Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  And what might this ‘miracle’ be?

  First, there remained the vague hope for some diehards that Germany’s armies, supplied by the Reich’s efficient war industries – which until late 1944 had survived the Allied bombing onslaught disrupted but still surprisingly productive – might yet find it in themselves to withstand the enemy. This hope diminished to almost nothing after the successful Anglo-American landing in Normandy and the rapid advance that followed.

  Second, the regime’s talk of ‘miracle weapons’ that would turn the tables at the last moment remained a straw at which a surprisingly large number of Germans clutched. The V1 flying bomb, and then the V2 rocket, while certainly wonders of German technology, proved disappointingly limited in their effects on Allied morale and industrial and architectural substance alike. Despite Goebbels-inspired propaganda reports of the apocalyptic damage wrought by these new weapons on British cities, ordinary German citizens’ hopes quickly faded there, too. The same went for the remarkable Type XXI submarine, the so-called ‘Elektroboot’ – only a few of which were ready to put to sea before the end of the war – and the revolutionary Messerschmitt jet fighter, which again was produced in numbers too small to make a real difference.

  And third, many Germans – from Hitler and Goebbels down – hoped and believed that the unlikely coalition of plutocrats and communists formed by Britain, America and the Soviet Union could not last the distance; that this coalition of convenience would somehow falter and crack in the face of impending Allied victory, reflecting the deep and ultimately irreconcilable ideological and political conflicts that lay beneath its surface. There were, of course, many who recalled the even more bizarre compact between Hitler and Stalin in August 1939, which had endured less than two years and ended in the epic and savage bloodshed of Operation Barbarossa.

  What seemed like just such a possible turning point presented itself when President Roosevelt died suddenly in mid-April 1945. Goebbels rushed to Hitler’s bunker and excitedly informed the Führer: ‘The Tsarina is dead.’ To Hitler, a keen student of the career of Prussia’s greatest monarch, Frederick the Great, Goebbels’ words would have instantly conjured up hope.

  The Propaganda Minister’s pronouncement referred to the sudden death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia in 1762, at the height of the Seven Years War. With her armies occupying Berlin, and Frederick the Great steeling himself to sue for a humiliating peace (in fact, contemplating suicide as a decent alternative), Elizabeth’s demise triggered the succession of the young Tsar Peter III. The new Russian ruler, German-born and a great admirer of Prussia, promptly withdrew from the war, imposing no claims on the kingdom that had just a few weeks earlier seemed on the brink of extinction.

  Within six months, Peter had been deposed and murdered, and his successor, Catherine II, had re-entered the war on the Franco-Austrian side, but Frederick had used the breathing space well. The peace treaties that followed in 1763 favoured Prussia and her chief ally, Great Britain.

  No such new ‘miracle’ occurred when Harry S. Truman succeeded FDR. The level-headed former senator from Missouri was a very different man from Roosevelt in many ways, but he had no game-changing plan. The great alliance held, at least for the moment. And the inexorable Allied advance into Germany from East and West continued.

  The Wehrmacht conducted a surprisingly determined resistance, even in the west, at least until the beginning of 1945. The initial Anglo-American advance, after the breakout from the beachhead, was surprisingly swift, but it came to an equally surprising and abrupt halt after the falls of Paris and Brussels. In September 1944, attempts to seize a Rhine crossing at Arnhem failed disastrously. Although American troops had a fleeting opportunity to breach that barrier in Alsace, the moment quickly passed and German resistance stiffened noticeably. Thousands of British and American troops died during the autumn and early winter, hammering away at the unexpectedly tough German defences. Twenty-four thousand Americans were killed, wounded or captured between September and December during the fight for the Hürtgen Forest, just inside Germany. More than 2,000 of General Patton’s men died taking the eastern French city of Metz in the last week of November.

  Then, less than a month later, came the German counter-attack in the Ardennes (the so-called ‘Battle of the Bulge’). Some 19,000 American troops were killed, most during the first few days, and many more wounded or taken prisoner, the US Army’s worst losses of the entire war in Europe. There were also 100,000 German casualties in this shockingly violent, if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to show that the Wehrmacht still had teeth.

