LIBERATION OF PARIS:A night of joyous debauchery

 

 

 

European Theater "This is a German Panzerkampfwagen VI, called the Tiger II and also known as the King Tiger." (Information kindly supplied by Hawk914.) #2 A 35mm print scan taken between Camp New Orleans and Troyes, France. Normandy/France WWII European Theater WWII 121 A heavy French artillery rail gun captured and used by the Germans, somewhere in Europe. Thanks so much to Hawk914 for that information! Germany WWII   European Theater WWII 118 Heavy French artillery rail gun captured and used by the Germans. Somewhere in Europe. Thanks so much to Hawk914 for that information!   Laid to rest: German cemetery on the battlefield of Tete des Faux - the highest point on the Western Front. 10 million soldiers died in the conflict almost 100 years ago. The Dragon Teeth, Riegelstellung Dune, BPT: Used to slow down tanks and mechanised infantry, landmines were often placed between the teeth

A savage reckoning - and a night of joyous debauchery: 70 years ago, Paris finally overthrew the Nazis. In this heart-stopping account, one of our greatest historians relives the chaos Two months after D-Day, Parisians went on strike to rise up against Nazis Gun fights broke out, barricades were armed by girls in summer dresses 40 Germans killed, 70 wounded; 125 Parisians died, nearly 500 wounded After bloody battle Nazis forced to surrender, Parisians marched in glee Paris celebrated with open arms, open beds and plenty of cognac +4 Hero's welcome: An RAF officer and a flirtatious young Parisian. Paris welcomed officers with open arms and open beds after their triumph A sick and bloated Adolf Hitler was fulminating at his Wolf’s Lair bunker. The city of Paris was to be held to the last man against the advancing Allies, he ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the soldier he had summoned to appoint as the new commander of the French capital. No surrender. Dig in and fight, he thundered. If necessary, destroy the city and defend it from the ruins. It was August 1944. Two months after the D-Day landings, the Allied armies were finally breaking out of the Normandy stranglehold and racing eastwards. Demoralised German forces were pulling out, retreating back across a France they had ruled over for four years to the borders of their own Fatherland. Choltitz came away from his meeting convinced that Hitler — more paranoid than ever after the bomb plot against his life just a few weeks earlier — was deranged and that the war was lost. So what was the general to do about his orders? Was he really going to turn one of the world’s most beautiful cities into a smoking ruin on the lunatic whim of the Fuhrer? Meanwhile, on the Allied side, there was similar uncertainty about Paris’s fate. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, and his generals saw no strategic advantage in diverting men to capture the city and above all supplies to feed it.  They were in favour of bypassing it and speeding their armies across eastern France to the German border. It was from General Charles de Gaulle that, not surprisingly, the pressure was coming to liberate the capital. He was desperate to make amends for its ignominious surrender without a fight in 1940 and the Vichy regime of collaborators that had been pretending to run France ever since. ‘We must march on Paris,’ de Gaulle told Eisenhower. ‘There must be an organised force there to maintain internal order.’ His real motive was political — to make sure the capital fell into the hands of his Provisional Government rather than those of the communists who made up a significant portion of the now active Resistance. In the end, the Parisians themselves forced the issue, rising up against the occupiers. First the railway workers went on strike. Then the 15,000-strong Parisian police force, which the Germans were trying to disarm, refused to put on their uniform. The Communist Party newspaper called for an ‘insurrection populaire’. The Gaullists, fearing they would lose the initiative, felt obliged to act too. They were encouraged by what became known as ‘la grande fuite des Fritz’ — ‘the great flight of the Fritzes’ on August 17. The contents of wine cellars were loaded on to German trucks, along with rolls of carpet, Louis XVI furniture and works of art. Streams of ‘purple-faced generals accompanied by elegant blonde women’ were seen decamping from luxury hotels, ‘as if off to some fashionable resort’. Parisians jeered, waving lavatory brushes at the fleeing jackboots. Two days later, 3,000 Paris policemen took over the Prefecture de Police, hoisted the French flag and sang the Marseillaise. Scouts sent out by Choltitz found the usually bustling streets ominously quiet and empty . . . until they reached the Left Bank of the Seine. There they came under rifle fire, forcing them to flee. One German soldier was dead. The fight for Paris was on. All over the city, gun battles were breaking out as Parisians began to build barricades of cobblestones, overturned vehicles, bedsteads, furniture and chopped-down trees — manned by shirt-sleeved young men and girls in pretty summer dresses, some wearing old helmets from World War I. That day some 40 Germans were killed and 70 wounded, while 125 Parisians died and nearly 500 were wounded. The death toll seemed certain to get very much worse. Choltitz assessed the forces at his disposal to hold Paris as instructed — a security regiment of old soldiers, four tanks, two companies mounted on bicycles, some anti-aircraft detachments, an ‘interpreter battalion’ and 17 elderly armoured cars.  