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End-of-War Retributions

In Yugoslavia, between 20 and 30 thousand believed to have collaborated with the German occupation forces were shot dead in what has been described as a frenzy of retribution. In Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, those who had collaborated with the Germans were also hunted.

In France toward the end of the war the resistance movement assassinated Germans, collaborators and others they deemed unworthy of living, such as black marketers. According to rough estimates, the French Resistance killed 2500 people between the autumn of 1943 and June 6, 1945. [note]

With the defeat of Germany looming, more people identified with the resistance - which had been limited to a few brave activists. The German commander in Paris, von Choltitz, was trying to work out an orderly withdrawal and he met with a leader of the resistance, Alexandre Parodi, who told him that he had no control over the movement. "The resistance," said Parodi, "is spontaneous."

The leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle, struggled to keep his resistance movement disciplined, and when the war ended he was quick in his disapproval of random killings. De Gaulle wished to hold to the rule of law, while some outside of his organization found opportunity in the atmosphere of victory over the Germans and fascists to assassinate personal enemies.

In France, women accused of having associated with German soldiers had their heads shaved. Some of them had swastikas painted on their foreheads. Some were stripped naked and then paraded through the streets. In Denmark and Norway similar retributions against women occurred, with men able to mask their jealousy with patriotism and moral righteousness. In Denmark, several hundred young women were jailed whose only crime was consorting with young German soldiers.

About collaboration the French author Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the whole country had both resisted and collaborated. Everything we did, he said, was equivocal. A subtle poison, he added, corrupted even our best actions.

Under de Gaulle, many who were arrested as suspected collaborators were interrogated and then released. Among those who stood trial and received the sentence of death was the eighty-nine year old World War I hero, General Pétain, who had been the chief of state, or figurehead, of the Vichy regime. An opinion poll indicated that only three percent favored death for Pétain, and his sentence was reduced to life in prison. The active leader of the Vichy regime, the prime minister, Pierre Laval, had not been a Nazi sympathizer and he had bargained as hard as he could with the Germans for the sake of France. He defended himself in court with such skill that the court cut his trial short. The court sentenced him to death. According to a poll, sixty-six percent approved of the sentence, and the sentence stuck. "I die," he said, "for having loved my country too much." He was shot on October 15, 1945.

The new regime in France targeted journalists they thought had been opportunistic in their support of the Vichy regime. The desire to murder annoying journalists was fulfilled as many were quickly tried and shot. Writers and journalists known to have had fascist views before the war were less likely to be targeted.

Accusations arose in France that the line was being crossed into punishment of people for their ideas rather than for criminal acts. A writer who had been with the resistance, François Mauriac, raised this claim in editorials in his newspaper Le Figaro, and he was joined by another resistance writer, Albert Camus.

In Norway, passion worked against the lesser offenders compared to the treatment of the great offenders. Cases against the greater offenders took longer to prepare and as time passed passions subsided.

From a few Norwegians came complaints that in the passion of retribuition civil liberties were being ignored. The leading collaborator in Norway was a fundamentalist Christian, Vidkun Quisling - after whom a word meaning traitor was coined. Quisling had headed Norway's government during the German occupation. His trial began on August 20, 1945. He pleaded not guilty to all changes, including the theft of silverware. The court questioned his sanity, and he was examined with electrical explorations of his brain. Deemed sane, his trial continued, as the end of which he said,

I would pray to God that for the sake of Norway a large number of Norway's sons will become such traitors as I, but that they will not be thrown into jailed.

He was found innocent of some of the petty charges against him, and he was hanged on October 24...

Plans, Expropriations and Denazification for Germany

Representatives of de Gaulle's movement favored dividing Germany into smaller, independent states - as France had wanted for Germany at the close of World War I. Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, advocated turning Germany into an agrarian society. These options were rejected. But it was decided that for an indefinite period of time Germany was not to have the industrial capacity for warfare.