  Even after the Rhine was finally crossed at Remagen in early March 1945, Germany’s soldiers – many under or over age, or the desperate combings of hitherto exempt employment groups – made the Allies pay dear for every kilometre of the homeland they occupied. For a great deal of the time the Anglo-American (and by now Free French) forces had to fight village to village and house to house against stubborn resistance.

  Only after the surrender, in the second week of April, of more than a third of a million German soldiers in the critically important Ruhr industrial area, and the beginning of the Russians’ final advance on Berlin, did the Wehrmacht begin to collapse in any meaningful sense. And even then, in the east, where the fear of Russian vengeance was greater than despair, many Germans fought on grimly to the end. They fought for their capital, Berlin – the capture of which cost the Russians some 80,000 men – and so that their comrades, and any civilians who could do so, might manage to surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Soviet forces.

  The brutal fate of German prisoners of war in Soviet hands was already well known (as was the even more savage treatment of Soviet troops by the Germans). As for Soviet behaviour towards civilians, many Red Army units had already gained a deserved reputation for rape, murder and pillage.

  Although most of those fighting for Germany had ceased to care about anything much beyond survival and saving what they could of their people and heritage, there were undoubtedly fanatics among the German population right to the end of the war and beyond. There were rumours on the Allied side of minutely organised resistance cells composed largely of brainwashed Nazi youth, of ‘stay-behind’ terror groups, and of a planned withdrawal by the regime’s rabid remnants into the near-impregnable so-called ‘Alpine Redoubt’, the mountainous region on the German/Austrian border.

  Some experience with so-called Werwolf resistance units in both east and west – and, most spectacularly, the organised assassination by a Nazi hit squad of the American-appointed High Burgomaster of the western German city of Aachen in March 1945 – caused the Allies, as they advanced inexorably into the heartlands of the Reich, to act with circumspection and not a little resentment of the native population. The Germans, it seemed, just would not admit defeat.

  Even though the supposed ‘Redoubt’ proved a chimera, there was enough evidence in individual acts of resistance – not forgetting the ghastly revelations of concentration camps and prisons captured during the Allied advance – to sour the average GI’s or Tommy’s view of the defeated. This would make for a nervous, unforgiving and sometimes aggressive relationship with the conquered Germans during those early months, an understandable attitude on the part of the vulnerable individual soldier. More ominously, it would also be reflected in the lobbies and conference rooms of Washington and London, where by this time the hardline attitude had, at least temporarily, gained the upper hand. The word ‘revenge’ might not be uttered openly, but German collective guilt and an Allied policy of, in effect, collective punishment were soon unspoken assumptions, guiding the actions of the victors in the time shortly before and after the surrender.

  Civilian Affairs officers in the American army, trained before embarkation to administer and liaise in the liberated territories, and their rough equivalents in the Russian, British and French forces, became, once the border of the Reich was crossed, officials of the Military Government of Germany. The rules were now different.
In the former German-occupied countries, relations with the locals had mostly been friendly and expected to be such. Even in the (fairly frequent) cases of misunderstandings and bad behaviour by Allied troops, enough basic goodwill remained to make the overall picture a happy one. After all, for the vast majority of civilians in all the formerly German-occupied countries, freedom felt better than captivity. And, more importantly, although there were problems and shortages, there was now hope that these would get better with time.

  The moment they crossed into Germany, the advancing Allied troops knew they were no longer among friends. This did not mean that the bulk of the German population necessarily hated them, or wanted them dead, or even that it planned to resist. The difference was visible, even in the last border town of a just-liberated country such as France, Belgium or Holland. The liberated locals’ response was to display their own, often long-hidden, national flag, perhaps combined with the flag of the liberators, if they possessed or could quickly make one. Across the line in Germany, mostly there was nothing. Germans shut themselves in their houses. If anything was displayed, it was a white flag, often improvised from a bed sheet hung out of an upstairs window, unreadable beyond its basic message of surrender.