By the morning of August 20, French flags were flying over numerous public buildings, placed there by Gaullist groups as they grabbed government ministries in a bid to seize power ahead of the Communists. Citizens hung tricolours from their balconies. Meanwhile, south of the city a Wehrmacht pioneer group escaping from Normandy and in full retreat home to Germany was urgently re-routed to Paris. Their orders were to prepare bridges for demolition. Driving in convoy into the Place de la Concorde, they were spooked by the empty streets, the barricades, the silence. At a naval depot, they loaded up with torpedo warheads for the task ahead. Inside the Hotel Meurice, Choltitz received the clearest order from Hitler that Paris was to be destroyed. At this point, the Free French 2nd Armoured Division under General Philippe Leclerc was 150 miles west of Paris, waiting impatiently for orders. They heard over the radio that, ahead of them, U.S. reconnaissance units were crossing the Seine. They were desperate to be part of the action, especially when news also came that the capital was in a ferment. +4 Jeering: Nazi prisoners were carted across the city to be shot, with Parisians hurling abuse at them Off his own bat and in defiance of his American superiors, Leclerc ordered a squadron of light tanks and infantry in half-track vehicles to move fast towards Versailles. When the Americans found out and ordered him to call his men back, he refused. That same day, the Allied high command was coming under the strongest pressure to act. De Gaulle sent urgent signals to Eisenhower that the Metro and the sewage system had been mined and thousands of children and old people were dying each day from starvation. None of this was true but Eisenhower’s resolve to bypass Paris was weakening. ‘I guess we’ll have to go in,’ he finally said, convinced by reports that the Resistance inside the city was running low on ammunition.  The official go-ahead was passed to Leclerc, who, to tears of joy, ordered his staff officers: ‘Mouvement immediat sur Paris!’ In heavy rain, his combat group of armoured cars, tanks, jeeps and trucks moved forward. Reaching Rambouillet in the suburbs south-west of the city, Leclerc interviewed Resistance leaders to discover the least-defended route into the capital. Go round via the south, he was advised. At Rambouillet, too, American war correspondents were gathering. Among them was Ernest Hemingway, toting a heavy automatic pistol as if he was a member of the Resistance rather than a non-combatant. When the man from the Chicago Daily News made a sarcastic remark about ‘General Hemingway and his Maquis [resistance fighters]’, Hemingway walked over and punched him. I'll grill his toes to make him talk,' said Hemingway  He offered to interrogate a pathetic German prisoner. ‘I’ll make him talk,’ he boasted. ‘Take his boots off. We’ll grill his toes with a candle.’ The others fortunately stopped him. Inside Paris, tension was soaring as the uprising spread. Flags were made out of scraps of cloth. Every time a secret Resistance wireless station played the forbidden Marseillaise, people opened their windows and turned up the volume so that those outside could hear it. Below ground, fighters moved to their positions through the Metro tunnels to avoid the tanks guarding key intersections. A rumour swept the city that two divisions of German tanks were even now approaching from the north and that Paris and everyone in it was about to be destroyed in the same ruthless way that the uprising in Warsaw was being crushed at that very moment. Everyone was on edge, desperate for the Allied armies to arrive. The advance guard of Leclerc’s division was doing its best, pushing on from the south via Orly, its progress through the French villages marked by a combination of fierce fighting against dogged German resistance and outright joy. Vehicles were brought to a halt by rejoicing crowds, forcing kisses and bottles on the soldiers, who begged to be let through unhindered to do their job. One beautiful young woman held out her hands to a French tank as it trundled through her village, expecting to be pulled aboard. Suddenly a hidden German machine gun opened up from a distance and she slipped to the ground, her best