Authors: Rebecca West
Some had been more than six weeks in the transit camp in the pine woods of Schleswig-Holstein. There were two thousand of them there, living in Nissen huts put up by a British regiment that had meant them for its own temporary use and therefore put in no insulation; so they were icy in winter and stifling in summer. The refugees were sleeping seventy or so in the dormitory huts, which stank. That was not their fault. Though the Germans were eating cream cakes and drawing a bigger fat ration than the British at that time, there was very little soap. Some of these people were beginning to stink morally too. “My people,” said the sea captain who was camp superintendent, and had learned his English at sea, “are bloody liars, but you must not blame them.” And there he was right. They had no assets but their hard-luck stories; and as they were surrounded by people who had just as poignant stories they started to compete and learned to be, as he said, bloody liars. They learned other things as well. Every few days the police came round and the superintendent wearily helped them to search the camp for sacks full of poultry, and if to find what you seek is good luck, then they were lucky. “And the young girls, and the young blokes,” said the sea captain, “what shall I do with the young things? All these woods, how should they not go into them?”
Old people hobbled about the clearing in the sunshine. There was nowhere for them to sit down and enjoy the warmth. It was forbidden to take chairs out into the open air, for too many chairs had been spirited away to be chopped up and used as firewood.
There was nothing for anybody to do. In the afternoon the women lay in their bunks and stared straight up at the ceiling. The matron was extravagantly grateful when Dorothy Thompson gave the camp a sewing machine. “But it seems silly to give only one to such a large camp,” said Dorothy, and the matron answered, “Those who never get to use it will hope that someday they will be the lucky ones.”
“What have they to look forward to?” we asked the official from the Schleswig-Holstein Ministry in charge of refugees. He explained that they hoped to be accepted as residents in Schleswig-Holstein, where they would look for work, but as there were nearly as many refugees in the district as natives, the prospect of finding it was uncertain. If they did not find work they drew an allowance of about a pound a week. If they did not pass the screening they would either have to go back to the Soviet Zone or live like outlaws, without even a ration card. It was hard to hear what this official said, he was so hoarse. He was a refugee himself, a lawyer with an anti-Nazi record, from an East German city, and he was very tired. He had to work in Kiel, where there was an acute housing shortage owing to the bomb damage, so he had to rent an expensive house in a seaside resort two hours away for his large family. This left him so short of money that he could eat only in the cheapest restaurants, and the food and service disgusted him, so he lived on coffee and sandwiches and never had a hot meal except when he was at home during the weekends.
But he was really very hoarse, even for a tired man. No, it was all right for him to talk, he always had a sore throat these days. Chronic hoarseness would make a sensible man in his forties consult a doctor, just to dismiss a certain suspicion. But it was easy to see why he had neglected this precaution. He could not take his mind off certain calculations. He could not see how the refugees could fail to bankrupt the district’s treasury, or how, even if responsibility for the refugees was accepted by the Bonn Parliament as a federal burden, that too could lead to anything but bankruptcy, as about fourteen hundred people were coming over the frontier every day. Then he would be axed, and he would have to go on the refugee allowance, and he and his family would sink to depths that even he, having seen so much, could not foresee; and it was even possible that the refugee allowance would no longer be paid. Then there would be—he raised his hands and dropped them, saying that there would be a
débácle,
a
débácle,
pronouncing the word in the stiff-jointed way that Germans pronounce French words. For the Western Germans would turn against the refugees and hate them, as the Nazis had hated the Jews, and the refugees would turn against the Western Germans … He gave a deep sigh, which his poor throat turned into a whistle.
That is precisely what would have happened had Germany not achieved her industrial resurrection. The sufferings of the displaced persons and expellees and refugees have been a terrible burden on the conscience of the Western Allies. We should not have allowed ourselves, in the course of fighting a just war, to have been transformed into the likeness of a torpid Attila, a slow-motion Tamerlane, a stuttering Ivan the Terrible. Of course there was a strong case for removing the German minority groups from the countries against which they had conspired treasonably with Hitler. But there was an unanswerable case against it. It was fatuously stipulated at the Potsdam Conference that the expulsions must be conducted “in a humane and orderly manner.” But it must have been obvious to any sane persons that only in an inhumane and disorderly manner could some millions of people be set down (with no more property than they could carry) in a strange land where there was already a housing shortage and the social and economic system was in ruins. The Western democracies were therefore responsible for an amount of suffering which puts them on a level with those tyrants whose names, fifty years ago, stood for a wide and radiating cruelty believed to have passed for ever from the face of the earth. It is true that governments succeeded in cancelling much of that suffering; yet that waterlogged air station outside Munich, and the many hells like it, and the transit camps, were enough to make the salvation of the Western democracies a questionable matter. But we should have fallen to a still lower level, we should have been equal to Hitler, had Germany gone bankrupt and the parties to this dreadful relationship been brought to a common grave by famine and aimless revolution.
Because Germany did not go bankrupt but broke out into a passion of productivity, the waterlogged air station outside Munich was closed in the early fifties. German jails must certainly have received many of its inhabitants; but the rest found a place in German factories and workshops. The transit camps continued to stink, screening continued to take weeks. It is impossible to guess a period when there will not be weeks when over a thousand East Germans cross the frontiers every day. But in the early fifties the routine was injected with hope. There was nothing like full employment. There was enough unemployment to cause a considerable amount of suffering. But there was enough employment to keep the community solvent and stable. There were so many jobs going that a capable refugee had as much chance of getting one as a competent native West German. The refugees were well enough off not to have justified the fear of their political influence, which many had feared in 1946. At elections they voted neither for the extreme Right nor for the extreme Left, but for the same parties that were supported by the native community.
