World War II Behind Closed Doors (48 page)

On her second day in captivity she was called into a room where three Soviet officers – one of them a woman – were waiting for her. What happened next, she feels even today, was the most degrading moment she faced in what turned out to be a long period of captivity. They told her to take her clothes off, and when she was naked, and in full view of the male officers, the female officer gave her a ‘gynaecological check-up’. When she was finished she cleaned her fingers on a newspaper, lit a cigarette and told Halina to go to the toilet – but the toilet door had to be kept open so that they could check that she ‘didn't kill herself’. All of this process, she says, ‘was maybe the worst and most humiliating [ordeal] for a woman’.

Several days later, the young NKVD officer who had beaten her placed food in front of Halina – sausage, wine, tea, buns and sugar. ‘He thinks I'll speak for that price’, thought Halina. She leaned forward and drank the tea, then said: ‘I won't speak’. He hit her hard and she started crying and sobbing once more. But then she saw a mouse in the room, feasting on a lump of sugar, and this sight made her suddenly laugh. ‘He thought I was crazy’, she says, ‘but in such a misfortune – such a funny incident’.

It was clear to Halina from her interrogation just what the Soviet authorities thought of both the Home Army and the Western Allies: ‘For them [the NKVD] we were spies. They said we [in the Home Army] were cooperating with the English and the Germans – that together with the English and the Germans we were fighting the Russians’. Halina was sentenced to ten years in prison. ‘[They said] that I was spying for the Germans and the English. That's what I was accused of…. It was enough for you to be a member of the Home Army. You were abandoned’. In Lublin
Castle prison she learnt how other Poles – some former members of the Home Army – were executed by firing squad. She heard how the officer in command of the execution squad would shout out: ‘Shoot at the traitor of the motherland’. And then, ‘When we went for a walk [in the exercise yard], after the execution, you could see human brains on the wall’.

One day, early in her sentence, Halina was given a further insight into the mentality of the people who held her captive. A Soviet commission arrived and enquired whether anyone had any complaints about the way they were treated. ‘I said: “Yes”’, says Halina. ‘In the basement – it was December – there were three water taps and three toilets and twenty-something people had to wash and piss in ten minutes. Is it possible? No’. After she had complained, one of the prison guards came to see her and said: ‘OK, now you will have time to wash’. She took Halina and the other women who had complained down to the freezing basement that contained the toilets and water taps, and told them to strip naked and stand there all night. Next morning a senior officer arrived and asked them: ‘Did you wash now?’ The women didn't reply. They were then paraded in front of the other cells so that ‘all the inmates would see what happens if you complain to the authorities’.

In the damp and unhealthy atmosphere of the prison, Halina contracted tuberculosis and was lucky to survive. But she was sustained by regular visits from her mother-in-law, who never gave up on Halina during her ten years in various Polish prisons. Halina's husband never came to visit her. After serving her full ten years, on the morning of her release Halina finally learnt from her mother-in-law the reason why: ‘She said, “Child, you can't return there [back to her home]. There's another woman there with one child already and another on the way”’.

Halina tried her best to begin a new life – without her husband and without her health. She was just one human casualty of the Soviet occupation of Poland. There were many, many more.

AN ENCOUNTER IN QUEBEC

In September 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Quebec. This encounter in Canada is not known today as one of the iconic meetings of the war – not judged as important as Tehran, Yalta or the Newfoundland conference that spawned the Atlantic Charter. Nonetheless, it was a highly significant moment in the relationship between the two leaders – one that belies the mythical sense of chummy friendship between them that, fanned by rose-coloured wartime propaganda, has grown to be the dominant feature of their relationship in popular consciousness today.

Quebec was initially important because of something that was not discussed in any detail. Even though the Warsaw Uprising was still in progress and the insurgents were clamouring for more help than ever, the fate of Poland and Stalin's intentions for the future of the country did not figure prominently at the talks. Roosevelt was – true to form – dealing with this unpleasant political reality by largely ignoring it. The Home Army's fight inside Warsaw, like the death of the Poles at Katyn, was an inconvenient – though no doubt regrettable – smudge on the bigger picture. And Roosevelt was a big picture man.

And what was prominently discussed at Quebec was certainly big picture stuff – most notably the future of post-war Germany. This vital question had proved divisive at Tehran, as evidenced by the infamous dinner at which Stalin had called for at least fifty thousand Germans to be shot in the immediate aftermath of the war. And here at Quebec the issue of Germany's future was just as contentious. During dinner on 13 September – an encounter that rivalled the Tehran dispute for sheer emotion – Roosevelt asked his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to outline for Churchill just what the Americans had in mind. It was a strange request from the start, because the question of the future of Germany should have been a matter for the State Department, not the Treasury.

Morgenthau proceeded to describe one of the most radical and destructive proposals ever formulated by a democratic state in the
twentieth century. Not only was Germany to be split into two countries, but all its industrial capacity was to be destroyed. Later in the twentieth century an American general threatened to bomb the Vietnamese ‘back to the stone age’
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– and economically at least, Morgenthau's plan for Germany was the equivalent during the Second World War.

Churchill, who trusted his emotional responses, was outraged. ‘I had barely got under way’, recorded Morgenthau, ‘before low mutters and baleful looks indicated that the Prime Minister was not the most enthusiastic member of my audience…. I have never seen him more irascible and vitriolic than he was that night…. After I finished my piece he turned loose on me the full flood of his rhetoric, sarcasm and violence. He looked on the Treasury plan, he said, as he would on chaining himself to a dead German’.
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Churchill further told Morgenthau that he felt his proposal was ‘unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary’.
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And according to his doctor, Lord Moran, who witnessed Churchill's protest, the British Prime Minister was clear that: ‘I'm all for disarming Germany, but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bonds between the working classes of all countries, and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating’.
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There could scarcely have been a greater point of division between Britain and America over future policy than was evident that night. But then something quite extraordinary happened. Two days later Churchill withdrew his strident objections and endorsed the substance of Morgenthau's radical plan.

