The London Conference of the Western Allies published the London Agreements on 7 June. It proposed the setting up of a constituent assembly, the defining of an Occupation Statute for the Allied armies and the creation of a Ruhr authority to allocate coal and steel production. It was typical of Adenauer that he was unconcerned about events in Berlin. The man of the moment was Reuter. Adenauer was chiefly concerned with the Ruhr authority, which he interpreted as an affront to German dignity. The Versailles Treaty was ‘a bed of roses by comparison’.114 As a recent biographer has written, given the situation in Berlin, Adenauer’s protestations sounded like ‘complaints about the functioning of the parish pump’.115 More important were the meetings to decide the form of the future constitution. Documents were issued to the minister presidents of the three Western zones. The Länder called a conference in Koblenz on 8 July which was followed by another at Frankfurt that began on 20 July. On 10 August they met again on the Herreninsel in Lake Chiemsee. There was little agreement between the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, and Adenauer disliked the Bavarian party chairman, Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ Müller.
On 26 July the minister presidents agreed to summon a constituent assembly to be called the Parliamentary Council in Bonn on 1 September. It was to be a conference of party officials, arranged proportionate to seats in the three Landtags. Bonn was not Adenauer’s idea. He would have preferred Koblenz, which was in the French Zone.116 It was in Bonn that one of the architects of the Grundgesetz or basic law came to the fore - Dr Carlo Schmid. Schmid was the SPD’s constitutional expert and it was the job of his committee to produce the legal foundations for post-war Germany. The SPD scored a small victory over Adenauer, who was anxious to prevent them from constituting a majority in the new Bundesrat, or upper house (the lower house was to be the Bundestag). He was trying to exclude Berlin from the body, both because of his animus against the city and because its inclusion would mean that the SPD carried the day. The SPD, however, succeeded in establishing that the size of the Land’s population would decide how many delegates would go to the Bundesrat.
It was at this time that Blankenhorn entered the stage. He had been a colleague and friend of Adam von Trott’s in the German Foreign Office, and was well aware of the aims and ideologies of the Kreisauer. He was an Anglophile, and fell out with Adenauer only when the latter opposed British membership of the Common Market. Blankenhorn could do what Adenauer could not: he could charm Allied generals and talk to journalists. Adenauer was too much of a stuffed shirt to appeal to them.
The French were distressed to see the progress being made towards a German government under the lead of Adenauer. Work was proceeding at such a lick that the minister presidents of the Länder were worried about taking the responsibility of splitting Germany in two. Not so Adenauer. He thought Germany’s future lay in the west in the defence of Romano-Christian culture. He knew that his bread was buttered in Paris. The French nonetheless wanted him to slow down, and confine his attentions to the basic law. When Clay and Robertson issued Bizonia Law 75 giving the Germans the cue to decide the future of the Ruhr, the French uttered a last gasp of fury embodied in a formal complaint from Schuman.117
Despite this, Adenauer was still flirting with the French. One of the contacts he made at the time was with Schuman. They met first in October 1948 at Bassenheim in the French-administered Pfalz, in the residence of the governor, Hettier de Boislambert. Adenauer had no desire to let the Anglo-Americans know of his talks and travelled to the meeting wrapped in a blanket with his Homburg pulled down over his eyes. The Ruhr was still a sticking point. Schuman had to go carefully. Even after 1949 the Saar was the cause of frequent friction between the French and Adenauer.118
The parliamentary capital had yet to be decided. Berlin was out, not just because of Adenauer’s loathing of Prussia, but because it was behind Russian lines and increasingly prone to Soviet intimidation. The natural capital was Frankfurt, in that it had been a semi-independent imperial, coronation city before 1806, and it was also the scene of the abortive German parliament of 1848. After 1848, German liberals believed the country had taken the wrong path - the path that led to the First World War and the Second. It was also famously the birthplace of Goethe. Frankfurt was the choice of the SPD. The CDU was for Bonn, a small city associated with the archbishop of Cologne, and with the Prussian university founded there in 1815. Bonn was the birthplace of Beethoven. The British decided in Bonn’s favour by offering to make it autonomous and free from their control. Frankfurt was administratively too important for the Americans to relinquish it. The Germans could finally be masters in their small house.
