After the Reich (3 page)

Introduction

In the years 1945 to 1946 Germany was a collection of denouncers, black-marketeers, prisoners, refugees from justice and tireless whingers. The Allies announced that the Germans needed to be handled with a rod of iron. It was pure nonsense.

Franz Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge durch die Landschaften meines Lebens, privately printed, Munich 2000, 166

T
he war had been the bloodiest yet, particularly for civilians. Laying aside some three million dead German soldiers, by 7 May 1945 at least 1.8 million German civilians had perished and 3.6 million homes had been destroyed (20 per cent of the total), leaving 7.5 million homeless; and the bloodshed was going to continue for a lot longer. As many as 16.5 million Germans were to be driven from their homes. Of these some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east.
^1
a

It was called
die Stunde null
(Zero Hour), though it was nothing of the kind. Germany was wrecked from top to bottom, but memories were still acute, the country had a past, and a large body of people who had supported the
ancien régime
needed to be assessed and rendered harmless. As it was, like Weimar, many of them were carried over into the new post-Nazi world.
²
There were simply too many of them, and most had lost their faith in Hitler when his armies were defeated at Stalingrad.

In May 1945 National Socialism was as good as dead. Apart from a few desperate ideologists, as anxious to save their skins as defend their creed, the vast majority of Germans had already come to the conclusion that it had been founded on a terrible fallacy. Defeat was one thing, but, as the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer pointed out a few years after the end of the conflict, Germans - even those in the Hitler Youth and the Waffen-SS - were already conscious of the country’s ‘moral bankruptcy’. The defeated Germans surprised their conquerors by their docility. They offered next to no resistance to them. They did what they were told. Of the promised Werewolves - Nazi guerrillas trained to fight in occupied territory - there was virtually no sign.

To some extent Germans believed the Allied propaganda: the Russians, the Americans, the British and the French had come to ‘liberate’ them. The Allies may have freed the Germans of their National Socialist shackles, but they did a lot of other things to them first. The novelist and psychiatrist Alfred Döblin records a conversation he had with a well-brought-up girl in the Black Forest. ‘We received the Allies with so much joy’, she told Döblin, ‘as liberators. And in the first week everything made us happy. The Allies were so lucky with us. Then they started requisitioning rooms, hotels, flats; we could take nothing with us. That took the wind out of our sails.’ Döblin told her that the war wasn’t over yet. She asked him when it would be concluded. He said: ‘When the ruins are knocked down and the rubble cleared away, and when new houses have been built where everyone can have a home and they can come out of their shelters and sheds. When the economy has taken off once more, when politics are stable again. Fräulein E., you are young. You will live to see the peace. Later, when you look back on the present time, you will be astonished that you were young enough to believe that it was peace.’
³

For some Germans defeat was what they were waiting for: it fulfilled their most eager hopes. In his dark first novel,
Kreuz ohne Liebe
, written in the years immediately following German defeat, Heinrich Böll explores the feelings of an anti-Nazi who has been fighting in the army from day one. Christoph Bachem’s brother has been shot. He is a Nazi who repents in the end and saves Christoph’s life. Christoph’s best friend has spent the war in a concentration camp, a victim of the same brother. Christoph enjoys a brief sojourn with his wife, Cornelia, before losing her for good after deserting and fleeing to the west. He indulges his feelings of utter nihilism. ‘No,’ he said tiredly, ‘I want no more. It is horrible to have been a soldier in a war for six years and always to have had to wish that it would be lost; to see the collapse, and at the same time to know that whatever power succeeds it, and kicks the daylights out of the corpse of this state, will quite probably be equally diabolic; the devil possesses all the power in this world, and a change of power is only a change of rank among devils, that I believe for certain.’
^b
Bachem has no faith in the Allies either. As he tells Cornelia,

Do you believe, then, that these people who are about to conquer us with their rubber soles and tins of Spam, will ever understand what we have suffered? Do you believe they will understand what it feels like to be showered with their bombs and shells and at the same time to be sullied by this diabolic state; what it means to be crushed between these two mill-stones? They simply cannot have suffered as much as us, and since Christ’s death there has been a hierarchy of suffering in which we will remain the victors, without the world ever learning or understanding what it was we felt.
⁴

The Allies may have chosen to style themselves as ‘liberators’ but they came in hate. In the cases of the Russians, French, Poles and Czechs, this was understandable. To be occupied is to be violated, even when it is not coupled with regular atrocities. The atrocities committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia were horrendous, and they were not lacking in France and Czechoslovakia either. It is hardly surprising that there were acts of revenge. Any SS man found in the east was liable to be subjected to the most fabulous torture and death. Such things we may understand, but surely never condone.

As the Soviets chose to introduce their own brand of ideology along the way, controlled ‘revolutions’ were carried out too, by the ‘Lublin’ Poles (those patronised by Moscow rather than the West) and the Czechs. The middle and upper classes were ruthlessly dispossessed. Their homes were sequestered, while they themselves were imprisoned, tortured and in many cases killed. In the Prussian east the old, Junker squirearchy was wiped out without mercy.

The French worked the hatred out of their systems in a few acts of grisly violence. Demonstrations of gross brutality were comparatively rare in the British army. For a few years Germany became another colony, dealing with the Germans a burden placed on the Christian white man. It was like India all over again. The Americans, however, saw it differently: although both the British and the Americans used films and photographs of the camps to encourage their soldiers to be hard-hearted and to chastise Germans, it seems to have had more effect on American GIs, who took their brief that much more seriously - that is, until the politicians decided the German people were to be wooed. There was a PR war to win now, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union.