The conquerors decided that Germany was to exist as an independent nation, divided temporarily into zones of occupation. Germany's production of arms, ammunition, aircraft and sea-going ships was to be prohibited, and the production of metals, chemicals, machinery and other items necessary to a war economy were to be "rigidly controlled." They decided that for the time being no central German government was to be established and that they were to control the country's international finance and trade in order to prevent Germany from developing war potential.

The Allies agreed that Germany's standard of living was not to exceed "the average of the standards of living of European countries." And the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union agreed to divide Germany's navy and merchant marine among themselves. Germany's submarines were to be sunk, except for thirty or less, which were also to be shared by them.

The Americans and the British were eager to see recovery in Germany. Stalin was less than eager. In the Soviet zone, the occupying forces were ripping off as much as they could and taking or sending it home. The Russians took the machinery that Germans needed to keep businesses going, creating more unemployment in their zone. And from people's homes envious soldiers ripped out electrical cables, toilets and anything else they could get their hands on.

Expropriations

The conquerors were following a plan that moved people to fit new boundaries they had agreed to - rather than fitting boundaries to match the location of people. This great social engineering project reduced Germany in size by 23 percent. Silesia, largely agricultural, was given to Poland although it had been thoroughly German for centuries. Polish people were eager to settle where Germans had been. They pushed against the Germans. Again German women were raped, and Germans were robbed as they were forced into sealed boxcars and shipped west.

After the German atrocities at the town of Lidice, the Czech leader, Eduard Beneš, had agreed to the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland, and he issued a decree allowing the expropriation of the property of Magyars or anyone else who had collaborated with the Germans. The Allies agreed, and after the war the Czechs confiscated 6.2 million acres of German-owned farmland. They drove Germans from their homes and occasionally murdered them. To some Czechs this was justice. To some it was more of the might that makes right that Hitler believed in.

Nearly ten thousand Germans arrived in the reduced Germany, by train and on foot, from East Prussia, from Danzig (which was renamed Gdansk), and elsewhere. Germany's economy was in shambles. Diseases were on the rise, with the Allies splashing DDT around. Children under fifteen were receiving immunization shots against diphtheria. People, especially in urban areas, were without sufficient food. And food shipments from the U.S. helped.

Some of the British and Americans were also greedy, but not for the domestic appliances - which they were more accustomed to than the Russians. When the occupation began, an American soldier who was seen trying to open a bank vault with his side-arm. Discrete looting of museums occurred. The British and American authorities were opposed to looting. The British government sent in agents from Scotland Yard. The British commander, Montgomery, announced that drastic measures were to be taken against looting as well as rape and other crimes - against crimes committed by Allied soldiers or those displaced persons freed from German authority.

The Americans prosecuted a theft in the millions by a U.S. welfare officer, Captain Kathleen Nash and Colonel James Durant, from the castle that the Army was using as a recreation club. The army had requisitioned the Hesse family home and castle, driving the family elsewhere. The jewels were discovered although they had been well hidden, in a welded-shut metal box behind brick and mortar, and the officers thought that the Hesse family were just a bunch of Nazis anyway and why not take their share of victor's loot. [note]

The U.S. was ashamed of vice in its zone. It had a policy of no collaboration between its occupation forces and the Germans. A Bavarian Catholic priest trying to organize recovery had difficulty meeting with representatives of the U.S. Army because of it. But relationships sprang up between soldiers and German women anyway.

After U.S. officials discovered how an imprisoned Nazi, the famous Hermann Goering (Göring), received a cyanide capsule they refused to disclose that Goering had managed to bribe an American officer of the guard, Lieutenant Jack G. "Tex" Wheelis. Goering had given the officer his gold watch, gold pen and gold cigarette-case. [note]

The Russians, Americans and British raced to get their hands on German technological secrets and hardware. Naval equipment interested them, as did jet propulsion and rocketry, synthetic rubber, oil catalysts and supersonic wind tunnels. From the Nordhausen plant in the Harz Mountains, the U.S. shipped home 400 tons of equipment. The U.S. began to recruit those involved with the rockets that had been sent against Britain. And the Russians began employing German scientists and others they thought they could use.

