The myths and truths of World War II
Kay
[The Second World War is still being fought. Sixty years after it
ended, almost every anniversary stirs up arguments and emotions:
D-Day, the Warsaw Uprising, the liberation of Auschwitz, the bombing
of Dresden, Yalta, the taking of Berlin, and Potsdam. There can be no
single version of this war. When the heads of state stand side by side
at the ceremony in Moscow on May 9, each of them will be remembering
something different.
by Adam Krzeminski -- The war destroyed not just countries, but the
whole edifice of traditional myths that supported the identity of the
European nations before it began. Meanwhile, the effort to create some
new myths fell foul of the shocking reality: millions of people had
been killed or murdered, there was immense material destruction, and
Europe had been politically and morally degraded. In 1945 only the
USSR and the USA could be triumphant without restraint. All the other
nations and societies – including not just those that openly
participated in the war – were deeply torn apart. People had been
divided by various political options and moral choices; firstly, there
was the resistance movement, which provoked repressions inflicted by
the occupying forces, secondly there were the collaborators who
supported them, and thirdly there was the passive majority just trying
to survive. Although the Third Reich was well and truly crushed, for
many countries occupied by the Red Army the end of the war did not
mean peace, but the imposition of Soviet hegemony, civil war and
governments that relied on Soviet tanks.
To all intents and purposes there were as many Second World Wars as
there were nations. Only for the Poles and the Germans did it start on
1 September 1939. Actually, that was when it started for the Swiss too
– it's true!, and they are proud that they announced mobilisation that
very day, to defend their Alpine redoubts. For the British and the
French, the war formally began two days later, but in reality not
until 8 April 1940, on the same day as for the Danes and the
Norwegians. For the Russians, it began on 21 June 1941 (the Soviet
invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939 and the cold war with Finland
have been pushed outside the definition of the "Great Patriotic War").
For the Americans it began on 7 December 1941, and for the Bulgarians
not until 1944, when they broke their passive alliance, and the
Bulgarians and Soviets became brothers in arms.
Apart from that, among the truly victorious powers, only Great Britain
and the USA did not change front during the war, which does not mean
they did not change their attitudes to Poland. Moreover, with the
exception of Poland most of the countries involved in the war actually
changed sides, above all France, which under the Vichy governments
withdrew from the war, considerably augmenting German military
capability. Until 1941 the USSR was allied to the Third Reich; to some
point so were Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania and Finland.
In today's Europe there are some states that owed their foundation to
Adolf Hitler, including Slovakia, Croatia, and others that lost their
independence for a long time as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov
pact, including Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. And finally there were
some neutral countries – Sweden, Switzerland and Spain – that
collaborated to an equal extent with both the Reich and the Allies,
who are proud of their resistance and at the same time ashamed of or
annoyed by accusations of dealing in stolen goods or handing over
refugees.
From this mishmash we can already see that a common European version
of the Second World War is not exactly probable. Each nation had a
different experience, each one has fostered and exposed its own war
myths, as recorded in photographs, memoirs, novels or films, changing
with the passage of time and often internally contradictory. First of
all, the versions told by the two main victors dominated. It was they
who imposed their view on the war. The superpowers not only won the
war and dictated the terms of peace, they also had the mass media to
disseminate their triumph.
Only against this background could the individual European countries
start to establish their own myths, as a nation united in its
resistance to the Nazi invader, even if, as in the case of Finland,
Slovakia or Bulgaria, that invader was for some time an ally, patron
or friendly ruler. These myths of playing an independent part in the
victory were illustrated by various icons. The picture of General de
Gaulle at the head of an ecstatic crowd under the Arc de Triomphe was
designed to erase the image of the Wehrmacht parading in the same spot
four years earlier. Even if the role played by the French Resistance
and the Free French in the Allies' ultimate victory was symbolic (even
in 1945 the French were not yet in a position to take Strasbourg on
their own), the pictures were meant to restore national pride. A
photograph of the Polish flag hoisted for a few hours on the Victory
Column (the Siegessaule) in Berlin was supposed to testify to Polish
participation in the defeat of Germany and to obscure the Lublin-based
government's dependence on the USSR. Pictures of Tito's partisan units
were meant to record the self-liberation of Yugoslavia, and the
photograph of Mussolini hanging by his feet represented the
self-liberation of Italy.
