews, Freemasons, and other blots on La France profonde. Italian fascists could not really be called collaborators until 1943, when Italy was occupied by German troops, and the authority of Benito Mussolini’s fascists was reduced to a tiny Nazi puppet state on Lake Garda. But the previous twenty years of Italian fascism had engendered enough loathing for the left to embark on a ferocious campaign of vengeance once the Germans started leaving.
Harold Macmillan, the later British prime minister, was Churchill’s plenipotentiary for the Mediterranean countries. In April 1945, he was driven to Bologna in an army jeep for a meeting with the Allied military commander, who had just installed himself in the splendid and undamaged Municipio, or town hall. He found the bodies of two well-known local liberals lying in state, with tearful crowds passing by to pay their last respects. The two liberals had been shot by members of the fascist Black Brigade, who had fled town just a day before. “The coffins were open,” Macmillan noted in his diary, “so that friends and admirers could see the faces of their leaders for the last time. They had been shot against the wall of the Municipio—the bloodstains were clear. Above the place where they had stood were already flowers and—pathetically—photographs of men and women of all ages who had been put to death during recent months by the Fascist Black Brigade.”
After quoting this passage from his diary, Macmillan goes on to say: “The Prefect—a Fascist—had failed to make his escape in time. He had been shot by the partisans next to his last victim. You could see the brains spattered against the brick and the blood on the ground.”41 Macmillan then went off to have lunch, and observed that the Italian cooks who had previously served Italian food to German officers now served American food to the Allied officers. “There was a moral in this,” he wrote, without quite divulging what that moral might have been.
Among the victims of the partisan reprisals in April 1945 were Mussolini himself, with his mistress, Clara Petacci. They were caught while attempting to escape to Austria with German soldiers from an antiaircraft unit. When they were stopped at a roadblock manned by partisans, the Germans were told to go on their way; the partisans had no more interest in them. But the Italians had to stay behind. Mussolini, despite wearing a German army greatcoat over his red-striped Italian general’s riding trousers, was recognized. On April 28, he, Clara, and fifteen fascists picked at random were machine-gunned in front of a country villa on Lake Garda. The following day, they were hung, like game, upside down from a girder at an Esso gas station on a shabby square in Milan, exposed to the wrath of the mob. Soon their faces were barely recognizable.
Edmund Wilson was shown the spot where it happened a month later. The names of the executed were still daubed in black on the girder of the now abandoned Esso station. Wilson wrote: “Over the whole city hung the stink of the killing of Mussolini and his followers, the exhibition of their bodies in public and the defilement of them by the crowd. Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”42
But this was just one instance of possibly twenty thousand killings of fascists and collaborators in the north of Italy between April and July. Eight thousand in Piedmont. Four thousand in Lombardy. Three thousand in Emilia. Three thousand in Milan province.43 Many were summarily executed by partisans, dominated by communists. Others were quickly tried in makeshift people’s courts, the so-called justice of the piazza. The killings were swift and sometimes involved innocents. Known fascists were gunned down together with their wives and children. Most recipients of rough justice were police officers and fascist government officials. Even those already in prison were not safe. On July 17, the Schio prison near Vicenza was raided by masked partisans, who murdered fifty-five incarcerated fascists. Some of these avengers were hardened resistance fighters. Some were the kind of last-minute heroes who swelled the ranks of the resistance everywhere, once the real fighting was over. Some were criminals who used their new “patriotic” status to blackmail rich businessmen or landowners, or loot their properties.
In Italy, too, however, revenge often had a political agenda; it was a revolutionary settling of scores. Communist partisans saw the purges as a necessary struggle against capitalism. Since big corporations, such as Fiat in Turin, had worked with Mussolini’s regime, they were seen as legitimate targets. Even though the most powerful businessmen from Turin or Milan had usually managed to save their skins by crossing the Swiss border, or buying potential killers off with black market goods, the corpses of lower-ranking figures did have a way of ending up dumped in front of the gates of local cemeteries.