Last but not least

Of six million Russian soldiers captured by the Germans, only one million are still alive in 1945, two million German women raped by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, countless millions of Jews and others done to death in German concentration camps, 12 million displaced persons wandering about in Germany at the end of the war not knowing where to go. Such are a few of the statistics of Hitler’s legacy inherited by Europe in May 1945.

These figures perhaps have become familiar, but how often do those to whom they have become familiar pause to consider what they really mean? Huge figures such as these have a self-defeating quality rather like those about money that are bandied about by chancellors of the exchequer; five billion more for this, five billion less for that. People hear the figures but do they stop to envisage a billion five-pound notes stacked in a pile?

In the case of Hitler’s legacy the challenge is far greater and more horrible than anything mere money can offer and it is in response to this human challenge that David Stafford has written Endgame 1945. He builds his explanation round the experiences of a few individuals. Among them is Robert Ellis, who fought his way up Italy with the American Tenth Mountain Division and bore the brunt of battle that was rendered the more absurd, but not the less severe, by the fact that the war was obviously almost over. There is Francesca Wilson, who worked for the United Nations Relief Organisation in a largely vain attempt to alleviate the appalling and chaotic suffering of the aftermath of war. There is Geoffrey Cox, a soldier from New Zealand who finished up in Trieste waiting to be told whether he was to fraternise with Tito’s forces or fight them, and Robert Reid, a front-line war correspondent who had to find words to tell the British public about conditions inside the first concentration camp to be liberated.