After the Reich (95 page)

As noted in the previous chapter, the meetings between the Big Three had foreseen a peace conference, similar to that which met in Versailles in 1919, putting the final coat of varnish on the post-war settlement. There were endless discussions about this, and about just who was to be allowed a seat at the table. Byrnes was still courting Stalin. He sat next to him at dinner in Moscow at the CFM in December 1945 and raised a toast: ‘Whom we hath [
sic
] joined together, let no peace put asunder.’ By his own admission it went down like a lead brick. The brief American-Soviet rapprochement struck fear into Bevin, but on 9 February 1946 Stalin appeared to open the batting in the Cold War with his speech hailing the victory of the Soviet people. The war, he said, had been the result of monopoly capitalism.
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It was very probably true, however, that the Soviet leader had not meant to frighten the Western Allies. Both he and Molotov were still keen on East-West co-operation. So, to some extent, was Byrnes; but his attempts to maintain the peace between East and West were undermined by Truman, who pronounced himself ‘tired of babying the Soviets’. He would go so far, and no further.
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Churchill made his speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March in which he was supposed to have coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’. The words had, in fact, been first used by Joseph Goebbels.
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Churchill’s views were loudly cheered by the Foreign Office, though they were very cautiously received in America at first, which was moving only slowly in that direction.
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The idea persisted in some quarters that Soviet Russia and America could carve up the world. The notion had found favour with Roosevelt. It often had to do with a profound Anglophobia on the part of senior American army officers.
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Now voices of dissent began to ring out.

The Soviets had no desire to see Germany break up - they had their eyes on the Ruhr with its industries, and on their 10 per cent share of German production. After the Berlin election of May 1946 that went by the board. The Russians were proceeding with their idea of setting up ‘democratic’ government in their zone. The political resolve of the Western Allies in Berlin had first been put to the test in March that year when the Soviets called for the merging of the SPD and the KPD. In April the socialists and communists of the SBZ held a conference in the Admiralspalast Theatre where the call for the new ‘Socialist Unity Party’ or SED was unanimous. Elections by secret ballot were held in the West but were banned in the Russian Sector. The Soviet ban was challenged in both Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain, but Russian troops broke up the polling station and carried off the ballot boxes. In the Western sectors the vote was a disaster for the Russian plans to introduce a one-party state: 29,610 Social Democrats voted against, with just 2,937 agreeing to the merger. It had been ‘the first free and secret election on German soil since 1932’.
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Russia’s policy had blown up in its face, especially when free elections were allowed.

The New Ideologists

The East-West co-operation that had won the war was going out of intellectual fashion. A different set of men were wielding influence in the Western corridors of power. George F. Kennan had served in the Moscow embassy during the war. For him the Soviet Union posed a threat to the American way of life.
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He believed the Americans were deceiving themselves if they thought they could change events in the areas already under Soviet hegemony; on the other hand he could see no reason for making things easier for them. Germany was not going to work - a shared Germany was a ‘chimera’. In the summer of 1945 Kennan wrote his famous ‘long telegram’: ‘We have no choice but to lead our section of Germany - the section of which we and the British have accepted responsibility - to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, that the East cannot threaten it.’ Better a dismembered Germany than totalitarianism at the North Sea.
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Kennan’s memorandum was echoed by three similar telegrams from the British diplomat Frank Roberts, although he expressed himself with more caution.

In retrospect Kennan probably went too far. It is highly unlikely that Stalin wanted to cross the Elbe. It did not make a lot of sense to strive for a communist Europe while the Americans and the British retained large forces on the mainland. If that had been what he desired, it was better to wait: the fruit might fall from the tree without any need to struggle. Besides, America had the atomic bomb, and was to possess a monopoly in nuclear weapons until 1949.
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The Soviets were still keen to reform their zone. The Soviet diplomat A. A. Sobelev told Murphy that the pan-German central government laid down by Potsdam would need years of preparation, as the spirit of Prussia had to be excised from the administration first.
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The changes of attitude were in the West, where the Americans feared an attack on the open economy and the British an attack on their interests in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
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Kennan was not deceived by the Czechs. By 1945 the country was already under the sway of Moscow. ‘Personal acquaintance with the Czech ambassador in Moscow, Zdenek Fierlinger, had given me the impression that we had to do in his person not with the representative of a free and independent Czechoslovakia but with one who was to all intents and purposes a Soviet agent.’
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Views like Kennan’s were becoming common currency in America. General George Patton was a case in point: with time he preferred Nazis to communists. A more analytical indictment of the policy that led to the Anglo-American rout at Potsdam appeared in Ralph Keeling’s
Gruesome Harvest
of 1947. Keeling called it ‘one of the most brutal and terrifying peace programmes ever inflicted on a defeated nation’. Germany was not a pawn in the battle between East and West, thought Keeling, ‘she is the major prize’. Germany needed to be attracted over to the American side and kept there.
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This was to become American policy before the year was out. Keeling echoed many of Victor Gollancz’s views on the treatment of the Germans, but he was rare at the time in being prepared to bring up Allied wartime atrocities, such as the bombing of civilian targets and the firestorms where men, women and children were fried at temperatures of 1,000 degrees. The Oder-Neisse Line contradicted the Atlantic Charter, and - Keeling pointed out - even the draconian Morgenthau had limited his territorial demands for the Poles to the southern half of East Prussia and the mixed Germano-Polish area of Upper Silesia.
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In Britain, Roberts’s views prevailed in the Foreign Office, which was calling for an all-out offensive against Russia’s mission of ‘dynamic and proselytising communism’. What Roberts feared was ‘communism on the Rhine’. The British attitude was so aggressively anti-Soviet in Bevin’s Foreign Office that some observers have suggested that the British were the prime movers in the Cold War.
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There were still delusions of grandeur in Whitehall and Bevin was certainly all in favour of the hard line. He thought it might be necessary to abandon the idea of a united Germany but insisted that responsibility for the breakdown in relations between the wartime Allies should rest fairly and squarely with the Soviets. Though the Russians appeared peaceful in Europe, they were already moving troops into Iran, the move that was to prompt Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.
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The Americans were the last to abandon their faith in a united Germany, but Byrnes was defeated in Paris, the location both of the farcical peace conference and of the Quai d’Orsay, which was most famously opposed to German unity. Byrnes could not believe a peace conference had any value now that so many countries had been absorbed into the Soviet bloc.
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Bevin was also worried about money, especially as Britain did not have much. Reputations die hard, but Britain’s subaltern position was recognised by the permanent under-secretary, Cadogan, who referred to the leaders of the Allied coalition as ‘the great two and a half’. In 1945 the economist Maynard Keynes was talking of a ‘financial Dunkirk’, and as the fuel crisis set in during the cruel winter of 1946-7 Britain’s economic handicap was patently obvious.
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In 1945-6 alone, Germany cost the British taxpayer £74 million, while the British people had to put up with a continuation of wartime rationing.

