Read After the Reich Online

Authors: Giles MacDonogh

After the Reich (5 page)

The Allied zones were ratified at Yalta in February 1945. France was once again excluded. Russia was making strides towards winning the war. Its troops were poised to cross the Oder while the Western Allies had yet to cross the Rhine. Churchill argued for including the French among the victorious powers. Stalin reluctantly agreed. He did not think the French had pulled their weight and in 1940 they had let the Germans in. France might have a zone, ‘but only as a kindness and not because she is entitled to it’.
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Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Paris to sugar the pill:
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the French were to have a small zone in the west, carved out of the British and American portions. An Allied Control Council was to be set up to deal with questions affecting all four zones. It would meet in Berlin.

In April 1945 the Western Allies had second thoughts. The Americans had pushed far into Saxony, which had been allotted to the Soviets; and the British had taken a sizeable chunk of Mecklenburg. Some people were hoping that the Western Allies would push on, take Berlin and turn on Soviet Russia. Chief among these was Hitler himself, and his propaganda minister, Goebbels. As it was, the British and Americans did not turn on their Russian ally - possibly
because
Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were so anxious for them to do so; but they did hang on to their booty for a while, and Churchill for one was anxious to use it as a counter for Soviet assurances about their territorial acquisitions. The new US president - Roosevelt died that April - Harry Truman would not listen, however, and the Russians moved into Mecklenburg and Saxony without providing satisfactory assurances about Germany’s borders or the status of Berlin. Stalin prevaricated for as long as he could so that he might strip Berlin bare and install his toadies in all the worthwhile positions of power.

The French were still worrying about their own status as their troops marched into Germany with the Anglo-Americans. A total of 165,000 troops under arms meant a lack of labour at home. Germans would have to be sent to France to carry out the work in the same way as the French had been obliged to toil in Germany. De Gaulle spoke of needing two million Germans, although he never managed that. He was still keen to annex the Rhineland. As Maurice Couve de Murville, a member of the French provisional government, put it pathetically, ‘If we do not achieve this we have lost the war.’
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France’s attitude led to friction, particularly with the Americans. When French troops occupied Stuttgart - which was meant to form part of the American Zone as the capital of Württemberg - the Americans ordered them to leave. De Gaulle refused, saying he would stay put until the zones were finalised. The French were causing problems in the Levant too, and in an act of bravura against the Italians (who had taken back Haute Savoie and Nice during the war) they occupied the French-speaking Val d’Aosta. The American solution was to offer them some bits of Baden and Württemberg while keeping the lion’s share for themselves.
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In Berlin on 5 June the Western Allies formally came into the zones and sectors, but it was not until 26 July, while the Big Three were deliberating at Potsdam, that the Soviets finally recognised the French Sector of Berlin. The French were still clamouring for more of Baden and Württemberg. They had been given a curious territory along Germany’s western borders with two big lumps sticking out to the east. It was mocked as ‘the brassière’.
e

There were other nations which expected to be in the running for something at the peace, principally the Poles and the Czechs. They placed their hopes on the tit-for-tat cessions and annexations that had become a feature of the twentieth century. The process had started with the population transfers between the Bulgarians and the Turks in 1913. In that instance 50,000 people had voluntarily switched lands. In 1923 the exchange of Greeks and Turks was more acrimonious, and the figures more disturbing: 400,000 Turks went east, and 1,300,000 Greeks took their place in what was to become a mono-racial homeland. In the spring of 1943 Roosevelt told Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, that the transfer of Germans from East Prussia would be similar to the business with the Turks and Greeks. In 1945 Stalin wanted revision of the Treaty of Riga of 1921, which had created three Baltic states out of Russia’s old Baltic territories. The expulsion of the Germans from the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers came down to that, and the fact that Roosevelt had always been prepared to give Stalin what he wanted: Russo-American cooperation was to become ‘the cornerstone of the new world order’. Britain tagged along in the hope of hanging on to its great-power status.
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Stalin was not going to relinquish Poland east of the Bug. With a blank cheque from the Russians as far as their western borders were concerned, the Poles were keen to recoup as much as they could by acquiring German territory. The idea of advancing to the Oder - and beyond - went back to the neo-Piast thinkers, Roman Dmowski and Jan-Ludwig Popławski.
40
As Germany walked into Poland again, the idea became more and more attractive. Hitler was seen as Prussia, and Prussia needed to be docked. Berlin was mentioned as a fitting ‘showplace for Prussia’s death’.
41
In London Władysław Pałucki began clamouring for the Oder-Neisse line as early as 1942. It can have been no surprise when Stalin adopted this view too, at Yalta.

