After the Reich (93 page)

It was at that moment that the president’s aide Admiral Leahy whispered his famous interjection: ‘Of course not . . . The Bolshies have killed all of them.’ In his memoirs Truman took a tough stance: ‘Of course I knew that Stalin was misinterpreting the facts. The Soviets had taken the Polish territory east of the Curzon Line, and they were trying to compensate Poland at the expense of the other three occupying powers. I would not stand for it, nor would Churchill. I was of the opinion that the Russians had killed the German population or had chased them into our zones.’
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Churchill later claimed that had he returned to Potsdam he would have prevented the Soviets from making off with so much of Silesia, but his contention was never put to the test.
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It was a pity he did nothing at the time, beyond repeating that it was a matter for the peace conference. No monitors were despatched east, no enquiries were made among the incoming treks or among the miserable trainloads of refugees that discharged their cargoes in the Western zones. They did not want to know.

Churchill
was
concerned for the beleaguered British economy. Silesia’s coalmines had been awarded to Poland, so that coal was not available for Germans. The West would have to foot the bill again. He was concerned that Germany needed to be built up again to avoid becoming a burden on the West. Reparations therefore had to take second place.
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Stalin came up with his most ingenious argument to date at this point: ‘the less industry there was in Germany, the greater would be the market for American and British goods’. Churchill reiterated, ‘We do not wish to be confronted by a mass of starving people.’ Stalin replied, ‘There will be none,’ and added, ‘Are we through?’
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That night Stalin gave his banquet. For occasions of this sort there was no shortage of provisions. On the contrary, it was quite a thing, with vodka and caviar at the beginning and melon and champagne at the end. There were at least twenty-five toasts. Truman took care to eat little and drink less. Stalin was not to be outdone by Eugene List, and had two great pianists and violinists perform. Truman was interested in what Stalin was drinking in his tiny glass. He presumed it was vodka, but the Russian leader was employing the same ruse as his marshal Koniev. Stalin finally told him with a smile that it was French wine - since a recent heart attack he could not drink as much.
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The next day, 22 July, was a Sunday. Truman studied the Yalta Declaration to see what it said about Poland’s western borders. The Big Three had accepted the Curzon Line then, but had left the western border open. They had not expected problems on this issue. Truman concluded that there was no case for the Poles receiving a zone. He did not really object, but he didn’t like the manner in which it had been done. Stalin thought that the Western Allies should listen to the Poles on this subject. Meanwhile the Soviet leader was romping home. He pointed out that the leaders at Yalta (Churchill was still at the conference at this point) had not meant the Eastern Neisse, but the Western Neisse. There were indeed two rivers of that name in Silesia, as we have seen - one which ran into the Oder below Breslau and one that joined it below Guben. This meant that the line demarcating Poland’s western borders would run to the left of the town of Stettin, and more than a hundred kilometres to the left of Breslau, and would encompass all that part of German Lower Silesia that ran between the two rivers. To make it clear to the Western leaders, Stalin rose and showed them the area on a map.
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This cunning confusion over the two Neisse rivers added greatly to the Polish cull. Not only were the Poles to be richly rewarded with their half of East Prussia, Danzig, all of Hinter Pomerania and a large chunk of Brandenburg east of the Oder and the so-called ‘border area’, they were now to receive such stock German towns as Brieg, Bunzlau, Frankenstein, Glatz, Glogau, Goldberg, Grünberg, Hirschberg, Landeshut, Liegnitz, Ohlau, Sagan, Waldenburg and Warmbrunn, containing altogether some 2.8 million Germans.
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In all they would be awarded 21 per cent of Germany’s pre-1937 territory, while the Russians made off with 3,500 square miles of East Prussia. All in all Germany would lose a quarter of its extent, and a large part of the arable land that had fed it in the past. In return the Poles were meant to shut up about Poland east of the Bug, and accept their place in Stalin’s world.

