For the Potsdamer life returned to what they now called normality. Hanna Grisebach was free to scrump again, stealing potatoes from the crown prince’s garden. She was caught red handed by a Russian: ‘Zappzarapp kartoscha!’ Her daughter pacified the soldier with a little school-book Russian. He dismissed them: ‘Na Haus!’111 The shadows lengthened and the cold set in. By February it was fifteen degrees below, and there was no glass in their windows. They slept in their coats and animal skins. The shortage of potatoes had been joined by a dearth of coal and wood. It was Karl Jaspers who finally helped them out by recalling August Grisebach to his chair in the newly reopened university. His wife and children had to remain behind in Potsdam until repeated visits to OMGUS, the American HQ in Berlin-Dahlem, yielded the necessary papers.
19
The Great Freeze
Whenever I think of the winter of 1946 to 1947 in Germany, I always recall the glitter on the walls and in the interiors of houses, that I must have seen a hundred times in German homes and which resembled the sparkly sheen on the unpolished side of a granite block. It was the glitter of a wafer-thin layer of white frost, an icy blast of damp; the frozen moisture in the atmosphere created by men, sweat, coughing and breathing; men whose clothing was sometimes soaked though with snow, and who dried out slowly when they got home.
Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 82
After Potsdam the stage was set for the Cold War, but it did not come for a while. One reason for this was that Stalin did not want a war, hot or cold; and it was the Western Allies, first Britain, and then America, who pushed him into it. He had no desire to reach the North Sea, the Rhine or the Atlantic. The Soviet Union was exhausted by war. If Stalin had considered resuming the march west, he knew that his country needed a good twenty years to recover first. When goaded to invade western Europe by one of his generals, he answered, ‘But who would feed all its people?’1 Similarly, he tried to restrain Tito’s wilder ambitions - although this did not come out at the time - when he appeared to back his territorial claims. Stalin’s system was about security, and his almost paranoiac sense that the Soviet Union was in danger. Poland was the lynchpin: he wanted a good, deep buffer. In Germany he saw something more akin to an ally. He sought to avoid division, although he allowed certain policies - such as agrarian reform - which could only have been intolerable to the West. The Cold War was the result of what Vojtech Mastny has called the ‘Western perception of a Soviet threat’.2 Stalin kept his options open.
There was friction at Potsdam, but the Allies went home in the belief that they were policing the globe together. They had instituted a regular conference of foreign ministers (CFM) to keep the world in check. The merry-go-round had taken the foreign ministers to London in September 1945. It was their first meeting since Postsdam. There was a predictable scrimmage over who was to receive what in the way of German resources. The French were still clamouring loudly for the Rhine and the Ruhr and ‘justice’, by which they meant coal, machinery, locomotives, consumer goods and men. They were pre-empted by the Soviets, who had awarded themselves 50 per cent of reparations, with 20 per cent each to Britain and America. France and the other claimants had to make do with 10. Bevin was still firm on the Ruhr. He was generally sympathetic to the French, but in this instance he realised that any internationalisation of the area would be tantamount to opening the door to the Russians.3
French behaviour upset Molotov and led to a chilling of relations between the two countries. On 7 October 1945 Pravda ran an article saying that the French had less right to discuss eastern Europe than the Yugoslavs, Czechs or Poles. Moscow complained that the French were not prepared to deport Russian POWs, by which it almost certainly meant those Russian citizens who were hiding under French skirts because France had not been party to Yalta. The Russians responded by saying they would not return French POWs, which meant Alsatians who had been recruited into the German army after 1940.4 They would have to spend another winter in the Gulag.
