After the Reich (44 page)

His attitude to the Germans amounts to a metaphor for the American occupation. At first he was toughness incarnate. He famously displayed his attitude - and more - by urinating in the Rhine on 24 March 1945 (‘I have been looking forward to this for some time’),
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and after throwing up at Ohrdruf not only ordered that local populations should be punished for what had gone on at the camps in their neighbourhoods, he wanted simple American servicemen to see the concentration camps. His attitude soon began to change, however, and it changed more quickly and went further than any of his colleagues. Like Clay he had no truck with the no-frat order, and he was clear in making a difference between Germans and Nazis: ‘All Nazis are bad. But not all Germans are Nazis.’
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He was made military governor of Bavaria and set up his HQ in the former SS officer training school in Bad Tölz. On 22 September he blotted his copy book by appointing Nazis to administrative roles within his Bavarian command and marginalising their criminality - all in defiance of JCS 1067. He backtracked a little, saying that he was employing Nazis because he needed to retain his own men to fight, and because they hadn’t yet found anyone better.
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A week later, Eisenhower relieved him of his command.
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It may have been that Patton thought the authorities were being ridiculously harsh about the run-of-the-mill Pgs, but there was something more sinister besides. He was prone to antisemitic utterances. Morgenthau and Baruch were exercising a ‘semitic revenge on Germany’, while the Jewish DPs were beneath contempt, or ‘lower than animals’.
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He visited Camp No. 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in September, which was said to contain among its nearly 5,000 inmates the ‘cream’ of the black - Totenkopf - SS which operated the concentration camps, including guards from Dachau and Buchenwald (those who had not been killed while the prisoners were liberated). He was told that some of the people there were not even Pgs, let alone criminals. At this moment Patton was heard to utter in frustration, ‘It is sheer madness to intern these people.’
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There is no doubt that he meant it. On another occasion he said, ‘We have destroyed what could have been a good race . . . [and replaced it with] Mongolian savages. All of Europe will be communist.’
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His conciliatory attitude towards the SS prisoners must have led to the rumour that he had told the camp commanders to behave more decently towards their captives. A few months after his dismissal he was injured in a car accident on his way to a pheasant shoot near Mannheim. He died in Heidelberg on 21 December 1945.
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There have been conspiracy theories.
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After Eisenhower went home, the American commander in chief in Germany was General Joseph T. McNarney. His deputy was Lucius B. Clay. Clay, who replaced McNarney as commander of European Command in the spring of 1947, was an instance of one of Westpoint’s great strengths, something that neither Sandhurst nor Woolwich has ever seemed capable of producing - astute political officers. He was a southerner who had spent seventeen years marking time as a first lieutenant in the engineers. He missed action in the First World War and never commanded anything with greater firepower than a desk. Yet he was one of a handful of outstanding figures of the immediate post-war period. Together with his political adviser Robert Murphy he refused to concede where his political superiors were prepared for retreat on all fronts.

Clay had abandoned any pro-Morgenthau feeling he might have had by 26 April 1945. He was already keen to relaunch German industry.
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His guru was James Byrnes, and he must have profoundly regretted the latter’s departure as secretary of state in January 1947. Three months later Clay confirmed his discipleship in a letter. Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech, in which he announced a new deal for Germany, served as his model: ‘Every word that you said at Stuttgart became a part of my “Bible” for Germany . . . It was a living document of hope. I am not pro-German but I hope with all my heart that in our political warfare with USSR we do not forget that here in Germany we have 70,000,000 human beings to remember.’
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Clay realised that his role was to make propaganda for the West. As he told General Draper in Washington, ‘we do propose to attack communism and the police state before the German people, whereas in the past we have confined our efforts to presenting the advantages of democracy . . . Our political objectives are to promote democracy which must mean to resist communism.’
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At first civil administrations were created in a similarly haphazard way to the Russians. The soldiers who occupied a town or village looked for someone who was untainted by Nazism. In the writer Ernst von Salomon’s local town they asked the parish priest, who suggested that the pre-1933 mayor had done a good job. The former mayor confessed, however, that he had subsequently joined the Party. The Americans turned a blind eye to that and asked him to appoint seven councillors. He told them frankly that he would be hard pressed to find seven decent men who were not members of the Party, so in the end they had a council that contained more Nazis than it had during the Third Reich.
