HISTORY | MEMORIES OF THE END OF THE WAR

Guilt only came when the stomach was full

Two books tell of Germany in ruins

Johan Östling — doctoral researcher in the Department of History at Lund University

“German Diary 1945–46: A Soviet Officer on the Collapse of Nazi Germany.” Vladimir Gelfand. Translated by Lars Wiklund. Ersatz (about 360 pages; due in May).
“The Path of the Victors: An Eyewitness Account of Germany in 1945.” Osmar White. Translated by Carl G. Fredriksson. Prisma (256 pages).

American and British soldiers who, in late winter and early spring 1945, left Luxembourg behind, crossed the River Sauer and entered enemy territory were met by a stark warning: “You are entering Germany — no fraternization!” The advance continued east through the wooded hills of the Rhineland, past slate mountains and quiet little towns such as Bitburg, Gerolstein and Prüm. In the evenings, in abandoned patrician villas or hastily pitched army tents, young soldiers read in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes that the Russians, advancing on Germany from the east, had put up a sign of their own: “The Beast’s Lair.”

THE LANGUAGE OF WARNING SIGNS makes clear how later generations imagine the past. The liberation, conquest and division of the rapidly disintegrating German Reich were carried out by forces of very different kinds. In the Western Allies’ own account, their advance was a noble and courageous struggle to liberate Europe in the name of democracy. Germany’s sick body had to be disinfected, its infected population cured, and the Nazi virus eradicated once and for all. During the operation, officers and enlisted men were to avoid all contact with a regime tainted by the enemy. The Soviet Union’s struggle, by contrast, was more like a fight with a Fascist beast — a monster bred by militarism and monopoly capitalism. The Red Army’s crushing assault was therefore marked by merciless, uncompromising violence: devastation, atrocities and purges. To destroy the beast for good and prevent its return, the soil in which Fascism had grown had to be rooted out and socialism widely established.

Postwar films, memoirs and heroic narratives polarized these pictures of the past. But a return to contemporary accounts reveals something far more varied, retaining nuances that were soon lost. Two unusually powerful eyewitness books — Osmar White’s The Path of the Victors and Vladimir Gelfand’s German Diary 1945–46 — restore history’s complexity, with its horror and reconciliation, contrasts and paradoxes.

OSMAR WHITE, AN AUSTRALIAN JOURNALIST, was no newcomer to the battlefield. He made his name as a war correspondent in the early 1940s, writing with deep sympathy about the fighting in the jungles of New Guinea. In the final phase of the Second World War, he felt drawn to Europe. He joined the Allied forces and accompanied General Patton’s Third Army during its final advance into Germany in 1945. Wearing a British uniform, he became an accredited war correspondent before the term had even been coined.

Born of his time in Germany in 1945–46, The Path of the Victors is marked by a hard-won, austere humanism. It tells of the passage from war to peace, of injustice and guilt, shattered illusions and nascent hope; it deserves to be counted among the most important books of its kind. And yet it had to wait to be published. White received promises from publishers in both London and New York, only for them to withdraw at the last minute, for reasons never fully explained. Much suggests that his frank, at times unvarnished criticism of the occupation authorities’ failures was unwelcome. The Cold War was approaching, and the public was weary of war. The manuscript was left untouched and did not appear until the early 1980s.

It was no triumphant march that White joined as he entered Germany in the winter of 1945, the coldest in living memory. There was something symbolic about a war that had dragged on being decided at the turn from winter to spring, as the ice broke and the frozen German countryside became sticky mud. Few of the soldiers White accompanied saw themselves as instruments in a great ideological confrontation. They pressed on fearfully despite aching limbs and failing spirits. They dreamed of victory, of the triumph they longed for, but wanted even more to go home, knowing they would not be turning west any time soon. The liberators’ road was behind them; the victors’ road lay ahead.

THE MUDDY MARCH OF VICTORY rolled across Germany, halting in Dueren, Juelich and Polch. In these burned-out towns, only the dead remained among the ruins, while ordinary Germans still hid in the surrounding villages. Terrified, they emerged from sheds and outbuildings to meet the foreign army that had taken possession of their land. At first White shared the Allies’ accumulated hatred of these detestable, hostile villagers, but soon he found reason to reconsider.

