Both Cold War versions were somewhat true, or at least not gross distortions. West Germany was not quite the rapidly resuscitated bastion of freedom and tolerance that many presented her as. The framework for some such existed, just as it had been between 1918 and 1933. However, as we shall see, at the time of the foundation of this part-state in 1949, 60 per cent of those polled among its fifty-something-million population still thought that Nazism was a good idea gone wrong – a figure that was actually substantially worse than in earlier, post-war opinion polls. When asked if, were the necessity to arise, they would choose security over freedom of expression, a majority saw security as the greater good. Many also continued to espouse various forms of anti-Semitism.
Large numbers of Nazis, many of them guilty of crimes against their own people as well as against innocent enemy nationals, went unpunished at the hands of the West German state. Even when proceedings against such malefactors were initiated, they often found protectors within sections of the post-war establishment. The social and cultural focus of West Germany for the first fifteen years or so of its existence was deeply, at times oppressively, conservative.
The political and cultural revolution of the 1960s, driven mostly by young people who had been barely old enough for kindergarten at the end of the war, affected West Germany more intensely than any other Western country, up to and including America. Suddenly, after twenty years of restoration and reconstruction but relatively little re-evaluation, there were ageing war criminals on trial before West German courts, there was talk of the Holocaust (largely ignored in the 1950s), there was a national debate about the country’s past and where it should be heading. In effect, the debate that might have been had in the years immediately following the German defeat (which many among the occupiers and the fairly small numbers of passionate German anti-Nazis had wanted to have) finally began to take place more than twenty years later. It has continued, and continues to shape the varied, vibrant and tolerant Germany we see in the twenty-first century.
Not that forms of fascism, many directly based on the Nazi model, have been entirely banished from the new Germany. Denazification, even the self-directed, subtle and long-term kind that ultimately triumphed in Germany, could never be and has never been complete. A substantial minority support exists in the reunited Republic – as it does, to be fair, elsewhere in Europe – for dark, xenophobic fantasies of racial purity and perfect ‘order’. The difference from the 1930s is that the numbers are relatively small, and there is no support for such ideologies within the cultural, political or for that matter the economic elite.
As for East Germany, for all its pretence of ideological purity, and its claims to have been the only post-war German state to properly cleanse itself of the Nazi infection, there is in fact strong evidence that the Marxist-Leninist spell under which its people were forcibly placed, while outwardly different, was every bit as subtly damaging as West Germany’s hyper-capitalist orgy of forgetting. Perhaps it was worse, because there was no 1960s, no younger generation asking awkward, often unfair questions of their elders, as there was in West Germany. East Germany claimed to have solved the national problem through communism, but in fact, after 1989, the bacillus of Nazism was found to have survived in far more virulent forms in the so-called ‘German Democratic Republic’ than in its capitalist-democratic competitor state. It is in the East that the neo-Nazis have most of their electoral strongholds, and where, in certain vulnerable towns and cities, they can seriously affect their fellow citizens’ quality of life.
In modern Germany, there is much talk about what was bad in the past, but at the same time there is also increasing debate about the suffering of Germans in the twentieth century, whether in the bombing of the country’s cities during the Second World War, or in the forced expulsion of millions from ancestral German territories, or under the sometimes harsh, vengeful and often plain incompetent interregnum of the Allied victors that followed defeat. So Jörg Friedrich’s passionate, tendentious 2003 account of wartime bombing, Der Brand (The Fire), for all its flaws, unleashed a cleansing national debate about German victimhood. So, likewise, bestselling works about the brutal ‘population transfer’ from the eastern provinces, most prominently Andreas Kossert’s Kalte Heimat (Cold Homeland, 2008), have made this other facet of German suffering the subject for rational debate rather than simple accusation.
So far as this book’s core subject matter is concerned, post-war and denazification history have become quite fashionable – particularly since reunification opened the East German archives – enabling scholars to take a more variegated and nuanced view of what was achieved (or not achieved) in freeing Germany from the shadow of Nazism.
Writers in the former Allied countries, especially Britain and America, have also – in part encouraged by a new flourishing of ‘occupation studies’ in the wake of the Afghan and Iraq wars – taken a long, hard look at what the Allied occupation of Germany actually involved. Books such as Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich have taken an aggressively forensic line, rightly detailing the failures and brutalities, but often failing to explore the unspeakable Nazi occupation policies during the previous six years that helped cause the Allied powers and their individual representatives (down to the most humble, frightened, sometimes angry soldier) to behave as vengefully as they did. More balanced treatments, such as Perry Biddiscombe’s indispensable The Denazification of Germany (interestingly informed by his earlier work on the Nazi Werwolf resistance movement and its offshoots), have, inevitably, also been able to devote limited space to examining the roots and the consequences of the process.
