Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (30 page)

As a little Polish boy from Białystok remembered, “They took us under bombs and there was fire because people began to burn up in the cars.” Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June, and its bombers caught up with the Soviet prison trains. About two thousand deportees died in the freight cars, victims of both regimes.
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In purging his new lands, Stalin had been preparing for another war. But he did not believe that it would come so soon.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack on 22 June 1941, Poland and the Soviet Union were suddenly transformed from enemies to allies. Each was now fighting Germany. Nevertheless, it was an awkward situation. In the previous two years, the Soviets had repressed about half a million Polish citizens: about 315,000 deported, about 110,000 more arrested, and 30,000 executed, and about 25,000 more who died in custody. The Polish government knew about the deportations, but not about the killings. Nevertheless, the Soviets and the Poles began to form a Polish Army from the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens now scattered across Soviet prisons, labor camps, and special settlements.
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The Polish high command realized that several thousand Polish officers were missing. Józef Czapski, the Polish officer and artist who had survived Kozelsk, was sent to Moscow by the Polish government with the mission of finding the missing men, his former campmates. A sober man, he nevertheless understood his task as a calling. Poland would now have a second chance to fight the Germans, and Czapski was to find the officers who would lead men into battle. As he journeyed to Moscow, to his mind came snatches of Polish romantic poetry, first the deeply masochistic reverie of Juliusz Słowacki, asking God to keep Poland on the cross until she had the strength to stand by herself. Then, speaking to an appealingly honest fellow Pole, Czapski recalled the most famous lines of Cyprian Norwid’s poem of desire for the homeland, written in exile: “I long for those who say yes for yes and no for no / For a light without shadow.” An urbane, sophisticated man from a nationally mixed family, Czapski found solace by understanding his own nation in the terms of Romantic idealism.
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Czapski was indirectly invoking scripture, for Norwid’s poem cites the Book of Matthew: “let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” This was the very same verse with which Arthur Koestler had just ended
Darkness at Noon
, his own novel of the Great Terror. Czapski was on his way to the Lubianka prison in Moscow, the setting of that novel; this was also the very place where Koestler’s friend, Alexander Weissberg, had been interrogated before his release in 1940. Weissberg and his wife had both been arrested in the late 1930s; their experiences were one source of Koestler’s novel. Czapski was intending to ask one of the Lubianka interrogators about his own friends, the missing Polish prisoners. He had an appointment with Leonid Reikhman, an NKVD officer who had interrogated Polish prisoners.
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Czapski passed Reikhman a report, describing the known movements of the thousands of missing officers. Reikhman seemed to read it from beginning to end, following each line with a pencil, but marking nothing. He then spoke some noncommittal words, and promised to call Czapski at his hotel after he had informed himself about the matter. One night at about midnight the phone rang. It was Reikhman, who claimed that he had to leave the city on urgent business. He had no new information. He provided Czapski with some names of other officials with whom to speak, all of whom had already been approached by the Polish government. Czapski even now did not suspect the truth, that all of the missing officers had been murdered. But he understood that something was being concealed. He decided to leave Moscow.
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The next day, returning to his hotel room, Czapski felt a pair of eyes staring at him. Weary of the attention that his Polish officer’s uniform drew in the Soviet capital, he paid no attention. An elderly Jew approached him as he reached the elevator. “You’re a Polish officer?” The Jew was from Poland, but had not seen his homeland in thirty years, and wished to see it again. “Then,” he said, “I could die without regrets.” On the spur of the moment, Czapski invited the gentleman to his room, with the intention of giving him a copy of a magazine published by the Polish embassy. On the first page happened to be a photograph of Warsaw—Warsaw, the capital of Poland, the center of Jewish life, the locus of two civilizations, and the site of their encounter. The castle square was destroyed, the famous column of King Zygmunt broken. This was Warsaw after the German bombing. Czapski’s companion slumped against a chair, put his head down, and wept. When the Jewish gentleman had gone, Czapski himself began to weep. After the loneliness and mendacity of official Moscow, a single moment of human contact had changed everything for him. “The eyes of the poor Jew,” he remembered, “rescued me from a descent into the abyss of unbelief and utter despair.”
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The sadness the two men shared was of a moment that had just passed, the moment of the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland. Together, between September 1939 and June 1941, in their time as allies, the Soviet and German states had killed perhaps two hundred thousand Polish citizens, and deported about a million more. Poles had been sent to the Gulag and to Auschwitz, where tens of thousands more would die in the months and years to come. Polish Jews under German occupation were enclosed in ghettos, awaiting an uncertain fate. Tens of thousands of Polish Jews had already died of hunger or disease.

A particular wound was caused by the intention, in both Moscow and Berlin, to decapitate Polish society, to leave Poles as a malleable mass that could be ruled rather than governed. Hans Frank, citing Hitler, defined his job as the elimination of Poland’s “leadership elements.” NKVD officers took their assignment to a logical extreme by consulting a Polish “Who’s Who” in order to define their targets. This was an attack on the very concept of modernity, or indeed the social embodiment of Enlightenment in this part of the world. In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the “intelligentsia,” the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the “extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.” The chief interrogator at Kozelsk had spoken of a “divergent philosophy”; one of the German interrogators in the AB Aktion had ordered an old man to be killed for exhibiting a “Polish way of thinking.” It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking.
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Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.