Conclusion
The policy of constraint applied by the victors brings only fragile and misleading solutions . . . For as long as there is reason for revenge, there will be a renewed risk of war. Germany was never as dangerous as when she was isolated.
Robert Schuman, Pour l’Europe, 2nd edn, Paris 1964, 107, 110
That means the old borders must fall and be replaced by new alliances, and a new, bigger empire must unite the nations . . . That is the only way to end the feud properly to everybody’s advantage.
Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 31
The Soviets had failed. They had failed twice: they had neither pushed the Western Allies out of Berlin nor forestalled the creation of a Western German state. The stage was now set for the division of Germany into two camps, each with its own ideologically orientated government. On 8 April 1949 the Allies in Washington decided to transform their Military Government into an Allied High Commission, and the French agreed to join Bizonia, briefly to be called Trizonia. On 23 May 1949 the basic law or Grundgesetz was signed in the presence of the three Western Allied governors. The Federal Republic was waiting in the wings. Adenauer claimed that the Grundgesetz constituted ‘a major contribution to the reunification of the German people’.1 This was clearly untrue, and it is interesting to speculate today how much Adenauer ever genuinely desired to see the family reunited. Some maintain that Adenauer was biding his time, waiting for the East to fall into his hands. For the time being, however, Germany east of the Elbe was cast adrift and would not come back into harbour until 1989, twenty-two years after Adenauer’s death.
Some would argue that Adenauer - indeed the West - was powerless to alleviate the plight of those Germans caught behind the Iron Curtain, but this is only true up to a point. There was another way: it was the solution which, after 250 days of negotiation, resulted in the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. The Allies then packed their bags and went home. That solution was presented to Germany too. On 10 March 1952 Stalin made Adenauer an offer of an armed and unified Germany. The only condition he sought to impose was that Germany - like Austria after 1955 - should not belong to any military alliance. Stalin was still worried about security. Adenauer pocketed the note. He said it contained nothing new. He thought it more important to integrate his West German state with the West than to unite with his brothers across the Elbe.2
The rest may be summarised. Elections in West Germany were set for 14 August 1949. Adenauer went into the lists claiming that the British were funding the socialists, which made him more sour than ever, even if he didn’t actually believe a word of it. The result was a hung parliament, with the CDU/CSU winning 31 per cent of the vote and the SPD 29.2 per cent. A coalition was inevitable. On 21 August Adenauer held a CDU coffee party at his home in Rhöndorf. The leader of the FDP, or Free Democrats, Theodor Heuss, was to be fobbed off with the ceremonial presidency. Adenauer pushed the CSU aside to clasp the chancellor’s role for himself. On 15 September it was put to a vote among the members of the Bundestag. Adenauer secured the Chancellery by one vote - his own. Kurt Schumacher dubbed him ‘the Allies’ Chancellor’.3 The new Germany could now start work. The adoption of the basic law that month ended the military occupation of Germany.
Adenauer’s election prompted an equal and opposite move in the East. On 16 September a SED delegation arrived in Moscow to receive instructio
ns from the Politburo on how to cope with the creation of a ‘West German imperialist state’ and to plan the creation of the German Democratic Republic. It was much the same crew: Pieck, Grotewohl, Ulbricht and Fred Oelssner on the German side, and Malenkov, Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovitch on the Soviet. America was cast in the light of a colonising power. The West German regime was to be unmasked as the organ of the Western powers.4
The GDR was created on 7 October not only as a response to the FRG, but also as a result of East Germany’s abandonment by West. At the end of 1949 the Soviet regime made promises that it did not keep, among which was an agreement to release all German POWs, and to close the camps in Germany. At the outset there had been eleven such establishments, but this number was now reduced to just three. At their peak the camps had contained 158,000 Germans. There were still 16,000 as 1949 turned into 1950, and the camps did not finally close until after Stalin’s death. As a special treat the German delegation had asked for some translations of Stalin’s speeches. The incentive was to be rid of the SBZ, which with time the East Germans were, although no one can argue that Moscow failed to keep them on a tight leash.
