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German Suffering
I suppose this makes me a bad person, but I have a hard time getting too seriously concerned about German suffering during the waning days of World War II and the related issue of the postwar expulsions of the German-speaking populations of various Eastern European countries. On the one hand, this all kind of falls under the "had it coming" file. On the other hand, rather than leading -- as a liberal-minded person might well have feared ex ante -- to just another cycle of conflict, things seem to have worked out pretty much fine. Now Germany is united and once again Europe's strongest country, but they don't go around conquering people anymore and, indeed, the German population seems to have internalized a semi-pacifist worldview that probably goes too far in some ways but that's strongly preferable to the previous habit of erring too far in the other direction.
But when you read about what happened, feeling this way really does seem like something only a bad person would feel. It was pretty damn terrible what happened.
May 8, 2005 | Permalink
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It's an interesting question though. What rights does the victor have over the vanquished? Such a population transfer would be considered inadmissible today.
Posted by: Adam Herman | May 8, 2005 2:36:36 AM
The they "had it coming" argument has a serious problem: who had it coming? The average German had less to do with what Germany did than the average American does today (with what America does). Is it really OK to rape any German woman you want after the NAZIs are defeated? Hell no, it's not. Is it really OK to forget that what was done to Dresden was worse than what was done to Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Nope. It's important to remember these things, to remember the evil that another's evil can bring out in the once victims.
That's part of the absolute horror of war: for a large part, those that suffer the most are responsible the least, and people that were once completely civil can be brought to the point of monstrosity. There is no clean division between good folks on the one side and bad folks on the other.
When something horrible is done, your reaction to that something tells us a lot about you. If you really want to be "the good guy" you can't decide to behave as horribly as the monster did, at lest not if you still want to be "the good guy." You sure as hell can't behave as badly as the monster to everyone that just happened to be in proximity to the monster.
Posted by: teece | May 8, 2005 2:52:25 AM
While the expulsions and so forth at the end of World War II are probably understandable on the "they had it coming" front, I don't think they're really excusable or justifiable. Yes, German leaders and military committed horrible crimes against the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe? But what kind of eye for an eye philosophy justifies returning these atrocities against people whose involvement in these crimes was marginal at best, and often against complete innocents? I don't see how it's ever justifiable to expel an entire population from the place where they and their ancestors have lived for generations, as happened to the Germans of, say, Stettin (Szczecin), Königsberg (Kaliningrad), Breslau (Wroclaw) and so forth. It was a horrible crime, by any reasonable standard. That Germans had, in the very near past, performed even worse horrors does not excuse it.
Posted by: John | May 8, 2005 2:57:28 AM
Note also that the "had it coming" observation depends on a notion of corporate solidarity whereby it is somehow okay that totally innocent people, because they happen to be German, suffer for the misdeeds of other Germans. It is not quite as simple as that, but almost.
Now many will be tempted to trash the concept of corporate solidarity altogether because it leads to suffering by innocent people. By the same token, the concept of corporate solidarity leads people to lay down their lives for others in the line of duty. Such as the duty of being a firefighter, or a police officer, or a soldier. Or, in more quotidian fashion, the duty of a mother caring for her sick child. In all cases, the suffering of innocent people comes with the territory.
On balance then, we cannot do without a notion of corporate solidarity. Pure libertarianism is pure bunk.
Posted by: JohnFH | May 8, 2005 2:59:57 AM
One of the most interesting articles I've read related to issues surrounding German suffering during the Second World War was a New Republic piece criticizing the late WG Sebald, a writer of talent and humanity who was nevertheless unwilling or unable to fully reconcile his understandably deep emotion on the subject with a full accounting for the German responsibilty that really was at the root of all the horror.
I'm sure it's behind a subscriber wall, but the link is
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020923&s=franklin092302
The terrible thing about war is how hard its consequences fall on those who aren't involved in bringing it on. For as utterly awful as German action during WWII was, it's impossible to see the rape of 1-2 million German women as any sort of justice, cosmic or otherwise, for their complicity in Nazi society.
That people are inevitably punished for actions they're not but fractionally responsible is not fundamentally just, even if it's unavoidable, even if it's the result of action by such benign a power as the United States.
Posted by: SamAm | May 8, 2005 3:17:27 AM
Read an extensive article in the Atlantic Monthly a few years back about the paucity of native accounts of late-war and post-war Germany. Say 45-49 is a black hole that no one who lived it wished to remember. Physical conditions unspeakable. Corporate responsibility indeed, one cannot imagine the psychological damage, the guilt and despair. It is hard to get decent accounts of immediate post-war conditions from any source.
