Poisoned Peace

789 Pages·2005·28.484 MB·English

by  Gregor Dallas

Poisoned Peace
1945 — The War that Never Ended
GREGOR DALLAS
JOHN MURRAY

Contents
Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Maps xxi
One flag, one shot - Berlin, 30 April 1945 I
ARMIES
Beginnings 21
Heartlands in the West 22
Their saddest hour 28
Heartlands in the East 3i
The Pact and the periphery 37
Partisans 42
Coincidental deaths 45
Coincidental battles: continent and periphery 50
Terror in Poland 54
Choice in France 58
The French connection: terror and extermination 62
Raflle is a game of chance 69
Frenchmen and Poles, Poles and Frenchmen 75
Movements
French Tempest 84
Petains plebiscite 86
Petains heir 88
Le Quatorze Juillet 94
Legitimacy: de Gaulle and the Communists 102
Legitimacy: Poland and the Communists
113
Legitimacy in Nazi Warsaw 117
Invasion 122
CONTENTS
Monty 129
Norman stalemate 130
Eastern response 132
SEASONS
Paris and Warsaw in summer
Waning ‘Tempest’ 139
Warsaw’s Rising 143
Military ‘yo-yo’ 148
Emigrant armies 152
Maczuga 157
Sartre’s Paris 160
The greatest urban catastrophe of mankind 164
Assumption Day 169
Von Choltitz’s choice 173
Prelude to an insurrection 179
The policemen’s role 184
The Chateau de Rambouillet 186
National sovereignty and King Charles 196
East is East, and West is . . . 201
London and Washington in autumn
Londons ‘doodlebugs’ 205
Washington’s ‘goobledegook’
America first? 218
‘Nazidom’ and Just William 224
The Beasts of England 231
The flying premier 238
Travelling the Gulf Stream 241
The Knickerbocker president 248
In his absence 254
An American-Soviet house 266
The pastoralization of Germany 268
Roosevelt and the State Department,
Churchill and Metternich 275
Hurricane season 281
Moscow: hot and cold 285
The Eleventh of November 294
CONTENTS
Berlin and Moscow in winter
Hitler’s Waterloo 299
A Gaullist mirror 312
The train to Moscow 3M
Silent Moscow 332
The man who stayed 344
Moscow’s war and ‘liberations’ 349
Hitler’s return 354
Berlin under bombs 367
German resistance to the Nazis 374
Russian resistance to the Communists 382
PEOPLE
People without cities
Eight days at Yalta 397
Hiss 409
Poles without Warsaw 40
Repatriating the citizenless 425
Haroldo Macmillano, ‘Viceroy of the
Mediterranean’ 434
Berlin and the ‘Southern Redoubt’ 445
The Holocaust and the Gulag 456
Final Solution: the finale 468
Last days at Auschwitz 47i
Endings
VE-Days 479
Signatures of surrender 485
Celebrations and silences 500
Britain repatriates the Cossacks 512
‘Starvation Corner’ and the General Election 526
The smile of Truman 539
‘Terminal’ at Potsdam 547
EUROPE, EUROPE
Truman’s Europe 57i
Stalin’s Europe 584
CONTENTS
Adenauer’s Europe 607
De Gaulle’s Europe 617
Macmillan’s Europe 631
Chronology 637
Glossary of names 653
Glossary of organizations 666
Notes 675
Bibliography 705
Index 716
Illustrations
ARMIES AND DIPLOMATS
1. A soldier carries a child through bombed Caen, Normandy
2. The Battle of Kursk, aerial view
3. The Battle of Kursk, ground view
4. British soldiers landing in Normandy
5. Americans snowbound in the Ardennes
6. An American parachutist prepares to jump
7. Building a pontoon bridge across the Rhine
8. The Quebec Conference, 1944
9. The Moscow Conference, 1944
10. The Yalta Conference, 1945
11. The Potsdam Conference, 1945
12. De Gaulle and Churchill
13. Hitler and Goebbels
CITIES
14. The Liberation of Paris: snipers fire on Parisians
15. The Place de 1’Opera just before Liberation
16. After the Liberation: a French citizen carries away a German signpost
17. VE-Day in Paris, 1945
18. The ‘Liberation’ of Warsaw: the ruined city under snow
19. The ‘Liberation’ of Warsaw: an abandoned monastery
20. Paddington Station, London: the evacuation of mothers and children,
1944
21. A V-2 bombing at Farringdon, March 1945
22. VE-Day, Piccadilly, London, 8 May 1945
23. Bonfire on VE-Day, Croydon, south London
24. Wartime Washington: ‘tempos’ beside Memorial Pond, the Mall
25. US fast-food stall
26. Berlin: concertgoers return home through rubble and snow
27. Moscow: VE-Day, 9 May 1945
xi
ILLUSTRATIONS
PEOPLE
28. A Russian soldier seizes a bicycle from a German woman, Berlin
29. German prisoners of war marched eastwards, through the centre of
Moscow
30. German prisoners of war assaulted by French civilians near Caen
31. German prisoners of warmarched westwards along an autobahn near
Frankfurt
32. German prisoners of war marched through an English street
33. The German surrender to Montgomery, Liineburg Heath
34. A soldier returns home to Frankfurt
35. German civilians search a bombed factory for fuel
36. Handout of potatoes in Berlin, summer 1945
37. Teenagers consult message boards for missing persons. Normandy, July
1944
38. British Nissen huts for the homeless, Berlin, summer 1946
39. An overcrowded train with refugees, post-war Germany
40. A German boy finds a mouldy loaf of bread in a rubbish dump,
autumn 1945
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permis­
sion to reproduce illustrations: Plates I, 7, 8 and 33, © Bettman/CORBIS;
2, 3, 27 and 29, Novosti (London); 4, 12 and 37, Rex Features/Roger-
Viollet; 5, Vaccaro; 6, © Robert Capa R/Magnum Photos; 9, 14, 28, 30,
31, 34 and 36, akg-images, London; to and 35, Associated Press; 11 and
26, Bildarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz; 13, Ullstein Bild; 15, 16, 17, 18
and 19, BDIC, Paris; 20, 21, 22, 23 and 32, Hulton Archive; 24, US
