“A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN THE NIGHT SKY”: THE OBLITERATION OF DRESDEN ON FEBRUARY 13-14, 1945

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By Dr. Jacques Pauwels

Corpses awaiting cremation after the bombing of Dresden [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden#/media/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-08778-0001,_Dresden,_Tote_nach_Bombenangriff.jpg]

“A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN THE NIGHT SKY”:
THE OBLITERATION OF DRESDEN ON FEBRUARY 13-14, 1945

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition, Toronto: James Lorimer, 2015.

In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.

Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in “terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,” so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation.

The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, a feat of arms that never did fit well within the myth that the Western Allies fought the world wars “for humanity,” so to speak. In recent times, however, the bombing of countries and of cities has almost become an everyday occurrence, rationalized not only by our political leaders but also presented by our media as an effective military undertaking and as a perfectly legitimate means to achieve supposedly worthwhile objectives. In this context, even the terrible attack on Dresden was rehabilitated not so long ago by a British historian, Frederick Taylor, who argues that the huge destruction wreaked on the Saxon city was not intended by the planners of the attack but was the unexpected result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, including perfect weather conditions and hopelessly inadequate German air defenses. (Frederick Taylor. Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York, 2004).

However, Taylor’s claim is contradicted by a fact that he himself refers to in his book, namely, that approximately 40 American “heavies” strayed from the flight path and ended up dropping their bombs on Prague instead of Dresden. If everything had gone according to plan, then, the destruction in Dresden would surely have been even bigger than it already was. It is thus obvious that an unusually high degree of destruction had been intended.

More serious is Taylor’s insistence that Dresden did constitute a legitimate target, since it was not only an important military centre but also a first-rate turntable for rail traffic as well as a major industrial city, where countless factories and workshops produced all sorts of militarily important equipment. A string of facts, however, indicate that these “legitimate” targets hardly played a role in the calculations of the planners of the raid. First, the only truly significant military installation, the Luftwaffe airfield a few kilometres to the north of the city, was not attacked. Second, the presumably crucially important railway station was not marked as a target by the British “Pathfinder” planes that guided the bombers. Instead, the crews were instructed to drop their bombs on the inner city, situated to the north of the railway station. Consequently, even though the Americans did bomb the station and countless people perished in it, the facility suffered relatively little structural damage, so little, in fact, that it was again able to handle trains transporting troops within days of the operation. Third, the great majority of Dresden’s militarily important industries were not located downtown but in the suburbs, where no bombs were dropped, at least not deliberately.

It cannot be denied that Dresden, like any other major German city, contained militarily important industrial installations, and that at least some of these installations were located in the inner city and were therefore wiped out in the raid, but this does not logically lead to the conclusion that the attack was planned for this purpose. Hospitals and churches were also destroyed, and numerous Allied POWs who happened to be in the city were killed, but nobody argues that the raid was organized to bring that about. Similarly, several Jews and members of Germany’s anti-Nazi resistance, awaiting deportation and/or execution, were able to escape from prison during the chaos caused by the bombing, but no one claims that this was the objective of the raid. There is no logical reason, then, to conclude that the destruction of an unknown number of industrial installations of greater or lesser military importance was the raison d’être of the raid. The destruction of Dresden’s industry – like the liberation of a handful of Jews – was nothing more than an unplanned “by-product” of the operation.

It is frequently suggested, also by Taylor, that the bombing of the Saxon capital was intended to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. The Soviets themselves allegedly asked their western partners during the Yalta Conference of February 4 to 11, 1945, to weaken the German resistance on the eastern front by means of air raids. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that confirms such allegations. The possibility of Anglo-American air raids on targets in eastern Germany was indeed discussed at Yalta, but during these talks the Soviets expressed the concern that their own lines might be hit by the bombers, so they requested that the RAF and USAAF would not operate too far to the east. (The Soviets’ fear of being hit by what is now called “friendly fire” was not unwarranted, as was demonstrated during the raid on Dresden itself, when a considerable number of planes mistakenly bombed Prague, situated about as far from Dresden as the Red Army lines were.) It was in this context that a Soviet general expressed a general interest in “air attacks that would impede enemy movements,” but this can hardly be interpreted as a request to mete out to the Saxon capital – which, incidentally, he did not mention at all – or to any other German city the kind of treatment that Dresden received on February 13-14.
Neither at Yalta, nor at any other occasion, did the Soviets ask their Western Allies for the kind of air support that presumably materialized in the form of the obliteration of Dresden. Moreover, they never gave their approval to the plan to bomb Dresden, as is also often claimed. In any case, even if the Soviets would have asked for such assistance from the air, it is extremely unlikely that their allies would have responded by immediately unleashing the mighty fleet of bombers that did in fact attack Dresden.

To understand why this is so, we have to take a close look at inter-Allied relations in early 1945. In mid- to late January, the Americans were still involved in the final convulsions of the “Battle of the Bulge,” an unexpected German counter-offensive on the western front which had caused them great difficulties. The Americans, British, and Canadians had not yet crossed the Rhine, had not even reached the western banks of that river, and were still separated from Berlin by more than 500 kilometers. On the eastern front, meanwhile, the Red Army had launched a major offensive on January 12 and advanced rapidly to within 100 kilometers of the German capital. The resulting likelihood that the Soviets would not only take Berlin but penetrate deep into Germany’s western half before the war ended, greatly perturbed many American and British military and political leaders.

Is it realistic to believe that, under those circumstances, Washington and London were eager to enable the Soviets to achieve even greater progress? Even if Stalin had asked for Anglo-American assistance from the air, Churchill and Roosevelt might have provided some token assistance, but would never have launched the massive and unprecedented combined RAF-USAAF operation that the bombing of Dresden revealed itself to be. Moreover, attacking Dresden meant sending hundreds of big bombers more than 2,000 kilometers through enemy airspace, approaching the lines of the Red Army so closely that they would run the risk of dropping their bombs by mistake on the Soviets or being fired at by Soviet anti-aircraft artillery. Could Churchill or Roosevelt be expected to invest such huge human and material resources and to run such risks in an operation that would make it easier for the Red Army to take Berlin and possibly reach the Rhine before they did? Absolutely not. The American-British political and military leaders were undoubtedly of the opinion that the Red Army was already advancing fast enough.

Towards the end of January 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill prepared to travel to Yalta for a meeting with Stalin. They had asked for such a meeting because they wanted to make binding agreements about postwar Germany before the end of the hostilities. In the absence of such agreements, the military realities in the field would determine who would control which parts of Germany, and it looked very much as if, by the time the Nazis would finally capitulate, the Soviets would be in control of most of Germany and thus be able to unilaterally determine that country’s political, social, and economic future. For such a unilateral course of action, Washington and London themselves had created a fateful precedent, namely when they liberated Italy in 1943 and categorically denied the Soviet Union any participation in the reconstruction of that country; they did the same thing in France and Belgium in 1944. Stalin, who had followed his allies’ example when he liberated countries in Eastern Europe, obviously did not need or want such a binding interallied agreement with respect to Germany, and therefore such a meeting. He did accept the proposal, but insisted on meeting on Soviet soil, namely in the Crimean resort of Yalta.

Contrary to conventional beliefs about that Conference, Stalin would prove to be most accommodating there, agreeing to a formula proposed by the British and Americans and highly advantageous to them, namely, a division of postwar Germany into occupation zones, with only approximately one third of Germany’s territory – the later “East Germany” – being assigned to the Soviets. Roosevelt and Churchill could not have foreseen this happy outcome of the Yalta Conference, from which they would return “in an exultant spirit.”

In the weeks leading up to the conference, they expected the Soviet leader, buoyed by the recent successes of the Red Army and enjoying a kind of home-game advantage, to be a difficult and demanding interlocutor. A way had to be found to bring him down to earth, to condition him to make concessions despite being the temporary favourite of the god of war.
It was crucially important to make it clear to Stalin that the military power of the Western Allies, despite recent setbacks in the Belgian Ardennes, should not be underestimated. The Red Army admittedly featured huge masses of infantry, excellent tanks, and a formidable artillery, but the Western Allies held in their hands a military trump which the Soviets were unable to match. That trump was their air force, featuring the most impressive collection of bombers the world had ever seen. This weapon made it possible for the Americans and the British to launch devastating strikes on targets that were far removed from their own lines. If Stalin could be made aware of this, would he not prove easier to deal with at Yalta?

It was Churchill who decided that the total obliteration of a German city, under the noses of the Soviets so to speak, would send the desired message to the Kremlin. The RAF and USAAF had been able for some time to strike a devastating blow against any German city, and detailed plans for such an operation, known as “Operation Thunderclap,” had been meticulously prepared. During the summer of 1944, however, when the rapid advance from Normandy made it seem likely that the war would be won before the end of the year, and thoughts were already turning to postwar reconstruction, a Thunderclap-style operation had begun to be seen as a means to intimidate the Soviets. In August 1944, an RAF memorandum pointed out that “the total devastation of the centre of a vast [German] city…would convince the Russian allies…of the effectiveness of Anglo-American air power.”

