The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (30 page)

In subsequent years, after West Germany became a val- ued ally of the United States, policy makers and histori-

ans alike tended to dismiss the significance of Morgen- thau’s harsh peace plan, chalking it up to the wartime passions of a Jewish cabinet officer.
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But Morgenthau’s ideas were not unconventional; even Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Henry Stimson, Morgenthau’s chief critics, accepted the need for a severe curtailing of Germany’s industrial power. American planners, as well as their British and Soviet allies, generally agreed that Germany would be demilitarized, that its borders would be redrawn and the state partitioned, that the Ruhr industries would have to be broken up and placed beyond the control of any future German central gov- ernment, and that the Germans would have to pay sig- nificant reparations. There had been widespread agree- ment too among the Allies that the political structure of the country was going to be radically decentralized, and that German society would be denazified, mean- ing that all cultural and political institutions must be wholly restructured. Morgenthau expressed his ideas crudely, perhaps, and went further than his colleagues in calling for the total breakup of German industrial capacity. But in most respects, his ideas were consis- tent with the general direction of American and Allied policies as they were emerging in late 1944.

This convergence was perfectly evident in the directive to Eisenhower of September 22, known as JCS 1067,

which though agreed to by the State, War, and Treasury departments, bore many hallmarks of Morgenthau’s influence. That directive ordered Eisenhower to oc- cupy Germany, arrest war criminals, break up all insti- tutions of the Nazi Party, eliminate the officer corps of the army, abrogate Nazi laws, seize Nazi property, close the courts, close schools and universities, eliminate Nazi textbooks, and halt all political activities. Most important, the document ordered Eisenhower to “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany nor designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy.” Finally, German civilians would be given aid only to the extent that was necessary to pre- vent disease and disorder. “It will be necessary to hold German consumption to a minimum” so the needs of other Europeans could be met first. Taken as a whole, the policy debates and directives that emerged from Washington in the fall of 1944 made one thing perfectly clear: the Germans were going to be punished.
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Any notion that Morgenthau’s plan was a dead letter is belied by Roosevelt’s continued support for harsh treatment of postwar Germany. Even after the plan was leaked to the press, causing the media to label the proposal “Carthaginian,” Roosevelt did not back away from a radical restructuring of postwar Germany. Though he conceded to Secretary Stimson that he did

not want Germany to be permanently destroyed as an industrial nation as Morgenthau wished, he continued to insist that Germany be so changed by the occupa- tion that it could never wage war again. On October 21, while in the midst of a reelection campaign, FDR told the American public that he was going to make the Germans learn a tough lesson once the war was over. Speaking to the Foreign Policy Association in New York in an address that was broadcast across the country on radio, the president indicated his desire for punish- ment and his hope for redemption through trial and toil:

As for Germany, that tragic Nation which has sown the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind—we and our allies are entirely agreed that we shall not bargain with the Nazi conspirators, or leave them a shred of control, open or secret, of the instruments of government. We shall not leave them a single element of military power, or of potential military power…. We bring no charge against the German race, as such, for we cannot believe that God has eternally condemned any race of human- ity. We know in our own land, in these United States of America, how many good men and women of Ger- man ancestry have proved loyal, freedom-loving, and peace-loving citizens. But there is going to be a stern punishment for all those in Germany directly responsi-

ble for this agony of mankind. The German people are not going to be enslaved, because the United Nations do not traffic in human slavery. But it will be necessary for them to earn their way back into the fellowship of peace-loving and law-abiding Nations.
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Even as Roosevelt and his staff prepared for the forth- coming meeting of the Big Three allies to be held at Yalta in the Crimea, the American government re- mained committed to exacting serious penalties from Germany. While FDR’s new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, Jr., shied away from “a program of sweep- ing deindustrialization,” the State Department contin- ued to call for “economic disarmament,” meaning ma- jor restrictions on any German industries that might be susceptible to war uses. As for the German people themselves, Stettinius believed, “we should favor, in the initial period, the lowest standards of health, diet and shelter compatible with the prevention of disease and disorder…. The needs of the liberated countries should, in any event, receive priority.” Even though the State Department called for less industrial destruction than Morgenthau wanted, the president said “he was still in a tough mood and that he is determined to be tough with Germany.”
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It is not surprising, then, that when Roosevelt met