Truman and Churchill were giving way at every point. Stalin talked of Königsberg as a conquest next. This was booty - not in keeping with Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s high-minded utterances in Newfoundland in 1941 - but Byrnes thought Churchill understood Stalin’s desire to grab a colony or two. The status of the city had been discussed at Teheran. The Soviet Union ‘should have an ice-free port at the expense of Germany’. Stalin added that the Russians had suffered so much at the hands of Germany that they were anxious to have some piece of German territory as some small satisfaction to tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Besides, Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed. Churchill made a weak attempt to backtrack. He said it would be difficult to admit that East Prussia did not exist and that Königsberg would not come under the authority of the Allied Control Council. Once more, the region’s ultimate status would be left for the peace conference that was never to be.
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The conference then heard a report from Field Marshal Alexander about the British Sector of Vienna. The area contained 500,000 people, but the British had no means of feeding them, their zone being hundreds of miles to the south and west of the city. Stalin promised to look into the matter with Renner. On the 24 July he generously agreed to feed the British charges for the time being.

The conference returned to the thorny matter of the Polish border on the 25th. Churchill and Eden had met the Polish delegates, headed by Bierut, the previous day. Bierut was a Soviet pawn who simply lied to and stonewalled the British leader, but all the same he provided a rather more generous estimate of the number of Germans remaining beyond the Oder. He believed there were a million and half of them. At the next session Churchill said that the question of the transfer of populations from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland should be discussed: ‘This area was part of the Russian Zone and the Poles are driving the Germans out. He felt this ought not to be done without consideration being given to the question of food supply, reparation and other matters which had not yet been decided’. In his reply, Stalin came close to being frank. The Poles, he said, ‘were taking their revenge upon the Germans . . . for the injuries the Germans had caused them in the course of the centuries’. Churchill expressed a material consideration once more - that revenge took the form of throwing the Germans into the American and British Zones to be fed.
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Truman reminded Stalin that the Poles were his responsibility too, and that he was also at the mercy of the Senate; and that they might easily refuse to ratify any proposed treaty. Stalin brought up another bargaining counter, one that was not in his hands: the Ruhr. This was in the British Zone, and the British were having a hard time keeping the French out. Churchill announced that he was leaving for Britain. ‘What a pity!’ said Stalin. ‘I hope to be back,’ replied the British premier. Stalin suggested that, judging from his rival’s face, ‘he did not think Mr Attlee was looking forward to taking over Churchill’s authority’, apparently adding, ‘He does not look like a greedy man.’ The British left Alexander Cadogan to mind the fort.
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There was no meeting on 26 July, as the British were absent. Truman flew to Frankfurt-am-Main to visit Eisenhower. On the way to Schloss Berckheim, General Bolling’s palatial headquarters in Weinheim, he drove through unscathed villages, and saw healthy-looking Germans. Eisenhower was based in the big IG Farben building in Frankfurt, which reminded Truman of the Pentagon. The British delegation had still not returned on 27 July and Truman relaxed with Eugene List’s piano-playing. He wrote to his mother and sister of this ‘Godforsaken country’. ‘To think that millions of Russians, Poles, English and Americans were slaughtered all for the folly of one crazy egotist by the name of Hitler. I hope it won’t happen again.’
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The day before he had met a Lieutenant Hitler, who came from the solidly German town of St Louis.

