Victory of a Monster
By ANDREW ROBERTS
The Daily Mail
Hitler's defeat 60 years ago this weekend prompted the wildest celebrations Britain had ever seen. But the real victor was Stalin, a dictator every bit as bloody and evil.
�
At the heart of the Second World War lies a
huge and abiding paradox. Although the war was fought in defence of
Civilisation and Democracy, although it needed to be fought and had to be won,
the chief victor was a dictator every bit as warped and evil as Adolf
Hitler.�
��
This central irony is perfectly illustrated by the fate of Poland,
for the sovereign independence of which Britain
and France went to war with
Germany
on 3 September 1939. By the time of the war�s end � 60 years ago tomorrow �
Poland had fallen into the steely grip of another totalitarian invader, one
that was then to rule over it for eight times longer than the Nazis had. How
can we reconcile that appalling injustice with the essential righteousness of
the great struggle of 1939-45?�
��
For Britain
the Second World War brought near-bankruptcy, national exhaustion and years of
grinding austerity. The British Empire, until then the proudest on earth since
Ancient Rome, had to be dissolved, with India
being granted independence exactly two years after the end of the war against Japan.
France
also lay in the dust for over a decade. Nor did the war add any territorial
acquisitions for the United
States, which wished for none. Yet for the
USSR, the War left that battered but militarily supreme country in control not
only of the whole of its pre-war territory, but also that of Latvia, Estonia,
Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Roumania, east Germany,
and large parts of Austria including Vienna. Yugoslavia
and Finland were
effectively client states, and a Communist insurgency in Greece
might easily have turned that country into one too. When the Russian leader
Joseph Stalin visited the tomb of King Frederick the Great of Prussia in Potsdam,
well inside the Russian zone of control, it was pointed out that no Tsar had
ever extended the Russian empire so far. All he said was: �Alexander I rode
into Paris.�
��
The boundless cynicism of Stalin, dictator of the USSR
since the death of Lenin in 1924, had been made plain to the world on 25 August
1941 when it was announced to a stunned world that the Soviet Union had entered
into a friendship pact with Hitler�s Germany.
The Nazi-Soviet pact, negotiated between the Russian foreign minister
Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentropp, allowed
Hitler to unleash his war of naked aggression against Poland, secure in the
certainty that Russia would not intervene on Poland�s side. After decades of
denouncing fascism as a political obscenity, the Bolsheviks had suddenly done a
deal with them.
��
The base nature of the secret clauses of that deal became obvious to all when
six weeks after Hitler�s invasion of Poland
from the west on 1 September 1939, the USSR
suddenly attacked that doubly-martyred country from the east. Fighting all out
against the Nazis, the brave Poles abruptly found in mid-October that they had
been attacked from behind. They were smashed between the Nazi hammer and the
Soviet anvil, and were not to regain their independence and freedom until November
1989, half a century later.
�
�Then, in one of the most despicable acts of naked viciousness of the war,
in the spring of 1940 the Red Army transported four thousand Polish officers
and troops who had surrendered to them to a forest near Smolensk
called Katyn, where they were all systematically executed. A further seven
thousand Polish prisoners-of-war were never accounted for. When the Germans
uncovered the mass graves two years later they broadcast the Katyn Massacre to
the world, but Soviet propaganda made out that it had been undertaken by the
Nazis themselves. By the time of the Nuremberg
trials the charges against the Germans were quietly dropped once the Allies
discovered the truth.
��
Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact, to which Stalin stuck rigidly to the
letter, the USSR had to
deliver large amounts of grain, oil, and other raw materials to Germany.
So unaware was Stalin of what Hitler had planned for the early hours of Sunday
22 June 1941 that there were trainloads of such supplies actually being taken
westwards, just as Operation Barbarossa � Hitler�s surprise attack on Russia �
was being unleashed. Stalin had ignored British warnings of what was afoot, and
had naively trusted the Nazi leader. The result was that the 187 million inhabitants
of the Soviet Union were utterly unprepared
for what happened next.
