Generous Americans, many of German origin, reading of the catastrophic conditions in Germany began to petition for and organise the sending of food packages through the newly formed CARE organisation (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) to German families. Allied authorities in the Western occupation zones relented in the latter part of 1946 for these to be allowed in and the first CARE packages began to reach German families in January 1947 — packages which were worth their weight in gold. Those who did not have relatives or friends in the United States envied those with a rich uncle in America, as the packages had to be sent to named individuals or families. But however welcome these packages were they only reached one in every 146 German people in the Western zones.(21)
Although more historians are today prepared to admit that, for at least the first two years of the occupation, the Allies caused the suffering and/or death of millions of German civilians in a vengeful and punitive attempt to collectively punish the German people for the crimes of the Nazi regime, it remains controversial to do so.cclxxxviii How many died depends on who you count and how you account for their deaths. Record keeping in the first years after the war was unreliable, not least in the chaotic conditions of the expulsions from Germany’s former eastern territories and in the Soviet zone of occupation but also in the Western zones. Those who died of disease due to poor rations, freezing conditions and a weakened immune system, from a lack of medication, in childbirth due to lack of available blood transfusion, or the enormous number of infant mortalities were often recorded as death by ‘natural causes’. They have certainly never been counted among the casualties of Germany’s war dead. But they certainly died as a consequence of the war and the ineptitude and indifference of the Allied occupation. Historians such as Alexander Häusser and Gordian Maugg called the first years of the Allied occupation ‘Germany’s humanitarian catastrophe’. Estimates of the overall death toll range from figures in the hundreds of thousands to those of the aforementioned military and political figures such as Robert Murphy, Lucius Clay and Herbert Hoover who put the total in the millions.(22)
At the time those in charge were well aware of the scale of the catastrophe, and an increasing chorus of leading military and political figures including General Patton, Lucius Clay, George Marshall, George Kennan, Allen Dulles, James Byrnes and many others began to realise that the continuation of this vindictive policy would play into Stalin’s hands. The fear in 1918 had been that the German revolution would link arms with the Bolsheviks and march west to the Channel. That seemed an impossible concern to many Western Allied leaders in May 1945, when the Germans had scrambled en masse to surrender to the Anglo-Americans. However, after two years of humiliating non-fraternisation policies, starvation rations and endless vindictiveness, many Germans began to despair; the Western Allies were no better than the Soviets. No matter how barbarous the Soviet invasion had been, Stalin’s plan was beginning to emerge in the Soviet zone, and he was beginning to win over German converts to the notion of a Soviet Germany. Living in a ‘red Germany’ actually began to look more promising than living in the shadow of the Morgenthau Plan. The Soviets came up with the popular slogan ‘Junker land in Bauern hand’ (Junker land in the people’s/farmers hands) and started distributing small parcels of 11 to 17 acres of land to citizens in the Soviet zone. Socialist brotherhood and the marginally better rations compared to the Western zones were enough to start turning the tide of opinion. The Germans began to wonder if there was perhaps more hope for survival and some form of rebirth in a Soviet Germany than in a capitalist one.(23) Lucius Clay was one of the first to realise this dilemma facing the German people, and openly stated, ‘There is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on 1000.’(24)
The Allies were very slow to see that their policies were potentially handing Germany to Stalin on a plate. Ralph Keeling of the American Institute of American Economics in Chicago wrote of the opening salvos of the coming Cold War as early as 1946 and could have been paraphrasing Churchill in his call for the West to wake up, arguing, ‘Surging, aggressive Soviet Russia represents a merger of the territorial ambitions of old Russian Imperialism and the communist program of world revolution.’ He then quoted Stalin himself, saying:
The victory of socialism is possible, first in a few or even in one single capitalist country… It is inconceivable that the Soviet republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with the imperialist states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable. This means that if the proletariat, as the ruling class, wants to and will rule, it must prove it also by military organisation… It is therefore the essential task of the victorious revolution in one country to develop and support the revolution in others… the victorious revolution is to do the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and stirring up of the revolution in all countries.(25)
The break-up of the great East Elbian landed estates was, of course, a precursor to the introduction of collectivisation in the Soviet zone. The hyperinflation caused by the Soviets distributing their entire allocation of Reichsmarks, followed by asking the Americans for the printing plates to pump billions more into the German economy, not only made the acquisition of German assets in all zones cheap, it also made the occupying troops feel like millionaires. This bankrupted the German upper and middle classes, depriving them of the value of their savings and creating the ‘levelling out’ (by levelling down) in society, which made all Germans increasingly dependent on state Socialism. Stalin’s policy was working like a Soviet dream. The rationale underlying his plan was outlined in a letter from the wife of Walter Ulbricht (the future head of Communist East Germany), who was the secretary to General Zhukov. Giving an enlightening overview of Soviet grand strategy in Germany, she wrote:
When the job of communising the Soviet zone is completed we shall devote ourselves to the other zones… Soon there shall not be any privately owned companies in the Soviet zone in Germany. All the large companies, even medium sized ones will revert to community ownership. This must be done rapidly, before the establishment of a central administration in Germany can interfere in our zone.
