After the Reich
Page 32
Clay had abandoned any pro-Morgenthau feeling he might have had by 26 April 1945. He was already keen to relaunch German industry.16 His guru was James Byrnes, and he must have profoundly regretted the latter’s departure as secretary of state in January 1947. Three months later Clay confirmed his discipleship in a letter. Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech, in which he announced a new deal for Germany, served as his model: ‘Every word that you said at Stuttgart became a part of my “Bible” for Germany . . . It was a living document of hope. I am not pro-German but I hope with all my heart that in our political warfare with USSR we do not forget that here in Germany we have 70,000,000 human beings to remember.’17 Clay realised that his role was to make propaganda for the West. As he told General Draper in Washington, ‘we do propose to attack communism and the police state before the German people, whereas in the past we have confined our efforts to presenting the advantages of democracy . . . Our political objectives are to promote democracy which must mean to resist communism.’18
At first civil administrations were created in a similarly haphazard way to the Russians. The soldiers who occupied a town or village looked for someone who was untainted by Nazism. In the writer Ernst von Salomon’s local town they asked the parish priest, who suggested that the pre-1933 mayor had done a good job. The former mayor confessed, however, that he had subsequently joined the Party. The Americans turned a blind eye to that and asked him to appoint seven councillors. He told them frankly that he would be hard pressed to find seven decent men who were not members of the Party, so in the end they had a council that contained more Nazis than it had during the Third Reich.19
America disposed of a large body of linguists. These were either German Americans from the Mid-West or German or Austrian Jews - often recent arrivals in the States - Czechs, Poles and other educated Slavs who had lately established themselves across the Atlantic, or soldiers who had simply acquired the language. There were German writers in uniform, like Klaus Mann, Hans Habe, Stefan Heym and Georg Stefan Troller, most of whom worked in intelligence or propaganda. Saul Padower, whose job was to interview prisoners for the Psychological Warfare Department, spent his early years on the Elbe. Padower thought his colleague Joe hailed from Nebraska - although his fluent German should have rendered him suspicious - but when they reached Bavaria Joe suddenly grew pensive. He said his parents lived near by. They drove to his village and entered the house. Joe poked an old man in a chair whose pipe dropped out of his mouth. He asked the man if he knew who he was. The man had a stab, got it wrong and tried again. This time he recognised the son who had left them at the age of twelve: He turned to his wife who was knitting: ‘Hoer mal Du . . . onser Sepp ist hier, doss ist onser Sepp!’ (Hey, listen you, our Joe is here, that’s our Joe!).20
American linguists were not always so politically reliable - some 70 per cent of US army linguists had German relations like Padover’s Joe-Sepp. Salomon’s friend the Austrian lawyer Diewald was astonished to find that the local American commandant was Chinese, but his amazement was unsurpassed when he discovered that the man not only spoke perfect German, but was a great admirer of the ‘As-As’, as he called the SS.21 Distrust, and the fact that many were only FOB (fresh-off-boat) Americans, meant that only sixty-five out of 1,500 exiles figured in Military Government, but that was still more than in the SBZ, and the British did not believe in making the oppressed victors.22
James Stern arrived in Germany in the spring of 1945. As the aircraft came in to land he glimpsed Koblenz and the Deutsches Eck, where the Rhine and the Mosel meet. He was appalled at his first reacquaintance with the country that he had first known as a teenager learning German: ‘Sections of a shattered bridge stuck up out of the mud-coloured water and a castle sat perched on top of the vine-terraced hills. Then the plane dropped, and we looked down into rows of burned out-houses - just shells of houses, without roofs or rooms, You looked down between their four walls to their ground floors, on which there lay either nothing or else a mound of smashed brick, smashed sticks of furniture and garbage.’23
Carl Zuckmayer returned an exile from his native land in the autumn of 1946, just before the great chill. He had emigrated to Switzerland after his works were banned by the Nazis. In 1939 he became an American citizen. At the end of the war he was living on a farm in Vermont and making his expertise on German life available to the War Office. In July 1946 he became the head of the European unit of the CAD (Civil Affairs Division). He resigned in May 1947, deeply disappointed by everything he had seen during a winter in the land of his birth.24 The occupation was eighteen months old, and he found that his former countrymen viewed the Americans with mixed feelings. There was ‘a little hatred, some disappointment and a bit of reasonable, grateful recognition’. What hatred there was existed chiefly in the hearts of stupid Germans, he thought, men and women who refused to take responsibility for what had happened.25 German attitudes to Americans were coloured by lack of contact; and lack of contact meant lack of influence. The Americans tended to live in their own compounds, or to requisition large sections of the extant middle-class suburbs of the bigger cities. This was the case in Wiesbaden, where they moved into the smart quarters on the heights above the town. The compounds were often ringed by barbed wire, making them into little fortresses announced by the legend ‘Entry Forbidden to Germans’ - a sign with a conscious or unconscious allusion to recent German exclusivity towards the Jews. The Americans bought from their own shops, went to their own schools and spent the evenings in their own clubs. When they wanted to know the news, they read it in the Stars and Stripes.