Churchill had very much expected to be back, but Attlee won by a landslide and became prime minister on the 26th. On the 27th he unexpectedly named the former docker Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary. Bevin himself thought he was destined for the Treasury, and that Hugh Dalton would get the Foreign Office. Attlee had even told Dalton as much when he saw him that morning. The Foreign Office, however, was not happy with Dalton, possibly fearing that the Old Etonian economist would be ‘too soft’ on the Russians. The permanent under-secretary, Cadogan, thought Bevin ‘the heavyweight of the cabinet’. A further deciding factor was the king’s antipathy towards Dalton. He too preferred Bevin.
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Bevin had no problem thinking himself into the role of chief diplomat. As he told his private secretary Nicholas Henderson, he knew all about ‘foreigners’. He had had plenty of experience of ships’ captains. ‘Oh yes, I can handle them,’ he said. As it was, he was devoted to the old guard at the Foreign Office and the Foreign Office liked him too, because he did not prevent them from shaping government policy. Bevin was strongly anti-Soviet and had become fed up with Churchill’s softness towards them. He thought the Conservatives had thrown too many ‘baubles at the Soviets’. On 28 July, badly overweight and heavily dependent on drink and cigarettes, Bevin went to Brize Norton to take his first flight.
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Truman was introduced to Ernest Bevin. Both he and Byrnes were rather shocked by his aggressiveness towards the Soviets. When he got to his digs, Bevin told General Sir Hastings Ismay that he was ‘not going to have Britain barged about’.
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His passion for the British Empire would not have been popular with the Americans or the Russians. Britain, however, had far less might than the other two. Economically it was on its back: six years of war had cost a quarter of the country’s pre-war wealth; its income was reduced by half; exports were just a third of what they had been, and its merchant fleet was down by 30 per cent. It had also lost 40 per cent of its markets - chiefly to the Americans. Together with these problems, the colonies were crawling with nationalists who were looked on with sympathy by the other two powers round the Russian table in Potsdam.
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Despite the limited affections of the Americans, Britain had only one way to turn. The Americans were avowed enemies of colonialism and the sterling bloc, which they saw as a threat to the open world economy.
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Naturally Stalin knew Attlee well. The later arrival of the British meant that the conference did not kick off until 10.15 p.m. on the 28th. Bevin was seeing the Russian leader for the first time. He decided he was like a ‘renaissance despot’ - it was always yes or no, ‘though you could only count on him if it was no’. Bevin immediately protested about the Oder-Neisse Line.
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For the time being, however, the conference continued to discuss booty. Stalin agreed that he would not seek reparations from Austria (he was insisting on payments from Italy). He would find another way of making off with the booty he desired - by sequestering ‘German’ assets. Truman was growing impatient with the reparations issue. He realised all too well that when these countries were bankrupted by reparations they would need bailing out by the United States. It was after midnight when the meeting broke up.
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The 29th was the second Sunday of the conference. Truman attended a church service in Babelsberg. Stalin had caught a cold and had stayed in bed, thereby postponing the end. Truman thought he was faking the illness, and that he was merely disappointed that Churchill had been replaced by Attlee. Molotov took his place at the table. Zhukov remarked that Attlee was rather more reserved than Churchill, but that he continued Churchill’s line of argument.
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Truman’s original suppositions about Stalin had been revised - he had never met such stubborn characters before and hoped he would never do so again.
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The American secretary of state James Byrnes read out a statement offering a definition of Poland’s western borders that would prevail until the matter could be decided by the peace conference. The area was to be administered by the Poles ‘until Poland’s final western border was fixed’ by the peace conference.
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Byrnes drew a line starting at Swinemünde, west of Stettin, and proceeding down the Oder to the Neisse before following the
Eastern
Neisse to the Czech frontier. The Poles would also administer Danzig and the lower half of East Prussia. It would not be considered a part of the Soviet Zone.
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Molotov immediately objected: he wanted the border fixed at the Görlitzer or
Western
Neisse. Truman thought he ‘requested a very large concession on our part’. That was a considerable understatement. Truman was already annoyed by the Russian-Polish
fait accompli
. The Russians had warned their clients in Poland and Czechoslovakia to put a temporary stop to their expulsions, at least until such time as the Allies could find places for them within the shrunken Germany. The miserable German population in Silesia were hoping vainly for justice from Potsdam. The Polish authorities had now declared them to be ‘outside the law, without possessions or honour’.
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The final decision was pure whitewash.
^eq
Molotov returned to the Ruhr. It was the bit of western Germany the Russians wanted and had failed to occupy. Now he demanded two milliard dollars or its equivalent - five to six million tons of machinery. Russian reparations had already been fixed at Yalta. They were to receive a quarter of the equipment in the Ruhr. There were other little points of that nature to clear up. The naval issue was settled by a three-part division.
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