On 15 September, Churchill signed a continuation of a Lend Lease agreement with America that guaranteed the British $6.5 billion. This was the second great issue discussed at the talks, and one of vital importance to the British economy, which, as everyone knew, had been devastated by the war. According to Morgenthau's own notes, ‘Churchill was quite emotional about the meeting and at one time had tears in his eyes’.
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After the signing of the agreement, Churchill turned to Roosevelt and said how grateful he was – thanking him ‘most effusively’. Then Churchill asked Morgenthau and Professor Lindemann (later Lord
Cherwell), the Prime Minister's scientific adviser: ‘Where are the minutes on this matter of the Ruhr?’

Eventually Churchill ended up dictating his own version of the Morgenthau Plan, based on Morgenthau's notes, which retained the essential destructive character of the original. Memorably, Churchill added one key word to the line: ‘This programme for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into largely an agricultural country’. In Churchill's version it became: ‘This programme for eliminating the war-making industries in the Ruhr and the Saar is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral’. The use of the word ‘pastoral’ – which became infamous – was probably intended to suggest ‘an idealized view of agricultural life’ and thus ‘give a rose-tinted view of the plan's drastic implications’.
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Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was astonished at Churchill's volte-face and remained adamantly opposed to the Morgenthau Plan. ‘It was as if’, he wrote, ‘one were to take the Black Country and turn it into Devonshire. I did not like the plan, nor was I convinced that it was to our national advantage. I said so…’.
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The Americans – including President Roosevelt – watched as the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had a public row about the Morgenthau Plan in front of them. Churchill first tried to convince Eden of the advantages for British exports if the plan was implemented and Germany would no longer be an industrial competitor, but ultimately he said: ‘After all, the future of my people is at stake, and when I have to choose between my people and the German people, I am going to choose my people’.
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Churchill had thus changed his position from believing that the American plan to destroy German industrial capacity was ‘unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary’ to one of steadfast support. It is scarcely credible that he made this reversal merely because of a sudden realization that Morgenthau's proposals benefited British industry – after all, the ‘advantages’ to British industry had been obvious when he had first heard the plan outlined. Much more likely is the straightforward explanation that Churchill went along
with what the Americans wanted after they had signed the additional Lend Lease agreement.

That was certainly the view of one of the creators of the American plan, Morgenthau's assistant Harry Dexter White. He explicitly linked Churchill's difficulties in the negotiations with Roosevelt over Lend Lease (at one point Churchill was reduced to saying to the President: ‘What do you want me to do, stand up and beg like Fala’
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– Roosevelt's dog) with his immense gratitude once the deal was signed and his immediate desire to agree the Morgenthau Plan in return.

As for Roosevelt, there is little doubt that he wanted to be hard on Germany out of personal conviction. For years he had been wary of what he believed were the military tendencies of the Germans. The actions of the Nazis, following on from German aggression in the First World War and back into the nineteenth century, were – as he saw it – all part of a pattern. And the Nazis had as little time for Roosevelt as he did for them. Just before the war, in a speech made in 1939, Hitler had openly ridiculed Roosevelt's appeal for a Nazi commitment not to attack a number of specific countries. And Roosevelt would also have been aware of both Hitler's contempt for America as a racially ‘impure’ country and his disdain for its President as an individual – his physical disability would have clearly demonstrated his inferiority as far as Nazi ideology was concerned.

At the Casablanca Conference in 1943, Roosevelt had insisted that the Allies accept only ‘unconditional’ surrender from the Germans; and now, just before the Quebec meeting, on 19 August, Roosevelt had told Morgenthau: ‘We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in such a manner so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past’.
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And although Morgenthau swiftly replied that ‘nobody is considering the question along those lines’, the strength of the President's desire to be ‘tough’ on the Germans could scarcely have been more apparent.

But there was another dimension to Roosevelt's support for the Morgenthau Plan that must not be forgotten. The American President was acutely aware that another powerful world leader too wanted Germany drastically weakened after the war – Stalin. The Soviet leader had emphasized this desire not just at Tehran, but also more recently during his last meeting with the Polish Prime Minister in Moscow on 9 August, when he had closed the meeting with the words: ‘I stand for all possible and impossible repressive measures against Germany’.
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Consciously or unconsciously, Stalin's views were on Roosevelt's mind during the initial conversation about the Morgenthau Plan with Churchill at Quebec. The American President remarked that the de-industrialization of Germany was necessary because ‘a factory which made steel furniture could be turned overnight to war production’.
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This was exactly the sentiment he had heard Stalin express at Tehran. ‘Are you going to let Germany produce modern metal furniture?’ demanded the Soviet leader. ‘The manufacture of metal furniture can be quickly turned into the manufacture of armament’.
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The Morgenthau Plan was thus exactly the kind of repressive measure against Germany that Stalin craved. Which makes it all the more significant that one of the authors of the plan – Harry Dexter White – was a Soviet spy, raising the intriguing possibility that Stalin, far from being absent from Quebec, had actually played a part in the creation of the Morgenthau Plan in the first place. White was named as a Soviet spy by the defecting Soviet agent Elizabeth Bentley as early as November 1945, but it was not until the release of the Venona decrypted Soviet intelligence material years later that his culpability was established beyond any reasonable doubt – something that the American Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, confirmed in 1997.