After the Reich (91 page)

Zhukov also had a meeting with Hopkins the next day, 12 June. Hopkins had flown in from two weeks in Moscow, where he had had six meetings with Stalin to discuss the UN Charter among other things and the chance of fitting in a few non-communists in the government of the Lublin Poles. Otherwise his task had been to reassure the Russian leader that the United States had no foreign political ambitions in Europe, thereby leaving him a free hand in Poland and Austria. Hopkins had not consulted Churchill, whom Truman was holding at arm’s length, while he refused to speed up the scheduled talks. Members of Truman’s entourage, however, took a completely different view, arguing for a showdown with Russia. These included Harriman, Forrestal and Leahy.
²⁴

Stalin and Molotov backed four or five of Hopkins’s Poles, who later had to flee for their lives. On the way out Hopkins’s aircraft had flown over Berlin. Seeing the ruins he remarked, ‘It’s another Carthage.’
²⁵
He was sympathetic towards the Russians, and regretted the former president’s sudden death. He had no close relationship with Truman: ‘It is a pity President Roosevelt didn’t live to see these days. It was easier with him.’
²⁶
Hopkins told Zhukov that the Americans would not be ready for 15 June and that they would need to postpone the leaders’ conference for another month, until 15 July. Zhukov proposed Potsdam because there was no suitable building in Berlin in a good enough state of repair. The only place in Potsdam was the crown prince’s palace, but there was the advantage of Babelsberg, a largely undamaged area of villas that had been inhabited by film-folk and politicians in Weimar times.
²⁷

The themes on the agenda were the political and economic future of Germany, denazification, demilitarisation and decentralisation, Germany’s eastern border, the status of Königsberg and East Prussia. Austria was also on the agenda, as well as all the other former belligerent powers. Zhukov took Hopkins and his assistant Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen on a tour of the ruined city and afterwards there was a buffet lunch that was ‘light on food, heavy on vodka’.
²⁸

Hopkins had been present at Yalta, and knew his old master’s mind. He had been sent to deal with de Gaulle, which he clearly found an onerous duty. When Roosevelt’s interpreter at the conference, Chip Bohlen, had said, ‘We can all admit that de Gaulle is one of the biggest sons of bitches who ever straddled a pot,’
²⁹
the late president had laughed. Roosevelt was insistent that de Gaulle should not receive a place at the top table. Churchill had to present the French case and obtain an occupation zone in Germany. Stalin only agreed as long as it took nothing away from his portion. What is striking is how little fight the Western Allies put up against the Russian leader even at Yalta. Hopkins had advised Roosevelt to accept Stalin’s huge reparations demands,
³⁰
and when America and Britain gave way on Poland’s western borders, it is not clear they knew exactly what was involved.

Churchill had tried to settle the Polish issue before the Red Army arrived, but Russia’s might had won the day. He had had a change of heart. On 15 December 1944 he had been quite open about the complete expulsion of Germans from the eastern territories, but he was worried about numbers. It appeared that he thought six million was the upper limit, and now he learned that the figure would be eight or nine, which was completely impossible to effect.
³¹
Churchill clung to his Wismar pocket as a bargaining counter, and on 9 June 1945 he cabled Truman to advise him to do the same and hold on to American positions in Thuringia and Saxony. He might have hoped for a better rapport with Truman, as his relations with Roosevelt had been strained at the end of the late president’s life. He told Truman not to consider withdrawing until the Austrian question had been properly settled. On 14 June Truman cabled Stalin, however, and agreed to move his troops back to the Elbe. Churchill had no alternative now but to comply with his ally’s decision. He now informed Stalin that the British would be gone by the 15th. Stalin then played for more time. He requested that the Allies wait until 1 July before taking up their lines in Berlin. There were mines to be cleared, and other chores to be effected first.
³²

They should have known what they were in for by now - Stalin had already shown his hand in eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was a case in point. The government in exile had taken leave of King George VI on 15 February and left England on 12 March. On 19 March Beneš and Masaryk were in Moscow. On 6 April they arrived in Prague to be welcomed with bread and salt. On 9 April an interim government was set up under Zdenek Fierlinger with representatives of the four parties and four non-party members. The highest goal was co-operation with Moscow.

