Exorcising Hitler (22 page)

Karl Renner, a veteran Social Democrat in his mid-seventies, who had also been first President of the Austrian Republic (or technically ‘German-Austrian Republic’) established in 1918 after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, had come out of retirement in April 1945, at the Russians’ behest, to declare a revived Austrian state. He was supported by a coalition drawn from all non-fascist parties, including his own, the People’s Party (conservatives), and the communists. This government was recognised on 27 April by the Russians, who had been in control of Vienna since 13 April, and shortly after by the Western Allies.

It was in many ways an odd, and to outside eyes puzzling, business. Hitler’s own people ‘liberated’ from him? The Viennese and other Austrians, so many of whom had ecstatically welcomed the annexation of the country to the Reich in March 1938, now suddenly so patriotic for the Red-and-White, so insistent that they were not actually ‘German’ at all? Returning to Austria on occupation business shortly after the war, George Clare, an exiled Viennese Jew, well attuned to such subtleties, noticed that even educated Austrians, who usually spoke a soft, Viennese-tinged version of High German, clearly recognisable as the same language spoken in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg, had begun resorting to the rough dialect of the low-rent Vienna suburbs in order to emphasise their Austrian-not-German identity.
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The recreation of the Austrian state was, in fact, an Allied war aim and had been so since the Moscow conference early in 1943, when the Allies had declared the annexation, or
Anschluss
,
invalid. Austrian members of the Wehrmacht in the custody of the Allies were therefore among the first to be released after the coming of peace. The fact that many of these had been, so far as their German comrades could see, just as keen on the Nazi regime as themselves, if not more so, caused considerable resentment. As Ulrich Frodien, himself a former Hitler Youth leader and still a convinced Nazi at the time, recalled of the Austrians in his prison hospital:

. . . among whom were several ‘super-Nazis’, compared with whom I was a wilting flower. They suddenly began to distance themselves from us to a noticeable degree. They put their heads together in conspiratorial fashion and finally demanded . . . their immediate release from captivity, because as foreigners they had served in the German Wehrmacht only under compulsion. Even the general hilarity and numerous sarcastic attacks on them from the Berlin characters among us did nothing to change this distancing operation, which in the end was successful. They were all released and allowed to go home. When the war ended, the [Austrian] former National Socialist Leadership Officer at the hospital . . . made a passionate speech against the Nazi government, in which he declared the opposite of everything he had always said previously. If it had not been so sad, one might have made a grotesque comedy out of the thing.
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So far as Germans were concerned, however, the matter was quite clear. The instructions put out to the troops by the Allied commands quite specifically stated that the Germans were not to be treated as a liberated nation. Again, attitudes had hardened.

The Handbook to be distributed to American troops entering Germany also contained the text of a proclamation, signed by Eisenhower, addressed to the defeated population and making their status apparent. In early drafts, the word ‘liberation’ had, in fact, been used in the context of the Allied invasion, but the powers that be had rapidly backtracked. There was to be no doubt (in contrast to 1918) that Germany had been conquered, would now be an occupied country and would forfeit any right to determine its own destiny. Finally, with American troops approaching the German border in the autumn of 1944, and a decision pressing, a formula was agreed. ‘Germany,’ the Handbook’s American readers were told, ‘will always be treated as a defeated, and not as a liberated country.’ Eisenhower’s proclamation to the German population accordingly read, in English:

The Allied Forces serving under my Command have now entered Germany. We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors. In the area of Germany occupied by the forces under my command, we shall obliterate Nazism and German Militarism. We shall overthrow the Nazi rule, dissolve the Nazi Party and abolish the cruel, oppressive and discriminatory laws and institutions which the Party has created. We shall eradicate that German Militarism which has so often disrupted the peace of the world. Military and Party leaders, the Gestapo and others suspected of crimes and atrocities, will be tried, and, if guilty, punished as they deserve.

All well and good, but German-speakers in the Psychological Warfare Division at SHAEF pointed out that the German word for conqueror,
Eroberer
, was a little more direct and brutal in its implications than its English nearest equivalent – in fact, pretty much synonymous with ‘oppressor’. It was finally changed, after consultations at the highest level, in the German translation from ‘conquerors’ to ‘a victorious army’ (
ein siegreiches Heer
), which was merely stating the obvious but also fudging the reality of what they were actually doing in Germany.
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So far as the English version was concerned, however, ‘conquerors’ stayed in. The practical consequence of all this, which was discussed amidst enormous controversy within the military bureaucracy, is somewhat diminished by the comment of a SHAEF high-up that ‘. . . nobody reads handbooks anyhow, except very junior officers, whose subsequent actions can have very little effect’.
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The Handbook was finally released to the mass of fighting men in December 1944, just in time, as it happened, for the Battle of the Bulge. Semantic spats apart, it did express some basic principles which dominated, possibly for better but arguably for worse, attitudes during the initial period of occupation.