Zuckmayer believed it was important for Americans to go out and meet Germans, particularly young Germans. Many German boys, he felt, were reticent about making contact with Americans, but he held out hope for the girls. By that he did not mean frat, but beneficial contact through discussion groups, possibly on Sundays. The most dangerous group of Germans were those who were most hard done by: those who remained homeless and out of work, and who spent their days idling, looking for trouble, or for something to steal.26
The American Zone had been fixed long before the end of the war, but on 12 December 1945 the US increased the size of its holdings in Germany by taking over the Bremen pocket from the British. The Americans needed a port to unload supplies for their forces. The news was bad for the famous Rathauskeller, as US forces adhered to their right to plunder supplies of wine. Whether the British had helped themselves to the world’s most famous collection of German wine first is not clear from the official history. Nearly 100,000 bottles were plundered before an order was received to deliver a further 300,000 to the American army. German civilians were no longer allowed to use the cellar and it was turned into an officers’ mess. American officers could buy wine, but no one restocked the cellar, and because many American servicemen were not keen on German wine, whisky was served under the ancient vaults.
The Americans may have drunk up many vintages from the nineteenth century, but they left the two most famous wines alone: the cask of seventeenth-century Rose wine from the Rheingau and the twelve barrels of eighteenth-century Apostle mosel were sealed and apparently left untouched. On 15 October 1948 the cellar was handed back to the town hall at a solemn ceremony at which the mayor, Wilhelm Kaisen, and the head of the American military, Thomas Dunn, were present. There were many toasts, so perhaps it was not so solemn by the end. All the Allies helped themselves to wine. For the owners of prestigious estates and cellars, the important thing was to protect the most highly prized bottles. At Maximin Grünhaus on the River Ruwer, for example, the current owner’s grandmother used to find an excuse to visit the building, which had been taken over by the Americans. She was a corpulent woman, who used to dress in wide skirts for the occasion. Once she had found her way down to the vast formerly monastic cellars, she would pick up some bottles of the best wines and hang them with cords under her clothes, thereby ferrying them to safety.27
The cession of Bremen was an instance of Anglo-American c
ooperation. In general the British and the Americans worked together from the beginning, although the Americans often looked down on the British, and vice versa. John Dos Passos cites an instance of a man requiring a spare part for his Opel. He was told he needed to obtain it from the British Zone, but it was no problem - ‘we have good co-operation on things like that’. Someone asked about the French: ‘If anybody knows any way of getting anything out of the French Zone they haven’t told me about it.’ Finally the Russians were mentioned. ‘We don’t talk about the Russian Zone’ was the answer.28
Due to clever planning and relocation, a lot of German industry had survived. Clay put the figure as high as 25-30 per cent, but he did not think the economy was ready to start up again in June 1945.29 The Americans had come through the war with their wealth, and they turned their noses up at the idea of demontage. Clay understood what that meant for his country all too well: ‘rolling stock, livestock and agricultural implements required for a minimum economy in Germany and which if not available would result in increased imports into Germany, would militate against the ability of Germany to pay reparations and inevitably result in calling on the US for relief’.30