Only the ghastly parade of the Soviet-controlled Ko?ciuszko First
Infantry Division in ruined, depopulated Warsaw could hardly be
regarded as self-liberation. It would also be hard to treat the
Bulgarian partisans entering Sofia as independent victors, so their
picture was soon replaced by the icon of Grigori Dimitrov, who in 1933
at the trial of the Reichstag arsonists had come up against Hermann
Goering, and in 1945 returned to Bulgaria from Moscow as a Comintern
agent and persuasive proof that Bulgaria had been on the right side
from the very start…
In countries where the self-liberation myth was especially hard to
believe, such as Hungary, it was replaced with the myth of the happy
crowds greeting the Soviet soldiers as their liberators. A classic
example is the 1952 oil painting by Sandor Ek which shows a tank with
a red flag in the foreground against the ruins of Budapest, and some
cheering Hungarians standing to one side – with none of their own
national symbols. This staged version of the gratitude of the
liberated nation was reproduced in all the countries occupied by the
Red Army, and a T-34 tank on a pedestal became the standard liberation
monument – and reminder of the military presence of the USSR.
Besides the tanks, there were also some plainly religious monuments to
the Soviet soldiers as liberators and protectors, combining the images
of Saint George killing the dragon with Saint Christopher carrying a
helpless child across the river. The classic model, designed by
Yevgeny Vuchetich in 1948, is the Monument to the Soviet Liberator in
Berlin's Treptow park, which features a Soviet soldier holding a child
in his left hand and a sword in his right, using it to smash a
swastika that lies sprawling at his feet. Located in Berlin, this
metaphor of liberation also allowed the Germans, obedient to the
victor, to cosy up to their protector like a little girl who has lost
her parents, and to be warmed by his saintly halo.
In the GDR two monuments illustrated the founding myth of the "first
worker-peasant state on German soil": the monument at Treptow and the
mausoleum at Buchenwald, which features on a 1960 poster with the GDR
emblem, a compass with a hammer in the background. The meaning of the
poster was explained by a caption that read: "The GDR is the
realisation of what the anti-fascists were fighting for". This myth of
liberation and self-liberation was recorded by monuments, novels and
films, among which a leading role was played by "Naked Among Wolves"
by Bruno Apitz, the story of how a child in Buchenwald was saved by
the resistance movement and how the camp liberated itself before the
American forces got there. The message was very clear, but not true.
When the documents were examined after the reunification of Germany,
it turned out the resistance movement in Buchenwald had in fact saved
a child, but only for others to be sent to the gas chamber instead. So
the resistance also came into contact with collaboration…
Some convenient, though different myths also helped the West Germans
bridge the gap into the post-war period. Once the Allies had condemned
the criminals and de-Nazified the innocent parties, it was possible to
get down to reconstruction and start to feel sorry for themselves. It
was just the Nazi gang that had dragged the fundamentally genial
German race into the abyss; the Germans had suffered during the war,
and after it they had undergone the terrible ordeal of expulsion from
the east and the vengeance of the victors. Fortunately, the British
and the Americans recognised the importance of Germany as a barrier
against communism and allowed them to build democracy in the Federal
Republic. The past was over, long life the future!
The war also remained as a family educational myth. The children,
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the wartime generation have
been shaped by the memory of the war. In the Polish People's Republic
after 1956, boys cut out cardboard models of the Polish destroyers
"Burza" (Storm) and "B?yskawica" (Lightning), read "Stones for the
Rampart" by Aleksander Kami?ski and "303 Squadron" by Arkady Fiedler,
and played games in the yard based on popular television serials about
heroic Polish soldiers. In Britain they used to imitate the squeal of
Spitfire engines, and in the USA they played board games where they
stormed the Pacific islands. In the USSR they eagerly read the tale of
a real fighter pilot who lost a leg in a dog fight, but through sheer
willpower was soon flying again.
For six decades in Europe, the USA and Israel, monuments and
mausoleums have been built, films have been made, and posters and
postage stamps have been printed. Heroic tales of war heroes who
"ducked the bullets" have been written, yet at the same time some of
the legends began to be debunked very early on. Books that were
praised one day were thrown on the rubbish heap the next. Monuments
erected earlier were demolished, and heroes were scorned, while those
who were once regarded as traitors were rehabilitated.
The quarrel with the hero myths probably began earliest in Poland. On
the one hand it was extorted by the terrible price of the Warsaw
Uprising, while on the other by a cold look at the horrors of war. The
cynical realism of Tadeusz Borowski's stories about Auschwitz, written
in the 1940s, was a revelation; they described the prisoners'
murderous competition for survival and were unequalled in the whole of
European concentration camp literature, which is also why they aroused
such violent opposition from those who had built up the myth of the
unyielding moral resistance of the anti-fascists.
