2

The Curtain

In April 1945, a U.S. Army unit, the Ninth Division, advanced into the Harz Mountains in Germany. The war almost over, the soldiers were far from large cities. A landscape of hills led to low mountains. The soldiers reached a small village named Degenershausen. The village was inconspicuous, without importance, and three ancient castles stood in the village. Inside one of them the soldiers found a room and, neatly stacked and tied in bundles inside, were all of the old letters, proposals, and counterproposals exchanged between the German and Soviet governments during the period from April to September 1939. Other documents up to 1941 were included. Most important was a signed copy of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, rumored to exist but never seen or confirmed until that moment.25

The Nazi government in Berlin had ordered these documents to be destroyed, but a meticulous, historically minded archivist in the German Foreign Office refused to carry out the order. The documents he saved were written by diplomats representing Hitler (Ribbentrop, Weizsaecker, Schulenburg, Schnurre), diplomats representing Stalin (Molotov, Merekalov, Astakhov), and Hirohito (Matsuoka). The main theme of the documents was the expansion of the three states in all four directions of the compass. Expansion was to take place not only in Europe but in Africa, the Near East, and Asia.

The neatly bundled documents included the first and most famous secret protocol to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop. It divided up Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia. Five different secret Protocols were added to the Pact, effectively terminating the independence of twelve countries. A provision was also made for a German bombing attack on London.

Soviet officials denied the existence of the Pact, and after 1945 continued to assert they found no evidence of it in their archives. In 1948, the U.S. Government Printing Office published all the documents found at Degenershausen in their entirety. For the next forty-five years, the USSR continued to denounce the documents as forgeries. It was only in 1991 that the new Confederation of Russian States—or “Russia”—publicly displayed their authentic second copy of the secret Pact, with Stalin’s clear signature. It was exhibited to the public in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.26

Other secret documents that influenced and determined events in the war were found in the quaint village in the Harz Mountains. Until then much that happened during the six years 1939–45 had been inexplicable. Major events, their causes and motivations, seemed impossible to understand. One historian compared them to men lurching and groping inside a dark room.

Documents showed that the talks leading to the Hitler-Stalin Pact had been initiated by the Soviet Union, and Ambassador Merekalov. Matsuoka, the Japanese foreign minister, signed the Pact in Berlin in April 1941. The “Serov Plan,” for the invasion and occupation of the Baltic states in 1939–40 by the Soviet Union, also came into the possession of the Allies. Germans captured the documents when they attacked the USSR in 1941 and these, in turn, fell into the hands of the Allies in 1945; this trove of secret papers was known as the “Riga Archive.” Documents for the Wannsee Conference in 1940, when the first plans were made for the destruction of the Jews, disappeared, but minutes of the conference were eventually found.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact included a map that carved Eastern Europe into Soviet and German “spheres of influence.” The euphemism opened the way to multiple invasions, and became a blueprint for armed occupation. It redrew many of the borders in Europe, and created artificial entities such as the “Generalgouvernement,” a hybrid term incorporating part of Poland into a new area intended for ethnic cleansing. It was ironically referred to during the war years as “the G.G.” The secret Protocols ended the sovereignty of eleven states: the three Baltic states, Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bessarabia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

During the twenty-two months from September 1939 to June 1941, some 60 million civilians were caught within the far-flung boundaries of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. With the inclusion of Imperial Japan in early 1941, the total of civilians would exceed 100 million.27 These numbers are high and difficult to imagine, the number of casualties during the war years is also extremely hard to imagine. A historian wrote, “One might think that the historians could have arrived at a consensus. In reality, no such consensus exists. Certainly 48 million died and maybe as many as 60 million, depending on when and where you begin the count, and whose figures you believe.”28

For the civilians on whom the pact was to have the most direct effect, the plans were unknown. Words such as “occupation,” “annexation,” and “maintaining peace” were intended to mislead. “Deportation,” itself a euphemism, became “mobilization of labor.” One of the most cynical euphemisms was the “Aktion AB” (“General Pacification Action”) by the SS.29 The populations were of different nationalities and ethnic groups, speaking a variety of languages. One writer called them a “kaleidoscope” of nationalities. Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, referred to the secret Hitler-Stalin-Matsuoka Pact as a great “Pandora’s box.” He wrote: “In the trade of territories between the Soviet Union and Germany in August 1939, whole countries were reduced to the role of objects.”30 This was true in an unexpected literal sense: the exploration of relations between humans and things—or material objects—was to become a major theme in twentieth-century literature.

As borders were redrawn, as towns were emptied and the deportations of whole villages carried out, new groups of camps and satellite camps were created for the deported civilians. Two of the largest camp systems in the world grew even larger.

The most rudimentary information was lacking. Hastily scrawled notes and written communications rarely reached their intended destinations. An exchange of messages was more likely to be in this form:

As the iron doors of a train clanged shut a little cloud of paper messages was dislodged, and they drifted to the ground. The clang of these iron doors coming together was a sound impossible to forget. From the gratings fluttered down showers of white scraps, atoms of paper on which were written names and addresses, last messages begging not to be forgotten, broken sentences and prayers.31

The anonymous author of The Far Side of the Moon—a collection of many of these writings—notes that no one was able to pick up the scraps of paper from the ground. But it was from these chaotic beginnings that the sending of messages became a widespread activity. Reception of messages usually failed, but the desire to reach a recipient—any recipient—was great, the number of attempts enormous. A few messages, aided by luck, succeeded in having great influence. Some, as we shall see, were to change the course of the war.

The messages were rarely written with concern for literary qualities. But the author of the passage above has given it some of the features of form. In her description the messages on scraps of paper take on a life of their own, they float in the air. They might be unread, lost, or destroyed, largely futile efforts and the senders unknown, but they continue to be animated—they drift, independent of any reader, almost without volition of their own, like thoughts. They are not forgotten.

These written communications were to continue to the very end in 1945. Many postwar writers of narratives highlighted them, developing them—their intent, writing, and transmission—into longer works. Often they considered them to be important benchmarks as they built on them and extended them into finished, published works. Gradually, ordinary people as well as writers found new, original ways to give meaning and shape to their experiences.