After the Reich Read online




  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART I - Chaos

  Chapter 1 - The Fall of Vienna

  Chapter 2 - Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe in 1945

  Liberation from the East

  Liberation from the West

  Disputed Areas

  Werewolves

  Illustrious Bones

  Chapter 3 - Berlin

  The Soviets in the Saddle

  Subsistence

  The Arrival of the Western Allies

  The Honeymoon is Over

  Autumn 1945

  Spring 1946

  Chapter 4 - Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia

  Beneš’s Return

  Revenge

  Prague

  Landskron

  Brno Death March

  Iglau and Kladno

  The American Zone

  Freudenthal, Freiwaldau and Bilin

  Brüx, Saaz, Komotau, Aussig and Tetschen

  Theresienstadt

  Pankrác

  Torture

  Expulsions

  Chapter 5 - Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the Prussian East

  Country Life

  Working for the Poles

  Rural Silesia

  Treks

  Transit Camps

  Home to the Reich

  PART II - Allied Zones

  Chapter 6 - Life in the Russian Zone

  Culture

  Chapter 7 - Life in the American Zone

  Political Life

  Culture

  Chapter 8 - Life in the British Zone

  British Military Government

  The Beginnings of West Germany in the British Zone

  Culture

  Chapter 9 - Life in the French Zone

  Culture

  Chapter 10 - Austria’s Zones and Sectors

  Vienna

  Feeding the Austrians

  German Assets

  Culture

  Soviet Zone

  British Zone

  Cossacks and Domobranci

  American Zone

  French Zone

  Chapter 11 - Life in All Four Zones

  Children

  Arts

  The Press

  Attitudes to 20 July

  Jews in Germany and Austria

  The Fate of Jewish DPs

  PART III - Crime and Punishment

  Chapter 12 - Guilt

  How Could We Have Known?

  Re-education through Propaganda

  The Fragebogen and Denazification

  Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork

  Punishment by Starvation

  Fringsen

  Frat

  Chapter 13 - Black Market

  Cigarettes and CARE Packets

  Chapter 14 - Light Fingers

  Chapter 15 - Where are our Men?

  The Status of German POWs

  The American Camps

  British Camps

  The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian Civilians in Germany

  The French Camps

  Belgium

  The Russian Camps.

  Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia

  The Return of the Warrior

  Chapter 16 - The Trials

  Interrogations

  Prison Walls

  The Trials

  Chapter 17 - The Little Fish

  Lesser Nuremberg Trials

  Elsewhere

  The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis

  PART IV - The Road to Freedom

  Chapter 18 - Peacemaking in Potsdam

  First Contacts between East and West

  Chapter 19 - The Great Freeze

  The New Ideologists

  The South Tyrol

  The Russians Come into the Cold

  The Great Freeze

  Bizonia

  A Thaw in the Weather

  Nacht und Nebel

  A Solution in the East

  Chapter 20 - The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic Recovery

  Currency Reform

  Crisis in Berlin

  Airlift

  Austria

  The Federal Republic

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR AFTER THE REICH

  “In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh, a British author of several books about German history, chronicles the final weeks of the war and the occupation that followed. His ambitious mission: to offer a comprehensive, unsparing account of what happened to the German people when the tables were turned. MacDonogh works to assemble a massive indictment of the victors, and his array of detail and individual stories is both impressive and exhausting.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “In his meticulously researched book After the Reich, British-born Giles MacDonogh, an expert in German history, offers a different view of this ‘noble’ war’s aftermath. With unsparing detail and ample documentation, he chronicles the events after the victory in Europe in May 1945 to the Berlin airlift four years later, and exposes the slippery slope of the moral high ground many of us believed the Allies possessed during those years. . . . One cannot read After the Reich without thinking of the phrase ‘winning the war but losing the peace’ as the book draws a line from the occupation directly to the division of Berlin and the Cold War that gripped much of the world and informed foreign relations for the next 60 years. Scars across Europe from the post-World War II era remain, and MacDonogh has picked the scab at a time of modern war and occupation when, perhaps, the world most needs to examine an old wound.”

  —Boston Globe

  “VE Day on May 8, 1945 mocked the subsequent condition of Europe. As crowds in London, Paris, and New York celebrated the declaration of peace, much more misery and death lay ahead. Two, perhaps three million Germans perished in the years that followed: in captivity; from hunger and casual violence; and above all, during the expulsions of ethnic Germans from the east, [on] which the western Allies had agreed with the Russians before hostilities ended. Giles MacDonogh’s book chronicles this saga from the liberation of Vienna to the 1948 Berlin airlift and 1949 formation of Konrad Adenauer’s government in Bonn. It makes grimmer reading than most war stories, because there is little redemptive courage or virtue. Here is a catalogue of pillage, rape, starvation, inhumanity, and suffering on a titanic scale. . . . The book brings together many stories that deserve to be much better known in the West.”

