CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“AN IRON CURTAIN”

The time of war,” muses one historian writing about Europe in the aftermath of the German surrender, “is one of effort, vigil, heroism, suffering. The brief period that follows is the time of determination: whether the struggle will have been just another match between nations . . . or whether it may be seen as the pangs of creation.” Did allied victory over Hitler mean the opening up of a new and more peaceful vista? Or did it merely herald the rehearsal for another dismal act in Europe’s bloodstained history? The answer, at the end of May 1945, was clear to no one.¹

Yet Churchill, for one, saw an act unfolding that filled him with gloom and apprehension. Not for nothing did he entitle the final volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy. Even as jubilant city crowds were celebrating VE Day, news reached London that fifteen Polish leaders approved by the West as possible future members of a democratic Polish government had been arrested and taken as prisoners to Moscow. What, feared Churchill, did this portend for democracy elsewhere in Europe?

Five days later, on Saturday 12 May, he penned his thoughts in the lengthy message to Truman that was ostensibly about the events in Trieste but then addressed the future of the whole continent. “I am profoundly concerned about the European situation,” he stated flatly, before proceeding to highlight his worry that while allied forces would soon be vastly reduced by withdrawals of American and Canadian forces across the Atlantic, those of Stalin would remain to dominate Europe. Here, he stressed, Soviet power, combined with communist techniques, were already causing deep anxiety.

But what made the future seem even darker, he warned the President–privately deploying a metaphor previously used by Joseph Goebbels which he would make famously public in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, a year later–was that “an iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lübeck–Trieste–Corfu will soon be completely in their hands.” Even more ominous, he went on, was that the enormous areas of Germany currently occupied by the Americans east of the Elbe would have to be handed over to the Russians because of the wartime agreements that assigned them to the Soviet zone of occupation. This American retreat, he feared, could spark yet another immense flight of refugees westwards. Given Germany’s already ruined and prostrate state, this would give the Russians the chance to advance to the North Sea and even the Atlantic.

It was not just events behind the Soviet lines that concerned Churchill. France and Italy, where communist parties had emerged from the war greatly enlarged, were also major causes for worry. Secretly, the day after VE Day, he had told Eisenhower that captured German weapons might yet be needed by the allies in both of these countries.² Meanwhile, however, there was a vacuum at the heart of the allies’ policy towards the defeated enemy. During the last few months of the war they had drawn up zonal occupation borders, discussed its post-war frontiers, and agreed on basic high-sounding principles such as demilitarization and denazification.

Yet all this meant little until they sat down together as occupying powers and hammered out some agreed practicalities. But here, all was vague. Only a week after VE Day, Churchill told his chiefs of staff that his personal policy towards Germany could be summed up in two words–“disarm” and “dig”–by which he meant that Germany should never again be in a position to start a world war and that its population should be saved from starvation. Unless that were done, he warned, “we might well be faced with Buchenwald conditions on a vast scale, affecting millions instead of thousands, and this would inevitably have repercussions in Great Britain.”³

But how much longer would American and Canadian troops remain in Europe to balance the millions of Stalin’s troops now in Central Europe? How were the allies to manage the German economy, and when would they agree on a joint policy? Germany had always been the economic motor of Europe. If it were to stall, what future could be expected for Europe and its population as a whole? How were people to be housed and fed, and what would happen to the millions of refugees desperate to return home, find work, and rebuild their lives? Was the “iron curtain” destined to become a permanent part of the continent’s landscape? If so, what would happen to all those DPs crowded into camps in Germany and Austria who had no desire to return to a life under communist or Soviet rule? And what would become of the millions of ethnic Germans no longer welcome in such places as Poland and Czechoslovakia? Already, events on the ground were providing unsettling answers.

SOE officer Fred Warner’s patience with Britain’s Red Army allies in Austria was rapidly fraying.

Soviet troops were now in charge of the airfield at Zeltweg. Three days after VE Day, they made it clear that the British group was no longer welcome and forbade it from using its radio transmitting set. They also ordered the Hungarian troops who had been stationed there under the Germans to leave, and suggested they should return home with their families. Provided with an official-looking pass from the senior Soviet officer, the Hungarians moved out in a large convoy of horse-drawn carts piled high with their personal belongings. But it was a cynical trap: the convoy did not get far before it was stopped by a detachment of Russian troops scavenging for food. “They took everything of value the Hungarians had,” recorded Warner, “including the horses. I shudder to think what happened to the women.” The Hungarians immediately headed back west, towards the protection of British forces.⁴

After being forced to quit the airfield, the SOE group moved south across the Mur River that marked the demarcation line separating Soviet and British troops. Warner was not sorry to leave the airfield and the Russians behind. “By now,” he wrote, “most of our illusions regarding them had been destroyed.” Nothing that happened over the rest of May would change his mind.

