HISTORY: ROBERT GERWARTH reviews William Hitchcock's Liberation: Europe 1945,Faber & Faber 446pp, £25
FOR THE civilian population of Normandy, the Allied landing on the beaches of northern France on June 6th, 1944, was a mixed blessing. Ever since the fall of France in the summer of 1940 they had lived under an increasingly harsh German occupation regime, hoping for the day that Nazi rule over their country would come to an end. But when that day of liberation finally arrived, it came at a high price.
Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in Normandy alone during and immediately after the landing, most of them as a result of misguided Allied bombing attacks that failed to destroy German defensive positions but hit civilian dwellings in the hinterland instead.
Civilians on the eastern front fared even worse. Quite apart from the systematic mass rapes of hundreds of thousands of German women between the ages of eight and 80 in the territories recently conquered by the advancing Red Army, the liberation of east-central Europe from Nazi oppression proved to be anything but an unambiguously positive experience.
During the unsuccessful Warsaw Rising of July 1944, for example, the Red Army consciously stopped its advance at the Vistula river while the SS killed tens of thousands of Polish patriotic insurgents and bystanders. Stalin had no sympathy for the nationalist insurgents and it was simply more convenient for him to let the Germans murder the members of the non-communist Polish Home Army than to order his own troops to do the same.
In his new book, William Hitchcock critically engages with the popular myth of Europe's "heroic liberation" in 1945, encapsulated in the thousands of photographs of smiling GIs or Red Army soldiers being welcomed by flag-waving, flower-throwing civilian populations.
Based on the testimonies, diaries, and letters of civilians and ordinary soldiers, the book offers a fresh interpretation of the dramatic events of 1944-45, an interpretation that highlights the grim realities of liberation, which have been largely cleansed from public memory because they did not fit into the popular image of the second World War as a war between "good" and "evil".
SUBDIVIDED INTO 10 chapters, Hitchcock's book offers stimulating insights into the often vicious fighting that took place on the European continent between D-Day and May 1945.
Based on exhaustive research in dozens of archives and a good command of the vast secondary literature, Hitchcock's book underlines that the liberation of Europe was both a major military triumph and a human tragedy of epic proportions.
He offers detailed analysis of the horrors of aerial warfare, which peaked at a time when it was no longer necessary to secure military victory; the massacres committed by retreating German and advancing US troops; mass starvation in the battle-torn theatres of war; and the widespread public humiliations of French, Belgian, and Dutch women believed to have engaged in sexual relationships with German soldiers.
Understandably, perhaps, given the huge death toll that Hitler's crusade had inflicted on eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in particular, the days of liberation were not a time of mercy. Those who had suffered under the Nazi occupation often engaged in appalling rituals of retribution.
Tito's partisans inflicted a dreadful revenge on those they often rightly, but sometimes wrongly, identified as collaborators. Perhaps as many as 30,000 former Chetniks and Ustaše fighters were hunted down and killed, and the same fate awaited the Cossacks who had joined Hitler's war effort in an attempt to rid themselves of Stalinist rule.
When the defeated Cossack army surrendered to the British against assurances that they would not be handed over to the Russians, they were betrayed. Once disarmed, nearly 23,000 Cossacks, men as well as their wives and children, were turned over to the Red Army. Nearly all of them were murdered or perished in Siberian Gulag camps.
ONE OF THE most harrowing episodes in the book concerns the liberation of the concentration camps. Many of the Jews of Europe, who, against all odds, had managed to survive the horrors of the Holocaust, remained in camps for months and even years, safe from extermination and starvation, but compelled to dwell inside temporary shelters in the land of their tormentors, far from their old homes, which often refused to repatriate them.
The catalogue of horrors described in this book will not come as a major surprise for historians of mid 20th-century Europe who have long acknowledged that for many communities across the continent, the final weeks of the war were among the most terrible of the 20th century. What the book offers, however, is a chilling synthesis of recently published scholarship on the subject, and it will not fail to leave a deep impression on a general readership.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is that it does not attempt to exonerate the Nazis and their frightful war of extermination in the east by pointing to Allied atrocities in the way that many other, rather dubious, publications over the past decades have done. Hitchcock repeatedly emphasizes that the cycle of violence that returned to Germany in 1944-45 in a brutal way was started by Hitler.
Instead of writing a balance sheet of German and Allied atrocities, Hitchcock reminds the reader, in often graphic ways, of the ugly realities of wars, even when these wars are fought for a good cause. And he does a remarkable job in emphasising that the ultimate victims of the second World War were the men, women, and children caught up in the fighting. As a result, this is not a book for the faint-hearted.
There is hardly a page on which civilians of various nationalities are not bombed-out, raped, maimed, killed, infected by venereal diseases, or forced to sell their bodies for food.
HITCHCOCK IS PROBABLY right in concluding that, more than 60 years after the end of the second World War, we have gained enough critical distance from the events of 1945 to develop a more complex history of "liberation" that allows for both an acknowledgement of its remarkable achievements and the price that many had to pay for it.
* Robert Gerwarth teaches modern European history at UCD and is director of UCD's centre for war studies (www.warstudies.ie). His recent publications include The Bismarck Myth, Twisted Paths: Europe 1914-1945, and Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain, all published by Oxford University Press