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America disposed of a large body of linguists. These were either German Americans from the Mid-West or German or Austrian Jews - often recent arrivals in the States - Czechs, Poles and other educated Slavs who had lately established themselves across the Atlantic, or soldiers who had simply acquired the language. There were German writers in uniform, like Klaus Mann, Hans Habe, Stefan Heym and Georg Stefan Troller, most of whom worked in intelligence or propaganda. Saul Padower, whose job was to interview prisoners for the Psychological Warfare Department, spent his early years on the Elbe. Padower thought his colleague Joe hailed from Nebraska - although his fluent German should have rendered him suspicious - but when they reached Bavaria Joe suddenly grew pensive. He said his parents lived near by. They drove to his village and entered the house. Joe poked an old man in a chair whose pipe dropped out of his mouth. He asked the man if he knew who he was. The man had a stab, got it wrong and tried again. This time he recognised the son who had left them at the age of twelve: He turned to his wife who was knitting: ‘Hoer mal Du . . . onser Sepp ist hier, doss ist onser Sepp!’ (Hey, listen you, our Joe is here, that’s our Joe!).
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American linguists were not always so politically reliable - some 70 per cent of US army linguists had German relations like Padover’s Joe-Sepp. Salomon’s friend the Austrian lawyer Diewald was astonished to find that the local American commandant was Chinese, but his amazement was unsurpassed when he discovered that the man not only spoke perfect German, but was a great admirer of the ‘As-As’, as he called the SS.
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Distrust, and the fact that many were only FOB (fresh-off-boat) Americans, meant that only sixty-five out of 1,500 exiles figured in Military Government, but that was still more than in the SBZ, and the British did not believe in making the oppressed victors.
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James Stern arrived in Germany in the spring of 1945. As the aircraft came in to land he glimpsed Koblenz and the Deutsches Eck, where the Rhine and the Mosel meet. He was appalled at his first reacquaintance with the country that he had first known as a teenager learning German: ‘Sections of a shattered bridge stuck up out of the mud-coloured water and a castle sat perched on top of the vine-terraced hills. Then the plane dropped, and we looked down into rows of burned out-houses - just shells of houses, without roofs or rooms, You looked down between their four walls to their ground floors, on which there lay either nothing or else a mound of smashed brick, smashed sticks of furniture and garbage.’
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Carl Zuckmayer returned an exile from his native land in the autumn of 1946, just before the great chill. He had emigrated to Switzerland after his works were banned by the Nazis. In 1939 he became an American citizen. At the end of the war he was living on a farm in Vermont and making his expertise on German life available to the War Office. In July 1946 he became the head of the European unit of the CAD (Civil Affairs Division). He resigned in May 1947, deeply disappointed by everything he had seen during a winter in the land of his birth.
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The occupation was eighteen months old, and he found that his former countrymen viewed the Americans with mixed feelings. There was ‘a little hatred, some disappointment and a bit of reasonable, grateful recognition’. What hatred there was existed chiefly in the hearts of stupid Germans, he thought, men and women who refused to take responsibility for what had happened.
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German attitudes to Americans were coloured by lack of contact; and lack of contact meant lack of influence. The Americans tended to live in their own compounds, or to requisition large sections of the extant middle-class suburbs of the bigger cities. This was the case in Wiesbaden, where they moved into the smart quarters on the heights above the town. The compounds were often ringed by barbed wire, making them into little fortresses announced by the legend ‘Entry Forbidden to Germans’ - a sign with a conscious or unconscious allusion to recent German exclusivity towards the Jews. The Americans bought from their own shops, went to their own schools and spent the evenings in their own clubs. When they wanted to know the news, they read it in the
Stars and Stripes
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Zuckmayer believed it was important for Americans to go out and meet Germans, particularly young Germans. Many German boys, he felt, were reticent about making contact with Americans, but he held out hope for the girls. By that he did not mean frat, but beneficial contact through discussion groups, possibly on Sundays. The most dangerous group of Germans were those who were most hard done by: those who remained homeless and out of work, and who spent their days idling, looking for trouble, or for something to steal.
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The American Zone had been fixed long before the end of the war, but on 12 December 1945 the US increased the size of its holdings in Germany by taking over the Bremen pocket from the British. The Americans needed a port to unload supplies for their forces. The news was bad for the famous Rathauskeller, as US forces adhered to their right to plunder supplies of wine. Whether the British had helped themselves to the world’s most famous collection of German wine first is not clear from the official history. Nearly 100,000 bottles were plundered before an order was received to deliver a further 300,000 to the American army. German civilians were no longer allowed to use the cellar and it was turned into an officers’ mess. American officers could buy wine, but no one restocked the cellar, and because many American servicemen were not keen on German wine, whisky was served under the ancient vaults.