dress peppered with bloody bullet holes. Leclerc, fearing that German reinforcements were indeed closing in on the capital from the north, was desperate to have troops in the centre of Paris by nightfall on August 24. To encourage the Resistance in the city to hold out, he sent a spotter plane to drop a message packed in a weighted bag. It said simply: ‘Tenez bon, nous arrivons’ — ‘Hold on, we’re coming’. +4 Storming the city: American soldiers marched along Champs d'Elysees after overthrowing the Nazis And they were. For those at the head of the advancing column, the Eiffel Tower was now in sight. Leclerc ordered Captain Raymond Dronne to put together a makeshift unit of half-tracks and tanks and push ahead without stopping. By whatever route they could find, they were to ‘go straight to the very heart of Paris.’ Dronne, unshaven, sweat-stained, a battered kepi on his head, stood in his Jeep and led the charge. Avoiding the German defences on the main roads, they ducked and dived through the back streets of the suburbs, guided by a local on an ancient motorcycle. The men cheered as they passed the city boundary at the Porte D’Italie. There a heavily built French woman planted herself on the front of Dronne’s Jeep like the Republican symbol, Marianne, to point the way. Just after 9pm that evening, Dronne’s column rumbled into the Place de l’Hotel de Ville at the very heart of Paris. He strode into the town hall and up its grand staircase to report to the leaders of the Resistance gathered there. Outside, civilians crowded round, nervous at first but then going wild as they realised these were American tanks manned by French soldiers. Church bells pealed out across the city. The sonorous great bell of Notre-Dame sounded in the twilight, leaving the writer Colette with tears of joy in her eyes as ‘the night rose like a dawn’. The bells finally convinced Parisians that the long-awaited moment of liberation had arrived. People filled the streets, yelling, ‘They’re here!’ Women brought mattresses and precious cakes of soap for Dronne and his men, and even took their filthy uniforms away to wash and press them. German soldiers were dragged away to be shot  At the far end of the road from the now liberated Hotel de Ville and the wild scenes of joy in the square outside, Choltitz and his staff officers were in his office in the Hotel Meurice, drinking vintage champagne from the cellars. When they heard the bells, he went to his desk and telephoned German army headquarters. When the phone was answered, he held the receiver towards the open window. The message didn’t need words. The population of Paris rose early on the morning of Friday, August 25, the feast of France’s patron saint, St Louis, in an atmosphere of excitement. Many women had stitched through the night to make flags and prepare dresses in patriotic colours. Once the early morning mist evaporated, it was a beautiful sunny day as crowds gathered in the south-west of the city to greet Leclerc and the main body of French troops. Ecstatic citizens surged forward holding up their fingers in V for victory signs. Streets cleared in panic when firing broke out against some German position, then filled again almost as quickly. It was, an observer noted, ‘a noisy and lyrical carnival punctuated by shots’. Armoured columns were brought to a halt as young women clambered up to kiss the crew, while men proffered long-hoarded bottles to toast the liberation. ‘Never in my life have I had cheeks so coloured by lipstick,’ recalled one soldier. There was huge acclaim for the American columns, now also entering the city. Having been told that the Parisians were starving and needed rescuing, U.S. soldiers were astonished by how healthy they looked, particularly the beautiful girls climbing all over them. At the numerous halts, a colonel recorded, ‘mothers would hold up their children to be kissed, young girls would hug the grinning soldiers and cover them with kisses, old men saluted, and young men vigorously shook hands’. The triumphal processions changed rapidly as they approached the remaining centres of German resistance. Girls were ushered off the tanks near the Palais de Luxembourg and gunners and loaders dropped back inside their turrets and fired. Near the Arc de Triomphe, a crowd that including the actor Yves Montand and singer Edith Piaf gathered to watch the surrender of the Germans in the Hotel Majestic. They cheered as the prisoners were led out and four bareheaded German soldiers were dragged away to be shot. Piaf managed to stop a young French woman from throwing a grenade into a truck full of German prisoners. One rightly cynical observer noted that, amid the triumphant singing of the Marseillaise and the doling out of retribution, ‘it is hard to distinguish the real Resistance fighters from the parasites and collaborators of the day before’. +4 Celebrations: Women crawled stiffly out of tanks after a