Vengeance on a Savage Globe

Excerpts from Savage Continent written by English historian Keith Lowe, winner of the Pen Hessell-Titlman Prize for History.

"In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War the threat, or promise, of vengeance permeated everything. It formed a thread in virtually every event that took place, from the arrest of Nazis and their collaborators to the wording of the postwar treaties that shaped Europe for the decades to come. Leaders, from Roosevelt to Tito happily indulged the vengeful fantasies of their subordinates, and sought to harness the popular desire for vengeance to further their own political causes. Commanders in all the Allied armies turned a blind eye to the excesses of their men; and civilians took advantage of the chaos to redress years of impotence and victimization by dictators and petty tyrants alike.

Of all the themes that emerge in any study of the immediate postwar period, that of vengeance is perhaps the most universal. And yet it is a subject that is rarely analyzed in any depth. While there are many excellent studies of its legitimate cousin, retribution - that is to say, the legal and supposedly impartial exercise of justice - there is no general study of the role that vengeance played in the aftermath of the war. Mentions of vengeance are usually confined to superficial, partisan accounts of specific events. In some cases its very existence is deliberately played down by historians, or even flatly denied; in other cases it is exaggerated out of all proportion. There are political and emotional reasons for both of these standpoints, which must be taken into account if an impartial understanding of events is ever to be reached.

Many historians have also taken contemporary stories of vengeance at face value, without stopping to question the motives of those who first drew up these accounts. The story of Nemmersdorf is a perfect example. For almost fifty years, while the Cold War was in progress, Western historians accepted the version of events given in Nazi propaganda. This was partly because it suited them - the Russians were the bogeymen of Europe - and partly because they were unable to access Soviet archives for an alternative version of events. But more recent studies show that the Nazis falsified photographs of Nemmersdorf, and exaggerated both the time-frame over which the massacre took place and the number of people killed. Such distoritions of tha truth were common in the aftermath of the war, when atrocities by both sides were exploited ruthlessly for their propaganda value. The real story of whast happened at Nemmersdorf, which is no less horrific than the traditional accounts, is therefore hidden beneath layers of what we today call 'spin'."

Mmm though these wars were well organised and prepped, narratives driven hard home bye all sides, suffering and power being the desire, vengence is but karma taken or not.

"In the following pages I shall describe some of the most common forms of vengeance that were carried out in the immediate aftermath of the war, on both an individual and a communal level, I shall show how the 'perception' of that vengeance was, and is, just as important as the vengeance itself. I shall demonstrate how a vengeful population was occasionally manipulated by those with ulterior motives who wished to strengthen their own positions. And I shall show how the new authorities in Europe were unable to establish themselves before first bringing the forces of vengeance under control.

Revenge was a fundamental part of the bedrock upon which postwar Europe was rebuilt. Everything that happened after the war, and everything that will be described in the rest of this book, bears its hallmark: to this day, individuals, communities and even whole nations still live with the bitterness born of this vengeance."

Just curious. Does this book mention Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK's predecessor? Man that was one vengeful SOB. Kind of crazy that particular time period is repeating itself now.

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Originally posted by Diabolical Boids

Just curious. Does this book mention Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK's predecessor? Man that was one vengeful SOB. Kind of crazy that particular time period is repeating itself now.

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No, not really, it mentions mostly the big 3, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin and paints none of them in a very favorable light. This is generally a Eurocentric book, very balanced in its treatment of all participants during the period from the 1940's thru the 1950's and does often allude to the processes of current history and how we got here.

One of the big takeaways despite its balanced treatment is that it does allow the 'worst' villains in the game to emerge and then elucidates the notoriety of their actions. Another of the interesting things is that its paints a nice picture of the historical patterns of the political behavior of the players. I found that part the most illuminating for 'what to expect' from these actors because as we all know the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

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Originally posted by Diabolical Boids

Just curious. Does this book mention Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK's predecessor?

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Successor, not predecessor. ;)

Sounds like a good book, Chuckie. Truth is the first casualty of war. And the winner writes the history books. That's why I try to be somewhat impartial about the Ukraine war!:fencing:

THE CAMPS LIBERATED:

Of all the symbols of violence and depravity that litter the history of the Second World War, perhaps the most potent is that of the concentration camps. These camps, and all they represented, were used to justify all kinds of vengeeance in the aftermath of the war, and so it is important to understand the sense of shock and sheer disbelief that they endendered at the time. There were many kinds of concentration camps, but it was the 'death camps' - the places where prisoners were either starved to death, or more deliberately exterminated in gas chambers or by firing squads - that were most publicized.

DISCOVERY

The first Nazi death camp to be discovered was that of Majdanek, near the Polish town of Lublin, which was taken by the Red Army at the end of July 1944. By this point in the war the Russians were well-acquainted with German atrocities. They had heard of Babi Yar, and countless other, smaller massacres across western Russia and Ukraine, but as one newspaper correspondent at the time claimed, "all this killing was spread over relatively wide areas, and though it added up to far, far more than Majdanek, it did not have the vast monumental, "industrial" quality of that unbelievable Death Factor two miles from Lublin.

The Germans had done their best to evacuate Majdanek before the Red Army arrived, but in their hurry to leave they had failed to conceal the evidence of what had taken place here. When Soviet troops drove into the compound they discovered a set of gas chambers, six large furnaces with the charred remains of human skeletons scattered around them and, nearby, several enormous mounds of white ash filled with pieces of human bones. The ash mounds overlooked a huge field of vegetables, and the Soviets came to the obvious conslusions: the organizers of Majdankek had been using human remains as fertilizer. "'This is German food production,' wrote one Soviet journalist at the time. 'Kill people; fertilize cabbages.'

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Originally posted by Aragorn

Successor, not predecessor. ;)

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Thanks, you are correct. It happens when you have to look backwards in time, and then rush forward again to find out what's going on today :p

"The scale of the killing that had taken place here and in other nearby camps only became apparent when the Soviets opened up some of the buildings that lay between the gas chambers and the crematorium. In one enormous barn-like structure they found hundreds of thousands of pairs of boots and shoes. Another large building was like a vast, five-storey department store': here they found shelves and shelves of shaving brushes, pen-knives, teddy bears, children's jigsaw puzzles, and loomng corridors lined with thousands of overcoats and women's dresses. On the ground floor of this building was the accounts department, which the departing Nazis had not had time to destroy. Here Soviet officials discovered some of the most damning documents of what would later become known as the Holocaust. Majdanek had acted as a central storage depot for a whole network of extermination camps: the belongings of Jews murdered in Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec were brought here to be sorted and then shipped back to the Reich, where they would be given to German families who had been evacuated or bombed out of their houses. In the first few months of 1944 alone, eighteen railway wagons of goods from this warehouse had been sent to Germany. Later, after speaking to liberated Soviet prisoners of war who had survived the camp, investigators learned of the gruesomely named 'Harvest Festival' killings of November 1943. Survivors led them to a series of mass graves where 18,000 Jews were buried.

The effect of these discoveries was immediate. The Soviet propagandist Konstantin Simonov was sent to Majdankek to write a story on the camp, which appeared in Pravda and Krasnaya Zvesda at the beginning of August. Foreign journalists werre also invited to the camp, and large parties of Russian and Polish soldiers were taken there on guided tours so that they could spread the word of what they had seen throughout the Red Army. On hearing that Majdanek had been captured virtually intact, Hitler was reportedly incensed. Himmler had gone to great lengths to conceal the Holocaust by dismantling and then leveling the main killing centres - but the discovery of Majdanek provided the first concrete proof that the terrifying reports coming out of Poland were all true."