Stalin had groomed puppet regimes in waiting to take control of all the states allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Walter Ulbricht, in particular, had plenty of time to prepare the communist takeover of Germany, having been in Moscow from 1933–45.(26)
The turning point in the Anglo-American attitude towards the Germans in their zones came in March 1947 (following Herbert Hoover’s second visit to Germany in February 1947), when the Hoover Commission reported to Truman and finally put the knife into the spirit of the Morgenthau Plan and directive JCS 1067. The commission categorically stated to the President, ‘There is an illusion that the new Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a “pastoral state”. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move twenty-five million people out of it.’ Starving millions, not least women and children, made for bad media headlines and Hoover advocated a change of heart on the part of the US towards German civilians, one that would give them hope and combat the ‘allure’ of a better life under communism.(27) Realising the threat, President Truman scrapped JCS 1067 on ‘national security grounds’ in July 1947, allowing Germany to start rebuilding and trading with her neighbours. The old directive was replaced with directive JCS 1779, which stated, ‘an orderly prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.’(28) German fishing boats were again allowed to venture out into the Baltic and the North Sea and from May 1947, Hoover’s plan also saw children receiving school meals again across Germany, even if the schools often remained closed for lack of heating fuel or teaching materials. And on every fifth day children were to receive a piece of chocolate with their school lunch: a luxury which many children had never seen before. This was followed by th
e new US Secretary of State, George Marshall, introducing the European Recovery Programme: the Marshall Plan, which today has become known simply as Marshall Aid. The Marshall Plan distributed 13 billion dollars over four years, from late 1947 onwards, to some seventeen nations. The largest recipients were the UK, receiving $3,297 billion, France, receiving $2,296 billion, and Germany — receiving $1,448 billion.(29) The Sudeten Germans alone totalled their losses in terms of property, land, businesses, savings, and other valuables, at over $19 billion dollars. So in retrospect, considering all that was stripped out of Germany by the occupying powers, the Marshall Plan no longer looks so generous. Nevertheless, it was the essential oil that greased the wheels of industry and got Germany going again, and was all the more welcome following years of grim, dehumanising, enforced inactivity.
By the spring of 1948, the four-power structure that had been put in place to administrate occupied Germany had completely collapsed. The Anglo-American zones had prepared for the introduction of a new currency in their western zones, with a view to killing off the black market, normalising economic activity in Germany again but also as a precursor to the establishment of a West German state. Stalin took this as a provocation and a breach of the Potsdam Accords (regardless of the fact that he had perpetrated plenty of breaches of his own).
