Byrnes was supposedly in Stuttgart merely to discuss occupation matters with senior US officers and AMG officials, but this was clearly something more deliberately public and much more important. He was accompanied, for good measure, by two US senators, the Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally of Texas, and his Republican counterpart, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg.
Byrnes looked tired, as well he might, but the sixty-seven-year-old South Carolinian read his speech slowly and clearly, helping even non-native speakers to understand. What he said transformed the American view of their mission in occupied Germany and, more to the point, revolutionised the view of the Germans themselves.
‘It is not,’ Byrnes said, ‘in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.’ This was an interesting statement. It admitted a conflict with the Soviets, but it was not the key statement. More interestingly for most Germans, he proclaimed that the German people should not be ‘denied . . . the possibility of improving their lot through hard work’. He admitted that, without Germany becoming a unified economic unit with a common financial policy, it was impossible for this to be properly achieved. And a democratic government in Germany was the aim, too. Then he came to another of his crucial points:
Security forces will probably have to remain in Germany for a long period. I want no misunderstanding. We will not shirk our duty. We are not withdrawing. We are staying here. As long as there is an occupation army in Germany, the American armed forces will be part of that occupation army.15
America was staying in Europe. Maybe not for ever, but there was no more talk of a two-year withdrawal.
The Secretary’s speech gave concessions to the Russians, accepting territorial changes in East Prussia in their favour, but cast some doubt as to whether the Poles would be able to hold on to all the areas of eastern Germany they were currently occupying. This must await the final peace treaty negotiations. He also conceded the Saar area to France – though emphatically not the Rhine and Ruhr.
Ever since, analysts have argued about the exact origins and meaning of the Byrnes speech. There is little doubt that it was based on Clay’s original letter to Echols. In some places, it reproduces the letter’s phrasing almost word for word. It still talks about a unified administration and pushes for all the things that had been pushed for ever since Potsdam. Some have argued that it was directed, despite a few little jabs in the direction of the uncooperative eastern neighbours, mainly at the French rather than the Russians.16
Byrnes’ promise that the Americans would not withdraw before things in Germany had been settled was an enormous boost to most Germans in the Western zones (Communist Party members perhaps excepted), as was the change in tone of the references to the German standard of living and the Germans’ right to work hard and see the fruits of their labour. Even the Secretary of State’s equivocation about giving all the rest of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia to the Poles might be seen as a comfort to the defeated nation. Now there was, at least, some hope.
This appears to have been the main aim of the speech. To encourage the German population to feel that they were no longer just being punished, but could actually have ambitions to live as other peoples lived, and perhaps in the not too distant future. As such, although applause at the Staatstheater was described by Time as ‘mild’, Byrnes instantly became a very popular man in Germany. After the speech, he was greeted with ‘enormous enthusiasm’ and mobbed by locals. ‘Here,’ Clay later recollected, ‘was an American Secretary of State out there signing autographs for the Germans, little over one year after the end of the war.’17
It was remarkable. A little more than a year after the end of the war – and not quite two since Sergeant Holzinger and his platoon had been the first American soldiers to splash across the river Our into Germany – an Allied leader had spoken convincingly to the defeated and apparently eternally disgraced German nation about hope.
The fact was, of course, that the country’s worst post-war winter still lay ahead of it. By the spring of 1947 there would be food riots and more bitter criticism of the Allies. But lines were being drawn and plans modified. Within ten days of Secretary Byrnes’ speech, Clay was in correspondence with the War Department in Washington discussing a revision of the draconian JCS 1067 and suggesting that the Stuttgart speech ‘be taken as a basis for a positive policy statement’.18
On 4 October 1946, premiers of the German Länder from the British and American Zones met in Bremen to discuss coordinating their political systems in a ‘Länder Council’ along the model followed in the American Zone. On 2 December, Secretary Byrnes and his British counterpart, Ernest Bevin, would sign an agreement leading to the economic unity of their zones, to take effect from 1 January 1947.
On 16 October 1946, eleven of the defendants arraigned the previous year at the Trial of Major War Criminals in Nuremberg were hanged. Goering cheated the noose by committing suicide in his cell. Three of them were acquitted, the rest sentenced to terms from ten years to life. It was the last of the war crimes trials to be conducted under four-power auspices.
The discussions in Paris ground on, finally leading to peace treaties with the former Nazi satellites, but the discussions over Germany rumbled on and on. Kennan was now back from Moscow and becoming an increasingly important figure in Washington. There the Republicans had wiped out the Democratic majority in Congress in the November 1946 elections. Of the pair who had backed Byrnes at Stuttgart, Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, once a staunch isolationist but now an equally fervent anti-communist internationalist, had replaced Connally at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In January, Truman replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State with the formidably hard-headed General George Catlett Marshall, who announced to Molotov in March 1947 at the latest foreign ministers’ conference that America was ‘opposed to policies which will continue Germany as a congested slum or an economic poorhouse in the centre of Europe’. The continuing move towards a more humane and realistic assessment of Germany gained further momentum from Hoover’s second trip to Germany in the winter of 1946–7, when the ex-President issued dire warnings about conditions there. Elsewhere, announcements of huge aid packages for Greece and Turkey, which were seen as threatened by communist aggression, showed that a new, tough Western line was now in place.
