Exorcising Hitler (30 page)

In collaboration with an UNRRA team, the soldiers took over a former Napola
School at Feldafing, drafted many of its German staff, including cooks and medical personnel, and turned it into a refugee camp, with a nearby hotel requisitioned as hospital accommodation. The number of inmates rapidly grew to some 4,000. By the end of May 1945, the camp had experienced its first survivor wedding and those in the hospital – now moved to a former monastery – had been treated to a concert by the Kovno Ghetto orchestra, dressed in their striped concentration-camp pyjamas.
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For the Germans among whom these foreigners had lived for the past years, there was no such help. Quite specifically. From the first day of peace until other forms of communication could take over, the language spoken between Germans and Allied occupiers was predominantly that of deprivation, of hunger and restriction and shortages – shortages of shelter and fuel, gainful activity and, above all, food.

After so many millions of others all over Europe had starved, it was now, after 8 May 1945, that defeated Germany’s great hunger began.

7

The Price

Deprivation was a short cut, a permanent, unspoken signal that said, on the Allies’ part, and eloquently so: you Germans are unimaginably bad and we are good; we will now live well in dwellings and on land taken from you and tell you what to do, while you spend some (unspecified) time suffering and obeying orders and purifying yourselves. We shall impose upon you Germans everything you imposed upon others for so long.

In return, the German population frowned and said: you spoke throughout this war of freedom, but now you impose on us only restriction and deliberate suffering. What do you want with us seventy million? Only to make us suffer more than we already do? Yes, the war was bad. However, we are not just the people of Hitler and Himmler, but also of Beethoven and Goethe. We have lived here in the heart of Europe for hundreds of years, mostly no less peaceably than our neighbours. We shall carry on living – unless you want to kill us all. So, again, what do you want with us?

There was no immediate answer from the Allied side in those days and weeks after Germany’s surrender. How could there be, when there was no definite plan? On the big scale that mattered, there was no conversation.

Since the German government was now abolished, and its servants – including Backe, Speer and all the other organisers of Germany’s ultimately futile wartime miracles – not just sacked but in the case of the upper echelons arrested, there was no German in authority to talk to. Almost all the Germans who knew which levers to pull to make the machine work had either been Nazis from the start or had ended up that way as the price of staying part of the elite.

Of course, from the first moment Allied troops crossed the border, despite the animosity and the non-fraternisation order and all the rest, thousands and millions of small conversations had taken place – often halting, awkward and even unpleasant, but sometimes, even as the killing continued, informed by hesitant kindness and mutual curiosity. And the number of these tiny conversations began to accumulate. To speak of normality would be wrong – too much had happened and too many innocent people had died unnecessarily to get to this point. There was nothing wholly natural, either, about most of the relationships that arose from these conversations, because they were so unequal. They were fraught with advantage and exploitative intent on the conquerors’ side and need and resentment, concealed or open, on the part of the vanquished. But human beings are instinctively, even compulsively, social animals. Even under the very worst of circumstances, in hopelessly beleaguered foxholes and claustrophobic air raid shelters and lice-ridden concentration camp barracks, we still want to make contact. Post-war Germany was no different. But before those millions of small conversations could lead to anything truly positive, the language of deprivation ruled the great affairs of post-war Germany.

Lieutenant General Lucius Dubignon Clay was born in Georgia, son of Alexander Stephens Clay (1857–1910), a member of the US Senate representing that state. The General was an engineer, a logistics man – he had earned his reputation building dams and airfields and, famously, swiftly restoring the wrecked harbour at Cherbourg after it was abandoned by the Germans following D-Day – rather than an old-fashioned battlefield warrior in the mode of George S. Patton.

Clay had risen quickly to become the youngest brigadier general in the US Army because he knew how to handle politicians and he got things done. In the late spring, just after his forty-eighth birthday, he was promoted to lieutenant general and appointed Eisenhower’s deputy at SHAEF, a post he continued in as SHAEF merged uneasily into the post-war Allied Control Council, and the Military Government of the American Zone came into being. Clay had gained a reputation as a supporter of ‘tough war’ measures in America itself, including curfews, restrictions on energy use and bans on horse racing and gambling, and there seemed no reason to believe he would be any easier on the conquered Germans.
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Eisenhower had unsuccessfully supported the candidacy of his abrasive Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith, whom Stimson and his Under-Secretary, McCloy, had thought temperamentally unsuited to such a post-war role. Nevertheless, Clay’s appointment had actually been approved by President Roosevelt shortly before his death as the intended Governor of the American Zone, and so it was with the authority of the coming man in Germany that he wrote in June 1945: ‘Conditions are going to be extremely difficult in Germany this winter and there will be much cold and hunger.’

Clay’s words were nothing more, in a way, than a statement of fact, a logical consequence of the massive human displacement and disruption and the catastrophic damage to the German economy and infrastructure inflicted during the disastrous, drawn-out endgame of the war. But then came the moral message: ‘Some cold and hunger will be necessary to make the German people realise the consequences of a war which they caused.’
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General Montgomery had been saying much the same thing, at least in public, and issuing declarations to that effect to the population in the British Zone. The Russians, for all their violence in word and deed, tended to be less moralistic.

There had been arguments during the war in Moscow over whether the Germans in general were ‘redeemable’ at all, but in the longer term a combination of textbook Marxism-Leninism and military pragmatism won the day when it came to occupation policy. Theoretically, of course, the Nazi regime ultimately counted as nothing more than the brutal final phase of capitalism. Those who had foisted it on the German people – Junker landowners, capitalists, militarists and so on – would be found and severely punished in the uninhibited Stalinist fashion familiar from the regime’s treatment of ‘class enemies’ back in the USSR, but the mass of Germans, inasmuch as they had not committed serious crimes, were more or less classifiable as victims.

