After the Reich (45 page)

American GIs had been fed a good deal of propaganda at home and on the way. They had drunk deep from the films of Frank Capra, and had read the articles of Emil Ludwig, Louis Nizer and Siegrid Schultz; they had heard Dorothy Thompson. They had been equipped with copies of the
Pocket Guide to Germany
. From the first moment they walked on German soil, they expected to be attacked by Werewolves. They were nervous of Germans - civilians and soldiers alike. Despite all this, surveys at home revealed that Americans were more anti-Japanese than anti-German: German Americans were and are a sizeable part of the US population.
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The order banning frat contributed to the Americans’ brutality towards the conquered Germans. Public opinion favoured punishment and Eisenhower had made it clear that there was to be no billeting of American soldiers with German families, no mixed marriages, no joint church services, no visits to German homes, no drinking with Germans, no shaking their hands, no playing games with them, no exchanging gifts with them, no dancing with them, going to their theatres, taverns or hotels. The penalty was a $65 fine or a court martial.
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Propaganda had taught the soldiers that Germans - particularly German soldiers - were subhuman. In the autumn of 1944 the Americans burned down the village of Wallenberg because they had encountered resistance. In the spring of the following year they liberated their first concentration camp at Ohrdruf. Eisenhower was quick to seize on the importance of the camp in raising American morale and ordered his troops to visit it. Pictures from the camps were also distributed to soldiers. The Germans were to be treated no better than dogs. Indeed, in some instances dogs loomed large. A Frau Sachse told Salomon of a potentially dangerous moment that occurred when her four-year-old daughter had heard that an American officer’s pet was called Hitler. ‘All dogs are called Hitler,’ he told her. The bemused child replied, ‘My dog’s called Ami [Yank]!’ The mother dragged the child away before the American could respond.
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Salomon gives a highly coloured account of the fate of his
Wehrpass
at the hands of a GI - this was the document that showed he was officially excused from military service. In his south German village a sentry post had been established in a tent:

one day as I approached the tent [I] saw a man seated on the stool[.] I automatically put my hand in my breast pocket. Sitting there outside the tent, his eyes glued on a plump girl leaning on a fence, he was whistling a tune of the type the Americans called ‘long-haired’. This man in his tight-fitting American uniform attracted my attention because on his left lower arm he wore no fewer than three wrist-watches, while his lapels were decorated with a great number of those little gold brooches containing brightly coloured stones such as peasant or servant girls wear in this part of the world. As I drew near him, this man, scarcely taking his eyes from the plump girl, signalled me with an inclination of his head to approach. He took my
Wehrpass
, glanced though it in a bored fashion for a few seconds, and then, with a slow and satisfied gesture, tore it in four pieces which he proceeded to drop into the gutter. While doing this he did not for a moment interrupt his long-haired whistling.
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James Stern met a heavily pregnant Frankfurt woman near Kempten in the Allgäu. She was walking home from Rome, where fascists had allegedly shot her husband. Stern asked her if she had come on foot all the way from Italy. She said she had had a bicycle, but an American soldier had stolen it together with her bag and luggage. The Englishman Stern refused to believe the story - Americans did not behave like that. It must have been a German in a stolen uniform.
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The Americans’ fear of Werewolves showed in their treatment of the civilian population. They were allegedly at their worst in Bavaria. The half-American journalist Margret Boveri thought the Americans particularly ignorant of Germany, a sentiment that was confirmed for her during her time in internment across the Atlantic. They had not taken the time or the trouble to look into National Socialism, for the good or the bad.
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The American authorities continued in their attempts to stop their soldiers listening to the siren calls of Germans. When US troops entered Frankfurt they were even prevented from speaking to the 106 remaining Jews. Before the war there had been 40,000. The American Forces Network put out anti-frat broadcasts: ‘pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory’. Some German women from Stolberg were prosecuted for attempting to woo GIs, although the trial turned into a farce. The first dent in the armour of American anti-frat policy came when the rule concerning small children was relaxed. The next exception concerned public contacts with Germans. The ban was lifted altogether on 1 October 1945. The last remaining stones in the edifice were interdictions concerning billeting and marriages with Germans.
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German men, such as there were, received a cold shoulder from their women. Poorly nourished, dressed in rags, penniless and morally suspect, they did not have the heroic smell of the conqueror. Carl Zuckmayer spoke to two pretty waitresses who worked in an American mess in Berlin. Neither would have anything to do with German boys. As one put it, ‘They are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too much.’ The other described German men as ‘worthless’.

