After the Reich
Page 33
When they weren’t working they went to a nightclub called Feminina in the ruins of the Tauentzienstrasse in Berlin’s New West. There were prostitutes there who served the Allied soldiers; the waitresses from the mess were not averse to selling their bodies either. In the Feminina the girls met men of the right sort who later took them off to a ‘black’ nightclub and were prepared to shell out a few hundred marks for a bottle of champagne. One of the girls would take her men home to the flat she shared with her parents. Her father was a civil servant. Zuckmayer was anxious to learn whether they knew what their daughter was doing - ‘Naturally, that is unavoidable, as our rooms are too close to one another. But the old folks say nothing, in the end I pay my own rent.’ The playwright reflected that after the First World War the parents would have thrown their daughter out on the street, or taken their own lives from shame. Now they just turn the other way and pretend not to notice.42
Understandably, civilians were shot as Germany was invested in the spring in 1945, either deliberately or by accident. This happened above all in the east, but it was a relatively frequent occurrence in the west as well, and the victims were not always Germans - sometimes soldiers succeeded in killing some poor foreign worker as well. Billeting soldiers was an anxious moment for families who were already harbouring refugees from the devastated towns and cities. The invading armies appeared pitiless. German armies compared the behaviour of French troops unfavourably with their own in occupied France.43
When Margret Boveri finally arrived in Bamberg after her long trek on 2 September 1945, she was relieved to find the city largely undamaged. Only the bridges were down. Also there was food to be had - bread, butter, cheese and soup made from meat stock. On the other hand the Americans drove around with a great show of force. Everywhere there were armed guards.
Carl Zuckmayer came rapidly to the conclusion that American policy was wrong-headed. In his report to the American War Office he advocated removing the propaganda role from the army and reinvesting it in the State Department. The problem was that he and his fellow left-wing German and Austrian émigrés were falling increasingly under the suspicion of communism, so that the American authorities tended to hold them and their suggestions at arm’s length.44 There was also backbiting within the émigré group in the United States, with the Manns retreating into their corner and pouring scorn on the efforts of others to restore culture in Germany. According to Zuckmayer, Thomas was not the worst of them, but he stood too much under the influence of his hot-headed daughter Erika.
With time, however, the Americans ceased to heed the injunction against frat. GIs empathised with the Germans, whose lives and values seemed similar to their own. As one soldier put it, ‘Hell! These people are cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs . . .’ The feeling that contact with the natives could have its pleasant side was compounded when American servicemen began to sleep with German women. Life came out with a variant on the old line about fires and chimneypieces: ‘You don’t talk politics when you fraternize.’45
American policy on the ground changed with new directives from Washington. On 6 September 1946 James Byrnes delivered his now famous speech in Stuttgart that announced an about-turn in US policy towards the conquered Germans. The Russians were now the principal enemy. On the advice of George Kennan, the ambassador to Moscow, and Clifford Clark, the special adviser to the president, who continued to warn of Soviet Russia’s expansionist desires, Truman decided to fight the growing threat of communist tyranny. The president’s speech of 12 March 1947 marked the ‘official’ beginning of the Cold War.by The phrase derived from the title of a book published that year by Walter Lippmann.bz On 7 July George Marshall, who had succeeded Byrnes as secretary of state, replaced the controversial Directive JCS 1067 of 17 July 1945 that forbade frat. Directive JCS 1779 advocated the creation of a ‘stable and productive Germany’. The Morgenthau Plan had also been laid to rest.