The powerless in Germany were creating their own power, and creating crime. Displaced persons were living in camps where they were receiving free rations and were free to come and go. Some of them formed gangs and were engaged in black market activities. Berlin and some other cities became steeped in crime, and the Allied Control Commission decided to allow the German police to have firearms. Curfews were in existence, and every night in Berlin after curfew shots could be heard. And hunger being what it was, a black market butcher was discovered doing business in human flesh.

Germans were getting by on 1000 or 900 calories a day, and in the British zone during the first winter after the war it dropped to 400 per day - half the amount allocated at the Belson concentration camp. Rumors spread that the Allies had agreed to make the Germans suffer three years of concentration camp conditions. It was widely expected that the winter of 1945-46 was going to kill a lot of Germans. Before winter set in, pits were dug for burial. But the winter was surprisingly mild.

Denazification Begins

The victors did not intend to let the Germans work out their own views as the Italians were doing in emerging from Mussolini's fascism. At the Potsdam Conference the victors agreed that,

all members of the Nazi Party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes shall be removed from public and semi-public office, and from positions of responsibility in important private undertakings. Such persons shall be replaced by persons who, by their political and moral qualities, are deemed capable of assisting in developing genuine democratic institutions in Germany.

And:

German education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas.

In the American zone virtually all adults were presented with a questionnaire, and for the Germans it was a sad joke, a parody spreading that asked, "Did you play with toy soldiers as a child. Is so, what regiment?" Aside from the Nuremberg war crimes trial, the Americans conducted court proceedings against 169,282 Germans. The British tried only 22,296 and the Russians 18,000.

National Socialist (Nazi) party membership had had around 12 million. At one point as many as three-quarters of the German population had been sympathizers or supporters of the party. Many had joined the National Socialists much as people would join a local club in the United States: because it was good business and good socially. And they were included in the American occupation's round up of Nazis. By Christmas 1945, the Americans forced around 141,000 Germans from their jobs. They dismissed 80 percent of their zone's school teachers, forced 50 percent of its doctors from practicing medicine and dismissed all those on the staff of public health - people whose services were important to the health crisis Germany was having.

One of those who suffered from the attempt at denazification by the Allies was John Rabe, who had been a hero to the Chinese at Nanjing. After he returned to Germany, sometime around 1938, he had been threatened and silenced by Hitler's secret police (the Gestapo). The war had reduced him to poverty and hunger, and after the war, having been a member of the National Socialist party in the thirties, he was subject to arrest. The Russians arrested him and interrogated him for three days and three nights. The British arrested him and interrogated him for an entire day. The British gave him a work permit, which they later denied him. And, unable to work, he was reduced to penury.

The Americans still associated Germany's aristocracy with evil - a carry over from World War I and Prussian Junkers. Roosevelt had retained it, to the surprise of George Kennan, a diplomat who had been stationed in Germany and knew better. Along with so-called Nazis, the Americans were targeting people whose surname had the aristocratic von attached.

Directors of companies that employed more than 3,000 persons were also suspect.

Some in charge of German prisoners found pleasure treating harshly those they saw as evil. In some cases, inmates were not allowed visits from their family or their lawyer. The American occupation authority awakened to abuses had to transfer a prison commander who had come to believe that he had license to give Germans a dose of their own medicine. Ernst von Salomon, a right-wing nationalist writer suffered at the hands of a couple of sadistic guards who described themselves as "Mississippi boys." [note] According to von Salomon, some American guards were enjoying their power. In what was perhaps an isolated incident, German men and women arriving at the prison were taken into a room and beaten, and women were raped while excited GIs watched through a window.

The Americans were made of the same material as the Germans. Indeed, most of them were genetically Germanic. But every country had its percentage of people willing to express their sadism if circumstances allowed it. At the end of the war, some Jewish inmates had the strength to tear apart a concentration camp commander. Their rage was understandable. The nations occupying Germany, on the other hand, had a rationale to live up to - justice through law.