The Americans were everything now, the Germans nothing. Natives who were taken on by Allied garrisons sometimes succumbed to the temptation to be high and mighty with their less fortunate countrymen. Some of the worst were the waiters and waitresses who worked in the messes. For them, the qualification for membership of the human race began with the right to shop at the American PX or the British NAAFI. Really superior beings were adorned with the officers’ pips of a foreign army. Zuckmayer was naturally interested in this phenomenon. As the author of the successful play
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
he had explored the old German, or rather Prussian, respect for uniforms, which had made the reserve lieutenant the metaphor for an arriviste in Wilhelmine society. Zuckmayer was not impressed by these sycophants who chewed gum, and said he believed that an unreformed young Hitlerite made better material for the new Germany than some toady who clicked his heels at the sight of an American sergeant or captain.
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In Heidelberg he discovered that there was no room at the inn for his driver, the latter being a German working for the military government. The German hotelier told the writer that his driver had to sleep in the car - he was not allowed to give beds to Germans.
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When they weren’t working they went to a nightclub called Feminina in the ruins of the Tauentzienstrasse in Berlin’s New West. There were prostitutes there who served the Allied soldiers; the waitresses from the mess were not averse to selling their bodies either. In the Feminina the girls met men of the right sort who later took them off to a ‘black’ nightclub and were prepared to shell out a few hundred marks for a bottle of champagne. One of the girls would take her men home to the flat she shared with her parents. Her father was a civil servant. Zuckmayer was anxious to learn whether they knew what their daughter was doing - ‘Naturally, that is unavoidable, as our rooms are too close to one another. But the old folks say nothing, in the end I pay my own rent.’ The playwright reflected that after the First World War the parents would have thrown their daughter out on the street, or taken their own lives from shame. Now they just turn the other way and pretend not to notice.
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Understandably, civilians were shot as Germany was invested in the spring in 1945, either deliberately or by accident. This happened above all in the east, but it was a relatively frequent occurrence in the west as well, and the victims were not always Germans - sometimes soldiers succeeded in killing some poor foreign worker as well. Billeting soldiers was an anxious moment for families who were already harbouring refugees from the devastated towns and cities. The invading armies appeared pitiless. German armies compared the behaviour of French troops unfavourably with their own in occupied France.
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When Margret Boveri finally arrived in Bamberg after her long trek on 2 September 1945, she was relieved to find the city largely undamaged. Only the bridges were down. Also there was food to be had - bread, butter, cheese and soup made from meat stock. On the other hand the Americans drove around with a great show of force. Everywhere there were armed guards.

Carl Zuckmayer came rapidly to the conclusion that American policy was wrong-headed. In his report to the American War Office he advocated removing the propaganda role from the army and reinvesting it in the State Department. The problem was that he and his fellow left-wing German and Austrian émigrés were falling increasingly under the suspicion of communism, so that the American authorities tended to hold them and their suggestions at arm’s length.
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There was also backbiting within the émigré group in the United States, with the Manns retreating into their corner and pouring scorn on the efforts of others to restore culture in Germany. According to Zuckmayer, Thomas was not the worst of them, but he stood too much under the influence of his hot-headed daughter Erika.

With time, however, the Americans ceased to heed the injunction against frat. GIs empathised with the Germans, whose lives and values seemed similar to their own. As one soldier put it, ‘Hell! These people are cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs . . .’ The feeling that contact with the natives could have its pleasant side was compounded when American servicemen began to sleep with German women.
Life
came out with a variant on the old line about fires and chimneypieces: ‘You don’t talk politics when you fraternize.’
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American policy on the ground changed with new directives from Washington. On 6 September 1946 James Byrnes delivered his now famous speech in Stuttgart that announced an about-turn in US policy towards the conquered Germans. The Russians were now the principal enemy. On the advice of George Kennan, the ambassador to Moscow, and Clifford Clark, the special adviser to the president, who continued to warn of Soviet Russia’s expansionist desires, Truman decided to fight the growing threat of communist tyranny. The president’s speech of 12 March 1947 marked the ‘official’ beginning of the Cold War.
^by
The phrase derived from the title of a book published that year by Walter Lippmann.
^bz
On 7 July George Marshall, who had succeeded Byrnes as secretary of state, replaced the controversial Directive JCS 1067 of 17 July 1945 that forbade frat. Directive JCS 1779 advocated the creation of a ‘stable and productive Germany’. The Morgenthau Plan had also been laid to rest.

The émigrés were almost all disappointed by the American policy. Marxists like Franz Neumann felt that the Americans had also failed to exterminate the ghost of National Socialism and that they would never succeed in introducing stable democracy. John Herz, who worked with Neumann at the Office of Strategic Services, was equally critical: ‘Too ambitious, because it started with the nonsensical idea of showing up every German by means of the
Fragebogen
; and not thorough enough, because at the same time we were content to give accreditation to the mayor and the priest - who were doubtless Nazis - and allow them to walk away.’ Herz had advocated the drawing up of lists of Germans who were 95-100 per cent sure anti-Nazis.
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Other exiles were harder hitting about American policies. Volkmar von Zühlsdorff had emigrated to Austria in 1933, departing for America later. He left with Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein who ran a republican youth group in Brandenburg for the Social Democrat Reichsbanner organisation, which vowed to defend the Weimar Republic from its enemies. Zühlsdorff wanted to help with the rebuilding of Germany. He expressed his outrage in correspondence with his fellow exile Hermann Broch, the Austrian novelist. For Zühlsdorff the Potsdam Declaration was a major crime that had been based on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Nazi-Soviet Fourth Partition of Poland: ‘Cutting off large, purely German regions is no less a crime than the earlier annexation of Czechoslovakia. The complete expulsion of the German population is a ponderous, international crime.’ Broch was not opposed to such views, but pointed out that protest against Potsdam meant war with Russia. The crime could never be resolved. Zühlsdorff felt that Nazism was burned out by 1945, that the German people were ready for a complete change. Instead they had been treated to ‘the propaganda of hate’. What they needed was ‘liberation, reason, peace and human rights’.
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Dorothy Thompson had been close to the hanged resister Helmuth James von Moltke during her time as a journalist in Berlin. She knew Germany and its people well, she was a fanatical opponent of collective guilt, and after the war she continued to press for reasonable policies. Her views resembled those of the writer Ernst Jünger in his essay
Der Friede
. Directly after the war she toured central Europe with her husband, the Prague-born painter Maximilian Kopf. She was particularly struck by her visit to Dachau, where she was able to view the commandant’s house and see that he possessed an edition of Goethe’s works, loved children, music, art and literature, and lived, to all extents and purposes, a normal family life.
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