The winter of 1945-6 was not abnormally cold, but the terrible lack of coal and food was felt acutely by the very large numbers of Germans without proper roofs over their heads. The ground was rock hard and the lakes froze. The Kommandatura authorised a Holzaktion in the Grunewald woods, allowing Berliners to cut down the venerable trees of the former royal hunting reserve. That winter 167 people committed suicide from despair, and the British authorities in Berlin decided to evacuate children aged between four and fourteen to their zone. This involved 50,000 children and 10,000 accompanying adults. Despite this precaution, 60,000 Berliners are believed to have died before March 1946. The following winter killed off an estimated 12,000 more when temperatures hovered around thirty degrees below.5
As noted in the previous chapter, the meetings between the Big Three had foreseen a peace conference, similar to that which met in Versailles in 1919, putting the final coat of varnish on the post-war settlement. There were endless discussions about this, and about just who was to be allowed a seat at the table. Byrnes was still courting Stalin. He sat next to him at dinner in Moscow at the CFM in December 1945 and raised a toast: ‘Whom we hath [sic] joined together, let no peace put asunder.’ By his own admission it went down like a lead brick. The brief American-Soviet rapprochement struck fear into Bevin, but on 9 February 1946 Stalin appeared to open the batting in the Cold War with his speech hailing the victory of the Soviet people. The war, he said, had been the result of monopoly capitalism. 6 It was very probably true, however, that the Soviet leader had not meant to frighten the Western Allies. Both he and Molotov were still keen on East-West co-operation. So, to some extent, was Byrnes; but his attempts to maintain the peace between East and West were undermined by Truman, who pronounced himself ‘tired of babying the Soviets’. He would go so far, and no further.7
Churchill made his speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March in which he was supposed to have coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’. The words had, in fact, been first used by Joseph Goebbels.8 Churchill’s views were loudly cheered by the Foreign Office, though they were very cautiously received in America at first, which was moving only slowly in that direction.9 The idea persisted in some quarters that Soviet Russia and America could carve up the world. The notion had found favour with Roosevelt. It often had to do with a profound Anglophobia on the part of senior American army officers.10 Now voices of dissent began to ring out.
The Soviets had no desire to see Germany break up - they had their eyes on the Ruhr with its industries, and on their 10 per cent share of German production. After the Berlin election of May 1946 that went by the board. The Russians were proceeding with their idea of setting up ‘democratic’ government in their zone. The political resolve of the Western Allies in Berlin had first been put to the test in March that year when the Soviets called for the merging of the SPD and the KPD. In April the socialists and communists of the SBZ held a conference in the Admiralspalast Theatre where the call for the new ‘Socialist Unity Party’ or SED was unanimous. Elections by secret ballot were held in the West but were banned in the Russian Sector. The Soviet ban was challenged in both Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain, but Russian troops broke up the polling station and carried off the ballot boxes. In the Western sectors the vote was a disaster for the Russian plans to introduce a one-party state: 29,610 Social Democrats voted against, with just 2,937 agreeing to the merger. It had been ‘the first free and secret election on German soil since 1932’.11 Russia’s policy had blown up in its face, especially when free elections were allowed.
The New Ideologists
The East-West co-operation that had won the war was going out of intellectual fashion. A different set of men were wielding influence in the Western corridors of power. George F. Kennan had served in the Moscow embassy during the war. For him the Soviet Union posed a threat to the American way of life.12 He believed the Americans were deceiving themselves if they thought they could change events in the
areas already under Soviet hegemony; on the other hand he could see no reason for making things easier for them. Germany was not going to work - a shared Germany was a ‘chimera’. In the summer of 1945 Kennan wrote his famous ‘long telegram’: ‘We have no choice but to lead our section of Germany - the section of which we and the British have accepted responsibility - to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, that the East cannot threaten it.’ Better a dismembered Germany than totalitarianism at the North Sea.13 Kennan’s memorandum was echoed by three similar telegrams from the British diplomat Frank Roberts, although he expressed himself with more caution.