JCS 1779 finally replaced JCS 1067 in July 1947, formalising a policy that was already in operation at ground level. The new orders for Clay, who had recently succeeded McNarney as Governor of the American Zone and C-in-C Europe, now stated quite clearly that ‘an orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany’. The Clay/Byrnes line had triumphed. Morgenthau was officially a dead letter.
But how to ensure that Germany became ‘stable and productive’ and democratic, too? The answer was given when Secretary Marshall delivered an address to the graduating class at Harvard on 5 June 1947. He used the occasion to outline the administration’s proposals for European recovery from the world war.
George Marshall had a plan, one which would become the most famous in modern history. The better future for Europe that this plan envisaged included a place for a new, post-war Germany. And, as it turned out, this latest reincarnation of Germany would be prosperous and peaceful beyond most contemporaries’ wildest dreams.
* Ferenc Nagy (1903–79) was the leader of the Smallholders’ Party, which won a majority in the free elections held in November 1945. He was in office from March 1946 until May 1947, when he succumbed to a mix of threats and bribes (the Russians had kidnapped his son), resigned, and finally went into exile in the United States. New elections ensured a communist majority in parliament.
Epilogue:
The Sleep Cure
On 15 September 1949, Konrad Adenauer was elected Chancellor of a new state that called itself the ‘Federal Rep
ublic of Germany’. Adenauer, at seventy-three long past the age when most politicians would take on such a job, had been approved by the 402-seat parliament with a margin of just one vote – his own. When the result, 202 votes for him – with 142 against, 44 abstentions, one invalid ballot and thirteen deputies not present – was announced by the parliament’s speaker, Adenauer turned, seemingly unperturbed, to his neighbour on the parliamentary benches and commented in his strong Rhenish accent: ‘Things have always turned out all right.’
By that autumn, four and a half years after the war ended, the various victors had truly gathered all ‘their’ Germans in. The state over which Adenauer so narrowly came to preside was formed from the three Western zones – American, British and French – with a population close to fifty million. It was federal, it was a republic, but it was not Germany. As if to emphasise the fact, it took as its (allegedly temporary) seat of government the university town of Bonn on the Rhine, rather than the much larger Frankfurt, which in the Middle Ages had been seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and might well have made a permanent capital.
The Russians’ protégés to the east founded their own state less than a month later, on 7 October, but they called it something subtly different: the German Democratic Republic. Again, two out of three words were correct. It was German, it was a republic, but it was not democratic.
Officially, the Western state had come into being in May 1949, when the three zones’ German representatives had passed a Basic Law that enabled elections for a parliament to take place throughout the areas concerned. The Länder that made up the Soviet Zone were invited to follow by a careful wording that said: ‘The entire German people remains invited to complete the unity and freedom of Germany in a process of free self-determination.’ They wouldn’t be allowed to do that for more than forty years, until free self-determination actually became possible.
Born in January 1876 in Bad Honnef near Bonn, Konrad Adenauer had followed a career as a legal civil servant in the service of the Prussian kingdom, of which his native Rhineland had become a part after the Napoleonic Wars. However, he was by religion a pious Catholic and by cultural inclination Westward looking. He had become High Burgomaster of Cologne in 1917, when the last Kaiser was still on the throne of Germany, and remained in office until 1933, elected repeatedly on the ticket of the Centre Party.
Adenauer’s politics may have been Catholic and conservative, but he became an energetic, progressive leader for the city. Among other achievements, it was Adenauer who persuaded the Ford Motor Company to establish a major car plant in Cologne, rather than expanding their small facility in Berlin. And the dignitary privileged to open the first four-lane, intersection-free highway in Germany – the country’s first Autobahn – on 6 August 1932 was also Adenauer. The highway, the first exclusively for the use of motor vehicles (its official name was Kraftwagenstrasse, or automobile highway), ran almost dead straight for twenty kilometres from Cologne to Bonn. ‘This is how the road of the future will look,’ proclaimed the Cologne High Burgomaster, who had been closely involved in the conception of the new route.1 Six months later, Hitler took power – and the credit as ‘inventor’ of the Autobahn.
Deposed by the Hitler regime, Adenauer spent the next twelve years sporadically hiding from its violence or in its custody (for instance, after the June 1934 ‘Night of the Long Knives’ purge and the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler’s life). At the same time, however, he was confident enough to write long, rather flattering self-exculpatory letters to the Nazi authorities, by means of which he managed to retrieve his mayoral pension entitlement and gain compensation for his rather grand house in Cologne, which had been seized by the regime.
When the Americans occupied Cologne in March 1945, Adenauer was reappointed High Burgomaster of the city, only to fall foul of the British, into whose zone it was absorbed after the war ended. They sacked him that autumn, ostensibly for failing to master the food supply situation, and for some time banned him both from the city and from political activity.