Nuremberg War Crime Trials

Germans generally did not see the Allies as ending the Nazi era with justice. Instead they saw it as more of might makes right. And that is how they viewed the war crimes trials that the Allies conducted at the city of Nuremberg. This was the trial of those accused of major war crimes, of crimes against humanity and the waging or conspiring to wage aggressive war. The trial was conducted by an international military tribunal, with four judges presiding: from the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom (Britain) and the United States. It was the first trial of its kind, begun on November 20, 1945. It was a precedent in modern history and a new page in international law.

The highest ranking National Socialists - Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had already killed themselves. Goering was tried but escaped by having committed suicide while in prison. The sentences were handed down on October 1, 1946. Ten of the defendants were sentenced to death. Seven were given sentences of imprisonment from seven years to life, and three were acquitted. The Russians were unhappy, wanting death for all the defendants.

The hangings took place on October 16, and the executioner, Master Sergeant John C. Woods, perhaps purposely, perhaps not, made the hangings so that the condemned struck the framework of the scaffold, which lacerated their faces as they fell.

The Occupation of Japan

According to the Potsdam Declaration, Japan was to be occupied until all of its war-making potential was destroyed and peace and security were established. Japan was to be divested of its overseas empire. Japan's industry was to be restricted sufficiently to prevent rearmament. All obstacles to the development of democratic tendencies were to be removed. "Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights" were to be established. And the leaders meeting at Potsdam declared:

We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.

Japan was obliged to give up Formosa (Taiwan) - its first colony, gained in 1895. According to the Allied agreement, the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kurile Islands, went to the Russians.

After Potsdam, the Truman administration and the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, resisted arguments by the Russians that they be allowed to take part in the occupation of Japan. President Truman agreed and was unhappy that the Russians had joined the war against Japan in early August.

MacArthur ruled Japan in the name of all the Allies, as head of what was called the Far Eastern Commission. But in fact it was the U.S. that was in charge, the  U.S. seeing this as right given the contribution the U.S. had made to defeating the Japanese.

MacArthur began his rule concerned about both democracy in Japan and the ability of Japan to maintain a healthy economy. Japan was economically devastated. People were hungry and many were desperate. U.S. leaders believed that reparations payments were impractical - while the world's leading proponent of Marxism's brotherhood of man, Stalin, was criticizing the U.S. for being too lenient with the Japanese.

Japan's military establishment was demobilized, but, unlike Germany, a central government was allowed in Japan, with MacArthur ruling from behind the scenes, appearing as giving "suggestions" and "advice" and as a benevolent overseer. Emperor Hirohito was still looked to as the nation's chief of state, or at least father figure. His role, as MacArthur and the U.S. State Department saw it, was to ensure domestic stability.

Keeping Hirohito as emperor also gave the United States more of an image of benevolence for the Japanese - a benevolence that actually came more from leaders than the masses. Sixty-seven percent in Britain and thirty-three percent in the United States had favored the execution of Hirohito. And most Americans, focusing on the righteousness of their cause and the evil of Japan's efforts, did not want to see Hirohito continue as emperor.

The strategy of hearts and minds worked well. U.S. troops were not roaming about intervening in local politics. Local government had remained intact. The Japanese were relieved. People who had seen the Americans as devils and barbarians now saw them as quite human. Foreign troops levels in Japan were kept at a low level - less than 200,000 after 1945 and before the Korean War. As at the end of World War I, when democracy was seen as on the winning side in that war, democracy was again winning support. And the Japanese were now respecting Americans for their belief in democracy, human freedom and dignity - beliefs that came easy to many after years of authoritarianism.