For the purpose of defeating Germany, Thunderclap was no longer considered necessary by early 1945. But towards the end of January 1945, while preparing to travel to Yalta, Churchill suddenly showed great interest in this project, insisted that it be carried out tout de suite, and specifically ordered the head of the RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, to wipe out a city in Germany’s east. On January 25 the British Prime Minister indicated where he wanted the Germans to be “blasted,” namely, somewhere “in their [westward] retreat from Breslau [now Wroclaw in Poland].” In terms of urban centres, this was tantamount to spelling D-R-E-S-D-E-N.

That Churchill himself was behind the decision to bomb a city in Germany’s east is also hinted at in the autobiography of Arthur Harris, who wrote that “the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.” It is obvious that only personalities of the calibre of Churchill were able to impose their will on the czar of strategic bombing. As the British military historian Alexander McKee has written, Churchill “intended to write [a] lesson on the night sky [of Dresden]” for the benefit of the Soviets.

However, since the USAAF also ended up being involved in the bombing of Dresden, we may assume that Churchill acted with the knowledge and approval of Roosevelt. Churchill’s partners at the top of the United States’ political as well as military hierarchy, including General Marshall, shared his viewpoint; they too were fascinated, as McKee writes, by the idea of “intimidating the [Soviet] communists by terrorising the Nazis.” (Alexander McKee. Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox, London, 1982, pp. 46, 105)

The American participation in the Dresden raid was not necessary, because the RAF was undoubtedly capable of wiping out Dresden in a solo performance. But the “overkill” effect resulting from a redundant American contribution was perfectly functional for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviets the lethality of Anglo-American air power. It is also likely that Churchill did not want the responsibility for what he knew would be a terrible slaughter to be exclusively British; it was a crime for which he needed a partner.

A Thunderclap–style operation would of course do damage to whatever military and industrial installations and communications infrastructure were housed in the targeted city and would therefore inevitably amount to yet another blow to the already tottering German enemy. But when such an operation was finally launched, with Dresden as target, it was done far less to speed up the defeat of the Nazi enemy than to intimidate the Soviets. Using the terminology of the “functional analysis” school of American sociology, hitting the Germans as hard as possible was the “manifest function” of the operation, while intimidating the Soviets was its far more important “latent” or “hidden” function. The massive destruction wreaked in Dresden was planned – in other words, was “functional” – not for the purpose of striking a devastating blow to the German enemy, but for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviet ally that the Anglo-Americans had a weapon which the Red Army, no matter how mighty and successful it was against the Germans, could not match, and against which it had no adequate defenses.

Many American and British generals and high-ranking officers were undoubtedly aware of the latent function of the destruction of Dresden and approved of such an undertaking; this knowledge also reached the local commanders of the RAF and USAAF as well as the “master bombers.” (After the war, two master bombers claimed to remember that they had been told clearly that this attack was intended “to impress the Soviets with the hitting power of our Bomber Command.”) (Olaf Groehler. Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin, 1990, p. 404) But the Soviets, who had hitherto made the biggest contribution to the war against Nazi Germany, and who had thereby not only suffered the biggest losses but also scored the most spectacular successes, e.g. in Stalingrad, enjoyed much sympathy among low-ranking American and British military personnel, including bomber crews. This constituency would certainly have disapproved of any kind of plan to intimidate the Soviets, and most certainly of a plan – the obliteration of a German city from the air – which they would have to carry out. It was therefore necessary to camouflage the objective of the operation behind an official rationale. In other words, because the latent function of the raid was “unspeakable,” a “speakable” manifest function had to be concocted.

And so the regional commanders and the master bombers were instructed to formulate other, hopefully credible, objectives for the benefit of their crews. In view of this, we can understand why the instructions to the crews with respect to the objectives differed from unit to unit and were often fanciful and even contradictory. Most of the commanders emphasized military objectives, and cited undefined “military targets,” hypothetical “vital ammunition factories” and “dumps of weapons and supplies,” Dresden’s alleged role as “fortified city,” and even the existence in the city of some “German Army Headquarters.” Vague references were also frequently made to “important industrial installations” and “marshalling yards.” To explain to the crews why the historical city centre was targeted and not the industrial suburbs, some commanders talked about the existence there of a “Gestapo headquarters” and of “a gigantic poison gas factory.” Some speakers were either unable to invent such imaginary targets or were for some reason unwilling to do so; they laconically told their men that the bombs were to be dropped on “the built-up city centre of Dresden,” or “on Dresden” tout court. (Groehler, p. 404.) To destroy the centre of a German city, hoping to wreak as much damage as possible to military and industrial installations and to communication infrastructures, happened to be the essence of the Allied, or at least British, strategy of “area bombing.”

The crew members had learned to accept this nasty fact of life, or rather of death, but in the case of Dresden many of them felt ill at ease. They questioned the instructions with respect to the objectives and had the feeling that this raid involved something unusual and suspicious and was certainly not a “routine” affair, as Taylor presents things in his book. The radio operator of a B-17, for example, declared in a confidential communication that “this was the only time” that “[he] (and others) felt that the mission was unusual.” The anxiety experienced by the crews was also illustrated by the fact that in many cases a commander’s briefing did not trigger the crews’ traditional cheers but were met with icy silence. (Taylor, pp. 318-19; David Irving. The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1971, pp. 147-48.)

Directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, the instructions and briefings addressed to the crews sometimes revealed the true function of the attack. For example, a directive of the RAF to the crews of several bomber groups, issued on the day of the attack, February 13, 1945, unequivocally stated that it was the intention “to show the Russians, when they reach the city, what our Bomber Command is capable of doing.” (Groehler, p. 404) Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many crew members understood clearly that they had to wipe Dresden from the map to scare the Soviets. A Canadian member of a bomber crew was to state after the war to an oral historian that he was convinced that the bombing of Dresden had aimed to make it clear to the Soviets “that they had to behave themselves, otherwise we would show them what we could also do to Russian cities”; and he added that “[the raid] was an idea of men like Churchill; it was a deliberately arranged bloodbath — I have no doubt about that.’(Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad, Don Mills, Ontario, 1976, p. 269)

The news of the particularly awful destruction of Dresden also caused great discomfort among British and American civilians, who shared the soldiers’ sympathy for the Soviet ally and who, upon learning the news of the raid, likewise sensed that this operation exuded something unusual and suspicious. The authorities attempted to exorcize the public’s unease by explaining the operation as an effort to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. At an RAF press conference in liberated Paris on February 16, 1945, journalists were told that the destruction of this “communications centre” situated close to “the Russian front” had been inspired by the desire to make it possible for the Russians “to continue their struggle with success.” That this was merely a rationale, concocted after the facts by what are called “spin doctors” today, was revealed by the military spokesman himself, who lamely acknowledged that he “thought” that it had “probably” been the intention to assist the Soviets. (Taylor, pp. 361, 363-365)

The hypothesis that the attack on Dresden was intended to intimidate the Soviets explains not only the magnitude of the operation but also the choice of the target. To the planners of Thunderclap, Berlin had always loomed as the perfect target. By early 1945, however, the German capital had already been bombed repeatedly. Could it be expected that yet another bombing raid, no matter how devastating, would have the desired effect on the Soviets when they would fight their way into the capital? Destruction wreaked within 24 hours would surely loom considerably more spectacular if a fairly big, compact, and “virginal” – i.e. not yet bombed – city were the target. Dresden, fortunate not to have been bombed thus far, was now unfortunate enough to meet all these criteria.

Moreover, the British American commanders expected that the Soviets would reach the Saxon capital within days, so that they would be able to see very soon with their own eyes what the RAF and the USAAF could achieve in a single operation. Although the Red Army was to enter Dresden much later than the British and the Americans had expected, namely, on May 8, 1945, the destruction of the Saxon capital did have the desired effect. The Soviet lines were situated only a couple of hundred of kilometers from the city, so that the men and women of the Red Army could admire the glow of the Dresden inferno on the nocturnal horizon. The firestorm was allegedly visible up to 300 kilometers.

If intimidating the Soviets is viewed as the “latent,” in other words the real function of the destruction of Dresden, then not only the magnitude but also the timing of the operation makes sense. The attack was supposed to have taken place, at least according to some historians, on February 4, 1945, but had to be postponed on account of inclement weather to the night of February 13-14. The Yalta Conference started on February 4. If the Dresden fireworks had taken place on that day, it might have provided Stalin with some food for thought at a critical moment. The Soviet leader, flying high after the recent successes of the Red Army, would be brought down to earth by this feat of his allies’ air forces, and would therefore turn out to be a less confident and more agreeable interlocutor at the conference table. This expectation was clearly reflected in a comment made one week before the start of the Yalta Conference by an American general, David M. Schlatter:

I feel that our air forces are the blue chips with which we will approach the post-war treaty table, and that this operation [the planned bombing of Dresden and/or Berlin] will add immeasurably to their strength, or rather to the Russian knowledge of their strength. (Cited in Ronald Schaffer. “American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians,” The Journal of Military History, 67: 2, September 1980, p. 330)

The plan to bomb Dresden was not cancelled, but merely postponed. The kind of demonstration of military potency that it was supposed to be retained its psychological usefulness even after the end of the Crimean conference. It continued to be expected that the Soviets would soon enter Dresden and thus be able to see firsthand what horrible destruction the Anglo-American air forces were able to cause to a city far removed from their bases in a single night. Afterwards, when the rather vague agreements made at Yalta would have to be put into practice, the “boys in the Kremlin” would surely remember what they had seen in Dresden, draw useful conclusions from their observations, and behave as Washington and London expected of them.