Not until ten years later did myths about nations united in their
resistance to the Nazi aggressor began to crumble in the rest of
Europe, first of all in Italy, after the death of Stalin (1953), and
in the West after the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961).
The debunking of the secrets and lies of Stalinist propaganda, as well
as of the privately fostered hero myth erupted soonest in Poland,
first expressed by a derisive wave in Polish cinema, and then by
absurdist and satirical literature. Andrzej Munk's film "Bad Luck" is
in some ways a prototype for Roberto Benigni's parody "Life is
Beautiful", which was made almost fifty years later. Andrzej Wajda's
films "Ashes and Diamonds" and "Kanal" were on the one hand a revival
of the hushed-up Home Army myth, and on the other an argument with it,
and so was Miron Bia?oszewski's "A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising". At
the same time, not just the Home Army and the role played by the
Polish armed forces in the West began to return to public memory, but
also – in the novels of Jerzy Krzyszto? – the fate of the Poles who
were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia from 1939 onwards.
Towards the end of the 1970s, as the democratic opposition grew
stronger, a famous essay by Jan Józef Lipski initiated not only the
revision of the official Gierek-era thesis about the moral and
political unity of the nation, but also the exposure of some blank
pages in Polish history, including Stalinist crimes against the Poles,
Polish anti-Semitism, the expulsion of the Germans, and some
paternalistic attitudes towards the Ukrainians, Belarussians and
Lithuanians.
This revision intensified after 1989, when there was direct talk about
the end of the romantic code, and reached its peak in 2001 during the
debate about Jedwabne. Next, as if provoked by the shock of this loss
of innocence, came a backlash of renewed hero-making and, in the
debate about the Berlin Centre Against Expulsions, a return to a
confrontational, rather than a cooperative attitude towards our
neighbours with regard to the war.
In the USSR, the thaw undermined the Stalinist myths but did not
entirely destroy them, except that from 1956 onwards it was not
Stalin, but the top commanders, such as Zhukov or Koniev, who were the
centre of attention, and the simple soldiers, whose heroism came at
the cost of psychological injury (e.g. in the film "The Cranes are
Flying"). In the Brezhnev era, when despite severe re-Stalinisation
the figure of Stalin was still not acceptable as a symbol of victory,
the persona of Mother Russia grew to gigantic proportions as the
goddess of victory with her raised sword – at the Mamayev Kurgan
museum in Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd, or as a replica of a 1941
poster known to every Soviet citizen, on which a stout woman in a red
shirt, with a stern expression on her face sent the men to the front –
"The motherland is calling", urged the caption. This poster appeared
in various versions on the covers of books and was the motif for a
series of monuments.
To a vast extent the USSR fell apart because of history. In the 1980s,
when glasnost and perestroika gradually began to lift the Soviet lid,
the bubble of the "Great Patriotic War" finally burst, and not only in
the Baltic countries, which began to document their own national
history during the war, from the Soviet occupation of 1940, through
the German – what? liberation? re-occupation? – to their next
annexation by the USSR, accompanied by repressions and deportations.
In free Latvia, state money has been used to restore cemeteries where
Latvian SS soldiers are buried, and museums recording the occupation
from 1940 to 1990 have been established. They have also begun to
foster the memory of the 70,000 Jews who were murdered in Latvia with
the help of Latvian collaborators. So too in the Ukraine: in the west,
the Galizien SS division is being honoured, while in the east the myth
of the "patriotic war" is still intact. Since the victory of the
Orange Revolution this fundamental conflict within Ukrainian memory
has been exposed at full force. In turn, in Russia a dilemma has
arisen over how much their victory in the Second World War was a
Soviet triumph, and how much a Russian one. And if it was Russian, to
what extent were Stalin's crimes a binding legacy too, and
incidentally, what should be done with the Russians who collaborated
with Hitler, if only those led by General Vlasov? As it would appear
from the planned scenario for the event to be held in Moscow on 9 May,
President Putin is trying to restore the Soviet myths and combine them
with the myth of the Russian empire, but without accepting any
responsibility for past crimes.
In Western Europe, the defence and revision of the myths have run
along different tracks. After 1968, the myth of the nation united in
its resistance against the Nazi occupier began to fall apart, as the
focus shifted to questions about collaboration, first in France, and
then in the other occupied countries – Belgium, Holland, Norway,
Denmark, and finally the neutral countries. Since the 1970s, thanks to
the American series Holocaust, the focus of public memory of the war
has been the industrial genocide planned by the leaders of the Third
Reich and to a large extent concluded by them and their collaborators.