Zuckmayer was able to witness the first steps taken to re-establish a professional life in the ruins. He met a young dentist and was intrigued to know how he would practise his skills in a broken city. He located the surgery in an area filled with the usual heaps of rubble. The ground floor was filled with heaps of masonry but an emergency staircase had been built to give access to the first floor, and on the second a dozen families and their sub-lessees were living in a few patched-up rooms. From there another exposed stairway took him up to the remaining rooms of the house where four dentists had established their practice. Only two of the rooms could be heated, and the surgery’s hours were limited by the caprices of mains electricity that came on and went off with distressing regularity. During the hours that the surgery functioned, it was overrun by patients who lived in the rubble all around. The nurses were sometimes engaged as assistants, sometimes as builders helping to render the other rooms inhabitable. They looked pale and thin, but not exhausted. When they saw Zuckmayer they did not ask for cigarettes or food - they wanted books. The dentists themselves had all suffered personal tragedies, their families killed in Allied raids. One had lost a leg. One was waiting to marry his fiancée, who was due to walk to Berlin from East Prussia. Her father had been killed and her mother had committed suicide.31 For others, the full story was only then coming to light. There was a cleaning lady who worked at Zuckmayer’s Berlin lodgings, for example. She was actually a pastor’s wife, but the clergyman had been called up by the Volkssturm in the last days of the war and had subsequently disappeared. She had three children, two boys in their teens and a baby boy born towards the end of the war. For their sake she had to work. She had always insisted that her husband would return. Then news came that his body had been found in the Grossbeerenstrasse in Glienicke in the far north of the city, and had been positively identified. It had lain among the ruins for nineteen months. The elder children had known their father was dead. Once she had heard one of them praying: ‘Lord, make us loyal and brave to the end, like him.’ It was two hours’ walk from Zuckmayer’s boarding house to the place where her husband had met his end, but she still insisted on going, and going on foot. Until that moment she had been utterly stoical about her fate. Now, finally aware of how hopeless her position was, she broke down: she wanted to leave Germany - ‘this damned country’. Then she recovered her composure and set out on her trek to Glienicke.32
American GIs had been fed a good deal of propaganda at home and on the way. They had drunk deep from the films of Frank Capra, and had read the articles of Emil Ludwig, Louis Nizer and Siegrid Schultz; they had heard Dorothy Thompson. They had been equipped with copies of the Pocket Guide to Germany. From the first moment they walked on German soil, they expected to be attacked by Werewolves. They were nervous of Germans - civilians and soldiers alike. Despite all this, surveys at home revealed that Americans were more anti-Japanese than anti-German: German Americans were and are a sizeable part of the US population.33
The order banning frat contributed to the Americans’ brutality towards the conquered Germans. Public opinion favoured punishment and Eisenhower had made it clear that there was to be no billeting of American soldiers with German families, no mixed marriages, no joint church services, no visits to German homes, no drinking with Germans, no shaking their hands, no playing games with them, no exchanging gifts with them, no dancing with them, going to their theatres, taverns or hotels. The penalty was a $65 fine or a court martial.34
Propaganda had taught the soldiers that Germans - particularly German soldiers - were subhuman. In the autumn of 1944 the Americans burned down the village of Wallenberg because they had encountered resistance. In the spring of the following year they liberated their first concentration camp at Ohrdruf. Eisenhower was quick to seize on the importance of the camp in raising American morale and ordered his troops to visit it. Pictures from the camps were also distributed to soldiers. The Germans were to be treated no better than dogs. Indeed, in some instances dogs loomed large. A Frau Sachse told Salomon of a potentially dangerous moment that occurred when her four-year-old daughter had heard that an American officer’s pet was called Hitler. ‘All dogs are called Hitler,’ he told her. The bemused child replied, ‘My dog’s called Ami [Yank]!’ The mother dragged the child away before the American could respond.35