The Poles had been obliged to accept the Curzon Line in the east, but on 21 July 1944 Stalin was able to placate the Lublin government by dangling compensation in front of their eyes, in the form of German territory in the west. Churchill and Roosevelt had raised no objection to the Oder-Neisse Line at Yalta, although there had been misgivings about giving the Poles such a large amount of German territory and it was left that land would be found for them in the west and north. The Poles were well aware of what they wanted from the Potsdam conference. The Lublin regime had formally stated that they wanted the Oder-Neisse on 5 February 1945. As Władisław Gomułka put it, ‘we must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones’.
³³

The issue was scheduled for review at Potsdam. The reason why the Russians had stood by and watched the Warsaw Uprising from the other side of the Vistula was that they wanted those elements out of the way that were not in favour of a communist or pro-Moscow Poland. The Western Allies continued to support the regime in exile in London. The sixteen London government emissaries who went to Moscow to enquire about possible collaboration were arrested. Meanwhile the Lublin men trotted along behind the Red Army. In March 1945 they created five new Polish
woiwode
: Masuria, Pomerania, Upper Silesia, Lower Silesia and Danzig. They were already referring to the areas as the ‘Recovered Territories’. The move resulted in protests from Washington: there had to be peace talks first!
³⁴

In their policy of demontage and cultural pillage, the Russians showed no desire to co-operate with the West. Some of the Soviet generals, such as Bulganin, thought like Montgomery - they had won a battle, not the war. Fascism had to be defeated, particularly in America. ‘America is now the arch-enemy!’ said Bulganin on the eve of the storming of Berlin. ‘We have destroyed the foundations of fascism, now we must destroy the foundations of capitalism - America.’ In cultural terms this was expressed by the Russian officer Vladimir Yurasov prior to the Western Allies’ arrival in Berlin: ‘Take everything out of the Western Sector of Berlin. Do you understand? All of it! What you can’t take, destroy. Only leave nothing for the [Western] Allies: no machine, not even a single bed; not even a chamber pot!’
³⁵
Berlin and its industrial satellites were being stripped bare: the hardware of companies such as Osram and Siemens, of the telephone exchanges, of the S-Bahn and so on, right down to their typewriters, was being loaded up and shipped back to Russia.

The Russian leader was also wary of American and British attempts to promote capitalism. The American minister responsible for Germany was John McCloy, who was a banker in normal life. He had some sympathy for the defeated Germans in that his wife had been born in Germany. In opposition to the Morgenthau view (which was essentially behind demontage) McCloy encouraged the rebuilding of Germany. Morgenthau had not abandoned his famous plan. In 1945 he published
Germany is our Problem
. Truman had been opposed to the plan even as a senator, so he was happy to listen to McCloy. Another opponent of Morgenthau was the secretary of war Henry Stimson, who thought the secretary for the Treasury ‘biased in his semitic grievances’. The day before his departure for Potsdam, Truman accepted Morgenthau’s resignation, commenting, ‘That was the end of the conversation and the end of the Morgenthau Plan.’ On the other hand the plan was still present in the minds of many of the soldiers, and their desire to lay waste to Germany had been sharpened by what they had seen in the concentration camps.
³⁶

In their recorded statements the Russians showed themselves more sympathetic to the conquered Germans. Anastas Mikoyan, then vice-president of the Council of People’s Commissars, expressed the view in an interview with
Pravda
, which found its way into
The Times
: ‘We have crushed Hitler’s armies in fierce combat and taken Berlin, but our moral sense and our traditions do not allow us to ignore the suffering and privations of the German civilian population.’ It was a far cry from the realities of life under Soviet dominion. Germans also clung to the comforting line of Stalin’s - ‘Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain.’
³⁷

