Exorcising Hitler (56 page)

On Clay’s instructions, the letter was copied to the Defence and State Departments. At the latter, the Assistant Secretary, Howard C. Peterson, commented, ‘My only criticism of Clay’s proposed statement is that it tends a bit in tone towards wooing the Germans.’
¹²
When it was discussed at the highest level, however, it was decided that the proposed material was too political, that this kind of thing was international policy – in other words, the Secretary of State’s job.

Clay got no reply for some time. On 7 August he wrote to the Civil Affairs Division at the War Department in Washington to protest about this, but again no instructions seemed forthcoming, even though, Clay said, this was merely a ‘statement of policy we are operating now’.
¹³
On 12 August, the War Department ordered Clay not to publish his 29 July statement and said it would send a delegation to Berlin to discuss things. Clay complained bitterly, but there was little he could do.

Except that the General’s opinions had not gone unheeded. ‘Wooing the Germans’ was, in fact, coming gradually into fashion, even in faraway Washington.

On 6 September 1946, what had once been Hitler’s personal train made a stately arrival at the still bomb-shattered main station in the south-west German metropolis of Stuttgart. Aboard was James F. Byrnes, US Secretary of State. He had slept in the Führer’s bed during his overnight trip from Paris. There he had spent the past few days at peace conference proceedings that had already lasted since 29 July and would continue until 15 October, leading eventually to comprehensive treaties with former German wartime allies such as Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Finland.

Byrnes’ last public appointment in Paris had been a discussion with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Nagy,
*
about the internal situation there and the progress being made towards post-war rehabilitation. Now, after his nearly 700-kilometre train journey, Byrnes stepped into an official car outside Stuttgart station. Preceded by an escort of ‘screeching US army jeeps’, as
Time
magazine’s man had it, he rode 600 metres or so to the city’s Staatstheater, the only major opera house in Germany still functioning after five years of Allied bombing. Here an audience was waiting for him, consisting not just of American officers and diplomats but of invited German officials and civilians, plus a wide range of the international press, including Russian journalists. Significantly, the speech was also to be broadcast on German radio, with a simultaneous translation.
¹⁴

Byrnes was supposedly in Stuttgart merely to discuss occupation matters with senior US officers and AMG officials, but this was clearly something more deliberately public and much more important. He was accompanied, for good measure, by two US senators, the Democratic Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally of Texas, and his Republican counterpart, Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg.

Byrnes looked tired, as well he might, but the sixty-seven-year-old South Carolinian read his speech slowly and clearly, helping even non-native speakers to understand. What he said transformed the American view of their mission in occupied Germany and, more to the point, revolutionised the view of the Germans themselves.

‘It is not,’ Byrnes said, ‘in the interest of the German people or in the interest of world peace that Germany should become a pawn or a partner in a military struggle for power between the East and the West.’ This was an interesting statement. It admitted a conflict with the Soviets, but it was not the key statement. More interestingly for most Germans, he proclaimed that the German people should not be ‘denied . . . the possibility of improving their lot through hard work’. He admitted that, without Germany becoming a unified economic unit with a common financial policy, it was impossible for this to be properly achieved. And a democratic government in Germany was the aim, too. Then he came to another of his crucial points:

Security forces will probably have to remain in Germany for a long period. I want no misunderstanding. We will not shirk our duty. We are not withdrawing. We are staying here. As long as there is an occupation army in Germany, the American armed forces will be part of that occupation army.
¹⁵

America was staying in Europe. Maybe not for ever, but there was no more talk of a two-year withdrawal.

The Secretary’s speech gave concessions to the Russians, accepting territorial changes in East Prussia in their favour, but cast some doubt as to whether the Poles would be able to hold on to all the areas of eastern Germany they were currently occupying. This must await the final peace treaty negotiations. He also conceded the Saar area to France – though emphatically not the Rhine and Ruhr.

Ever since, analysts have argued about the exact origins and meaning of the Byrnes speech. There is little doubt that it was based on Clay’s original letter to Echols. In some places, it reproduces the letter’s phrasing almost word for word. It still talks about a unified administration and pushes for all the things that had been pushed for ever since Potsdam. Some have argued that it was directed, despite a few little jabs in the direction of the uncooperative eastern neighbours, mainly at the French rather than the Russians.
¹⁶

Byrnes’ promise that the Americans would not withdraw before things in Germany had been settled was an enormous boost to most Germans in the Western zones (Communist Party members perhaps excepted), as was the change in tone of the references to the German standard of living and the Germans’ right to work hard and see the fruits of their labour. Even the Secretary of State’s equivocation about giving all the rest of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia to the Poles might be seen as a comfort to the defeated nation. Now there was, at least, some hope.

This appears to have been the main aim of the speech. To encourage the German population to feel that they were no longer just being punished, but could actually have ambitions to live as other peoples lived, and perhaps in the not too distant future. As such, although applause at the Staatstheater was described by
Time
as ‘mild’, Byrnes instantly became a very popular man in Germany. After the speech, he was greeted with ‘enormous enthusiasm’ and mobbed by locals. ‘Here,’ Clay later recollected, ‘was an American Secretary of State out there signing autographs for the Germans, little over one year after the end of the war.’
¹⁷

It was remarkable. A little more than a year after the end of the war – and not quite two since Sergeant Holzinger and his platoon had been the first American soldiers to splash across the river Our into Germany – an Allied leader had spoken convincingly to the defeated and apparently eternally disgraced German nation about hope.

