Cruel World (95 page)

Nowhere was there enough food or any other basic necessity. Over and over again, Gollancz met mothers who had returned home empty-handed after hours of standing in line for bread. Items such as shoes, diapers, and baby clothes were simply not obtainable. There were clothes held in stock by UNRRA and sent in by American relief agencies, but the Germans, and especially the refugees, got last choice after DPs and certain essential workers such as miners. A British welfare officer, imploring his headquarters for clothes, wrote in November 1946, “My argument is that the DP is
now fairly well clothed and the need of the definitely unclothed refugee child is much greater.”
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The winter of 1946–47 was far worse than the one before. Food allocations were minimal for all of Europe, and Allied Military Government officials, whose own rations were also limited, were constantly confronted with desperately hungry Germans:

In May 1947, Churchill described starving Europe as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” American Secretary of State George Marshall had also been appalled at the conditions he had seen. Amid rising fears of the total collapse of Western Europe, Truman and Marshall initiated planning for the massive aid program that would come to be called the Marshall Plan.
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While their discussions were progressing, Hoover persuaded Congress to allow the Army to set up a child-feeding program in the German schools. The program, which used 40,000 tons of Army rations and other food, made possible a tiny daily 350-calorie lunch for some 3.5 million German children in the combined British and American zones. Military Governor Clay thought this program had “saved the health of German youth.” The food ration would improve with terrible slowness from then on: the magic number of 2,000 calories, considered the minimum sufficient for maintenance, would not be reached until the summer of 1948.
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The collapse of the Nazi regime and its highly regimented school and youth activities had left German children in a state of limbo. There were no more HJ and BDM meetings and duties, and the total immersion in the final defense of the homeland, which had occupied everyone at the end, was over. In its place was unaccustomed leisure time. The disillusionment and letdown were especially hard for teenagers. The uniforms, the parades, the mass intoxication, and the excitement that living in extreme danger with one’s peers can give were all gone. There were few older people
to talk to about what had happened. Parents and relatives retreated into protective silences and concentrated on the basics of living. In the cities, supervision was minimal in the many single-parent households (if a cellar under a bombed house can be so described), usually run by malnourished women working at whatever job they could find as they waited for husbands to return from POW camps or other incarcerations. There were hundreds of thousands of homeless and orphaned children in the ruins and the countryside. Nine hundred young “vagrants” were picked up in Munich in April 1945 alone. The Bavarian Red Cross listed 11,000 in its region and set up shelters for them. The director of one such home said that the boys he encountered, in the seventeen- to twenty-one-year-old range, were “completely cold and blasé, entirely calculating in what they do. They have lost every feeling of relationship with their homeland and home, with parents and relatives, even with their mothers. Memories mean nothing to them. Their only interests are food, sleep, money and girls.”
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The British Red Cross found 2,000 highly indoctrinated, uniformed KLV boys and girls, evacuated from bombing zones by the German government, who had been marooned in homes in Austria. Thirteen hundred were sent home; the rest were collected in a school run by the Quakers to await processing. The mood was not cheery. The young people, aged ten to eighteen, were all too aware of Germany’s defeat and felt hopeless about the future. Some had been away from home for three years. They disliked the British and were contemptuous of the obsequiousness toward the Allies so common among their elders. The wise Quakers decided to combine fun and work and avoid all ideology. The children chopped wood, set up a theater, and decorated rooms. There was a Christmas pageant, presents came from England, and British soldiers handed out food. And gradually, “these boys and girls realized that outside the Nazi world there was another and a wider one in which it was pleasant to live.”
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By 1945 the Save the Children Fund in Aachen was running a reception center for more than 20,000 children, many of whom had been left alone when their parents were sent to jail. Gang life had great appeal to those young people whose lives no longer had any structure. Most children involved in acts of petty theft were looking for food either to eat or to sell on the black market. Some were sent on bartering expeditions by their families. One gang near Aachen specialized in smuggling food in from Belgium, an enterprise that required frequent illegal crossings of the frontier. The border guards, perfectly aware of what was going on, did not
arrest very many. Some of the foraging was less innocent: a group of enterprising boys of about thirteen learned how to control railway signals so that they could stop and loot trains.
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There was more defiance in the Soviet Zone, where small gangs of fifteen- to seventeen-year-old former HJ and BDM members spent a lot of time painting anti-Soviet graffiti and making rude remarks during the propagandistic newsreels shown at the movies. They sang Nazi songs, interrupted speeches at meetings held by the Free German Youth, the new Soviet-approved youth organization, and were generally obnoxious. There were a few cases of groups of boys beating up Red Army soldiers. The Soviet NKVD was not amused. Hundreds were arrested on the grounds that they were part of the Werewolf organization. This was probably not the case, but the punishment was severe. The teenagers were taken off to places unknown, without any legal procedures, and were not allowed to communicate with their parents. It is not clear if most went to the USSR or to the camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, among others, which the Russians had recycled and found quite handy as an addition to the Gulag. A number were released after a time, but most would remain in detention until 1948, when a general amnesty and end to deNazification was declared in the Soviet Zone.
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It was clear to all the Allies that the revival and de-Nazification of the school system was essential for the rehabilitation of German youth. Each of the four Allied nations would attempt to guide German policy for the new schools after its own fashion, particularly by setting up teacher training programs and later encouraging exchange programs abroad. But in the chaos of defeated Germany any major transformations were pushed aside for years by basic issues. In all zones new textbooks, cleansed of Nazi propaganda, and de-Nazified teachers were a primary requirement. The first new school in Western-occupied Germany, for 1,000 children in grades one through four, opened on June 4, 1945, in Aachen, which had been taken by the Allies the previous October. The local Military Government detachment had managed to have 40,000 textbooks printed in London, found a half-Jewish school superintendent, and recruited twenty-six middle-aged, non-Nazi former housewives as teachers.
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This sort of efficiency would be hard to duplicate on a larger scale, when millions of students were involved. School buildings were virtually nonexistent. In Cologne, 92 percent of them had been destroyed, and in many places any
intact structures were being used for military purposes or had become DP housing. There was a huge shortage of paper for new textbooks. Both Soviet and American education officers reverted for a time to Weimar-period texts, even though they were full of militarism and negative allusions to Allied policy after World War I. Sometimes they were forced to simply tear acceptable pages out of the Nazi books and glue them together.
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Despite these difficulties, elementary schools were opened in all zones by the early fall of 1945. De-Nazified teachers were few, and vetting in the face of such great need was not always careful. Many teachers had to be brought back from the ranks of the retired and were challenged by enormous classes of as many as seventy-five streetwise children. The lack of classroom space required children in most areas to go to school in shifts. In the bombed-out areas of Hamburg, Victor Gollancz found a school for 800 pupils set up in a dank and windowless air-raid bunker. Everywhere, the schools lacked adequate sanitation and even lightbulbs. Concentration was not easy: there was no heat, and the hungry children had few warm clothes. Shoes were even scarcer. In some families, one pair of shoes was shared by several children, who took turns going to school.