Poland’s eastern borders, with the Soviet Union, presented a trickier problem. At Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt were slightly at variance over the Curzon Line, first proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon in 1920. Roosevelt held out for Lvov, a city that was chiefly Polish. Churchill was prepared to abandon Lvov to the Russians. As regards the western borders, Stalin made his feelings abundantly clear. When the Anglo-Americans expressed their doubts about the size of the German population to be evicted, he stood up and in an impassioned voice declared: ‘I prefer the war should continue a little longer although it costs us blood and to give Poland compensation in the west at the expense of the Germans . . . I will maintain and I will ask all friends to support me in this [that] . . . I am in favour of extending the Polish western frontier to the Neisse river.’ It was at this point that Churchill uttered his line about stuffing the Polish goose so full that it died of indigestion. The figure of six million Germans was conjured up as the number who would be required to move. In private Churchill told Byrnes that it was more like nine million.
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Poles would have to be resettled too, from Lvov and the lands east of the Bug, but the population was mixed, with the Poles in the towns and owning the big estates, which was hardly the case in East Prussia, Pomerania or Lower Silesia.

Edvard Beneš, head of the Czechoslovak government in exile, had taken a long time to recover from the humiliation of Munich. He had spent seven years in exile. It was his plan from the beginning to reduce the size of the minorities in the young republic: Hungarians and Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. The Germans made up some 23 per cent of the Czechoslovak population. Other lessons he had learned from the rape of his country were the need to co-operate with the Poles (who had grabbed the region of Teschen while the Czechs were prostrate and defenceless), and to secure the patronage of the Soviet Union. The Poles could be accommodated in Freistadt (Fryštát) and he would expel two-thirds of the Hungarians in Slovakia. As for the Germans, his ‘5th Plan’ provided for the cession of certain border regions with an overwhelmingly German population. That would relieve him of a third of his Germans; a third more would be expelled. He would keep the Jews, democrats and socialists.
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Later the plans were adapted. The three cantons he was prepared to cede to Germany - Jägerndorf, Reichenberg and Karlsbad - grew smaller. The border adjustment would still leave him with 800,000 Germans. He decided that some of these would flee, some would be expelled and the rest ‘organised for transfer’. When the peace came he quite forgot about the idea of losing territory and actually claimed land from Germany, but the Allies did not respond.
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For much of the war Beneš had clung to the idea of a reduction in the number of his German subjects. He had the backing of the British. On 6 July 1942 the war cabinet ruled that the Munich Accords were invalid and agreed in principle to the idea of a transfer of the German populations of central and south-east Europe to the German fatherland in cases where it seemed ‘necessary and desirable’. Ten months later Roosevelt also came round to this view, although American military planners thought it could be done more humanely by transferring six small territories to Germany. Stalin too agreed to the transfer on 12 December 1943 after the Czech ministers Jan Masaryk and Hubert Ripka spoke to the Soviet ambassador to the exile regimes, Bogomolov.
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Austria

 