When towards the end of the hostilities American troops had an opportunity to reach Dresden before the Soviets, Churchill vetoed this: even at that late stage, when Churchill was very eager for the Anglo-Americans to occupy as much German territory as possible, he still insisted that the Soviets be allowed to occupy Dresden, no doubt so they could benefit from the demonstration effect of the bombing.

Dresden was obliterated to intimidate the Soviets with a demonstration of the enormous firepower that permitted bombers of the RAF and the USAAF to unleash death and destruction hundreds of kilometers away from their bases, and the subtext was clear: this firepower could be aimed at the Soviet Union itself. This interpretation explains the many peculiarities of the bombing of Dresden, such as the magnitude of the operation, the unusual participation in one single raid of both the RAF and USAAF, the choice of a “virginal” target, the (intended) enormity of the destruction, the timing of the attack, and the fact that the supposedly crucially important railway station and the suburbs with their factories and Luftwaffe airfield were not targeted.

The bombing of Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany: it was an American British message for Stalin, a message that cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Later that same year, two more similarly coded yet not very subtle messages would follow, involving even more victims, but this time Japanese cities were targeted, and the idea was to direct Stalin’s attention to the lethality of America’s terrible new weapon, the atomic bomb.
Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany; it had much, if not everything, to do with a new conflict in which the enemy was to be the Soviet Union. In the horrible heat of the infernos of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War was born.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

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Seventy-Seven Years Ago, U.S. and Russia Signed Historic Agreement at Yalta

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

IMPERIALISM IS ONLY THE DEGENERATE, MONOPOLY PHASE OF CAPITALISM

Dateline: February 12, 2022

By Jeremy Kuzmarov and Jacques Pauwels

[Source: biblio.com]

Source: ronnel.com

Reuters reported last week that the Ukrainian military was carrying out war games with newly delivered American military hardware in preparation for a conflict that could break out at any time.

For years now, the U.S. media has been demonizing Russia, accusing its leader Vladimir Putin of being an iron-fisted dictator who has interfered in U.S. elections, poisoned opponents, and carried out aggression by illegally annexing Crimea.

Cartoon depicting Putin as the evil Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. [Source: rferl.org]

With Russia having amassed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s border, the U.S. Congress is prepared to pass a “sanctions bill from hell” whose purpose would be to cripple Russia’s economy.

Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, the second-highest Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, went so far as to suggest in an interview with Fox News that the U.S. should not rule out a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia if it invaded Ukraine.

Today’s deeply Russophobic political climate provides an opportune moment to look back to an era of promise in the U.S.-Russian relationship—when U.S. leaders were more sober minded and rationale.

Seventy-seven years ago today, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt brokered a deal with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that offers a particular model of diplomatic engagement.

Under the terms of the Yalta agreements, Stalin agreed to enter the war in the Pacific in exchange for the return of Russian territory that had been lost during the Russo-Japanese war.

Stalin further agreed to the division of Germany and to stay out of Greece’s civil war. In return, the U.S. and Great Britain agreed to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe to avoid the prospect of Germany ever invading Russia again.

Conservatives have compared FDR’s performance at Yalta to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at the Munich conference in September 1938.

In May 2005, then-U.S. president George W. Bush stated in a speech in Latvia that “the Yalta Agreement followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.”

In a history of the Yalta agreements published in 1970, Diane Shaver-Clemens wrote “we are living with the problems of a world that could not benefit from the experience at Yalta. It is perhaps relevant to ask what the world would have been like if the spirit of Yalta had triumphed.”^[1]

The same question, I think, is relevant today.

Below is an excerpt from Jacques Pauwels’ book, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, rev ed. (Toronto: Lorimer Publishers, 2015), dealing with Yalta. Pauwels’ account debunks historical misconceptions and stereotypes that still prevail about Russia today and gives us a model of diplomatic cooperation that hopefully will prevail again.

YALTA, FEBRUARY 1945: INDULGING STALIN?

The events of the years 1943 and 1944 in countries such as Italy, Greece, and France had shown all too clearly that it was the liberators who determined how the local fascists were chastised or spared, how democracy was restored, how much input the antifascist resistance movements and the local population in general were permitted in the reconstruction of their own country, and whether political, social, and economic reforms were introduced or not.

In Italy for example, the American and British liberators had sidelined the leftist resistance movement, established a regime (under Marshal Badoglio) that was sarcastically described as “fascism without Mussolini,” and – violating previous inter-allied agreements – had excluded the Soviets from any input into the postwar arrangements for the country.

This unsubtle conduct set a fateful precedent: it implicitly gave Stalin carte blanche to proceed similarly in countries in Eastern Europe that were destined to be liberated by the Red Army. However, this symmetry was far from perfect. First, until the summer of 1944 the Soviets continued to fight almost exclusively in their own country. It was only in the fall of that same year that they liberated neighbouring countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, states which could hardly rival Italy and France.

Second, a sphere-of-influence formula agreed upon between Stalin and Churchill (during WC’s visit to Moscow in the fall of 1944.) afforded the Western Allies a small but possibly important percentage of input in some countries of Eastern Europe, which the Soviets did not enjoy anywhere in Western Europe. Regarding their prospects for influence in the post-war reorganization of Europe, then, the situation of the Americans and the British did not look bad at all toward the end of 1944.

And yet, there were also reasons for concern. After the failure of Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 attempt by the American and British to cross the Rhine, it had become obvious that the war in Europe was far from over. A considerable part of the continent still awaited liberation, and Nazi Germany itself had yet to be conquered.

In the meantime, it was evident that Poland would be liberated in its entirety by the Soviets, a prospect that alarmed the conservative and strongly anti-Soviet Polish government-in-exile in London. This government, incidentally, did not consist of devoted democrats, as is too often taken for granted, but represented the autocratic Polish regime of the prewar period, a regime that had connived with Hitler himself and that on the occasion of the Munich Pact had followed his example by pocketing a piece of Czechoslovakia.^[2]

Furthermore, by the start of 1945 at the latest it was as good as certain that the prestige of marching victoriously into Berlin would fall to the Red Army, and not to American or British troops. The advance of the British-Americans in the direction of the German capital was first checked in the Netherlands at the time of Operation Market Garden and was strongly impeded again between December 1944 and January 1945 by Field Marshal von Rundstedt’s unexpected counteroffensive in the Ardennes.

The latter episode was destined to enter the American collective consciousness as well as American history books as a gigantic and heroic clash, the Battle of the Bulge, and was celebrated in due course in an eponymous Hollywood production. In reality, however, the confrontation in the Ardennes represented a serious setback for the Americans. Von Rundstedt’s counteroffensive did eventually end in failure, but initially the German pressure was considerable.

The Americans battled back heroically on many occasions, for example at Bastogne, but there were also cases of panic and confusion, and the danger would not be fully averted before the end of January 1945.^[3] It was therefore decided to call once again on the unloved but useful Soviet partner.

Responding to an urgent American request, the Red Army unleashed a major offensive in Poland on January 12, 1945, one week earlier than originally planned.

Forced to face a new threat in the east, the Wehrmacht had to divert resources from its project in the Ardennes, thus relieving the pressure on the Americans.

But on the Eastern Front the Germans could not stop the Soviet steamroller, which forged ahead so quickly that in a few weeks it reached the banks of the Oder. In early February, the Soviets arrived in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, a town situated less than one hundred kilometres from the German capital.

The Americans had reason to be grateful for the military favour rendered by Moscow, but they were far from happy that in the undeclared inter-Allied race to Berlin the Soviets had thus taken a huge lead over their Western partners, who had not even reached the banks of the Rhine and were still separated from Berlin by more than 500 kilometres.^[4]

Already after the failure of Market garden, it became apparent to the American and British leaders that they would lose the race to Berlin and that the Red Army would eventually control the lion’s share of German territory, so that in keeping with precedents set by the liberators in Italy and elsewhere, the Soviets would be able to impose their will on post-war Germany.

This produced much pessimism, and doomsayers like General MacArthur, who opined in November 1944 that all of Europe would inevitably fall under Soviet hegemony, undoubtedly gained additional credibility at the time of the setback suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.^[5] It was true that if military developments alone would be allowed to determine things, the eventual outcome would be very unfavourable to the Western Allies. However, the result might be different if the Soviets could be talked into agreements which would be binding regardless of military developments.^[6]

Precisely this is what the British and the Americans hoped to achieve in a series of meetings with Soviet representatives in London in the fall of 1944. They proposed to divide Germany into three roughly equal occupation zones regardless of the position of each ally’s army at the end of the hostilities. (A fourth occupation zone would be assigned to the French much later.)

This arrangement was clearly in their own interest, but Stalin accepted the Western proposal. It was a major success for the BritishAmericans, which must have dumbfounded pessimists such as MacArthur. “In brief,” writes the American historian Gabriel Kolko, “the Russians agreed not to run Germany unilaterally despite every indication of an imminent military victory that would permit them to do so.”^[7]

An additional unexpected bonus for the Western Allies turned out to be the fact that the Soviets also agreed that the capital, Berlin, like Germany as a whole, would be divided into three occupation zones, even though it was obvious that the Red Army would take the city and that Berlin would be situated deep in the occupation zone assigned to the USSR.

That a “West Berlin” could later exist in the heart of East Germany was due to the accommodating attitude displayed by Stalin in the fall of 1944 and again the successes of the Red Army and the Yalta Agreements during the winter of 1944-45.

