A World at Arms (173 page)

The experience of the Allies in connection with the handling of war crimes after World War I had been discouraging, to put it mildly. One of the many concessions made to the Germans in modifications of the 1919 peace treaty had been to allow them to conduct their own trials. The result had been a fiasco; this time the Allies would, at least initially, conduct the trials themselves; and it would be years before the Germans began to prosecute mass murderers and other offenders themselves.
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Some trials were also conducted of Japanese accused of war crimes by the Allies; unlike the Germans, the Japanese post–occupation government has preferred to hold no trials but instead to pretend that no crimes were committed.
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Some individuals escaped trial by suicide; some were sheltered by one or another of the victors for political, intelligence, or other reasons; some managed to disappear; and some escaped to neutral countries, which in many cases refused to extradite them, often benefiting from help by individuals associated with the Vatican, where such fugitives from justice sometimes found more sympathy than those fleeing the Nazi murderers earlier.
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The destruction caused by the war had been tremendous. It was worst in Eastern and Southeast Europe; in addition, bombing had affected numerous cities in Western Europe, Germany and Japan. There had been extensive damage in China, especially in the early years of fighting there; there had been great destruction in the Philippines, and much of Manila had been wrecked in the fighting for that city. Innumerable other cities, towns and villages in both the European and Pacific theaters had been dramatically and directly damaged during hostilities. Millions of tons of shipping had been sunk; factories destroyed or damaged; bridges and dams deliberately blown up by one side or the other.

All participants had poured enormous financial resources into the conflict. In the case of Germany, a very substantial portion of the cost of war had been exacted from conquered territory by looting, direct exactions of various sorts, and the imposition of forced loans from her satellites in the form of trade clearing debts.
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Both Italy and Japan had
used up their financial resources. The Soviet economy had been drained by that state’s great exertions, while Great Britain had fought a war far beyond her means and was left with huge debts to the members of the Commonwealth and to India. The United States had poured vast sums into her own and her allies’ war efforts, but emerged from the war with her economy strengthened rather than weakened as a result. The big question that would face her people afterwards was whether they would rise to the challenge of assisting others in rebuilding their economies. The new institutions that would make that feasible had been established or soon would be; the open question was whether and how they would work.

The costs in human life and suffering, in destruction and economic dislocation, had been of absolutely unprecedented magnitude. If the question is asked, was victory worth such tremendous exertions and the price paid for their success, one is obliged to consider the consequences of Axis victory. Whatever the more limited imperial objectives of Italy, Japan had intended to create an enormous exploitive empire in East, Southeast, and South Asia, reaching into the Western Hemisphere and, as the Korean model showed, disastrous for the lives and welfare of the oppressed.

By far the most far-reaching objectives, however, had been sought by Germany. World-wide in scope, the Germans looked first to a complete demographic reordering of the Eurasian land mass in which tens of millions would be slaughtered, sterilized, or deliberately left to die of starvation. The reach of this new dark age was confidently expected by its advocates to extend to the exploitation of vast portions of the African continent, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere. The view held by some extreme nationalists in the European colonial empires that a victory of Germany, Italy and Japan over Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States would, thereafter, facilitate the attainment of independence against the new masters of the globe is too ridiculous to be worthy of serious discussion. Those powers had already demonstrated
their
way of controlling conquered territories, and not one of the colonies would have been liberated but for the triumph of the Allies.

At the beginning of the century, the German Emperor William II had held up the Huns to his nation as the people they should emulate.
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The German governor general in World War II occupied Poland proudly proclaimed the intent of naming his province after the Vandals instead. A new dark age was to descend on the earth, wrecking the existing features of civilization the way the barbarian invasions had once snuffed out whatever advances had been made in the ancient Mediterranean
world. Only this time the destruction was to be more complete and the instruments of continued repression were certain to be more sophisticated. If the costs of victory were immense, those of an alternative outcome would have been even more horrendous. And not only for the losers in the war; as the great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and some other German opponents of Hitler recognized at the time, even for the peoples of the Axis, defeat would be better than a world dominated by evil.

The most basic challenge which the events of the war years placed before all inside and outside Germany was an unprecedented aspect of that evil: the deliberate attempts to eliminate physically from the face of the earth whole populations, whose members were to be killed regardless of age, sex, or conduct but instead solely as a punishment for having been born. Applied on a huge scale to the Jews of Europe and in a substantial way to its Gypsies, such a procedure was almost unprecedented, the World War I massacres of Armenians being perhaps the clearest precursor. For Germany, this meant essentially that the two religions which had arrived there simultaneously during the period of Roman rule, Judaism and Christianity, were removed simultaneously by the Germans themselves, to be replaced first by the worship of Moloch, the idol of blood, and thereafter by Mammon, the idol of gold. Whether that former area of cultural vigor could recover a spiritual foundation would surely be one of the critical issues for its post-war history, in many ways far more significant than the problem of rebuilding its bombed cities.

For the rest of the world, which had watched this process with a mixture of horror and indifference, the challenge to established values and beliefs was different but in some ways equally threatening. It is hardly surprising that, in the face of that threat to the concept of what human beings were capable of doing, some should take refuge in the assertion that the terrible need not be confronted because it had never happened. In the face of mountains of documents and pictures, such escapism neither brought back to life a single one of the victims nor assisted the mass of astounded and puzzled onlookers with the difficult problem of comprehending the dangerous capacities of human beings with the highest levels of education and training and a total absence of moral sensibility.

