TV review: The Savage Peace told a story we don’t want to hear | The Herald
This was a thoroughly depressing programme, full of execution, rape and ethnic cleansing, and there was no respite from the horror and no nice ending.
1945: The Savage Peace (BBC2) told the largely unknown story of what happened to the Germans after their surrender. For those living outside Germany, notably in Czechoslovakia and Poland, ordinary people who had committed no crime, but who merely happened to be German or Ethnic German, were subject to horrific atrocities which matched what the Nazis did, not in scale, of course, but in method.
I suppose we don’t like to admit this. Most of us prefer to think the Nazis were evil, and so that explains their actions, because if we allow some subtlety to shade the story that will discomfit us, making us think that perhaps any country, and any person, could gas, rape and slaughter. Yet this programme forced us to acknowledge that the ‘good’ side in the war were also capable of horrors. In fact, they often took care to precisely match what the Nazis did, pushing Germans into concentration camps, carrying out public hangings, lining them up by a pit or a ditch to shoot them en masse, and branding them with swastikas and armbands even though ‘their only crime is that they happen so speak German.’
It was impossible immediately after the war, and perhaps even now, to conceive of a German as a victim. They were branded as Nazis, and the concept of collective guilt made an individual’s own innocence or goodness invisible. They were German and so were fair game for the tortured, weary and angry populations who were suddenly free and, sadly, but inevitably, wanted revenge.
The programme showed some images of Britain in 1945, and it was all about bunting, street parties and kisses, but that tiny snippet of London’s VE Day is all we saw before moving East. Indeed, Britain’s jolly VE Day was unique only to us. Elsewhere the peace was "violent and chaotic’.
This was an oral history, moving across Eastern Europe to tell the individual stories of Germans, or German speakers, who were raped, battered or stripped of their citizenship and forced to leave in what was the largest ethnic cleansing operation in history.
Christa Ronke, a teenager in Berlin, was raped at gunpoint by a Russian soldier, as were the other women in her flat. Stalin had given the soldiers three days in which to do as they pleased, as a reward for taking Berlin, and so they raped German women.
In Czechoslovakia, there was an extreme rage unleashed against ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. Some had swastikas carved into their faces and then the wound was rubbed with salt. This was a horrible Czechoslovak version of the Nazis marking Jews with a yellow star. After viewing the treatment of the Sudeten Germans one of the witnesses says bluntly, ‘I would never want to live in this country again’.
We would assume that Poland suffered worst under the Nazis, but most of the violence reported in this programme was meted out in Czechoslovakia, including the most disturbing scene: Germans were lined up by the roadside and shot in the back. As they slumped forward, many still alive, a truck was gleefully driven towards them and deliberately driven over their legs. The bodies buckle, shift and roll under the wheels like rag dolls.
Poland had its own methods of hitting back at resident Germans. The concentration camp at Zgoda was taken over by a Jewish partisan called Solomon Morel and Germans were imprisoned there, with Morel telling them, ‘You will think of Auschwitz as a kindergarten by comparison.’
Much of this was revealed to us in stark colour film and photography, which is relatively rare for WWII film, so had the effect of setting these stories apart from the war, and therefore releasing it from the narrative of ‘good’ versus’ bad, or ‘Nazis’ versus ‘us’. We were forced to think that perhaps we’re all capable of horrors.
It was a depressing programme indeed, and the only shred of hope came from the ‘wolf children’. These were a band of East Prussian children who lost their parents and lived alone in a forest in Lithuania, living wild and falling asleep at night to the howls of wolves. Locals screamed at the children, throwing freezing water at them and refusing to help, but the tiny group of siblings stayed together and survived the war. I felt slight hope in hearing the children’s stories, but how can they have any hope in their chests, especially when one of them admitted, ‘I wanted to force my mother to commit suicide.’