  —MAX HASTINGS, Sunday Times (London)

  “Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich is important and timely. He has a profound understanding of Germany, which he communicates in a humane and engaging style. Though he is sensitive to the sufferings of the Germans after the war, he never loses sight of the fact that this was an occupation that the Western powers got right. After the Reich is a remarkable book, with a rich cast of characters, and it has oblique relevance to our own problems in the wider world.”

  —MICHAEL BURLEIGH, author of The Third Reich: A New History and Sacred Causes

  “Mr. MacDonogh has given readers the history of an era all too often ignored.”

  —Contemporary Review

  “The bitter experiences of a defeated Germany have often been forgotten. MacDonogh’s book, drawing heavily on the often moving testimony of those who lived through them, brings them brilliantly into the light.”

  —Sunday Times

  “Unique and important.”

  —Guardian

  “Mass deportation
s, murder, and brutalization of helpless noncombatants—these are the crimes one readily associates with Hitler’s minions as they ravaged their way across Europe. But MacDonogh, a journalist with particular expertise in German history, convincingly illustrates that this was the fate of millions of German-speaking civilians in the period from the fall of Vienna to the Soviets to the Berlin airlift. . . . Given the horrors visited upon Europe by the Nazis, one might be tempted to consider these atrocities as just retribution. However, MacDonogh’s eloquent account of the suffering of these people is, one hopes, able to evoke strong feelings of both revulsion and compassion from most readers.”

  —ALA Booklist

  “This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of value. . . . The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied victory.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here historian MacDonogh examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of defeated Germany. . . . Of interest to students of modern Europe, complementing W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) and other studies of history from the point of view of the vanquished.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  For Joseph Maximilian Cornelius MacDonogh

  born 8 December 2002

  Absumet heres Caecuba dignior

  servata centum clavibus et mero

  tinget pavimentum superbo,

  pontificum potiore cenis.

  The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Plates 1, 2, 8, 21, 22 and 29, Herder-Institut Marburg, Bildarchiv; 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 15, Sudetendeutsches Archiv; 11, 12, 13 and 14, Oberhausmuseum, Passau; 19, Sebastian Cody; 23, 24 and 26, Private Collection; 25, Provost and Fellows of Eton College; 27, Bob McCreery; 28, Dennis Sewell; 29, Volkswagen AG; 30, akg-images/Tony Vaccaro. Plates 9 and 10 are from the author’s collection; plates 16, 17 and 18 are taken from Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch 1944/1945, edited by Eva-Marie Csáky, Franz Matscher and Gerald Stourzh, and reproduced with permission. Every effort has been made to clear permissions. If permission has not been granted please contact the publisher who will include a credit in subsequent printings and editions.

  Preface

  This book is about the experience of the Germans in defeat. It is about the occupation imposed on them following the criminal campaigns of Adolf Hitler. To some extent it is a study in resignation, their acceptance of any form of indignity in the knowledge of the great wrongs perpetrated by the National Socialist state. Not all of these Germans were involved in these crimes, by any means, but with few exceptions they recognised that their suffering was an inevitable result of them. I make no excuses for the crimes the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible desire for revenge that they aroused.

  I have tried as much as possible to use individual accounts to give the flavour of the time. Many of these are by women. There is an obvious reason for this: there were not many men left. Those who survived did so in a variety of places, from internment camps to Soviet mines. The subject is so vast that I have had to use a broad brush. Some elements are immensely well covered, such as the American Zone and the beginnings of the Cold War. It was the start of the American century and the end of isolation, after all. Other parts of the story are hardly told: the French occupation, for example. Because I wished to give the tenor of everyday life at the time, I have divided the book into four parts: the first looks at the chaos that followed the end of the war within the lands that were then Germany, and the punitive stance of the Allies; the second looks at the day-to-day existence of the Germans and Austrians; the third examines crime and punishment; and the fourth introduces the chronology and records the major political developments from Potsdam to the foundation of the two German republics. The Austrian State Treaty lies outside the scope of this book, as it did not occur until 1955.