I think the Germans are more a weight on the world's conscience than we usually realize. Besides the physical split I grew up with, I really believe we, the good guys, destroyed that country, that cultural identity. Ethnocide. Frederick, Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Mann...they belong to Europe now instead of the faceless heartless hole we left behind.
"Proud to be a German. Proud of German heritage and history and culture." Still can't be said.
I am half-German half-Irish(roughly). The German half is very vague and distant.
The Jews and Gypsies and Slavs and so many others were victims. The Germans were sacrificed to something or other for something or other. And maybe the Palestinians also.
Russia too lost a war and may be disappearing.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | May 8, 2005 3:47:08 AM
Maybe in a not so distant future, the USA 'will have it coming' for the current wave of aggression it is engaged in.
Maybe the USA does need a bit of what Germany got back then. The rest of the world would certainly welcome it if the USA developed "a semi-pacifist worldview that probably goes too far in some ways". It would no doubt make for a better and more peaceful world.
Posted by: Rene | May 8, 2005 4:03:22 AM
Just. Gunter Grass "Tin Drum" is of course essential reading. But my favorite books about Germany are by Thomas Mann "Joseph & his Brothers" and "Doctor Faustus".
"Joseph" is a complicated example, think Egypt as Europe and the brothers as Europe. Germany I think always felt like the rejected talented brother. But it was also a book written by a very German author during the thirties about Jews. A lot of wonderful ideas in the tetrology.
"Faustus" isn't really about Germany, though the bland narrator thinks so. "Faustus" is about Thomas Mann being unable to stop loving Germany even during and after the war. And how the Enlightenment and modernism and cosmopoltanism provided no solace or consolation. It is the scream of a patriot watching his country die. And blaming himself.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | May 8, 2005 4:15:29 AM
Re Mr McManus comments on the black hole 45-49. The early Bergman film usually called Three Strange Loves in English features a train ride across a desolated German waste land that I found quite shocking.
In spite of my last name I am actually ethnically German, and I do know that my grandfather was proud of his German ethnic heritage, in no small measure because my mother and her two brothers that were physically able were doing their damnedest to fight Hitler. But then his father had moved to the US to get out of fighting for Bismarck.
Am I a "bad person" because I get impatient with high minder denouncers of the IRA who never seem to remember the genocide of 1846-48?
Posted by: Gene O'Grady | May 8, 2005 4:33:21 AM
Why should anyone be proud to be German or Irish or Russian or Jewish? I see no reason whatsoever; it's a chance, not something you've done.
The suffering thing is indeed intriguing. So, the Germans went ost and killed and raped a bunch of Slavs there. Then the Slaves overpowered them, moved west and killed and raped a bunch of Germans. So far so good, normal, what you'd expect. But then... it stopped. Where's the normal cycle of violence, where is the freakin retaliation? If you drive to Paris with German plates on your car, your car is still likely to be vandalized there, but not a French (or any other) car in Germany. Somehow the Germans have managed to learn the lesson. It's amazing. Makes you wonder if their culture is indeed superior in some respects.
Posted by: abb1 | May 8, 2005 4:41:05 AM
Sorry to disagree, but too many people in the region of Bayern, Germany, seem to be getting melancholic about the old days and uncle Adolf. More or less the same kind of village or small town, low income, white fat guys in camouflage pants that vote Republican in the U.S.
Posted by: Lucía | May 8, 2005 6:07:25 AM
For those of you who read German, I recommend Joerg Friedrich's book "Der Brand" - a detailed history of the firebombing of Germany (an English version will be published by Princeton this summer). We need a historical reassessment ot the US/British policy of targeting civilian populations from 1942 on - a policy that killed at least 600,000 non-combatant Germans. There is plenty of evidence that this policy did nothing to hasten the end of the war, and maybe even prolonged it.
Posted by: David | May 8, 2005 7:05:07 AM
As the remaining Germans who actually saw the war are increasingly people who were too young to be able to really do anything about it, I think it gets even easier to feel sympathy. Obviously, we shouldn't go blaming 10 year olds for what their parents and grandparents generation did.
