Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Around 740,000 German POWs would be handed over to the French. The French, in fact, took over the camps in the middle Rhine valley as part of their zone in July, so that many would spend up to two or three years as their effective slaves (though by no means always under harsh conditions).19 It should be noted that the Americans agreed, on request by the French later that summer, to supply sufficient rations for these German prisoners, even though they were technically no longer their responsibility. When pressured by the French, the Americans even continued with this provision of supplies well into 1946 – hardly the action of a nation with the vindictive intention of starving a defeated enemy.20

  At least half a million, but perhaps as many as a million, German troops were unfortunate enough to suffer the undoubted privations and horrors of these improvised open-air camps. As for how many died in total? The general figure estimated is usually around 1 per cent, but plausible estimates up to 5 per cent have been made.21 Particularly if the latter figure is more accurate, this was much higher than it should have been, and a stain on America’s reputation.

  All the same, to give some idea of how much of an anomaly the Rhine Meadows cages represented, these are the generally accepted mortality rates for soldiers taken prisoner, nation by nation, during the Second World War:

  %

  Italian POWs in Soviet hands

  84.5

  Russian POWs in German hands

  57.5

  German POWs in Soviet hands

  35.8

  American POWs in Japanese hands

  33.0

  German POWs in Eastern European hands

  32.9

  British POWs in Japanese hands

  24.8

  British POWs in German hands

  3.5

  German POWs in French hands

  2.58

  German POWs in American hands

  0.15

  German POWs in British hands

  0.0322

  Since the mortality rates for German POWs sent to camps in America (a total of 380,000) amounted to no more than 0.02 per cent23 (one in five hundred – less than the rate for the equivalent civilian age group within Germany itself), it is not hard to see that fatalities ascribed to the Rhine Meadow cages were, relatively speaking, strongly disproportionate, especially since they existed for a space of just three to four months – but they were much less lethal than falling into Russian, Yugoslav, Polish or even French hands.

  The almost equally significant point about the Rhine cages was, in fact, political. What happened there went, for a start, completely against what Allied propaganda had said would happen when encouraging German troops to surrender. The leaflets dropped over German lines in the previous weeks and months were often made up as official-looking ‘safe conducts’ (Passierscheine), which seemed to entitle the surrendering German soldier to some kind of guaranteed special treatment. They varied slightly in details, but the leaflet numbered ZG61 was typical. The Allies printed 67,345,800 of this one, and dropped 65,750,000. Tens of millions of other forms of the Passierschein were also dropped between D-Day and April 1945.

  The leaflet, impressively printed in either red or green, bore the name and facsimile signature of General Eisenhower and instructions addressed to American troops: ‘The German soldier who carries this safe conduct is using it as a sign of his genuine wish to give himself up. He is to be disarmed, to be well looked after, to receive food and medical attention as required and to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.’ The text on the reverse featured prominently the ‘Basic Principles of International Law regarding Prisoners of War’:

  BASIC PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW REGARDING PRISONERS OF WAR

  (According to the Hague Convention, 1907, and the Geneva Convention, 1929)

  1. From the moment of surrender, German soldiers are regarded as P.O.W.s and come under the protection of the Geneva Convention. Accordingly, their military honour is fully respected.

  2. P.O.W.s must be taken to assembly points as soon as possible, which are far enough from the danger zone to safeguard their personal security.

  3. P.O.W.s receive the same rations, qualitatively and quantitatively, as members of the Allied armies, and, if sick or wounded, are treated in the same hospitals as Allied troops.

  4. Decorations and valuables are to be left with the P.O.W.s. Money may be taken only by officers of the assembly points and receipts must be given.

  5. Sleeping quarters, accommodation, bunks and other installations in P.O.W. camps must be equal to those of Allied garrison troops.

  6. According to the Geneva Convention, P.O.W.s must not become subject of reprisals nor be exposed to public curiosity. After the end of the war they must be sent home as soon as possible.

  Soldiers in the meaning of the Hague Convention (IV, 1907) are: All armed persons, who wear uniforms or any insignias which can be recognized from a distance.

  RULES FOR SURRENDER

  To prevent misunderstanding when surrendering, the following procedure is advisable: Lay down arms, take off helmet and belt, raise your hands and wave a handkerchief or this leaflet.

  A bilingual version, with a French translation of the ‘safe conduct’ instruction, was dropped over areas of the front where Free French forces were serving.24

  The clash between brute realism, not to mention cynicism, and the letter of the Geneva and Hague conventions, applied to the Allies’ handling of the defeated civilian population as well as the military. If anyone in Germany had expected the arrival of the Allies to bring not just an end to violence but a rapid improvement in the supply of food, fuel and other necessities, they were to be terribly disappointed. That disappointment was to last not months but years.

