After the war was won

Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation

By David Stafford

Published by Abacus, 2008

Available at Asia Books, Bt550

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The Nation

 War's end, beyond the jubilant newsreels, is certainly not all banners and bunting. Europe remained a boiling nightmare for months after Hitler's Third Reich was vanquished, but the weary citizens of Britain and the Americas had had enough after six horrifying years of the tyranny of tanks.

 All they wanted to know was that World War II was over, at least in Europe. And so today, their memories are of flags flying and GIs grinning and Marshall getting on with his rebuilding plan.

 In "Endgame 1945", David Stafford lays out the grim reality of what kept right on happening. Atrocities continued even as the veil was torn from the concentration camps. In peacetime, inflamed partisans imposed terrible vengeance on their wartime masters. Displaced persons were everywhere - it must have seemed like all of Europe was on the move.

 And, in a foreshadowing of the terror that Stalin was about to generously share with all of Eastern Europe, Russian PoWs refused to go home, and whole communities scattered rather than see more of the brutality already meted out by the victorious Soviet army.

 Then there were the German troops, legions of whom kept on fighting even after it was abundantly clear that their cause was hopeless. Such was the depth of their indoctrination that Allied troops routinely encountered German officers, even death-camp commanders, who expected honour and obsequity from their captors.

 In some bizarrely ill-considered cases they received that honour.

The Canadians, having liberated a huge Dutch population that had initially been bypassed in the rush to conquer the German homeland, and ended up as cadaverous in malnutrition as the inmates of Dachau, actually agreed to a dual command with the tens of thousands of German troops remaining in western Holland.

 These Germans, deemed "surrendered army personnel" rather than PoWs, were even given rifles on several occasions so they could assemble firing squads to execute their own deserters. It was weeks before common sense and morality prevailed.

 These are the sort of amazing revelations that Stafford places before the unnerved reader.

 Staff at the Kaufbeuren mental institute in Bavaria continued giving physically and mentally handicapped inmates lethal injections long after the German surrender - or simply let them starve to death. Only at the end of July did an Allied medical team decide to ignore the typhus warning signs and enter. They found that many of the internees, including many children, had died just hours earlier.

 In a Tirolean village, the fate of several busloads of European VIPs freed from the death camps hung in the balance as German officers of the Wermacht battled with those of the SS for some mad semblance of territorial control.

 In Germany's Lubeck Bay, the SS piled thousands of prisoners into ships bearing no markings that would have saved them from the RAF Typhoon bombers that descended. All the ships were sunk, almost all the souls lost.

 Those prisoners were bound for the Germans' "northern redoubt" in Norway, a place to stage a last stand and perhaps turn defeat's hand. The Allies had an abiding fear of an "alpine redoubt" in Bavaria.  Both German "plans" turned out to be figments of the imagination, just as General Patton had predicted, but Eisenhower had seen the death camps and would put nothing past the enemy high command.

 And yet British and American focus shifted rapidly away from shutting down the German resistance to shutting out Soviet territorial ambitions. The USSR was soon imposing its will in Vienna, and Winston Chuchill was understandably rattled, up to his knees in a bloody, tainted victory.

 Stafford presents his story of millions by focusing on the progress of half a dozen individuals through the tortured landscape, tracking each in turn in stages. It's a clever way of infusing the saga with humanity, though in most cases the details of these people's lives slow down a book that's otherwise electric with micro- and macro-history.