Exorcising Hitler
Page 16
The Handbook was finally released to the mass of fighting men in December 1944, just in time, as it happened, for the Battle of the Bulge. Semantic spats apart, it did express some basic principles which dominated, possibly for better but arguably for worse, attitudes during the initial period of occupation.
Then, in April, with final victory in sight, came the notorious JCS 1067, a putatively comprehensive set of instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington to Eisenhower aimed at closely directing the behaviour of US forces in occupied Germany. The tone was inevitably moralistic, stern, even harsh. So far as the basic behaviour of American forces towards the Germans was concerned, the message was quite crisp and clear but largely divorced from any notion of what was happening on the ground:
a. It should be brought home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.
b. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation. Your aim is not oppression but to occupy Germany for the purpose of realizing certain important Allied objectives. In the conduct of your occupation and administration you should be just but firm and aloof. You will strongly discourage fraternization with the German officials and population.
c. The principal Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world. Essential steps in the accomplishment of this objective are the elimination of Nazism and militarism in all their forms, the immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, the industrial disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, with continuing control over Germany’s capacity to make war, and the preparation for an eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.
d. Other Allied objectives are to enforce the program of reparations and restitution, to provide relief for the benefit of countries devastated by Nazi aggression, and to ensure that prisoners of war and displaced persons of the United Nations are cared for and repatriated.12
JCS 1067, even more than the Handbook, had been the outcome of savage infighting between the Pentagon, the White House and the Department of the Treasury. This conflict – which was by no means over even with JCS 1067’s approval by the President – expressed both the varying attitudes among Roosevelt’s officials and aides when it came to the shape post-war Germany should take, and also differences in quite basic political assumptions.
The political struggle was essentially between the idealists, who wished to transform Germany, by radical action, into a new kind of country, peaceful and harmless by design, and the practical types, who weighed up the plight of the country’s seventy million people, most of them now reduced to penury and inactivity and menaced by the threat of starvation, and saw the rapid restoration of its capacity to pay its way and feed itself as the main priority.
The chief protagonists of these two conflicting points of view were fifty-four-year-old Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Junior (for the idealists) and Henry J. Stimson, the veteran Secretary for War, who in 1945 was already seventy-seven (for the realists).
A member of the East Coast Republican elite, educated at Yale and Harvard Law School, Stimson had served between 1911 and 1914 as Secretary for War under President Taft, and in the inter-war period had been American proconsul in both occupied Nicaragua and the Philippines. Despite Stimson’s republicanism, Roosevelt had offered him the post at the War Office in 1940 because he was unquestionably anti-Nazi. However, he was also a hard-headed realist with considerable administrative experience and a distrust of utopian schemes.
Morgenthau’s background was different. His own father had been Ambassador to Turkey after the First World War, and as a young man Henry Jr had witnessed with horror the massacres and expulsions that followed the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. He was also a (highly assimilated) Jew. Whether that last fact influenced in a decisive way his views on the future of Germany was a matter for discussion at the time, and remains so to this day.
The idea at the heart of Morgenthau’s plan for the post-war fate of Germany was that the country should, quite literally, be rendered incapable of ever waging war again. In short, he proposed that Germany become ‘a land primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character’, and that it be divided into three, a ‘north German’ state, a ‘south German’ state, and an international zone including the heavy industrial and coal-mining areas of the North Rhine and Ruhr, along with a swathe of territory running north and east to include Hamburg, Bremen and the strategic Kiel Canal. Of the Ruhr, the proposal insisted:
Within a short period, if possible not longer than six months after the cessation of hostilities, all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action shall either be completely dismantled and removed from the area or completely destroyed. All equipment shall be removed from the mines and the mines shall be thoroughly wrecked.13
The standard of living of the German population should, he suggested, ‘be held down to a subsistence level’.
Stimson’s response, on 5 September, began by stating that the Secretary of War agreed with the ‘principles stated therein’, which were ‘in conformity with the lines upon which we have been proceeding in the War Department in our directives to the armed forces’. It then added: ‘with the exception of the last paragraph’. The last paragraph was the all-important one in which Morgenthau made his drastic, not to say draconian, proposals regarding the future shape of the German economy. ‘I cannot,’ Stimson said firmly, ‘treat as realistic the suggestion that such an area in the present economic condition of the world can be turned into a non-productive “ghost territory” when it has become the centre of one of the most industrialised continents in the world, populated by peoples of energy, vigour and progressiveness.’ He concluded:
Nor can I agree that it should be one of our purposes to hold the German population ‘to a subsistence level’ if this means the edge of poverty, condemning the German people to a condition of servitude in which, no matter how hard or how effectively a man worked, he could not materially increase his economic condition in the world. Such a programme would, I believe, create tensions and resentments far outweighing any immediate advantage of security and would tend to obscure the guilt of the Nazis and the viciousness of their doctrines and their acts.