The émigrés were almost all disappointed by the American policy. Marxists like Franz Neumann felt that the Americans had also failed to exterminate the ghost of National Socialism and that they would never succeed in introducing stable democracy. John Herz, who worked with Neumann at the Office of Strategic Services, was equally critical: ‘Too ambitious, because it started with the nonsensical idea of showing up every German by means of the Fragebogen; and not thorough enough, because at the same time we were content to give accreditation to the mayor and the priest - who were doubtless Nazis - and allow them to walk away.’ Herz had advocated the drawing up of lists of Germans who were 95-100 per cent sure anti-Nazis.46
Other exiles were harder hitting about American policies. Volkmar von Zühlsdorff had emigrated to Austria in 1933, departing for America later. He left with Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein who ran a republican youth group in Brandenburg for the Social Democrat Reichsbanner organisation, which vowed to defend the Weimar Republic from its enemies. Zühlsdorff wanted to help with the rebuilding of Germany. He expressed his outrage in correspondence with his fellow exile Hermann Broch, the Austrian novelist. For Zühlsdorff the Potsdam Declaration was a major crime that had been based on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Nazi-Soviet Fourth Partition of Poland: ‘Cutting off large, purely German regions is no less a crime than the earlier annexation of Czechoslovakia. The complete expulsion of the German population is a ponderous, international crime.’ Broch was not opposed to such views, but pointed out that protest against Potsdam meant war with Russia. The crime could never be resolved. Zühlsdorff felt that Nazism was burned out by 1945, that the German people were ready for a complete change. Instead they had been treated to ‘the propaganda of hate’. What they needed was ‘liberation, reason, peace and human rights’.47
Dorothy Thompson had been close to the hanged resister Helmuth James von Moltke during her time as a journalist in Berlin. She knew Germany and its people well, she was a fanatical opponent of collective guilt, and after the war she continued to press for reasonable policies. Her views resembled those of the writer Ernst Jünger in his essay Der Friede. Directly after the war she toured central Europe with her husband, the Prague-born painter Maximilian Kopf. She was particularly struck by her visit to Dachau, where she was able to view the commandant’s house and see that he possessed an edition of Goethe’s works, loved children, music, art and literature, and lived, to all extents and purposes, a normal family life.48
The Russians linked food distribution to work, encouraging the business of clearing up. In the American Zone no one worked because there was nothing to buy. Soon that position reversed itself and the Russians fell behind. Russians were also notorious for their light fingers - wristwatches were always at risk, but the French and the Americans were not so loath to steal the odd souvenir, or even a watch or three. American official theft was carried out on a massive scale when it came to seizing scientists and scientific equipment. This received governmental sanction as ‘Operation Paperclip’. During their few months in the famous lens-city of Jena, the American military government or AMG nabbed eighty scientists between 22 and 25 June and obliged them to make their way to the safer, US areas of occupation in the west.49
The Anglo-Americans were not uninterested in plunder. Margret Boveri thought the Russian reputation was unfair. True, they had stolen a good deal, but the Western Allies stole objects of greater worth. The British received the best press. They were the ‘quietest, slowest and most understanding’.50 Sometimes they paid. James Stern recounts a visit to a black market in Kempten where he was received by a dirty greasy little black-marketeer who tried to sell him some sweet Mavrodaphne. ‘We are not ladies . . . and we want wine . . .’ said Stern firmly. Through an open door, however, he saw something more interesting: some cases of 1939 Pfalz wine. A second man said they had been ordered by the Military Government, but thirty marks seemed to do the trick and the Englishman went off with a couple of cases.51 The Americans and the Russians were also trading. James Stern got wind of exchanges of gems for cases of cognac or A
merican cigarettes.52
Nor were all the rapes committed by the Russians. In Salomon’s local town, he claims half a dozen women were raped as the Americans took possession of place and people. Nor was his indictment so far fetched - the figures bear him out. Rape charges in the US army rose steadily, from 18 in January 1945 to 31 in February to an enormous 402 in March and 501 in April, once military resistance had slackened off. With peace the rapes petered out: there were 241 reports in May, 63 in June and 45 for each month thereafter. About a quarter to a half of these reports resulted in a trial and a third to a half of the trials to a conviction. A number of American servicemen were executed, proportionally higher than any of the other occupying powers.53
One reason there were fewer reports of rape was that there was far more consensual congress. German girls would have sex for food or cigarettes. You didn’t court a German woman with flowers - a basket of food was more welcome. The Americans were attractive to the Germans, because they had not suffered the deprivations of war in the same way. Few were crippled, and they were taller and more athletic. Every now and then the Germans took it out on the women who spurned them in favour of the occupiers. It is not hard to imagine the feeling of impotence of the rare young German who saw his girl making for the American garrison on the promise of sweets and cigarettes. Zuckmayer believed that this and the brutal confiscation of property by the military made the Americans unpopular. He alludes to an incident in the Munich suburb of Harlaching in the perishing cold of December 1946.