Over the next dozen years or so, the Holocaust put national versions
of the war into perspective, becoming, as some people think, the
universal founding myth for a re-unifying Europe, the main warning for
the twenty-first century.
So too was the message of the exhibition entitled "Myths of the
Nations. 1945 –Arena of Memory", held at the German Historical Museum
in Berlin from October to the end of February. In a space a thousand
square metres in size, 400 exhibits were on display, including heroic
pictures and photographs, posters, sets of postage stamps, cult novels
and reportages, and also clips from fifty feature films and television
serials that shaped the popular image of the war. The organisers did a
superb job of demonstrating the muddle of national myths in Europe,
the USA and Israel, myths embodied in a liturgy of state ceremonies,
in the symbolic meaning of sites of remembrance, in films and
literature.
The exhibition began with the famous photograph of the Big Three –
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Next came some Soviet and American
iconic images of victory, such as Yevgeny Khaldey's photograph of a
Red Army soldier hoisting the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag
or, similarly, the picture of the American GIs hoisting their flag at
Iwo Jima. But photographs don't tell the truth. Nowadays we know that
Khaldey had to airbrush out one of two trophy watches the soldier was
wearing on his wrists.
In the shadow of the big ones, the smaller leaders also stylised
themselves as the unambiguous victors. This ritualised form of
remembrance soon began to wear thin. In any case, it had little
credibility compared with the real experiences and memories of
ordinary people. This "other memory", as Pierre Nora puts it, was a
more emotional, sensitive and painful attitude to the past. It did not
concentrate on heroic exploits, but traumatic memories. It sanctified
the victims and vilified the perpetrators, the Nazi leaders, their
eager sidekicks and the German civilian population too. The Nuremberg
trial was proof of legal justice, while Germany's loss of its eastern
territory and the resettlement of Germans to the west were an
expression of historical justice. But Hitler's allies and
collaborators in the occupied countries were also worthy of
condemnation and contempt. The thesis was simple: only a small
minority of renegades had acted against their own nation. After the
war they were punished, and now, united in reconstruction and the
memory of their heroic fight, the nation could look to the future.
The official memory of the war had a stabilising significance for the
nations of Europe, and this version took root even in countries that
only seceded from Germany very late on or, like Austria, were actually
part of the Reich. For example, after 1945 Austria fostered the myth
of having been the first victim of Nazi aggression, as if Hitler was
not an Austrian and as if crowds of Austrians had not been fixated on
him in 1938. The GDR too regarded itself as a new, better Germany,
liberated by the Red Army and governed by anti-fascists who had
survived the Third Reich in concentration camps or in exile. Like
this, Nazism was just a mistaken episode in German history. The German
masses were not just innocent, but had been seduced by the Nazi
clique.
Unlike the neutral countries: here the obligatory myth involved armed
neutrality on the one hand, and humanitarian aid on the other. This
was symbolised by the Red Cross, or the activities of the Swedish
diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who issued Swedish passports to Hungarian
Jews, and later perished in the Gulag. The victors' war myths were
important, but were not adequate for long. The Berlin exhibition
reveals that every single nation, including the Germans, fostered the
myth of their own sacrifice and resistance, sometimes actually
changing the role of perpetrators and victims after a certain period
of time. Tito's partisan army, the Slovak uprising, the Bulgarian
partisans, and in Poland the People's Army (AL), the National Home
Council (KRN) and of course the Ko?ciuszko First Infantry Division,
were supposed to legitimise communist power. Post-war Austria
presented itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression, regarding the
Catholics and Social Democrats who had been imprisoned in Nazi
concentration camps as their founding fathers. The unmasking of the
other, Nazi side of the Austrian past only began in the 1970s, to
erupt as the Waldheim scandal, when the Austrian president and former
UN Secretary General was reminded of his past as a Wehrmacht officer.
In the western countries occupied by the Third Reich, the myth of
steadfast resistance, propagated immediately after the war, soon began
to crumble too, all the faster since estimates of the point where
resistance ended and collaboration began were not at all clear. Was
the Belgian king, who in 1940 stayed in his occupied country in order
to protect it, a collaborator? That is how the left-wing leaflets
presented him: as a traitor chatting with Hitler, and playing golf
while Belgian prisoners of war languished in the camps. Yet in a 1952
referendum the Belgians voted in favour of keeping the monarchy.
Nowadays a similar debate is under way in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary
and Slovakia. Was King Boris III a collaborator or a hero? How should
we evaluate the policy of Father Hlinka in Slovakia, Romania's King
Carol II or Hungary's Admiral Horthy? What should we say about the
anti-Jewish pogroms committed by the Hungarian Arrow Cross (more), or
the pogroms organised by the Romanian Iron Guard (more)?