One evening in a small town just west of Koblenz, he was lodged in a sturdy four-storey stone house decorated with stucco. Its interiors suggested that a prosperous family had lived there until quite recently. Oak furniture stood in orderly rows in the neat sitting room; Meissen porcelain and valuable pewter tankards were displayed in a cabinet; leather-bound editions of Goethe and Schiller crowded the tidy bookshelves. The pantry held jars of jam, biscuits and barley flour, and cupboards bulged with all kinds of clothing. The head of the household seemed to have been a dentist and a pipe collector; his wife, apparently, was a thrifty homemaker and a devout believer. “Ordinary people,” White thought, slightly ashamed of rummaging through their drawers. But in the attic, beneath a layer of newspapers, he found an impressive collection of Nazi propaganda and a stack of family photographs from local party gatherings. “It was a rather disturbing discovery,” White admitted. He had begun to feel warmly toward the unknown family whose home had given him shelter. Who, then, really lived in the enemy country? Cold-blooded killers in immaculate uniforms? Nazi dentists who collected old pipes? Housewives who hoarded buttons and hid sweets from their children? Yes: all of them.

During the year he spent in Germany, White returned often to the question of German guilt. He was among the first foreign journalists allowed into Buchenwald. Like many observers who came later, he first visited Weimar and then the concentration camp nearby; like many after him, he contrasted the “land of poets and thinkers” with a country of judges and executioners. As he left the homeland of German idealism for the infernal lair, he had no illusions about what he would see. Every literate person had known for years that Nazi concentration camps were places of mass murder and torture: prisoners died from forced labour, and Jews were killed in gas chambers. Even so, what he saw shocked him. The crematorium had barely cooled, the racial-biology laboratory remained untouched, and thousands upon thousands of human bodies still lay scattered across the grounds. White was accompanied by a middle-aged French doctor who had arrived with the American troops: a serious physician who had seen everything and yet had not lost his capacity for compassion. “It seemed,” White wrote, “that neither love nor hate nor fear could blind him. He had the courage to acknowledge that even things one sees here belong to the fabric of human life; they must therefore be faced without passion, while we fight them without ceasing.”

The concentration-camp visits stirred White deeply. He was outraged not only by what he saw, but even more by the refusal of so many Germans he met to acknowledge their share of the guilt. At Ohrdruf in Thuringia, he watched villagers being taken to a nearby camp and made to look at emaciated bodies and corpses that had been burned. Yet they waved it away and insisted they had known nothing. In time, however, White began to doubt the educational purpose of this practice and concluded that Allied propaganda was having no psychological effect. The Germans simply could not take it in. Their cities lay in ruins, their villages were being looted, and their first task was to find food for the day. White’s observations became a criticism of the clumsy, insensitive way the occupation authorities tried to show people the camps: “The early propaganda intended to awaken a sense of guilt came at the wrong time and utterly failed to convey that concentration-camp prisoners had been systematically tortured and killed for more than ten years.”

The aim was to undertake a kind of historical archaeology and discover which traces of the Third Reich lay hidden beneath the mud and the dust of war.

WHEN PEACE CAME, White was able to move about more freely. He made several trips around the country and marvelled at how quickly the infrastructure was being rebuilt. His aim was a kind of historical archaeology: to find the traces of the Third Reich hidden beneath mud and the dust of war. A difficult journey took him into the Bavarian mountains, to the beautiful Salzburg Alps and Berchtesgaden. There, a stone’s throw from Hitler’s private residence at the Berghof, he hunted for the remnants of Nazism. His travels also brought him into contact with British and American occupation soldiers. Encounters with these self-assured victors produced bleak portraits of revenge. As so often in war, victory implied a right to the spoils, and far too many exercised that right without shame. White describes theft, atrocities and rape by soldiers without adornment — an uncomfortable subject today, and even more so in 1946.

