Authors: Rebecca West
But the case for the continuance of dismantling was just as imbecile. Though synthetic petrol plants were war potential, it was no use pretending that they were decisive war potential. Stress was laid on figures which showed that the works were carried on at
a
loss, but it seemed probable that the degree of the loss was largely due to an imposed obligation to work them to fifty per cent or less of their capacity while they still stood; and in any case it would not have been unnatural if the German government should have chosen to subsidize a process which yielded fatty by-products, especially since Lord Boyd Orr, that banshee of the nutritional world, was then prophesying a world shortage of fats. The propaganda for the continuance of dismantling made painful reading then and makes painful reading now, but it was the very best the case allowed. This policy was enormously dear to the Foreign Office, and to Mr. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary who has been most completely in the hands of his officials. The Foreign Office was unmoved by the fact that every British official worth his salt and the German trade-union movement in a body were opposed to dismantling.
This crusade left Germans with the poorest impression of British common sense. Many of them read with interest the Foreign Affairs debate in which Mr. Bevin justified his policy: a debate which then appalled and still appalls by its incoherence. They were told that France and the Soviet Union were hounding the Foreign Office and the State Department to implement the dismantling agreement to the bitter end. They knew that the Foreign Office and the State Department were not at all likely to run into trouble in order to please France, and they knew that the insistence of the Soviet Union was an impudence which demanded disregard. The Russians had long abandoned dismantling in the Eastern Zone and were permitting factories to work in their own zone of Germany which were the exact analogues of the factories they were hounding the Allies to pull down in Western Germany. In every country outside Germany, Communists were urging haste in dismantling and were declaring that the delay was due to fascist big business influences in Great Britain and America and Germany. British and American and French Communists and fellow travellers visited Germany and sent home articles which bolstered up this story. But the Communists inside Western Germany opposed dismantling so vigorously that, as a protest against the policy, the Works Council of a famous factory in the Ruhr for the first time elected three Communists to the three presidential chairs. Not only were the Communists of Western Germany parading in full propaganda fig in defence of the threatened plants, the Eastern Zone was pouring a continuous stream of letters and telegrams on the management and workers of these plants, congratulating them on their resistance and encouraging them to make an even bolder stand. They did not fail, in these letters and telegrams, to point out that the similar plants in the Eastern Zone were running “to benefit the German economy,” and as a master stroke various provinces in the Eastern Zone adopted the staffs of these dismantled factories as American and British towns used to adopt the populations of war-damaged Continental towns. This nonsense went on and on until 1950, when, against the passionate resistance of the Foreign Office, the policy was abandoned.
The Germans liked the officials of the Allied Control Commission and thought them on the whole honest and conscientious and kind. Even those who looted and fiddled they did not greatly resent; that they could understand. But they did not respect the government of Great Britain. They were never therefore won away from the idea of free enterprise, and it is not for democrats to deny their right to practise and preach any economic theory they chose. All the same, the altruistic impulse which made Britain wish to share and share alike was warming, and that warmth too it would have been agreeable to share. It is true too that it was largely a lack of social conscience and flighty industrial ambition which gave Hitler his chance. But if we are going to be moralists, we had better note what the Germans have done to lift a burden of moral guilt off the shoulders of the rest of us.
This moral guilt related to the persons present in Germany as displaced persons, expellees, and refugees. The blame for the presence of the displaced persons rested primarily on the Germans, for most of them had been brought in by the Nazis as slave labour; but they had remained in Germany because they were not Communists and Mr. Churchill and Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had imposed communism on their countries without consulting the inhabitants. Then there were the expellees, whose presence was entirely due to the Allies. They were the groups of German origin in East European countries which the Potsdam Conference had agreed to remove from the places where their ancestors had lived for centuries and sent to Germany. There were also the refugees from the Eastern Zone of Germany, who were fleeing from Russian inefficiency. In these categories there were about ten million people.
Many of the displaced persons had emigrated. The lot of those who had not was often terrible. Outside Munich there was an abandoned air station, wind-swept and waterlogged, where five thousand White Russians lived in hutments falling into ruin. This was high summer, but every hut was watered by a drip from the ceiling. In the winter the rain came through the broken roofs and soaked the insulated material, and it never got quite dry before the next winter came on. There were eight or ten people in every room, usually belonging to two families. They could hear everything that their neighbours were saying or doing in the rooms on either side. The roads from these huts to the canteens and ablution centres and social buildings were fissured with ruts. The cement floors of the kitchens and canteens were scuffed and splintered, and the inmates were always catching their heels in the cracks and falling when they were carrying food and drink. Anyway, they got sick of the canteen food and found it dear, and many used to cook in the rooms, but their stoves wore out and they were short of fuel, so they sat at their tables and ate cold food out of the paper from the delicatessen store. It was hard to know which were in worse case: those who went out to work and shared in the bustling life of reviving Germany and had to come back to this morgue at night, or those who had to stay there all day. “I could mend the roof,” said the old man. “Look, I am strong, I was very strong once, I am still strong, but I can get no corrugated iron.” They could have mended the cement floors too, and the stoves, and even the roads, but they had no material.