Secondary schools and universities began to open by December 1945. For thousands who had not been to school for two years, high school was a matter of making up what they had missed and escaping into such noncombative subjects as music and poetry. In the university towns, food shortages and the lack of decent lodging dampened college life. DeNazification of faculty was uneven at best: newspaper stories reported eugenics professors teaching much as before, and there was considerable dissembling by university administrations. The presence in the student body of many recently demobilized soldiers, angry at their nation’s defeat, worried the Allied authorities. At a speech to the students of Erlangen, in February 1946, the famed pastor Martin Niemoller, speaking on collective responsibility for war guilt, was drowned out by the young men shuffling their boots on the floor.
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The students were not pro-Nazi so much as irritated that their war service was not appreciated. But in general, they were simply glad to be free and avoided anything political or ideological in favor of the pure pragmatism of training themselves for individual survival. The collective life of Nazism, with its insistence on the sacrifice of self to one leader and his ideas, was over. The doctrine of glorious devotion to nation and race had disappeared in the terrible deaths of millions, and each of Germany’s children would now have to find his own way to the future.
They would not have much help from their parents or their schools when it came to understanding and coming to terms with the Nazi era, and would live for a long time in a world of silence and veiled denial that would not begin to reveal the inner secrets of the Reich for many years.

In every zone, it was also evident that, in addition to school, some sort of controlled extracurricular youth activity was vital. Nonfraternization rules made this difficult to organize at first, as did the ban on participation by most HJ and former Wehrmacht members, especially as leaders or counselors. Catholic and Evangelical groups, which many suspected had continued to function underground all along, revived quickly. There were also socialist and Communist organizations and various other groups run by sports and labor organizations. The Soviets allowed the Free German Youth and unsuccessfully tried to promote local branches of their own Pioneers. The British, in particular, felt that a diversity of organizations and mutual tolerance were vital. All the organizations had to be registered in the British Zone; those that seemed too authoritarian, such as the Scouts and the Bündische Jugend, which wanted to have uniforms and “tests of courage” reminiscent of the past, were carefully watched.
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The American Military Government allowed many of the same organizations and set up a Youth Office, which was run by Germans. This agency often put children to work clearing public areas of war debris or helping craftsmen to restore schools. In Offenbach and Munich, children volunteered to collect medicinal plants for pharmacies and pick off potato bugs in the fields.
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Alongside this official entity, local Army units, ignoring the nonfraternization rules, early on organized many kinds of informal programs for the children they found around them. GIs bulldozed rubble to make playgrounds, transformed ruins into weatherproof clubhouses, and gave Christmas parties featuring chocolate and toys. It soon became clear to the Military Government that such interaction, discouraged at first, was a good thing, and once the nonfraternization rules were abandoned, the Army efforts were greatly expanded and formalized in the German Youth Activities program. The GIs liked working with kids: “It keeps your mind off sex and desertion,” one said. Soon the Germans were initiated into the mysteries of softball and American football, and there was even a Theater Athletic School in Stuttgart that trained coaches and put on tournaments.
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Adults were sometimes resentful and suspicious of GYA activities, which they felt competed with German organizations. For their children, the food and clothes distributed by the GYA were probably more of an attraction than crafts or baseball. Nevertheless, there were many
genuine gestures of appreciation on the part of the young people. In Darmstadt, 9,000 ten- to fourteen-year-olds made thousands of toys as Christmas presents for the children of the U.S. soldiers.
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The Americans had their motives too: they wanted to get the gangs off the streets and prevent any revival of Hitler Youth activities. Things were improved by an amnesty in the Western zones for HJ and Wehrmacht members born after January 1, 1919, which the Americans passed in August 1946 and the British in May 1947, thereby ending the exclusion of many young people from numerous educational and vocational programs.