Their new base was Schloss Authal, the residence of Prince von Croy, a Belgian-born naturalized Austrian, and his wife, Countess Schwarzenberg. Here, Kelly set up his radio set and established contact with SOE headquarters in Siena–the only way they had of receiving instructions in what was proving a fluid and highly combustible transition from war to peace. The castle was packed with refugees and evacuees. Among them were the Count and Countess Andrassy of Hungary and some of their children and grandchildren. The countess was Swedish, and one of her sons-in-law had been stationed as a Hungarian officer at the Zeltweg airfield. One of the children, a small boy, spent much of his time risking life and limb playing with disused weapons he found in the gardens. The Andrassys had fled Hungary to escape the Russians, but the Red Army had now caught up with them anyway. Between them, the Croys and the Andrassys were delighted to welcome Warner and his group, who provided a valuable form of protection.

This proved all too necessary, as the castle was a continuous target for drunken Russian soldiers searching for loot–not surprisingly since its grounds were richly stocked with cattle and poultry. Warner’s group therefore mobilized several French prisoners of war to take turns acting as guards day and night. The men had worked on the estate for several months and been well-treated by the Croys, so they willingly obliged.

Although the war in Europe had officially come to an end, it did not feel like that to Warner. Nazi power had evaporated, but fear of the Russians was palpable. “We tried our utmost to keep out all Russian soldiers who continuously strayed across the River Mur,” he recorded. “There was a constant coming and going, civilians needing help and advice–among them women who had been raped by the Russians. Others, who feared this might happen, swam across the Mur as the Russians guarded all bridges.” The river, in fact, was rapidly turning into a barrier between the allies. On the evening after the SOE group moved to the castle, they were warned that it was dangerous to venture back across in any vehicle flying the British flag as they were liable to be shot at by Soviet troops.⁵

One day, things turned from merely unpleasant to sinister when two grim-looking Soviet commissars turned up on a motorbike and announced they had come to arrest Prince von Croy. The SOE men refused point blank to turn him over. “We stood around in a circle debating furiously,” said Warner, “the Prince wearing shorts and an old straw hat and looking anything but princely.” Eventually, they persuaded the commissars that they had already arrested the prince themselves. In fact, they had earmarked him as the first potential “Landeshauptmann” to govern post-war Styria under the direction of the British.

Another unexpected visit proved more welcome. One evening, two German staff cars pulled up and four German officers clambered out. One of them introduced himself as Captain Niemoller, the nephew of Pastor Martin Niemoller, Fey von Hassell’s erstwhile companion during her recent forced odyssey across the Alps. Niemoller had been on the staff of a general who had made his headquarters at the castle and was searching for papers left behind in their hurried evacuation. Hugely relieved to find the British and not the Russians in control, the Germans agreed to stay for dinner. It was, recalled Warner dryly, “a rather international affair with Austrians, Swedes, Hungarians, Germans and British sitting round the Croys’ beautiful old dining table. It was laid without a table cloth but with small mats, the British way. Due mostly to the charm of our hostess, this meal was the most pleasant we had experienced since our rather unorthodox arrival on Austrian soil.”⁶

At other times, Warner made fruitless visits to the local Red Army headquarters in Zeltweg, trying to put a stop to the continuous raids over the Mur and arranging exchanges of Soviet and British prisoners of war across the demarcation line. By the time he was finished, he had grown used to Russian sentries saluting him wearing half a dozen wrist-watches on each arm and with alarm clocks on strings around their necks.

One thing was abundantly clear: the locals had had enough of being occupied. Even those who admitted to having welcomed the Anschluss claimed they had quickly tired of the Nazis. Party bigwigs had moved in, confiscated the best land, and exhorted the locals to emigrate to the east. This had killed off any enthusiasm about the benefits of union with Germany, and strengthened feelings for Austrian independence. As for the Russians, the behavior of the Red Army troops had swiftly extinguished any early enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, even among local communists. For Warner and the British occupiers, however, the honeymoon was still in full swing–if only because they were not Russians.

