. . . I began to meet parties of civilians moving in the opposite direction to the Army. Some were in small groups on foot, and others in larger bands with belongings heaped on farm carts. It was some time before I realised they were our Allies – the freed prisoners-of-war and deported workers who were beginning their homeward trek. At first I’d taken them for Germans, and it wasn’t so much their dress and the delighted and rather solemn expression I began to notice on their faces that made me realise who they were. They went steadily on as if nothing on earth would stop them.
Then I began to overtake parties of Easterners moving along in the same direction as ourselves, in bodies that were even larger, often riding in a chain of wagons pulled by a tractor which carried a red flag. In some of the villages I passed, they seemed to have taken possession, and I saw whole communities camped in barns by the roadside, cooking themselves meals. I wondered what was happening to the farmers.
These three streams of traffic grew thicker and thicker: our lorries going north-east along the road, the eastern Allies pushing on beside us along the grass verge and the Westerners moving back in the opposite direction. It was as though a day of judgment had come, with the Germans fleeing hopelessly, and the victims rising up and setting out for separate paradises beyond the frontiers.27
The distinction between Germans, even displaced Germans, and DPs was clear. According to officials at SHAEF, DPs were defined as those individuals ‘obliged to leave their country or place of origin or former residence or who have been deported from there by action of the enemy because of race, religion or activities’. This distinction was especially clear when it came to the matter of feeding. All the Allies acknowledged that the many millions of human beings who had found themselves in Germany against their will as a result of forced emigration deserved to have their further suffering minimised – and their swift return home facilitated.
From the beginning, especially for those DPs who had experienced liberation while still in labour or concentration camps, medical help, however rough and ready, and food, at first from forces rations, was available on an ad hoc basis. For many, transport home was quickly arranged. By May 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded with impressive foresight at Roosevelt’s behest two years earlier to cater for these eventualities, had already set up five hundred assembly centres for DPs. From these, almost one million DPs had already, officially, been repatriated, even before the end of the war.28 (This figure did not of course include the vast flood of self-directed returnees encountered by ‘Sergeant Mac’ on the roads of north-western Germany at this time.)
However, things were by no means perfect, especially for the several hundred thousand Jewish DPs in Germany at the end of the war, who, unlike Poles, most Russians, Yugoslavs and Western European prisoners and forced labourers, did not necessarily have anywhere to go. Their communities in Germany or Poland or Russia had been destroyed, many or even most of their relatives murdered, and for the moment the only places where they felt at home or, on a basic level, safe, were camps – sometimes new ones set up by the victors to accommodate them, sometimes even the same camps where they had been held by the Germans until liberated.
These Jewish DPs were often in very poor physical condition, starving and diseased. In mid-January 1945, after Reichsführer Himmler’s order to evacuate the camps in Poland of all but the sickest prisoners, many thousands had been herded on to the roads west. In the final horror that followed, which has gone down in infamy as the ‘Death March’, many, many died of exhaustion, hunger, or at the brutal hands of the guards who had accompanied them. The Allied soldiers found them – and tens of thousands of other prisoners – packed under the most appalling conditions into the by now obscenely overcrowded camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and their satellites during the course of April 1945.
The occupiers experienced pity, horror – but also, not infrequently, repulsion.
At Dachau, on the edge of suburban Munich, Time magazine’s correspondent Sidney Olson found boxcars in sidings, filled with corpses, many still showing whip marks on their bony buttocks and rumps, and further into the camp, ‘half covered by a brown tarpaulin . . . a stack about five feet high and about 20 feet wide of naked dead bodies, all of them emaciated’. That was the dead. Worse were the unwelcome attentions of the living, who were
. . . frantically, hysterically happy. They began to kiss us, and there is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all. You cannot hit them, and besides, they all kiss you at the same time. It is no good trying to explain that you are only a correspondent. A half-dozen of them were especially happy and it turned out they were very proud: they had killed two German soldiers themselves.29
At Bergen-Belsen near Celle, 700 kilometres to the north-west, which the British liberated on 15 April, some 10,000 bodies lay unburied when they entered the camp. Thirteen thousand more inmates died in the days and weeks that followed. A Jewish chaplain with the British Second Army, Leslie Hardman, described the condition of survivors there. He happened to enter the camp with two young British soldiers, who were carrying sacks of potatoes meant for the feeding of the liberated prisoners:
Almost as though they had emerged from the retreating shadows of dark corners, a number of wraithlike creatures came tottering towards us. As they drew closer they made frantic efforts to quicken their feeble pace. Their skeleton arms and legs made jerky, grotesque movements as they forced themselves forward. Their bodies, from their heads to their feet, looked like matchsticks. The two young Tommies, entering camp for the first time, must of thought they had walked into a supernatural world; all the gruesome and frightening tales they had heard as children – and, not so many years since, they had been children – rose up to greet them; the grisly spectacle which confronted them was too much. They dropped their heavy sacks and fled.30
No sooner had the young Tommies retreated than these images of living death, uttering thin, eerie cries, began fighting with the sacks and with each other to get at the precious raw potatoes within.