CHAPTER 5

THE ECONOMICS OF APOCALYPSE

The twenty-second of June 1941 is one of the most significant days in the history of Europe. The German invasion of the Soviet Union that began that day under the cryptonym Operation Barbarossa was much more than a surprise attack, a shift of alliances, or a new stage in a war. It was the beginning of a calamity that defies description. The engagement of the Wehrmacht (and its allies) with the Red Army killed more than ten million soldiers, not to speak of the comparable number of civilians who died in flight, under bombs, or of hunger and disease as a result of the war on the eastern front. During this eastern war, the Germans also deliberately murdered some ten million people, including more than five million Jews and more than three million prisoners of war.

In the history of the bloodlands, Operation Barbarossa marks the beginning of a third period. In the first (1933-1938), the Soviet Union carried out almost all of the mass killing; in the second, during the German-Soviet alliance (1939-1941), the killing was balanced. Between 1941 and 1945 the Germans were responsible for almost all of the political murder.

Each shift of stages poses a question. In the transition from the first stage to the second, the question was: How could the Soviets make an alliance with the Nazis? In the transition from the second to the third, the question is: Why did the Germans break that alliance? The Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe made by Moscow and Berlin between 1939 and 1941 meant occupation or loss of territory for Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Romania. It also meant mass deportations and mass shootings for the citizens of Poland, Romania, and the Baltic States. But for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, it meant fruitful economic cooperation, military victories, and expansion at the expense of these countries. What was it about the Nazi and Soviet systems that permitted mutually advantageous cooperation, between 1939 and 1941, but also the most destructive war in human history, between 1941 and 1945?

Very often the question of 1941 is posed in a more abstract way, as a matter of European civilization. In some arguments, German (and Soviet) killing policies are the culmination of modernity, which supposedly began when Enlightened ideas of reason in politics were practiced during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The pursuit of modernity in this sense does not explain the catastrophe of 1941, at least not in any straightforward way. Both regimes rejected the optimism of the Enlightenment: that social progress would follow a masterly march of science through the natural world. Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes. Thus it was legitimate to destroy the Polish upper classes (Stalinism) or the artificially educated layers of Polish subhumanity (National Socialism). Thus far the ideologies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union permitted a compromise, the one embodied in the conquest of Poland. The alliance allowed them to destroy the fruits of the European Enlightenment in Poland by destroying much of the Polish educated classes. It allowed the Soviet Union to extend its version of equality, and Nazi Germany to impose racial schema upon tens of millions of people, most dramatically by separating Jews into ghettos pending some “Final Solution.” It is possible, then, to see Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as representing two instances of modernity, which could emanate hostility to a third, the Polish. But this is a far cry from their representing modernity as such.
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The answer to the question of 1941 has less to do with the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment and more to do with the possibilities for imperialism, less to do with Paris and more to do with London. Hitler and Stalin both confronted the two chief inheritances of the British nineteenth century: imperialism as an organizing principle of world politics, and the unbroken power of the British Empire at sea. Hitler, unable to rival the British on the oceans, saw eastern Europe as ripe for a new land empire. The East was not quite a tabula rasa: the Soviet state and all of its works had to be cleared away. But then it would be, as Hitler said in July 1941, a “Garden of Eden.” The British Empire had been a central preoccupation of Stalin’s predecessor Lenin, who believed that imperialism artificially sustained capitalism. Stalin’s challenge, as Lenin’s successor, was to defend the homeland of socialism, the Soviet Union, against a world where both imperialism and capitalism persisted. Stalin had made his concession to the imperialist world well before Hitler came to power: since imperialism continued, socialism would have to be represented not by world revolution but by the Soviet state. After this ideological compromise (“socialism in one country”), Stalin’s alliance with Hitler was a detail. After all, when one’s country is a fortress of good surrounded by a world of evil, any compromise is justified, and none is worse than any other. Stalin said that the arrangement with Germany had served Soviet interests well. He expected it to end at some point, but not in 1941.
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Hitler wanted the Germans to become an imperial people; Stalin wanted the Soviets to endure the imperial stage of history, however long it lasted. The contradiction here was less of principle than of territory. Hitler’s Garden of Eden, the pure past to be found in the near future, was Stalin’s Promised Land, a territory mastered at great cost, about which a canonical history had already been written (Stalin’s
Short Course
of 1938). Hitler always intended to conquer the western Soviet Union. Stalin wanted to develop and strengthen the Soviet Union in the name of self-defense against just such imperialist visions, although his fears involved Japan and Poland, or a Japanese-Polish-German encirclement, more than an invasion from Germany. The Japanese and the Poles took more trouble than the Germans to cultivate national movements within the boundaries of the Soviet Union. Stalin assumed that anyone who would assay an invasion of his vast country would first cultivate an ally within its boundaries.
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