But the Soviets were still their allies, at least on paper. Shortly after British troops finally arrived on the scene, they agreed to a Soviet request to adjust the demarcation line south of the River Mur, which meant handing over Schloss Authal to the Red Army. Although the agreement forbade any civilians to move, Warner and his friends succeeded in exempting the Andrassys and the Croys from the rule. “We told the Croys,” wrote Warner,

and asked them to warn all the other occupants of the castle. This was done and plans were made for a speedy evacuation. The Andrassys had reached the castle in horse-drawn vehicles, which were now loaded up with theirs and some of the others’ property. This was taken to a village south of Judenburg and just outside the area to be taken over by the Russians. We took the Croys a bit further afield to a shooting lodge of theirs in the mountains to the south. They took with them only their most important belongings, but told us to take anything we liked . . . I received a beautiful double-barreled Mauser rifle complete with telescopic sight. Eric [Rhodes], a heavy smoker, got a gold cigarette case and a .22 rifle.7

By this time, Warner and the others were acting mostly as interpreters for the Leicestershire Regiment, which was occupying the area. The task meant that they became inextricably mixed up in one of the most notorious operations of the British Army in post-war Austria–the rounding up of Soviet citizens and their forcible return to the Red Army and repatriation to the Soviet Union.

Over the course of the war, several million Soviet citizens fell into German hands. Thanks to Nazi maltreatment, of the six million prisoners of war, only about a million survived. Still alive in May 1945, however, were about two million slave laborers, a million refugees mostly from the Soviet Union’s smaller states who had a profound dislike of both Russians and Bolsheviks, plus a million or so men who had actively fought for the Germans against the Red Army. This last group had either been recruited from Russian prisoners of war for service in the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlassov, who defected to the Germans in 1942, or were deployed in the Wehrmacht proper in the so-called eastern legions, composed of Georgians, Kalmuks, Ukrainians and Cossacks, among others. Having retreated steadily westwards from Russia with the Germans, they spent most of the winter of 1944/5 in northern Italy, but as the allies advanced north, during the spring they retreated over the Alps and into Austria. When the war ended, they surrendered to the British. One British officer recorded:

With their fur Cossack caps, their mournful dundreary whiskers, their knee-high riding boots, and their roughly-made horse-drawn carts bearing their worldly goods and chattels, including wife and family, there could be no mistaking them . . . They were a tableau taken from Russia in 1812. Squadrons of horses galloped hither and thither on the road, impeding our progress as much as the horse-drawn carts. It was useless to give them orders; few spoke German or English and no one who understood seemed inclined to obey.8

In Fred Warner’s part of Styria, the Cossacks were also running wild. Terrified of falling into Soviet hands, they were also short of food and regularly harassed the local population. Even though they were fine horsemen and loved their animals with a passion, they were now slaughtering them for food. Some of the lucky ones managed to get across the border into Germany. Warner wrote: “I doubt that a worse fate could have befallen them than that which was in store for their colleagues whom we dealt with in Austria.”⁹

The Cossacks that he helped round up belonged to the XV Cossack Cavalry Corps, which had been under the command of General Helmuth von Pannwitz, who was now a prisoner of the allies. Most of the corps’ officers were also German, and some cooperated with the British in the grim task of rounding up their men and herding them over the zonal border to the Russians. By way of assistance and reward, they were given a special mess of their own next to the officers’ mess of the Leicesters, and allocated to small teams of armored cars and trucks led by British officers that scoured the area. Warner reported:

These search parties set off into the mountains and to other places where recce [reconnaissance] parties, Austrian civilians, the police etc. had previously reported the Cossacks . . . These parties were quite successful and rounded up at least 2,000 all ranks who were leaderless and appeared to be pretty fed up, hungry, and dispirited. At the concentration areas the officers were separated from their men. It was quite moving to see the former saying goodbye. The horses and weapons were removed from all ranks, who were allowed to keep all their personal belongings. Some officers, with tears in their eyes, handed over their horses personally to certain Leicester Regiment officers, begging them to take good care of them.

Then the Cossacks were bundled onto British Army trucks and driven under heavy guard to Zeltweg, where they were handed over to the Russians. “From what we heard later,” wrote Warner, “the officers were shot immediately on arrival, whilst the approximately 2,000 other ranks were sent to a camp in Russia after being sentenced to 25 years’ hard labor.”¹⁰

Warner drew a veil over the details of this handover, but a vivid picture exists of what happened when a group of Cossack officers was turned over at the end of May to the Red Army at nearby Judenburg. Here, the River Mur divides the town. A bridge across the gorge formed the border between the British and Soviet zones. First, the officers were separated from their men, which was done by deceiving them into believing they were being taken to hear personally from Field Marshal Alexander an announcement about their fate. Of course, when they arrived at their destination, they found no field marshal, but a British officer told them abruptly that they were to be handed over to the Russians and that the issue had been decided. They were then interned over night.