What is clear from important work such as Biddiscombe’s is that Germany’s experience between 1944 and 1949, roughly the period of post-war denazification, was neither straightforward nor complete. The beginnings of Germany’s journey back to international respectability and prosperity, and eventually even to moral wellbeing – in short, to what passes among the community of nations for normality – were halting, compromised, sometimes brave and noble, sometimes forced or self-serving, and mostly no more than just that: beginnings.
Like all such human progressions, Germany’s was both aided and hindered by external and chance forces. History was still working away in the background, enigmatic and almost inconceivably complex, even while victors and vanquished alike struggled to find some way of making sense of what had happened and was continuing to happen. These had been truly terrible years and, even with the advent of peace, the misery was by no means over. Many of the things that subsequently happened to all involved were much worse than they had hoped, while others were, especially in the end, much better than expected.
The story of Germany’s enforced transformation begins, as it must, in the thick of war, when a still defiant German heartland was bracing itself for the now inevitable enemy invasion. Although the Allies had broad ideas about what they needed to do once they controlled the enemy’s country, much policy was as yet only sketchily defined, and would be made on the hoof according to the exigencies and anxieties of the moment.
So we join the advancing Allied troops at the point when they took their first modest and cautious steps on to the soil of the Third Reich.
The day was, as it happened, 11 September – or as Americans usually express it, September 11 – 1944.
1
Into the Reich
Ninety-six days after the Allies’ first landings on the Normandy beaches, a seven-man patrol of the 2nd Platoon, Troop B, 85th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, attached to the 5th Armoured Division, 1st United States Army, crossed the River Our from Luxembourg into the pre-war territory of the Third Reich.
The bridge that normally straddled the border had been demolished by the retreating Wehrmacht, but the waters of the Our were shallow enough for Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger and his men to wade across and cautiously make their way on to the far bank. Encountering no enemy troops, they proceeded up the slope on the German side.
Soon the America
ns observed a German farmer at work in the field. Sergeant Holzinger – a German-American who spoke his parents’ language – addressed the man, who offered to show them the enemy bunker system. Led by this disarmingly friendly native, they walked a mile or more into Reich territory and, sure enough, found themselves gazing at a set of German fortifications – in this case, consisting of nineteen or twenty concrete pillboxes. Adjoining one of these, incongruously, locals had constructed a chicken shed. There was no sign of enemy forces.1
Deciding not to push their luck, the American soldiers quickly retraced their steps and returned to the Allied-held side of the river. They reported at about 18:15 hours on 11 September to their platoon commander, Lt Loren L. Vipond.
The news of their incursion into Germany was quickly radioed to the Headquarters of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, Commander of the First Army, from where the long-awaited message flashed around the world: the Allies had finally pierced the Reich.2
The 2nd Platoon’s dart across the border was the first of several undertaken by American units. In early evening, a company of the 109th Infantry, 28th Division, crossed the Our on a bridge between Weiswampach, in the northern tip of Luxembourg, and the German village of Sevenig. Near St Vith, Belgium, a patrol from the 22nd Infantry, 4th Division, likewise went over the border near the village of Hemmeres and roamed around the countryside for a while. The GIs rounded up and talked to some civilians. Many had been evacuated by the SS. Those of the German population who remained had largely taken to the nearby woods, though for these country people the exigencies of peace proved unsuited to the imperatives of war. A local woman from the small farming community of Heckuscheid reported a little melodramatically: ‘Suddenly we realised that the people who had gone back into the village to feed the livestock had not returned: they had been arrested by the Americans who had in the meantime advanced into the village.’3 To provide proof of their success, the border-crossers brought back a German cap, some currency and a sample of earth.
A more determined incursion in force had to wait until the following day, 12 September, and it took place a hundred kilometres or so north of the previous day’s efforts. Shortly before 3 p.m., the Sherman tanks of Colonel William B. Lovelady’s armoured task force, an elite outfit that had carved a path to here all the way from Omaha Beach, rumbled in battalion strength past a last farmhouse flying the Belgian flag in anticipation of liberation. Beyond that house, over the railway tracks, clustered more dwellings, but if they flew any banners they were white ones of surrender. Beyond the railway lay enemy territory.
Task Force Lovelady entered the small, picturesque German border town of Roetgen, and occupied it without encountering resistance. In fact, of the locals who risked leaving their houses to take a look at their conquerors, some offered flowers and even, in one case, coffee. They seemed relieved rather than anxious to find themselves under American control.4 The signals team radioed the task force’s immediate superior, Major General Boudinot, of Combat Command ‘B’, 3rd Armoured Division. The hot-blooded, Iowa-born general – a renowned cavalryman and former balloon racer – radioed back: ‘Tell Lovelady he’s famous! Congratulate him and tell him to keep on going!’5
In fact, the newly minted celebrity was forced to pause. On the eastern outskirts of the town, barring advance towards the Reich’s interior, lay the formidable ‘dragon’s teeth’ defences of the famous Siegfried Line, constructed in the 1930s at Hitler’s order and substantially strengthened since. When Lt Burroughs, who had led the reconnaissance group that cleared the way into Roetgen, dismounted from his vehicle to check a crater on the outskirts of town, he was shot dead by a German sniper. Lovelady took the hint. He decided to settle down and wait.
