By Gianluca Cinelli
In
all ages of human history, torture has represented a fear and a reality
for prisoners of war. Soldiers captured in war can be the victims of
the victor’s retaliation immediately after battle as well as far behind
the front line, through interrogations for intelligence, forced-labour,
brain-washing. In fact, torture is not only physical. George Orwell
describes the perversion of psychological torture in his novel 1984 (1948)
by means of the symbol of Room 101. Primo Levi, the well-known
Auschwitz-witness, once wrote that “useless violence” in Nazi Lagers
consisted in inflicting apparently aimless physical and psychological
suffering in order to demolish the human dignity and resilience of
captives.
A
mass-scale case of ideological torture was the political re-education
of German POWs in Soviet concentration camps during WWII. In 1941 Walter
Ulbricht (1893-1973, he was President of the Democratic Republic of
Germany from 1960 up to his death), in exile in Moscow, thought that
German POWs could represent a useful instrument of propaganda, if they
could be won to the cause of Communism. Ulbricht believed that the Red
Army would eventually win the war, and he therefore saw the necessity to
create a group of German Soviet agents who would trigger a socialist
revolution in Germany after the end of the war. Ulbricht submitted his
project to the Soviets, who recognized the potential of the proposal and
decided to install the first School of Antifascism in the concentration
camp of Jelabuga, where the German Captain Ernst Hadermann began to
cooperate with Ulbricht and the Soviets to win the German POWs to the
cause of antifascism. The breakthrough came in winter 1943, after the
German debacle in Stalingrad, where the entire 6th Army was
destroyed. Although only 90.000 Germans were taken prisoners, among them
Feldmarschall Freidrich Paulus and his staff were also captured. For
the first time hundreds of thousands of POWs were in the hands of the
Red Army (over 100.000 Germans, about 74.000 Italians, and many
thousands of Rumanians and Hungarians).
On 13th
July 1943 in the Lager of Krasnogorsk the National Committee “Free
Germany” was founded with the purpose to create the first group of
military resistance against Hitler’s regime. Soon after, in September
1943, a number of officers who had refused to join “Free Germany”
because it seemed too compromised with Communism, founded the Union of
German Officers, which was apparently independent but actually under the
thumb of Communist political activists. By the end of 1944 some tens of
officers and a few hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers had joined the
antifascist movement, small figures in comparison with the 3.500.000
German POWs in Soviet hands at the end of the war.
In
November 1945 “Free Germany” and the Union of German Officers were
disbanded. The former members were sent back to the Soviet Zone of
Occupation in Germany between 1946 and 1948 in order to build the new
socialist German fatherland. Nonetheless, although political
re-education of POWs was no longer in agenda, POWs remained exposed to
arbitrary Soviet policies concerning intelligence and forced-labour. In
1949 a wave of political trials stormed over the thousands of
concentration camps in the USSR: thousands of German POWs were accused
with war crimes and sentenced to death, life imprisonment or 25 years of
forced-labour. POWs were to be used to rebuild the Russian cities and
infrastructures destroyed by war as well as hostages to put pressure on
West Germany, which in 1950 was to be re-armed within the NATO.
Political trials against POWs took place in an atmosphere of terror and
menace, which can be acknowledged from the literary memoirs of
witnesses.
One
must distinguish between memoirs written in the Democratic Republic of
Germany and those published in West Germany because they reflect
different political perspectives: in fact, all Eastern authors (e.g.
Paulus, Adam, Müller, Steidle and Rühle) occupied relevant roles in
politics, culture and education and their memoirs depict the political
re-education in Soviet concentration camps as a rejuvenating experience
of self-affirmation. Political re-education, or Antifascism, certainly
was not for them torture or suffering. They consider themselves as
patriots who embraced the cause of a free and democratic Germany shaped
on the Marxist view of history and society. They interpret Germany’s
catastrophe as the necessary outcome of imperialism and militarism, to
which they oppose socialism and its vocation to internationalism and
peace.
On
the other side of the Iron Curtain, things were different. A small
group of witnesses came from the ranks of former antifascists, such as
Heinrich Einsiedel (vice-president of the National Committee “Free
Germany”), novelist Heinrich Gerlach, and theologian Helmut Gollwitzer.