The next morning, British Army trucks arrived to transport them across the zonal border, but the Cossacks refused to move and resisted passively by sitting on the ground and linking arms. A platoon of British infantry advanced on them with rifles and bayonets fixed. Still the Cossacks refused to move. Finally, the British soldiers resorted to force and manhandled them onto the trucks. Nicholas Bethell continues the story:

A river gorge marked the boundary. British armored cars and machine guns lined the approach. One at a time the trucks crossed the bridge over the river to the other side. While the trucks waited for their turn to cross, one Cossack was given permission to use the urinal bucket at the head of the bridge, then suddenly ran forward and jumped over the cliff and fell on the rocks a hundred feet below.

The desperate man was duly recovered, then handed over, mangled and dying, to the Red Army. At least one of the other Cossack officers managed to cut his throat with a razor.

The British could see nothing of what happened when the Cossacks reached the Soviet side, but they could hear well enough. That night and the following day, records Bethell,

they heard small-arms fire coming from across the river, to the accompaniment of the finest male voice choir they had ever heard. After each burst of gunfire there would come a large cheer. Clearly, the Cossack officers knew how to die bravely. For several days and nights firing-squads were busy liquidating the Cossack officers in the disused steel mill at Judenburg.11

Subsequently, all the remaining Cossacks, along with their wives and children, were also forcibly handed over. Many killed themselves to avoid this fate, while over four thousand fled into the surrounding forests. Here, British patrols combed the mountains for them, sometimes assisted by Soviet Smersh agents. Some thirteen hundred were recaptured, of whom nine hundred were handed over to the Soviets and immediately executed. Altogether in Austria, some fifty thousand Cossacks were handed over. “Of course,” wrote Warner, “these men were traitors, but one could not help feeling sorry for them.”¹²

Shortly afterwards, the SOE group began to break up. Eric Rhodes joined in the hunt for war criminals, top Nazis and others on the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROW-CASS) established by Eisenhower’s headquarters that spring, and soon he was hot on the trail of Odilo Globocnik. Although the SS officer managed to commit suicide before being captured, two Austrian Gauleiters traveling with him gave themselves up without a fight. One of them had fathered ten children, and his wife had been personally presented by Hitler with a “Mother Cross” made of solid gold. Rhodes duly “liberated” it and gave it to Warner.

By the beginning of June, Warner himself was in Villach, helping with public safety. All the officers involved were British policemen, and none of them, apart from Warner, spoke German. It was his specific task to supervise the translators, all of whom were local Austrian women. It quickly became obvious to him that they were misrepresenting people they disliked and favoring friends to find them enviable jobs with the occupying forces. “We soon came to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that these ‘ladies’ had been chosen . . . because of their looks and not their integrity. The period after the war was rife with corruption. This was the time to settle old scores: we received denunciations and anonymous letters by the dozen.”¹³

But being an occupier was not all work. On the first weekend of June, he was invited by a friend to take a trip into the mountains and cross the border into Italy to watch a huge ski race being organized by the US Tenth Mountain Division. With happy memories of his own ski training in Italy, he readily agreed. Driving an open Tatra automobile, he and his friend set off on a glorious journey through the Dolomites to Udine.

One of the ironies of the Tenth Mountain Division’s war was that after all the training at Camp Hale, once in Europe they rarely donned skis. Both the terrain–jagged and rocky–and the rainy spring weather put paid to that. The benefits of the grueling mountain training were revealed instead in the unprecedented fitness of the American troops and the intense camaraderie it produced. “A dozen reconnaissance patrols did use skis, but of course no one swooped down slopes,” recalled one veteran. “What really counted in combat were the rock-climbing skills.”¹⁴

So the ski meet in the Alps was the first opportunity for the division’s top skiers to demonstrate their skills since arriving in Europe. Hundreds of US soldiers were trucked in to watch them and have a good time. Among them was Robert Ellis, who saw the overall contest won by Sergeant Walter Prager, the former ski coach at Dartmouth College, two-time winner of the prestigious Arlberg-Kandahar race held each year in Switzerland, and the 1931 World Champion. Prager was a Swiss instructor who made his name at Davos, and he was one of hundreds of Europeans who had joined the Tenth Mountain. Most were exiles from occupied countries such as Austria and Norway, and had been expert skiers before the war. Their presence in the division, along with their strong anti-Nazi credentials, did much to give it an enviable image in the minds of the public as an elite and fearsome war-fighting unit.¹⁵

Unfortunately Fred Warner never got to see the race. The night before, he was invited to a big party in Udine where everyone drank “buckets” of champagne. All he remembered later was the presence of a couple of New Zealanders, to whom he talked for a while because two of his sisters were living there. When he awoke next morning on a canvas camp bed, it was to find that he had been stripped of all his valuables and papers, including the watch given to him by SOE before leaving London. Crestfallen and nursing a severe headache, he forgot about the race and returned to Austria.