The belief in empire and militarism was rapidly evaporating in Japan. Ordinary Japanese were criticizing wartime leaders - who were being blamed for the war more than was the Emperor. Some would continue to respect the old ways and the old military virtues, but what they saw as foreign influences were overwhelming them. Cooperation, dear to the Japanese, was now seen as the more workable way for the nation to conduct itself vis-à-vis other nations. Darwinism applied to international affairs - the view also of the Italian and German fascists - was on its way out.

Stories of atrocities by Japanese soldiers returned with Japan's soldiers from China and the Pacific. Veterans confessed. Men who had fought for their country, many of them walking the street in their old uniforms were disturbed by looks of disrespect and disgust. Some Japanese continued to be unaware of atrocities committed by their military. Some who had served as camp guards chose not to remember the brutality there. And some Japanese made the excuse that people would hear elsewhere in the world: that during war occasional brutality was to be expected. Public reaction to excesses committed by the military of one's own nation would always be a mix of blissful ignorance, unawareness or excuses on the one hand and disapproval on the other.

One of the first things that MacArthur did in Japan was to have political prisoners released, thousands of them , including Communists - some of whom were returning from exile. Everyone was to be free to participate in politics, to run for office and campaign. Over 300 political parties were in the making.

Labor unions had been outlawed in Japan, and MacArthur reversed this. From no labor unions in 1945, by the end of 1946 Japan would have 17,265 different unions. And much of the labor union leadership fell into the hands of those who believed in class struggle: the Communists.

A new constitution was in the making, written behind the scenes by a group of Americans selected by MacArthur. In its preamble was the prohibition of restoring war as a means of resolving international disputes - a "renunciation of war" tailored for a defeated aggressor nation. The Emperor presented the draft of the constitution to Japan's parliament - the Diet. Women were given the vote, and the voting age was lowered from 25 to 20. In April 1946, campaigning for seats in parliament was enthusiastic. And thirty-nine women were elected to seats.

In early November, 1945, MacArthur's command moved to reduce the power of  Japan's business conglomerates - the Zaibatsu - shocking Japanese business elite. Land reform, meanwhile, was underway, initiated by the Japanese themselves - something the Japanese had been toying with during the war. The reform took land from absentee landlords and gave it to those who had been tenant farmers. Lands with tenant farmers were to be divided into no larger than 2.45 acre plots and given to the tenants.

MacArthur did impose censorship on the Japanese. The press and radio broadcasting were censored, including news that censorship existed. No unfavorable opinion about the occupation was allowed. Discussions on the effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were forbidden. Motion pictures were censored, including the work of filmmakers whose movies had been forbidden during the war years. By January 1946, 670 newspaper articles had been banned. And U.S. military authorities had textbooks screened.

A directive from MacArthur's headquarters in December 1945 ordered the deletion of all references to Japan's Shinto religion from school textbooks, and school trips to Shinto shrines were forbidden. The Americans disliked Japan's mix of state and religion, and Shinto had been a state sponsored religion - much as Christianity had been in Europe, except that the religion was headed by what had been believed to be a living divinity - the Emperor. In his 1946 New Year message, Hirohito proclaimed that he was not divine and that rather than his reign resting on ancient myths it was based on "mutual trust and affection."

The downgrading of Shinto was no boon for Christianity. MacArthur's command welcomed Christian missionaries to Japan. Bibles were widely distributed, but the number of Japanese Christians by December 1948 - 342, 607 or six percent of the population - remained the same as before the war. [note]

Moves to punish militarism in Japan resulted in MacArthur making all who had been officers in Japan's army and navy since 1930 ineligible for appointive or elective office in any branch of government. So too were those who had belonged to ultra-nationalist organizations and had held office while the militarists were in power. Also, those who had held positions of responsibility in leading industrial, commercial and financial corporations during the reign of the militarists had to resign from their positions and were debarred from politics. All teachers were screened and their wartime activities investigated. By April 1949 over 942,000 had been investigated and just over 3000 found unacceptable.