Salomon gives a highly coloured account of the fate of his Wehrpass at the hands of a GI - this was the document that showed he was officially excused from military service. In his south German village a sentry post had been established in a tent:one day as I approached the tent [I] saw a man seated on the stool[.] I automatically put my hand in my breast pocket. Sitting there outside the tent, his eyes glued on a plump girl leaning on a fence, he was whistling a tune of the type the Americans called ‘long-haired’. This man in his tight-fitting American uniform attracted my attention because on his left lower arm he wore no fewer than three wrist-watches, while his lapels were decorated with a great number of those little gold brooches containing brightly coloured stones such as peasant or servant girls wear in this part of the world. As I drew near him, this man, scarcely taking his eyes from the plump girl, signalled me with an inclination of his head to approach. He took my Wehrpass, glanced though it in a bored fashion for a few seconds, and then, with a slow and satisfied gesture, tore it in four pieces which he proceeded to drop into the gutter. While doing this he did not for a moment interrupt his long-haired whistling.36
James Stern met a heavily pregnant Frankfurt woman near Kempten in the Allgäu. She was walking home from Rome, where fascists had allegedly shot her husband. Stern asked her if she had come on foot all the way from Italy. She said she had had a bicycle, but an American soldier had stolen it together with her bag and luggage. The Englishman Stern refused to believe the story - Americans did not behave like that. It must have been a German in a stolen uniform.37 The Americans’ fear of Werewolves showed in their treatment of the civilian population. They were allegedly at their worst in Bavaria. The half-American journalist Margret Boveri thought the Americans particularly ignorant of Germany, a sentiment that was confirmed for her during her time in internment across the Atlantic. They had not taken the time or the trouble to look into National Socialism, for the good or the bad.38
The American authorities continued in their attempts to stop their soldiers listening to the siren calls of Germans. When US troops entered Frankfurt they were even prevented from speaking to the 106 remaining Jews. Before the war there had been 40,000. The American Forces Network put out anti-frat broadcasts: ‘pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory’. Some German women from Stolberg were prosecuted for attempting to woo GIs, although the trial turned into a farce. The first dent in the armour of American anti-frat policy came when the rule concerning small children was relaxed. The next exception concerned
public contacts with Germans. The ban was lifted altogether on 1 October 1945. The last remaining stones in the edifice were interdictions concerning billeting and marriages with Germans.39
German men, such as there were, received a cold shoulder from their women. Poorly nourished, dressed in rags, penniless and morally suspect, they did not have the heroic smell of the conqueror. Carl Zuckmayer spoke to two pretty waitresses who worked in an American mess in Berlin. Neither would have anything to do with German boys. As one put it, ‘They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.’ The other described German men as ‘worthless’.
The Americans were everything now, the Germans nothing. Natives who were taken on by Allied garrisons sometimes succumbed to the temptation to be high and mighty with their less fortunate countrymen. Some of the worst were the waiters and waitresses who worked in the messes. For them, the qualification for membership of the human race began with the right to shop at the American PX or the British NAAFI. Really superior beings were adorned with the officers’ pips of a foreign army. Zuckmayer was naturally interested in this phenomenon. As the author of the successful play Der Hauptmann von Köpenick he had explored the old German, or rather Prussian, respect for uniforms, which had made the reserve lieutenant the metaphor for an arriviste in Wilhelmine society. Zuckmayer was not impressed by these sycophants who chewed gum, and said he believed that an unreformed young Hitlerite made better material for the new Germany than some toady who clicked his heels at the sight of an American sergeant or captain.40 In Heidelberg he discovered that there was no room at the inn for his driver, the latter being a German working for the military government. The German hotelier told the writer that his driver had to sleep in the car - he was not allowed to give beds to Germans.41