Free Year Zero by Ian Buruma Page B

Gestapo prison, then Auschwitz and Dachau. Liberated in Dachau, he stayed more or less locked up as a displaced person in a former SS barracks near Munich. His account of this squalid experience in limbo was included in a classic book of short sketches of camp life and death titled
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
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    One of the stories is called “Silence.” A number of DPs spot a former Nazi henchman trying to escape through a window. They grab him and begin “tearing at him with greedy hands.” When they hear U.S. soldiers, who are running the DP camp, approaching, they push the man onto a straw mattress under layers of bedding. The senior American officer, a fine young fellow in a freshly pressed uniform, tells them through his translator that he quite understands how much the survivors of Nazi camps must hate the Germans. But it is most important that the rule of law should be observed. The guilty should be punished only after due process. The Americans would see to that. The DPs nod and give the nice American a cheer. He wishes them a good night’s rest and “accompanied by a friendly hum of voices” leaves the room to conclude his tour of the barracks. No sooner has he gone than the German is pulled from the bed and kicked to death on the concrete floor.
    This was not an unusual incident in the immediate aftermath of Liberation, or, in the case of the DPs, semi-liberation. In other accounts, the liberating soldiers, shocked by the visual evidence of German depravity, were less attached to the rules of due legal process. At Dachau, American soldiers stood by as SS guards were lynched, drowned, cut up, strangled, or battered to death with spades, and at least in one case beheaded with a bayonet lent by a GI to a former inmate for this purpose. Sometimes the GIs took it upon themselves to shoot the German guards. Also at Dachau, one American lieutenant executed more than three hundred guards with his machine gun. His rage was understandable; he had just seen the corpses of prisoners piled up in front of the camp crematorium. 3
    At Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 a British nurse saw what happenedwhen a group of German nurses entered the camp for the first time. Having been ordered to care for the desperately ill survivors, they walked into one of the hospital wards, and in an instant “a shrieking mass of internees, among them even the dying, had hurled themselves at the nurses, scratching and tearing at them with knives and forks, or with instruments snatched from the dressing trolleys.” 4
    In this case, the British had to protect the German civilians, whose presence was vital to the survival of the inmates. Dealing with the natural desire for vengeance, for the rough justice of an eye for an eye, was a serious problem for Allied officers, government officials returning from exile, members of welfare organizations, and all others who were interested in restoring some sense of order or normality to the devastated continent. Like the hapless GI in Borowski’s story, however, they were often powerless to stop further mayhem, especially in countries torn by civil war. On many occasions, too, they decided to look the other way, or were actively complicit, in far more unsavory ways than the GI who lent his bayonet at the Dachau concentration camp. Indeed, most cases of organized vengeance would not have happened without official encouragement. Just as sexual desire rarely leads straight to orgies, mass violence seldom comes from individual initiatives; it needs leadership, organization.
    And it needs the right timing. One of the surprising things about the aftermath of the war is that more Germans didn’t attack other Germans. A journalist in Berlin, one of the few Germans who had actively resisted the Nazis, wrote in her postwar diary that people had been “ripe for retribution.” During the last months of the war, a time of desperation for many Germans, “even the