To fulfill the agreement at Potsdam, war crimes had to be punished. Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried in Manila and hanged on February 22, 1946. He had been one of Japan's brightest generals and had opposed going to war against the United States. After Yamashita's victory in Malaya, Prime Minister Tojo, who did not like him, had put him at a desk job. After Tojo was dismissed in 1944, Yamashita was sent to the Philippines. There he struggled with chaos and against MacArthur. He saw Manila as strategically unimportant and ordered troops out of the city, but a subordinate commander did not obey. It was this band of more fanatical troops that committed the atrocities for which MacArthur held Yamashita responsible - responsible too for the atrocities at Singapore early in the war. Yamashita was one of the more humane men who commanded troops in World War II. He was a forthright and responsible man who claimed that the atrocities had occurred without his knowledge or control. But  MacArthur had decided that Yamashita had to be punished for having "failed utterly his soldier faith." MacArthur dismissed arguments supporting Yamashita. "The results," he said, "are beyond challenge."

Trials of those who had taken part in the brutalities involved in building the rail line from Thailand to Burma resulted in death by hanging of thirty-two, officers and enlisted men. Numerous others were sent to prison.

The war crimes trials for "Class A" war criminals began in May 1946. Eleven justices, representing the eleven victorious Allied nations, charged twenty-eight Class A war criminals with crimes against humanity and conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Among the prosecuted was the wartime prime minister, General Hideki Tojo and fourteen other generals, three admirals and five career diplomats. The commander at Nanjing at the time of the atrocity there, General Iwane Matsui, was among them. From the U.S. State Department, George Kennan went to Japan to evaluate the trials. He found them procedurally correct but ill-conceived, with a lot of procedural nonsense added. He saw the trials more as victor politics than good international law. Acquittals and punishments left the Japanese confused as to where whimsy was divided from justice in international law.

On December 24, 1948, Hideki Tojo and six others, including Matsui, were hanged.

The Soviet Union in East Europe and Iran

In addition to occupying its zone in Germany, and half of Austria, Russian troops were in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia. Slovakia's wartime leader, Tiso was among those to whom fate was unkind: he was charged as a war criminal and hanged - not that he was more of a criminal than Stalin. Tiso, a Catholic priest, had not been in charge of a victorious army. Stalin had more tanks than had Tiso.

The Soviet Union and Great Britain had agreed in 1942 that they would evacuate Iran within six months from the end of the war. At the end of the war the Soviet Union maneuvered for control of the oil in Iran's north, near its border. Kurdistan and Azerbaijan had been provinces of northern Iran (in the Caucasus region) occupied by the Russians, and in September 1945 some Azerbaijanis rebelled against their Iranian overlords and gained Russian support. Rebels forces also had arisen in Kurdistan. The British were out of Iran by March 1946, but the Russians remained. The Russians were negotiating with Iran for the creation of an Iran-Soviet oil company - the Iranians happy to deal with the Russians rather than the British. Iran was to have 51 percent share of the company, the Soviet Union 49 percent. A part of agreement between the Russians and Iranians was that Russia was to return the provinces of Azerbaijan and Turkestan to Iran. And Stalin readily let the revolutions in those places slide for the sake of access to oil. On May 9 the Soviet Union pulled out of Iran, and Iran moved into Azerbaijan and Kurdistan and severely punished its rebels.

Prisoners of War

At the end of the war, approximately 72,000 Russian prisoners of war who had labored in Norway for the German occupiers were repatriated, the Norwegians finding to their surprise that Soviet authorities were hardly interested in them. By October 1945 all of them had been sent back to the Soviet Union. In Norway were also Poles, Dutch, French and Czechs who had labored for the Germans, and they too were repatriated. And there were around 14,000 Poles and 12,000 Czechs who had been with the German army who were afraid to go home.

