In Paris, on 7 January 1946, 1,000 ‘50-pointers’, scheduled to be kept on in the forces beyond their assumed demobilisation date, staged a protest meeting, and two days later 4,000 marched on army headquarters in Frankfurt to take their grievance to General McNarney. McNarney was absent attending a Control Council meeting in Berlin. All the same, on 15 January the War Department announced a revised schedule geared to getting all 45-pointers and above home and discharged by April 1946. This meant that by the summer the entirety of the American forces in Europe (USFET) would amount to barely a quarter of a million, and by the end of the year would fall to 200,000 – one-twenty-fifth of its strength when the occupation had begun.
The replacements sent to Europe were mostly unskilled and to a large extent untrained. In November and December 1945, 95 per cent of requisitions had been for men with technical specialities. Of those who arrived, only 13 per cent actually had such qualifications. Beginning in January, replacements shipped out for Europe after eight weeks of training, which was more or less limited to qualification with the M-1 rifle, personal hygiene and sanitation, and ‘orientation for occupation duty with emphasis on discipline’.
In the first week of March, after a tour of parts of eastern France and Germany, the army’s inspector general reported:
Discipline is generally poor and at this time is below desirable standards. Definite responsibility for maintaining discipline where troops of various arms and services are stationed has not been satisfactorily established. Incident to the shortage of personnel, the majority of replacements are not receiving additional disciplinary basic training as expected. Many young officers command important installations and units. Numbers of these have not had sufficient training to carry out their administrative responsibility. Similarly, there are many untrained non-commissioned officers.27
And with this human material, Clay was supposed to process millions of Fragebogen and ascertain the denazification status of the respondents, who were filling out the forms in German, which the overwhelming majority of American troops had little or no knowledge of? A vast exercise in political and social engineering, affecting more than five million individual human beings, and carried out entirely by foreigners?
In fact, the American military managed in 1945–6 to review almost 1,600,000 Fragebogen. There were five possible categories of result from each review: in the most serious cases, mandatory removal; next in seriousness, discretionary removal with an adverse recommendation; next, discretionary removal with a positive recommendation; next, non-Nazi; and most desirable of all, anti-Nazi.
This huge and complicated process resulted in the dismissal of 374,000 certified Nazis from their posts.28 They were to be permitted only to do ‘simple work’. At the end of 1945, with the entire process still under direct American control, 90,000 of those considered especially dangerous were still held in civilian internment camps awaiting processing, with another 25,000 picked out as dangerous Nazis or major militarists from among the POWs and accordingly put into separate custody, giving some 115,000 individuals detained in the American Zone as a whole.29
This still left, however, some 3.5 million known Nazis waiting to be classified. In many cases these tainted individuals were unable to work or reintegrate into society until this was done. They were often respected figures in their communities – business people, farmers, doctors, lawyers, teachers. And they were arguably the backbone of the country, indispensable to its recovery.
Malnutrition was now widespread throughout Germany, energy and sanitation services were still unrepaired in many urban areas affected by wartime bombing and ground fighting, hundreds of thousands of buildings were still in ruins, and the threat, because of these factors, of epidemics and diseases of all kinds was ever present.
Many Americans had started out with missionary intentions. They would punish the Germans, but then they would reform them, turn them into good democrats. Now, like a host of occupiers before and since, these once-optimistic soldier-reformers were starting to think they might just settle for crowd control.
Realising that, for all his determination to cleanse the American Zone of Nazis, he would soon have neither the quantity nor the quality of manpower to achieve this through American personnel alone, at the end of November 1945 General Clay had done what many decision-makers do when a tough decision presents itself – he had appointed a commission.
The ‘Denazification Policy Board’ began considering the possibilities through that first post-war winter, and especially consulting with the appointed German officials of the three Länder, or states, that made up the American Zone: Bavaria, Hesse and Württemburg-Baden.
Wilhelm Hoegner, the appointed Bavarian Premier, was a fifty-eight-year-old former Social Democrat Reichstag deputy, a lawyer who had spent the war in Switzerland. His denazification expert was a communist by the name of Heinrich Schmitt, who had spent ten years in jail during the Nazi time. Hoegner thought that the fervently anti-Nazi Schmitt might act as a counterbalance in Bavaria, with its reputation as a stronghold of the nationalist right. It was a bold move. Schmitt was reliably anti-Nazi but too left wing for many Bavarians, and also some Americans. Nevertheless, along with their colleagues from Hesse and Württemberg-Baden, these appointed post-Nazi officials put together a law that effected some compromises between German interests and concerns and the still-dominant punitive intentions of the ‘Removal from Office and from Positions of Responsibility of Nazis and of Persons Hostile to Allied Purposes’ directive that the four-power Control Council had promulgated in January 1946.
As a result of these consultations, in March 1946, the ‘Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism’ followed, drafted by officials of the Office of Military Governor US Zone (OMGUS) but processed through the nascent German political organs, who thus took co-responsibility.