He now had a new job, at Wolfsberg, vetting police officials, issuing travel permits for civilians, and searching premises for hidden weapons. On one of these missions he unearthed an old Fiat car in a garage. No one else wanted it because its reverse gear was not working, so he made it his own. Whenever he needed to back up, he simply commandeered a gang of willing local children to push him, and rewarded them with sweets. By mid-summer, he was something of a local celebrity.

The repatriation of the Cossacks was merely a single episode in the gigantic movement of people in Europe in the weeks after VE Day. While forced returns to the Soviet Union inevitably caught the headlines, the vast majority of people going home were only too eager to leave. But this did not necessarily mean that they went full of happiness, as Francesca Wilson was finding out in Bavaria. At the end of May, she was still in the Feldafing camp, doing welfare work with the Jews. “One gets a kind of affection for these people,” she wrote in her diary, “but they are many of them poor broken wretches.” Three days before, the first group of Czech Jews had left, bound for a reception camp at Pilsen. Nearly all the West Europeans had already left, but this was the first evacuation to the East. She spent hours registering the Czechs individually on carefully printed SHAEF cards that had been produced in the millions. One copy of each card was sent to the destination reception center, while the other was kept in Germany. In addition to basic personal details, the card contained a medical record signed by Francesca’s medical colleague.

She liked the job because it helped her get to know the Czechs individually. Yet she also dreaded it. There were too many questions she hated to ask. Are you married? Do you have children? The answer was almost always the same–Auschwitz. She was dealing with people who had lost their wives, their husbands, their children. Even to her, with a lifetime’s experience of working with refugees across Europe, it was a sobering experience. “It was this loneliness that made these people seem more unanchored and nakedly exposed than any I have known,” she noted. “Even repatriation had no joy.”¹⁶

Sunday 17 June found her sitting in the boathouse in Tutzing, reflecting on events since VE Day. The lake was lapping gently at her feet, the pale gray water occasionally catching a glint of the sun. In the distance, clouds veiled the Alps from her view. It was a peaceful moment after days of turmoil. At the beginning of the month she had started working with the thousands of deportees scattered in towns, villages and farms throughout Upper Bavaria. It was a welcome change. Lieutenant Smith, the commandant at Feldafing, preferred doing things his own way and Francesca eventually felt she was wasting her energies there.

Since then, she had scoured the region trying to bring order out of chaos. More often than not it proved a frustrating task. One of the biggest problems was finding work for the DPs. German soldiers were now being demobilized and the local farmers had more of their own countrymen than they could employ, never mind foreigners. She found plenty of deportees who were skilled engineers and mechanics, but there were hundreds of equally qualified Germans who were queuing up for jobs. And while the military authorities had decreed that displaced persons should have priority over Germans, in practice this was difficult to enforce herself.

On one occasion, Francesca visited a battered aerodrome being reconstructed by the Americans near Munich. “I could employ a hundred DPs,” said the US Army captain in charge, “but I can’t lodge them. I could send a truck and haul them, if they’re not far off. Begin with twenty-five next Monday.” Francesca knew of a village only eight miles away with dozens of Russians, mostly engineers and technicians. Finding these few jobs was such a little thing, she mused, but with memories of the mass unemployment of the thirties still fresh in her mind, triumphs such as this felt as precious as gold. But would it happen? The truck was due to turn up at six-thirty the next morning, but she had been frustrated too many times before to raise her hopes too high.¹⁷ The fact was that no one really wanted to make life easy for the DPs and thus encourage them to stay. The Germans feared and disliked them, and increasingly the Americans were wary of dealing with their problems and so devoted their energies to sending them back home, not finding them work. Some of the worst problems involved the Russians, the biggest single group of foreigners at large in Bavaria.

Francesca was still recovering from a fiasco involving some Russians. One morning word suddenly spread that the repatriations, for which everyone had been waiting for weeks, had begun and that four thousand people a day were leaving by train from Munich. But because the city itself held fifty thousand Russians, it was decided that they would leave first, to be followed later by the thousands more scattered throughout Bavaria. But someone, somewhere in the occupation hierarchy, decided to help the Americans in charge of the Starnberg camp, where the Russians had been causing trouble, and it was decided to ship them out straight away. Francesca volunteered to lead the convoy of nineteen trucks into Munich.

