Year Zero (10 page)

It is worth quoting in full an observation made by Alfred Döblin, author of the prewar masterpiece
Berlin Alexanderplatz
(1929). After surviving the war in exile in California, Döblin returned to Germany, where
he felt like an exile all over again. This is what he wrote after arriving in the spa town of Baden-Baden:

The main impression I got in Germany was of people who were like ants running back and forth through a destroyed nest, in a state of excitement and desperate to get to work in the midst of their ruination. Their only worry is that they can't get to work at once without the requisite tools and directives. They are less depressed by the destruction than inspired to want to work even harder. If they had the means, which they lack today, they would rejoice tomorrow, rejoice that their antiquated, badly laid out places have been demolished, offering them the chance to build something first class and modern.
⁴⁴

I
n Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1945, near the town of Budweis (
), best known for its fine beer, was a concentration camp with a sign nailed to its main gate which read: “An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth.” The camp was now under Czech control. It was filled with German prisoners, most of them civilians. The Czech commandant, a young man with a savage reputation, made the Germans work twelve hours a day on minimal rations, then woke them in the middle of the night and ordered them to the
Appelplatz
where they were made to sing, crawl, beat each other, dance, or any other torment that amused the Czech guards.
¹

The desire for revenge is as human as the need for sex or food. Few people have expressed this more finely, and more brutally, than the Polish author Tadeusz Borowski. After being arrested in 1943 for publishing his poems in the clandestine press—wartime Warsaw was alive with a vast underground culture, including schools, newspapers, theaters, and poetry
magazines, all of which exposed participants to the risk of concentration camp or a more immediate death—Borowski survived a Gestapo prison, then Auschwitz and Dachau. Liberated in Dachau, he stayed more or less locked up as a displaced person in a former SS barracks near Munich. His account of this squalid experience in limbo was included in a classic book of short sketches of camp life and death titled
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
.
²

One of the stories is called “Silence.” A number of DPs spot a former Nazi henchman trying to escape through a window. They grab him and begin “tearing at him with greedy hands.” When they hear U.S. soldiers, who are running the DP camp, approaching, they push the man onto a straw mattress under layers of bedding. The senior American officer, a fine young fellow in a freshly pressed uniform, tells them through his translator that he quite understands how much the survivors of Nazi camps must hate the Germans. But it is most important that the rule of law should be observed. The guilty should be punished only after due process. The Americans would see to that. The DPs nod and give the nice American a cheer. He wishes them a good night's rest and “accompanied by a friendly hum of voices” leaves the room to conclude his tour of the barracks. No sooner has he gone than the German is pulled from the bed and kicked to death on the concrete floor.

This was not an unusual incident in the immediate aftermath of Liberation, or, in the case of the DPs, semi-liberation. In other accounts, the liberating soldiers, shocked by the visual evidence of German depravity, were less attached to the rules of due legal process. At Dachau, American soldiers stood by as SS guards were lynched, drowned, cut up, strangled, or battered to death with spades, and at least in one case beheaded with a bayonet lent by a GI to a former inmate for this purpose. Sometimes the GIs took it upon themselves to shoot the German guards. Also at Dachau, one American lieutenant executed more than three hundred guards with his machine gun. His rage was understandable; he had just seen the corpses of prisoners piled up in front of the camp crematorium.
³

At Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 a British nurse saw what happened
when a group of German nurses entered the camp for the first time. Having been ordered to care for the desperately ill survivors, they walked into one of the hospital wards, and in an instant “a shrieking mass of internees, among them even the dying, had hurled themselves at the nurses, scratching and tearing at them with knives and forks, or with instruments snatched from the dressing trolleys.”
⁴

In this case, the British had to protect the German civilians, whose presence was vital to the survival of the inmates. Dealing with the natural desire for vengeance, for the rough justice of an eye for an eye, was a serious problem for Allied officers, government officials returning from exile, members of welfare organizations, and all others who were interested in restoring some sense of order or normality to the devastated continent. Like the hapless GI in Borowski's story, however, they were often powerless to stop further mayhem, especially in countries torn by civil war. On many occasions, too, they decided to look the other way, or were actively complicit, in far more unsavory ways than the GI who lent his bayonet at the Dachau concentration camp. Indeed, most cases of organized vengeance would not have happened without official encouragement. Just as sexual desire rarely leads straight to orgies, mass violence seldom comes from individual initiatives; it needs leadership, organization.

And it needs the right timing. One of the surprising things about the aftermath of the war is that more Germans didn't attack other Germans. A journalist in Berlin, one of the few Germans who had actively resisted the Nazis, wrote in her postwar diary that people had been “ripe for retribution.” During the last months of the war, a time of desperation for many Germans, “even the biggest fool understood how villainously he had been deceived by Nazism . . .” And so, she continued, “If there had been a three-day period between the collapse and the [Allied] conquest, thousands and thousands, disappointed, humiliated and abused by the Nazis, would have wreaked revenge upon their enemies. To each his personal tyrant. ‘An eye for an eye,' people swore back then. ‘The first hour after the collapse belongs to the long knives!' Destiny had it differently.”
⁵

She was right; the shared hardship under foreign occupation kept
Germans from each others' throats. Vengeance against Germans would be exacted by others.

Hans Graf von Lehndorff was running a hospital in the old East Prussian city of Königsberg, now a Russian city called Kaliningrad, when it was taken by the Soviet army in April 1945. In his diaries, written in a style both clearheaded and deeply religious, he describes how Soviet troops, blind drunk from a raid on the adjacent liquor factory, stagger into the wards and rape every female they can find, including the very old and the very young, nurses as well as patients, several of them so gravely wounded that they are barely conscious. Some of the women beg the soldiers to shoot them, but this act of mercy is seldom accorded before they have been assaulted many times, rendering an execution superfluous in most cases.