champagne-drenched night of jubilation The Arc de Triomphe was the next trophy to fall as Free French officers moved underneath it to salute the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Above them, a huge French flag moved gently in the breeze. But then a shell screamed over their heads from a German tank at the other end of the Champs-Elysees. French tank destroyers moved into position on either side of the arch. A commander called out the range as 1,500 metres, but his gunner remembered from his schooldays that the Champs-Elysees was 1,800 metres long. He made an adjustment and scored a direct hit with his first shot. In the Hotel Meurice, Choltitz refused an invitation to surrender without at least putting up a token resistance. He and his officers took lunch as bullets fired from the Louvre riddled the windowpanes and sent chunks of wall flying. As they finished their meal, the shooting increased, followed by the explosion of tank shells. Outside, French infantry were making their way down the Rue de Rivoli, racing from pillar to pillar along the colonnade. They hurled smoke grenades into the lobby of the Meurice and surged into the building. Upstairs, Choltitz, his grey skin glistened from sweat and breathing heavily from a heart condition, decided he had done enough. He surrendered. The German pioneer unit, with its explosives set and primed under the Alexandre III bridge, waited for an order that never came. Choltitz was hurried away from the Meurice by a back door, but other German officers were not so lucky. As they were escorted out through a hostile crowd, they were punched and spat at. A man pushed forward and put a pistol to the head of one German and shot him dead. Others were said to have been gunned down in the Tuileries gardens after surrendering. All over Paris, the remaining isolated German garrisons were surrendering one by one, persuaded by emissaries sent by Choltitz under a flag of truce. Some chose not to capitulate. One German air force officer held a grenade against his stomach and pulled out the pin. Out of 12,000 prisoners taken by the Allies, few got out of which ever building they were holed up in without running a gauntlet. Many arrived in custody with blood pouring down their faces. Paris celebrated with open arms and open beds  That night Paris celebrated in memorable style, welcoming the liberating army of French and American soldiers with open arms and beds in what was described as ‘a night dedicated to Venus’. The next morning, amid the hangovers from all the beer, cider, Bordeaux, Burgundy, champagne, cognac and calavados consumed the night before, ‘tank hatches slowly opened and bedraggled women crawled stiffly out,’ according to a U. S. army officer. In the Bois de Boulogne, Captain Dronne went round pulling the young women out of his men’s tents and they all breakfasted together on army rations round improvised camp fires. By now de Gaulle had arrived to take possession of his capital. Hearing that a victory procession was planned, an American general tried to ban Leclerc’s division from taking part as they were still under his orders. He was ignored. That afternoon, de Gaulle took the salute at the Arc de Triomphe, then set off on foot down the Champs-Elysees towards Notre-Dame, taking no notice of the occasional outbreaks of gunfire. Behind him came disgruntled members of the National Council of Resistance, who had not at first been invited. To de Gaulle, this was a victory by his army not the maquisards. A million ecstatic Parisians lined the streets, perched on lamp posts, leant out of windows and stood on rooftops to watch and cheer and welcome their salvation and the safe return of their city. So who exactly saved Paris? The Resistance, as they charged around the streets in commandeered black Citroens, were convinced it was their victory. Their uprising had been crucial. De Gaulle, however, maintained that the city had been saved by his insistence that Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division should dash to the capital and by their speed and courage. He did not mention that it would never have been possible at all without the Americans to back up the French. But the role of Choltitz was vital too — for what he didn’t do. Under interrogation by his Allied captors, he stated unequivocally that he had ‘saved Paris’. He had, he argued, put up only enough of a fight ‘to satisfy his government that the city was not capitulated without honour’. There was truth in this. Evidence later emerged that, when he had taken charge of Paris just 18 days earlier, despite Hitler’s words ringing in his ears, he had been persuaded by fellow officers that the city served no useful military purpose and that its destruction was pointless. Quietly and without fuss, the loyal Nazi disobeyed his Götterdämmerung orders. As a result, Paris did not burn but, free and jubilant, was taken back miraculously unscathed.