  Germany, as it came under Allied control, resembled a blank object, a clean sheet. What government or political life had existed there before was viewed by the conquerors as unremittingly evil. In Belgium or Holland or Norway, even in the more frenetic and complicated conditions of Italy and Greece, the aim was to restore something like the situation that had existed before the fascists took power (the situation in Poland and Eastern Europe was different for a number of reasons, most notably because the Soviet ‘liberators’ had an aggressive and radical political agenda of their own). In Germany, however, the first aim was unquestionably to get rid of what was presently there, to destroy the fabric of Nazi totalitarian control, not just in the administration but throughout industry, the arts, education and the sciences.

  The question of what should, or could, replace these malevolent structures was much less clear and, in the initial stages, largely irrelevant. Germany had first to be secured by and for the occupiers, a task that was not expected to lack danger or difficulty. Aside from the likelihood of fanatical, Werwolf-style resistance, there was a vast, defeated German army of five million or so to be disarmed, detained, its surrendered ranks checked for war criminals and politically dangerous individuals. The weeding out and neutralisation of these latter categories was a process that combined the two most pressing tasks of the occupiers – the securing of the occupation from potential enemies and the parallel political cleansing of the country itself.

  The situation discussed between the Allies at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, with victory still months away, was not the same as that which, half a brutally eventful year later, formed the basis of the arguments at their post-war meeting in Potsdam, just outside the recently conquered German capital.

  By the time the Potsdam proceedings began, Hitler and Mussolini were no more, and one great Allied leader – Roosevelt – was also dead. Yet more terrible, bloody battles and massacres had occurred – the forced expulsion of millions of Germans from eastern Germany, Poland and the Sudetenland, the apocalyptic bombings of Dresden, Pforzheim and Würzburg, the siege of Berlin, the ‘death marches’ as the prisoner-of-war and concentration camps were emptied. Above all, a vast forced population movement had been set in motion, the greatest in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire – involving not just Germans but also Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Italians and others. Churchill, finally subjected to the verdict of the British electorate, resigned on 26 July 1945. The leader of the socially radical Labour Party, Clement Attlee, had been swept to power in a landslide that showed the British public moving on from the heroics of war to the hard practicalities of peace, making its resultant political choice clearly and without sentimentality.

  So a triumphant but anxious Allied presence met a dazed, disillusioned German populace, amid ruined cities and the general breakdown of communication and supply in what had once been the best-organised state in Europe. The possibility that harsh, or at least stern, treatment of the former Reich during the post-war occupation might somehow conflict with the aim of creating a future Germany fit to take its peaceful place in the family of nations seems to have dawned on most in the Allied camp relatively slowly.

  In Britain, all but a handful of critics, led by the Labour MP Richard Rapier Stokes and Bishop Bell of Chichester (both of whom had been prominent wartime critics of the bombing of German cities), plus the passionate, if eccentric left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, considered the Germans had brought their miserable fate upon themselves. The publication of press accounts of the liberation of the concentration camps forced this forgiving minority even further into their corner.

  Likewise, in America, many in high places – most prominently Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau – promoted rigorous post-war treatment of Germany, dismantling of all war-related industries, total decentralisation, and even the country’s forced downgrading into a purely agrarian state. It was a radical, in its way idealistic solution to the perceived problem, presuming continuing good relations between the wartime Allies, thereby allowing for a post-war condition of peace which only a militarily resurgent Germany could possibly disturb. The main, even only, aim was to prevent that resurgence, most crucially by removing the heavy industrial capacity that would permit it.