Nonetheless, the US Army was established on German soil. It was a sensation. Unlike the earlier patrols, Task Force Lovelady was accompanied by a small but eager flock of journalists. The New York Times trumpeted the ‘first German town to fall’. Elsewhere it was noted that ‘the Germans welcomed their invaders’.6
Before long, a Burgomaster, Herr Schleicher, was appointed, to communicate the orders of the American commander to Roetgen’s people.7 Thus the town moved from the process of being conquered to the condition of being occupied, the first of many hundreds to do so over the following weeks and months.
Not a moment too soon, several hundred miles away the would-be victors were finally agreeing on how that occupation should be conducted.
Lancaster House, a grand late Georgian pile built of tawny Bath stone, lay (and still lies) in the heart of the Establishment village that is London’s Mayfair, just opposite St James’s Palace and a very short walk from Buckingham Palace. Its construction was, as might be expected, the work of a consummate insider – Queen Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of York and Albany, second son of King George III and heir presumptive to the British throne. He ordered it built in 1825.
The Duke, however, would die, childless, less than two years later at the age of sixty-three – allegedly of various diseases induced by a life of dissipation – leaving his house still little more than a shell. It was nevertheless known for a few years as York House, before passing into the possession of the Marquis of Stafford. For nearly ninety years the place was known as Stafford House, and then – after being bought by the public-spirited Lancastrian soap magnate Lord Leverhulme, and in short order presented to the nation – Lancaster House.
Back in 1799, the house’s original builder had been put in charge of a British expeditionary force charged with invading France via the Dutch wetlands. Not helped by his inexperience or by the sorry state of the kingdom’s land forces at that time, the young Duke there presided over an unreserved military disaster. Ironically, 145 years after this legendary British defeat, his former residence had now become the headquarters of the European Advisory Commission, a body whose work had quite specifically to do with the apportioning of the fruits of one of history’s greatest victories.
The EAC took up residence at Lancaster House in January 1944. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had arrived at certain key decisions regarding Germany’s fate once the war was over: first, that large parts of its eastern provinces would be assigned to Poland; and second, that the German government would be abolished and the once mighty Reich partitioned.
It was the EAC’s job to work out the details of this arrangement, along with the mechanisms of the enemy’s surrender. To that end, each Allied power appointed a delegate – in Britain’s case a powerful Foreign Office official of ambassadorial rank, fifty-two-year-old Sir William Strang, who acted as full-time secretary general of the organisation. In the case of the United States and the Soviet Union, the delegations were led by their respective ambassadors, the affable John G. Winant and the altogether less so Feodor T. Gusev. Not yet forty years old when appointed by Stalin to replace the sociable, cosmopolitan Ivan Maisky the previous autumn, Gusev was by most accounts a charmless and narrow-minded Stalinist bureaucrat.8 Both he and Winant were, however, very much part-time in their commitment. Military, economic and political advisers naturally did most of the day-by-day donkey work.
The EAC having laboured for the appropriate nine months, on 12 September, as American patrols ducked tentatively into western Germany, it gave birth to a protocol on the surrender and occupation of Germany. This was signed by the delegates amidst the faux Louis XIV splendour of Lancaster House.
In outline, the protocol limited Germany’s territory to its 1937 borders, that is, to its borders prior to the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland – and of course before the absorption of huge areas of Poland in 1939–40.
The document stipulated the establishment of three occupation zones, which were to be administered separately. These were to follow existing administrative boundaries and to take population size into account. Moreover, the Allies agreed on the joint administration of the capital, Berlin, by an inter-Allied military body to be known as the Kommandatura.
While t
he occupation of both the ‘Eastern Zone’ and the eastern part of Berlin by Soviet forces had already been finalised, the exact allocation of the ‘North-Western (British) Zone’, the ‘South-Western (American) Zone’, and the British and American sectors of Berlin itself still remained formally open.
The agreement ignored rather more than it acknowledged – above all there was still no real agreement concerning the eventual fate of Germany as a unitary state – but at least the boundaries of the various Allies’ areas of control in post-war Germany as a whole were formally laid down. The fortunes of war would, of course, dictate where the armies would stand at the time of the German surrender. However, as soon as possible after the hour of victory the powers would be bound to withdraw to their apportioned zones and commence the distinctly problematic business of ruling over (and feeding and housing) the population of the defeated Reich.
So much for the theoretical map of post-war Germany. In the autumn of 1944 the war was clearly not yet over. While it seemed the Allies’ war to win, the real facts that mattered were facts on the ground, and they were still being established. As for the actual map of post-war Germany, it was being drawn not in ink, but in blood.
Exorcising Hitler Page 3