  My ‘Germans’ are the German-speaking peoples as they are massed in central Europe. I have therefore included Austria, which called itself ‘German Austria’ until it was annexed in 1938, and subsequently became part of the Greater German Reich. I mention the South Tyrol in Italy, because Austrians saw that as part of their lands, as well as other satellites in Yugoslavia, for instance. I have also examined the plight of the so-called ‘ethnic’ Germans who were expelled, mostly from Czechoslovakia, but also from Hungary and Romania. Elsewhere ‘Germany’ is defined by its 1937 borders, and I have referred to towns and villages by the names Germans would have known. Where possible I have included the Polish or Czech names too.

  Although it was my first intention to study the German-speaking peoples as they suffered their chastisements on the ground, I soon realised that it was impossible to make any sense of what was happening without reference to what was taking place on Mount Olympus: the Allied command HQs and the political forces behind them. I had to travel de haut en bas and vice versa - to examine the effect of the occupation on the Germans, but also to look upstairs at what the Olympians were doing, and see what they had in store. On the other hand I have always tried to focus on Germans, not on the Allies.

  The book is the fruit of my long acquaintance with both Germany and Austria. My interest began during a short stay in Cologne in my mid-teens and a meeting with one of the two modern German novelists whose writings have most coloured this book. I was a guest of the Böll family and one afternoon the later Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll came to tea. He introduced me to Underberg, the viciously powerful bitters, and I can still feel the wave of fire travelling up from my stomach to my cheeks. We argued about Irish Republicanism, which he favoured. It wasn’t until much later that I began to respect his books, and admire the picture of the returned soldier in those early stories and novels.

  I met Ernst Jünger many years later, through my friend the eccentric hotelier Andreas Kleber, who was then still in possession of his family hotel, the Kleber Post in Saulgau in Württemberg (incidentally one of the first venues for the writers’ group Gruppe 47). One night I had dinner with Jünger there and the two of us spoke to ZDF television about the meaning of Prussia. Jünger was a writer from the generation before Böll, but outlived the younger man by decades. He was a mere ninety-seven when I met him and had another six years to live. Again conversation turned to drink: the bottle of Pommard he consumed with his wife every night (he had two-thirds of it, he confessed), and his real love - Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  He became more serious when he complained that he could not wear his Pour le Mérite medal, which he had won in the Great War, when he had been left for dead on the field of battle. He was, I think, the last surviving military holder of the medal. The Allies had swiftly banned the wearing of decorations, and the Federal Republic has followed suit. War could not be officially celebrated, and that went for acts of heroism too. I recalled the First World War memorial in the little park in Berlin-Friedenau where I had stayed with friends. The inscription had been chipped off: in Germany such things were taboo, while in Britain war memorials were still placed at the focal point of any town or hamlet. In Germany there were no more heroes. The Germans had lost the right to them.

  Friends of mine, even published historians, have often told me that the Germans ‘deserved what they got’ in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behaviour in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers; and that
when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.

  It is true that some of the old men and a lot of the women had voted for Hitler, but it should be recalled once again that he never achieved more than 37.4 per cent of the vote in a free election, and in the last one he was down to 33.1 per cent.1 That meant that, even at his most popular, 62.6 per cent of the German electorate were unmoved by his programme. Of course, at that point it did not propose the slaughter of the European Jews (he never made any public statement on this subject other than dark allusions that have become easier to read in retrospect); nor did it mention his desire to confront Soviet Russia and enslave the Slavs; nor did it hint that he would eventually bring the roof down on the German house and kill a large number of its inmates. It is possible that he might have secured more votes that way, but I think not. To make all Germans responsible for the relatively docile Hitler of 1933 is to apply the Allied weapon of collective guilt. Collective guilt makes them all responsible: women, old men and children, even newborn babies - they were German and they could also be slaughtered or starved to death. Indeed, the Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg exhorted the Red Army not to save ‘the child in its mother’s womb’.2

  There were many Russians, Poles and Czechs who were not ashamed to feel that way in the heady days of liberation. Some of them were as young as fifteen at the time they joined ad hoc police squads and they may still be alive today and healthy; but I think few of them would now own up to the acts of terrible violence they committed.

  If children are included in collective guilt, this could be accepted on the basis that they were going to grow up to be Germans and therefore possibly Nazis. Then, of course, we need to determine at what age a child becomes a German, and can be blamed for the crimes of his country. It is clearly not twenty-one (when many are already in the army), or eighteen (when they were likely to have been called up, and were often among the bravest and most ruthless fighters), or sixteen (when they had already been drafted into anti-aircraft units or, like Günter Grass, about to be forced into the SS), or indeed younger (Hitler Youth boys as young as twelve distinguished themselves in the Battle of Berlin). Maybe in an indoctrinated society a cut-off point for guilt needs to be imposed at seven, and, if so, a date needs to be fixed when the child had attained that age. Was it 1933 or 1945 (twelve years after the last free election)?