with Stalin and Churchill in the hastily repaired, re- painted, deloused Livadia Palace at Yalta, on the Black Sea shore, from February 4 to 11, 1945, the Big Three had no trouble agreeing on a very severe settlement for postwar Germany. Roosevelt brought with him a set of ideas that called for harsh treatment indeed for the defeated German state. And his hatred toward the Germans was stoked by the destruction he witnessed while in the Crimea. On February 3, the President flew from Malta to Saki, eighty miles from Yalta, and then endured a jarring five-hour road journey along rutted roads, through charred war-ravaged countryside, to reach Yalta. “ We saw few, if any, trees,” wrote the na- val officer in charge of the president’s daily log, “and many reminders of the recent fighting there—gutted- out buildings, burned out tanks and destroyed German railroad stock that had been abandoned and burned by them in their flight.” In the white granite Italianate pal- ace that had served as the summer palace of the czars— and was converted by the Bolsheviks into a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients—the three war leaders dis- cussed the political challenges facing the alliance in the final stages of the war. The agenda was laden with thorny problems, from Poland and its future, to the for- mation of the United Nations Organization, the ques- tion of German postwar reparations, and the entry of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan. Throughout

all these talks, one searches in vain for any indication of leniency or forgiveness toward Germany. Roosevelt struck the opening tone when he said to Marshal Stalin in their first meeting on February 4 “that he had been very much struck by the extent of German destruction in the Crimea and therefore he was more bloodthirsty in regard to the Germans than he had been a year ago, and he hoped that Marshal Stalin would again pro- pose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German army,” as Stalin had done at their meeting in Tehran in November 1943. To this remarkable opening, Stalin replied that “everyone is more bloodthirsty than they had been a year ago.” He added that “the Germans were savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings.” The minutes re- cord simply that “the president agreed with this.”
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As they had done at Tehran, FDR and Stalin margin- alized Churchill and pressed for a punitive German peace. Roosevelt supported Stalin’s call for the “dis- memberment” of Germany and for significant repa- rations. “ We don’t want to kill the people,” Roosevelt said casually. “ We want Germany to live but not to have a higher standard of living than that of the USSR.” This startling suggestion—that urbanized, highly industrial Germany be reduced to the living standards of the peas- ant-based, agrarian Soviet Union—would have found

favor with FDR’s old pal Henry Morgenthau. “I envi- sion a Germany that is self-sustaining but not starv- ing,” Roosevelt said, if only because starving people might require additional aid from the occupiers.
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The final conference documents left little doubt about the severe treatment the leaders had in store for Germany. Though they kept their agreement to dismember Ger- many private, they made their overall ambitions plain. “Nazi Germany is doomed,” said the official statement released to the press at the conclusion of the confer- ence:

It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German milita- rism and Nazism and to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. We are determined to disarm and disband all German armed forces; break up for all time the German General Staff that has repeatedly contrived the resurgence of Ger- man militarism; remove or destroy all German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production; bring all war criminals to just and swift punishment and exact reparation in kind for the destruction wrought by the Germans; wipe out the Nazi party, Nazi laws, organi- zations and institutions, remove all Nazi and militarist influences from public office and from the cultural and economic life of the German people; and take in har-

mony such other measures in Germany as may be nec- essary to the future peace and safety of the world. It is not our purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but only when Nazism and Militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of nations.
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Roosevelt had no doubt that this was the right policy to adopt toward Germany. Leaving Livadia Palace by car en route to Sevastopol and the waiting naval ves- sel U.S.S. Catoctin, the president saw the devastation of this port town wrought by the Germans. “ The city,” observed the president’s naval aide, “was virtually lev- eled to the ground except for the walls of homes and other buildings which the mines, bombs and shells in recent battles left standing like billboards—mute tes- timony of the horrorful wanton Nazi vengeance. Of the thousands of buildings in the city, the president was told that only six were left in useful condition when the Germans fled.”
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T

