After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  In Berlin that winter Schumacher had talks with Hynd and the political advisers Sir William Strang and Christopher Steel, and with Clay and Murphy. The British thought the Russians would kidnap him. He was evidently a man who inspired protection. Dachau had wrecked him physically, a fact that was further compounded by his hunger strike at the concentration camp. His assistants combed the black market for milk and butter which they thought would assuage his delicate stomach. Yet Schumacher did little to help by his diet of black coffee and cigarettes.68 This austerity was not everyone’s cup of tea. Like many Prussians, Schumacher lacked charm. That was where Carlo Schmid came in. He had the social graces Schumacher lacked, and could bring the SPD into Germany’s shabby drawing rooms. The half-French Schmid was deemed to be at home anywhere: talking about Baudelaire, writing poetry, dealing with points of law as a professor of jurisprudence or eating with the former rulers of Württemberg off the finest china.69

  Schumacher may have taken up the British offer of protection, but he was bitter about the Allies, whose reputation was less than spotless in his eyes. He thought the idea of collective guilt an abomination. Writing to Hans Vogel, he vented his ire:You could not imagine what a frightful effect the propaganda attempt to impose ‘collective guilt’ on the German people has had on the German opponents of Nazism. The men and women in our country who even before 1933 risked so much in the fight against Nazism and Big Business, who after the assumption of power, at a time when the present victorious powers were still concluding state treaties with the Hitler regime, were working underground and were being put in prisons and concentration camps; they should recognise their guilt. They must do this in no way and in no circumstances.

  Schumacher felt himself personally defamed by the notion of collective guilt.70

  Adenauer and Schumacher were mutually antipathetic. The Protestant Prussian was for a central administration, the Catholic Rhinelander for a federal state. They had difficulty speaking to one another. Michael Thomas saw it in their lifestyles: Adenauer was gutbürgerlich, while Schumacher worked from a bombed-out building, and yet his talk was coloured by wit and irony. The British brought the two men together in Hamburg in March 1946 to tell them they were going to merge the states of North Rhine and Westphalia in response to the Russians introducing a one-party state in their zone. Adenauer remembered Sir Sholto Douglas making his entry to ‘drum rolls and the blast of trumpets’. It was all very colonial: the Germans might speak, but the British kept all the power in their own hands.71 They appointed an old schoolfriend of Adenauer’s, Rudolf Amelunxen, to head the administration. Adenauer remained aloof, as he did when the CDU was asked to form part of the governing party in the Landtag. In reality the new Nordrhein-Westfalen was Adenauer’s dream: one of the three quasi-independent states he had imagined for Germany. He would pick up the western German remnants of his detested Prussia, and the centre of gravity for Germany would be shipped several hundred miles to the west. Schumacher was appalled.

  Adenauer had not been singled out - the British behaved in a supercilious way towards several German post-war politicians. One was Karl Arnold, Oberbürgermeister of Düsseldorf. He was second only to Adenauer in the CDU and minister president designate in Nordrhein-Westfalen, but he failed to grab the top job because he was too modest and believed his time had passed. Victor Gollancz called him ‘one of the half dozen best Germans I met’.72 George Clare had arranged to meet him at his Berlin mess, but the mess butler informed him that Germans were not allowed. Not only had they not let him in, they had left him outside in the cold. This occurred in March 1947, some eighteen months before the restoration of the German state.73

  Culture

  The British management of the arts was closely bound up with weeding out Nazis - an admirable aim in itself, but one which had very little to do with promoting cultural activity. It became increasingly obvious, as well, that the British were netting just the small fry, and there was more and more grumbling at home. The complaints about the denazification policy eventually spread to the Germans, who were annoyed to see the Party big-shots go free while the authorities continued to harass rank-and-file members who had done nothing monstrous.74

