After the Reich (50 page)

In the winter of 1946-7, Karl-Heinz was taken to the cinema for the first time by his Irish grandfather. He saw Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V
in English, with German subtitles. He cried with happiness at the end, and had to be taken three times. He fell in love with the English language, which became an important factor in coming to terms with occupation. Looking back on the time he felt that the British pursued a sensitive but unflashy cultural policy in their zone.
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For him, growing up in the west, a new orthodoxy was developing. Intellectually the period was informed by Jaspers, Habermas (‘German history starts at Auschwitz’) and Professor Heimpel of Göttingen. Hartwig von Hentig and Georg Picht proved influential pedagogues. Education was much discussed and the writings of Schiller invoked. Germans were not to get into the same mess again. The Nazis were temporarily cleared out of the universities, but those establishments remained otherwise unchanged until 1968. For him the outstanding political figure of the time was Carlo Schmid. What was to become West Germany sought to identify with the West.

The Beginnings of West Germany in the British Zone

In the Rhineland the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, had been forced into retirement by Hitler’s men. He went on prolonged gardening leave, and resisted all attempts to become involved. He was suspicious of the July Plot against Hitler, but was imprisoned all the same. The Nazis had known what they were doing in the last months of the war. They executed some 5,000 people who might have created the cadre for a post-Hitlerian Germany. Very few of those killed had any direct involvement with the July Plotters. The bloodbath was intended to create a political vacuum.

Cologne’s proximity to France meant that Adenauer was liberated rather earlier than any politician in Berlin. American tanks were seen in his home village of Rhöndorf as early as 15 March 1945. The following day two American officers arrived at Adenauer’s door to ask him to resume the office of mayor of Cologne. To their surprise he refused: he had three sons away at war, and he feared reprisals. He must have been aware of what had happened to the mayor of Aachen (he had been murdered). In his heart of hearts, however, he might have already been eyeing up a bigger job: that of post-war German leader.
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Adenauer was put under some pressure to change his mind. One who wanted him to take up the offer was Josef Frings, the German primate and archbishop of Cologne. He was interested in the idea of rebuilding the city, the medieval core of which had been smashed by the 1,000-bomber raid. The ever-cautious Adenauer agreed to run Cologne once hostilities were over, and he took up his old job on 3 May. In his earliest statements he was already seeking to make Prussia the scapegoat for the failure of German democracy, even if it had been as a Prussian that he had been elected mayor of Cologne and a member of the Herrenhaus (or House of Lords) in 1917.

He was flattered that the Americans appeared to hold him in such high esteem and had placed him at the top of their ‘white list’, although - as a recent biographer has pointed out - this might have had something to do with the fact that his name began with A.
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After a while, the Americans lost their glamour in his eyes: he found them childish and was relieved when authority in the region passed to the British on 21 June. His relief was premature, however - there was to be no repeat of the more courteous attitudes of 1918. The ban on frat was still in force, denazification was on the cards, and - as one British officer put it - no German is
persona grata
with the military government.
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What is more, the British were the slowest of the Allies to allow the Germans to express themselves politically. Montgomery made a promise to restore party politics on 6 August 1945, but it was not until 29 September that parties became legal again.
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The French may have started as the poorest and least regarded of the victorious Allies but it turned out that their plans to atomise Germany tallied with the eventual solution to the problem. What they were proposing for the Rhineland had possibilities: there you could erect a state that was Catholic, free-market driven, anti-Prussian, federalist and dominated by the Rhenish upper-middle classes. The European and German division along ideological lines was no more or less than a foundation to build on. The German state would be made in the west and act as a sponge that might absorb the other parts of Germany at a later date. This was summed up by Wilhelm Hausenstern, ambassador to Paris at the time of the founding of the Federal Republic: ‘Adenauer conceived the Federal Republic on the Rhenish, or even Lower Rhenish Axis.’ The Rhine was the natural centre point for the new Europe, the link between Germany and western Europe. It was an ore that was a conglomerate ‘Catholicism and liberalism, north and southern Europe, French lifestyle and Prussian virtue’.
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The mayor wanted to readjust the balance, above all by concluding a sort of concordat with the French. Prussia had had only a marginal role in the Holy Roman Empire, and Adenauer now chose to make his vision of Charlemagne’s Europe into the foundation stone for Germany’s future. Prussia had become a monster to him - he attributed to it all the vices of the Nazis, despite the fact that Prussia (which had amounted to two-thirds of pre-war Germany) was notably under-represented in Nazi Germany, and that most of the leaders of the movement came from the Catholic south and west. One of the most pungent - Joseph Goebbels - was a man from his beloved Rhineland. Adenauer was singing a tune that appealed to the Control Council: they too were keen to make Prussia the black sheep that had led Germany astray. It was a convenient argument anyway, because much of the Prussian heartland had been lost to Poland and Russia at Potsdam. Adenauer could clearly put it on with a trowel if he had to - but he didn’t have to. On 25 February 1947, the Control Council issued its Law No. 46: ‘The Prussian State which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany has
de facto
ceased to exist.’ Its remaining agencies and institutions were scrapped in ‘the interests of preservation of peace and security of peoples and with the desire to assure further reconstruction of the political life of Germany on a democratic basis’.
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It seemed that there was a possibility of an agreement between Adenauer and the Allies, but the British frustrated him at every turn. It was then that he turned his attention to the French. They too were victims of the Allies, perhaps - their vanities were also wounded. But for de Gaulle, they might have had to brook the ignominy of military rule from London. The Yalta Conference had carved out a small corner of Germany to be ruled from Paris. Adenauer pinned his hopes on its expansion to cover Cologne, as de Gaulle was agitating for a larger slice of the cake. In the summer and autumn he had a number of meetings with the French arranged by his friend the Swiss consular official ‘Uncle Toni’ Weiss. The idea was Germano-French economic co-operation in the Rhineland. He suggested that Germany should be broken up into three small quasi-autonomous states. Naturally he would be the ruler of the one that centred on the Rhineland.
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Weiss’s undiplomatic wheeling and dealing caused anger in Berne, and Adenauer’s flirtations annoyed the British. They may have known little about his meetings with the French, but they were aware that he was holding talks with politicians in Bad Godesberg and Königswinter aimed at creating the political party that would be the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, of the post-war German right. His adversary was the head of the British Military Government in North Rhine Province, Brigadier John Barraclough, who thought Adenauer increasingly unreliable politically. Barraclough was a tough soldier, but not necessarily a shrewd political analyst. On 6 October Adenauer was summoned to appear before Barraclough and two other officers in Cologne and was denied even the right to sit down in their presence. They read out a letter dismissing him from office. He was to be banned from all political activity and was to leave Cologne as quickly as possible. This put a temporary end to his dalliance with the CDU, for which he was an obvious leader. Adenauer felt grossly insulted.
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The British clearly believed that Adenauer was incompetent. Cologne lagged behind the rest of North Rhine when it came to the business of clearing up and sanitising the city. As the director of Military Government, General Gerald Templer, put it, ‘The city was in a terrible mess; no water, no drainage, no light, no food. It stank of corpses.’
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The decision to sack Adenauer was regretted almost immediately. In Berlin, Noël (later Lord) Annan, then a colonel serving in the Political Division of the Control Council, saw that an awful gaffe had been committed, and both he and Captain Michael Thomas
^cg
were anxious to mend fences. Perhaps fearing loss of face, Barraclough was not prepared to reinstate Adenauer, but very soon the British allowed him the opportunity to indulge in politics again, albeit only within the limits of the city of Cologne. During the crisis, Annan went to see a badly shaken Adenauer. He broached the issue of the politician’s attitude to Britain. Adenauer replied that he was not anti-British, but that ‘he found difficulty in seeing Britain as a European state’.
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As a result of the interview, the ban on Adenauer’s political activity was completely lifted, and he was free to come and go in Cologne whenever he pleased. He could now play his role in the founding of the CDU.