��
Hitler said that when he unleashed his Blitzkrieg (�Lightning War�) invasion of
Russia,
looking for Lebensraum (�Living space�) for his Aryan people, �it will make the
world hold its breath�. Certainly, the scale of the assault was breathtaking,
involving 162 divisions of ground troops � numbering approximately three
million men � attacking over a two thousand mile long front, supported by
preliminary air bombardments and featuring spectacularly deep thrusts into
Soviet territory, especially by General Fedor von Bock�s Army Group Centre. By
mid-July von Bock�s panzer tank pincer movements had snapped shut around Minsk
and 290,000 Soviet soldiers had been taken prisoner, with 2,500 tanks and 1,400
guns captured. By the end of that month, Smolensk
had also yielded up 100,000 prisoners, 2,000 tanks and 1,900 guns.
��
It took a fortnight before Stalin, who seems to have suffered some form of
mental breakdown when brought the news of his ally�s betrayal, was capable of
operating effectively. Once the German advance began to run out of momentum in
the sub-zero temperatures of November and December 1941, they had captured much
of European Russia. At the fall of Kiev
alone, 665,000 Red Army troops had surrendered. Leningrad
was subjected to a thousand-day siege so dreadful that cannibalism was resorted
to, and the Wehrmacht even reached the suburban railway stations of Moscow
itself.
��
The struggle over the next four years saw some of the most bitter and
hard-fought� military engagements in the history of Mankind, where the Red
Army fought with outstanding courage and the Russian people endured incredible
hardships for their Motherland. In this merciless Manichean clash the rules of warfare
were discarded, as the two vast armies fought � often house-to-house and
street-to-street � across half a continent.
��
Historians estimate that perhaps as many as thirty million people perished in
the war in the East, the overwhelming majority � perhaps as many as 90% -
Soviet citizens. Of course the Russians were used to brutal treatment: Stalin
had sentenced between seven and eight million of his own citizens to execution
or a living death in the gulag concentration camps, and the struggle of the Great
Patriotic War was an extension of that terror.
��
Nor did Stalin�s war against his own people end when Russia
was invaded. In order to instil discipline in the Red Army, Soviet commissars
ordered the liquidation of thousands of Russian soldiers. Researching for his
bestselling book �Stalingrad� in the Russian ministry of defence archive in
Podolsk, the historian Antony Beevor found the files of no fewer than 13,500
soldiers � more than a whole division � who had been shot by their own side for
cowardice, desertion, drunkenness, �anti-Soviet agitation� or treachery.
�Treachery� might simply mean that they had surrendered to the Germans when
further resistance was useless.
��
Once the Germans had been turned back � losing half a million men in the battle
of Stalingrad in the autumn and winter of 1942 � and forced onto the defensive,
Stalin set about ensuring that every country through which the Red Army passed
had a pro-Soviet government installed. No genuine independence was allowed to
any territory �liberated� by the Soviets: free _expression was crushed,
opposition politicians were arrested, democracy was stifled. With nine million
men mobilized in the Red Army, Stalin could do whatever he wished.
��
Stalin�s cynicism was once again starkly demonstrated in August and September
1944 at the time of the Warsaw Uprising, when Polish underground forces
attempted to wrest the city from German control, in the hope that the Red Army,
just on the other side of the Vistula River, would help them. Instead, Stalin
ordered his soldiers to wait until the SS had destroyed the resistance, and
with it much of the ancient city itself. He also refused the RAF permission to
land in Soviet-held territory, severely hampering its ability to drop supplies
of food and arms to the Poles. Only after the Uprising had been completely
crushed did the SS withdraw from Warsaw,
at which the Red Army crossed the river and took over the smoking ruins of the
city.
