by Kai Bird
GEORGE KENNAN, 1952
The clemency decisions left McCloy tired and emotionally drained. After two years as Germany’s “proconsul,” he was hoping that he could soon return to private life. But it was Dean Acheson’s intention to “hang onto McCloy’s coattails in Bonn” until the occupation could be formally liquidated.1 This would be complicated, because one couldn’t negotiate a formal peace treaty: that would require Soviet compliance, and presumably the unification of Germany. So, instead, Washington decided to enter into a “contractual agreement” with Adenauer’s government that would restore German sovereignty in the three Western Allied occupation zones in all but four issues: the protection of Allied troops stationed in West Germany, Berlin, the question of unification, and any future overall peace settlement. Talks commenced in May 1951, and by September the broad outlines of such a contract had been agreed upon.
The negotiations then hit a snag on several delicate matters involving German rearmament and the future rights of the Allies to intervene in the event that West Germany became a totalitarian state. The French were most reluctant to see Germany rearmed and worried about relinquishing too many Allied prerogatives too early. And though it was McCloy’s job to hammer out a compromise that might assuage French fears without offending German pride, personally he found it difficult to shed his own deep-seated prejudices regarding the threat of German nationalism. The talks were often filled with acrimony. On one occasion, François Poncet flatly announced that the “essential principle” governing the relationship between the Allies and Germany—the fact of the 1945 unconditional surrender—could not be changed. Incensed, Adenauer retorted that this did not give the Allies “the right to keep such a country occupied for an indefinite period.” To Adenauer’s surprise, McCloy took the side of the Frenchman in this argument and reminded him that the Germans had repudiated treaties in the past and that the American stake in the “middle of Europe is an extremely important one. We’re not going to play around with that until we’re sure where we stand.”2 He assured the angered chancellor that the Allies intended to end the occupation someday, but it would not happen without mutual trust and long-term guarantees. Never again, he argued, could the Germans wage war against France, and that meant that, before full sovereignty could be restored to the Bonn government, the Allies had to be sure that West Germany was firmly wedded to the Western alliance.
He turned the same argument against the French position, and tried to persuade the French that concessions had to be made in order to nudge the Germans into a permanent West European union. In Paris that September, he told Monnet and a roomful of French officials that “Germany would in all probability be armed in some form in the near future in any event, but whether armed or not she would constitute a real danger if she did not wholeheartedly align herself with the West. . . .” In almost apocalyptic terms, he warned, “There were those among the Germans who felt that Germany might have one more bid for power left in her. Many of these took now the feeling that Germany’s role should be one of balance between the forces of the East and the West. Joined with the East or with the threat of going to the East, she could exhibit tremendous pressures on France.” He concluded that “this was a very solemn moment and no time for France to equivocate or draw back in respect to Germany. If constructive steps were not taken immediately, I could foresee the loss of our whole position in Western Europe, the re-creation of a really dangerous Germany, and the fundamental success of Soviet policy and influence in Western Europe.”3
This line of reasoning rather unsettled the French. They were being asked to believe that, in order to keep Germany divided, with its Western portion firmly aligned to the Atlantic alliance, Adenauer should be allowed to rearm. But the French were far more skeptical than McCloy that Germany could be kept divided in the long run. The division was unnatural, and might only become a source of tension in the future. Far better, thought the French government, would be a resumption of serious four-power talks to settle once and for all the fate of Germany. And if the Soviets would not negotiate a permanent solution of the German problem, the last thing the French wanted to see was a rearmed West Germany. The Pleven Plan for a European Defense Force was still on the table, but the French refused to consider the possibility that German contingents for such a force might be mustered before the European army was firmly established. Adenauer’s position, of course, was that Germany would not participate in a European army other than on an equal basis with the French. On this contentious point, the contractual talks floundered throughout the autumn of 1951.