In retrospect Kennan probably went too far. It is highly unlikely that Stalin wanted to cross the Elbe. It did not make a lot of sense to strive for a communist Europe while the Americans and the British retained large forces on the mainland. If that had been what he desired, it was better to wait: the fruit might fall from the tree without any need to struggle. Besides, America had the atomic bomb, and was to possess a monopoly in nuclear weapons until 1949.14 The Soviets were still keen to reform their zone. The Soviet diplomat A. A. Sobelev told Murphy that the pan-German central government laid down by Potsdam would need years of preparation, as the spirit of Prussia had to be excised from the administration first.15 The changes of attitude were in the West, where the Americans feared an attack on the open economy and the British an attack on their interests in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.16 Kennan was not deceived by the Czechs. By 1945 the country was already under the sway of Moscow. ‘Personal acquaintance with the Czech ambassador in Moscow, Zdenek Fierlinger, had given me the impression that we had to do in his person not with the representative of a free and independent Czechoslovakia but with one who was to all intents and purposes a Soviet agent.’17
Views like Kennan’s were becoming common currency in America. General George Patton was a case in point: with time he preferred Nazis to communists. A more analytical indictment of the policy that led to the Anglo-American rout at Potsdam appeared in Ralph Keeling’s Gruesome Harvest of 1947. Keeling called it ‘one of the most brutal and terrifying peace programmes ever inflicted on a defeated nation’. Germany was not a pawn in the battle between East and West, thought Keeling, ‘she is the major prize’. Germany needed to be attracted over to the American side and kept there.18 This was to become American policy before the year was out. Keeling echoed many of Victor Gollancz’s views on the treatment of the Germans, but he was rare at the time in being prepared to bring up Allied wartime atrocities, such as the bombing of civilian targets and the firestorms where men, women and children were fried at temperatures of 1,000 degrees. The Oder-Neisse Line contradicted the Atlantic Charter, and - Keeling pointed out - even the draconian Morgenthau had limited his territorial demands for the Poles to the southern half of East Prussia and the mixed Germano-Polish area of Upper Silesia.19
In Britain, Roberts’s views prevailed in the Foreign Office, which was calling for an all-out offensive against Russia’s mission of ‘dynamic and proselytising communism’. What Roberts feared was ‘communism on the Rhine’. The British attitude was so aggressively anti-Soviet in Bevin’s Foreign Office that some observers have suggested that the British were the prime movers in the Cold War.20 There were still delusions of grandeur in Whitehall and Bevin was certainly all in favour of the hard line. He thought it might be necessary to abandon the idea of a united Germany but insisted that responsibility for the breakdown in relations between the wartime Allies should rest fairly and squarely with the Soviets. Though the Russians appeared peaceful in Europe, they were already moving troops into Iran, the move that was to prompt Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.21 The Americans were the last to abandon their faith in a united Germany, but Byrnes was defeated in Paris, the location both of the farcical peace conference and of the Quai d’Orsay, which was most famously opposed to German unity. Byrnes could not believe a peace conference had any value now that so many countries had been absorbed into the Soviet bloc.22
Bevin was also worried about money, especially as Britain did not have much. Reputations die hard, but Britain’s subaltern position was recognised by the permanent under-secretary, Cadogan, who referred to the leaders of the Allied coalition as ‘the great two and a half’. In 1945 the economist Maynard Keynes was talking of a ‘financial Dunkirk’, and as the fuel crisis set in during the cruel winter of 1946-7 Britain’s economic handicap was patently obvious.23 In 1945-6 alone, Germany cost the British taxpayer £74 million, while the British people had to put up with a continuation of wartime rationing.
