In Europe

a treasure trove of new historical material emerged in the 1990s in particular, after the opening of the DDR and Soviet archives – but also with the strictly judicial character of the investigation: all attention was focused on the role of the defendants and of Germany in general.
    Furthermore, the trials consistently suggested that the war had been a purely moral matter, that the Germans had stood only for Evil and the Allies only for Good. Yet the events between 1939–45 are impossible to explain with such a simplistic scheme. Ideology and morality played asubordinate role with the Allies as well. The ‘moral bombings’ instigated by Bomber Harris were emphatically aimed, in violation of all the moral conventions of war, at maximising the number of civilian casualties. Troop movements were speeded up, slowed down or rerouted for considerations of prestige, to seize an important city or sever the enemy's supply lines, but never to liberate a concentration camp more swiftly. A war leader like Churchill was driven by a fervent anti-communism and an iron determination to save the British Empire; Stalin and his generals wanted to destroy the Western enemy at all costs; Roosevelt watched over America's hegemony, and de Gaulle was less an anti-fascist than an authoritarian French patriot. States go to war primarily to serve their own national interests, and this war was no different. ‘The Nuremberg trials were the source both of huge quantities of valid historical information and of manifest historical distortions’ Norman Davies and other European historians rightly concluded.
    In October 1946, the American
Saturday Evening Post
noted that only thirty-three out of the hundreds of top Nazi officials in the German steel industry – so vital to the war – had been arrested. The rest had simply remained at their posts. Speer, the brilliant manager of the Third Reich, succeeded in striking precisely the right tone towards his judges and prosecutors: that of the civilised technocrat, intelligent, responsible, contrite. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, served his sentence (unlike many others), and died in 1981 like an upright citizen.
    The practitioners of medicine got off particularly easily, even though doctors and nursing officers had played a central role in the Third Reich. They had helped to establish the criteria for ‘racial purity’, they had selected the handicapped and the malformed children for the euthanasia campaign and then ‘put them to sleep’, and they had carried out large-scale medical experiments in the concentration camps – often with gruesome results. Yet of these hundreds, perhaps thousands, of doctors, only twenty-three were tried at Nuremberg. They pleaded innocent without exception. Four doctors were finally condemned to death, including one of Hitler's private physicians, Karl Brandt, who had also played a role in the Bethel hospital affair. With this verdict, the case was closed for the German medical profession. Within five years, almost all of the SS physicians and euthanasiasts – including the medical inspectors who had beenactive at Bethel – were back at work as general practitioners, medical examiners, scientific researchers or professors.
    When Ernie Pyle died on 18 April, 1945 – having meanwhile been transferred to the Pacific – he was carrying a few notes with him. They were intended for the column he had hoped to write on the day Germany capitulated. One of them read:
    Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks. But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
    The Second World War claimed the lives of at least forty-one million Europeans: fourteen million soldiers and twenty-seven million civilians, including six million Jews. It was a catastrophe that every day, for six long years, there were an average of 20,000 deaths. By the end of the war, one out of every five former inhabitants of Poland and the Baltic States was dead. In the Soviet Union, the casualties could only be processed by reducing the total population figures at the next census.

Chapter FORTY-NINE
Prague
    ALONG THE BANKS OF THE ELBE, NOT FAR FROM DRESDEN, THE AUTUMN leaves swirl down gently, every morning the grass on the campsite is streaked with brown and red. Beautiful antique