In that camp there was a large criminal society, vile and varied. There were dope pedlars and pimps and blackmailers, and every sort of thief. A woman flung out her arm as she passed a group of horrible young men whose hair came near meeting their eyebrows, broad-shouldered and crouching gorillas. She screamed at them and they jeered back. They were a gang who watched to see which of their fellows were earning good wages and buying new clothes and bedding and stoves, and then, under cover of night, threw midget bombs into the hut and, while the terrified occupants rushed out by the door, climbed in at the window and stole all that was valuable. They had stripped this woman and her husband of the first decent possessions they had had to call their own for thirteen years. There were many bloody assaults, and even murders. There was also a cold intellectual hell in this camp, an iceberg in which there was preserved every political faith which has emerged in Russia during the last hundred and thirty years, with the single exception of Stalinist bolshevism; everything from Decembrism to Eurasian fascism and Trotskyism, and even some deviations within Trotskyism. All these faiths had been frozen hard by the misery of those who held them, and they were now so chill that they burned. All these Russians loved Russia, and for that reason each party hated implacably all the rest, for having whored after strange political gods and brought the beloved country to ruin, and themselves to this wet and windy end of hope.
It mattered very much what happened to these people, for between these hot and cold hells a stable society had established itself. There were many people who astonished by their nobility. One family had achieved a miracle. The father had been an officer in Tsarist Russia and had escaped after the Revolution to Yugoslavia, where he had become a teacher. In middle life he had married the daughter of another White Russian, and they had one son. From the time the Germans had invaded Yugoslavia in 1941 the family had had the worst of both worlds, for the Germans persecuted them for their liberal opinions, and they later had to flee into Germany from Tito and the Russians. Never once, in all their wanderings, had the father and mother let a day pass without giving their son his lessons, and the boy had been so well taught that he had just been admitted to Munich University, after sitting for the entrance examination at the usual age. What was more remarkable, the boy was serene. He talked without rancour and without fear, and might have been brought up in some country magically left untouched by the two wars.
There were a number of young people in the camp who presented the same unscathed appearance. This was not the result of a happy accident but of ferocious efforts on the part of their elders, who had, to be sure, been given a church and a school by the authorities, but had added much to those gifts. An Orthodox church is nothing without its furnishings and its liturgy. The inmates had taken some old airplanes to pieces and had hammered out an iconostasis and great candlesticks, and had painted their own icons, and the services were performed with careful ardour. They had scraped together their pennies to pay such amongst them as were qualified to teach in school, and to buy lesson books, and they constantly impressed on their young that it would be dangerous to go out into the world without the protection of their people’s culture. The ridiculous vanity of Pan-Slavism looked out of their eyes, changed to a homely remedy against evil.
With these people were three hundred Kalmucks, descendants of those Western Mongolians who went to South Russia in the eighteenth century. These belonged to a group that had fled to Belgrade after the Russian Revolution and taken over the cab-driving industry there between the wars. In Yugoslavia they had always looked very steadfast. “It is a delusion,” a painter had told us there. “It is due to the epicanthic fold, which drapes the eye with a stern, straight curtain of flesh, and the austere moulding of the cheekbones. If I had these advantages, gipsy as I am in my nature, I could look a pillar, a stronghold.” But here it was plain that they were in fact steadfast. They clung quietly to the customs of their people and were solicitous for their children, and in one of the huts had made a little tinselled Buddhist temple. The ritual calls for prostrations and genuflections in different parts of the temple, and the grave brown people trod out the prescribed movements round a number of tin baths set to catch the trickles from the ceiling.
The displaced persons were a diminishing group. The Kalmucks, for example, eventually went to Canada and the United States. But there were nearly four million expellees in Western Germany, and the number was stable. Some of them, chiefly mothers and children, were lodged in the great houses of the rich, and they were in a sense the luckiest. But our own British evacuees know the disadvantages of such quarters, and the great houses of Germany are even more isolated. From the casement of the medieval castle we could look down on the moat and see the little expellees playing on the grass marge between the water and the forest, while their mothers walked about knitting, tucking the ends of the needles under their armpits in the German way. “Is it usual to have cowbells in this district?” asked someone. “No. We put them on during the war because it was so terribly lonely.” There was no village near the castle, the nearest town was ten miles away; the women had no means of transport at their disposal, and no money beyond a dole of a few shillings. Others lived in bombed houses. Half of them, indeed, were recorded as living in damaged houses. Many of them were living in camps vacated by displaced persons; and that means that they were living in hutments which had been occupied by the armed forces since 1939, or even earlier, until 1945, and during all that time had had almost nothing done to them in the way of repairs.
What happened to these camps was beyond the range of normal imagination. In Bavaria, where the expellees and refugees numbered a third of the population, a German official in the Ministry put his head down on his desk and wailed aloud at the close of a telephone conversation which had brought him tidings of a permanent camp to which he had intended to move some thousands of refugees that very day. It had previously been occupied by Jewish displaced persons, who had recently gone to Palestine. They had all been engaged in trade of some sort and had found themselves, when they had to leave, faced with the problem of moving their possessions, which they had all accumulated. With a resourcefulness for which nobody could blame them, they set about making packing cases out of every piece of wood they could detach from the buildings. When the German officials came to take over, they found the place a shell. The German official had therefore nothing to do but to move the refugees to another camp, which he did not himself consider fit for human habitation.
But doubtless the refugees were glad to go, for at least they left a transit camp, and few places were more horrible in 1949 than a transit camp. There men and women and children arrived dirty and bleary-eyed after a journey over the frontier that might have lasted for days. They had to be packed like sardines into huts until they could be screened and diagnosed for what they were.
That was one of the most horrid aspects of their situation. They had all to be treated at first as if they were guilty, for their own sakes. They might be honest refugees moved by hunger and terror, fleeing from the uranium mines, or from conscription into the military police, or from investigation by the MVD; they might be Soviet spies; they might be criminals; they might be lunatics who imagined they were being persecuted. Some of them might not have come from the Soviet Zone at all, they might be naughty children who had got into trouble with their families and thought they would pose as refugees and get a hiding place. As the flow over the border increased, the pipe got choked. They had to stay longer and longer in the transit camps.