The Soviets were the only occupiers who, paradoxically – for their mode of conquest, administration and exploitation of Germany’s human and industrial resources was anything but soft – allowed some leeway for the German population in the ‘guilt question’.
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It is difficult to know whether the early phase of post-war Germany’s existence would have been perceptibly easier had the Allies done the thing that they were firmly set on not doing: treating conquered Germany on an equal basis with the rest of the continent, which of course was also facing horrendous problems of food supply and economic and structural rehabilitation. Clay and Montgomery were eminently practical men. As his correspondence with Churchill proved, Montgomery was already, by July, growing restless at the restrictions placed upon him by London. All the same, in the push-pull of the post-war crisis, there were times when vengeance trumped pragmatic decency.

This was most apparent in the matter of the German prisoners of war who fell into Western, particularly American, hands. Much of the manoeuvring of German military forces in the very final phase of the war had to do, not with any notion of ‘turning the tide’ or ‘winning’, but with reaching the relative safety of the Anglo-American lines and surrendering to the Western Allies. The very luckiest of the Wehrmacht’s finest delivered themselves into American hands in time to be put on one of the last transatlantic POW convoys and join the hundreds of thousands of surrendered Wehrmacht personnel in the established prison camp network within the continental USA.

Josef Bischof, for instance, captured near Kaiserslautern in south-west Germany in March 1945, found himself just a few weeks later on the other side of the Atlantic, harvesting sugar beet and beans in Colorado. Later he would wash dishes in a hospital kitchen. By and large, he saw out the war and the immediate post-war era in decent, though not luxurious surroundings. His treatment corresponded to the Geneva Convention, which had until now been more or less adhered to by both the Anglo-Americans and the Germans in the west, although not by the Germans and the Russians on the Eastern Front, resulting in huge losses of POWs on both sides.
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At the beginning of April, the transatlantic POW transports were stopped. There was a simple reason, apart from the clearly imminent end of the war: there were now just too many prisoners, too many for this system to cope with anyway. When the German forces of Army Group ‘B’, besieged in the Ruhr industrial area, surrendered on 18 April, 317,000 men passed into American captivity. This was the largest mass surrender of German troops in the entire war. The total number of prisoners in American hands soared from 313,000 at the end of 1944 to 2.6 million in early April 1945, and over five million at the beginning of May. The ‘temporary enclosures’ in which prisoners were usually kept before being shipped into captivity in the United States quickly proved utterly inadequate for receiving such numbers.
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The problem here was quite clear. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, the Allies were duty bound to feed enemy POWs at the same rate as their own base troops (and to pay them as well, according to rank). Josef Bischof and his comrades were the last captured Germans to be granted that privilege. But how could this level of treatment be sustained for five million unproductive German POWs, suddenly dropped into a SHAEF-occupied area in the middle of a continent where food shortages were already acute and threatening to take on apocalyptic proportions?

The response to the problem of POW numbers, stated in an order from the JCS in Washington to Eisenhower, was to create a new category, not ‘prisoners of war’ as stipulated under existing international agreements but ‘disarmed enemy forces’. In a coordinated move, the British reclassified their own captives as ‘surrendered enemy personnel’. This new category could be fed and maintained at a lower level than stipulated by the Geneva Convention.

Since there was no German government after 8 May 1945, who was there to protest? The German Red Cross, purged of its Nazi leadership, would be allowed to continue some inspection work, but in the post-war context this amounted to a fairly toothless watchdog. Basically, there was little or no recourse for the German soldiers who had fallen (or put themselves, often at considerable effort) into Anglo-American hands in preference to those of the Russians.

Huge numbers of the German prisoners were housed (if that is the word) in the open, with little, or for quite long periods, no food, in a cold, wet spring season. They were often mistreated. That hundreds of thousands, running into millions, of these POWs suffered horribly from hunger, exposure and associated diseases, and that a shamefully large number of them died as a result, cannot be denied. There are wildly differing estimates of the dead, ranging from 8,000 or so up into the hundreds of thousands, just as there are in the case of those bombed at Dresden – and as in the case of Dresden the post-war political orientation of the estimators seems to be a critical factor.
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Until early 1945, it had been usual for Germans captured at the front line to be transferred back to holding camps over the border in France. The massive numbers who surrendered from that time onwards, however, overwhelmed the system. As early as February 1945, the Americans had handed over the administration of these camps to the French authorities. It was a cynical move, since, although the French agreed in writing that they would adhere to international agreements on the care of POWs, everyone was perfectly aware that the French did not have the resources (or perhaps the will) to feed these prisoners at the previous levels – and also that they would reserve the right to use these prisoners as forced labourers. However, with the war rapidly drawing to an end, German retaliation against American troops in their custody – which had earlier always mitigated against neglecting the letter of the laws of war – was becoming ever more unlikely and would soon be irrelevant.
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The numbers of German troops surrendering in the west in the last weeks of the war was unlike anything anyone involved had ever seen. The closest comparison was the millions of Red Army soldiers who had fallen into German hands in the summer and autumn of 1941 and then again during the summer of 1942. This was not an encouraging precedent. There were, however, differences. Firstly, the Americans, though prepared, along with the other Western Allies, to bend the laws of war seriously out of shape when it came to caring for their millions of new captives, had no genocidal impulse. And secondly, unlike in the Soviet Union, where the war continued to rage for years after the great encirclements and mass surrenders of the early months, peace was on the horizon, and that horizon seemed close.