Adenauer’s courting of the French not only ensured their eventual support, it had one lasting benefit: it laid the foundations for the Common Market, or European Union as it has now become. The idea has its precursors. Emperor William II of Germany made frequent references to the subject and voiced a hope that it would come to fruition. It apparently derived from his chancellor Caprivi.5 Aristide Briand had proposed a European Federation in 1929-30 as a means of matching the might of the United States after 1918, but the suggestion was put aside by the slump that followed the Wall Street Crash. Robert Schuman became interested at that time as a deputy for Lorraine in the French Assembly.6 During the war the notion of European unity surfaced on both sides of the Rhine. In Germany it tended to be the left who took it up, especially some of the intellectuals in the Kreisau Circle. Adam von Trott, for example, was keen to revive a ‘Carolingian’ Europe and it was a conception that found echoes in the Quai d’Orsay at the end of the war.7
In France a union of Europe was more popular with the right, often as an unlikely benefit that had accrued with defeat. Ernst Jünger, who must have encountered its champions on both sides of the Rhine, thought it a lost opportunity that the French and Germans were not brought together on an equal footing after the Fall of France. Writing in the middle of the war, he saw the forging of a new ‘empire’ to be a task for the peace: ‘Can someone like an Alsatian live as a German or a Frenchman without being forced to turn from one to the other?’ Jünger was also swayed by the Carolingian idea - to build a new empire that would be as strong as its rivals.8 His thoughts were not far from those of Schuman.
De Gaulle too took up the banner in September 1943, when he spoke of Europe’s ‘common identity’. The first task was to remove customs barriers. The plans were more elaborately worked out by the French radical politician René Mayer in a memorandum of 30 September 1943. He called for an ‘economic federation’ centred on France and taking in Benelux and ‘Rhenania’ (the German territories bordering the Rhine), and possibly Italy and Spain too.9 Jean Monnet, the head of the French General Planning Committee, put forward a line of argument similar to that of Helmuth James von Moltke: there would be ‘no peace in Europe if states re-establish themselves on the basis of national sovereignty . . . To enjoy . . . prosperity and social progress . . . the states of Europe must form . . . a “European Entity”, which will make them a single European unit.’10 For Schuman, a fragmentary Europe was anachronistic. The resources of individual states were not enough, as France discovered after the war: they needed German coal. The solidarity of nations should be greater than ‘outworn nationalism’.11
The European idea even found a few champions in Britain. Victor Gollancz warned of the dangers of an isolated, dismembered Germany: ‘A federal Europe, a hundred times yes; an atomized Germany in an unfederalised Europe, danger and folly.’12 Sir Robert Birley, headmaster of Eton, and the man who had been chosen to shape education policy in the British Zone, looked forward to European Union in his 1949 Reith Lectures, and for much the same reason - sovereignty needed to be sacrificed to collective security.13 And Britain was present as the first steps were taken towards union. It was one of the signatories of the Western European Union on 17 March 1948 and of the Atlantic Pact a year later, even if it fell by the wayside before the Treaty of Rome established the Common Market in March 1957.