Posted by: MDtoMN | May 8, 2005 7:57:35 AM
Where was it US policy to deliberately attack German civilian population? US bombers conducted day light "precision" bombing of military, industrial, and infrastructure targets. Precision bombing in 1940 meant that a small percentage of the bombs actually arrived on target, and the rest probably fell on civilian areas, causing many civilian deaths. The RAF, on the other hand, could only manage night bombing attacks. Due to the rudimantary navigation aids, they couldn't conduct precision attacks, so resorted to wide area attacks against cities. To be fair, it was the Luftwaffe that began the attacks on civilian targets with its bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and then Coventry. When the RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin, the London Blitz followed as a result. I would argue about the air war's contribution to the final victory. It tied down about 1 million German soldiers in this "front" manning anti-aircraft and fighter units, making them unavailable to the fighting fronts in the east and west. Also, it forced the Luftwaffe to devote a majority of its resources into defensive fighter production, forgoing upgrades and increses in its offensive bomber forces. I really don't see how this campaign could have prolonged the war.
Posted by: DC Loser | May 8, 2005 8:10:26 AM
I think it was Curtis Lemay who said that if the Japanese had won the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal for the American firebombing of Japanese cities. Even in the context of the time, there was some serious moral wrangling over the policy of bombing civilians (the British called it a "de-housing" campaign, as if the people in the houses did not get killed). Ultimately, the Allies fell on the side of "better them than us; only good Jap/Nazi is a dead Jap/Nazi." As a moral construct, that is pretty weak, of course, but as a national war-fighting policy, it seems to have worked, and worked for the long term (considering the economic success and pacificism of Japan and Germany since WWII). It is a policy that is much easier to question on this side of victory, and 60 years after the fact, than it was at the time, facing two murderous and well-armed cultures of aggression and expansion.
Posted by: Jeff | May 8, 2005 8:17:01 AM
Who really 'wins' a war? All of the major parties on both sides suffered major changes to their lives during and after the war. Only the US people benefited in the 1945-1950 period in terms of the major improvements of the standard of living, probably because we suffered almost no destruction of physical facilities within the country.
Did the Germans (and Japanese) suffer greatly during the war and the immediate postwar period. Surely yes. But so did the British, French, Poles, Russians, Filipinos, etc.
It is hard for someone to make a case that suffering is a zero sum calculation. There was suffering for all to varying degrees. That is the nature of war, and a reason why heroic efforts to find solutions that don't require war.
The 'they deserved it' approach comes very close to blaming the victims when applied to entire populations.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 8, 2005 8:20:46 AM
And DC Loser raises a good point-- the American air war in Europe was a daylight campaign designed to hit military-industrial targets (which would kill some civilian employees intentionally), whereas the British conducted area bombing at night. It was only in Japan where the US intentionally pursued indiscriminate bombing of cities (including, of course, the use of atomic bombs). In either case, while I think an argument can be made that strategic bombing was not as effective as its advocates hoped, I can't see how it prolonged the war. There is almost no practical way that the D-Day landings could have been pulled off in '42 or '43-- no boats to do it, among a zillion other things-- and given that we committed something like 80% of our resources to Europe, victory in Japan was always going to come after victory in Europe, so I can't see how NOT bombing would have shortened the war at all.
Posted by: Jeff | May 8, 2005 8:25:29 AM
Hey McManus,
Speaking of Guenter Grass, did you see his op-ed in the NY Times on Saturday?
Posted by: clarkent | May 8, 2005 8:43:52 AM
US troops landed in Normandy to restore justice and liberty and to remove potential threat to their country
Soviet troops marched into Germany to defeat the enemy that destroyed their own lives, killed many (some times all) of their friends and loved ones, sent millions to death camps, the enemy who worked hard to turn the Soviet people (as well as a few other peoples in Eastern Europe) into slaves
Do you really expect the behaviour of US and Soviet troops and their attitude towards the German population to be the same??
I was born and grew up in Belarus, which used to be part of the USSR. I am two generations after this war. The Nazi invasion killed a quarter of Belarus population, thousands of villages were burn to the grounds with their inhabitants locked inside, hudreds of thousands of people were sent death camps and to labor camps in Germany. Both of my grandfathers were killed by the Germans, my mother was shot at by Germans when she was 5 just to get her running around.
I was watching the History Channel documentary last week and I realized that while at a conscious level I definitely felt sorry for German women raped by the Soviet army, at an emotional level I just could not equate that to what the Germans did to the Soviets - I did feel "they had it coming".
The really amazing fact is that the Soviet troops did not start mass executions of all Germans, both military and civilians, to discharge revenge and hatred they had been carrying in their hearts for 4 long years.