The ‘Liberation Law’, as it was known (Befreiungsgesetz), was the first to provide a framework for the Germans themselves to cleanse their own body politic. It took upon itself the right to speak in the name of the German people in proclaiming its aim:
(1) To liberate our people from National Socialism and Militarism, and to secure a lasting base for German democratic national life in peace with the world, all those who have actively supported the National Socialist tyranny, or are guilty of having violated the principles of justice and humanity, or of having selfishly exploited the conditions thus created, shall be excluded from influence in public, economic and cultural life and shall be bound to make reparations.
(2) Everyone who is responsible shall be called to account. At the same time he shall be afforded opportunity to vindicate himself.
Clay was aware that this handover to the Germans was necessary for hard-headedly practical reasons. He also knew that, when it came, it would attract attention at home, and not necessarily of a positive nature. This was clear from the transcript of a frank phone call with General John H. Hilldring, who had been head of civil affairs under him but had just been appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas:
CLAY: You will find that we will get a tremendous amount of abuse from those of us that will say that we are turning back responsibilities to the Germans too quickly. Actually, if you gave me 10,000 people over here, I couldn’t do that job. With 10,000 people I couldn’t do the job of denazification. It’s got to be done by the Germans.
HILLDRING: Yes.
CLAY: This is a good law and I am going to approve it over here, and specifically not send it back to you because I’m going to take the responsibility for it myself.
HILLDRING: Yes, OK.
CLAY: But I just want to warn you on it because it will hit the press on the 5th of March and I want you to know about it.
HILLDRING: Yes.
There was another hidden problem here. A large number of the US Army’s best denazifiers in Germany, and its most suitable administrators – given their knowledge and language skills – were German Jews. Many of them had left Germany after the Naz
is came to power, and then returned with the conquering forces.
To many Germans such émigré Jews were near-mythical beings, inspiring fascination yet at the same time somehow especially resented and feared. During the war, fantasy tales had abounded in the Reich of these émigrés acting as guides to the Anglo-American bomber fleets, often directing the deadly aircraft to the towns and cities where they had grown up and been persecuted because of their race.30
Now that these exiles were returning in foreign uniforms to their native Germany or Austria, they were assumed by many of their one-time compatriots to be highly vengeful, and, moreover, likely to favour the Jewish survivors, whether German-Jewish or DPs, over native Germans. This strange mixture of communal guilt and residual anti-Semitism seems to have been widespread among a German population still conditioned by Nazi ideology but nonetheless striving to adapt to a new, post-Hitler world where they were the villains and not the heroes.
Nor was this suspicious attitude confined to Germans. The more or less oblique criticisms from Secretaries Stimson and Hull, centring on Morgenthau’s Jewish identity, that had greeted his plan for post-war Germany, were reflected in the American and British armies on the ground in occupied Germany. Here, both the genteel and the less subtle kinds of anti-Semitism were not uncommon. Professional soldiers were and remain most commonly conservative in their social and political inclinations. The keenest denazifiers, the ‘Morgenthau boys’ or ‘Chaos boys’ as disapproving comrades called them – including Saul Padover in the early days in Aachen – were Roosevelt’s New Dealers in uniform, and many of them, again like Padover, Jewish New Dealers at that.
In fact, American denazification policy itself had been influenced by the ‘Frankfurt School’ of exiled German leftists, a group who were mostly but not exclusively Jewish. One major architect of the policy was the Marxist political scientist Franz Neumann, along with his colleague Herbert Marcuse, both adherents of the Frankfurt School, who were recruited to the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) to consider the internal situation in Germany during the war years and come up with ideas.
Neumann, author of an influential Marxist analysis of the National Socialist state, Behemoth, and Marcuse (who twenty years later would become a guru of the 1960s ‘New Left’) saw Nazism not as a ‘top down’ power structure foisted on the passive populace by an elite of relatively few charismatic individuals, with Hitler at its apex, but as a more diffuse, virus-like phenomenon that had spread widely throughout various sectors of society, including the military, industry, bureaucracy and so on. This made it, in a way, more difficult to deal with and post-war Germany harder to change. Just getting rid of the Nazi leaders who had, according to the opposite theory, dictated to and corrupted the German people, would not suffice to eliminate the ideology. Root and branch work, delving into every corner of the country, every aspect of German life, was the answer. Denazification, New Left style. The aim: to purify Germany through revolutionary inquisition. Or, as one German commentator put it, ‘the Nuremberg of the common man’.31
There was, of course, a great deal of common-sense opposition within the American military to these extreme forms of denazification, which would have involved the imprisonment, perhaps indefinitely, of hundreds of thousands of Germans, but sometimes this reluctance was clearly tinged with anti-Semitism. This could take on grotesque forms.
The brilliant but unbalanced American General George S. Patton, as military governor of Bavaria in 1945, rapidly began talking of another war against the ‘Mongol savages’ of Russia and soft-pedalled denazification to the best of his ability. ‘What we are doing,’ Patton wrote to his wife, ‘is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole.’32 He especially expressed his loathing for the DPs, who were still present in the occupied zones in their hundreds of thousands and were undoubtedly causing political and public-order problems.
