Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Read Online Free PDF Page B

paid Sack an advance, belatedly decided to cancel it. Likewise, a magazine that had bought serial rights pulled their article two days before publication. Despite being Jewish himself, Sack was accused both in print and on television of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. There was similar controversy over his book in Europe, where Sack’s Polish publisher cancelled publication for fear of bad publicity, as did his German publisher. Sack’s book was insensitive and badly written – and, like James Bacque’s book about German POWs, was considered dangerous precisely because it contained seeds of truth.
    The acknowledgement of postwar vengeance is an extremely uncomfortable issue for any historian, even when it is not clouded by national or religious sensitivities, and it is probably impossible to discuss it without stepping on somebody’s toes. Firstly, there is the worry that by characterizing an action as retributive, the historian partially legitimizes it. So, for example, when the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers is described as revenge, it thereby becomes more understandable, and perhaps to a degree more acceptable. German women, so the argument goes, were part of the Nazi regime just as much as German men, and rape was therefore something that they had brought upon themselves. This was the argument that many Soviets used at the time.
    Conversely, the act of vengeance might be deemed so terrible that it overshadows the original offence: so, to use the same example, the mass rapes in Germany might be considered so repugnant that modern readers will forget that many of the women who were raped were also part of an evil regime. In our minds the atrocities that were committed in the name of Nazism – even crimes as vast as the Holocaust – might be at least partially ‘cancelled out’ by the suffering that German people endured once the war was over. This is certainly the worry that many academics in Germany have. When a groundbreaking documentary about the mass rape was broadcast in 1992, for example, it caused a furore in the German press: outraged commentators argued that the documentary should never have been broadcast, because if Germans began to see themselves as victims of atrocity, they would lose sight of the fact that they were also perpetrators. 4
    In order to avoid weaving a path between these two extremes, many historians cheat. Most histories of the Second World War, for example, make no mention of the revenge that came after the war was over; likewise, most books that describe the rape and murder of Germans after the war do so without so much as a peep about the wartime atrocities in eastern Europe that first created this seemingly unquenchable desire for revenge. The problem with divorcing vengeance from its wider context is that it makes it impossible to understand why people acted the way they did in the aftermath of the war. From a modern, political point of view it also creates a competition over victimhood.
    Sooner or later the arguments tend to break down along national or political lines. Poles and Czechs understandably feel aggrieved when historians begin to speak about the suffering of ethnic Germans, since they themselves were forced to endure years of savage occupation at the hands of many of those Germans. French Communists become indignant when right-wingers highlight their excesses, since it was the French right that presided over the capture, torture and execution of tens of thousands of Communist Resistance fighters. Russians dismiss the anger over how Romanian and Hungarian civilians were treated after the war by arguing that Romania and Hungary should never have gone to war against the Soviet Union in the first place. And so on.
    The truth is that the moral morass produced by the war spared nobody. All nationalities and all political persuasions were – to vastly differing degrees, of course – both victims and perpetrators simultaneously. If historians still struggle to see