Lehndorff was not a Nazi. Indeed, like many members of his aristocratic family, he abhorred the Nazis. His mother had been arrested by the Gestapo. A cousin was executed for having taken part in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler. Seeing his city burning, while the women are raped, the men hunted down, and the shot-up houses systematically looted, Dr. Lehndorff wonders what it all means: “Does this still have anything to do with natural wildness, or is it vengeance? Vengeance, probably . . . What an effort they make to create a show out of chaos! . . . And these frenzied children, not much older than fifteen or sixteen, throwing themselves on our women like wolves, without having a clue what it's all about. This has nothing to do with Russia, nothing with any particular people or race—this is man without God, a grotesque caricature of humanity. Otherwise all this would not hurt one so deeply—like one's own guilt.”
⁶

The sentiments are noble, and Lehndorff is surely right that human beings everywhere, given the license to do what they please with other human beings, are quite capable, even willing, to do their worst. But often the worst is done by men who feel that God, or some worldly substitute,
is
on their side. Vengeance is rarely free-floating. It usually has a history, personal or collective. Jews aside, citizens of the Soviet Union had
suffered more than other peoples from German savagery. The figures are hard to imagine. More than 8 million Soviet soldiers died, of whom 3.3 million were deliberately starved to death, left to rot in open-air camps, in midsummer heat or wintry frost. The civilian death toll was 16 million. Only the Chinese, who lost more than 10 million civilians under Japanese occupation, come anywhere close. But these are statistics. They don't tell the full story. Murder and starvation went together with constant degradation and humiliation. Russians, like other Slavs, were less than fully human in Nazi German eyes,
Untermenschen
, whose only role would be to work as slaves for their German masters. And those unfit to work as slaves did not deserve to be fed. Indeed, Nazi Germany had a policy, called the Hunger Plan, of starving the Soviet peoples to provide Germans with more living space (
Lebensraum
) and food. If fully carried out, this monstrous economic plan would have killed tens of millions.

But vengeance was not just a matter of rage or indiscipline. Men who are brutally treated by their own officers often take out their suffering on the civilian population too. This is one explanation for the ferocity of Japanese soldiers in China, besides their racist contempt for Chinese people. The ruthless treatment of Soviet soldiers by their military superiors, as well as by the political commissars and secret police, is well known. But quite apart from that, once the Germans were forced to retreat from the Soviet Union, the Red Army troops were explicitly told to do their worst as soon as they entered German lands. Road signs on the border said in Russian: “Soldier, you are in Germany: take revenge on the Hitlerites.”
⁷
The words of propagandists, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, were drummed daily into their heads: “If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing funnier for us than a pile of German corpses.” Marshal Georgy Zhukov stated in his orders of January 1945: “Woe to the land of the murderers. We will get our terrible revenge for everything.”
⁸

Men who had been humiliated for years as
Untermenschen
and had usually lost friends and relatives, often in horrible circumstances, needed little encouragement. There was another factor too. The Soviets had
already been fed propaganda about the rapaciousness of bourgeois capitalism. Here was a chance for revolutionary violence. What shocked the soldiers, some of whom had barely seen functioning electricity, let alone such luxury items as wristwatches, was the relative opulence of German civilian life, even in the miserable conditions of bombed cities and wartime shortages. Greed, ethnic rage, class envy, political propaganda, fresh memories of German atrocities, all this served to quicken the thirst for vengeance. As one Soviet officer put it, “the deeper we penetrate into Germany, the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere . . . I'd just love to smash my fist into all those neat rows of tins and bottles.”
⁹

Even when not fueled by a desire for revenge, this feeling could lead to serious aggression. When the Soviet Red Army invaded northeastern China, or Manchuria, in August, less than a week before the Japanese surrender, their troops went on a rampage in such major cities as Harbin, Mukden (Shenyang), and Shinkyo (Changchun). There was no reason for vengeance against the large Japanese civilian population in these cities, let alone against the Chinese. Japan had never invaded any part of the Soviet Union, even though the Japanese did inflict a humiliating defeat on Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905–6, fought over the very same Manchurian territory. On the one occasion when Japan foolishly attacked the Soviet Union, in 1939, on the Mongolian border, the Japanese were decisively beaten. And yet the behavior of Soviet troops in northeastern China was like that of fifteenth-century conquistadores.

Like the German populations in eastern Europe, Japanese civilians were totally vulnerable, for the same reason: just as most German SS men, military officers, and senior Nazi officials had fled to the west, Japanese army officers and government officials had hogged the last trains bound for the ships that would take them back to Japan, leaving the mass of civilians behind to fend for themselves. This meant that almost two million Japanese were trapped without any protection. Many of them had moved to the continent since 1932, when Manchuria became Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state; emigration was actively promoted by the Japanese government seeking
Lebensraum
for its rural citizens. In the
cities—Mukden, Shinkyo, Kirin, Harbin—an entire Japanese society emerged of banks, railways, department stores, schools, art academies, cinemas, restaurants, all run by Japanese for Japanese. In rural areas Chinese had been kicked off their land to make room for Japanese settlers. All this was justified by official Japanese propaganda about Asia for the Asians, a brave new Orient, more modern, more efficient, more just than the old Western imperial order, ruled by the Japanese masters.

Some Chinese took advantage of Japanese defeat by robbing Japanese civilians. They had reason to feel aggrieved. For in Manchukuo, set up and controlled by the Japanese Kwantung Army, Chinese were treated as third-class citizens, lower even than the Koreans, at the mercy of almost any Japanese. Yet in many Japanese memories, the Soviets were far worse than the Chinese. In one account: “They would break into Japanese homes, firing off their pistols, and not only grab any object that caught their fancy, but rape any woman they liked as well.”
¹⁰