But it is hard to see how any but a speculative and uncurbed economy could have been flexible enough to assimilate the expellees and refugees and relieve the Allies of so much of their guilt. It is sobering to consider what would have happened in postwar Britain, which has about the same population as Western Germany, if ten million people had been dumped in the country (with no more property than they could carry) and a million and a half of these had immediately begun to draw unemployment benefits while the rest competed with Britons in the labour market. Yet it is not hypocrisy to pretend that the rigid British economy was framed in the idealistic hope that no man shall be in need if his brothers can help him; but it would be revolting hypocrisy to deny that the German devil-take-the-hindmost economy was merciful to those whom the British and Americans had abandoned. Here, as so often before, we see that history takes no care to point a moral.
The Germans served us by taking away the guilt of a grave sin against the refugees. But it was not clear what the Allied occupation did to help the Germans rid themselves of their sins. There were many Allied Control Commission officials who took their duties with extreme seriousness and sought to use the occupation as a means towards the betterment of the world. One, who was greatly beloved and highly efficient, was clearly understood by his friends. He was a practising Christian, and regarded the Germans as sinful, but felt no superiority to them, because the difference in degree of sinfulness between himself and the Nazis was as nothing compared to the contrast between the sinfulness of all human beings and the sinlessness of Christ. He believed that the Germans should be provided with the necessities for the body which enable the soul to start on its journey to salvation, and saw to it that they were given houses and food and schooling and work, while he joined with other Christians, whether German or not, to establish a relationship with God and his Church which would enable grace to be visited on the situation. At the other end of the scale were men who refrained from treating the Germans dishonestly or unkindly, even under extreme temptation, but could have given no reason for their abstention from such conduct, except, perhaps, that it was not sporting. Yet the occupation as a whole left a sense of insipidity. It was, to use a Scottish expression, a long drink of water.
The reason for this was best understood in the French Zone. This was an area ill spoken of elsewhere. In the British and the American Zones the French were never mentioned save as the stumbling block in the way of the regeneration of the Germans by exalted ethical methods; and their Zone was regarded as Old Testament country, where an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was recognized administrative routine, and all was as if there had never been a star over Bethlehem. But it has to be remembered that there is a great deal to be said for the Old Testament. The French, instead of importing food into their Zone, according to the British and American practice, exported it to their own country, rapidly and in large quantities; and far from preventing their officials from living on the German economy, they encouraged them and their families to live well on it, and sent in parties of schoolchildren and convalescents and old people to have holidays off the country. They also brought with them the vast vituperative resources of their language. On their arrival they told the Germans in raucous tones that they were barbarians, had waged the most barbaric war in history, had asked for trouble by being defeated, and were going to get it. Officially German guilt was never left undenounced if an opportunity offered; and unofficially pigs and camels and excrement were frequently named in sentences animated by the rudest of verbs. Yet in the end the French were liked better than the British or the Americans, for the reason that many simple souls find the eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth morality a help to their simplicity as they go through this complex world. If a man has been seduced by a demagogue into committing and condoning acts which he knows to be wrong, and everything after that goes very badly, he may find it easier to fit this phase of his life into the pattern of a reasonable universe if at this point a representative of a number of his victims rushes at him and calls him a pig, a camel, an excrement and threatens to mutilate him in resourceful and imaginative ways should he offend again; and he may find it quite bewildering if instead there appears before him another representative of his enemies, offering to love him. There was an element of moral restfulness in the French Zone which could be disregarded only by the doctrinaire. Moreover the French did not keep up their abusiveness. They got tired of it and got on to another phase in the relationship. A German doctor, long an anti-Nazi refugee, first in Paris and then in London, was at work in the French Zone; and he regarded instances of the aggressiveness of French language and deportment with the resentment which any self-respecting German was bound to feel, only to explain that he recognized that it was of no real consequence. His words were halting. “The French … they live with us.” He told a story to clarify the point. One evening he had been called out by a German living in a village outside Baden, whose wife was in labour with her fourth child. As he hurried to the case it crossed his mind that when he had last visited the family six months before they had just had billeted on them a French official, a typical minor civil servant, who had struck him as thoroughly disagreeable and full of nationalist feeling; and it struck him that this uncongenial guest must be adding to the strain of the moment. But when they, got to the house they found the French official giving the older children their supper, hearing their lessons as they ate their soup, and telling them quietly that they could help their mother best by being good and behaving as if nothing unusual were happening. When the baby was born the French official was called in to see it like the rest of the family. “Not all French officials are like this,” said the German doctor, “but quite a number are.” There were very few British and American officials who lived with the Germans in this sense. It could, of course, be described as living on the German economy, but it could also be described as fraternization with greater accuracy than the process known by that name in the British and American Zones, which often seemed to have nothing to do with the Latin word for brother.
Sometimes the French fell into the bog of mutual misunderstanding that was always waiting to engulf officials in every Zone. There was, for example, a row over a schoolbook which defied all attempts at explanation. The French put out schoolbooks for use in their Zone which were, on the whole, admirable; and they were quite certain that the history of Germany for intermediate pupils represented a real moral victory over their own chauvinism. They felt therefore that the Germans were merely being insincere propagandists when they denounced this book on the ground that among the illustrations was a caricature of Bismarck. In this they were wrong. The Germans are so deeply respectful to their rulers that strict laws, which the community supports, forbid any but the mildest ridicule of public figures; and the proper place for a caricature of Bismarck seemed to them a grossish comic paper, and not a schoolbook. But the French claw whom they crown, and by their standards the caricature of Bismarck was hardly a caricature at all. It was wholly lacking, they pointed out with pride, in any touch of obscenity.