  Most of the US State Department and the Department of War – including Secretary Stimson – were, on the other hand, in favour of firm but flexible policies that would neutralise the Nazi danger but allow Germany to get back on her feet. The initial aim was to save her from being an undue burden to the victors, but politico-military reasons quickly started to play a role. Soon after the end of the war (in fact, arguably even before it, given the inter-Allied conflicts over the future of Poland that arose in the final wartime months), it became clear that a smoothly functioning Anglo-Russian-American-French-controlled Germany, run from a single coalition HQ in Berlin, was unlikely. The French were especially keen to sabotage this. However, ruthless Soviet behaviour in Eastern and Central Europe, and clear indications of communist ambitions elsewhere, combined with an awareness in the new Truman administration that fifty million hungry and unemployed Germans in the Western-ruled zones did not represent the raw material out of which a recovering Western Europe could be communism-proofed, also served to send the star of the Morgenthau group into inexorable decline.

  It would take some time to elapse after the end of the war, and some bitter clashes within the occupation administration, before the pragmatists gained a clear upper hand over the idealists. After they did, however, policies towards the German population, Nazi or not, became much more pragmatic, and, to some, disappointing. The Morgenthau Plan to divide Germany and make it new gave way to a three-quarter Germany, rebuilt within a democratic framework, but with its industrial potential intact and with the country’s structure including old, suspect materials the occupiers had initially, in the flush of victory, never planned to use. Germany would, of course, in the end be made new – but it would take almost fifty years.

  In the case of the Russians, any post-war status quo would be an imposed one, in their occupied parts of Germany as much as elsewhere in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe ‘liberated’ by the Red Army. Any such considerations therefore inspired mostly tactical, as opposed to strategic, reactions.

  Certainly, the creation of a communist-totalitarian satellite state in East Germany was Moscow’s achievement. There is very little likelihood that without Russian direction and control, not to mention its cohorts of tame German communists, such a state would have evolved spontaneously out of the ruins of Nazism. The form of statehood achieved in the Western-occupied parts in the late 1940s was, perhaps, more complicated in its origins and took a lot longer for its final shape to become clear. In particular, the Western-oriented ‘Federal Republic’,
created almost exactly four years after the end of the war out of the British, American and French zones, would, at least initially, remain much more like pre-war Germany than its rival, the Soviet-controlled ‘Democratic Republic’.

  The consensus on the success or failure of the occupation(s) of Germany has wavered and changed in the years since 1945. At the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a valued ally and bulwark against communism, the story ran that the Germans had embraced democracy pretty quickly after 1945 – at least where they were given the chance, i.e. in the West. The Western Allies, so this version of the story went, had provided the Germans in their zones with the framework and the education for this successful transformation. Within a few years, West Germans were firm friends of America, France and Britain, fellow members of NATO. This was the natural consequence of the wise occupation policies pursued. The Western victors had embraced a much less harsh attitude than had been apparent after the First World War, and more especially a less punitive economic policy.

  Certainly, by and large, the positive story was the one that the elites of the countries involved, including West Germany itself, France (which by the 1960s was locked in a positively romantic embrace with its former hereditary enemy), America (whose own free and easy popular culture and decentralised politics had also influenced the new Germany) and Britain (which prided itself on giving the West Germans a liberal education system and efficient trade unions) had agreed upon.

  The Soviets, with their mass expulsions, rapes and pillage, had made an even worse start than the Western Allies. Their belated and often clumsy attempts to curry, if not favour with the natives, then at least a little less unpopularity, failed to conceal the fact that the East German government was essentially an imposed puppet regime. The discontent of the population compelled the building of a fortified border, first (1952) in the German–German interface that ran down the middle of the former country from Lübeck to Hof and then (1961) in that last refuge of inter-Allied rule, Berlin. In 1953 the population of the Soviet Zone rose up in an open rebellion that could only be suppressed by massive use of force and a range of repressive measures that included hundreds of executions and thousands of long prison sentences. The seventeen million Germans unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Soviet Zone after twelve years of Nazi dictatorship were then seamlessly subjected to more than forty years of a competing brand of totalitarianism, marginally less brutal and at least not racist, but no less disappointingly oppressive for that. Even worse, the new communist bosses went around claiming that, unlike the West German elite, they represented a clean break with the Nazi past and were therefore morally superior.