History is re-encroaching, destroying the post-war myths. However, as
not just the organisers of the Berlin exhibition claim, it is
apparently not the case that in the twenty-first century the Holocaust
has settled in the memory of nations as the one and only myth uniting
all parties, the descendants of the perpetrators as well as the
victims. Memory of the Second World War will continue to be divided
into national segments for a long time to come, and those too will
remain divided into opposing options that cannot always be
unambiguously classified in terms of morality. How for example should
we evaluate the attitude of the Finnish government? They turned to the
Third Reich for military aid in order to regain territory lost to the
USSR in 1940, and handed over some Jewish refugees to the Gestapo,
while at the same time Finnish Jews were fighting at the front
alongside the Wehrmacht. Later on they withdrew from their alliance
with Germany and began to negotiate with Stalin.
The only Second World War myth that can be kept intact is the American
one. As the title of an American best seller puts it, it was "A Good
War". Fixed to Franklin D. Roosevelt's wheelchair, beside Winston
Churchill, is the symbol of America's invincible will and power. For
over half a century the Second World War has been a living Hollywood
myth ("Private Ryan", "Pearl Harbor", "Windtalkers"), telling how the
GIs saved Europe from the brown-shirted Evil Empire, and the Pacific
zone from Japanese colonial ambitions. That war is also the founding
myth for America's global power and moral mission, as fulfilled on the
beaches of Normandy in 1944, but also in the courtroom at Nuremberg
(more), and later during the Cold War.
At the same time, if the Holocaust has become a metaphor for the
Second World War anywhere, it became one in Israel in 1967 after the
six-day war, and soon after in the USA as well. The organised genocide
of the European Jews is nowadays the symbol of absolute evil in the
USA, giving the absolute superpower the authority to take absolute,
preventative action anywhere in the world. The Second World War
changed Europe completely, but to this day there is no single European
version of it. The war experiences of the individual nations are too
different and internally contradictory. At first glance the 1939-1945
war was one of the founding myths of the European Union, or rather the
European Coal and Steel Community, followed by the EEC. The union of
Western Europe was meant to be the best lesson learned from the
catastrophe of war. At its core was the reconciliation and cooperation
of the two main losers in the war, (West) Germany and France, which
had only symbolically – with the grudging agreement of Britain and
America – been promoted to the rank of an occupying power. In fact,
however, it was not so much the Second World War that was the founding
myth of the EEC, but the Cold War – awareness that Western Europe,
which in 1933-1940 had suffered a defeat in its confrontation with the
Third Reich, could not repeat the same mistakes in a confrontation
with Stalinism.
In turn, in Eastern Europe the Second World War was presented by the
propaganda as the founding myth for the camp of "people's
democracies", countries liberated from German fascism by the Red Army
and threatened by American imperialism and German revisionism. In
fact, however, this propaganda myth was just a cover for the imperial
aspirations of the USSR. Its repudiation was an essential part of the
emancipation of Central and Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony.
Today's European Union is divided not only by different experiences of
the Second World War and the Cold War, but also of the Velvet
Revolution of 1989. This event has not become the founding myth of the
new, expanded EU, although the overthrow of communism was a condition
for the former people's democracies to enter the EU and NATO. The year
1989 has still not yet imprinted itself on the awareness of Western
European societies. It has not been accepted as an inseparable part of
the common European heritage, just as the war experience of Poland and
the Baltic countries, not to mention Ukraine, has never been accepted
within European historical awareness. And whenever it is articulated,
as recently by the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia, who refused to
take part in the Moscow celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of
the end of the war, or Poland's objection to the return of Putin's
official Russia to the Stalinist interpretation of the
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the Warsaw Uprising or Yalta, it meets with
little understanding in the West.
Europeans will go on living with competing memories and competing
myths for a long time to come. What is new is that these competing
myths are no longer being fostered in confinement, but in constant
dialogue between neighbours, besides which in each country as well as
being fostered they are also being debunked. Time will tell if this
clash of national myths will ultimately engender a common European
view of the Second World War, without dropping the national
experiences. Already in many countries the Europeans are gradually
ceasing to be victims of autism, exclusively fixated on separate
images of the past.
*The article was originally published in Polish in Polityka on 23
March, 2005 and in German in Perlentaucher on 6 April, 2005.
Adam Krzeminski, was born in West Galicia in 1945 and has been editor
of the magazine Polityka since 1973. He is one of Poland's leading
journalists and chairman of the Polish-German Association in Warsaw.
Translation: Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
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