On 19th June the Deutsche Mark was introduced into the western zones and the Soviets followed suit with the introduction of their own currency in their zone on 23rd June. But on 24th June 1948 Stalin escalated the crisis by closing off all road and rail corridors to the three western zones of Berlin. Later the Soviets also cut off the electricity and gas supplies to the west of the city. West Berlin had food supplies enough for three weeks. The Western Allies organised the ‘Berlin Airlift’ to bring supplies in by air. The airlift alone was not going to bring in enough to supply all of West Berlin’s food needs, let alone her fuel and heating needs, but Berliners knew how to scavenge and barter for food and fuel from the areas surrounding the city, since many of them had been having to do this since the end of the war. Stocks of everything, from food to medicines, were in short supply; as the winter approached, medical supplies ran out, and hospitals and homes froze. By Christmas 1948, Berliners were down to an average of 800 calories per day, and a renewed tuberculosis outbreak, along with malnutrition and freezing temperatures, claimed tens of thousands more lives. Winter nearly came to Stalin’s aid again when the airlift threatened to collapse after thick fog grounded all flights for five days, but the Anglo-American pilots risked their own lives to keep the air bridge open, and resumed their flights in treacherous conditions. In the year-long blockade, thirty-nine Brits, thirty-one Americans and eight Germans lost their lives to keep the air bridge open, delivering 2.1 million tons of supplies in over 277,000 flights. The blockade ended on 12th May 1949.(30)
The ‘Berlin Crisis’ was the starting gun for the Cold War, which tore what remained of Germany apart, with the establishment of two German satellite states. The Western Allies founded the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) on 23rd May 1949. The Soviets followed suit, establishing the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) on 7th October 1949. The Korean War exploded a year later. The Berlin Crisis was also a prequel to the Cuban Missile Crisis, in that the US refused to blink first. At a time when only the US had the atomic bomb, four B29 long-range bombers were flown to England, to show the Soviets they meant business.(31)
The Berlin Airlift changed the political landscape of the post-war era; it ended the punitive policies of the Western Allies following the war, and marked the end of the war against the German people and the beginning of a new Cold War against the Russians. The Germans were no longer the enemy; initially they became pawns, and then became allies, in a new war to stop the spread of communism in Berlin, Germany and across the globe.
CONCLUSIONS
As I indicated in my preface I do not believe there is such a thing as objective history and I admire Norman Davies, who as one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians was honest enough to confess his ‘negative feelings about everything German…(and of) decades passing before the revulsion subsided.’ He is also noted as saying, ‘I do not think it possible for apolitical historians to write apolitical studies… and I agree that complete objectivity is unattainable.’(1)
I tend increasingly toward the view of the philosopher Karl Popper who argued that there is no such thing as history, only historical interpretation, not least as each generation re-evaluates its view of the past.
In the clamour to rewrite Germany’s history anew after the Second World War, the victorious powers each found different ways to explain the great catastrophe of the twentieth century, but all of them ensured that the ‘defective character of the Germans’ remained at the core of their historical worldview. There has always been a contradiction at the heart of this view, that the Germans have a ‘defective gene’. They cannot be both the eternal barbarians at the gates, whilst at the same time remaining a ‘non-historic people’. The first view demeans them as lesser human beings; the second belittles them as a people and denies their historical ancestry. Both views are opposite sides of the same coin and just examples of Vansittartian (anti-German) prejudice dressed up in different forms.
The collective punishment meted out to German civilians during and after the Second World War has been described in detail here, but this should also be read as a testament to man’s continued inhumanity to man; an example of how war allows ordinary people to become desensitised to violence, and to dehumanise their enemies, thereby opening the door to previously unthinkable atrocities; an example of how propaganda can be used to manipulate the public’s emotions into hating their so-called enemies, people they have never met and who, for the most part, have committed no grievance against them.cclxxxix Dehumanising your enemies makes it easier to kill them. The Nazis dehumanised Jews and Slavs, and the view among many soldiers of the Red Army, after years of Soviet military propaganda, was that a crime is not a crime if it is committed against a German. But we fool ourselves if we choose to believe that these attitudes remain the exclusive preserve of the Nazis and Soviets.