A curious letter in British archives, dating from July 1945 and contained within a file dealing with Adenauer’s dismissal, throws a little light on the tense relationship between the High Burgomaster and the new rulers on the Rhine. It is from a General Ferguson, who had been British Military Governor of Cologne from December 1918 to July 1919, and contains some fascinating misinformation. Despite saying he ‘came to know him well’, Ferguson states that Adenauer was ‘a Prussian, not a Rhinelander by birth’ (untrue), that he had ‘served in the war and been severely wounded’ (untrue), and that he had ‘a metal lower jaw wonderfully camouflaged’ (also untrue).* The octogenarian retired general, who had spotted an interview with Adenauer in the Scottish Daily Express, warned his colleagues in Germany:
Adenauer was, and probably still is a man of great influence and undeniable ability. It may be true that he hates the Nazis, in fact if as I believe, he is of the Junker class, it probably is the case, but I am quite certain that unless he has changed very much in the last 25 years his hatred of Britain is far deeper than any other feeling. He is clever, cunning, a born intriguer and dangerous. I suggest that too much reliance should not be placed on him, and that in their dealings with him, our authorities should be on their guard.2
That Adenauer didn’t like the British very much seems likely, and not entirely surprising. That he disliked both the Russians and the Prussians much more is probable. Noel Annan had a meeting with him when Adenauer, rehabilitated by the occupation authorities early in 1946, was Chairman of the post-war Christian Democratic Party in the British Zone. In an exchange of small talk, Annan, who was planning to return to his teaching post at Cambridge University in the near future, asked the venerable ex-Burgomaster what was the worst mistake the British had made in their relations with Germany. Adenauer answered that the mistake had been made 130 years before:
It was at the Congress of Vienna, when you so foolishly put Prussia on the Rhine as a safeguard against France and another Napoleon.3
At the same meeting, Annan also gently queried Adenauer’s activities after the First World War (being an intelligence officer, had he seen General Ferguson’s somewhat excitable letter?). The future Chancellor denied being anti-British, though he admitted he found it difficult to regard Britain as a properly European state.
Prussia, at the time of this discussion, had just ceased to exist, on the insistence of the Allies (on 25 February 1947). It would have been missed by many, though not so many the further south and west the news travelled. In Bavaria, where the term ‘Saupreuss’ (pig of a Prussian) has been a generally accepted insult for centuries, in Saxony, the Catholic Rhineland, and many parts of south-west Germany, the Iron Kingdom had been admired and respected, but never popular.
The only true Prussian to figure prominently at the time Adenauer became Chancellor was Kurt Schumacher. The Social Democrat leader and Adenauer’s greatest opponent had been born in West Prussia, a region lost by Germany to Poland in 1918. This fact made Schumacher no less a democrat, but perhaps more of a nationalist, and more liable, despite his fervent anti-communism, to look East as well as West in his search for his country’s advantage. Had the SPD not gained only 29.2 per cent of the votes against the CDU/CSU’s 31 per cent in the August 1949 elections, and had Schumacher consequently become Chancellor, the new West German state might have looked quite different. Under Adenauer, it turned its gaze west to France, and then even further westward. To America.
The French had finally been forced to give up their dreams of a permanently harmless Germany of small states and of an internationalised, exploitable Ruhr, when they realised that they could not carry anyone with them – not even the Russians, and certainly not most Germans in their own zone. In any case, like the British, by early 1947 the French were in deep financial trouble and suffering from a serious case of imperial overstretch. They needed more American money, on the tempting scale that was already being talked about and which would eventually begin to beco
me available after Secretary Marshall’s great speech in June 1947.
The price Paris paid for American support was abandonment of its grand post-war plan for breaking up Germany into a multiplicity of states and thereby ensuring that it would never again be an economic or military threat. The British–American ‘Bizonia’, which had existed since January 1947, had now to become a British–American–French ‘Trizonia’. Although the expression ‘Trizonia’ was current from mid-1948 on, the French took their time making it all the way to the altar for this exercise in politico-economic troilism. France participated in the currency reform in June 1948 and helped the Anglo-Americans break the Soviets’ blockade of Berlin, and was engaged in increasingly close de facto economic and political collaboration with London and Washington in Germany throughout 1948 and into 1949. Nevertheless, the final, conclusive legal steps for the three-way merger were put into place only in the spring of 1949. The way was now clear for the three Western zones to become a West German – possibly, ultimately, an all-German – state. This was the very thing Paris had spent the first years of the occupation trying to avoid, and represented, in the circumstances of the time, a major sacrifice for the French political establishment.
Meanwhile, the German population managed to glean some fun from the uncertain national situation, which had its absurd side. One of the great pop music hits of 1948 was the popular Cologne singer-songwriter Karl Berbuer’s humorous ditty, ‘Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien’ (‘We Are the Natives of Trizonesia’). With its play on the name of Indonesia, the new South-east Asian nation that had just emerged from the wreckage of the Dutch East Indies, it became, for many, a sort of substitute national anthem for the not-yet-born new German state.
Exorcising Hitler Page 40