‘All I felt,’ said another British officer, in an alarmingly honest appraisal of his own reactions, ‘was horror, disgust, and I am ashamed to admit it, hate. Hate against the prisoners for looking as they did, for living as they did, for existing at all. It was quite unreasonable, but there it was, and it gave us one possible explanation of why the SS had done these things. Once having reduced their prisoners to such a state the only emotions the guards could feel were loathing, disgust and hate.’31
All the same, away from these absolute extremes of bearable experience, most Allied troops did what they could. The beginnings of a post-war network of refuges for such problematic DPs began to take shape. Towards the end of April 1945, Lieutenant Irving J. Smith, a Jewish-American officer, led his unit into the town of Tutzing, near the Starnberger See and about twenty miles south of Munich. There he found some survivors who had been evacuated from Dachau before the camp was liberated and forced to head south in what was essentially a ‘death march’. There were a thousand of them, ‘starving, almost raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’.
In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.32
For the Germans among whom these foreigners had lived for the past years, there was no such help. Quite specifically. From the first day of peace until other forms of communication could take over, the language spoken between Germans and Allied occupiers was pr
edominantly that of deprivation, of hunger and restriction and shortages – shortages of shelter and fuel, gainful activity and, above all, food.
After so many millions of others all over Europe had starved, it was now, after 8 May 1945, that defeated Germany’s great hunger began.
7
The Price
Deprivation was a short cut, a permanent, unspoken signal that said, on the Allies’ part, and eloquently so: you Germans are unimaginably bad and we are good; we will now live well in dwellings and on land taken from you and tell you what to do, while you spend some (unspecified) time suffering and obeying orders and purifying yourselves. We shall impose upon you Germans everything you imposed upon others for so long.
In return, the German population frowned and said: you spoke throughout this war of freedom, but now you impose on us only restriction and deliberate suffering. What do you want with us seventy million? Only to make us suffer more than we already do? Yes, the war was bad. However, we are not just the people of Hitler and Himmler, but also of Beethoven and Goethe. We have lived here in the heart of Europe for hundreds of years, mostly no less peaceably than our neighbours. We shall carry on living – unless you want to kill us all. So, again, what do you want with us?
There was no immediate answer from the Allied side in those days and weeks after Germany’s surrender. How could there be, when there was no definite plan? On the big scale that mattered, there was no conversation.
Since the German government was now abolished, and its servants – including Backe, Speer and all the other organisers of Germany’s ultimately futile wartime miracles – not just sacked but in the case of the upper echelons arrested, there was no German in authority to talk to. Almost all the Germans who knew which levers to pull to make the machine work had either been Nazis from the start or had ended up that way as the price of staying part of the elite.
Of course, from the first moment Allied troops crossed the border, despite the animosity and the non-fraternisation order and all the rest, thousands and millions of small conversations had taken place – often halting, awkward and even unpleasant, but sometimes, even as the killing continued, informed by hesitant kindness and mutual curiosity. And the number of these tiny conversations began to accumulate. To speak of normality would be wrong – too much had happened and too many innocent people had died unnecessarily to get to this point. There was nothing wholly natural, either, about most of the relationships that arose from these conversations, because they were so unequal. They were fraught with advantage and exploitative intent on the conquerors’ side and need and resentment, concealed or open, on the part of the vanquished. But human beings are instinctively, even compulsively, social animals. Even under the very worst of circumstances, in hopelessly beleaguered foxholes and claustrophobic air raid shelters and lice-ridden concentration camp barracks, we still want to make contact. Post-war Germany was no different. But before those millions of small conversations could lead to anything truly positive, the language of deprivation ruled the great affairs of post-war Germany.
Lieutenant General Lucius Dubignon Clay was born in Georgia, son of Alexander Stephens Clay (1857–1910), a member of the US Senate representing that state. The General was an engineer, a logistics man – he had earned his reputation building dams and airfields and, famously, swiftly restoring the wrecked harbour at Cherbourg after it was abandoned by the Germans following D-Day – rather than an old-fashioned battlefield warrior in the mode of George S. Patton.
Clay had risen quickly to become the youngest brigadier general in the US Army because he knew how to handle politicians and he got things done. In the late spring, just after his forty-eighth birthday, he was promoted to lieutenant general and appointed Eisenhower’s deputy at SHAEF, a post he continued in as SHAEF merged uneasily into the post-war Allied Control Council, and the Military Government of the American Zone came into being. Clay had gained a reputation as a supporter of ‘tough war’ measures in America itself, including curfews, restrictions on energy use and bans on horse racing and gambling, and there seemed no reason to believe he would be any easier on the conquered Germans.1
Eisenhower had unsuccessfully supported the candidacy of his abrasive Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith, whom Stimson and his Under-Secretary, McCloy, had thought temperamentally unsuited to such a post-war role. Nevertheless, Clay’s appointment had actually been approved by President Roosevelt shortly before his death as the intended Governor of the American Zone, and so it was with the authority of the coming man in Germany that he wrote in June 1945: ‘Conditions are going to be extremely difficult in Germany this winter and there will be much cold and hunger.’