The hatred of the conqueror, however, had no political overtones, and was by no one politically exploited; and if there was grumbling about the behaviour of the Amis, there were always people to remind the malcontent that he would be shot in the Russian Zone, worse fed in the British, and face more corruption in the French. The American Zone was the easiest place to obtain cigarettes as well.54 The liaisons naturally resulted in children. It is estimated that 94,000 Besatzungskinder or ‘occupation children’ were born in the American Zone under military government. The Germans joked that at the next war they would not need to send soldiers, just uniforms. These children - wanted or unwanted - often caused distress, as there were no paternity orders issued against the servicemen. The situation must have been alleviated in December 1946 once marriages were finally permitted. The American soldiers were not slow to show their enthusiasm. There were some 14,000 GI brides brought home from Germany, a figure only exceeded by Britain, which saw nearly 35,000 of its girls go home with the American troops. For Ruth Friedrich and her friends these German brides were ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’.55
There were 42,000 American blacks in the forces of occupation. They were particularly enthralled by the Fräuleins - women who were more prepared to sleep with them than people back home. They were, as one writer has written, ‘early and enthusiastic fraternisers’.56 During the first years of the occupation. between two and three thousand mixed-race babies were born - about 2 to 3 percent of the Besatzungskinder. In Bendorf on the Rhine the Russian Elena Skrjabina encountered ten ‘half negro’ babies that had been brought in for adoption: ‘These soldiers quite willingly go with German girls, the girls are available for all types of rarities such as coffee, chocolate and so forth.’ The only problem was that the arrival of the coloured child caused anger in the girl’s family, hence the fact the children were being offered for adoption.57 Another problem was VD. An American source related that over three-quarters of the black solders were infected. Relationships between black soldiers and German girls caused friction with the natives, and with white American soldiers too. The consequence was ‘bitter hatred among German men. Many of our own [US] soldiers feel almost as strongly about it.’58 In Asperg in Bavaria there was an incident at a dance when a fight broke out. A white soldier was killed and four others wounded. Three blacks were sentenced to death as a result.59
German racial tolerance clearly surprised American blacks. A black musician came to see Leo Borchard in Berlin and talked to him about Bach. Borchard sent him off with a score. The musician told Borchard, ‘We are the most despised people on earth. We are even more deeply despised than the Jews, or . . . or the Germans.’ He said that people came to his concerts not to hear him play, but to see the novelty of a black man playing classical music.60
With time and with the increasing unease between the Western Allies and the Russians, the Americans sought to win over the hearts and minds of the conquered Germans. From a policy of forbidding fraternisation, American soldiers were actively encouraged to look after vulnerable Germans, reserving their wrath only for the more obvious culprits. In Bad Kissingen, for example, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia was able to come together with a Captain Merle Potter to create the first German American Club in 1946. Louis Ferdinand was the grandson of that famous militarist, Kaiser William II, who would certainly have failed the test of the Fragebogen.61
Political Life
While the British were keen to see the Germans issued with a good, workable constitution that would prevent them from falling into bad ways in the future, the Americans were obsessed with the need to introduce their brand of government: every German was to become a good democrat. Once the Germans had democracy, they would never be tempted by totalitarianism again. The fact that they had already had democracy, and that it had dramatically failed in 1929, seems to have been unclear to people such as James Stern’s colleague ‘the Professor’.62 This attitude led to a deal of absurdity in the Americans’ pursuit of fairness in the newspapers they licensed: the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung had to offer leading articles