After the Reich Read online

  Of course the real reason why the Allies imposed the idea of collective guilt was that it was a useful way of depriving the Germans of rights and national sovereignty. Once their guilt was assumed, they could be punished. They were to be at the mercy of the Allies until their conquerors had decided what to do with them, and in the meantime they could not protest about their treatment.

  Then there is the issue of tit-for-tat. The Anglo-Americans wisely fought shy of exacting reparations because they realised that they would then have to pay to feed the Germans; and that if they left the Germans an industrial base they might be able to feed themselves. The tit-for-tat school of retribution and revenge goes back a long, long way. Historically minded Germans might blame the French for the Thirty Years War (which caused bloodshed on a similar scale to the Great War) or for the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV. More might recall the Napoleonic invasion of Germany and the occupation of Prussia. Bismarck was famously intractable in 1871 when the French demanded mercy, saying there was not a tree in his country that did not bear the scars of the French years. Then the jackboot was on the other foot. On each occasion there were territorial cessions and crippling reparations to pay. Someone needed to cry halt. But the business surfaced again at Versailles in 1919, and there was the same punitive peace. After the Second World War most wise men understood that a peace treaty would have been a farce. It was left to what Churchill called ‘our consciences to civilisation’ to determine how the enemy was to be treated.

  Post-war Germany is a problem that has taxed me for years and it is hard to know now who has helped me with this particular book. Some, perhaps many of them, are already dead. Some names stand out in my mind, others were often nameless people I met on my travels, and who unburdened themselves over a late-night drink, or a second glass at lunchtime.

  In London my friends Karl-Heinz and Angela Bohrer have been constant in their encouragement over the years. Karl-Heinz was kind enough to give me an extensive interview on his childhood in post-war Germany. Angela long ago gave me a copy of her mother Charlotte von der Schulenburg’s privately printed memoirs. I also learned much from the writings of her aunt, Tisa von der Schulenburg, and from my meetings with her. My neighbour in Kentish Town Nick Jacobs, owner of the German-specialist publisher Libris, was kind enough to lend books and copy interesting articles. In Oxford I thank Sudhir Hazareesingh; Robert Gildea for providing me with some suggestions for reading on the French occupation of Germany; and Blair Worden for explaining the role of Hugh Trevor-Roper.

  Germany provides me with many memories and much assistance, from my friend Ursula Heinzelmann in Berlin; Gertrud Loewe; Eva Raps in Wiesbaden; and in the wine country growers told me of their experiences of the immediate post-war years. The late Prince Franz von Sayn-Wittgenstein in Munich sent me his privately printed memoirs; Daria Fürstin von Thurn und Taxis the unpublished memoirs of her uncle Willy; and Christiane von Maasburg gave me permission to quote from the Magisterarbeit she wrote on Nikolaus von Maasburg. A kind lady in Hildesheim recounted harrowing details of the trek she undertook from Pomerania as a child of six; the retired border guard Captain Schmidt in Coburg told me no less moving stories of his childhood in Silesia; an anonymous man in Malbork, Poland, briefly informed me of how he evaded the Polish authorities after the war; an ethnic German woman in Opolne offered to pray for me, if I gave her ten marks; a former Danzig policeman I met in Titisee-Neustadt told me about his time in an American camp in Passau, surrounded by members of the French Division Charlemagne.

  In Vienna, enormous thanks are due above all to my friends Christopher Wentworth-Stanley and Sebastian Cody. Christopher found me literature on post-war Austria and read a part of the manuscript, as did Ambassador Erwin Matsch. Sebastian was kind enough to read and comment on a number of chapters. Johannes Popper von Podhragy sent me articles from his late father’s archive. Dr Wolfgang Mueller provided me with much help and a useful book list. On Lake Bled, Janez Fajfar showed me the wonderful mural in the hotel he has run for decades in the palace where Tito and Stalin fell out in 1947. In Prague I was counselled by Dr Anna Bryson and in Sofia by my old friend Professor Evgeni Dainov.