The fact was, of course, that the country’s worst post-war winter still lay ahead of it. By the spring of 1947 there would be food riots and more bitter criticism of the Allies. But lines were being drawn and plans modified. Within ten days of Secretary Byrnes’ speech, Clay was in correspondence with the War Department in Washington discussing a revision of the draconian JCS 1067 and suggesting that the Stuttgart speech ‘be taken as a basis for a positive policy statement’.
¹⁸

On 4 October 1946, premiers of the German
Länder
from the British and American Zones met in Bremen to discuss coordinating their political systems in a ‘
Länder
Council’ along the model followed in the American Zone. On 2 December, Secretary Byrnes and his British counterpart, Ernest Bevin, would sign an agreement leading to the economic unity of their zones, to take effect from 1 January 1947.

On 16 October 1946, eleven of the defendants arraigned the previous year at the Trial of Major War Criminals in Nuremberg were hanged. Goering cheated the noose by committing suicide in his cell. Three of them were acquitted, the rest sentenced to terms from ten years to life. It was the last of the war crimes trials to be conducted under four-power auspices.

The discussions in Paris ground on, finally leading to peace treaties with the former Nazi satellites, but the discussions over Germany rumbled on and on. Kennan was now back from Moscow and becoming an increasingly important figure in Washington. There the Republicans had wiped out the Democratic majority in Congress in the November 1946 elections. Of the pair who had backed Byrnes at Stuttgart, Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, once a staunch isolationist but now an equally fervent anti-communist internationalist, had replaced Connally at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In January, Truman replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State with the formidably hard-headed General George Catlett Marshall, who announced to Molotov in March 1947 at the latest foreign ministers’ conference that America was ‘opposed to policies which will continue Germany as a congested slum or an economic poorhouse in the centre of Europe’. The continuing move towards a more humane and realistic assessment of Germany gained further momentum from Hoover’s second trip to Germany in the winter of 1946–7, when the ex-President issued dire warnings about conditions there. Elsewhere, announcements of huge aid packages for Greece and Turkey, which were seen as threatened by communist aggression, showed that a new, tough Western line was now in place.

JCS 1779 finally replaced JCS 1067 in July 1947, formalising a policy that was already in operation at ground level. The new orders for Clay, who had recently succeeded McNarney as Governor of the American Zone and C-in-C Europe, now stated quite clearly that ‘an orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany’. The Clay/Byrnes line had triumphed. Morgenthau was officially a dead letter.

But how to ensure that Germany became ‘stable and productive’ and democratic, too? The answer was given when Secretary Marshall delivered an address to the graduating class at Harvard on 5 June 1947. He used the occasion to outline the administration’s proposals for European recovery from the world war.

George Marshall had a plan, one which would become the most famous in modern history. The better future for Europe that this plan envisaged included a place for a new, post-war Germany. And, as it turned out, this latest reincarnation of Germany would be prosperous and peaceful beyond most contemporaries’ wildest dreams.

*
Ferenc Nagy (1903–79) was the leader of the Smallholders’ Party, which won a majority in the free elections held in November 1945. He was in office from March 1946 until May 1947, when he succumbed to a mix of threats and bribes (the Russians had kidnapped his son), resigned, and finally went into exile in the United States. New elections ensured a communist majority in parliament.

Epilogue:

The Sleep Cure

On 15 September 1949, Konrad Adenauer was elected Chancellor of a new state that called itself the ‘Federal Republic of Germany’. Adenauer, at seventy-three long past the age when most politicians would take on such a job, had been approved by the 402-seat parliament with a margin of just one vote – his own. When the result, 202 votes for him – with 142 against, 44 abstentions, one invalid ballot and thirteen deputies not present – was announced by the parliament’s speaker, Adenauer turned, seemingly unperturbed, to his neighbour on the parliamentary benches and commented in his strong Rhenish accent: ‘Things have always turned out all right.’

By that autumn, four and a half years after the war ended, the various victors had truly gathered all ‘their’ Germans in. The state over which Adenauer so narrowly came to preside was formed from the three Western zones – American, British and French – with a population close to fifty million. It was federal, it was a republic, but it was not Germany. As if to emphasise the fact, it took as its (allegedly temporary) seat of government the university town of Bonn on the Rhine, rather than the much larger Frankfurt, which in the Middle Ages had been seat of the Holy Roman Empire, and might well have made a permanent capital.

The Russians’ protégés to the east founded their own state less than a month later, on 7 October, but they called it something subtly different: the German Democratic Republic. Again, two out of three words were correct. It was German, it was a republic, but it was not democratic.

Officially, the Western state had come into being in May 1949, when the three zones’ German representatives had passed a Basic Law that enabled elections for a parliament to take place throughout the areas concerned. The
Länder
that made up the Soviet Zone were invited to follow by a careful wording that said: ‘The entire German people remains invited to complete the unity and freedom of Germany in a process of free self-determination.’ They wouldn’t be allowed to do that for more than forty years, until free self-determination actually became possible.

Born in January 1876 in Bad Honnef near Bonn, Konrad Adenauer had followed a career as a legal civil servant in the service of the Prussian kingdom, of which his native Rhineland had become a part after the Napoleonic Wars. However, he was by religion a pious Catholic and by cultural inclination Westward looking. He had become High Burgomaster of Cologne in 1917, when the last Kaiser was still on the throne of Germany, and remained in office until 1933, elected repeatedly on the ticket of the Centre Party.