from all four main political parties, including the communists. One of the movers and shakers in post-war Bavarian politics was Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ Müller. Müller returned from Capri in the middle of June 1945 having established a relationship with the Americans that would stand him in good stead. The American authorities allowed him to establish a base for anti-Nazi politicians in Munich that would form the nucleus of a new political party. The men met on Wednesdays. To observe the proceedings the Americans sent along Dany Weiss, a Jew who had lost his entire family in the east. The idea was to establish a party that would cross Christian lines, and not be entirely Catholic like the old Centre Party.ca Müller also recruited the leading political figure in Franconia, Adam Stegerwald, and the trades-unionist Franz Wegner.63
Müller’s ideas echoed those of Jakob Kaiser in Berlin: Germany needed to learn from the primitive Christians. If their teaching was followed there would be no need for communism or socialism. It was an idea he had developed in the Hotel Paradiso in Capri, in conversation with the American naval officer and Mormon, Dale Clark. These sun-baked discussions sired the Christlich-Sozial Union or CSU.64 A few monarchists were easily pushed to one side. Their leader, Eugen Graf Quadt-Isny, had unfortunately had himself photographed in SS uniform in the company of the leading Nazi ‘beasts’ after the dissolution of his own Bayrische Volkspartei or BVP.65 The Americans licensed the CSU on 8 January 1946.
The Americans insisted that denazification be carried out with a toughness absent from the other zones. Fritz Schäffer, a former head of the BVP and an old Dachauer, was their first nominee as minister president of Bavaria. He then fell foul of the Americans because he failed to pursue former Nazis with the right degree of enthusiasm, even if they already had 46,000 in the can by 3 October 1945. Clay thought him insufficiently liberal and had him sacked.66 Not even Müller was immune, he who had been in Flossenbürg and Dachau, had almost been shot, and had witnessed some of his closest friends being beaten, tortured and murdered for their opposition to Nazism. As a former member of military intelligence he had belonged to a ‘tainted’ organisation. Through the new minister president, the ‘remigrant’ Dr Wilhelm Hoegner, and his ‘special minister’ for denazification, the communist nominee Heinrich Schmitt, Bavaria established ‘Spruchkammer’ or special courts. They were staffed by non-professional judges reflecting the parties in power in the Landtag, or local parliament. Müller’s view was encapsulat
ed in a joke that was doing the rounds at the time: a former street-sweeper passes a man ineptly cleaning the pavements on his old beat. As he stares at the new cleaner, the latter shouts out, ‘I have to clean the streets because I was in the Party!’ The former cleaner shouts back, ‘I am not allowed to do it, because I was in the Party too!’67
One outstanding figure who joined Hoegner’s government was Ludwig Erhard. He was from Fürth in Franconia, making him a sort of Bavarian. After a chequered academic career as an economist he found himself unemployed when the Americans came in and volunteered his services in his home town. He had no Nazi track record and he was popular with the Americans. When Schäffer’s government fell in October he was appointed minister for trade. He was not a member of any party and his career in the Bavarian government came to an end a little over a year later. He went back into academic life as an economics teacher at Munich University.68
The Americans fished him out again to make him one of seven members of the Economic Council in autumn 1947. Erhard became president of the Special Commission for Money and Credit. Germany had somehow to stabilise its currency, which had no credibility. The Reichsmark, which was still circulating, was causing terrible inflation. Erhard’s idea was that the quantity of money in circulation needed to reflect the quantity of goods on offer in the marketplace. This way prices could be made constant and there would be something to buy.69 Erhard’s formulations became the basis for the Homburg Plan for a market economy which was published on 18 April 1948. Erhard himself became the head of the economic administration in Bizonia after Johannes Semler’s well-publicised faux pas in describing the American food aid as ‘chicken feed’.70