The journey itself was a nightmare. No one had bothered to tell the Russians that she was coming, so she found them in one of the barracks squatting around a stove enjoying a meal of stewed rabbit which they insisted on finishing. They were also drinking huge amounts of some ghastly wood alcohol, and when they were finally ready to leave she had to round up some of the more drunken ones from the woods. She also had to persuade them not to leave most of their possessions behind in the hurry to get home, including blankets and overcoats. It was just as well, too, because it started to rain shortly after they left, and the blankets provided at least some cover.

Then came the awful tangle of Munich. The streets were still piled high with rubble on either side and were thronged with thousands of DPs and German civilians, so the going was slow. Francesca was forced to leave the convoy for an hour and a half and go ahead on foot to find out exactly where she was heading. When she got back she was relieved that the Russians had not embarked on some wild round of looting. In the end, she delivered them to their reception point, but news had spread about her convoy, and the US military ordered several hundred Russians to be brought from Feldafing the next morning. However, they had blocked the route ahead of a second convoy out of Starnberg, which had been forced to turn back. By the time it returned, though, the camp had already been transformed into a detention center for Nazi suspects and was surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun posts. Francesca was tasked with finding alternative housing for the Russians at Feldafing, but Lieutenant Smith insisted that the rooms must be properly disinfected, as there was still typhus in the camp. It was an exhausting and frustrating day.

Francesca felt guilty because if it had not been for her convoy encouraging others to leave, the chaos could have been avoided. On the other hand, she comforted herself, things could have been far worse. After all, none of the nightmares she had conjured up in advance had come true: the Russians had not murdered anyone; and the whirlwind the Germans were reaping as a result of their atrocious treatment of them was still largely confined to stealing.

Anyway, things moved so fast that there was always a new problem to deal with: brooding about old ones did no one any good. One day, she discovered a “whole nest” of DPs at Penzberg, a village about twenty miles away from Tutzing where there was a coal mine. Some were Russian officers who had been forced to work in the mine. Others were Poles, who were held in a separate camp. The problem was that half the Poles were suddenly moved by the Americans, without any warning, to another camp at Oberammagau. Families were arbitrarily separated and trouble broke out. Francesca and a Polish officer, a prisoner in Germany since 1939, drove off to the local US military government headquarters in Murnau to discover what was going on.

A friendly US lieutenant and major were in charge. Francesca liked most of the Americans she met. At their best, she felt, they had something that Europeans lacked. “They are buoyant, their wit is fresh, their speech original and free from clichés,” she wrote. “Above all, they are so willing to experiment, to try out your suggestion, not next week but this minute, almost before you have finished making it, that they blow you off your feet.”¹⁸

Now was a case in point. The lieutenant explained that they were trying to clear Penzberg of all DPs. This was because he was trying to get the mine working again, but the Germans had refused to do that until they felt able to leave their homes instead of defending them–and their wives–from “the looting of the free slaves.” At least, that was the argument they were using, explained the lieutenant. So he had decided to eliminate their excuse by removing all the foreigners. Where, he asked, could he send the rest of the Poles?

Francesca said she would find out, so she motored with the Polish officer to nearby Oberammagau. It was an exquisite day–Bavaria at its best–with farmers mowing the hay and stacking it in sunny green meadows with the still snow-capped mountains looking down on them. She passed through villages with chalets and brightly painted wooden shutters and balconies bursting with flowers as though there had never been a Hitler, or SS men, or the ruin and human misery that now met her at every turn.

After this, it came as a shock to enter the barracks at Oberammagau. There were no baths, the beds were full of bugs, the plumbing was broken and the roofs leaked. It was a desolate place with not even a flower to be seen. The children were poorly clad and looked sickly. They were living off half a liter of milk a day with no special food. “Very little butter or sugar,” Francesca noted down in her diary, “lots of haricot beans. They lack vitamins. Where are the stores we hear of? What about cod liver oil?” Red Cross parcels occasionally got through, but they were hardly enough. She discovered that the camp commandant was a Dutchman, supposedly a former collaborator, and that he was deeply disliked for treating the inmates like prisoners and not allowing them out. So she and the Polish officer immediately drove off and found a far better camp close by with a hospital and school that had room for the Poles. She just hoped the American lieutenant would agree to the move.¹⁹

More of the unpredictable human debris of war confronted her on the drive back. They stopped to give a lift to an old man with a wrinkled, Mongolian face sitting on a pile of baggage by the roadside. He came from a camp of Kalmucks hidden deep in a nearby valley, so they drove him there and in an instant were surrounded by a crowd of men, women and children all talking at once.