Indeed, the London Agreements regarding the future occupation zones in Germany, and the agreements reached by the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin) at the Yalta Conference between February 4 and 11, 1945, can be properly understood only from the perspective of the conundrum of the Western Allies at the time of the setbacks of their own armed forces and the simultaneous successes of the Red Army in 1944-45.

It has often been said that in the Crimean resort of Yalta the shrewd Stalin managed to dupe his Western colleagues, and above all President Roosevelt, who was already a very sick man at the time. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, it was the British and Americans who had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from such a meeting. The reverse applied to the Soviets, who might arguably have been better off without this conference.

Indeed, the Red Army’s spectacular advance deep into the German heartland put more and more trumps into Stalin’s hands. On the eve of the conference General Zhukov stood on the banks of the Oder River, a mere stone’s throw from Berlin.

This is why Washington and London, and not Moscow, insisted on a meeting of the Allied leaders. Precisely because they were so desperate to meet Stalin in order to reach binding agreements, Roosevelt and Churchill also proved willing to accept his precondition for a conference, namely, that it be held in the USSR.

The American and British leaders had to undertake an inconveniently long voyage, allowing the Soviets a kind of “home-game advantage” during the tug-of-war that the conference promised to be. But these were minor imperfections compared to the advantages that a conference might bring and compared to the huge disadvantages certain to be associated with the anticipated occupation of most of Germany by the Red Army. Stalin had not needed or wanted a meeting of the Big Three at this stage of the war.

However, as we will soon see, he had reasons of his own for agreeing to hold such a conference, from which he of course also expected to derive certain advantages for the Soviet side, and he also had good reasons to reveal himself accommodating vis-à-vis his Western partners.^[8]

Second, the agreements which eventually resulted from the Yalta Conference were indeed favourable to the Western Allies. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., who was present at the Crimean resort, later wrote that in this conference “the Soviet Union made more concessions to the [west] than were made to the Soviet Union.”^[9]

And the American historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg emphasizes that the U.S. delegation left Yalta “in an exultant spirit,” convinced that thanks to the reasonableness of the Soviets not only the Americans but mankind in its entirety had “won the first great victory of the peace.”^[10]

With regard to Germany, the London Agreements were officially confirmed in Yalta by the Big Three. As mentioned, the division of Germany into occupation zones was advantageous to the Americans and the British, because already in the fall of 1944 and even more so at the time of the Yalta Conference it appeared likely that the Red Army, which stood in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder in the east, might find itself in Frankfurt-on-the-Main in the West when the hostilities concluded.

Furthermore, the British and Americans were assigned the bigger and richer western part of Germany. It was also agreed in principle on the Crimean Peninsula that after the war Germany would have to make reparation payments, as had been the case after the First World War.

Both Roosevelt and Churchill found it justified and reasonable that half of these payments, then roughly estimated at 20 billion dollars, would go to the Soviet Union, where the Nazi vandals had conducted themselves in a particularly barbarous and destructive manner. (The amount of 10 billion dollars assigned to the USSR has been considered by some to be too high, but in reality it was “very moderate,” as the German historian Wilfried Loth has put it; a few years after the Yalta Conference, in 1947, the total war damage suffered by the Soviet Union was conservatively calculated at no less than 128 billion dollars.)

To Stalin, the issue of reparation payments was crucially important. It is very likely that he revealed himself to be so accommodating toward his Western partners regarding the division of Germany into occupation zones because he craved their cooperation in the matter of reparations.^[11]

Conversely, to obtain the Soviet leader’s ratification of Germany’s division into occupation zones and his acceptance of other arrangements that were advantageous to themselves, the Americans and the British also indulged Stalin in some respects. In return for Stalin’s renewed commitment to eventually declare war on Japan, for example, Roosevelt offered American assent to the Soviet recuperation of the Far Eastern territories that czarist Russia had lost as a result of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-05.^[12]

No definitive decisions for Germany’s future were arrived at in Yalta, even though particularly the Americans, and to a certain extent also the Soviets, showed some interest at the time in the widely publicized plan of the American secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau.

Morgenthau reportedly proposed to solve the “German problem” by simply dismantling the country’s industry, thereby transforming Germany into a backward, poor, and therefore harmless agrarian state. In reality, this plan amounted to not much more than a rather vague and incoherent series of proposals, far less draconian than its opponents claimed and many Germans still believe.^[13]

What was not properly realized at the time, neither in Washington nor in Moscow, was that not only major moral but also serious practical objections could be raised against the Morgenthau Plan.

For example, the plan could hardly be reconciled with the expectation that Germany was to pay huge reparations; this presupposed a certain measure of wealth, and for such wealth there was no room in Morgenthau’s scenario. “The logical inference of the Morgenthau Plan,” writes the German historian Jörg Fisch categorically, “was that there could be no question of reparations payments.”^[14]

Moreover, as the American historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg points out, Morgenthau’s plans for a “pastoralization” of Germany were totally “out of step with the thinking of the most important US . . . policy-makers,” who had good reasons for favouring the alternative option, “the economic reconstruction of Germany.”

Certain American politicians feared that the Plan would drive Germany into the arms of anarchy, chaos, and possibly Bolshevism. Businessmen realized that one would not be able to do any profitable business with a poor Germany.

And influential Americans worried about the possibly extremely negative implications of the Morgenthau Plan regarding the fate of Opel, Ford-Werke, and other highly-profitable German branch plants of American corporations.^[15]

It was not a coincidence that precisely the representatives of firms with huge investments in Germany—such as Alfred P. Sloan, the influential chairman of the board of GM, the parent firm of Opel—were most categorically opposed to the Morgenthau Plan. (The Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Andrei Gromyko, was not far off the mark when he remarked that the opposition against the Morgenthau Plan was spearheaded by America’s “imperialist circles.”)

Alfred P. Sloan [Source: wikipedia.org]

Andrey Gromyko [Source: wikipedia.org]

The Plan would thus gradually and quietly disappear from the scene during the months that followed the Yalta Conference. Morgenthau himself, a good friend of Roosevelt, would be dismissed from his high-ranking government position on July 5, 1945, by the new president, Truman.^[16]

From the perspective of the Western Allies, then, the sometimes vaguely formulated agreements concluded in Yalta regarding Germany were important and advantageous. In addition, Stalin was prepared to discuss the future of the Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army, such as Poland, even though the Big Three had never discussed the postwar fate of Western European countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium.

Stalin had no illusions regarding Western Europe, and he did not want to jeopardize the relationship with his British and American allies for the sake of countries that happened to be far away from the borders of the Soviet Union, the “socialist fatherland” whose survival and security had obsessed him since the beginning of his career.

With respect to Eastern Europe in general, however, and with Poland in particular, the situation was very different. The Soviet Union was keenly interested in the post-war makeup of neighbouring countries whose governments had formerly been unfriendly and sometimes totally hostile to the USSR, and whose territories formed the traditional invasion road to Moscow.

As for the postwar reorganization of Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe, Stalin had good reasons and, in the form of the Red Army’s presence in these countries, effective means to demand for the Soviet Union at least the same kind of input that the Americans and the British had permitted themselves in Western Europe.

Stalin had not challenged the Western Allies’ modus operandi in Western Europe; it may be supposed that he felt that it was now the turn of his Western partners to give him a free hand in Eastern Europe.^[17]

In spite of all this, however, in Yalta Stalin was prepared to discuss the fate of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, even though the topic of Western Europe remained unmentioned. In addition, the actual Soviet demands turned out to be minimal and far from unreasonable, as Churchill and Roosevelt could hardly deny: the so-called Curzon Line should form the border between Poland and the Soviet Union (for which Poland would receive compensation in the form of German territory to the east of a line formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers) and no anti-Soviet regimes would be tolerated in Poland and other neighbouring states.^[18]

In return for their agreement to these demands, the Americans and the British received from Stalin what they wanted in the liberated countries of Eastern Europe, namely, no social and economic changes along communistic lines, free elections, and continuing input for themselves—together with the USSR, of course—In the future affairs of these countries.

This kind of formula was far from unrealistic, and variations of it were to be implemented successfully after the war in Finland and Austria.

The Yalta Agreements, then, did not award the Soviet Union the monopoly of influence in Eastern Europe, that is, the kind of exclusive influence that the Americans and the British already enjoyed, with Stalin’s silent approval, in Western Europe, even though they assigned “controlling influence” in Eastern Europe to the USSR.

The Yalta Agreements thus represented a considerable success for the Western Allies. It has often been said of Churchill that he had grave misgivings about the “concessions” that Roosevelt allegedly had made in the Crimean resort. In reality, he was totally euphoric when the conference ended,^[19] and with good reason, since the British and Americans had fared far better at Yalta than they would have dared to hope when it started.

The allegation that in the Crimean resort the shrewd Stalin wrung all sorts of concessions from his Western colleagues is therefore totally false. It is true that afterwards the Yalta Agreements would not be properly implemented, for example regarding Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. This had a lot to do with Stalin’s reaction to America’s “atomic diplomacy” of the summer of 1945, after the “nuking” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Washington believed that it could impose its will on the presumably defenseless Soviets, and also with the irreconcilable, and totally unrealistic anti-Soviet attitude of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

The London Poles did not even want to recognize the Curzon Line as the future eastern border of their country, which had been acknowledged by Roosevelt and Churchill as both fair and inevitable, and which had been officially accepted in Yalta.^[20]

Owing to the intractability of the London Poles, Stalin increasingly played the card of a communist and pro-Soviet Polish government-in-exile, the “Lublin Poles,” and this would eventually lead to the installation of an exclusively communist regime in Warsaw.