  The British did a few things well, if half-heartedly. They had their own version of the Russian culture club, Die Möwe. It was a requisitioned villa in the Branitzerplatz in Neu Westend where they could entertain screen and theatre people over a whisky. The club had its own chatelaine in the person of Else Bongers, a former dancer who had suffered under the Nazis.75 The British also sponsored performances of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and operas at the Volksoper in their sector. Just like for Margret Boveri, the first post-war concert proved a memorable event for the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise. In her case she heard the Berlin Philharmonic play in Celle. Celibidache was conducting. As there was no other room available, they used the riding school of the town stud, and the podium was set up in the same place as they had once trained the celebrated Celle stallions, while the chairs were laid out in the sand of the riding school. Music ‘tore us away from the murkiness of our everyday lives and lifted us into the sphere of the pure and beautiful. It was like redemption.’ Wilhelm Furtwängler might not have expressed it better himself.76

  9

  Life in the French Zone

  When they at last reappeared, their faces looked as white as the slips of paper they carried in their hands, and they were speechless. They had spent that half an hour arguing with three stubborn, disinterested little bureaucrats already half asleep with wine. The men had carefully examined, or pretended to, every paper in their possession and then insisted on their filling out a sheaf of forms. Only after these had been carefully read, checked and rechecked were four Americans given permission to inhabit two rooms in Stuttgart for the night.

  James Stern, The Hidden Damage, London 1990, 104-5

  France’s German policy looked suspiciously like a return to Cardinal Richelieu and the Thirty Years War. The French were largely indifferent to the question of whether a German was a Nazi or not, or whether he needed to be cured; it was enough to be a German.1 They wanted a fragmentation of the enemy who had invaded their territory three times in under the century. The man they installed to enforce their will on the ground was a hero of their African wars, General Pierre Koenig - Scipio Africanus. Unlike Scipio, however, Koenig was anything but patrician. His civilian sidekick could not have been more different: Emile Laffon was a brilliant lawyer, a member of the resistance and an intimate of de Gaulle, albeit a socialist.2

  The French were not free of the sort of behaviour more commonly associated with the Russians. Even after the scandals of Freudenstadt, Stuttgart and Vaihingen, James Stern heard the testimony of a half-Jewish woman friend in Seldau in Bavaria. The husband was away working in his hospital in Munich when the French Moroccans arrived at the farmhouse. They left the woman alone - ‘by some miracle they didn’t touch her’ - but the whole house was looted and most of the furniture smashed. They killed the livestock and stole whatever they could carry.3

  Initially the French were deeply unpopular in Germany because of their insistence on coming as conquerors. As far as the atrocities were concerned, they adhered to the policy ‘Never apologise, never explain.’ They had their grievances: the bits and bobs of Germany that they had received off the Anglo-American plate continued to make little sense. They had 64 per cent of Baden4 - the Residenz in Baden-Baden but not the capital, Karlsruhe. In Württemberg they had Hohenzollern, the minuscule former territory of the Catholic cousins of the rulers of Prussia and Germany. It was significant that the capital - it hardly merits such a grandiose description - Sigmaringen had been the last seat of Pétain’s and Laval’s Vichy government. The French ruled Sigmaringen, but not the coveted Stuttgart, and they had large amounts of the Rhineland, including Mainz - but not Cologne or Frankfurt.

  They came into formal possession of the ‘Brassière’ in July 1945. Unlike the Americans, who requisitioned entire areas and fe
nced them off from the German population, the French sequestered good houses and villas but erected no fences. In Baden-Baden they put their administrative bodies in the best hotels of the spa town.5 Military headquarters was in Freudenstadt - an extraordinary choice of location - but one that was, perhaps, in keeping with their possession of Sigmaringen: they were the best custodians of their own secrets. They continued to voice their disgruntlement, and tried to swap their portion of Württemberg for the rest of Baden, which would have afforded them not only a big town in Karlsruhe, but also a territory that was contiguous with their border, but the Americans were not willing to do the deal.6 The Americans wanted the whole motorway that went from Karlsruhe to Munich, via Stuttgart.