Clay’s words were nothing more, in a way, than a statement of fact, a logical consequence of the massive human displacement and disruption and the catastrophic damage to the German economy and infrastructure inflicted during the disastrous, drawn-out endgame of the war. But then came the moral message: ‘Some cold and hunger will be necessary to make the German people realise the consequences of a war which they caused.’2
General Montgomery had been saying much the same thing, at least in public, and issuing declarations to that effect to the population in the British Zone. The Russians, for all their violence in word and deed, tended to be less moralistic.
There had been arguments during the war in Moscow over whether the Germans in general were ‘redeemable’ at all, but in the longer term a combination of textbook Marxism-Leninism and military pragmatism won the day when it came to occupation policy. Theoretically, of course, the Nazi regime ultimately counted as nothing more than the brutal final phase of capitalism. Those who had foisted it on the German people – Junker landowners, capitalists, militarists and so on – would be found and severely punished in the uninhibited Stalinist fashion familiar from the regime’s treatment of ‘class enemies’ back in the USSR, but the mass of Germans, inasmuch as they had not committed serious crimes, were more or less classifiable as victims.
The Soviets were the only occupiers who, paradoxically – for their mode of conquest, administration and exploitation of Germany’s human and industrial resources was anything but soft – allowed some leeway for the German population in the ‘guilt question’.3
It is difficult to know whether the early phase of post-war Germany’s existence would have been perceptibly easier had the Allies done the thing that they were firmly set on not doing: treating conquered Germany on an equal basis with the rest of the continent, which of course was also facing horrendous problems of food supply and economic and structural rehabilitation. Clay and Montgomery were eminently practical men. As his correspondence with Churchill proved, Montgomery was already, by July, growing restless at the restrictions placed upon him by London. All the same, in the push-pull of the post-war crisis, there were times when vengeance trumped pragmatic decency.
This was most apparent in the matter of the German prisoners of war who fell into Western, particularly American, hands. Much of the manoeuvring of German military forces in the very final phase of the war had to do, not with any notion of ‘turning the tide’ or ‘winning’, but with reaching the relative safety of the Anglo-American lines and surrendering to the Western Allies. The very luckiest of the Wehrmacht’s finest delivered themselves into American hands in time to be put on one of the last transatlantic POW convoys and join the hundreds of thousands of surrendered Wehrmacht personnel in the established prison camp network within the continental USA.
Josef Bischof, for instance, captured near Kaiserslautern in south-west Germany in March 1945, found himself just a few weeks later on the other side of the Atlantic, harvesting sugar beet and beans in Colorado. Later he would wash dishes in a hospital kitchen. By and large, he saw out the war and the immediate post-war era in decent, though not luxurious surroundings. His treatment corresponded to the Geneva Convention, which had until now been more or less adhered to by both the Anglo-Americans and the Germans in the west, although not by the Germans
and the Russians on the Eastern Front, resulting in huge losses of POWs on both sides.4
At the beginning of April, the transatlantic POW transports were stopped. There was a simple reason, apart from the clearly imminent end of the war: there were now just too many prisoners, too many for this system to cope with anyway. When the German forces of Army Group ‘B’, besieged in the Ruhr industrial area, surrendered on 18 April, 317,000 men passed into American captivity. This was the largest mass surrender of German troops in the entire war. The total number of prisoners in American hands soared from 313,000 at the end of 1944 to 2.6 million in early April 1945, and over five million at the beginning of May. The ‘temporary enclosures’ in which prisoners were usually kept before being shipped into captivity in the United States quickly proved utterly inadequate for receiving such numbers.5
The problem here was quite clear. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, the Allies were duty bound to feed enemy POWs at the same rate as their own base troops (and to pay them as well, according to rank). Josef Bischof and his comrades were the last captured Germans to be granted that privilege. But how could this level of treatment be sustained for five million unproductive German POWs, suddenly dropped into a SHAEF-occupied area in the middle of a continent where food shortages were already acute and threatening to take on apocalyptic proportions?
The response to the problem of POW numbers, stated in an order from the JCS in Washington to Eisenhower, was to create a new category, not ‘prisoners of war’ as stipulated under existing international agreements but ‘disarmed enemy forces’. In a coordinated move, the British reclassified their own captives as ‘surrendered enemy personnel’. This new category could be fed and maintained at a lower level than stipulated by the Geneva Convention.
Exorcising Hitler Page 21
