After the Reich (104 page)

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 intense 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.

3
Alfred Döblin,
Schicksalsreise
,
Bericht und Bekenntnisse
, Frankfurt/Main 1949, 420-2.

4
Heinrich Böll,
Kreuz ohne Liebe
, Cologne 2003, 285-6.

5
Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork,
Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present
, New Haven and London 1996, 10.

6
Anonymous,
A Woman in Berlin
, introduced by C. W. Ceram and translated by James Stern, London 1965, 139.

7
Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
, 3rd edn, London and New Haven 2003, III, 1138.

8
David Blackbourn’s
The Conquest of Nature
, London 2005, sees early Nazi tendencies in the desire to control Germany’s waterways.

9
Michael Balfour and John Mair,
Four Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945-1946
, Oxford 1956, 28.

10
Ibid., 15.

11
Eugene Davidson,
The Death and Life of Germany - An Account of the American Occupation
, 2nd edn, Columbia, Miss. 1999, 6-7. Davidson possibly means Adam von Trott, who arrived in America in September 1939 - see Giles MacDonogh,
A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz
, revised edn, London 1994, 307-19. It was Roosevelt who told J. Edgar Hoover to have him closely followed: the president considered Trott a threat to national security.

12
Curtis F. Morgan, Jnr,
James F. Byrnes, Lucius Clay, and American Policy in Germany, 1945-1947
, Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter 2002, 2, 5.

13
Henric Wuermeling,
Doppelspiel: Adam von Trott zu Solz im Widerstand gegen Hitler
, Munich 2004, 142-4.

14
Davidson,
Death and Life
, 5; Balfour and Mair,
Four Power Control
, 34.

15
Balfour and Mair,
Four Power Control
, 30-1, 36.

16
Ibid., 34; Paul W. Gulgowski, ‘The American Military Government of United States Occupied Zones of Post World War II Germany in Relation to Policies Expressed by its Civilian Governmental Authorities at Home, During the Course of 1944/1945 through 1949’ (doctoral dissertation, Frankfurt University) Frankfurt/Main 1983, 22.

17
Balfour and Mair,
Four Power Control
, 18.

18
Morgan,
Byrnes, Clay
, 8-9.

19
Ibid., 7.

20
Ibid., 15.

21
Hermann Graml,
Die Alliierten und die Teilung Deutschlands. Konflikte und Entscheidungen 1941-1948
, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 27, 60.

22
Morgan,
Byrnes, Clay
, 41; Graml,
Teilung Deutschlands
, 53, 56.

23
Norman M. Naimark,
The Russians in Germany - A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949
, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1995, 9; Morgan,
Byrnes, Clay
, 52-3.

24
Naimark,
Russians in Germany
, 76.

25
John W. Young,
France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance, 1944-49: French Foreign Policy and Post-War Europe
, Leicester and London 1990, 9.

26
Vojtech Mastny,
The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity
, New York and Oxford 1996, 17.

27
Ibid., 19.

28
Oliver Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente in die “unendliche Geschichte” von den Sowjetische Absichte in Österreich’, in Ableitinger et al.,
Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung
, 139-42, passim.

29
Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘France 1945: L’Ambition allemande et ses moyens’, in Klaus Manfrass and Jean-Pierre Rioux, eds,
France-Allemagne 1944-1947
, Les Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, December 1989-January 1990/Akten des deutsch-französisch Historikerkolloquiums, Baden-Baden, 2-5 December 1986, 37.

30
Ibid., 15.

31
Ibid., 25.

32
Ibid., 40.

33
Ibid., 26.

34
Ibid., 28.

35
James F. Byrnes,
Speaking Frankly
, London 1947, 25.

36
Rioux, ‘France 1945’, 40-1.

37
Ibid., 49.

38
Ibid., 50-1.

39
Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ‘Der Weg nach Potsdam - Die Alliierten und die Vertreibung’, in Wolfgang Benz, ed.,
Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten. Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folgen
, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 51-2, 55-6.

40
Andreas Lawaty,
Das Ende Preussens in polnischer Sicht. Zur kontinuität negativer Wirkungen der preussischen Geschichte auf die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen
, Berlin and New York 1986, 56-7.

41
Ibid., 100.

42
Byrnes,
Speaking Frankly
, 29-30.

43
Detlef Brandes, ‘Die Exilpolitik von Edvard Beneš 1939-1945’, in Arnold Suppan and Elisabeth Vyslonzil, eds,
Edvard Beneš und die tschechoslowakische Aussenpolitik 1918-1948
, 2nd edn, Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford and Vienna 2003, 159.

44
Ibid., 160.

45
Ibid., 161.

46
Manfred Rauchensteiner,
Stalinplatz 4: Österreich unter alliieter Besatzung
, Vienna 2005, 7-8.

47
Quoted in General Béthouart,
La Bataille pour l’Autriche
, Paris 1966, 15.

48
Quoted in ibid., 16.

49
Ibid., 10.

50
Otto von Habsburg,
Ein Kampf um Österreich 1938-1945
, Aufgezeichnet von Gerhard Tötschinger, Vienna and Munich 2001, 26, 69.

51
Rauchensteiner,
Stalinplatz 4
, 14.

52
Ibid., 12.

53
Charmian Brinson, ‘Ein “Sehr Ambitioniertes Projekt” - Die Anfänge des Austrian Centre’, in Marietta Bearman et al.,
Wien-London, hin und retour: Das Austrian Centre in London 1939 bis 1947
, Vienna 2004, 15.

54
Marietta Bearman, ‘Das kommende Österreich. Die Planung für ein Nachkriegs-Österreich’, in Bearman et al.,
Wien-London
, 222.

55
Ibid., 207.

56
Ibid., 212

57
Ibid., 207-8.

58
See Helene Maimann,
Politik im Wartesaal
, Vienna, Cologne and Graz 1975 and F. C. West,
Zurück oder nicht zurück?
, London 1942.

59
Brinson, ‘Ein “Sehr Ambitioniertes Projekt”, 22-3.