  Proportionally speaking, the French were the most densely populated of the Western occupiers: they had eighteen men for every thousand Germans, the British had ten, the Americans three. They set about the business of denazifying, politically re-educating and punishing war criminals while assuring the population that they would have a ‘bearable standard of living’.7 They also punished at least some of the rapists of Freudenstadt and Stuttgart. Nothing was said to the locals, but the soldiers were informed that such acts were not to be tolerated, and death sentences were handed out.8 Being kind but firm was meant to conceal a darker purpose - the French had not forgotten their aims to sever parts of western Germany like the Rhine, the Ruhr and the Saar, and they wanted to encourage provincial loyalty above all. They were frustrated in their attempts to prise the Ruhr away from the British. Meanwhile they transferred what resources they could to France, and rounded up all available manpower for their own version of the STO, the service de travail obligatoire, by which the French had been forced to work for the Nazis.

  The Soviet example of cruelty towards the Germans was one reason for the milder treatment they received in the ZOF, or Zone d’Occupation Française. There was a conflict between the two wings of the administration in Baden-Baden, or ‘Little Vichy’ as the French communists rendered it, Vichy also being a spa. The communists were alluding too to the fact that there were quite a few Vichy men lying low in occupied Germany. The military chief Pierre Koenig was anxious to be tough, while his civilian counterpart Emile Laffon believed that occupation meant reform, a difference of approach that led to frequent fights. The French took all they could: between 1945 and 1947 some 45-47 per cent of the ZOF’s exports left for France. Their sale in France made the ZOF a healthy profit of eight million dollars, while the Germans were subjected to heavy taxes, strict rations and a wage freeze. On the other hand the inhabitants of the ZOF could boast some advantage over, say, the inhabitants of Brandenburg or Thuringia: they had a free press, democratic elections and the right to an education that stressed French and European cultural achievement.9

  The Germans did not entirely acquiesce in French rule, especially given their supposed conquerors’ insistence on their ‘right to plunder’ and their view that ‘le boche payera’ (the Hun will pay). The half-French professor of law Carlo Schmid in Tübingen knew how to play the fish. He was quickly made chief of the ZOF’s Democratic Union and, when governments were formed in the French provinces, he became minister president of Württemberg-Hohenzollern.10 Schmid was an outstanding politician, the father of the basic law (the Federal Republic’s constitution) and no French stooge. Within the SPD he appeared to be a federalist, but was rather vague about this when challenged.11 He fought for German rights: ‘Democracy without sovereignty is a contradiction in terms,’ he told his audiences. He also railed against the terrible demontage in the zone. He was not alone. In October 1947, for example, there were strong objections to cutting the electricity at Tuttlingen Hospital between 7.30 a.m. and noon and again from 4 p.m. to 8. It was pointed out that operations were being performed and babies born. On 21 June that year the Baden minister of economics Dr Lais had complained ‘before God and humanity’ that more machines were being dismantled and taken to France.12 ‘Unlicensed requisitions’ amounted to somewhere between fifty and seventy million Reichsmarks in pre-war values. Ludwig Erhard estimated the value of the machinery going west at RM180 million in 1945-6 alone.13

  Sometimes the French showed themselves more pragmatic than the Americans. Where the latter had sequestered IG Farben and banished the directors, the French allowed BASF in Ludwigshafen to remain as it was. On the other hand they made no bones about pocketing a chlorine business in Rheinfelden, a viscose business in Rottweil, the Preussag mines or the chemicals group Rhodia in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and awarding them to French concerns. In Friedrichshafen they shipped out everything useful in the Zeppelin works and did much the same at Dornier and Maybach.14 Clay voiced his frustration at the French ‘living off the land’ in Baden-Württemberg, but it was to some extent an expression of a more old-fashioned attitude to war and conquest, where naked self-interest played a large part.15

  The French too managed to pick up a few scientists, whom they wanted for their missile programme. There had been a research institute outhoused at Biberach in their zone. The Germans were lured over to work for them by the promise of excellent conditions. They could live in Germany and work in France. There was Kehl opposite Strasbourg, and Neuf Brisach on the other side of the Rhine to Alt Breisach. One of the scientists, Helmut von Zborowski, invented the coleoptor, a pioneering VTOL aircraft.16