Following the Liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, Pétain and his ministers were taken to Germany by the German forces. There,Fernand de Brinon established a pseudo-government in exile at Sigmaringen. Pétain refused to participate and the Sigmaringen operation had little or no authority. Just imagine living in a world in which law and order have broken down completely: a world in which there is no authority, no rules and no sanctions. In the bombed-out ruins of Europe’s cities, feral gangs scavenge for food. Old men are murdered for their clothes, their watches or even their boots. Women are mercilessly raped, many several times a night.Neighbour turns on neighbour; old friends become deadly enemies. And the wrong surname, even the wrong accent, can get you killed. It sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But for hundreds of millions of Europeans, many of them now gentle, respectable pensioners, this was daily reality in the desperate months after the end of World War II. Humiliated: A French woman accused of sleeping with Germans has her head shaved by neighbors in a village near Marseilles Two Frenchmen train guns on a collaborator who kneels against a wooden fence with his hands raise while another cocks an arm to hit him, Rennes, France, in late August 1944. In Britain we remember the great crusade against the Nazis as our finest hour. But as the historian Keith Lowe shows in an extraordinary, disturbing and powerful new book, Savage Continent, it is time we thought again about the way the war ended. For millions of people across the Continent, he argues, VE Day marked not the end of a bad dream, but the beginning of a new nightmare. In central Europe, the Iron Curtain was already descending; even in the West, the rituals of recrimination were being played out. This is a story not of redemption but of revenge. And far from being ‘Zero Hour’, as the Germans call it, May 1945 marked the beginning of a terrible descent into anarchy. Of course World War II was that rare thing, a genuinely moral struggle against a terrible enemy who had plumbed the very depths of human cruelty. But precisely because we in Britain escaped the shame and trauma of occupation, we rarely reflect on what happened next. After years of bombing and bloodshed, much of Europe was physically and morally broken. Indeed, to contemplate the costs of war in Germany alone is simply mind-boggling. Across the shattered remains of Hitler’s Reich, some 20 million people were homeless, while 17 million ‘displaced persons’, many of them former PoWs and slave labourers, were roaming the land. Half of all houses in Berlin were in ruins; so were seven out of ten of those in Cologne. Not all the Germans who survived the war had supported Hitler. But in the vast swathes of his former empire conquered by Stalin’s Red Army, the terrible vengeance of the victors fell on them all, irrespective of their past record. In the little Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, the first German territory to fall to the Russians, every single man, woman and child was brutally murdered. ‘I will spare you the description of the mutilations and the ghastly condition of the corpses,’ a Swiss war correspondent told his readers. ‘These are impressions that go beyond even the wildest imagination.’ Near the East Prussian city of Königsberg — now the Russian city of Kaliningrad — the bodies of dead woman, who had been raped and then butchered, littered the roads. And in Gross Heydekrug, writes Keith Lowe, ‘a woman was crucified on the altar cross of the local church, with two German soldiers similarly strung up on either side’. Many Russian historians still deny accounts of the atrocities. But the evidence is overwhelming. Across much of Germany, Lowe explains, ‘thousands of women were raped and then killed in an orgy of truly medieval violence’. But the truth is that medieval warfare was nothing like as savage as what befell the German people in 1945. Wherever the Red Army came, women were gang-raped in their thousands. One woman in Berlin, caught hiding behind a pile of coal, recalled being raped by ‘twenty-three soldiers one after the other. I had to be stitched up in hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again’. Of course it is easy to say that the Germans, having perpetrated some of the most appalling atrocities in human history on the Eastern Front, had brought their suffering on themselves. Even so, no sane person