De Gaulle found the notion of embracing the whole of German territory in French plans too ambitious. He focused his attention on westward-looking ‘Rhenania’, and Adenauer was cunning enough to sell him a Germany that was just that.14 Indeed, Adenauer was also keen to play the Carolingian card, based on France and Germany’s common Frankish inheritance. The new Germany based in Bonn would defend Romano-Christian culture from - guess who? The Slavs.15
Germany’s experience of post-war bloodletting was not an isolated one. In the wake of the Second World War there was imprisonment, trial and retribution - des rendements de comptes - all over the world. In 1956 Margret Boveri estimated that as many as half a million French people had been arrested after the war, resulting in 160,000 trials. In Belgium the number of investigations was as high was 600,000, in Holland 130,000. Even in America, 570 federal officials were dismissed and 2,748 resigned during Truman’s term; another 8,000 were sacked by Eisenhower. In England they hanged Lord Haw Haw and John Amery, and branded up to 10,000 people with ‘legitimate doubt’.16
The question arises whether the Allies achieved what they desired. The war horses on the American side had their doubts. The Cold War showed them that they had not defeated the enemy - Germany was not the enemy any more. That was the Soviet Union. For Patton or Mark Clark it had been a botched job. Clark wrote: ‘We had not won the war. We had stopped too soon. We had been too eager to go home. We welcomed the peace, but after more years of effort and expenditure we found that we had won no peace.’17 America had succeeded elsewhere, however. It was able to shove the ailing Great Britain aside and assume the leadership of the Western world. The days of the Raj and the rest of the British Empire were numbered. British India was over even before the signing of the Grundgesetz. Britain would be encouraged to drop its pretensions to power and follow at the American heel.
The Russians had been checked at the Elbe, but they had the security Stalin craved, and it was thirty-five years after Stalin’s death before their European empire finally tottered and fell. The most surprising victors of the peace were the French, who started right at the back yet finished by realising all their war aims. For the Poles and the Czechs it proved bitter-sweet: they had their national states without the dangers presented by racial minorities, but they had communism, and Soviet Russia squatting on their national aspirations.
And what did the Germans gain from the peace? The Allies had helped them ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ in what was an often misguided desire to dig out the roots of the evil. They promoted an idea of Germany’s past as ‘another country’ which became enshrined in Jurgen Habermas’s dictum that ‘history begins at Auschwitz’. They were well rid of Adolf Hitler and his cronies, who had led them to ruin and besmirched their name for all time. They gained stability created by a monetary reform which ushered in a new era of prosperity.
The Germans didn’t want to know their sullied history. Weary of the past they began to take pleasure in the destruction of their towns. Those few towns and villages in Germany and Austria that had emerged unscathed were ripped down all the same in the 1950s and 1960s: the past had to go, to be replaced by an anodyne notion of comfort and prosperity. The myth of zero hour was taken to all their hearts. The perceptive writer Alfred Döblin noticed this tendency as early as 1946. For the time being there was little construction going on. Commerce thrived in the ruins. The people made no bones about the state of Germany: ‘They are not depressed by the destruction; they see it rather as an inte
nse spur to work. I am convinced that, if they had the means they lack, they would rejoice tomorrow that all their outmoded, badly laid-out conurbations had been knocked flat giving them the opportunity now to build something first class and wholly contemporary.’18
The west was patched up quickly; buildings went up here there and everywhere to replace those destroyed in the war. A vast ugliness replaced the ruins. If they were allowed to, they could finally forget the blood they had spilled, and concentrate on the birth of the new Germany, which they had watered with their own.
Notes
PREFACE
1 A. J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler, 3rd edn. London 1991, 136-7.
2 Quoted in Ernst Jünger, Jahre der Okkupation, Stuttgart 1958, 130.
INTRODUCTION
1 Gerhard Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus: Vertreibung und Eingliederung von 15 Millionen Ostdeutsche, Stuttgart 1973, 94. Ziemer’s figures are based on those published by the Statischen Bundesamt in Wiesbaden in 1958.
2 See also Manfred Rauchensteiner, ‘Das Jahrzehnt der Besatzung als Epoche in der Österreichischer Geschichte’, in Alfred Ableitinger, Siegfried Beer and Eduard G. Staudinger, eds, Österreich unter alliieter Besatzung - 1945-1955, Vienna, Cologne and Graz 1998, 18-19.
After the Reich Page 73