The purely economic losses of the victors were expected to be made up, at least in part, by reparations from the defeated. Although there was far less noise about this issue in the post-war era this time than after World War I, the reality was that Germany paid far more than earlier. The Russians extracted huge reparations from the portion of Germany
they occupied and received some reparations from the western zones as well. The Federal Republic of Germany, created out of the three western zones of occupation in 1949, though much smaller and more seriously damaged by the war than the Germany of 1919, paid far more in reparations than in the interwar years, the key difference being that of a government with the political will to follow a new policy, a will embodied in its leader Konrad Adenauer.
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The result was that instead of impoverishing herself, first by run-away inflation, later by horrendous deflation, in order to prove that Germany could not pay, this time she became wealthier than ever as she returned constructively to the world economy.

This dramatic change in Germany was, perhaps, due not only to her new leadership but also to another major difference between the impact of the two great wars on the country. World War I had been fought almost entirely outside Germany; though hard on that country as well, it had damaged the enemies of Germany far more than herself. This time the war had come home: first in the bombing which her own foolish defiance of the earlier peace treaty had provoked and then in the form of invading armies, which Germany had also brought on herself. The experience of World War II was not only terrible for others; this time the conflict had indeed left its mark inside the country. There is more than symbolic significance in the decision of several German cities to keep at least one large ruined building as a conspicuous reminder of the devastation of war.

The extraordinarily inept way in which Italy first entered and then left the conflict had led to a destructive campaign almost the whole length of the Italian peninsula as well as the loss of her whole colonial empire, substantial territory to Yugoslavia, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. The country was beginning to work its way back toward a new status already in the last years of the war, and with some outside help toward a new role in Europe. In the decades when Italian governments had attempted to play the role of a major power, Italy had never had the resources to sustain such a posture. It was only after the disaster of World War II–by contrast with the victory of World War I–that the Italian economy eventually became modernized, and under new leadership there emerged a significant middle-size power. The memory of the resistance to Fascism, especially to Mussolini’s “Social Republic” in the north, provided something of a unifying myth, especially as it grew out of all proportion to the real accomplishments of that resistance. The development of functioning democratic institutions proved a more difficult task, but one that was assisted rather than hindered by Italy’s having lost a colonial empire which had always been a drain on the country’s slender resources.

France had been defeated in 1940 but had been liberated by her allies. The effort of Charles de Gaulle to assert his own authority in France upon liberation had been successful, but his insistence on retaining the great power status to which he devoutly believed France entitled would lead his successors into a series of disastrous colonial wars from which he, once again, would have to extricate the country. At the insistence primarily of the British government, France was accorded a major role in the formation of the United Nations Organization and in the control of occupied Germany and Austria; the French would repay these favors by vetoing Britain’s joining the European Economic Community.

For decades, France, like many of the West European countries which had been temporarily occupied by the Germans, was wracked by the problem posed by the collaboration of many Frenchmen with the occupiers. In the years immediately after liberation, the purges were in some cases very severe and at times arbitrary.
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There followed a period of years in which all seemed to be forgotten and forgiven; eventually there would be a revival of questions and recriminations. Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, and numerous others had been executed, but questions about the behavior of many remained open.

Although the realities were concealed from the view of many contemporaries, the impact of war was especially great on Britain. Its power declining in the pre-war years, Britain had maintained herself in the long war partially as a result of assistance from the United States. Furthermore, the members of the Commonwealth had provided massive support and credits to the mother country in addition to their own direct military contributions. The ties of empire had been loosened further, and in spite of Churchill’s own preference for the maintenance of Britain’s imperial role, especially in India, the very success he had had in leading the country through the great ordeal contributed to the sapping of its strength. It had been in part his recognition of this process which had led him to advocate a policy of extensive concessions to the Soviet Union, in order at least to set specific limits to Soviet expansion before Britain had been weakened even more, but the extent to which he tried to portray himself in his memoir-history of the war as the advocate of a policy opposite to the one he had followed in practice shows how difficult that recognition had been for him. Under a new government, the United Kingdom would become a more just society at home even as it shed many of the remaining imperial trappings; finding a new place for itself in a changed world was to prove a lengthier and more difficult task.

The terrible winter of 1944-45 in the Netherlands left a heritage of redoubled bitterness toward the Germans, but there as in Luxembourg
the return of the government-in-exile brought with it a slow and difficult but effective recovery. That recovery would be aided by the United States, as was true for Belgium, a country rent by the question of what to do about the monarch who had remained behind–and who had to abdicate–as well as by the friction between its Flemish and Walloon population. The fact that when Germany surrendered her armies were still in occupation of Denmark and Norway meant that with the exception of the extreme northeastern portion of Norway, which the retreating German army had devastated in the winter of 1944-45, those two countries had suffered relatively little physical damage in the war. The Red Army had turned over the liberated north eastern most portion to the Norwegian government-in-exile right away; it took until 1946 for the Soviets to return the island of Bornholm to the Danes. Both Scandinavian countries had been ruthlessly exploited by the Germans, but a continuity of democratic regimes assisted a return to normal life.

Finland had tried to leave the war in September 1944 but soon found itself fighting its erstwhile German ally. Once the German forces had retreated from the northern portion of the country–devastating it as they left– Finland faced the problems of reconstruction and the requirement of paying reparations to the Soviet Union from a country weakened by the exertions of war, territorial losses, primarily in the north, going beyond those of March 1940, and the continuing suspicion of her large and victorious neighbor. A Soviet lease on the Porkkala area was substituted for the one on Hangö required by the March 1940 treaty; the Soviet Union voluntarily giving up this lease in 1955. But the country did retain its independence.