HE AVERAGE AMERICAN soldier, who knew lit- tle about governing and had no desire to remain in Germany after the war, would nonetheless

shoulder the burden of imposing the Big Three’s harsh

peace. To prepare soldiers for the transition from fight- ing the Germans to ruling them, both the U.S. and Brit- ish armies drew up short guides to be distributed to the fighting men in the field to define the goals of the occupation and provide a basic code of conduct for the occupiers. These texts reveal the profound hostil- ity and suspicion that U.S. military officials harbored toward German civilians and wished to inculcate in their soldiers. The American Pocket Guide to Germany, prepared by the War Department, told U.S. soldiers to remain “Firm, Fair, Aloof and Aware.” The thesis of the guide was simple: Germans could not be trusted. “ You are in enemy country! These people are not our allies or friends,” the guide warned. Clearly, military officials worried that the average soldier might put the travails of the war behind him and seek out a rapid accommo- dation with the vanquished foe. But forgiveness was unacceptable, for Americans were not on “a good will errand.” Rather, “the Germans have sinned against the laws of humanity and cannot come back into the civi- lized fold merely by sticking out their hands and saying ‘I’m sorry.’” The guide drew out in fifty pages of text some basic elements of the German national character, which compared unfavorably with American habits of mind. Where Americans were forgiving, democratic, and well schooled since childhood in the rules of fair play, decency, and the concept of the fair fight, Ger-

mans shared none of these ideals. Teachers and politi- cal leaders taught German children to cheat, bully the weak, snitch on friends, betray family, fight unfairly, and to brutalize and torture their enemies. The mass program of indoctrination pursued by the Third Reich spelled trouble for the occupation. Germans could be expected to go underground, and continue to resist the Americans, or to try to manipulate the occupiers, to lie to them, to seek their pity, to blame others for the war and for the atrocities of the regime. The guide also sought to show that Hitler was no anomaly. In a brief historical survey, replete with terms like “treachery,” “henchmen,” and “gangsters,” the guide placed Hitler squarely in the tradition of aggressive, dictatorial lead- ers like Wilhelm II and Bismarck. Hitler was but “a cru- el new version of an old story” of German aggression and war. The guide assumed that a generally unpoliti- cal, war-weary U.S. soldier would be happier making friends with Germans than hating them, and so reiter- ated the mission of the occupation: “you will be doing a soldier’s job on the soil of the enemy.”
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The British War Office prepared its own guide, with a somewhat more sophisticated and elegant text. “ You are about to meet a strange people in a strange, ene- my country,” it began. The British guide insisted that the German people bore full responsibility for their

present suffering, for they had legally placed Hitler in power, cravenly obeyed him as he consolidated his powers, and failed to throw up any serious resistance to his regime. British officials clearly worried, howev- er, that the defeated Germans, so haggard and unlike the once-feared master race of German propaganda, might prey on the sympathies of the British soldier and try to escape responsibility for the war. The Ger- mans might look like familiar cousins, but these first impressions would be deceptive. They could not be trusted, they would tend to whine and complain, and they would try to take advantage of the good-hearted Tommie. “Many of them will have suffered from over- work, underfeeding and the effects of the air raids and you may be tempted to feel sorry for them.” They “will protest with deep sincerity that they are as innocent as a babe in arms.” But their “hard luck stories…will be hypocritical attempts to win sympathy.” Thus, the best solution was for the soldier to avoid contact un- less they had to give orders, and then “give them in a firm, military manner. The German civilian is used to it and expects it.” The booklet concluded: “Germans must still be regarded as dangerous enemies.”
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