Osmar White had entered enemy territory in late winter and early spring 1945; he had been told not to fraternize with the locals. He never obeyed. Instead, he tried to understand for himself what was happening: listening to testimony and stories, taking part in the revival of everyday life in a Bavarian village and in the turbulent nightlife of Berlin’s reawakened clubs. He grew tired of German lies and excuses, and rejected just as strongly the occupation authorities’ unqualified hatred of Germans. As time passed, he became increasingly convinced that the Allies’ denazification measures were misguided and sometimes directly counterproductive. Most clearly, he came to understand that Germany itself would have to bear collective guilt for a long time: “because under Hitler, its freely elected and celebrated leader, the nation had watched as evil men became the bodyguards of still more evil men who had seized power.”

VLADIMIR GELFAND’S MEMORIES of 1945–46 were quite different in many ways, as were the circumstances of his life. Gelfand was born in 1923 in eastern Ukraine to a poor Jewish family. In April 1942 he volunteered for the army and was sent to the front. In oilcloth notebooks and exercise books he recorded his thoughts and feelings — sometimes as material for the great war novel he dreamed of writing, sometimes as solace and a way to make sense of what was happening. After the war, while working as a teacher in Perm and Dnipropetrovsk, he long hoped to rework his notes into an epic about the Great Patriotic War. What survived him, however, were his unedited diary entries, now appearing in Swedish translation.

A party member who hoped to receive a political post at the end of the war, Gelfand seems far more naive than the perceptive White: he was at once a dreamy romantic and a committed communist. He believed wholeheartedly in Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union’s basic ideals; news of the deaths of Romain Rolland and Aleksey Tolstoy brought him to tears. Where White often seasoned his observations with bitter irony, Gelfand was an idealistic artist, given to grandiloquence and appeals to destiny. His diary is a vivid collage of life in Soviet Germany in 1945–46: the hardships and pleasures of daily life, high politics and contradictions, drink, women and songs. Weather observations and emotional outbursts sit alongside personal letters, business reports and reflections on life. It is a rare account from the Soviet zone, almost unique in Western European languages.

In April 1945, just a week before Germany’s unconditional surrender, Gelfand arrived in Berlin. He remained in and around the city for a little over a year and watched the German capital undergo a striking transformation: from a dying metropolis into a city coming back to life, bustling with the work of reconstruction. He often marvelled at the enormous forces set in motion and tried to put them into words, but violence and vodka ruled the intolerant world of the soldiers, and intellectual impulses met with nothing but mockery. He felt most at ease on his own excursions, when he could meet ordinary people informally and visit them at home.

Much of Gelfand’s diary for the autumn of 1945 and spring of 1946 is devoted to women. Though he condemned the many Red Army soldiers who harassed German women, he himself was constantly longing for women. His charm and pleasant manners seem to have attracted every woman who crossed his path, but he found it hard to form lasting relationships. When longing and nostalgia became especially intense, he admitted to himself that he would probably never be able to love a German woman as he had loved the girls back home.

Taken on their own terms, these diary entries make an interesting counterpoint to the harrowing account A Woman in Berlin (republished in Swedish in 2005), the bitter testimony of an anonymous German woman in the final days of the war. Gelfand’s notes have little of that book’s literary power, but they nonetheless enrich the overall picture by shifting the perspective. In the anonymous ranks of the Red Army, a human face comes into view.

Osmar White’s The Path of the Victors and Vladimir Gelfand’s German Diary 1945–46 are each, in their own way, above all a document politique, a political document; it is hard to call either of them a document humain, a human document, as A Woman in Berlin is. The work that joined sharp social thought with reflection on human nature was Stig Dagerman’s German Autumn — in my view, the finest account of Germany amid the ruins after the war. Though still young, Dagerman saw how high politics continued to shape people’s lives and to play into the hands of dark forces:

“There is [...] in Germany a large group of honest anti-Fascists who are more disappointed, homeless and defeated than Nazi accomplices have ever been; disappointed because liberation was not as radical as they had hoped; homeless because they do not want to identify either with German discontent, in which they sense too much concealed Nazism, or with Allied policy, whose indulgence toward former Nazis they watch with alarm; and finally defeated because they doubt that Germans can have any part in the Allies’ final victory, while at the same time they are unsure that, as anti-Nazis, they bear no share of responsibility for Germany’s defeat.”