  I am also grateful to all those who helped locate or donated pictures: John Aycoth in Washington, Sebastian Cody and Christopher Wentworth-Stanley in Vienna, Lady Antonia Fraser, Livia Gollancz and Dennis Sewell in London, Manfred Pranghofer and Rudi Müller of the Oberhaus Museum in Passau, Bob McCreery, Klaus Mohr of the Sudetendeutsches Archiv in Munich, Bengt von zur Mühlen of Chronos Films in Berlin, Eva Reinhold-Weisz of Böhlau Verlag in Vienna, Elisabeth Ruge of the Berlin Verlag in Berlin, Thomas Urban of the Herder Institut in Marburg, Mrs C. Skinner at Eton College, Manfred Grieger and Ulrike Gutzmann at Volkswagen in Vienna.

  My thanks are due to the staffs of the British Library and the German Historical Institute. At John Murray I am grateful to my editor Roland Philipps, to Caro Westmore and Rowan Yapp, to Douglas Matthews, for making me yet another exemplary index; and to Peter James, whose demanding questions sent me back to my books over and over again.

  I would also like to thank my family for their patience, especially in the last days when my body was over-charged with adrenalin and I was able to think and talk of little else.

  Giles MacDonogh

  London, October 2006

  Chronology

  February 1945 Yalta Conference

  30 March 1945 Danzig falls

  8 April 1945 The Red Army enters Vienna

  9 April 1945 Königsberg falls

  13 April 1945 Vienna capitulates

  2 May 1945 Berlin falls

  6 May 1945 Breslau capitulates

  7 May 1945 Germany surrenders

  23 May 1945 The Dönitz government is arrested

  5 June 1945 Germany is divided into zones

  9 July 1945 Austrian zones finalised

  17 July-2 August 1945 Potsdam Conference

  22 July 1945 Western Allies move into Vienna

  30 July 1945 First meeting of the Allied Control Council

  15 August 1945 The end of the Second World War

  September 1945 London CFM (Conference of Foreign Ministers)

  25 November 1945 Austrian general election

  December 1945 Moscow CFM

  5 March 1946 Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

  July 1946 Paris CFM

  September 1946 Paris Peace Conference

  6 September 1946 Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech

  22 October 1946 Berlin elections

  12 December 1946 New York CFM

  16 January 1947 London CFM

  25 February 1947 Prussia abolished by Control Council Law 46

  March 1947 Moscow CFM

  June 1947 Robert Schuman president of the council in France. Paris CFM. Marshall’s Harvard speech

  November 1947 London CFM

  6-7 December 1947 People’s Congress for Unity in East Berlin

  17 March 1948 Brussels Pact and Prague Coup

  17-18 March 1948 Second People’s Congress for Unity in East Berlin

  20 March 1948 Russians leave the Control Council

  31 March-2 April 1948 Little Berlin Blockade

  April to June 1948 London CFM

  7 June 1948 London Agreement

  17 June 1948 The Russians quit the Kommandatura

  24 June 1948 Motorway blocked to Berlin

  25 June 1948 Introduction of the D-mark

  1 July 1948 Berlin cut off from the West

  27 July 1948 London CFM agrees to create a West German state

  9 September 1948 Reichstag demonstration in Berlin

  11-12 May 1949 Traffic resumed to Berlin

  Introduction

  In the years 1945 to 1946 Germany was a collection of denouncers, black-marketeers, prisoners, refugees from justice and tireless whingers. The Allies announced that the Germans needed to be handled with a rod of iron. It was pure nonsense.

  Franz Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge durch die Landschaften mein
es Lebens, privately printed, Munich 2000, 166

  The war had been the bloodiest yet, particularly for civilians. Laying aside some three million dead German soldiers, by 7 May 1945 at least 1.8 million German civilians had perished and 3.6 million homes had been destroyed (20 per cent of the total), leaving 7.5 million homeless; and the bloodshed was going to continue for a lot longer. As many as 16.5 million Germans were to be driven from their homes. Of these some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east.1a

  It was called die Stunde null (Zero Hour), though it was nothing of the kind. Germany was wrecked from top to bottom, but memories were still acute, the country had a past, and a large body of people who had supported the ancien régime needed to be assessed and rendered harmless. As it was, like Weimar, many of them were carried over into the new post-Nazi world.2 There were simply too many of them, and most had lost their faith in Hitler when his armies were defeated at Stalingrad.