could possibly read Lowe’s book without a shudder of horror. Are we more immune to the atrocities that occurred after the war ended on the continent because we did not suffer the indignity and pain of occupation? German refugees, civilians and soldiers, crowd platforms of the Berlin train station after being driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia following the defeat of Germany by Allied forces. The truth is that World War II, which we remember as a great moral campaign, had wreaked incalculable damage on Europe’s ethical sensibilities. And in the desperate struggle for survival, many people would do whatever it took to get food and shelter. In Allied-occupied Naples, the writer Norman Lewis watched as local women, their faces identifying them as ‘ordinary well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping housewives’, lined up to sell themselves to young American GIs for a few tins of food. Another observer, the war correspondent Alan Moorehead, wrote that he had seen ‘the moral collapse’ of the Italian people, who had lost all pride in their ‘animal struggle for existence’. Amid the trauma of war and occupation, the bounds of sexual decency had simply collapsed. In Holland one American soldier was propositioned by a 12-year-old girl. In Hungary scores of 13-year-old girls were admitted to hospital with venereal disease; in Greece, doctors treated VD-infected girls as young as ten. What was more, even in those countries liberated by the British and Americans, a deep tide of hatred swept through national life. Everybody had come out of the war with somebody to hate. In northern Italy, some 20,000 people were summarily murdered by their own countrymen in the last weeks of the war. And in French town squares, women accused of sleeping with German soldiers were stripped and shaved, their breasts marked with swastikas while mobs of men stood and laughed. Yet even today, many Frenchmen pretend these appalling scenes never happened. Her head shaved by angry neighbours, a tearful Corsican woman is stripped naked and taunted for consorting with German soldiers during their occupation It is easy to say that the Germans, having perpetrated some of the most appalling atrocities in human history, had brought their suffering on themselves. The general rule, though, was that the further east you went, the worse the horror became. In Prague, captured German soldiers were ‘beaten, doused in petrol and burned to death’. In the city’s sports stadium, Russian and Czech soldiers gang-raped German women. In the villages of Bohemia and Moravia, hundreds of German families were brutally butchered. And in Polish prisons, German inmates were drowned face down in manure, and one man reportedly choked to death after being forced to swallow a live toad. Yet at the time, many people saw this as just punishment for the Nazis’ crimes. Allied leaders refused to discuss the atrocities, far less condemn them, because they did not want to alienate public support. ‘When you chop wood,’ the future Czech president, Antonin Zapotocky, said dismissively, ‘the splinters fly.’ It is to Lowe’s great credit that he resists the temptation to sit in moral judgment. None of us can know how we would have behaved under similar circumstances; it is one of the great blessings of British history that, despite our sacrifice to beat the Nazis, our national experience was much less traumatic than that of our neighbours. It is also true that repellent as we might find it, the desire for revenge was both instinctive and understandable — especially in those terrible places where the Nazis had slaughtered so many innocents. So it is  shocking, but not altogether surprising, to read that when the Americans liberated the Dachau death camp, a handful of GIs lined up scores of German guards and simply machine-gunned them. We in Britain are right to be proud of our record in the war. Yet it is time that we faced up to some of the unsettling moral ambiguities of those bloody, desperate years. By any standards this was a war crime; yet who among us can honestly say we would have behaved differently? Lowe notes how ‘a very small number’ of Jewish prisoners wreaked a bloody revenge on their former captors. Such claims, inevitably, are deeply controversial. When the veteran American war correspondent John Sack, himself Jewish, wrote a book about it in the 1990s, he was accused of Holocaust denial and his publishers cancelled the contract. Yet after the liberation of Theresienstadt camp, one Jewish man saw a mob of ex-inmates beating an SS man to death, and such scenes were not uncommon across the former Reich. ‘We all participated,’ another Jewish camp inmate, Szmulek Gontarz, remembered years later. ‘It was sweet. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t do more.’ Meanwhile, across great swathes of Eastern Europe, German communities who had lived quietly for centuries were being driven out. Some had blood on their hands; many others, though, were blameless. But they could not have paid a higher price for the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s imperial ambitions. In the months after the war ended, a staggering 7 million Germans were driven out of Poland, another 3 million from Czechoslovakia and almost 2 million more from other central European countries, often in appalling conditions of hunger, thirst and disease. Joyous: When we picture the end of the war, we imagine crowds in central London, cheering and singing. Today this looks like ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Yet at the time, conscious of all they had endured under the Nazi jackboot, Polish and Czech politicians saw the expulsions as ‘the least worst’ way to avoid another war. Indeed, this ethnic savagery was not confined to the Germans. In eastern Poland and western Ukraine, rival nationalists carried out an undeclared war of horrifying brutality, raping and slaughtering women and children and forcing almost 2 million people to leave their homes. What these men wanted was not, in the end, so different from Hitler’s own ambitions: an ethnically homogenous national fatherland, cleansed of the last taints of foreign contamination. In 1947, in an enterprise nicknamed Operation Vistula, the Poles rounded up their remaining Ukrainian citizens and deported them to the far west of the country, which had formerly been part of Germany. There they were settled in deserted towns, whose old inhabitants had themselves been deported to West Germany. It was, Lowe writes, ‘the final act in a racial war begun by Hitler, continued by Stalin and completed by the Polish authorities’. To their immense credit, the Poles have had the courage to face up to what happened all those years ago. Indeed, ten years ago the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, publicly apologised for Operation Vistula. Yet the supreme irony of the war is that in Poland, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, VE Day marked the end of one tyranny and the beginning of another. Justifiable: Conscious of all they had endured under the Nazi jackboot, Polish and Czech politicians saw the expulsion of Germans as 'the least worst' way to avoid another war.  Here in Britain, we too often forget that although we went to war to save Poland, we actually ended it by allowing Poland to fall under Stalin’s cruel despotism. Perhaps we had no choice; there was no appetite for a war with the Russians in 1945, and we were exhausted in any case. Yet not everybody was prepared to accept surrender so meekly. In one of the final chapters in Lowe’s deeply moving book, he reminds us that between 1944 and 1950 some 400,000 people were involved in anti-Soviet resistance activities in Ukraine. What was more, in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which Stalin had brutally absorbed into the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of nationalist guerillas known as the Forest Brothers struggled vainly for their independence, even fighting pitched battles against the Red Army and attacking government buildings in major cities. We think of the Cold War in Europe as a stalemate. Yet as late as 1965, Lithuanian partisans were still fighting gun battles with the Soviet police, while the last Estonian resistance fighter, the 69-year-old August Sabbe, was not killed until 1978, more than 30 years after the World War II had supposedly ended. We in Britain are right to be proud of our record in the war. Yet it is time, as this book shows, that we faced up to some of the unsettling moral ambiguities of those bloody, desperate years. When we picture the end of the war, we imagine crowds in central London, cheering and singing. We rarely think of the terrible suffering and slaughter that marked most Europeans’ daily lives at that time. But almost 70 years after the end of the conflict, it is time we acknowledged the hidden realities of perhaps the darkest chapter in all human history.