crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Tamás Stark
A topic doomed to oblivion: foreign prisoners in Soviet
custody – with special regard to the fate of Hungarian
civilian internees
I like to watch a documentary series on the history of World War Two on the National Geographic
channel or on the Discovery channel. All of these movies finish with the celebration of victory over Nazi
Germany. People gathered cheerfully to celebrate peace and victory in London, New York, Paris ... These
widely circulated documentaries often forget to state that about half of Europe remained silent on ‘VE-
Day’. The arrival of the Soviet army in Riga, Vilnius, Tallin, Budapest, and even in Warsaw, signalled
the beginning of another, new occupation, and the commencement of arresting and deporting civilians
in great numbers to the Soviet Union. On ‘VE-Day’, the people in these cities had misgivings about
how they would fare in the future.
On April 8, 2008, at the European hearing entitled “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes”
the former Lithuanian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ms Sandra Kalniete, said that in the West, people
thought in clichés about the history of the Second World War and the post-war period. It is a commonplace
to say that ‘good’ people won the war, and that ‘wrong’ people were defeated and they deserved their
fate. There is no place for Eastern Europe in this black and white concept. Even historians are devoted
to this oversimplified view. Other colleagues spoke about the double standard in the Western analysis
of the history of World War II. The meanings of such words as ‘occupation’, ‘liberation’, and ‘victory’
are not necessarily the same even in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Their experiences of the war
and, consequently, the memory of war time are quite different.
I have experienced personally that many Western scholars do not understand this difference. For
them, World War II has only one interpretation of the war, and the history and memory of the war
years are indivisible. In 2000, I was honoured to be involved in an international research project of the
European Science Foundation (ESF) entitled “Occupation in Europe: the impact of National Socialist
and Fascist rule”. The research objectives of this programme were to study the immediate impact of
war and occupation on the lives of the occupied peoples, and the consequences of war and occupation
during the first phase of post-war reconstruction.
When I was invited to join this project, the group already had been decided that the four years’
long programme would focus on the German and Italian occupation; consequently, the impact of Soviet
occupation in Eastern Europe would not be studied. Nevertheless the programme was productive, and
valuable publications such as articles, essays, and books were milestones of its success. The project gave
a unique opportunity to the mainly young colleagues from every segment of Europe to work together.
What is even more important is that the project brought together historians from the ‘Western’ and
the ‘Eastern’ parts of Europe. Consequently, this project gave us a chance to write essays and books that
reflected the special viewpoints of Eastern European scholars. I wrote on ‘chances’ and ‘opportunities’.
In practice, we could not make the most of the opportunity. For various reasons, it was difficult to involve
colleagues from the Eastern part of Europe. To my knowledge, nobody represented Ukraine, or the
Baltic and Balkan States. Consequently, Eastern European historiography remained underrepresented,
and most of the workshops and publications focused on the Western European experience. Therefore,
this project could not function as a platform for Eastern European historians to describe their views on
World War Two, in general, and on the character of the Nazi and the Soviet occupations, in particular.
Within the framework of the project, six teams were organised, each team studying the history of
the war years and the early post-war period from a different aspect. I was proud to be the co-leader of
the team which dealt with the World War II-related forced migrations.
This was not a new research topic. Since the early 1950s, dozens of classic works have been
written on the subject. Two common aspects pertained to these books: they focused on the problem
of displaced persons, population transfers, and the expulsion of the Germans; all were published in
Western Europe and the USA.
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