Adenauer had rivals for the time being. Some of the July Plotters survived and were popular with the German people and, more important, with the Allies. The Christian trades-unionist leader Jakob Kaiser, who based his ‘Christian socialism’ on the Sermon on the Mount,
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the former Centre Party politician and minister Andreas Hermes, and Adenauer’s later foreign policy adviser Herbert Blankenhorn had been part of Helmuth James von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle, which had looked forward to the dawn of a new Europe. At Moltke’s Schloss at Kreisau in Silesia they discussed dropping notions of hegemony in order to dig out the roots of war. Germany had been perceived as a European counterweight to the United States as early as 1942.
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The French right had also listed towards the idea of a united Europe during the Collaboration; they recognised the
fait accompli
of occupation.

Kaiser’s views did not prevail in the infant CDU, however, because he saw the French as the enemy. The French consistently opposed German unity, which they saw as an attempt to restore the venomous Reich. Adenauer, on the other hand, envisaged working with the French from the beginning.
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Kurt Schumacher, head of the SPD in the British Zone, thought the French the enemy for different reasons: they wanted to bleed Germany of its resources.
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Andreas Hermes was in an uncomfortable position, fronting the fledgling party in the Russian Zone. Adenauer’s task was to assert his authority in the British Zone and to take control of the Party.

Hermes was expelled from Berlin for opposing the Soviet policy on land reform. That meant that Adenauer’s chief rival was Kaiser in Berlin. Kaiser was backing the wrong horse in the old Reich capital, which was to be sidelined and virtually eliminated from post-war German politics. Adenauer was not averse to using pure fabrication to do down his political enemies. He claimed that Kaiser had been holding talks with Soviet officials and former Wehrmacht generals, which was enough to discredit him with the Party. Adenauer’s position was shored up by the arrest of 600 members of the Party in the Soviet Zone in August 1947.
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In the end it proved very easy for him to grab the presidency of the CDU in the British Zone and see off any possible challenge from Hermes.

On the left, Adenauer’s rival was Schumacher, a First World War veteran and front-line socialist politician. He came from Culm in West Prussia and was the very model of a Protestant Prussian. His mentality contrasted with that of Adenauer. There was none of the cosiness of the Rhineland. The Culmer was always on the battlements, watching out for the arrival of the enemy. He had lost an arm fighting for Germany only to be rewarded by nine years, nine months and nine days in Hitler’s camps, including an eight-year stint in Dachau. His solid principles and experience during the Third Reich made him one of the very few German politicians with spotlessly democratic credentials.
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He felt very much alone at first: his colleagues, the fighters, were all dead. The concentration camps, the bombing and the 20 July Plot ‘have swallowed so many of us’.
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He was soon seen as a potential post-war German leader, but he fell by the wayside when West Germany moved to the right. As the leader of the SPD in the Western zones, he might have been expected to find favour with the ruling Labour Party in Britain, but he was not impressed by British socialists. The British nonetheless felt responsible for him. When he went to Berlin in February 1946 he was provided for: ‘The visitor from Hanover travelled in a British aircraft, slept in a British bed, had a British car with a British escort at his disposal and was for the duration of his stay in Berlin accompanied by a British officer with a revolver at the ready.’ This British patronage was later used by Adenauer to suggest that Schumacher was a Labour Party puppet.
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