Although Truman had recognised the Oder-Neisse Line on 9 August 1945, the Americans were ready to backtrack almost immediately. For the time being, however, the Control Council defined Germany as the land between the Line and the ‘present western borders’. The French had made it clear as well that, although not party to Potsdam, they approved the cessions in the east. It was Byrnes who reopened the can of worms by raising the question of border revision and threatening Poland with a peace conference. 24
That other Russo-sceptic, Clay, drew his inspiration from Byrnes. On 19 August he wrote to the secretary of state, ‘You are carrying so much of the hope of the world on your shoulders against almost insurmountable odds that you should be free of all other worries. If you cannot win the fight for peace, no one can.’25 The Berlin elections were coming up. Clay thought the Americans should support the democratic parties in the west - the CDU and the SPD represented the ‘substantial majority of the population’. ‘I am not unduly apprehensive of the election results in Berlin,’ he wrote, as he did not trust them anyway. Berlin depended on Russia, which fed its people, and was subject therefore to Soviet economic pressure.26 Indeed, there was a feeling that the Germans in the SBZ could not be trusted and that they would turn to communism under the blandishments of the occupiers. Even when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary - as in the Austrian elections - the Anglo-Americans still persisted in their view. The feeling that Germans in the east had been seduced by the Soviets strengthened their resolve to create a separate state in the west of the country. As early as May 1946 Bevin explained to the cabinet why he felt a divided Germany was desirable. The Russians presented a danger as great as, if not greater than, a revived Germany. The idea was to create a Germany ‘that would be more amenable to our influence’, whereas a united Germany would be more under Soviet hegemony.27
Byrnes was also the architect of Bizonia - the idea of merging the Western zones rapidly replaced Bevin’s notion of a ‘loose federation’. In April 1946 the four powers met to discuss the situation in Germany, and Russia was accused of reneging on the agreements made at Potsdam. The result was an economic amalgamation of the British and American zones. The conference affirmed the fact that the enemy had changed since the onset of the Cold War: the Germans had become allies in the new order. The British cabinet agreed in principle to Bizonia on 25 July 1946. Germany should become self-sufficient again by 1949.28
Byrnes made his statement of intent in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946. He had been attending the impotent Paris Peace Conference and had left for Berlin before flying on to the Württemberg capital. He met the German minister presidents and addressed an audience in the Opera House. The German politicians told him a new Hitler was an impossibility: were such a man to emerge, he would have to be a communist. Byrnes said it had been a mistake for America to lose interest in Europe after the First World War. ‘The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honourable peace among the free and peace-loving nations of the world . . . What we want is lasting peace. We will oppose harsh and vengeful measures which obstruct our attempts at peace. We will oppose soft measures which invite the breaking of the peace . . . We do not want Germany to become the satellite of any power or powers or to live under a dictatorship, foreign or domestic.’ There were sideways swipes at the Poles for seizing land before they had been granted leave. Poland’s borders, he warned, were not final; there had
been no agreement. The French were also put in their place: America could not deny their right to the Saar, but it would not support any encroachment on the Ruhr or the Rhineland. The criticism of the French in Stuttgart, of all places, must have been especially piquant.29
Byrnes’s hard stand was heartily approved by Clay. The British were also enthusiastic. Churchill cabled his congratulations. After some initial reticence, Bevin appeared pleased and made similar noises before the House of Commons in October.30 Attlee was all for withdrawing from Germany, but Bevin, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff ganged up on him, claiming that it would be tantamount to another Munich. They wanted confrontation, not retreat. Above all Byrnes’s speech went down well with the Germans. The Wiesbaden Kurier called it ‘a ray of light at last’. Then again, in Wiesbaden, it was wise to praise anything the Americans did.31 When Byrnes went, Clay continued the hard line. Washington interfered very little with American military commanders in Germany.32 Not so enthralled by Byrnes’s words were the Poles, who staged a protest outside the American embassy in Warsaw.33
John Dos Passos had the chance to interview Clay in Berlin at the end of 1945. Clay exerted his charm on the journalists, telling them ‘with a smile that we weren’t necessarily trying to produce an efficient Germany, we were trying to produce a democratic Germany’. He did not know if he would succeed in this. Nor could he say whether the Germany they produced would be separate or unified: ‘That decision couldn’t seem to get past the [Control] Council.’ Clay was referring to the French, who obstructed anything that exuded a whiff of unity.34
The French were up to their usual tricks and not playing ball with the Anglo-Americans. From the very beginning they sought to disable the Control Council and resist the implementation of the Potsdam Agreements as far as creating ‘central agencies’ was concerned. There was to be no recreation of the ‘Reich’. Pierre Koenig wielded his veto like a bacon slicer. On 20 October 1945 he put paid to the idea of a unified trades union structure. The Americans were incensed. First Eisenhower threatened to scrap the Control Council, then the matter came within Clay’s domain, and Clay was permanently furious with the French for their obstructions. The latter still had their hearts set on the dismemberment of Germany and looked approvingly to what had happened on the other side of the Oder-Neisse Line. As Bidault put it: if you can do it with Breslau, why not Mainz?35
After the Reich Page 67
