History of England 1-6

Russia, however, as the ancestral leader of the ‘degenerate’ Slavic nations, was to receive less considerate treatment. The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact had been signed the previous year, but Hitler had no intention of honouring it. The failures of the USSR in the Winter War against Finland, coupled with Stalin’s timely cull of his own officers, gave him his opportunity. Hitler had issued a decree that ‘The struggle against Russia was one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be carried out with merciless harshness.’ This was not a war, he said, that could be waged ‘in a knightly fashion’. The language of spite, violence and murder sprang to his lips as if from some secret recess of Hell. Hitler told his officials that his great invasion of Russia was to occur on 20 May.

Slaughter by conventional means carried on. During the bombing of Belgrade, 17,000 civilians were killed in a single day. The Yugoslavs signed an act of surrender, and national dissolution followed. Serbia, now under occupation, was succeeded as leader of the former union by a newly forged Fascist state of Croatia, with results that would be felt decades after the war had ended. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the Greek dictator Metaxas refused the Italian demand that he surrender his country’s ports. The Italian invasion of Greece, undertaken largely to impress Germany, was considered ‘easy to accomplish’, but it quickly sank into a vortex of lives lost in the cause of national self-respect. An overconfident Italian army found itself driven back into the mountains of Albania by dogged Greek opponents, but this hope for a free Europe quickly died when the Germans moved in to aid their ally, and Greece was divided between the two Axis powers.

Another large annexation was taking place. In the early morning of 22 June 1941, the Germans initiated their attack on Russia. Sixty-seven aerodromes were attacked and five cities subjected to bombardment, before the Germans began their march across the frontier. Three thousand Ukrainians were killed by the NKVD, the Communist secret police, followed by the massacre of Jews in Romania. This was not war as it had ever been envisaged. As the Germans advanced closer to Moscow, barbed wire and deep ditches were laid along their route. Seven thousand Jews at Borisov were shot ‘in the manner of tinned sardines’. The killers confirmed their slaughter by consuming bottles of alcohol. Such a recourse was not unusual: German doctors engaged to separate the healthy from the sick in the death camps could stomach such work only when drunk.

Everything changed on 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent American response, when Germany declared war on the United States. The Allies, immensely heartened, counselled time and patience – victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Hong Kong surrendered to the Axis powers on 25 December, and 11,000 Allied prisoners were taken. The death camps multiplied in almost unimaginable ways. In Sobibor, in the Lubin district of Poland, the Axis troops killed 250,000 Jews in a year. Auschwitz was one of the most notorious of the camps, but the procedure was to be one of ‘concealment’. Whether this suggests guilt or fear of punishment is difficult to determine, though the euphemisms employed are telling: ‘special treatment’ referred to the mass murder of Jews; a ‘special action’ was an individual massacre. The latter often served as popular entertainment for visiting officials.

31

Would you like an onion?

In Britain, as rationing became even more severe, the most unlikely foodstuffs became luxury items. Jokes about onions wrapped up and offered as house-warming presents or wedding gifts quickly proved prophetic, but beer was still very much available. Despite severe rationing of grain, the government accepted that it would be foolish to deny the nation its follies. An unintended consequence was the new acceptance of women in pubs, or, rather, the new willingness of women to enter them. And grain could go to still more salutary uses. As a sign outside one bomb-wrecked pub proudly proclaimed: ‘Our windows are gone but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.’

Nevertheless, life for civilians was harsh and uncertain; it was increasingly felt that the nation’s soldiers had it easy by comparison. Aerial bombardment had ensured that the ordinary citizen was placed in the front line, while the soldier was frequently kicking his heels, waiting to leave. One observer, speaking for many, noted: ‘Although I can readily believe that most serving men want to play their part in winning the war, I can’t resist the taunt that joining the Army is about the quickest way to forget all about it.’