It was also becoming clear how little the Anglo-Americans could trust Stalin. The Russians had occupied the Danish island of Bornholm, which, they said, lay to the east of the line of their own sphere of influence. The truce in Hungary was signed without any participation of the Western Allies, and at the time of Potsdam the west had yet to be allowed into Vienna. Just how much Stalin was lying at Potsdam is clear from an exchange between Clay and Zhukov on 7 July, just ten days before the meeting of the Big Three. Zhukov informed the American general that Silesia had already been turned over to the Poles; ‘the Germans had moved out of the area in such huge numbers that there is little agriculture remaining for this area’. The Russians did not even have access to the coal, said Zhukov. They had to pay for it like everyone else. The British and the Americans were having to supply the Germans with 20,000 tons of food every month. The loss of Silesia was therefore highly significant. The United States had already protested about the handing over of Silesia to the Poles.
³⁸

At the Cecilienhof - the palace of the Prussian crown prince and the venue for the Potsdam Conference - the Russians planted a great red star of geraniums, pink roses and hortensias in the flower bed at the entrance.
³⁹
Inside the house there were frantic preparations for the arrival of the Big Three.
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The different quarters were to be colour-coded: blue for the Americans, white for the Russians and pink for the British. The conference table had been specially made in the Lux Factory in Moscow.
⁴¹
The Russians and the Americans were already observing one another from either side of the Glienecke Bridge, as they were to do until the end of the Cold War.

In Potsdam itself Hanna Grisebach and her family were made aware of the coming of the Big Three by increased security around the Neue Garten and the Cecilienhof. They were lucky enough to be on the far side of the Heiligensee. All the streets leading directly to the palace had to be evacuated. GPU carried out a wave of arrests and a sentry was posted in their garden. There were one or two advantages: the Russians quickly laid out a new street and a bridge was thrown across the Havel to Babelsberg where the leaders were staying. A pontoon bridge was also put up to allow access to Sacrow and the airport at Gatow. Russian soldiers rode bareback and naked into the waters of the lakes, reminding Hanna of centaurs, but she was less pleased to find herself under house arrest from 16 July, living in a state of impotent rage while she observed the Red Army guard knocking twenty-five kilos of unripe apricots off their tree in the garden. Any attempt to go out was greeted by cries of ‘Dvai-Dvai! Zuhrick nah Haus!’ (Quick, quick! Back in the house!). When an aircraft flew low over their street she hoped it was the British and American leaders going home.
⁴²

Stalin arrived by train on 16 July. He wanted no special arrangements, no regimental bands. He told Zhukov to meet him, and to bring along anyone he thought necessary. Zhukov sat beside him in the car and they drove to a luxurious villa. Stalin wanted to know who had lived there. He was told it had belonged to General Ludendorff.
⁴³
The British and Americans arrived the same day. Truman and Churchill were in frequent contact in the run-up to the conference. Churchill had wanted King George VI to attend, and also to review the British forces in Berlin, but that idea was dropped in June.
⁴⁴
The British had had a general election on 5 July, but because British servicemen were scattered throughout the world, the results would not be in for three weeks. Churchill informed Truman that, whatever the results of the election, the conference should not be hurried.
⁴⁵

Truman came via Amsterdam. He was very much an innocent abroad and relied on his secretary of state, James Byrnes. He had no strong feelings of his own. He had inherited from Roosevelt the idea that America and the Soviet Union could happily coexist. Kennan, for one, thought this an illusion.
⁴⁶
Truman and Byrnes flew in separate aircraft, Byrnes himself piloting the plane between Cassel and Magdeburg. Truman looked at both cities from the window. He could see not one single undamaged building. He landed on the ‘British’ airfield at Gatow, which was conveniently close to Potsdam. They drove to their quarters in Neubabelsberg. British and American soldiers lined the route until they reached the Soviet Zone.