  In May 1945 National Socialism was as good as dead. Apart from a few desperate ideologists, as anxious to save their skins as defend their creed, the vast majority of Germans had already come to the conclusion that it had been founded on a terrible fallacy. Defeat was one thing, but, as the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer pointed out a few years after the end of the conflict, Germans - even those in the Hitler Youth and the Waffen-SS - were already conscious of the country’s ‘moral bankruptcy’. The defeated Germans surprised their conquerors by their docility. They offered next to no resistance to them. They did what they were told. Of the promised Werewolves - Nazi guerrillas trained to fight in occupied territory - there was virtually no sign.

  To some extent Germans believed the Allied propaganda: the Russians, the Americans, the British and the French had come to ‘liberate’ them. The Allies may have freed the Germans of their National Socialist shackles, but they did a lot of other things to them first. The novelist and psychiatrist Alfred Döblin records a conversation he had with a well-brought-up girl in the Black Forest. ‘We received the Allies with so much joy’, she told Döblin, ‘as liberators. And in the first week everything made us happy. The Allies were so lucky with us. Then they started requisitioning rooms, hotels, flats; we could take nothing with us. That took the wind out of our sails.’ Döblin told her that the war wasn’t over yet. She asked him when it would be concluded. He said: ‘When the ruins are knocked down and the rubble cleared away, and when new houses have been built where everyone can have a home and they can come out of their shelters and sheds. When the economy has taken off once more, when politics are stable again. Fräulein E., you are young. You will live to see the peace. Later, when you look back on the present time, you will be astonished that you were young enough to believe that it was peace.’3

  For some Germans defeat was what they were waiting for: it fulfilled their most eager hopes. In his dark first novel, Kreuz ohne Liebe, written in the years immediately following German defeat, Heinrich Böll explores the feelings of an anti-Nazi who has been fighting in the army from day one. Christoph Bachem’s brother has been shot. He is a Nazi who repents in the end and saves Christoph’s life. Christoph’s best friend has spent the war in a concentration camp, a victim of the same brother. Christoph enjoys a brief sojourn with his wife, Cornelia, before losing her for good after deserting and fleeing to the west. He indulges his feelings of utter nihilism. ‘No,’ he said tiredly, ‘I want no more. It is horrible to have been a soldier in a war for six years and always to have had to wish that it would be lost; to see the collapse, and at the same time to know that whatever power succeeds it, and kicks the daylights out of the corpse of this state, will quite probably be equally diabolic; the devil possesses all the power in this world, and a change of power is only a change of rank among devils, that I believe for certain.’b Bachem has no faith in the Allies either. As he tells Cornelia,

  Do you believe, then, that these people who are about to conquer us with their rubber soles and tins of Spam, will ever understand what we have suffered? Do you believe they will understand what it feels like to be showered with their bombs and shells and at the same time to be sullied by this diabolic state; what it means to be crushed between these two mill-stones? They simply cannot have suffered as much as us, and since Christ’s death there has been a hierarchy of suffering in which we will remain the victors, without the world ever learning or understanding what it was we felt.4

  The Allies may have chosen to style themselves as ‘liberators’ but they came in hate. In the cases of the Russians, French, Poles and Czechs, this was understandable. To be occupied is to be violated, even when it is not coupled with regular atrocities. The atrocities committed by the SS and the Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia were horrendous, and they were not lacking in France and Czechoslovakia either. It is hardly surprising that there were acts of revenge. Any SS man found in the east was liable to be subjected to the most fabulous torture and death. Such things we may understand, but surely never condone.