The Americans, like the British, would complain loudly about this, but their protest was hardly reconcilable with the uncontested fact that after the war they themselves would install or support dictatorial regimes in many countries, such as Greece, Turkey, and China, and that in those dictatorial client states they never insisted on the kind of free elections that they urged Stalin to organize in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Stalin was a realist. On the occasion of the London Agreements and the Yalta Conference he proved to be accommodating vis-à-vis Churchill and Roosevelt not because he wanted to be so, but because he correctly calculated that he could hardly afford not to be.

The war in which the USSR had suffered grievously and had just barely escaped total obliteration was not yet over. The Soviets’ military situation in early 1945 was excellent, of course, but all sorts of disagreeable things could still come to pass. As the end approached for the Third Reich, for example, the propaganda machine of Goebbels aggressively pursued an ultimate rescue scenario for the Nazi state, namely, the project of a separate armistice between Germany and the Western Allies, followed by a common crusade against the Bolshevik Soviet Union.

This plan was not nearly as naive and unrealistic as one might assume, because Goebbels knew only too well that leading circles in Great Britain and virtually everywhere else in the Western world had considered Bolshevism as the “natural” enemy, and simultaneously viewed Nazi Germany as the spearhead in the coming anti-Soviet crusade.

The Nazi propaganda minister was also keenly aware that during the war quite a few Western leaders found the Soviets a useful ally but continued to despise the communist state and were determined to eliminate it sooner or later.

As for the USSR, all this meant that after years of superhuman efforts and huge losses, when victory seemed tantalizingly near, the order of the day continued to be survival—the survival of the country and the survival of “socialism in one country,” which had always been Stalin’s great obsession.

The Soviet leader worried about Goebbels’ scenario, and not without reason. In the camp of the Western Allies several leading personalities, generals as well as statesmen, found this scenario quite attractive. After the war some of them would openly express regret that the American and British armies had not continued to march eastward in 1945, preferably all the way to Moscow.

Churchill himself flirted with the thought of this kind of initiative and actually ordered preparations to be made for what was codenamed Operation Unthinkable.^[21]

Stalin harboured no illusions with respect to the true Western feelings for the Soviet Union. His diplomats and spies kept him well-informed about opinions and developments in London, Washington, and elsewhere.

For the Soviet leader, who remembered the historical precedent of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, the possibility of a reversal of alliances, a combined German-Western undertaking against the Soviet Union, constituted a genuine nightmare. He tried to exorcize it by not giving Churchill and Roosevelt the slightest excuse to undertake something against the USSR.

Thus it becomes possible to understand why he refrained from criticizing their conduct in Western Europe and in Greece, and why he revealed himself to be so accommodating at Yalta.^[22] In any event, in Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill did not indulge Stalin, to the contrary, the Soviet leader indulged his “Anglo-Saxon” counterparts.

REFS

Diane Shaver-Clemens, Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) quoted in Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 65. ↑
↑
↑
↑
MacArthur’s opinion is cited in Erich Schwinge, Bilanz der Kriegsgeneration (Munich: Universitas, 1997), pp. 10–11. ↑
Edward M. Bennett, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Search for Victory: American-Soviet Relations, 1939–1945, (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990), p. 156. ↑
Rolf Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1961: Darstellung und Dokumente in zwei

↑
Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 82. ↑
Stettinius quotation from Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse (New York Random House: 1969), p. 131. ↑
Carolyn Eisenberg, The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1943-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 61. ↑
↑
Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975), p. 656. ↑
Deutsche und amerikanische Gewerkschaften und Geschäftsleute 1945–

1941–1949 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 250–51. ↑
Jörg Fisch, Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: Beck, 1992), p. 48. ↑
Jacques R. Pauwels, Big business and Hitler (Toronto: Lorimer, 2017). ↑
302. ↑
↑
Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, p. 137. ↑
Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

bipolaren Welt (Munich: Drutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1998), p. 29. ↑
Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse, p. 139. ↑
“Operation Unthinkable,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable. ↑
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947

↑

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jeremy Kuzmarov and Jacques Pauwels

Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). Jeremy can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.

Jacques Pauwels holds PhDs in history (York University) and political science (University of Toronto) and has taught history at numerous universities in Ontario, Canada. He is author of books on Nazi Germany, World Wars I and II, the French Revolution, and the origins and meaning of the names of peoples and places. Jacques can be reached at jackpauwels@yahoo.ca.

CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptions, orders and donations from readers like you.

Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

From Pétain to Macron, from the Resistance to the Yellow Vests…: 1944-1945, France’s Fake Purge of “The Collaborators”

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By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

A comment on a new book by historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, La Non-épuration en France de 1943 aux années 1950 (Armand Colin, Paris, 2019)

In her most recent book, La Non-épuration en France de 1943 aux années 1950 (“France’s Non-Purge from 1943 to the 1950s”), historian Annie Lacroix-Riz challenges a view of the Liberation of the country in 1944-1945 – and its aftermath – that has been trending recently in a historiography increasingly dominated by the right wing of the political spectrum (“droitisée”). This vision is highly critical of the Resistance and, conversely, rather indulgent with respect to collaboration. It is claimed, for instance, that the Resistance was generally ineffective, so that France owed its liberation almost exclusively to the efforts of the Americans and other Western Allies – the latter seconded by de Gaulle’s “Free French” forces – who landed in Normandy in June, 1944. Furthermore, we are told that the Resistance seized upon the opportunity presented by the liberation to commit all sorts of atrocities, including murder and the public shaving of the heads of innocent young women who had committed “horizontal collaboration,” that is, had love affairs with German soldiers. This “wild purge” (épuration sauvage) of the collaborators supposedly amounted to a “terreur communiste,” orchestrated by the communists, real or fake members of the Resistance, in an attempt to achieve sinister revolutionary objectives.

Except for the most blatant cases, the collaborators are now presented by the “dominant historiography” as mostly decent, respectable, well-meaning and “upstanding citizens” (gens très bien, an expression borrowed from the title of a novel by Alexandre Jardin), victims of coercion by the Germans, powerless and therefore innocent “subordinates” (subalternes), caught helplessly between the Nazi Scylla and the Charybdis of the Resistance, and often themselves involved in secret acts of resistance. Some collaborators were fanatics, of course, and did commit crimes, but they were mostly lower-class villains, best exemplified by members of the Vichy regime’s infamous paramilitary organization, the Milice.

In 1944-1945, the French provisional government, led by General de Gaulle, eventually managed to restore “law and order.” This, supposedly, is how in France, after years of economic and political troubles, military defeat, German occupation, and the turmoil of the Liberation, a law-abiding state, a Gaullist État de droit, was born. Even so, an inevitable purge of real and imaginary collaborators took place, which claimed many innocent victims, especially in the higher ranks of the state bureaucracy, the crème de la creme of business, and the nation’s elite in general.

Lacroix-Riz demolishes this revisionist interpretation in her new opus, which is thoroughly researched and documented and also full of names of personalities obscure as well as important, making it a somewhat challenging read for those who are not familiar with the history of France in the Second World War. In her earlier books, such as Le choix de la défaite and De Munich à Vichy, she first explained how, in the spring of 1940, France’s political, military, and economic elite had delivered the country to the Nazis in order to be able to install a fascist regime; such an authoritarian system of government was expected to be more sensitive to its needs and wants than the pre-war system of the “Third Republic,” deemed overly indulgent towards the working class, especially under the “Popular Front” government of 1936-1937. And she followed up with other meticulously researched studies (Industriels et banquiers français sous l’Occupation and Les élites françaises, 1940-1944. De la collaboration avec l’Allemagne à l’alliance américaine) that show how that elite had prospered under the auspices of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime, collaborated eagerly with the Germans, and fought tooth and nail against a Resistance that was mostly working-class, communist-dominated, and bent on introducing radical, even revolutionary changes after the war. Now she demonstrates that the Liberation was not accompanied by a thorough purge of the collaborators but, au contraire, that the “gens très bien” of France’s elite of state and business managed to avoid atoning for their collaborationist sins, and that much of the Vichy system that had served them so well from 1940 to 1944 remained in place – arguably until the present time.

Many of the women whose heads were shaved were guilty of more heinous activities than mere “horizontal collaboration” with the Germans, for example betrayal of members of the Resistance.

Let us start with the so-called “wild purge,” the alleged victimization of innocent folks by communist partisans, or communists posing as partisans, presumably in an attempt to eliminate opponents and rivals in preparation for a revolutionary coup d’état. Lacroix-Rix demonstrates that assassinations and summary executions did take place, but mostly in the context of the bitter fighting that erupted already before the landings in Normandy and the liberation of Paris. Contrary to the theory of its military inefficiency, the Resistance disrupted the enemy’s preparations for a defense against allied landings that were to come in Normandy, and caused heavy casualties, as German authorities themselves admitted. And most of the atrocities perpetrated in the context of that form of warfare were not the work of the partisans but of the Nazis and of collaborators, especially the Milice, for example the execution of hostages and the infamous massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. The Resistance fighters, on the other hand, did not target innocent victims but went after German soldiers and particularly odious collaborators, often men whose punishment (including execution) had repeatedly been called for in radio broadcasts by de Gaulle’s Free French in England. As for the women whose heads were shaved, many if not most of them were guilty of more heinous activities than mere “horizontal collaboration,” for example betrayal of members of the Resistance.