��
���Nor was there any will among the Western powers to oppose the
man who was popularly known in the West as �Uncle Joe�. The sacrifices of the
Russian people during the war had produced in Britain
what one historian has called �the blooming of a thousand committees and
societies to publicize the Soviet cause and encourage friendship between the
two nations�. Powerful organisations such as the Anglo-Soviet Trades Union
Committee and the left-wing intellectuals� Anglo-Soviet Public Relations
Committee could be relied upon to put Stalin�s actions in Eastern
Europe in the best possible light. The Polish and Czech democrats
who the Soviets had arrested were libelled as �reactionary elements�, in an
attempt to tar them with the Nazi brush.�� �
����
The one opportunity that Britain
and America did have to
restrain Stalin came in February 1945 when Winston Churchill and President
Franklin D. Roosevelt met Stalin at the Crimean resort city of Yalta.
There was much on the agenda for �the Big Three�, as they became known,
including the founding of the United Nations, the splitting of Germany into zones,
the de-Nazification of German society, the Nuremberg Trials, attempting to get
Russia to declare war on Japan, and the future political orientation of the
Balkans. Yet the most important � and contentious � issue was the future of Poland.
Although Stalin promised there would be �free� elections after the Nazis were
expelled from that country, he completely stonewalled all Anglo-American
questions over the timing, supervision and conduct of these elections. Needless
to say, when they finally took place they were completely rigged by the
Soviets.
��
Many have criticised Churchill and Roosevelt for not being tougher with Stalin
at Yalta.
Poles, of course, have long felt betrayed by the conference�s outcome. Yet a
glance at the position of the armies on the map of Europe
in February 1945, let alone in May 1945, makes it absolutely clear that there
was � tragically � nothing that the Western powers could practically have done.
The Red Army numbered nine million men, and it sat astride eastern Europe in a
manner that brooked no opposition, internal or external. The sheer unanswerable
reality of the position on the ground made the result at Yalta
unavoidable. As it was, Churchill did at least manage to get Stalin to promise
that he would not try to grab Greece
too, and an agreement was later made for the Soviets to evacuate Austria.
��
Pro-Churchill historians have blamed Roosevelt
for the Yalta Agreement, pointing out how ill he was - only two months from
death - and claiming the president was na�ve in his seeming preference for
Stalin over Churchill. Meanwhile, pro-Roosevelt historians have blamed
Churchill, saying that he was lulled by Stalin into wishful thinking over Poland.
Both are wrong; the simple fact is that since no-one could budge the Red Army
from eastern Europe, democracy could not have been installed there, however
much the Western leaders had blustered. Realpolitik means just exactly that �
the politics of reality. And nowhere in the 20th century was it more
blatantly evident than at Yalta
in 1945.
��
Some hot-heads such as the American general George S. Patton suggested
re-arming the Wehrmacht and using it to attack the Red Army. Others have even
suggested that Roosevelt�s successor Harry Truman should have threatened to use
the atomic bombs against the Russians rather than dropping them on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
This ignores the tremendous popularity that Stalin and Russia
enjoyed in the West as a result of their titanic struggle against Hitler. An
anti-Russian policy was simply not politically possible in 1945, or until the
Iron Curtain began to be erected in 1947.
��
Yet nor is it right to argue that the victory over Germany made no difference,
that it merely opened the door for five more decades of totalitarian rule over
countries such as Poland. To have ridden the world of a monster as baleful and
dangerous as Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly worth the enormous sacrifices it took
to achieve. A successful Lebensraum policy and a completed Final Solution, let
alone the possibility of a victorious Hitler getting hold of nuclear weapons in
the late 1940s, are such nightmare concepts that they outweigh even the tragedy
of post-war Poland.
Hitler�s Holocaust would later have been extended to all Slavic unter-mensch
(�sub-humans�) under the Lebensraum programme, meaning the probable
extermination of most Poles by the end of the decade.� However bad it got
in Poland
under Communism, it was never as ghastly as that.
��
Civilisation triumphed over barbarism on 8 May 1945, even if the Poles, Czechs
and many others had to endure the tribulations of Communism for decades
afterwards. That is why the 60th anniversary of VE-Day deserves to be
celebrated tomorrow, for all the paradox at its heart.
�
Andrew Roberts�s �Hitler and Churchill:
Secrets of Leadership� is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
