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Epilogue

© William Waller

The shadow of Hitler still looms large: even this week in England, the use of his image in a political campaign brought out some praise and some condemnation. As the leader of an extreme fascist party in a country desperately in need of a way back to a feeling of pride and patriotism after its failure in the First World War, Hitler provided the focus, but then took the power given to him and perverted it into the most horrendous regime the world has yet seen. In the same way that Alexander, Genghis Khan and Napoleon have continued to live in people’s imaginations over centuries, Hitler will be remembered and, one hopes, the lessons will eventually be learned that his methods must be rejected. The dictatorship regimes of Peron and the Argentinean generals, of Pinochet, of Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, of Milosevic, of Saddam Hussein, of nearly every African country, all point in the other direction, that such hopes are only pious, as if human beings as a whole were incapable of keeping out of their governments every sadist and amoral monster their countries produce.

The aftermath of the War was nearly worse than the war. Firstly there was the discovery of the evidence of the rumoured murder of all Jews; then there were the millions upon millions of displaced persons, all trying to get back to their pre-war homes, only to find, in many cases, that their homes no longer existed, perhaps also their whole town, and family; then there was the long hard terrible winter 1945 to 1946; and so on. With the best will in the world and the help of thousands of Allied troops, life returned to western Europe. But, for millions on the wrong side of the cease fire line, there was the even longer hell of Communist regimes as Stalin took and annexed, while the Americans and British could only stand and stare for lack of the political will to re-start war with a different enemy. It is impossible to imagine the lives of people blighted from 1939 to the 1990s. Whole generations could only wonder at a free world, where you did not pay with your life for speaking the truth about politicians; where talk was not censored; where lies were quickly discovered by a free press. ( In Poland , in 1973, my nephew by marriage, living with his parents less than 100 miles from Auschwitz said, flatly, that he did not believe that the Germans did all those monstrous things; it was all filthy American propaganda. He was 17 at the time and he had been told so at school.)

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