National Archives, photo BDIC, Paris; 25, Time Life/Getty Images; 38,
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS; 39, SV-Bilderdienst; 40,
Illustrated London News Picture Library.
Every effort has been made to clear permissions. If permission has not
been granted please contact the publisher who will include a credit in
subsequent printings and editions.
xii
Preface
The first vague awareness I had of a thing called the ‘Second World War
must have been on the day I was born, in July 1948. A post-war polio
epidemic was then at its height in London and that was the day I got it;
the result is I have two partially paralysed legs. I often jokingly referred
to myself as the ‘last of the war disabled’. But even as an infant I knew
it was not the case. Londons hospitals in the late 1940s and early ’50s
were crammed with children born after the war with diseases directly
arising from the war. The artisan who made my orthopaedic boots was a
Viennese Jew who had come to London because of a Nazi mass murder
programme (I knew about that before I was two); he was a quiet-spoken,
cultivated man with manual talents you would never find today; heaven
knows what he had been through. Many of the hospital personnel had
strange, unpronounceable names; they were also ‘Displaced Persons’ — the
lucky ones — of this ‘Second World War’. My frequent trips to and from
hospital took me across devastated wastelands in the heart of what my
Edwardian parents proudly called ‘the greatest city in the world’; I can
remember very clearly the rough grasslands of Battersea and the gaping
holes of destruction in the City. There was the sight of the poor, plenty
of poor in the streets, which astonished a boy up from privileged rural
Sussex. War rationing of essentials was at its height in 1948 (not 1945)
and ended in England only in 1954.
Poverty, disease, rationing, refugee camps — these, much more than my
legs, served as reminders that the Second World War was ‘the war that
never ended'. Perhaps all books are basically autobiographical: it is inter­
esting to note how historians build up subjects, sometimes obsessively so,
which are obviously by-products of some feature of their childhood or
youth. Jules Michelet, the French historian, was born in the heartland of
the French Revolution, eastern Paris, in 1799; interest in the past, he
wrote, begins with a curiosity in what happened just before one’s birth.
Victor Hugo was born in 1802, the son of one of Napoleon’s generals.
'Ce siecle avait deux ans’ (‘This century was two years old’) began one of
his most famous poems: Hugo could never stop looking at what happened
xiii
PREFACE
before he was born. Walter Scott, the inventor of the historical novel, was
not born in a year of particular note - 1772 - but in infancy he did catch
polio, though the disease had not yet been given that name. He came
from peaceful, civilized Edinburgh but became fascinated with the violence,
which had ceased not so long before, in the neighbouring Scottish
Highlands. In nearly every novel he wrote, the leading character, often an
Englishman, crosses a frontier of time and of place: Scott put historical
events in their physical setting, a detailed physical setting.
My own condition is probably what led me eventually, after exploring
other fields of the past, to examine the moment wars have turned to
peace, not just in England but right across Europe. What was it like in
the different cities of Europe when the Napoleonic wars ended? I followed
Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, in his carriage across Europe
in the years 1814-15. How did the face of nineteenth-century civiliza­
tion change at the instant the whole of Central Europe collapsed in the
autumn of 1918? I took the route of the German plenipotentiaries from
Berlin across the Western Front to a point near Paris, where they sued for
peace in November that year; then I followed the process on through the
diplomats in Paris, to the Armistice crowds of London, of Washington,
the chaos and violence of a revolution in Berlin, then on to Moscow
devastated by the Bolsheviks.
And naturally, and autobiographically, I came to ask: what actually
happened to Europe in 1945?
In my books on peace there is always a hinge to the story, the moment
the peace broke out. There is always a branching out from that moment
and from that place. These last three books, combined, cover two and a
half centuries of the history of Europe, with North America included.
Yet I am by taste and by training a local historian; it is the detail that
interests me - like those bomb craters in Battersea. But it is the fitting of
the bits and pieces of real life and real places into the enormous puzzle
that fascinates me. Peace is fragile. Undoubtedly, the noblest activity of
man is the construction of peace; after all the barbarisms, a few brave
people somehow manage to make us civilized again. It happened just
before I was born.
I must admit that, despite my personal experience and commitment
(indeed, in some deep psychological sense because of it), I was daunted
at the prospect of writing a book about the Second World War, especially
its ending. There was no formal peace settlement, no peace conference,
no key treaties. The war legally only came to an end with a series of
accords and treaties in 1990, culminating in the Conference on Security'
and Co-operation in Europe when thirty-two European countries, along
xiv