With the exception of the death camps in Poland, which had already been closed and blown up by the Germans, all the most infamous concentration camps together with work camps were put back to use by the Allies: Auschwitz-Birkenau,
⁵
Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald for the Russians; Dachau for the Americans and Bergen-Belsen for the British, not to mention the grisly Ebensee in the Salzkammergut, where the Americans kept 44,000 SS men. This strikes us as disgusting now, but there were obvious logistical reasons for using them, together with an understandable temptation to ‘rub the Germans’ noses in their own mess’. Central Europe was teeming with homeless DPs (displaced persons) who were in the process of resettlement after ethnic cleansing. Millions of POWs were also held in camps. In the east they were earmarked for work details and they needed to be housed. Some were to be allotted a more sinister fate. They too needed to be put in a secure place until their destiny was decided.

While the fate of the Jews shocked the British and the Americans and - particularly in the case of the Americans - sharpened their attitudes towards the conquered nation, the Soviet authorities made little of it. The anonymous author of
A Woman in Berlin
, for example, was surprised: ‘no Russian has so far reproached me for the German persecution of the Jews’.
⁶

When the Allies invaded Germany in the first half of 1945, they came bearing war aims and plans. They had gone to war because they had been provoked by the Axis powers. Now the desire was to crush Germany and its allies. ‘Their effort to emerge victorious included neither an aim to destroy any segment of the German population nor a plan to save any part of Germany’s victims,’ one historian has written. ‘The post-war punishment of perpetrators was largely a consequence of afterthoughts. The liberation of the survivors was almost entirely a by-product of victory. The Allies could harmonise with their war effort all sorts of denunciations of the Germans, but there was no disposition to deviate from military goals for the deliverance of the Jews. In that sense the destruction of the Jews presented itself as a problem with which the Allies could not effectively deal.’
⁷

The Allies needed to win first, before they could even think about how they would clear up the mess. The first war aim was to establish security, which the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had singularly failed to do. At first there were only the British. When Churchill came to power in 1940 ‘appeasement’ was already a dirty word. ‘Vansittartism’, which saw the Germans as a tribe of incorrigible louts from the time of Tacitus to the present day, had become the dominant thinking in governing circles. It was developed by the diplomat Lord Vansittart, who spent part of the war giving radio broadcasts which examined different Germans in turn, pointing out how nasty they all were. Vansittartism inspired historians to search archives for further evidence of the deep-seated evilness of the Germans. To some extent it is still alive today.
⁸

The first Vansittartite directive to emerge from Whitehall was ‘absolute silence’. Officially, at least, Her Majesty’s Government would not talk to Germans. With time ‘absolute silence’ gave way to ‘unconditional surrender’. There was to be no negotiated peace this time. The opposite school was that of the historian E. H. Carr, who thought that a civilised Germany was merely a question of finding the right man. In Britain’s first studies for a post-war Germany there was discussion of reparations: Germany would thereby be deprived of the means to make war. From the summer of 1943 the task of planning the occupation was handed over to Clement Attlee, who would become one of the ‘Big Three’ at the Potsdam Conference
⁹
when the Conservatives lost the July 1945 election.

The Western Allies tended to agree with Robert Vansittart that the Second War had been largely caused by the perpetrators of the First, and that meant Prussia. It was a long time before they came to terms with the idea of Nazism as a non-Prussian movement. The Atlantic Charter of 14 April 1941 had a little flavour of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points twenty-three years before. An expression of the principles on which the peace was to be based, it was drawn up by Churchill and amended by Roosevelt. The American president added the passages condemning aggressive war and calling for German disarmament.
¹⁰
It was followed by the Declaration of the United Nations signed by twenty-six governments on 1 January 1942, an agreement to uphold the Atlantic Charter.

The first meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt to discuss war aims was held in Newfoundland in August 1941. Churchill was more pragmatic than Roosevelt; the American leader was much more hostile to the Germans. He had been partially educated in Germany and he had come home with strongly held anti-German views. He had no desire to meet a member of the German resistance who came to see him at the beginning of the war.
¹¹
The two leaders decided that there would be no annexations after the successful campaign, and no territorial changes would be effected that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. The high-minded principles expressed at that time formed the basis for the Atlantic Charter -
Pax Americana
. Future wars would be prevented by stopping Germany from disturbing the peace. Germany was to be demilitarised, denazified and made to restore the land it had poached from its neighbours.
¹²

German and Austrian émigrés played an important role in shaping American thinking after 1941. Many of them worked in the Research and Analysis Branch (R & A) of Military Intelligence (OSS). Prominent were the historians Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert, the politicologues Otto Kirchheimer, John Herz and Franz Leopold Neumann and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The most important of them was Franz Neumann, the author of
Behemoth: The Structure and Practise of National Socialism
. Neumann argued for a radical reconstruction of Germany to avoid repeats of Hitler’s coming to power. One key plank to his doctrine was the establishment of some sort of European Union. The traditional Germany was to be removed by a social revolution.
¹³
There was only a brief window when the Western Allies tried to woo the Jews. This corresponded to the time of the first Nuremberg trials. When East and West fell out for good, the Allies - the West in particular - were prepared to sweep a good deal under the carpet in order to groom their new German ally and relieve themselves of the unpleasant business of censuring its people for their past conduct.