BR TO THE NEW STATESMAN, [EARLY NOV. 1945]
BRACERS 92421. ALS. McMaster
Proofread by K. Blackwell

To the Editor of New Statesman1

Sir,

We of the Western democracies, who have profited by Russian help in winning the war, and who have acquiesced in Russian occupation of all Germany east of the Elbe (with the exception of a part of Berlin), have to face a very grave responsibility — as grave as any that has ever confronted human beings in the whole history of the world. By the unanimous testimony of all who have knowledge of the facts, the Russians, and the Poles with Russian acquiescence, are perpetrating a vast atrocity larger in scale, and scarcely less horrible in detail, than those perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps. They have adopted a policy which must result, and evidently is intended to result, in the extermination of a very large proportion of the Germans who have hitherto lived east of the Elbe. In the Russian zone machinery, live stock, stores of food, etc., have been confiscated, nominally as reparations, but often only to be wantonly destroyed. The harvest has rotted for want of labour. Nothing whatever has been done to avert the consequent wide-spread starvation. Raping of women, on a scale hitherto unknown, has proceeded unchecked in circumstances of unspeakable cruelty, sometimes by large numbers in the presence of the children or mothers of the women. As a result, in some districts as many as fifty per cent of women have become infected with venereal disease.

An even more direct responsibility lies on the governments of Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia for the expulsion of Germans from the territories annexed in what used to be parts of Germany. These expulsions have been carried out with utter barbarity: at a few minutes’ notice, women, children, and old men have been herded into trains where they were kept for days without food, so that many died on the journey and many more shortly after their arrival in Berlin. From Berlin, after days and nights in queues, still starving, they were packed into other trains and taken to the western edge of the Russian zone, where no means of keeping them alive had been prepared, and where the existing population was already on the verge of starvation. It is universally agreed that during the coming winter many millions will die unless Russian policy is changed.

Friendly representations, both by the British Government and by that of the United States, have been tried without avail. It is clear that there will be no improvement unless and until the Russian Government has reason to fear that its brutality, with the problems which it raises for us through the influx of millions of destitute refugees in the zones of the Western Powers, will give rise, if continued, to active hostility on the part of Britain and America.

Only great firmness now can prevent the world from marching towards another world war. Acquiescence at this stage is bound to lead, as it did in the case of the Nazis, to continually fresh offences, until at last, perhaps in very unfavourable circumstances, the Western Powers find themselves compelled to resist.

However that may be, it is the duty of every humane individual to do all that is possible to mitigate a vast disaster which we unavoidably have helped, by our alliance with Russia, to bring about.

Yours,
Bertrand Russell.

• 1

  New StatesmanUnpublished; 52 in Collected Papers 24.