There was no épuration sauvage asserts contrarian historian Annie Lacroix-Rix

There was no épuration sauvage before or during the Liberation, and the allegedly major purge that was to follow the Liberation itself turned out to be a charade. The elite of the French state as well as the private sector had profited handsomely from collaboration and had good reason to fear an advent to power of its enemies in the Resistance. But in the wake of the Liberation, the radicals of the Resistance did not come to power; the elite received little or no punishment for its collaborationist sins; its cherished capitalist social-economic order remained intact (in spite of some reforms); and the elite itself retained most of its power and privileges. For this undeserved blessing, they had to thank the Americans liberators of the once grande Nation, as well as Charles de Gaulle, the general who aspired to make France great again.

De Gaulle was a genuine patriot, but a conservative man, much devoted to France’s established social and economic order. As for the Americans, destined to succeed the Germans as the masters of Europe, or at least of the western half of the continent, they were determined to make “free enterprise” triumph throughout Europe and to bring the continent into Uncle Sam’s political and economic orbit. This meant preventing all but purely cosmetic political and social-economic changes – regardless of the wishes and aspirations of those who had resisted the Nazis and other fascists, and of the people in general. It also meant forgiveness, protection, and support for collaborators with anti-communist credentials, which is exactly what members of the elite in France had been. In fact, the American authorities had nothing against the Vichy regime and initially hoped to see it subsist after the Germans were chased out of France, either under Pétain or some other Vichy personality, such as Weygand or Darlan, if necessary after a purge of its most rabid pro-German elements and the application of a veneer of democratic varnish. After all, the Vichy system had essentially functioned as the political superstructure of France’s capitalist social-economic system, a system Washington purported to save from the clutches of its left-wing enemies in the Resistance. Conversely, after German setbacks on the Eastern Front, and particularly after the Battle of Stalingrad, countless Vichy collaborators saw the writing on the wall and expected salvation in the form of an “American future” for France or, as Lacroix-Riz likes to put it, by switching from a German to an American “tutor.” Following a liberation by the Americans, they could expect their collaborationist sins and even crimes to be forgiven and forgotten, while the revolutionary or even simply progressive aspirations of the Resistance would be doomed to remain a pipe dream.

The leaders in Washington had no use for de Gaulle; like the Vichyites, they considered him a front for the communists, someone who, if he came to power, would pave the way for a “Bolshevik” takeover, as Kerensky had preceded Lenin during the 1917 Russian Revolution. But gradually they came to realize, as Churchill had already done before them, that it would be impossible to foist a personality associated with Vichy on the French people, and that a government led by de Gaulle happened to be the only alternative to one set up by the communist-dominated, radical reform-minded Resistance. They needed the general to neutralize the communists at the end of the hostilities. De Gaulle himself managed to appease Washington by promising to respect the social-economic status quo; and to guarantee his commitment, countless Vichy collaborators who enjoyed the favours of the Americans were integrated into his Free French movement and even given leading positions. De Gaulle thus morphed into “a right-wing leader,” acceptable to the French elite as well as the Americans, poised to succeed the Germans as “protectors” of the interests of that elite. This is the context in which de Gaulle was rushed to Paris at the time of the city’s liberation in late August 1944. The idea was to prevent the communist-dominated Resistance from attempting to establish a provisional government in the capital. The Americans arranged for de Gaulle to strut down the Champs Elysees as the saviour that patriotic France had been awaiting for four long years. And on October 23, 1944, Washington finally made it official and recognized him as leader of the provisional government of liberated France.

Under the auspices of de Gaulle, France replaced the Vichy system with a new, democratic political superstructure, the “Fourth Republic.” (That system was to be replaced by a more authoritarian, American-style presidential system, the “Fifth Republic,” in 1958.) And the working class, which had suffered so much under the Vichy regime, was treated to a package of benefits including higher wages, paid holidays, health and unemployment insurance, generous pension plans, and other social services; in short, a modest kind of “welfare state.” All these measures benefited from widespread support from wage-earning plebeians, but were resented by the patricians of the elite, and especially by the employers, the patronat. But the elite appreciated that these reforms appeased the working class, thus taking the wind out of the revolutionary sails of the communists, even though these found themselves at the height of their prestige because of their leading role within the Resistance and their association with the Soviet Union, then still widely credited in France as the vanquisher of Nazi Germany.

The women and men of the Resistance were officially elevated to hero status, with monuments erected and streets named in their honor. Conversely, collaborators were officially “purged,” and its most infamous representatives were punished; some of them – for example the sinister Pierre Laval – even received the death penalty, and leading economic collaborators, such as the car manufacturer Renault, were nationalized. But with his provisional government full of recycled Vichyites and Uncle Sam looking over his shoulder, de Gaulle ensured that only the most high-profile bigwigs of the Vichy regime were punished or purged. Many if not most of the collaborationist banks and corporations owed their salvation to an American connection, for example Ford’s French subsidiary. Death sentences were frequently commuted, and Nazi occupation officials (such as Klaus Barbie) and collaborators who had committed major crimes were spirited out of the country to a new life in South or even North America by France’s new American overlords, who appreciated the anti-communist zeal of these men. Countless collaborators got off the hook because they managed to produce fake “Resistance certificates” or suddenly developed diseases that caused their trials to be postponed and eventually dropped. Local officials guilty of working with and for the Germans escaped retribution by being transferred to a city where their collaborationist past was unknown, e.g. from Bordeaux to Dijon. And most of those who were found guilty received only a very light punishment, a mere slap on the wrist. All of this was possible because de Gaulle’s government, and its Ministry of Justice in particular, teemed with unrepented former Vichyites; unsurprisingly, they were what Lacroix-Riz calls “a club of passionate opponents of a purge” (un club d’anti-épurateurs passionnés).

While France’s elite had to put up again, as before 1940, with the inconveniences of a democratic parliamentary system, in which plebeians were allowed to provide some input, it managed to remain firmly in control of the post-war French state’s non-elected centres of power, such as the army, the judiciary, and the high ranks of the bureaucracy and the police, centres which it had always monopolized. Vichy generals, for example, mostly known to have been enemies of the Resistance who had conveniently converted to Gaullism, retained control over the armed forces, and countless officials who had been diligent servants of Pétain or the German occupation authorities remained in office and were able to pursue prestigious careers and benefit from promotions and honours. Annie Lacroix-Riz concludes that the supposedly “law-abiding state” of de Gaulle “sabotaged the purge of the [collaborationist] high-ranking officials, thus . . . allowing the survival of a Vichy-hegemony over the French judicial system” – and, one might add, the survival of a Vichy-style system in general.

In 1944-1945, the French elite did not atone for its collaborationist sins, and it was lucky that the revolutionary threat to its capitalist social-economic order, embodied by the Resistance, could be exorcised through the introduction of a system of social security. The bitter wartime class conflict between France’s patricians and plebeians, reflected in the dichotomy of collaboration-resistance, was thus not really terminated, but merely yielded a truce. And that truce was essentially “Gaullist,” since it was concluded under the auspices of a personality who was conservative enough for the taste of the French elite and its new American “tutors,” but whose sterling patriotism endeared him to the Resistance and its constituency.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the communist threat, however, the French elite ceased to see the need to maintain the system of social services it had only adopted reluctantly. The task of dismantling the French “welfare state,” undertaken under the auspices of pro-American presidents such as Sarkozy and now Macron, was facilitated by the de facto adoption by the European Union of neoliberalism, an ideology advocating a return to unfettered laissez-faire capitalism à l’américaine. Thus was restarted the class warfare that had pitted collaboration against the Resistance during World War II. It is in this context that French historiography became increasingly dominated by a revisionism that is critical of the Resistance and indulgent with respect to collaboration and even fascism itself. Annie Lacroix-Riz’s book provides a much-needed antidote to this falsification of history. Let us hope that other historians will follow her example and investigate to what extent fascists and collaborators have been rehabilitated, and the anti-fascist Resistance been denigrated, by revisionist historiography – and by right-wing politicians – in other European countries, for instance Italy and Belgium.

A final remark is in order. Macron seeks to destroy a welfare state that was introduced in the wake of the Liberation to avoid revolutionary changes advocated by the communist-led Resistance. He is playing with fire. Indeed, by attempting to liquidate social services that limit, but do not prevent, capital accumulation and are thus essentially only a nuisance to the established social-economic order, he is removing a major obstacle to revolution, a genuine existential threat to that order. His offensive has triggered massive resistance, that of the “Yellow Vests.” This motley crew is admittedly not led by a communist vanguard like the wartime Resistance, but certainly seems to have a revolutionary potential. The conflict between a president who represents the French elite and its American tutors and is in many ways the heir to Pétain, and, on the other hand, the gilets jaunes who represent the disgruntled, restless plebeian masses yearning for change, heirs to the wartime partisans, may yet cause France to experience something it escaped at the time of the Liberation: a revolution – and a real, rather than a fake, épuration.*

Dr Jacques R. Pauwels is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Pauwels has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Waterloo. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War. Dr Pauwels is TGP's resident historian.