McCloy became increasingly impatient, and began stepping up the pressure on both parties. Acheson bluntly told French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman that, without a German army, Washington’s aid to France would dry up.4 In November, McCloy publicly announced that the time had come to allow the Germans to become equal armed partners in a united Europe. He called upon Europeans to abandon what he called their “nationalism and cynicism.”5 In December, he told a gathering of German politicians that West Europeans must unite or perish.6
West European unity in this context was actually a metaphor for the more or less permanent division of Germany. McCloy and Adenauer might on occasion pay lip service to the idea of reunification, but both men felt that it should only happen if East Germany were someday integrated into the Western alliance. Adenauer’s political opponents in Germany recognized this all too well. As the contractual negotiations proceeded, Schumacher denounced in ever more bitter terms what he regarded as the betrayal of German interests in the East. In his view, the rearming of West Germany—and the contractual agreements—were “merely a cover for the perpetuation” of Germany’s occupied status.7 Schumacher’s attitude infuriated McCloy, who had given up any hope of influencing the iconoclastic SPD leader. Adenauer told him, “Schumacher [is] crazy; you either get married or you don’t.”8
One did not have to be a military expert to conclude that the purpose of rearming West Germany was to keep the country divided. A rearmed West Germany certainly offered no credible defense against the Soviet Union’s now vastly superior conventional forces. Adenauer’s military advisers knew the Soviets were stronger in 1952 than during the war, when two hundred German divisions had failed to stem the Soviet assaults.9 The proposed creation of ten German divisions as the heart of a European army could at most pose a symbolic deterrence to a Soviet invasion. In reality, as McCloy and most U.S. intelligence estimates concluded, the Soviets had no intention of starting a land war, and if they did, the only real deterrent was the American nuclear arsenal. Rearmament for Adenauer was the path to West German sovereignty, just as for McCloy it was a means of keeping Germany divided and well outside the dangerous shoals of neutralism. So Schumacher was not far wrong to suggest that rearmament would merely mean a continued occupation—or, in Adenauer’s terms, a “marriage” of American and West German interests. Repeatedly during the contractual negotiations, McCloy made it clear that he was willing to make all sorts of concessions as long as Washington retained iron-clad guarantees that Allied troops would remain in West Germany and that the country would commit itself to the Western alliance. If this amounted to a permanent occupation, so be it. What was important, McCloy believed, was that it be done with the enthusiastic support of most West Germans.
This could be made palatable to both the Germans and the French only if rearmament occurred within the context of a Western Europe moving in the direction of federation. So it was that McCloy, Acheson, and other American spokesmen in these years repeatedly emphasized European unity. McCloy was greatly heartened when, in early 1952, the Bundestag voted overwhelmingly to approve the Schuman Plan. He called it “an important date in the history of the new Europe.”10 The Schuman Plan’s provisions for sharing various coal and steel resources laid the foundation for what later became the Common Market and the European Economic Community. But these institutions were a long time coming, and in the near term, McCloy was soon disappointed that the Schuman Plan did
not lead to more immediate steps toward a United States of Europe. Nor did it accelerate French acceptance of a European Defense Force.