  Part of the problem was certainly dislike and vindictiveness on the part of victors against vanquished – that silent but eloquent language of enforced deprivation – of that there can be little doubt. Most of the shortages, economic sclerosis and mass suffering, were, however, probably inevitable. If the Allies had treated the Germans no differently from the other ‘liberated’ nations of Europe – they could not possibly have treated them better, by any rational measure – would the country’s and the people’s experience in the immediate post-war period have been less gruelling? The question is hard to answer, but worth considering.

  And then, of course, there were the political consequences. Just as many German soldiers – but by no means all – felt themselves to be victims of American brutality in the Rhine Meadows cages and similar camps, so, in short order, millions of German civilians inevitably developed a strong sense of victimhood, arising from their suffering during the Allied invasion of Germany and the consequent months and years. Years of punishment, and, as many saw it, unjust persecution.

  The massive bombing of German cities and, in the last phase of the war, the destruction of the country’s transport system and other infrastructure by bombing and strafing, had helped spread war weariness among the civilian population. It had also created a lasting reservoir of resentment and defiance that carried on into the post-war years. The Allies accused the German nation of atrocities, but what about their own?

  In mid-May 1945, the stalwartly anti-Nazi (though socially conservative) Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, for instance, complained not just about the pettifogging arrogance of the British after they captured her native Hamburg, but their hypocrisy in:

  . . . proclaiming to the whole world that only Germany could have sunk so low in such abysmal cruelty and bestiality, that they themselves are pure and beyond reproach. And who destroyed our beautiful cities, regardless of human life, of women, children or old people? Who poured down poisonous phosphorous during the terror raids on unfortunate fugitives, driving them like living torches into the rivers? Who dive-bombed harmless peasants, women and children, in low-level attacks, and machine-gunned the defenceless population? Who was it, I ask you? We are all the same, all equally guilty . . .25

  Similar attitudes were widespread,
and became even more so when the Allies’ less-than-perfect wartime behaviour was followed by equally, if not more, flawed attitudes and actions after peace broke out and they had the whole of Germany to rule.

  Fritz Mann, the German POW who had chronicled first the privations of the Gummersbach valley camp and then the Remagen-Sinzig cage, had helped conquer thousands of square miles of Europe and Eurasia, and had been part of the occupation force in Holland, France, Poland, the Balkans and Russia, with all that implied.

  Nevertheless, like Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, Mann resented the Allied assumptions of superiority. He saw himself and most of his fellow Germans as victims, equal in this respect to the formerly Nazi-occupied populations and the DPs. His dreadful experiences at the Americans’ hands in the Rhine cages merely confirmed him in this view. Finally released in July 1945, one of the lucky ones not handed over to the French for forced reconstruction labour, he hitched a lift in an American jeep that was headed for his home town. His benefactors were three American soldiers and an older American woman in uniform, who spoke some German. Having casually discussed his experiences in the Rhine Meadows – which he is keen to tell us they did not believe – and the extent of his ‘travels’ with the Wehrmacht before that, they arrive on the shattered outskirts of his home city, known in the text only as ‘F’. The woman gestures at the shattered ruins:

  And for all this, she continues, you have to thank one single man. Terrible! All for nothing!

  Certainly, I think, it was one man who gave the signal for the beginning of it all; but isn’t it a bit convenient for everyone involved to say: for all this we have to thank one man . . . Do we not all bear some responsibility for this terrible blow that so profoundly shattered our western world, and from which it may never properly recover, all – vanquished and victors alike? – Everything that humanity individually achieves on this earth is always a piecemeal thing, in good or in evil; it takes all of us together to do the deed . . .26

  The American woman’s apparent attempt to assign the blame to ‘one man’ – Hitler – is, of course, faintly absurd, but her omni-guilty Hitler is also the German narrator’s welcome straw man. Perhaps, in fact in all probability, the woman is simply using the Führer, in a slightly lazy way, as a symbol for Nazism, the ideology to which so many Germans remained loyal for so long, even as millions died and their country disintegrated around them. So, Mann is, in the narrow sense, right, but he is also being deliberately obtuse, exploiting her dramatic exaggeration in order to slide over the question of Nazism’s responsibility – the party had twelve million members, and many, many millions more supporters, especially in the early, victorious years – and move quietly into more amenable territory.

  Within this foggy moral landscape, occasionally warmed by the milky sunlight of collective blame, victors and vanquished appear equally tainted. All are guilty and therefore, if one is not careful, none are. It is clear that the Americans’ appalling treatment of himself and his fellow prisoners between April and July has given Mann permission – at least in his own mind – to do that. In a similar way, the apparently indiscriminate bombing and ground attacks carried out by the Allies in pursuit of victory – especially in the final months of the war – cancelled out, for Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, notions of the conquerors’ moral superiority and Germany’s absolute culpability for the recent European catastrophe.

  This psychological process was to prove a common resort for many millions of Germans in the post-war years. If some experienced a hunger for democracy, more did so for peace, but the overwhelming majority hungered almost exclusively for – food. The last of these needs would, for some time to come, consume all the mental and physical energy available.