Featured image: Women accused of collaboration in Paris, summer 1944 (Bundesarchiv photo 146-1971-041-10 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

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World War I: The 1914 Christmas Truce

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

IMPERIALISM IS ONLY CAPITALISM IN ITS FINAL MONOPOLY PHASE

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Soldiers cowering in the trenches, WWI, a still from the antiwar classic Paths of Glory, by Stanley Kubrick.

The following is an excerpt from Jacques Pauwels’ book The Great Class War, 1914-1918

The situation in the fall 1914, after the “war of movement” has given way to the infamous stationary “trench warfare”:

The ordinary soldiers developed more and more antipathy and even hatred toward their own officers. Simultaneously, they started to empathize and even sympathize for the men facing them on the far side of the no man’s land. The official enemy – the Germans, Russians, French, whatever – were demonized by the authorities but the soldiers had little or nothing against them. In many cases, they hardly knew the people they were supposed to hate and kill. Furthermore, they soon found out that they had much in common with “the enemy,” first and above all a lower-class social background, and second, the same exposure to danger and misery.

The men learned in many ways that the official enemy was in fact not the real enemy, that the soldiers on the other side were human beings just like themselves. This lesson could be learned, for example, by reading letters and looking at pictures found or taken from prisoners. The contempt for the “other,” deliberately fabricated by the military and political superiors, thus soon gave way for mutual respect and the feeling “that we are all the same,” for a “reciprocal respect and even sympathy.” In January 1915, a French poilu commented as follows on letters he had found on a prisoner:

“The same as on our side. The misery, the desperation, the longing for peace, the monstrous stupidity of this whole thing. The Germans are just as unhappy as we are. They are just as miserable as us.”

This kind of lesson was also learned by physical meetings with the enemy. What is meant is obviously not hand-to-hand combat, which was actually far less frequent than we have tended to believe, but encounters with prisoners of war. About German captives a British officer reported that “they were pleasant chaps, who generally behaved like gentlemen.” And in 1916 a Scottish soldier, Joseph Lee, expressed his pity and sympathy for German prisoners as follows:

When first I saw you in the curious street,

Like some platoon of soldier ghosts in grey,

My mad impulse was all to smite and slay,

To spit upon you – tread you ’neath my feet.

But when I saw how each sad soul did greet

My gaze with no sign of defiant frown,

(…)

I knew that we had suffered each as other,

And could have grasped your hand and cried, ‘My brother!’

Sympathy for German prisoners was also reflected in the poem “Liedholz,” written by the British officer Herbert Read. He may have been an officer but he happened to be a convinced anarchist. Read captured a German named Liedholz, and already before they reach the British trenches, “werden de versperringen van formele vijandschap weggenomen,” [ "the barriers of formal hostility were taken down"], to use the words of a literary commentator:

Before we reached our wire

He told me he had a wife and three children.

In the dug-out we gave him a whiskey.

(…)

In broken French we discussed

Beethoven, Nietzsche and the International.

In “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer,” published in 1930, Siegfried Sassoon was to write that, during the war, the Germans were generally hated by British citizens, but not, or certainly far less, by British soldiers. He himself, he added, “had nothing against them.” Countless French soldiers likewise failed to develop feelings of hatred with respect to their German “neighbours on the other side.” “We don’t hate the Germans,” wrote a poilu in a letter that was intercepted by the censors.

The French soldier Barthas soon felt sympathy for the German prisoners he escorted on a train traveling from the front to a camp somewhere in southern France, and who were verbally abused by civilians in railway stations. He and his comrades shared the wine and the grapes those same civilians had offered them with their prisoners in a gesture of camaraderie. “Those who has seen the dreadful realities of war,” observes Max Hastings, “recoiled from displays of chauvinism.” The soldiers loathed the civilians, journalists, and politicians who could or would not understand their miserable fate. Conversely, they found it impossible to hate a so-called enemy who shared their misery. “The soldiers of the rival armies felt a far stronger sense of community with each other than with their peoples at home,” writes Hastings.

The “no man’s land” that separated the armies revealed itself to be less wide than the gap that separated the soldiers from the officers of these armies. During the late summer and fall of 1914, two different wars had thus actually started to ravage Europe. First, a highly visible “vertical” war, a conflict between groups of countries, in which all uniformed men of the one side were enemies of all uniformed men on the other side. Second, below the surface, so to speak: a “horizontal” war, an explosion of class conflict, a conflict in which the officers of each army were the enemies of their own subordinates, while a high degree of solidarity united the ordinary soldiers of both sides. In the first war, a geographic (or topographic) frontline separated friend and foe. In the second war, a social gap separated the antagonists.

In the autumn of 1914, when on the western front the “war of movement” petered out and gave way to a “stationary war,” the soldiers discovered that their enemies were human beings just like themselves, with whom they happened to have a lot in common. They were overwhelmingly of a lower-class origin and they all experienced an urgent need to curb the mutual massacre as much as possible. Practices emerged that have been described as “live-and-let-live.” For example, the soldiers often deliberately refrained from firing their weapons, especially during mealtimes, hoping that the enemy would do the same, as usually turned out to be the case. When, during such a pause, a mortar did suddenly get fired, a German voice loudly offered excuses to the British “Tommies,” which prevented an escalation of the firing. When specific orders arrived from “above” to open fire, the men deliberately aimed too high, and the enemy did the same. The artillerists also often opened fire at the same time of the day, aiming at the same target, this in order to give the enemy a chance to withdraw to a safe area.

Quiet sectors thus originated along the front, areas where the casualty rate was noticeably lower than elsewhere. In the vicinity of Ypres the British and Germans thus agreed to let the men on both sides sit on the parapet of their muddy and frequently flooded trenches, in full view of each other, in order to stay dry. Yet another form of “live-and-let-live” consisted in the conclusion of unofficial ceasefires, unauthorized by the superiors, after heavy fighting, which allowed both sides to recuperate the wounded and bury the dead. Those opportunities were often used to start a conversation with the enemy and to exchange small presents such as tobacco and insignia, in other words, to “fraternize.” Occasionally this even involved visits to the trenches on the other side of no man’s land! A German soldier later remembered such a pause in the fighting in France toward the end of November 1914: “French and German soldiers walked around, fully visible in the bright daylight. Nobody fired their weapons. It was said that some brave men even visited the enemy trenches.” The same soldier related how even later, for example in February 1915, “it was silently agreed to leave each other in peace as much as possible.” And a French poilu, Gervais Morillon, described in a letter how on December 12, 1914.

Frenchmen and Germans shook hands after unarmed Germans came out of their trenches, waving a white flag…We reciprocated, and we visited each other’s trenches and exchanged cigars and cigarets, while a few hundred metres further they were shooting at each other.

In some sectors such fraternizations developed into an almost daily routine. In the area of the town of Pont-à-Mousson French as well as German soldiers started in November 1914 to fetch water daily at the Fountain of Father Hilarion (Fontaine du Père Hilarion), a spring situated in a ravine in the middle of no man’s land. Normally, they took turns to go there, and no shots were fired while water was being collected. But it frequently came to meetings and conversations. According to a report that appears to refer to that site, Frenchmen and Germans exchanged “bread, cheese, and wine,” ate together, showed each other pictures of wife and children, amused themselves together, sang songs, played the accordion. That sociability abruptly ended when, on December 7, heavy fighting erupted in the area.

The soldiers were supposed to hate each other, but something very different actually happened: on both sides many men, though admittedly not all, developed a considerable measure of empathy for, and solidarity with, their counterparts on the other side of the no man`s land. The outbreak of war had produced an explosion of nationalism and had dealt a heavy blow to the ideal of internationalist solidarity among proletarians, exactly as the elite had hoped. But it now appeared that the vagaries of war caused the uniformed proletarians to rediscover and re-appreciate internationalist solidarity. The military elite did not approve. Of the war it was indeed expected that it would bury internationalism once and for all instead of resurrecting it. According to Adam Hochschild, such an “outburst of spontaneous solidarity among ordinary, working-class soldiers…outraged higher-ups and militarists on both sides.”

` `The ordinary soldiers were keenly aware that their superiors had their reasons for execrating all forms of “live-and-let-live,” even though it sometimes proved possible to persuade or even force them to participate, as we will see later. It is therefore understandable that these activities often occurred when the officers were not present, which was often the case in the dangerous first lines. The fraternizations were immediately aborted whenever it was signaled that officers were on their way. Barthas describes such an occurrence that took place in rhe Champagne region in the summer of 1916. The French had to inform the German soldiers with whom they were socializing that their officers had become suspicious, so that they had to suspend the meetings. “The Germans were deeply moved and thanked us cordially. Before they disappeared behind their sandbags, one of them lifted his hand and called out: ‘Frenchmen, Germans, soldiers, we are all comrades!’ Then he made a fist: ‘But the officers, NO.’ “ Barthas commented as follows:

God! That German was right. One should not generalize, but the majority of the officers were morally farther removed from us than those poor devils of German soldiers who are being dragged against their will to the same slaughterhouse.