German rearmament was certainly the most contentious issue under negotiation. But emotions flared as well on the delicate matter of whether the Allies would retain any rights to intervene in West Germany’s internal affairs in the “case of a dangerous threat to German democracy.”11 On this issue, just as he had on the question of rearmament, McCloy took a rather hard-line anti-German view. Just as Germany could not be allowed to rearm except within the context of a European Defense Force, neither could it be trusted to guarantee its own democratic form of government. Whereas Henry Byroade and the State Department favored a more or less unqualified restoration of German sovereignty, McCloy insisted that the contractual agreements contain some kind of “Monroe doctrine for democracy” that would allow the Allies to intervene against any totalitarian trends in German society. Publicly he might be willing to defend the Germans and praise their growing democratic instincts. But privately he still had serious doubts. Speaking with all the moral force at his command, he expressed to a gathering of the high commissioners his “deep anxiety lest the tender plant of German democracy, whose roots were not yet deeply set, might wither and die if Allied support, present since 1945, were now withdrawn.”12
In September, he and Byroade separately wrote Acheson letters laying out their arguments. McCloy warned that Germany could still take a totalitarian path if Adenauer were to leave the scene or the economy took a turn for the worse. He begged Acheson to consider an Allied guarantee of German democracy. It was “supremely important.” Byroade in turn argued that such a provision constituted such a “serious infringement of Germany sovereignty” that it might actually stimulate nationalist forces.13 In the end, McCloy won this argument, partly thanks to the support of the British and French. Article five of the final contractual agreement restoring German sovereignty reserved for the Allies the right to proclaim a state of emergency if confronted with a “subversion of the liberal democratic order.”14
By early 1952, McCloy could point to agreement on a broad range of issues. But the negotiations seemed to drag on interminably, with disputes cropping up over such issues as how to share the cost of Allied troops stationed in Germany, and whether the French should continue trying various German war criminals. In January, McCloy went on a skiing vacation and came back with a broken ankle; while convalescing, he wrote Frankfurter to complain that “things are at sixes and sevens again and I am almost depressed.”15 He began to think seriously once again of leaving Germany and returning to private life.
Then, in March 1952, the Soviets launched a “peace offensive” that threatened to derail all of McCloy’s efforts. Stalin called for the resumption of four-power talks to negotiate a final peace treaty for Germany. The Soviet leader endorsed the reunification of Germany based on free elections and the withdrawal of all foreign troops no later than one year after the signing of a peace treaty. Moreover, to the surprise of many in Washington, he said Germany should be allowed to establish its own army, as long as the country did not enter into a military pact with any of its former enemies. Democratic rights would be guaranteed for all Germans, including all former German soldiers and Nazis. Stalin obviously had calculated that such a package might so regalvanize neutralist sentiments within Germany that the United States would be forced to postpone the integration of West Germany into the American military alliance.
The Soviet proposal immediately won widespread support among many Germans, particularly among SPD voters. Polls indicated that a majority of all Germans favored at least a postponement of the contractual negotiations in order to explore the Soviet offer. Even Adenauer’s own minister for all-German affairs, Jakob Kaiser, urged a favorable response, particularly after the East German regime announced its acceptance of Bonn’s proposal for an all-German electoral law as a basis for discussions.16 McCloy was so dismayed by these developments that he wrote Acheson, volunteering this time to stay on in his post a while longer: “. . . since there is so much need for keeping the pressure on the contractual and the financial arrangements, I feel I should not come home.. . . The Soviets are playing their heaviest cards as one expected they would do to deflect our policy of European integration. . . .”17
A neutral, reunified, and rearmed Germany was “unthinkable” for McCloy. But even he recognized that to reject Stalin’s offer out of hand would be a diplomatic and public-relations disaster. So, in what later became known as the “battle of the notes,” the Allies desperately tried to make the Soviet initiative appear to be less than reasonable. They suggested that before any all-German elections could be held, the United Nations should be allowed to inspect the conditions for free elections inside East Germany. They also demanded that the reunified German state should be freely allowed to join any political or military alliance. To no one’s surprise, both points were brusquely rejected by the Soviets, and over the next few months the peace initiative died.18
Historians have since learned that the Allied assessment of Soviet intentions was anything but uniform. Some British and French officials believed Stalin’s proposal was more than a propaganda stunt. Many Germans still believe a unique opportunity to achieve unification was lost in 1952. A unified, neutral Germany would have left NATO stillborn, an empty shell of a military alliance. Likewise, without East Germany, the Warsaw Pact would not have been the same. Unless one believed the Soviets were prepared to risk nuclear war by invading Western Europe, the European continent would have evolved alternative security arrangements, less dependent on the two nuclear superpowers. The Cold War might have taken quite a different trajectory.