For every German soldier killed by Anglo-American forces, three German civilians were killed in the bombing and hail of firestorms caused by Bomber Harris’s ‘manic attacks on German cities’.ccxc (4) Western fighter pilots were not averse to attacking fleeing refugee ships, once their reach and the lack of a German air force allowed for it, or even terrorising German civilians queuing for bread in towns and villages across Germany.ccxci French North African colonial troops raped and murdered their way along the Italian peninsula and into Germany.(5) New Zealanders massacred medical staff and wounded men, and took their victims’ ears as trophies of war in the North African campaign, in what is otherwise still regarded as the most chivalrous of all the campaigns of the Second World War.(6) A recent television documentary on British war heroes who had been awarded the Victoria Cross conspicuously failed to mention the British submariner who, ‘systematically machine-gunned German survivors after sinking their ships in the Mediterranean in 1941. Any captured Nazi U-boat commander would have been executed in 1945 for such an action. Miers by contrast, received the VC and became an admiral.’(7)
When exactly the Second World War started and ended depends largely on where you lived. If you were living in western Poland, it began on 1st September 1939, which is when it also formally began for Britain and France, although in practice the war in Western Europe did not begin until May 1940. If you lived in eastern Poland, it began on 17th September 1939, with the Soviet invasion. For the Russians it began on 22nd June 1941, with Operation Barbarossa and Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and for the US it started on 7th December 1941, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. The starting point of the conflicts that collectively came to be called the Second World War did not have a single start date; nor did they have one end date.
For many in the areas either liberated or occupied by the Anglo
-Americans it ended on 8th May 1945 but for those unfortunate souls who ended up in the territories reannexed by Czechoslovakia, their torment only began on 8th May 1945. For those Germans living in their eastern German homelands that became part of the area of ‘Polish administration’ (read ‘annexed territories’), their hell began in January 1945 and for many of them did not end, if they survived at all, until the last of them were ethnically cleansed out of these territories in 1951. German POWs and civilians who were deported to the Soviet Union, of those that survived, endured their torture until the mid 1950s, with the last official batch returning in 1956. For those autochthons who took the Polish Option or ‘Crusader’s choice’ (to become Poles or die), the psychological torment of having to survive in their homelands while estranged from their own language and culture continued to the 1990s, if not to this day.ccxcii
Nevertheless, we choose to commemorate 8th May as the day the world was liberated from Nazi tyranny. In Russia, it is celebrated during the May Day parades in Red Square. In France, it is also celebrated with a national holiday and the town halls are decked out with the Tricolore and symbols of liberation, even in Alsace. There are those in Germany who have come to recognise 8th May as the day of liberation from Hitler’s tyranny, but most of those who lived through that ‘liberation’ would at best recall a sense of relief that the fighting war had officially ended. For the Germans, whether you were for Hitler or against him, the destruction of Germany, the humiliation of defeat and occupation were not emotions that were easily reconciled with a feeling of liberation. It is not a day that is celebrated in Germany because relief and tragedy went hand-in-hand on 8th May and in the months, and years, that followed.ccxciii
The punishment meted out to German civilians remained a taboo subject for over sixty years and still remains so for many today; it is still hard to find an audience that is empathic towards the suffering of German civilians. Only in the last decade have the last victims of the Second World War begun to be heard. Of course, no sympathy is due to those who led Germany to war, or who committed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity in the history of mankind, but empathy is due to those tens of millions of German civilians who never supported Hitler, including those who risked and gave their lives in opposition to Hitler’s regime; all the more so, because they received no support or encouragement from the Allies, only the promise of slavery and the insistence upon unconditional surrender. What must be reclaimed for their sakes is a more honest and accurate chronology of the Second World War, which lists both the crimes of the Nazi regime and the Allies’ responses to them; it is no longer acceptable to excuse all Allied ‘excesses’ with the simplistic and all too easy argument that the Germans started the war and therefore all consequences that flowed from it they brought on themselves; not least because the majority of Germans never voted for Hitler.
Death of a Nation Page 75