The officers did indeed abominate any arrangements reflecting solidarity between their own subordinates and the “enemy.” Charles De Gaulle, for example, the progeny of a Catholic bourgeois family in Lille, a young officer during the First World War, condemned each form of “live-and-let-live” as “lamentable.” But there were also many ordinary soldiers who did not approve of such gatherings, since they had internalized the elite’s nationalist and militarist ethos and thus genuinely hated the enemy. Hitler was one of them.

The authorities condemned and prohibited all forms of fraternization and “live-and-let-live” in general. The officers sometimes put snipers to work when they suspected that fraternizations “threatened” to take place. However, the spontaneous truces and fraternizations also reflected the need of all warriors to maintain and display a semblance of humanity even in the middle of an unprecedently bestial war. This explains why officers too sometimes chose to participate. The French soldier Gervais Morillon described how an officer walked at the head of a group of Germans who came out of their trenches. Sometimes superiors with a rank as high as that of colonel participated.

The fact that fraternizations were officially strictly prohibited, apparently made them even more fascinating and appealing to soldiers. It is probably thus that we can interpret a myth that enjoyed an inordinate amount of success among soldiers of both sides throughout the war. Countless soldiers were convinced that, somewhere in the no man’s land, in abandoned trenches and preferably deep under the ground, and thus beyond the reach of projectiles and of officers, beastlike deserters of all armies dwelled together in a kind of permanent state of fraternization. By night they would rob the dead and wounded, seek food, etc. They became such a threat to the troops that eventually the army brass ordered them to be exterminated with gas. This myth was a cocktail of many ingredients. It amounted to a modern version of the Medieval theme of the simultaneously feared and admired “wild man.” But is was also a commentary of the soldiers on their own beastly existence in the trenches and a fantasy about disobedience. Last but not least, it vaguely reflected the soldiers’ solidarity with the men on the other side of the no man’s land, combined with the ardent desire to wave adieu to their own superiors and the miserable war. “An anti-establishment smell was attached to this myth,” writes Tim Cook, it was “a form of disobedience.” Indeed, the generals could prohibit fraternizations in the real world, but they proved powerless in the face of such mythical fraternization – this clearly to the satisfaction of the soldiers who wished to believe in this myth.

In any event, the authorities were also unable to prevent the wave of fraternizations that took place on Christmas Day, 1914. In the vicinity of Ypres, the sector of the western front that was held from September-October of that year by the British and became known to them as “Flanders’ Fields,” it already started on Christmas eve. The Germans decorated trees near their trenches with burning candles and started to sing Christmas songs such as Stille Nacht, “Silent Night.” The British reacted by lighting bonfires and singing English Christmas carols. Then the soldiers on both sides started to loudly call out Christmas wishes. The Germans arranged to deliver a chocolate tart to the British, accompanied by an invitation to conclude a truce. Shortly thereafter soldiers crawled out of their trenches in order to fraternize in no man’s land and in each other’s trenches. That sort of thing continued on Christmas Day itself, and in some sectors even on Boxing Day. Presents such as tobacco, whiskey, and cigars were exchanged, and the two sides helped each other to bury the dead. In the no man’s land a soccer game was also played, which the British claimed to have won. An English soldier wrote in a letter that this was “the most remarkable Christmas” he had ever experienced, and that he “had had the pleasure to shake hands with numerous Germans,…to smoke together and to enjoy a friendly chat.” A favourite conversation topic was the madness of ta war of which both sides had had more than enough.

Between the British and the Germans the unofficial Christmas truce affected virtually the entire front of approximately forty kilometers along which they faced each other. In some sectors of that front, the truce dragged on until New Year’s Day. Some historians claim that the Anglo-German fraternizations of the end of December 1914 were nothing less than “massive.” But on Christmas Day similar truces and fraternizations also occurred between the Germans and the French. Barthas confided to his diary that, in their sector, the morning of Christmas witnessed “singing and shouting and the firing of flares” and that no shots were fired. And it is known that poilus met boches to sing and exchange tobacco, cognac, postcards, newspapers, and other presents in the vicinity of Soissons and in villages of Picardy such as Cappy and Foucaucourt. A poilu later remembered that

The boches signaled us and indicated that they wanted to talk to us. I approached to three or four meters from their trench in order to talk to three of them who had surfaced…They asked that we would refrain all day and night from shooting and said that they themselves would not fire one single shot. They had enough of the war, they said, they were married and had nothing against the French, only against the English. They gave me a box of cigars and a package of sigarets, and I gave them a copy of [the magazine] Le Petit Parisien in exchange for a German newspaper. Then I withdrew to the French trench, where many men were keen to try my German tobacco. Our neighbours on the other side kept their word, even better than we did. Not even one single rifle shot was fired.

There were many other sites along the front where groups of French soldiers visited the German trenches in order to enjoy a drink, or where Germans came to offer cigars to the Franzosen. Christmas carols were performed in both languages, for example Minuit chrétien and O Tannenbaum. Belgians and Germans, who faced each other in the lowlands of the Yser River estuary, allegedly also fraternized on Christmas 1914. The Germans agreed to mail letters from Belgian soldiers to family members in occupied Belgium. At the eastern front it also came to fraternizations. The Russians met their Austrian-Hungarian enemies in the no man’s land in Galicia and exchanged the usual tobacco, but also schnapps, bread, and meat.

The superiors were far from enchanged with the Christmas truces, but could not prevent them. On the British side an officer rushed to the scene with this intention, apparantly from the safety of the rear, but he arrived too late. His men had already started to socialize with Germans in the no man’s land. He could only resign himself to the fait accompli. He himself and a handful of other officers ended up joining their subordinates and went to greet the German officiers. One of the latter ordered beer to be fetched for everyone, and the officers courteously drank to each other’s health. A British officer reciprocated by treating those present with pieces of a traditional English plum pudding. It was finally agreed that the inofficial truce would last until midnight, so that everyoone would have to be back in their own trenches by midnight. The “damage” done by the fraternizations, at least from the viewpoint of the superiors, was thus limited somewhat, at least in that sector.

The higher the rank of the superiors, the less they liked this strange Christmas idyll. The British commander in chief, Generaal French, who on Christmas Day enjoyed a gourmet dinner, featuring turtle soup, with as digestif a brandy from 1820 offered by the Rotschilds, issued a specific order to nip in the bud any future attempts to fraternize. One year later, the artillery would be made to fire into no man’s land all day, starting on Christmas Eve, in order to prevent any meetings there. However, it proved impossible to prevent fraternizations to occur here and there and from time to time.

In the 1980s, the strange events of Christmas 1914 inspired the song Christmas in the Trenches, 1914, written and put to music by the American folksinger John McCutcheon. It features the following lines:

’T was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,

The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,

Our families back in England were toasting us that day,

Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

(…)

There’s someone coming towards us!’ the front line sentry cried

All sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side

His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright

As he bravely strode unarmed into the night.

Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man’s land

With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand

We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well

And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ’em hell.

We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home

These sons and fathers far away from families of their own

Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin

This curious and unlikely band of men.

(…)

’T was Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung

The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung

For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war

Had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell

Each Christmas come since World War I I’ve learned its lessons well

That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame

And on each end of the rifle we’re the same.

Jacques R. Pauwels is a people's historian. In the tradition pioneered by Marx and Engels, and continued by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Leo Huberman, and others of similar merit, he writes history that is not only firmly grounded in truth but is aimed at liberating the mind from the claptrap of existing ruling class mythology. Pauwels has taught European history at the University of Toronto, York University, and the University of Waterloo. His books include Big Business and Hitler, The Great Class War 1914-1918, and The Myth of the Good War. Jacques Pauwels is TGP's resident historian.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

World War I: The 1914 Christmas Truce

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Frenchmen and Germans shook hands after unarmed Germans came out of their trenches, waving a white flag…We reciprocated, and we visited each other’s trenches and exchanged cigars and cigarets, while a few hundred metres further they were shooting at each other.

God! That German was right. One should not generalize, but the majority of the officers were morally farther removed from us than those poor devils of German soldiers who are being dragged against their will to the same slaughterhouse.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Dinner With Marx in the House of the Swan

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

“A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN THE NIGHT SKY”: THE OBLITERATION OF DRESDEN ON FEBRUARY 13-14, 1945

By Dr. Jacques Pauwels

“A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN THE NIGHT SKY”: THE OBLITERATION OF DRESDEN ON FEBRUARY 13-14, 1945 By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition, Toronto: James Lorimer, 2015.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

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YALTA, FEBRUARY 1945: INDULGING STALIN?

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

From Pétain to Macron, from the Resistance to the Yellow Vests…: 1944-1945, France’s Fake Purge of “The Collaborators”

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

A comment on a new book by historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, La Non-épuration en France de 1943 aux années 1950 (Armand Colin, Paris, 2019)

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

World War I: The 1914 Christmas Truce

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Frenchmen and Germans shook hands after unarmed Germans came out of their trenches, waving a white flag…We reciprocated, and we visited each other’s trenches and exchanged cigars and cigarets, while a few hundred metres further they were shooting at each other.

God! That German was right. One should not generalize, but the majority of the officers were morally farther removed from us than those poor devils of German soldiers who are being dragged against their will to the same slaughterhouse.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

“A MESSAGE WRITTEN IN THE NIGHT SKY”:
THE OBLITERATION OF DRESDEN ON FEBRUARY 13-14, 1945

By Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels, author of The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, revised edition, Toronto: James Lorimer, 2015.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jeremy Kuzmarov and Jacques Pauwels