Posted by: MrM | May 8, 2005 9:45:50 AM
At least Germany has made heartfelt amends for its actions. Contrast that with Japan. Like MrM's family in the USSR, my family spent the war years in China running away from the Japanese Army, and my mother was almost killed by the Japanese when she was a baby. I don't hold any animosity towards individual Japanese people, but I fully understand the fury that recently occured in China and Korea over Japanese textbooks. And I don't feel any regrets about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Compared to what they had done to everybody else, they had it coming.
Posted by: DC Loser | May 8, 2005 10:02:12 AM
...I did feel "they had it coming"...
Do you mean that German civilans were partially liable for the actions of their government and retribution against them would've been understandable, if not justified? If so, then you have to apply the same standard to all other conflicts in the world, including the current ones.
Posted by: abb1 | May 8, 2005 10:20:25 AM
I suppose this makes me a bad person, but I have a hard time getting too seriously concerned about German suffering
You needn't wonder, Matthew, it does. All human suffering concerns us, or we are bad people.
There was an innocent, stupid old German woman in Dresden in 1945 who was horribly hurt by the firebombing that she didn't understand. Multiply that by thousands, even under the most stingy definition of innocent, and...the humanity.
That such a fact can be used by unregenerate Nazis does not allow us to endorse the torture of that innocent German woman. But the larger issues has nothing to do with the German people, but with us. The lasting tragedy of being victimized by violence is the imprint of fear and anger it imposes on our personality. You are wrong to encourage it.
Posted by: epistemology | May 8, 2005 11:06:17 AM
If you haven't seen the film 'Downfall' - in theaters now, in German with subtitles (I forget the German title) - it is very much worth seeing if you are interested in this question. It looks at the relationship between the Nazi elite and the rest of German society in the last 10 days of the war. Makes for a really interesting lens on these questions of responsibility...
Posted by: Easterbunny | May 8, 2005 11:08:46 AM
In a real sense the Germans did "have it coming." Ordinary Germans benefited directly and in a material way from Hitler's pillaging of the rest of Europe. There is a very interesting new book called "Hitlers Volksstaat" (Hitler's People's State) that just came out in Germany. The author (Goetz Aly) has done a lot of research to demonstrate to what extent the Nazis literally bought the support of the German people, and had to finance it through basically robbing the rest of Europe. During most of the war the German people were well-fed, German women did not have to work in munitions factories (like the US) or serve in the army (as in the USSR), there was no strict rationing as in UK, USSR, even US. Streams of artwork, jewelery, clothing, antiques, were constantly flowing back to the Fatherland. Wehrmacht soldiers were given incredible allowances to send booty back to their families to make sure the home-front stayed happy. The German people were not asked to sacrifice anything except their sons until the late stages of the war. Hopefully this book will be translated soon, it is a useful corrective to the numerous "German-as-victim" books that have been appearing lately in Germany (such as Der Brand, which is incredibly one-sided).
Posted by: Vanya | May 8, 2005 11:11:37 AM
Where was it US policy to deliberately attack German civilian population? US bombers conducted day light "precision" bombing of military, industrial, and infrastructure targets. Precision bombing in 1940 meant that a small percentage of the bombs actually arrived on target, and the rest probably fell on civilian areas, causing many civilian deaths. The RAF, on the other hand, could only manage night bombing attacks.
One of the RAF's stated goals was to "dehouse" workers. So technically they weren't targeting civilians, just their houses. The Americans in Europe certainly were uncomfortable with area bombing with cities and argued with the British about it frequently, sometimes even saving cities from bombing raids (Rothenburg ober der Tauber is one example). On the other hand they had little compunction about firebombing Japanese cities.
Late in the war in Europe the firebombing raids were deliberately targeted at burnable cities. I lived in Wuerzburg which was firebombed on March 8, 1945, two weeks before the Americans arrived, killing 8000 people. It had absolutely zero strategic value, being a beautiful medieval and historic city (Roentgin discovered X-rays there), with all the industry tucked into a valley along the Main north of the city, outside the bombed area which was all residential and commercial. They even missed the only conceivable military targets, three small army barracks, a military hospital, and an airfield, all of which were captured intact by the Americans and some of which are still American bases today (all were used by the Americans until the early nineties, but two were turned back over to the Germans after the wall came down in 1989)
Posted by: Freder Frederson | May 8, 2005 11:11:59 AM