The Allies had agreed that at the end of the war people would be allowed to return to their home country. Many of the Japanese who surrendered to the Allies were sent home expeditiously. Until sometime in 1947, the British retained roughly 113,500 Japanese prisoners of war as laborers, the last Japanese in Malaya and Burma not being repatriated until October 1947. More than a year after the surrender it was reported that some 68,000 prisoners in Manchuria were still being employed by the Chinese. Roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million Japanese surrendered to the Russians, and they became a source of labor for the Russians. The Russians released their first contingent of Japanese prisoners of war in December 1946, and by the end of 1947 only 625,000 had been repatriated. [note]

German prisoners of war were treated well in Canada - and in the United States, where they had also been used as laborers on a contract basis to civilian employers. In the Midwest they worked in fields planting, hoeing, and picking vegetables. This extended into 1946, and an outraged International Red Cross complained that the United States, Britain and France were violating International Red Cross agreements they solemnly signed in 1929. Thousands of former German soldiers were being used to clear minefields, retrieve sea mines or raze shattered buildings, and the Red Cross pointed out that the Geneva Convention expressly forbade employing prisoners of war in any dangerous labor.

German prisoners of war in the United States had it good compared to those held by the Russians. Germans taken prisoner by the Russians numbered around 3,250,000, and about 36 percent of them - 1,200,000 - vanished in the Soviet Union, the rest of them trickling back to Germany in the years after war.

Russian prisoners of war held by the Germans had it no better than the German prisoners held by the Russians. An estimated 5.7 million Russians had been taken prisoner by the Germans between 1941 and the end of the war and of these about 3,300,000 had perished.

The British had promised the Russians that they would send to the Soviet Union all Soviet citizens in their zone, including those who did not want repatriation. Their agreement appears to have been made with little thought or concern and with the assumption that those not wanting to return were guilty of treason - such as those Russian prisoners who had chosen to fight on the side of the Germans. The British tried to talk the Americans into cooperating with this policy in their zone. The Americans went along with it but with skepticism and reluctance. The British handed over to the Russians thousands of men, women and children from their zone amid scenes that haunted ever after the British soldiers involved in it, including suicides by those being forced to return. The Americans handed over no more than a few hundred before they quit in disgust.

Among those shipped back to the Soviet Union against their will was Rauol Wallenberg, a Swede who had been working to save Jews in Hungary. When Soviet troops arrived in Hungary they grabbed Wallenberg, and in the years ahead they refused to answer questions about his whereabouts.

Some Russians who had been looking forward to being liberated by their country's soldiers were disappointed. Stalin had broadcast a general amnesty, but rather than greet the liberated Russians with joy, the liberated were greeted, in some cases at least, with frowns and insults. The Russians treated those who had been captured with suspicion. Many of them who had been innocent of treason were sent to do labor in Siberia or they met the same fate of those who had joined the German military.

Overall Results of Military Victory

The U.S. and Britain succeeded militarily against Italy without an occupation, leaving the Italians to deal with their own internal politics and fascists as they saw fit. This allowed the greatest friendliness to the United States and Britain.

The occupation of Germany by France, Britain and the United States ended in 1955, when their zones became the Federal Republic of Germany. Germans had some hostility to the occupiers, and in the beginning some tried to start an insurgency, but in the wake of World War II most Germans were sick of war and demoralized. They wanted merely to survive. Germany had had an advanced capitalist economy and Germans saw recourse in applying their skills to rebuilding. Germans were homogenous and respected order. Their nation had formally surrendered. Respect for the order created by the Western Powers helped. The insurgents of 1945 gained little support and faded away. The arrogance of occupation was largely forgotten or forgiven.

Japan was also a homogenous nation that had surrendered formally, with a population that respected order and authority. The general population had an increased distaste for war, and they met postwar deprivation with stoicism. Japan too had had an advanced capitalist economy, and the skilled were eager to create. The occupation force under U.S. General MacArthur largely impressed the Japanese. There was some hostility to foreigners, but it was not organized politically. Plans for resistance to the occupation had been discarded. The occupation benefited from leaving Emperor Hirohito in place and by functioning governments at the local and national level. The occupation ended and Japan received full sovereignty on April 28, 1952.

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