Their history was complicated. Originally a nomadic people from Mongolia, they had settled in southeastern Russia between the Volga and the Don, and were Europe’s only Buddhists. They were systematically oppressed by the tsars, but many also fought with the White armies against the Bolsheviks, so Stalin suppressed them even more ruthlessly, destroying their monasteries, killing and harassing their priests, and doing everything in his power to wipe out their religion. Then, in 1944, he exiled all those not fighting in the Red Army to Siberia or to Central Asia. Those in exile as a result of the revolution had previously settled in such countries as France, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia before being forced by the Nazis to work in factories and mines. Others in the group, which numbered some 350, were picked up by the Nazis in Rostov and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Now, all they wanted to do was stick together and be émigrés–although not, they added hastily, in Germany, where they were treated as a lower order of humanity.

They proudly showed Francesca their little temple decorated with pictures of Buddha and its altar and lamps. She and the Polish officer were the first outsiders ever to show any interest in them. They wondered if they could get permits to travel to Munich to contact the Russian émigré office. She said she would try to help, but knew it was probably hopeless. Maybe those who had worked in France would be able to go back there, but what about the rest? She found it difficult to tear herself away, so desperate were they to have someone listen to them. “Give us horses,” they pleaded, “you will see how we can manage them. All beasts–but most of all horses.”

“I never saw a more desolate, forgotten group of uprooted people in my life,” she wrote in her diary.²⁰ But there were plenty of others almost equally lost. Soviet citizens were going back, but like the Kalmucks many had no desire to return to Stalin’s brutal dictatorship. The policy agreed on by the allies at the Yalta Conference that February was that everyone who was a Soviet citizen in August 1939 had to return, regardless of their wishes. As Fred Warner had seen in Austria, that decision created thousands of victims, and it caused anguish to front-line welfare workers such as Francesca. Repatriation–“going home”–was a heart-warming phrase in anyone’s book, as well as in UNRRA pamphlets. But the agency had largely failed to predict that so many of the displaced would not wish to return home. In the end, its greatest task was not repatriation but the care of those who chose not to go home. Francesca had been largely unprepared for that. Everything was far more complicated than she had expected.

One day, for example, she found a knot of ten dark-eyed and curly-haired peasants waiting outside her villa. They were Georgians and Armenians from Tiflis who had served in the Wehrmacht–but only, they claimed, because it was either that or death. They had not borne arms, they swore, but had worked for the Todt Organization. Now they wanted to go back to their wives and children but were fearful that they would be shot. Francesca suggested that the Soviet Union needed all the labor it could get for post-war reconstruction so they would probably be fine. And think how awful the alternative would be, she added: statelessness in Germany. “Their large eyes grew sadder and sadder,” she noted. “It was harrowing.”²¹

She was far from convinced she was giving them good advice. On one occasion she had gone to Dachau to see if she could get certificates proving that the Russians at Feldafing had been sent to the concentration camp for sabotage or some other anti-Nazi misdemeanor, such as trying to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. This could be a life-or-death issue for them because many Russians had more or less willingly fought in the Wehrmacht and faced death or at least hard labor on their return. Regardless, the Americans seemed eager to send back as many as they could, while the Germans were ecstatic at the prospect of their repatriation, whoever they were. It was not just that they were glad to see the backs of their former slaves: they also needed the space for a new wave of German refugees.

At a meeting with the Mayor of Tutzing he told Francesca that millions of Germans were being expelled by the Czechs from the Sudetenland and would soon be arriving in Germany. Some of them were already on their way with nothing but knapsacks on their backs. Tutzing alone could expect as many as 25,000. Where would they be housed? How would they be fed? Francesca could see that it was an impending nightmare.

The fate of the Sudetens was part of the mass retribution now being visited on some fifteen million ethnic Germans expelled from their former homelands in Eastern and Central Europe. The bulk came from parts of Germany suddenly placed under Polish or Soviet rule, such as East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, but about three million hailed from Czechoslovakia. Altogether, it was the largest “ethnic cleansing” in Europe’s bloody twentieth-century history.

