Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque

      And indeed, that friendship continues today. In the 1990s, they were still in need of food, and we in the West joined with the Americans in sending it to them. Now, in 2007, we understand that Hoover in 1920 spoke the truth when others were dumb. In those days so long ago and so different from now, he was an accurate prophet. Yet he was simply carrying out one of the basic Christian precepts of Western society, to forgive your enemy, and do good to those who hurt you. One could say there was no prescience at all. The ideas of Hoover, as Gandhi said of his own ideas, are as old as the hills and so endure.

      In 1919, Hoover was in Brussels to attend a conference to present to the Germans a formula he had devised for solving the blockade problem. A British Admiral, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, was the head of the British delegation. He saw Hoover in the hotel lobby one day, and said brusquely, ‘Young man, I don’t see why you Americans want to feed these Germans.’ To which Hoover immediately replied, ‘Old man, I don’t see why you British want to starve women and children after they are licked.’²⁸

      From Brussels Hoover went on to Paris, where he helped President Wilson negotiate the details of the German peace treaty. He was still struggling against his nemesis, Winston Churchill, who energetically advocated continuation of the blockade in the House of Commons: ‘Germany is very near starvation,’ Hoover believed, ‘… [there is] the great danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle.’²⁹ Churchill was opposed not only by Hoover and Wilson, but even by his former ally, Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, who said, ‘It will remain forever a terrible precedent in modern history that against all pledges, all precedents and all traditions, the representatives of Germany were never even heard; nothing was left to them but to sign a treaty at a moment when famine and exhaustion and threat of revolution made it impossible not to sign it …’³⁰

      Hoover protested to the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who immediately criticized him for failing to send in the food. Hoover let him have it, in ‘a torrent that he ought to remember even in his grave,’ slamming the British and French officials who were obstructing his relief work. To the Prime Minister’s face, Hoover denounced the ‘grasping attitude of your trickster minions.’ The British navy was even preventing the German fishing boats from going out to catch fish. Hundreds of thousands of tons of food were lying on the docks at Rotterdam waiting to go up-river to Germany, while Germans starved.

      As Hoover dryly noted after, Lloyd George was an overworked but a reasonable man.³¹ Lloyd George later quoted Hoover’s words in a speech of his own, demanding that the French in particular cease their obstructionism, otherwise they ‘would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread bolshevism in Europe.’³²

Somewhere between half a million and a million Germans starved after the war. These deaths were largely caused by the British blockade, or so the Germans believed. But they also had been deceived by their own Kaiser. Early in the planning for the war, the Kaiser’s Cabinet, foreseeing a food shortage, decided that to preserve the potato crop essential to feed the population, the harvest should be stored not in clamps* in the field as was the custom, but in the basements of schools and other public buildings across the nation, to reduce the losses caused by rain, frost and animals. So in 1914 and in 1915, the potatoes were stored in basements. The basements were too warm, and the potatoes rotted, spreading a disease known as phytophthora infestans (the terrible plant destroyer). The cure for this was known, copper sulphate, invented in Germany several decades before. But Germany’s supply of copper was scarcely enough for munitions. The Cabinet decided for the munitions. Uncontrolled, the disease infected seed potatoes, spreading devastation across the countryside. Civilians began to starve en masse, and soldiers home on leave in 1917 and 1918 saw their relatives dying. They began to doubt their leaders, and the war.

      The doubt spread through the army like the terrible destroyer through the fields. In the summer of 1918, the collapse of the soldiers’ morale caused General Erich Ludendorff to advise the Kaiser to make peace.

      The mass deaths from starvation became part of the culture of resentment fomented and exploited by Hitler, as the communists had done. Most Germans came to believe that the army had not been defeated at the front in 1918, as Hitler repeatedly said in his speeches during his campaigns for power from 1919 onwards. Largely victorious during the war, holding enormous tracts of enemy territory at the Armistice in 1918, the army, and corporal Hitler with it, felt betrayed by ‘plutocrats, Jews, profiteers and communists’ on the home front. It can scarcely be believed that the people who eventually voted for Hitler were indifferent to the memory of their own hunger and those who caused it, or to the deaths of millions of people, and those who starved them.

      So, although Hoover was right to criticize the British for attempting to starve German women and children, even he was not aware that infesting the lies and errors that caused the war, and prolonged it to 1945, there was a terrible destroyer spread by Germany’s own leaders.

* Shallow trenches filled with root crops, then covered with earth.

II THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM?

      For Britain, the most important aim of diplomacy in the 1930s had been to maintain in Europe a balance of power so that no nation would be strong enough to threaten her interests. In 1939, Britain hoped to achieve this partly by threatening Germany with war if Germany attacked Poland. Germany was seen as the only threat, and Poland was the place to end her aggressions. But, in fact, Poland was attacked in 1939 by two European aggressors, Germany and the USSR. Six years later, Poland was free of Germans, but the USSR was still in ugly possession of eastern Poland and other territories it had first taken with the help of Hitler. The British guarantee to Poland had not been fulfilled. And the Soviet threat to Europe in 1945 was great.

      A decision was made in 1945 that shaped modern history. The last battle of the Second World War was not to be fought. As the Polish Minister Babinski in Ottawa said to the Prime Minister of Canada Mackenzie King in July 1945, ‘Poland has lost the war she fought, and the Allies have lost the war … Russian communism has won the day.’¹ The weakness of the British vis-à-vis the Soviets is often assumed to be the cause, but the ‘weak’ British of 1939 had gone to war against Hitler; and in 1940, when they were even weaker, the British had continued to defy him. Now the victorious British of 1945 were meekly collaborating in the Soviet takeover of all eastern Europe. Why?

      The answer begins with one of the dominant international facts of the twentieth century, the strength of Germany. The Axis alliance in 1941–42 seemed so strong that our leaders believed that it was imperative to ally ourselves whole-heartedly with the dictator Stalin against the dictator Hitler.

      This was one of the more astonishing reversals in history, for the British, French, Canadians and Americans had all fought against communism during the first days of the Russian revolution. They had failed to suppress communism in Russia, but their old enemy Germany had secretly begun to co-operate with Soviet Russia to re-arm in the 1920s. The Germans under the Weimar Republic had begun to rebuild their air force and army, which was illegal under the Treaty of Versailles. In Kazan, German tank units under General Heinz Guderian were secretly trained, and helped to train Red Army units; at Lipetsk airbase nearby, the Germans tested ‘a whole new generation of German fighters and heavy bombers.’² And in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed in a secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, to conquer Poland together and then split the spoils. Assured of a speedy victory in Poland, Hitler courted the risk that Britain and France would declare war on Germany. Thus started the Second World War.

      Hitler continued the war against the British and French with the help of the Soviets, who delivered oil, rubber, wheat and strategic metals in return for some machinery and for Hitler’s compliance in their takeover of the Baltic states. Thus for almost two years, the UK and British Commonwealth – with a little help from France – fought against German armies fuelled