Although Truman had recognised the Oder-Neisse Line on 9 August 1945, the Americans were ready to backtrack almost immediately. For the time being, however, the Control Council defined Germany as the land between the Line and the ‘present western borders’. The French had made it clear as well that, although not party to Potsdam, they approved the cessions in the east. It was Byrnes who reopened the can of worms by raising the question of border revision and threatening Poland with a peace conference.
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That other Russo-sceptic, Clay, drew his inspiration from Byrnes. On 19 August he wrote to the secretary of state, ‘You are carrying so much of the hope of the world on your shoulders against almost insurmountable odds that you should be free of all other worries. If you cannot win the fight for peace, no one can.’
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The Berlin elections were coming up. Clay thought the Americans should support the democratic parties in the west - the CDU and the SPD represented the ‘substantial majority of the population’. ‘I am not unduly apprehensive of the election results in Berlin,’ he wrote, as he did not trust them anyway. Berlin depended on Russia, which fed its people, and was subject therefore to Soviet economic pressure.
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Indeed, there was a feeling that the Germans in the SBZ could not be trusted and that they would turn to communism under the blandishments of the occupiers. Even when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary - as in the Austrian elections - the Anglo-Americans still persisted in their view. The feeling that Germans in the east had been seduced by the Soviets strengthened their resolve to create a separate state in the west of the country. As early as May 1946 Bevin explained to the cabinet why he felt a divided Germany was desirable. The Russians presented a danger as great as, if not greater than, a revived Germany. The idea was to create a Germany ‘that would be more amenable to our influence’, whereas a united Germany would be more under Soviet hegemony.
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Byrnes was also the architect of Bizonia - the idea of merging the Western zones rapidly replaced Bevin’s notion of a ‘loose federation’. In April 1946 the four powers met to discuss the situation in Germany, and Russia was accused of reneging on the agreements made at Potsdam. The result was an economic amalgamation of the British and American zones. The conference affirmed the fact that the enemy had changed since the onset of the Cold War: the Germans had become allies in the new order. The British cabinet agreed in principle to Bizonia on 25 July 1946. Germany should become self-sufficient again by 1949.
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Byrnes made his statement of intent in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946. He had been attending the impotent Paris Peace Conference and had left for Berlin before flying on to the Württemberg capital. He met the German minister presidents and addressed an audience in the Opera House. The German politicians told him a new Hitler was an impossibility: were such a man to emerge, he would have to be a communist. Byrnes said it had been a mistake for America to lose interest in Europe after the First World War. ‘The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honourable peace among the free and peace-loving nations of the world . . . What we want is lasting peace. We will oppose harsh and vengeful measures which obstruct our attempts at peace. We will oppose soft measures which invite the breaking of the peace . . . We do not want Germany to become the satellite of any power or powers or to live under a dictatorship, foreign or domestic.’ There were sideways swipes at the Poles for seizing land before they had been granted leave. Poland’s borders, he warned, were not final; there had been no agreement. The French were also put in their place: America could not deny their right to the Saar, but it would not support any encroachment on the Ruhr or the Rhineland. The criticism of the French in Stuttgart, of all places, must have been especially piquant.
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Byrnes’s hard stand was heartily approved by Clay. The British were also enthusiastic. Churchill cabled his congratulations. After some initial reticence, Bevin appeared pleased and made similar noises before the House of Commons in October.
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Attlee was all for withdrawing from Germany, but Bevin, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff ganged up on him, claiming that it would be tantamount to another Munich. They wanted confrontation, not retreat. Above all Byrnes’s speech went down well with the Germans. The
Wiesbaden Kurier
called it ‘a ray of light at last’. Then again, in Wiesbaden, it was wise to praise anything the Americans did.
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When Byrnes went, Clay continued the hard line. Washington interfered very little with American military commanders in Germany.
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Not so enthralled by Byrnes’s words were the Poles, who staged a protest outside the American embassy in Warsaw.
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