  As the Soviets chose to introduce their own brand of ideology along the way, controlled ‘revolutions’ were carried out too, by the ‘Lublin’ Poles (those patronised by Moscow rather than the West) and the Czechs. The middle and upper classes were ruthlessly dispossessed. Their homes were sequestered, while they themselves were imprisoned, tortured and in many cases killed. In the Prussian east the old, Junker squirearchy was wiped out without mercy.

  The French worked the hatred out of their systems in a few acts of grisly violence. Demonstrations of gross brutality were comparatively rare in the British army. For a few years Germany became another colony, dealing with the Germans a burden placed on the Christian white man. It was like India all over again. The Americans, however, saw it differently: although both the British and the Americans used films and photographs of the camps to encourage their soldiers to be hard-hearted and to chastise Germans, it seems to have had more effect on American GIs, who took their brief that much more seriously - that is, until the politicians decided the German people were to be wooed. There was a PR war to win now, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union.

  With the exception of the death camps in Poland, which had already been closed and blown up by the Germans, all the most infamous concentration camps together with work camps were put back to use by the Allies: Auschwitz-Birkenau,5 Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald for the Russians; Dachau for the Americans and Bergen-Belsen for the British, not to mention the grisly Ebensee in the Salzkammergut, where the Americans kept 44,000 SS men. This strikes us as disgusting now, but there were obvious logistical reasons for using them, together with an understandable temptation to ‘rub the Germans’ noses in their own mess’. Central Europe was teeming with homeless DPs (displaced persons) who were in the process of resettlement after ethnic cleansing. Millions of POWs were also held in camps. In the east they were earmarked for work details and they needed to be housed. Some were to be allotted a more sinister fate. They too needed to be put in a secure place until their destiny was decided.

  While the fate of the Jews shocked the British and the Americans and - particularly in the case of the Americans - sharpened their attitudes towards the conquered nation, the Soviet authorities made little of it. The anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin, for example, was surprised: ‘no Russian has so far reproached me for the German persecution of the Jews’.6

  When the Allies invaded Germany in the first half of 1945, they came bearing war aims and plans. They had gone to war because they had been provoked by the Axis powers. Now the desire was to crush Germany and its allies. ‘Their effort to emerge victorious included neither an aim to destroy any segment of the German population nor a plan to save any part of Germany’s victims,’ one historian has written. ‘The post-war punishment of perpetrators was largely a consequence of afterthoughts. The liberation of the survivors was almost entirely a by-product of victory. The Allies could harmonise with their war effort all sorts of denunciations of the Germans, but there was no disposition to deviate from militar
y goals for the deliverance of the Jews. In that sense the destruction of the Jews presented itself as a problem with which the Allies could not effectively deal.’7

  The Allies needed to win first, before they could even think about how they would clear up the mess. The first war aim was to establish security, which the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had singularly failed to do. At first there were only the British. When Churchill came to power in 1940 ‘appeasement’ was already a dirty word. ‘Vansittartism’, which saw the Germans as a tribe of incorrigible louts from the time of Tacitus to the present day, had become the dominant thinking in governing circles. It was developed by the diplomat Lord Vansittart, who spent part of the war giving radio broadcasts which examined different Germans in turn, pointing out how nasty they all were. Vansittartism inspired historians to search archives for further evidence of the deep-seated evilness of the Germans. To some extent it is still alive today.8

  The first Vansittartite directive to emerge from Whitehall was ‘absolute silence’. Officially, at least, Her Majesty’s Government would not talk to Germans. With time ‘absolute silence’ gave way to ‘unconditional surrender’. There was to be no negotiated peace this time. The opposite school was that of the historian E. H. Carr, who thought that a civilised Germany was merely a question of finding the right man. In Britain’s first studies for a post-war Germany there was discussion of reparations: Germany would thereby be deprived of the means to make war. From the summer of 1943 the task of planning the occupation was handed over to Clement Attlee, who would become one of the ‘Big Three’ at the Potsdam Conference9 when the Conservatives lost the July 1945 election.