  Reading Elena Skrjabina’s account of life near Koblenz in the French Zone, you would believe all was sweetness and light. The French had not been present at Yalta, and had made no promises to return Russian nationals. A Soviet commission for repatriating Russian citizens had been set up in a nearby castle, but Elena was spared the consequences of Operation Keelhaul, which probably saved her life. She had spoken French from childhood, and this evidently made her sympathetic to the officers of the garrison. They arrived at the beginning of July 1945 and a few days later she was helping their cook procure veal for the 14 July celebrations. The Russians quite naturally fared better than the Germans, who were being rounded up for heavy labour in France, but not all Germans by any means suffered in this way, and returning soldiers were allowed to go back to their homes.17

  When Karl-Heinz Bohrer went to school in the Black Forest, he came face to face with life in the French Zone. At the outset the French were the most hated of the four occupying powers. They threw their weight around, requiring Germans to walk in the roads in the university city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Karl-Heinz had heard reports of atrocities carried out by Moroccan troops. The locals laughed at the operatic uniforms. The French wanted to have their revenge for the German occupation, and the Germans resented the political imposition of French ‘victory’. That changed with time. For Karl-Heinz the next few years were marked by an awakening, political and erotic. He read Eugen Kogon’s book Der SS-Staat which was pretty well the first in German to examine the machinery of Hitler’s terror. He discovered French culture, first of all in the little cinema in the tiny village of Bickendorf near his school; he saw La Belle et la bête, Les Enfants du paradis, La Mort de Danton and Sous les toits de Paris. Among his neighbours, France - Paris in particular - became chic. The antipathy to all things French disappeared. Boys wore Basque berets and hung French posters in their dormitories. They longed to be accepted by the French.18 That was a long time in coming. Paul Falkenburger, a Frenchman who taught at Freiburg University, recalls that it was not until 1947 that there was any meeting between young Germans and French, and that that first occasion took place in Titisee in the Black Forest.19

  Berets became a potent symbol for post-war German youth. Ruth Friedrich saw them cropping up like mushrooms in Berlin: ‘Anyone who felt they had something to say wears a black beret. There have never been so many berets in the city. They are the Phrygian bonnets of the first post-war weeks in Berlin.’20

  The French acquired the Saar at the four-power conference in Paris in April 1946. They were once again the keenest to return to the Kleinstaaterei - the system of small, impotent states that had been Germany before 1806 -
and to this end were reluctant to join Bizonia. French attitudes to Germany changed radically after the end of the war. At first they wanted merely to milk the country, but soon they saw the point of wooing the defeated Germans. President de Gaulle did this as early as October 1945 when he visited the ZOF and spoke of the need to return to ordinary life, to reconstruct the economy. The Germans and the French had to work together ‘because we are Europeans and Westerners’.21 Of course the reason for this was de Gaulle’s spat with Moscow. The Soviet leaders had gone cold on him, and he could no longer rely on the Russians to get his own way.

  De Gaulle was still insisting on a veto for the central agencies at the Control Council. Koenig was happy to take on the role of opposing any attempt to reunite Germany, which removed any chance of a centralised railway system and trades union movement. Koenig came up against Clay, who was anxious to re-establish sovereignty so that American troops could go home. Here the French became the unconscious allies of the British, who feared just that - an American departure. Clay was tempted to proceed without France, which was deliberately segmenting Germany.

  At the New Year of 1946 de Gaulle insisted that Germany be re-created as a confederation, not a Reich. As the barometer dropped the French were as pitiless as ever in their demands for coal. Production in the Ruhr had fallen to 12 per cent of the 1943 level. In June 1945 the British commander Montgomery had insisted that the coal be kept in Germany ‘to prevent . . . unrest and disorder’.22 At the Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in Moscow in December French demands for coal went up again. They required annual shipments of twenty million tons from 1947. Once again they dished the idea of central agencies by rejecting the suggestion that there should be a central body looking after finance. Koenig was prepared to accept a German commission of experts, providing that it did not operate west of the Rhine (which the French hoped would fall to them). Clay could scarcely conceal his annoyance at the Control Council.23 It was suspected that he intentionally disrupted shipments of wheat to the ZOF.24 Later he quite openly proposed stopping deliveries. Clay was slow to decide that the real danger to peace came from Moscow, not Paris.