The crimes of the victors.

The Crimes of the Victors

THE END OF the cold war (if that's what it is) is prompting a re-examination of some of the consequences of the end of the last war, and the news is disquieting to the victors. That is, to us.

Vaclav Havel, the new president of Czechoslovakia, caused his first flap by suggesting that his country had an obligation to apologize to the Sudeten Germans, who had been forcibly expelled after 1945. Cardinal Tomasek and the Communists joined in denouncing this proposal. A book recently published in Canada (Other Losses, by James Bacque) argues that as many as one million soldiers of the Wehrmacht who became postwar prisoners of the American Army perished in camps that were deliberately inhumane. Bacque compares the camps to Andersonville, and blames Eisenhower for the mal-treatment. Americans and Britons have known for years of "Operation Keelhaul," the program under which thousands of Russian defectors who had fought alongside the German army were returned to Stalin, and certain death. (See "The Unquiet Graves of Yalta," p. 27.)

It is possible to think of excuses for these, as for any evil action. The Sudeten Germans had been Hitler's pretext for dismembering Czechoslovakia; naturally the Czechs would bear them a grudge. Most of the hapless Russians were, technically, traitors. Americans were unlikely to think well of a country that had sucked them into a European war for the second time in 25 years.

But Western democracies (though not, of course, the Soviet Union) rest on the principle of individual justice and individual guilt. Prisoners of war, even krauts and Russian turncoats, are entitled to prescribed norms of treatment. Sudeten Germans who served Hitler deserved punishment--not all Sudeten Germans as a class.

One of the price misnomers of recent times was to call World War II the "good war." Wars can be necessary and just. They are never good. The amnesic rhetoric of goodness only makes it easier for revisionists--America Lasters here, Nazi symps in Europe--to claim to be telling the whole truth when instead they harp on partial truths that have been suppressed. Only the whole truth sets us free. President Havel had the right idea.