Hitler’s armies went into Austria on 12 March 1938. Very soon the Germans made the place intolerable for certain groups of people. The Jews were an obvious target, and the Nazis introduced a regimen that was far more extreme than that current in Germany - at least until November that year, when Berlin turned up the heat with the ‘Reichskristallnacht’, when mobs throughout Germany smashed Jewish properties. Adolf Eichmann was placed in charge of antisemitic activities in Austria and went about his business with all the diligence that Himmler expected of him. But it was not just Jews: in two great trainloads the ‘Prominenten’ were also shipped out to Dachau. These were the members of the governing elite who had banned the NSDAP or Nazi Party and thrown its members into Austria’s own concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria. They had executed a few of these Nazis for their part in the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss four years before. It was time for Nazi revenge. The fates of the Austrian elite are in part recounted in Bruno Heilig’s book
Men Crucified
: ministers, civil servants and magistrates, most of them of an age when they were no longer capable of hard labour, were physically broken and beaten to death. Some of them went on to Buchenwald, others to Mauthausen. Those who survived returned as martyrs. No one begrudged them that title.

Despite the treatment of their leading politicians, many on the right and left in Austria might have been prepared to back Hitler. Perhaps 10 per cent of the country’s adult citizens joined the NSDAP, but a certain Teutonic heavy-handedness failed to win them all the friends they might. Austrian industry was appropriated by Göring’s Four Year Plan and increasing numbers of Germans swanned about their newly acquired territory all the while, treating Austrians with a disdain they have yet to forget. Worse, Austrians tended to be despatched to the toughest theatres of war. For the Allies, however, Austria was now part of Greater Germany and they were at war. Exiles tried to guide their hands, and plead that the Austrian case was different. Many Allied leaders found that hard to take, but for political reasons they evolved the idea of Austria as a victim. Although no one had seriously considered granting it a government in exile, the Allies had to entertain the idea that Austria had an exile community that wished to meet and discuss the country’s future, and there might be added benefits if their discussions caused problems for the German administration.

There were five possible solutions for a post-war Austria. The first was a simple reversion to the independent state it had been between 1918 and 1938. The second proposed leaving Austria in bed with Germany. A third involved making some sort of Danube Confederation based loosely on the most positive side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and a fourth was that favoured by the Morgenthau plan: a separation of Austria’s provinces with perhaps the Vorarlberg going to Switzerland, the Tyrol and Salzburg to Bavaria
f
(which would then be detached from Germany) and the eastern parts attached to a federation of Danubian lands. A fifth possibility was simply to roll up Austria and Bavaria together to make a Catholic south-German state.
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The Allies probably felt that a little confusion would do some good - it did not pay to let the Austrians feel they were completely off the hook. They would have to labour to show their love before they could receive the prize of renewed independence. This ambivalence was enshrined in the Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943: ‘Austria, which was the first victim of Nazi aggression, must be liberated from German domination.’
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The Anschluss, the annexation of 15 March 1938, was declared null and void: ‘Austria is nonetheless reminded that it bears a responsibility from which it may not escape, for having participated in the war on the side of Hitler’s Germany and that, in the final reckoning, the role that it plays in its own liberation will inevitably be taken into account.’
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The Austrians were not so much to be exonerated from the roles they had played in the ‘Movement’ and war as encouraged to
rebel
against the Germans.

The pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Otto von Habsburg, blamed the Russians for the mealy-mouthed nature of the Declaration, but it is likely that Edvard Beneš had a hand in it too.
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The Declaration also rejected the idea of a Danubian Federation and put paid to the hopes of a Habsburg restoration. This was Stalin’s work. Otto himself had left for America in 1940, leaving his brother Robert in London to campaign for the cause there. Otto’s name figured on a Nazi hit-list. He went first to New York and then to Quebec. Naturally he was hoping that the Allies would look favourably on a Habsburg restoration, but there was little chance of that. He found certain figures remarkably unsympathetic in their attitude to Austria. One of these was Churchill’s foreign secretary Eden, who had apparently defined the country as ‘five Habsburgs and a hundred Jews’. Otto wanted to change Roosevelt’s mind. It will be recalled that the president was smitten with the Morgenthau Plan at Quebec. Otto claims that he was able to bring both Churchill and Roosevelt round.
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