These authors had first joined Communist antifascism because they had
believed in the historical necessity to take a stand against Hitler and
his war. They had later gown critical toward Communism and they had been
persecuted and punished for that, in concentration camps before and
once they had come back to Germany after 1948. They represent the
political re-education as a two-fold experience: on the one hand it was a
noble and heroic assumption of responsibility that they faced as
officers and human beings; on the other that experience was also a
dangerous compromise with power and corruption insofar as being
antifascists in Soviet concentration camps meant claiming privilege and
prominence over other fellow POWs. These authors remember in their
memoirs how they had to act as spies for the Communist authorities, how
they had to lie and deceive in order to keep their privileges, and how
they had to go through a never-ending psychological war against other
prisoners in order to conquer power. These authors recall the motto of
Soviet antifascism: “whoever is not with us is against us”, or “whoever
does not work does not eat”, which did not sound much different than
under the Nazi yoke.
The
political re-education in the memoirs of lower officers and ranks, who
depict it as sheer torture, appears even worse, as a school of
double-thought and as a struggle for surviving, because the periodical
interrogations carried out by Communist activists made the difference
between being admitted to the school of antifascism (which meant more
food, warm bedrooms and no hard-labour) and being sent out to Siberia
for hard-labour in the woods, in mines or on cotton fields.
Interrogations were subtle and dangerous, aimed at forcing prisoners
into self-contradiction. When this happened, the prisoner had to choose
between becoming a spy and collaborating, and ending up in punishment
camps. These witnesses recall the wave of political trials of 1949 as
the most fearful experience after starvation and typhus epidemics of
1943-1944: threatened to be held for years in hard-labour camps, many a
prisoner chose to denounce even close friends as war-criminals, in order
to be sent back to Germany, and many even mutilated themselves in order
to be spared from work and sent home.
In
West Germany some authors, such as former pilot and POW Assi Hahn,
caught the occasion to raise a vehement polemic against Communism, which
in many cases turned out to be a shameful apology of the old Nazi
regime, militarism and imperialism. What is striking is that the Soviet
project of conquering a huge mass of POWs, marked as a “bunch of
fascists”, to the political cause of Communism eventually ended up into a
large-scale failure. In fact, the strategy of attracting POWs to
antifascism in exchange of privilege and power over fellow comrades in
concentration camps did not produce the model of a virtuous democratic
society, but rather a “grey zone” where compromise, deceit and egoism
prevailed over social virtues such as solidarity, friendship and
justice.
In
this sense, Soviet concentration camps of POWs also represented a sort
of laboratory for social experimentation. The separateness of POWs from
their homeland permitted to create the condition for an artificial
acceptance of the new political and social doctrine in abstract, not as a
real means to manage the life of a community. Better said, there was a
community, but a fragile and weak one, of starving and frightened POWs
under the thumb of a powerful and intricate structure capable of
inflicting suffering and death or to grant favour and privilege. Such
political re-education can be seen as torture, especially if one
considers that many German POWs remained in Soviet camps up to 1956.
Torture
is an evil and useless instrument. Its secrecy and separateness testify
to its unlawfulness as well as to the bad will of those who use it. In
the past, criminals were tormented and executed in public, as Foucault
pointed out, in the course of violent ceremonies aimed at restoring the
authority of the State challenged by serious offences. But torture is
different. It is a closed-door activity, because it is brutal and
illegal, because it is aimed at overwhelming the victim’s will, in order
to force out a confession beyond evidence of crime and guilt. Torture
can make up evidence as magic: in order to stop suffering and fear the
victim is ready to confess what the torturer wants to hear. The case of
political re-education shows that torture can also be a means to force
ideologies into the mind of people. Nonetheless, experience teaches that
such achievements almost always remain unattained, or that they are
reached at the cost of moral degradation, illegality and inhumanity.
For further reading
Bungert, Heike, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen. Die Reaktion der Westalliierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943-1948, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1997
Scheurig, Bodo, Freies Deutschland. Das Nationalkomitee und der Bund Deutscher Offiziere in der Sowjetunion 1943-1945, München, Nymphenburger, 1960
Schoenhals, Kai, The Free Germany Movement. A Case of Patriotism or Treason?, New York, Greenwood Press, 1989
Smith, Arthur, The War for the German Mind. Re-Educating Hitler’s Soldiers, Oxford, Berghan, 1996