But at the time, McCloy and his peers were unwilling to gamble on the uncertainties of a neutral Europe. Certainly, they feared such a Europe might drift toward communism. But an even greater fear was the prospect of a unified Germany, unfettered by any outside constraints, once again dominating Europe. Better to keep Europe divided into separate military pacts, and shoulder the risks of a Cold War with the Soviets, than to live with a unified Germany. George Kennan noted in his diary that autumn, “Our [decision-makers] were basing their entire hopes on the ratification of the German contractual and the European Defense Community, and they were unwilling to contemplate at any time within the foreseeable future, under any conceivable agreement with the Russians, the withdrawal of United States forces from Germany. . . . Our stand meant in effect no agreement with Russia at all and the indefinite continuance of the split of Germany and Europe.”19 McCloy, Acheson, and most other American policy-makers disagreed with Kennan, who had left the State Department in 1949 precisely because his views on the German question were being ignored. In retrospect, McCloy remained certain he had done the right thing: “We made unthinkable another European civil war. We ended one of history’s longest threats to peace.”20 If the Germany that had waged two world wars was ever again to be unified, it should not happen for many, many years. And in the meantime, he believed, nothing should stand in the way of integrating the Western portion of Germany into the American-financed Atlantic alliance.
Working in close collaboration with Adenauer, McCloy now stepped up the pace of the contractual negotiations, promising Washington that the treaties could be signed in late May. In order to meet this deadline, he forced the negotiators to keep a grueling schedule. He and the elderly chancellor wore down their argumentative British and French colleagues by sheer physical stamina.21 Some all-day sessions stretched on until five-thirty in the morning, and then resumed again at ten o’clock. The British high commissioner claimed he had never suffered so “punishing an ordeal.”22
With the full knowledge that Washington was insistent on concluding the treaties as quickly as possible, Adenauer skillfully took advantage of the situation to extract further concessions from the high commissioners. At one point, when the chancellor raised yet another minor objection, McCloy looked up from reading the draft treaty and muttered, “Oh, all r
ight, that’s concession Number 122 so far.”23 Most of the time, Adenauer found the American high commissioner to be a sympathetic partner.24
When Adenauer tried, however, to use the contractual negotiations to get a better deal in his bargaining with representatives of world Jewry over reparations, McCloy balked. Earlier, Adenauer had appointed two German intellectuals with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials as his negotiators with the Jews. In preliminary talks, these men had agreed in principle to start negotiations on the basis of Israel’s claim of 3 billion German marks. Adenauer had told them and the World Jewish Congress’s Nahum Goldmann that German reparations to world Jewry were a matter of morality. But then, in mid-May, he began to modify the money issue, apparently on the advice of his financial adviser, Hermann Abs, the financier who had narrowly escaped prosecution at Nuremberg for war crimes. On May 19, 1952—only days before the scheduled signing of the contractual agreement—Abs informed the Israelis that Germany could now only afford to ship 100 million marks’ worth of goods in the following year. Nor could he commit Germany to a total amount in coming years; this, Abs said, would depend the level of American aid to Germany. The Israelis declared this offer to be “entirely inadequate” and broke off negotiations. At this point, Adenauer’s own negotiators denounced Abs and handed in their resignations, telling the press, “The issue here . . . is our debt of honour to the Jews.” Simultaneously, Goldmann wrote a letter to Adenauer protesting the German position, and forwarded a copy to McCloy.
The high commissioner stepped in behind the scenes and made it clear that Abs’s position was unacceptable. Within forty-eight hours, McCloy was on the phone to Goldmann in Paris with the news that he could expect to hear “some important news within the next few hours.” True to his word, in several hours a German Foreign Ministry official called Goldmann to say that an emissary was on his way to Paris. On the following day, the Germans agreed to the 3-billion-mark figure. Goldmann forever felt indebted to McCloy.25