  On a purely practical level, the frequent brutality and unfairness of Allied policy – during but especially after the war – seemed to absolve all but the most self-laceratingly fastidious Germans from moral introspection, and effectively freed them up for the struggle ahead – the struggle for physical survival. By a glorious irony, this was the opposite of what the Allies, and particularly the British and Americans, with all their talk of ‘teaching Germans a lesson’ by deprivation, had intended.

  While the Reich had suffered terribly from food shortages in the First World War, and even during the following months – the Allied blockade was maintained after the November 1918 Armistice and not officially lifted until the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919 – the country’s governmental apparatus and infrastructure had survived undamaged. Despite severe economic problems and short-term political dislocation, the food situation returned more or less to normal relatively quickly.

  In the post-First World War period, in other words, the German people were humiliated and greatly impoverished, but not, once the blockade was lifted, starving. There had been no fighting on German soil (although following the peace there was the nationalist Freikorps’ futile armed struggle against the ceding of West Prussia and Upper Silesia to Poland) and therefore no destruction of buildings and transportation networks. Moreover, after 1918 the country had remained sovereign, despite the presence of French, American and British forces in the Rhineland and later, from 1923, temporary Franco-Belgian occupiers in the Ruhr.

  After the Second World War, the spectre of hunger would have haunted Germany, even had the occupation been a kinder affair. The country’s cities were largely wrecked, with between a quarter and a half of urban dwellings seriously damaged or destroyed, its railways operating sporadically or hardly at all, little fuel, and dangerously low food reserves (in the last weeks of the war, as the Allied forces approached, the authorities had opened up many emergency food dumps for the Wehrmacht and the German civilian populations – though not to DPs, prisoners of war or concentration camp inmates).27 And then there were the internally displaced – up to twenty million – and the other ten million refugees who had fled from the Russian-occupied east, to which, it was rapidly becoming clear, few would want to or be able to return. And the country had no government – or only at the very lowest level, and often, having been cleansed of experienced but politically tainted incumbents, dubiously competent.

  So, by their unconditional surrender policy and their decision to abolish the German government, the Allies had ensured that it was upon their own authority – which in practice following the surrender meant their armed forces – that the governance of Germany, including the feeding and care of its people, devolved.

  Article 43 of the Hague Rules of Land Warfare (1907) (Section III, ‘Military Power over the Territory of the Hostile State’) stated: ‘The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.’28 Although feeding the population was not specifically mentioned, it was assumed at the time and later, in the words of an expert testifying to a US Senate Committee, that:

  The Hague Conventions . . . are based on the assumptions that when a country has been defeated and occupied, the occupier or occupiers have become responsible for the orderly government of the people in their power. They must safeguard the basic rights of the local population and see to it that their basic needs are met just as they were to the national government of that country. Wilfully to deny them the necessities of life is a violation of international law.29

  Questions were begged, however, even by this seemingly unequivocal declaration of intent. First, what were ‘the necessities of life’? Second, more pragmatically, even if an appropriate level of nutrition were agreed, when – as potential American and British Military Government officers were being told in training schools in England in the final months of the war – most of liberated Europe was existing on 1,600 calories per day or less, how could the Germans be given more, or even the same? (Two thousand calories was the rough life-preserving rule of thumb used earlier in the war for occupied and liberated countries alike by the British and the Americans.)30

  A senior off
icer at the training school in London told his students that the German adult would receive ‘1500 calories as a maximum, although there is no assurance he will get that much; that is all he can have during our occupation’. He continued:

  As for supplying the Germans with food, it will only be as a last resort. We are going to treat Germany as a defeated country. We expect to put out food to the German people only where there is no other food available . . . The food problem will cause more trouble from a public safety angle than another one. But we have to be strict with them and we have to watch the food now because later we will have to feed them if supplies become exhausted. We do not want circumstances to force us to import food for Germans.31

  This was as early as December 1944, when only a tiny proportion of Germany was in Allied hands. Everyone knew then that there would be shortages, possibly on a catastrophic level, because they knew what things were like elsewhere. It was no accident that Franz Oppenhoff, American-appointed Lord Mayor of Aachen, the first German city to fall, spent the March afternoon before he was murdered in his garden, with his wife, breaking soil and sowing seeds for vegetables to keep him and his family alive through the post-war year he would never see.

  In the end, feeding the occupied population under the Hague Convention was reinterpreted not to mean providing the best standard of living possible under the circumstances, but, as expressed in the instructions issued to Eisenhower by Washington on 10 May 1945, merely ensuring ‘supplies necessary to prevent starvation or widespread disease or such civil unrest as would endanger the occupying forces’.

  The Western Allies had baulked at feeding the five to six million Wehrmacht servicemen who fell into their hands in the last weeks of the war on the same level as their own base troops – as the Hague Convention demanded and as had been the case until the last few months of the war – by reclassifying them as Disarmed Enemy Forces or Surrendered Enemy Personnel rather than prisoners of war. So, by a similar token, German civilians were essentially reduced to a new, legally somewhat dubious status, in order to satisfy the twin demands of vengeance and practical necessity.