By such economic mistakes I cannot but feel that you would also be poisoning the springs out of which we hope that the future peace of the world can be maintained.
My basic objection to the proposed methods of treating Germany which were discussed this morning was that in addition to a system of preventive and educative punishment they would add the dangerous weapon of complete economic oppression. Such methods, in my opinion, do not prevent war; they tend to breed war.14
It was a crushing rejoinder. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, was not far behind him, though less aggressively so. Like Stimson, he was happy to see Germany pay reparations in money, kind and even human labour (there were already plans to allow the other Allies to retain German POWs as forced labour far beyond the coming of peace), but could not conceive of de-industrialising the country.15
This joint offensive did not immediately affect the President’s apparently keen support for Morgenthau’s plans. Roosevelt responded to their objections with a jocular reference to Germans’ being ‘fed three times a day with soup from army soup kitchens . . . [so that] they will remember that experience the rest of their lives’.
FDR took Morgenthau to his summit with the British in the middle of the month. When they met Churchill at Quebec on 16 September, with the British leader looking to renew a much-needed lend-lease deal with the Americans, it was almost certainly the Treasury Secretary’s control of the cheque book as well as his eloquence that tipped the balance. That, and the Americans’ assertion that, with German industrial power destroyed and prevented f
rom recovering, a near-bankrupt Britain’s economy would find it much easier to forge ahead once more after the war. For whatever reason, they managed to impose a slightly watered-down version on an initially reluctant Churchill.
The prompt leaking of the text to the press – and a widespread negative public reaction – caused Roosevelt, who was running against the youthful New York Governor, Thomas E. Dewey, for his third re-election in November, to deny that the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ was firm Allied policy.
It also quickly became clear that the Morgenthau Plan was a gift to German propagandists. The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ran a screaming headline: ‘Roosevelt and Churchill Agree to Jew Murder Plan’. Goebbels eagerly began to promote a new scapegoat, Morgenthau, ‘the Jewish angel of hate’. In a speech at the beginning of October he sneered:
Hate and revenge of a truly old-testament character are clear in these plans dreamed up by the American Jew Morgenthau. Industrialised Germany should be literally turned into a huge potato field.16
From now on, Goebbels’ journalists and propagandists repeatedly rammed home the simple, stark message: with the Morgenthau Plan now official Allied policy, Germans faced either victory or mass death and starvation.
It seems probable that this propaganda campaign helped stiffen resistance in what was left of the Reich during the final months of the war. Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Boettiger, who visited the front during the bitter fighting for Aachen in October 1944, reported that the troops on the ground had told him the Plan was ‘worth thirty divisions to the Germans’.17
Between the Quebec Conference in September and Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945, the momentum behind the Morgenthau Plan slackened. It was the beginning of a painfully slow backtrack that would take up to three years in all.
Churchill may have signed up for the Plan in Quebec, but even before the Prime Minister returned to London, leading figures in his government – especially Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden, who at Quebec had argued angrily with him about it (‘You can’t do this! After all, you and I publicly have said quite the opposite!’) within full earshot of the Americans – started agitating against the so-called ‘Carthaginian Peace’ demanded by Morgenthau.18 Eden wrote in his diary that he was ‘irritated by this German Jew’s bitter hatred of his own land’.19
Meanwhile, and almost fatally, no alternative policy was developed. There remained strong ‘Morgenthau’ elements in JCS 1067 – particularly regarding the feeding of the country at a basic level no higher than any of the surrounding nations and the assertion that the US would do nothing to stimulate or ‘rehabilitate’ German industry – though some of the most extreme suggestions, such as wrecking German mines and factories, were quietly dropped. Nonetheless, the breathtakingly radical elements contained in Morgenthau’s proposal would impede the ruling and feeding of occupied Germany and alienate many in Germany and elsewhere from Allied post-war policy.
Nor was the matter of Morgenthau’s Jewish identity left out of the picture, even in Washington. Stimson considered Morgenthau ‘so biased by his Semitic grievances that he really is a very dangerous adviser to the President’,20 while Secretary Hull referred in coded fashion to ‘Morgenthau and his friends’, and asserted that the Plan ‘might well mean a bitter-end German resistance that could cause the loss of thousands of American lives’.21
The other great pillar of the proposed post-war occupation of Germany was the notorious ‘non-fraternisation’ order contained both in the Handbook and in slightly modified form in JCS 1067.