The Czech government-in-exile worked out its expulsion policy long before liberation, and then won the consent of all the allies for it. Sudeten sympathy and support for Hitler climaxing with the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland in 1938 had virtually guaranteed that there would be no place for this large and troublesome minority in post-war Czechoslovakia. Although the bulk of ethnic Germans lived in the western border area known as the Sudetenland, significant numbers were in Bohemian cities such as Prague and Brno. Indeed, the University of Prague nurtured claims to be regarded as one of the oldest German universities in Europe.

Expulsions began almost as soon as the fighting stopped in May 1945, regardless of age, gender or past political allegiance–a grotesque mirror-image of the racial “cleansing” practiced by the Nazis that indiscriminately included even Germans who had opposed Hitler, such as social democrats and communists. Many Czech Germans saw the writing on the wall and left voluntarily before the end of the fighting, trekking west towards the German frontier in huge horse-drawn convoys. “We read that Hitler was dead,” recalled one man. “It was time to leave . . . We left our village at eight in the evening and by four in the morning had reached the western highway. It was crammed, filled, overfilled, with every sort of cart and vehicle that you can imagine.”²²

Embodied in the decision to expel the Germans was the raw reality that many Sudetens played a prominent role in the harsh Nazi rule over the country–such as the notoriously cruel and detested SS General Karl Hermann Frank from Karslbad, who ran the police and succeeded SS General Reinhard Heydrich as “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia after the latter’s 1942 assassination by Czech agents trained by Britain’s SOE. One of the worst Nazi massacres in all of Europe took place at the village of Lidice, not far from Prague, where in direct reprisal for Heydrich’s death all the men were shot and the women and children deported to Germany. The village was then razed to the ground and all evidence of its existence eliminated. On 10 June 1945, the Czech President Edward Benes visited the site and made a speech. The blame for Nazi crimes, he thundered, rested with the overwhelming majority of Germans. “Let us not forget,” he added, “that the leading instigators, accomplices, and executioners of these crimes were Bohemian Germans.”²³

Patton’s Third Army occupied much of the western Sudetenland. Here, things remained relatively calm–so much so, indeed, that complaints began to be heard that the Americans were being too friendly with the Germans. But in areas liberated by the Red Army, retribution against ethnic Germans was swift and often violent. In Prague, where the Czech resistance had helped liberate the city, partisans stormed the German-held radio station and began broadcasting calls to “Kill Germans wherever you meet them,” making no distinction between soldiers and local German citizens. Throughout most of the city, revolutionary guards rounded up Germans and interned them in prisons, theaters and schools, where they faced starvation, rape and other forms of torture. Thousands of Czech Germans also now found themselves interned in Theresienstadt, the concentration camp used by the SS as a way station to Auschwitz.

A week after VE Day, almost the entire German population of Brno was rounded up and interned. Over the next two weeks, Czech officials went from house to house valuing their contents for confiscation. Then, on the last day of May, the twenty thousand Germans still remaining were force-marched either to holding camps or to the Austrian frontier. Here, though, the guards refused to let them cross. Unable to go back, they sat in a field for days without food or sanitation, and typhus soon broke out.

This was typical of the pogrom mood that swept across Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1945. In one camp for women, armed Czechs and Russians appeared at night, chose their victims by the light of torches, and raped them in public. Czech authorities required all Germans inside or outside the camps to wear white armbands. They could claim only starvation rations, and were forbidden from using local transport.²⁴

Back in Bavaria, Francesca Wilson took a trip to see Dachau. She walked through the hospital barracks, still packed with the sick. “God, how lonely the people look,” she thought. Some were dying, others were unconscious, and some were recovering. The plan now was to divide the camp in two. One half would consist of the hospital, while the other would become a prison for ten thousand captured SS men. Good retribution, she thought.²⁵

At Belsen, in the British zone, conditions were slowly improving and the death rate had declined dramatically: five hundred a day at the camp’s liberation, by the middle of May it had fallen to below a hundred. Camp No. 1–the worst–was being steadily cleared of its inmates, and as each hut fell empty it was burned to the ground. The last four hundred inmates were evacuated on Saturday 19 May, and two days later the last of the huts was ceremonially torched. But twelve thousand sick remained in the hospital, and thousands of others–now classified as displaced persons–were living in Camp No. 2 (for men), and Camp No. 3 (for women).

By June, as the survivors grew fitter, new problems were emerging. Some of the former prisoners, mostly Russians and Poles, started to engage in an orgy of destruction of anything German, and assaults on the German nursing staff were on the rise.²⁶ The composition of the camp was also beginning to change. Left behind for the most part were Jews, many with no homes to return to and determined to build a new country of their own. For them, in Dachau and other concentration camps as well as Belsen, the liberation had been both the ending of a story and the beginning of a new one.