Then, in April, with final victory in sight, came the notorious JCS 1067, a putatively comprehensive set of instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington to Eisenhower aimed at closely directing the behaviour of US forces in occupied Germany. The tone was inevitably moralistic, stern, even harsh. So far as the basic behaviour of American forces towards the Germans was concerned, the message was quite crisp and clear but largely divorced from any notion of what was happening on the ground:

a. It should be brought home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.

b. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation. Your aim is not oppression but to occupy Germany for the purpose of realizing certain important Allied objectives. In the conduct of your occupation and administration you should be just but firm and aloof. You will strongly discourage fraternization with the German officials and population.

c. The principal Allied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world. Essential steps in the accomplishment of this objective are the elimination of Nazism and militarism in all their forms, the immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment, the industrial disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, with continuing control over Germany’s capacity to make war, and the preparation for an eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis.

d. Other Allied objectives are to enforce the program of reparations and restitution, to provide relief for the benefit of countries devastated by Nazi aggression, and to ensure that prisoners of war and displaced persons of the United Nations are cared for and repatriated.
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JCS 1067, even more than the Handbook, had been the outcome of savage infighting between the Pentagon, the White House and the Department of the Treasury. This conflict – which was by no means over even with JCS 1067’s approval by the President – expressed both the varying attitudes among Roosevelt’s officials and aides when it came to the shape post-war Germany should take, and also differences in quite basic political assumptions.

The political struggle was essentially between the idealists, who wished to transform Germany, by radical action, into a new kind of country, peaceful and harmless by design, and the practical types, who weighed up the plight of the country’s seventy million people, most of them now reduced to penury and inactivity and menaced by the threat of starvation, and saw the rapid restoration of its capacity to pay its way and feed itself as the main priority.

The chief protagonists of these two conflicting points of view were fifty-four-year-old Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Junior (for the idealists) and Henry J. Stimson, the veteran Secretary for War, who in 1945 was already seventy-seven (for the realists).

A member of the East Coast Republican elite, educated at Yale and Harvard Law School, Stimson had served between 1911 and 1914 as Secretary for War under President Taft, and in the inter-war period had been American proconsul in both occupied Nicaragua and the Philippines. Despite Stimson’s republicanism, Roosevelt had offered him the post at the War Office in 1940 because he was unquestionably anti-Nazi. However, he was also a hard-headed realist with considerable administrative experience and a distrust of utopian schemes.

Morgenthau’s background was different. His own father had been Ambassador to Turkey after the First World War, and as a young man Henry Jr had witnessed with horror the massacres and expulsions that followed the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. He was also a (highly assimilated) Jew. Whether that last fact influenced in a decisive way his views on the future of Germany was a matter for discussion at the time, and remains so to this day.

The idea at the heart of Morgenthau’s plan for the post-war fate of Germany was that the country should, quite literally, be rendered incapable of ever waging war again. In short, he proposed that Germany become ‘a land primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character’, and that it be divided into three, a ‘north German’ state, a ‘south German’ state, and an international zone including the heavy industrial and coal-mining areas of the North Rhine and Ruhr, along with a swathe of territory running north and east to include Hamburg, Bremen and the strategic Kiel Canal. Of the Ruhr, the proposal insisted:

Within a short period, if possible not longer than six months after the cessation of hostilities, all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action shall either be completely dismantled and removed from the area or completely destroyed. All equipment shall be removed from the mines and the mines shall be thoroughly wrecked.
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The standard of living of the German population should, he suggested, ‘be held down to a subsistence level’.

Stimson’s response, on 5 September, began by stating that the Secretary of War agreed with the ‘principles stated therein’, which were ‘in conformity with the lines upon which we have been proceeding in the War Department in our directives to the armed forces’. It then added: ‘with the exception of the last paragraph’. The last paragraph was the all-important one in which Morgenthau made his drastic, not to say draconian, proposals regarding the future shape of the German economy. ‘I cannot,’ Stimson said firmly, ‘treat as realistic the suggestion that such an area in the present economic condition of the world can be turned into a non-productive “ghost territory” when it has become the centre of one of the most industrialised continents in the world, populated by peoples of energy, vigour and progressiveness.’ He concluded:

Nor can I agree that it should be one of our purposes to hold the German population ‘to a subsistence level’ if this means the edge of poverty, condemning the German people to a condition of servitude in which, no matter how hard or how effectively a man worked, he could not materially increase his economic condition in the world. Such a programme would, I believe, create tensions and resentments far outweighing any immediate advantage of security and would tend to obscure the guilt of the Nazis and the viciousness of their doctrines and their acts.

By such economic mistakes I cannot but feel that you would also be poisoning the springs out of which we hope that the future peace of the world can be maintained.

My basic objection to the proposed methods of treating Germany which were discussed this morning was that in addition to a system of preventive and educative punishment they would add the dangerous weapon of complete economic oppression. Such methods, in my opinion, do not prevent war; they tend to breed war.
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It was a crushing rejoinder. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, was not far behind him, though less aggressively so. Like Stimson, he was happy to see Germany pay reparations in money, kind and even human labour (there were already plans to allow the other Allies to retain German POWs as forced labour far beyond the coming of peace), but could not conceive of de-industrialising the country.
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