After the former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania and United States Commissioner of Immigration, Earl G. Harrison, toured the DP camps, often former concentration camps, in the summer of 1945, he reported back unfavourably to the President at the end of August, saying that ‘as matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them’. The defeated Germans, Harrison added, might even suppose from this that ‘we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy’.33 He also recommended that Jewish DPs be allowed to emigrate to Palestine, although since that country was under British mandate, and the British were keeping Palestine firmly closed to Jews, his suggestion had no immediate force.
Patton wrote in his diary, just after the publication of Harrison’s report:
Harrison and his ilk believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.34
When, after further ill-advised remarks about the defeated Nazis being just like members of an American party who had lost an election, Patton found himself faced with Eisenhower’s disapproval, he remarked in a letter to his wife in October 1945 that ‘The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting . . . to implement a further dismemberment of Germany’.35
Shortly after this incident, Patton was dismissed from his post as governor. He had not much longer to live. The General died from injuries sustained in a traffic accident while on a hunting trip in Bavaria a few days before Christmas 1945. He was not, however, alone in taking a negative view of DPs in general and Jews in particular. They were, to many occupation officials, an irritation and a threat, who suffered by comparison with the apparently meek and law-abiding Germans. As a representative of a Jewish children’s charity wrote:
If one can understand, though deplore that fact, that the American soldiers prefer the company of German men and women, clean, healthy, well dressed, to that of the D.P., dirty, destitute, in frayed garments, and torn shoes, we must, however infer that the attitude of the responsible officers, benevolent and sometimes even – horribile dictu – obsequious towards the Germans, but impatient, severe, incomprehensive, intolerant and often hostile towards the religious and political victims of these last – is due to the anti-democratic and pro-fascist mentality of many responsible commanders and their subordinates.36
This problem remained largely undiscussed, at least in public, but it did not go away. Former President Hoover’s adviser on press and relations with the Military Government in Germany, Frank E. Mason, returned early in 1947 to Washington and spoke with, among others, General Eisenhower, who was now Chief of Staff. Shortly after, Eisenhower wrote to Clay about his conversations with Mason, who had told him:
. . . that many of our civilians are German-speaking people of a rather undesirable type. Among other things they say that many of these people have been citizens of the United States for only two or three years and are using their present positions either to communise Germany or to indulge in vengeance. One very conservative man recommended that we should allow no one to be in our Military Government unless he has been a citizen . . . for at least ten years.37
The coded message seems to have been read and understood. On 7 April Clay gave secret instructions to reduce the number of German-born refugees in the employ of the American Military Government. His deputy, General Frank L. Keating, sent out a ‘highly confidential’ memorandum to the effect that Clay had ‘decided we shall not employ anyone or renew the contract of anyone who has been naturalized since 1933’. Even where special technical expertise was required, ‘we should try to find a way out’. In carrying out this instruction, Keating continued, officers must ‘refrain from general discussion of the subject or issuance of any orders. It is not necessary for us to indicate why we do not intend to rehire anyone [but] see that diplomacy is used in handling each case.’ The document in the file was later marked ‘recalled’ but a sudden wave of dismissals among AMG officials of a certain background ensued.
In th
e British Zone, too, and in the British sector of Berlin, there were worries in certain circles about ‘over-zealousness’ on the part of Jewish officers and men of the Military Government. George Clare, a Jew who had left Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, was now, eight years later, a British Army officer involved in denazifying the cultural sphere in Berlin and Hamburg, with special attention to press and radio. One day in 1946, Clare was called into his superior’s office. Major Sely discussed Clare’s new role – the young man had just been in London on a course and getting his British naturalisation papers – and then unlocked his desk and handed him a letter he had been keeping safe for this moment. Clare read it carefully and recalled later:
Addressed to Colonel Edwards, Deputy Chief of PR/ISC,* it was from Public Safety, the CCG’s police division. Couched in somewhat more diplomatic language than my summary of it, its author, a Public Safety Commander, accused our section of denazifying with – in his words – ‘excessive zeal’. Was PR/ISC Group aware of this, he enquired, or – and there was the sting – the fact that the officer in charge, a Major Sely, his Hamburg representative, a Mr Felix, as well as his man in Hanover, one Staff-Sergeant Ormond, were all of German-Jewish extraction, which might well incline them to act in a spirit of revenge? Did PR/ISC consider it advisable that such a delicate task should be entrusted to people of such background?38
Clare asked Sely if he should therefore pack his bags and take the next train back to London.
The major laughed. No, Colonel Edwards, a fiery Welshman, had already sorted out the ‘bloody ignorant jumped-up bobbies’, telling them that he chose his own staff and they had his full confidence. ‘And since,’ Sely added, quoting their boss, ‘they had his full confidence he had to refute the Commander’s aspersions on their integrity with the same determination with which Public Safety had refuted reports that it allowed former Gestapo officers to seep back into the German police.’
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