Poles and Ukrainians fought with or against the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and each other according to the moment and the place. In Poland this conflict, which after 1944 transmuted into guerilla warfare against the Communist state, took the lives of some 30,000 Poles in the years 1945-48. In the Soviet-occupied Ukraine, the last partisan commander, Roman Shukhevych, was killed near Lviv in 1950, though sporadic anti-Soviet activity persisted for a few years more in Ukraine and Estonia in particular.
It was in the Balkans, however, that the Second World War was experienced above all as a civil war, and a uniquely murderous one at that. In Yugoslavia the meaning of conventional labels—collaborator, resister—was particularly opaque. What was Draza Mihajlović, the Serb leader of the Chetnik[10] partisans? A patriot? A resister? A collaborator? What was it that moved men to fight? Resistance against the (German, Italian) occupier? Revenge against domestic political enemies from the inter-war Yugoslav state? Inter-community conflicts among Serbs, Croats and Muslims? Pro- or anti-Communist goals? For many people more than one motive was in play.
Thus Ante Pavelic’s Ustase regime in the Croatian puppet state murdered Serbs (well over 200,000) and Muslims. But Mihajlović’s (mostly Serb) royalist partisans also killed Muslims. For this reason if no other the Muslims of Bosnia sometimes cooperated with the German armies in their own defence. Tito’s Communist partisans, despite their strategic goal of ridding Yugoslavia of German and Italian forces, devoted time and resources to destroying the Chetniks first—not least just because this was an objective within their reach. Writing a decade later and already disillusioned with the outcome of the battles between partisans and Chetniks in which he himself played a heroic role, Milovan Djilas bore witness to the real experience of war and resistance in occupied Yugoslavia: ‘For hours both armies clambered up rocky ravines to escape annihilation or to destroy a little group of their countrymen, often neighbours, on some jutting peak six thousand feet high, in a starving, bleeding, captive land. It came to mind that this was what had become of all our theories and visions of the workers’ and peasants’ struggle against the bourgeoisie.’
Further south, Greece—like Yugoslavia—experienced World War Two as a cycle of invasion, occupation, resistance, reprisals and civil war, culminating in five weeks of clashes in Athens between Communists and the royalist-backing British forces in December 1944, after which an armistice was agreed upon in February 1945. Fighting broke out again in 1946, however, and lasted three more years, ending with the rout of the Communists from their strongholds in the mountainous north. While there is no doubt that the Greek resistance to the Italians and the Germans was more effective than the better known resistance movements in France or Italy—in 1943-44 alone it killed or wounded over 6,000 German soldiers—the harm it brought to Greeks themselves was greater still by far. The KKE (Communist) guerillas and the Athens-based and western-backed government of the king terrorized villages, destroyed communications and divided the country for decades to come. By the time the fighting was over, in September 1949, 10 percent of the population was homeless. The Greek civil war lacked many of the ethnic complexities of the fighting in Yugoslavia and Ukraine,[11] but in human terms it was costlier still
The post-war impact of these European civil wars was immense. In a simple sense they meant that the war in Europe did not finish in 1945, with the departure of the Germans: it is one of the traumatic features of civil war that even after the enemy is defeated he remains in place; and with him the memory of the conflict. But the internecine struggles of these years did something else. Together with the unprecedented brutality of the Nazi and, later, Soviet occupations they corroded the very fabric of the European state. After them, nothing would ever be the same. In the truest sense of a much-abused term, they transformed World War Two—Hitler’s war—into a social revolution.
To begin with, the serial occupation of territory by foreign powers inevitably eroded the authority and legitimacy of local rulers. Purportedly autonomous in name, the Vichy regime in France—like Father Józef Tiso’s Slovak state or Pavelic’s Ustase regime in Zagreb—was a dependent agent of Hitler and most people knew it. At municipal level the collaborating local authorities in Holland or Bohemia retained a degree of initiative, but only by avoiding any conflict with the wishes of their German masters. Further east the Nazis and later the Soviets replaced pre-existing institutions with men and machinery of their own, except where it suited them to exploit for a while local divisions and ambitions for their own advantage. Ironically, it was only in those countries allied with the Nazis—Finland, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary—and thus left to rule themselves that a degree of real local independence was preserved, at least until 1944.
With the exception of Germany and the heartland of the Soviet Union, every continental European state involved in World War Two was occupied at least twice: first by its enemies, then by the armies of liberation. Some countries—Poland, the Baltic states, Greece, Yugoslavia—were occupied three times in five years. With each succeeding invasion the previous regime was destroyed, its authority dismantled, its elites reduced. The result in some places was a clean slate, with all the old hierarchies discredited and their representatives compromised. In Greece, for example, the pre-war dictator Metaxas had swept aside the old parliamentary class. The Germans removed Metaxas. Then the Germans too were pushed out in their turn, and those who had collaborated with them stood vulnerable and disgraced.
The liquidation of old social and economic elites was perhaps the most dramatic change. The Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews was not only devastating in its own right. It had significant social consequences for those many towns and cities of central Europe where Jews had constituted the local professional class: doctors, lawyers, businessmen, professors. Later, often in the very same towns, another important part of the local bourgeoisie—the Germans—was also removed, as we have seen. The outcome was a radical transformation of the social landscape—and an opportunity for Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians and others to move up into the jobs (and homes) of the departed.
This leveling process, whereby the native populations of central and eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler’s most enduring contribution to European social history. The German plan had been to destroy the Jews and the educated local intelligentsia in Poland and the western Soviet Union, reduce the rest of the Slav peoples to neo-serfdom and place the land and the government in the hands of resettled Germans. But with the arrival of the Red Army and the expulsion of the Germans the new situation proved uniquely well adapted to the more truly radicalizing projects of the Soviets.
One reason for this was that the occupation years had seen not just rapid and bloodily-enforced upward social mobility but also the utter collapse of law and the habits of life in a legal state. It is misleading to think of the German occupation of continental Europe as a time of pacification and order under the eye of an omniscient and ubiquitous power. Even in Poland, the most comprehensively policed and repressed of all the occupied territories, society continued to function in defiance of the new rulers: the Poles constituted for themselves a parallel underground world of newspapers, schools, cultural activities, welfare services, economic exchange and even an army—all of them forbidden by the Germans and carried on outside the law and at great personal risk.
10
The wartime ‘Chetnik’ partisans were named after upland guerilla bands who had fought against Serbia’s Ottoman rulers in the eighteenth century.
11
But not all—the Greek Communists’ opportunistic post-war support for the annexation to Communist Bulgaria of ethnically Slav regions of northern Greece did little to advance their cause.