The Americans may have drunk up many vintages from the nineteenth century, but they left the two most famous wines alone: the cask of seventeenth-century Rose wine from the Rheingau and the twelve barrels of eighteenth-century Apostle mosel were sealed and apparently left untouched. On 15 October 1948 the cellar was handed back to the town hall at a solemn ceremony at which the mayor, Wilhelm Kaisen, and the head of the American military, Thomas Dunn, were present. There were many toasts, so perhaps it was not so solemn by the end. All the Allies helped themselves to wine. For the owners of prestigious estates and cellars, the important thing was to protect the most highly prized bottles. At Maximin Grünhaus on the River Ruwer, for example, the current owner’s grandmother used to find an excuse to visit the building, which had been taken over by the Americans. She was a corpulent woman, who used to dress in wide skirts for the occasion. Once she had found her way down to the vast formerly monastic cellars, she would pick up some bottles of the best wines and hang them with cords under her clothes, thereby ferrying them to safety.
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The cession of Bremen was an instance of Anglo-American cooperation. In general the British and the Americans worked together from the beginning, although the Americans often looked down on the British, and vice versa. John Dos Passos cites an instance of a man requiring a spare part for his Opel. He was told he needed to obtain it from the British Zone, but it was no problem - ‘we have good co-operation on things like that’. Someone asked about the French: ‘If anybody knows any way of getting anything out of the French Zone they haven’t told me about it.’ Finally the Russians were mentioned. ‘We don’t talk about the Russian Zone’ was the answer.
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Due to clever planning and relocation, a lot of German industry had survived. Clay put the figure as high as 25-30 per cent, but he did not think the economy was ready to start up again in June 1945.
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The Americans had come through the war with their wealth, and they turned their noses up at the idea of demontage. Clay understood what that meant for his country all too well: ‘rolling stock, livestock and agricultural implements required for a minimum economy in Germany and which if not available would result in increased imports into Germany, would militate against the ability of Germany to pay reparations and inevitably result in calling on the US for relief’.
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Zuckmayer was able to witness the first steps taken to re-establish a professional life in the ruins. He met a young dentist and was intrigued to know how he would practise his skills in a broken city. He located the surgery in an area filled with the usual heaps of rubble. The ground floor was filled with heaps of masonry but an emergency staircase had been built to give access to the first floor, and on the second a dozen families and their sub-lessees were living in a few patched-up rooms. From there another exposed stairway took him up to the remaining rooms of the house where four dentists had established their practice. Only two of the rooms could be heated, and the surgery’s hours were limited by the caprices of mains electricity that came on and went off with distressing regularity. During the hours that the surgery functioned, it was overrun by patients who lived in the rubble all around. The nurses were sometimes engaged as assistants, sometimes as builders helping to render the other rooms inhabitable. They looked pale and thin, but not exhausted. When they saw Zuckmayer they did not ask for cigarettes or food - they wanted books. The dentists themselves had all suffered personal tragedies, their families killed in Allied raids. One had lost a leg. One was waiting to marry his fiancée, who was due to walk to Berlin from East Prussia. Her father had been killed and her mother had committed suicide.
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For others, the full story was only then coming to light. There was a cleaning lady who worked at Zuckmayer’s Berlin lodgings, for example. She was actually a pastor’s wife, but the clergyman had been called up by the Volkssturm in the last days of the war and had subsequently disappeared. She had three children, two boys in their teens and a baby boy born towards the end of the war. For their sake she had to work. She had always insisted that her husband would return. Then news came that his body had been found in the Grossbeerenstrasse in Glienicke in the far north of the city, and had been positively identified. It had lain among the ruins for nineteen months. The elder children had known their father was dead. Once she had heard one of them praying: ‘Lord, make us loyal and brave to the end, like him.’ It was two hours’ walk from Zuckmayer’s boarding house to the place where her husband had met his end, but she still insisted on going, and going on foot. Until that moment she had been utterly stoical about her fate. Now, finally aware of how hopeless her position was, she broke down: she wanted to leave Germany - ‘this damned country’. Then she recovered her composure and set out on her trek to Glienicke.
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