Growing up in Post-War Germany

Chapter 5 – Growing up in Post-War Germany At the end of April or the beginning of May [1945] something happened that in one bolt structured the disorder and suffering in my head and developed my image of the world with big strides. (…) Within the period of one week, seamlessly, a child is turned into an unripe adult. Jochen Neumann101 “My childhood was a happy one, in all respects,” writes Jochen Neumann in one of his private essays, in which he reflects on his own life.102 “It ended more or less abruptly in 1945, together with the turning of tides shortly before the middle of the century.” Indeed, the period 1944-1945 was a turning of tides, and so was actually the whole period of the Second World War. It is almost three quarters of a century later and hard to imagine the immensity of the destruction that befell the regions that quickly and unwillingly turned into battlegrounds. Millions of people were uprooted, became victims of acts of war, pillaging, rape and mass murder. In particular Eastern Europe was victimized, being caught between the military and ideological powers of two totalitarian regimes that, on one hand, collaborated extensively but at the same time plotted to overthrow the other. Much of the hardships of the second half of the twentieth century were a direct consequence of this war, which ended in a standoff between two military blocs. Central and Eastern European countries were either annexed or subjugated to a Soviet-oriented regime and Western Europe entered a prolonged period of political polarization, fear of a Soviet attack and a constant urge to profess its superiority. Many thousands of books have been written about this Second World War, and about the ensuing Cold War, and many more will be written. However, no words will be able to capture the sheer horror that befell the people that had to live through it, or did not survive. Undoubtedly, the most ostensible 101 Neumann, Jochen: Der Sozialismus und Ich, pp. 2-3. 102 Der Sozialismus und Ich, November 29, 2008. Neumann wrote a consider- able number of recollections, mostly during his life in Saudi Arabia in the mid 1990s and in the period 2005-2008, which were made available to the author. Although they were not intended for publication, they give an extraordinary insight in the development of Jochen Neumann as a person, and are sometimes quoted in this and other chapters with permission of the author. They are now located in the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv in Emmendingen, Germany. Robert van Voren 45 victims in Europe were the Jews, who fell victim to a murdering machinery that, on one hand, was well-organized and systematic, but on the other hand based itself on existing anti-Semitic attitudes and made effective use of the desire of local populations to rid themselves of the people that evoked feelings of jealousy, fear and despise. The ensuing Holocaust resulted in the almost total annihilation of the Jewish presence in Eastern Europe and ended a rich history spanning almost six centuries. It also laid the base for the foundation of the State of Israel, the standoff in the Middle East and the continuous bloodshed in that region ever since. The Soviet population undoubtedly lost more of its members than any other nation in the world, but not all can be ascribed to the terror of the Nazi war machine. Stalin, as ruthless a dictator as Hitler and as disinterested in the fate of his people, waged war on both the Nazi occupants and his own people, which is well symbolized by the existence of the special NKVD troops, the SMERSH, who were to shoot any Soviet soldier who tried to flee the battle front.103 Accounts show that soldiers were sometimes more afraid of the SMERSH troops than of the Nazi enemy. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops would die purely because of unwise decisions of the Soviet military leadership or Stalin himself; just a few years before the war the Soviet leader had liquidated the top echelons of his military, which did not help his war effort.104 And while Nazi troops attacked the country in the late days of June 1941, the Soviet authorities used much of their railroad capacity to ship prisoners from the European parts of the Gulag back to the East, away from the advancing troops, as free forced laborers. Those who could not be evacuated were shot to death, their corpses left to the advancing Nazi troops who tried to make use of the scenes for propaganda purposes.105 Soon the ranks of the dead would be joined by the hundreds of 103 The main task of SMERSH was to secure the Red Army’s operational rear from partisans, saboteurs, and spies; to investigate and arrest conspirators and muti- neers, “traitors, deserters, spies, and criminal elements” at the combat front. 104 A personal account of this can be found in Adamishin, Anatoly: Human Rights, Perestroika and the Cold War, where former Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin describes how his own father disappeared during the first months of the war; p. 8 105 A well-known example is the Katyn massacre, a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by the Soviet NKVD. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000. The victims were murdered in the Katyn forest in Russia, the Kalinin (Tver) and Khar- kov prisons and elsewhere. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being “intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials.” Since Poland’s conscription system required every unex-.

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