The non-fraternisation policy had been framed in the early months of 1944 and was incorporated into Eisenhower’s order of the day on 3 September 1944, just before the US Army launched itself into Germany proper. Non-fraternisation was defined as ‘the avoidance of mingling with Germans upon terms of friendliness, familiarity or intimacy, whether individually or in groups, in official or unofficial dealings’. Specifically prohibited were marriages, integrated seating at religious services, visiting private homes, attending dances and even shaking hands. To ‘protect’ their men against such temptations, officers were encouraged to keep them occupied by, among other things, intensified training and the promotion of education and sports. Transgressions were punishable with a $65 fine for a first offence.22
The order was transposed into what was supposed to be a ‘GI-friendly’ form in the forty-eight-page ‘Pocket Guide to Germany’, some two million of which were distributed to American soldiers for the advance into Germany in the autumn of 1944. Prepared by German-speaking members of the army’s Morale Service Division, and packed with chilling warnings, the Pocket Guide told its readers: ‘Trust no one but your own kind. Be on your guard particularly against young Germans between the ages of 14 and 28. Since 1933, when Hitler came to power, German youth has been carefully and thoroughly educated for world conquest, killing, and treachery . . .’
On the subject of relations with Germans, of whatever age, it was also perfectly clear that ‘you are in an enemy country’:
There must be no fraternization. This is absolute! [italicised in the original] Unless otherwise permitted by higher authority you will not visit in German homes or associate with Germans on terms of friendly intimacy, either in public or in private. They must never be taken into your confidence.
This warning against fraternization doesn’t mean that you are to act like a sourpuss or military automaton. Your aspect should not be harsh or forbidding. At home you had minor transactions with many people. You were courteous to them, but never discussed intimate affairs, told them secrets, or gave them the benefit of your confidence. Let that behaviour be your model now.
The Germans will be curious. They will be interested. Their interest will be aroused by observation. They will notice your superb equipment. They will notice your high pay (high compared to the standards of their own and other European countries). They will observe your morale and the magnificent spirit of cooperation and mutual respect that exists in the American Army and they will ask questions about America and American life.
Within the limits of your instructions against fraternization and intimacy, you can by your conduct give them a glimpse of life in a Democracy where no man is master of another, where the only limit of success is a man’s own ability.23
Among other useful, though less worrying, information in the booklet was the revelation that ‘Germany is not as large as Texas’. And it contained tourist stuff – weights and measures equivalents, currency and so on, and a twenty-page phonetic guide to useful terms and phrases for non-German-speaking conquerors:
Where is a toilet?
VO ist ai-nuh two-LET-tuh?
When does the movie start?
VAHN buh-GINT dahss KEE-no?
Bring help!
HO-len zee HIL-fuh!
And moving from this back into worrying territory again:
Take cover!
DEK-koong!
Take me to a hospital
BRIN-gen zee mish tsoo ai-nem la-tsa-RET
The entire strictness of the affair, supported by frequent exhortations on American Forces’ radio, which ran regular, recorded warnings, was somewhat undermined by the evidence, as early as the end of 1944, that almost all the German secretaries and housekeepers employed at American military headquarters were very pretty and very young.24
The British also produced a Guide for their troops and a Handbook for officers. It had more history in it, but otherwise took a similar line. However, the British high command quite quickly showed a more relaxed attitude to the actual practicalities. Judging from the sections dealing with the anti-fraternisation order in the American Pocket Guide, any positive effect from interaction between Allied troops and Germans seemed to be expected to come out of some kind of mime performance or silent-movie routine.
The problem was, of course, that once any soldier, but perhaps especially any American soldier, came into contact with the people hitherto known as the enemy and
observed that they both looked pretty much like him and his comrades and also behaved pretty much in the same fashion, there was no preventing fraternisation. And it was hard to see where that fraternisation would stop. The fine for forbidden contact with German civilians was $65, and so asking a German girl out on a date became known as the ‘$65 Question’.25
Since that same soldier was lonely, frightened, frustrated and bored, in that unique combination that only war service can provide, what was he supposed to do? Within a few weeks of the war’s end, soldiers were told they could loosen up when it came to talking with German children. Well, kids were kids, same as everywhere; they liked candy and a few games. And then there were their unmarried aunts and their grown-up sisters . . . according to one magazine story of the time, GIs, spotting an attractive young German woman, would wink at her and say ‘Good day, child’.26
At the end of July 1945, the non-fraternisation policy was supposedly modified, so that conversations with German civilians were permitted ‘in public places’. This was widely interpreted as a de facto abandonment of the policy. As a Time magazine correspondent reported from a Bavarian lakeside resort (under the headline ‘Ban Lifted’):
One of the first people in this picturesque town to hear about the rescinding of the ban was a 28-year-old blonde, blousy German girl named Helga. She was told about it by the American soldier whose room in one of the local hotels she had been sharing for the past 30 days. Helga’s reaction was mixed. She said she was very happy because ‘now we don’t have to hide it any more’. But the joy was somewhat shadowed, she allowed, because ‘it is much better when it is forbidden’.27