After the Reich (51 page)

The SPD was splitting in two. The leader in the Soviet Zone, Otto Grotewohl, was taking his faction into the new communist-socialist front, or SED. It was not a road Schumacher was prepared to take. He had seen the communists wreck Parliament in 1932, at the time of the
Preussenschlag
which brought down the Prussian state government and opened the way to Nazism. His soulmate in Berlin was Gustav Dahrendorf, another ‘red’ who had done time in a concentration camp, and a bitter opponent of the SED. The British had been hedging their bets. At one stage they were wooing Grotewohl, or ‘Jugo’ (
der junge Gott
because of his imposing build and striking looks). The Russians were using both stick and carrot: to bring over the socialists. Dahrendorf’s son Ralf, later a British peer, remembered the carrot: it came in the form of ‘pajoks’, food parcels at Christmas.
⁶⁷

In Berlin that winter Schumacher had talks with Hynd and the political advisers Sir William Strang and Christopher Steel, and with Clay and Murphy. The British thought the Russians would kidnap him. He was evidently a man who inspired protection. Dachau had wrecked him physically, a fact that was further compounded by his hunger strike at the concentration camp. His assistants combed the black market for milk and butter which they thought would assuage his delicate stomach. Yet Schumacher did little to help by his diet of black coffee and cigarettes.
⁶⁸
This austerity was not everyone’s cup of tea. Like many Prussians, Schumacher lacked charm. That was where Carlo Schmid came in. He had the social graces Schumacher lacked, and could bring the SPD into Germany’s shabby drawing rooms. The half-French Schmid was deemed to be at home anywhere: talking about Baudelaire, writing poetry, dealing with points of law as a professor of jurisprudence or eating with the former rulers of Württemberg off the finest china.
⁶⁹

Schumacher may have taken up the British offer of protection, but he was bitter about the Allies, whose reputation was less than spotless in his eyes. He thought the idea of collective guilt an abomination. Writing to Hans Vogel, he vented his ire:

You could not imagine what a frightful effect the propaganda attempt to impose ‘collective guilt’ on the German people has had on the German opponents of Nazism. The men and women in our country who even before 1933 risked so much in the fight against Nazism and Big Business, who after the assumption of power, at a time when the present victorious powers were still concluding state treaties with the Hitler regime, were working underground and were being put in prisons and concentration camps; they should recognise their guilt. They must do this in no way and in no circumstances.

Schumacher felt himself personally defamed by the notion of collective guilt.
⁷⁰

Adenauer and Schumacher were mutually antipathetic. The Protestant Prussian was for a central administration, the Catholic Rhinelander for a federal state. They had difficulty speaking to one another. Michael Thomas saw it in their lifestyles: Adenauer was
gutbürgerlich
, while Schumacher worked from a bombed-out building, and yet his talk was coloured by wit and irony. The British brought the two men together in Hamburg in March 1946 to tell them they were going to merge the states of North Rhine and Westphalia in response to the Russians introducing a one-party state in their zone. Adenauer remembered Sir Sholto Douglas making his entry to ‘drum rolls and the blast of trumpets’. It was all very colonial: the Germans might speak, but the British kept all the power in their own hands.
⁷¹
They appointed an old schoolfriend of Adenauer’s, Rudolf Amelunxen, to head the administration. Adenauer remained aloof, as he did when the CDU was asked to form part of the governing party in the Landtag. In reality the new Nordrhein-Westfalen was Adenauer’s dream: one of the three quasi-independent states he had imagined for Germany. He would pick up the western German remnants of his detested Prussia, and the centre of gravity for Germany would be shipped several hundred miles to the west. Schumacher was appalled.

Adenauer had not been singled out - the British behaved in a supercilious way towards several German post-war politicians. One was Karl Arnold, Oberbürgermeister of Düsseldorf. He was second only to Adenauer in the CDU and minister president designate in Nordrhein-Westfalen, but he failed to grab the top job because he was too modest and believed his time had passed. Victor Gollancz called him ‘one of the half dozen best Germans I met’.
⁷²
George Clare had arranged to meet him at his Berlin mess, but the mess butler informed him that Germans were not allowed. Not only had they not let him in, they had left him outside in the cold. This occurred in March 1947, some eighteen months before the restoration of the German state.
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Culture

The British management of the arts was closely bound up with weeding out Nazis - an admirable aim in itself, but one which had very little to do with promoting cultural activity. It became increasingly obvious, as well, that the British were netting just the small fry, and there was more and more grumbling at home. The complaints about the denazification policy eventually spread to the Germans, who were annoyed to see the Party big-shots go free while the authorities continued to harass rank-and-file members who had done nothing monstrous.
⁷⁴

The British did a few things well, if half-heartedly. They had their own version of the Russian culture club, Die Möwe. It was a requisitioned villa in the Branitzerplatz in Neu Westend where they could entertain screen and theatre people over a whisky. The club had its own chatelaine in the person of Else Bongers, a former dancer who had suffered under the Nazis.
⁷⁵
The British also sponsored performances of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and operas at the Volksoper in their sector. Just like for Margret Boveri, the first post-war concert proved a memorable event for the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise. In her case she heard the Berlin Philharmonic play in Celle. Celibidache was conducting. As there was no other room available, they used the riding school of the town stud, and the podium was set up in the same place as they had once trained the celebrated Celle stallions, while the chairs were laid out in the sand of the riding school. Music ‘tore us away from the murkiness of our everyday lives and lifted us into the sphere of the pure and beautiful. It was like redemption.’ Wilhelm Furtwängler might not have expressed it better himself.
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9

Life in the French Zone

When they at last reappeared, their faces looked as white as the slips of paper they carried in their hands, and they were speechless. They had spent that half an hour arguing with three stubborn, disinterested little bureaucrats already half asleep with wine. The men had carefully examined, or pretended to, every paper in their possession and then insisted on their filling out a sheaf of forms. Only after these had been carefully read, checked and rechecked were four Americans given permission to inhabit two rooms in Stuttgart for the night.

James Stern, The Hidden Damage, London 1990, 104-5

F
rance’s German policy looked suspiciously like a return to Cardinal Richelieu and the Thirty Years War. The French were largely indifferent to the question of whether a German was a Nazi or not, or whether he needed to be cured; it was enough to be a German.
¹
They wanted a fragmentation of the enemy who had invaded their territory three times in under the century. The man they installed to enforce their will on the ground was a hero of their African wars, General Pierre Koenig - Scipio Africanus. Unlike Scipio, however, Koenig was anything but patrician. His civilian sidekick could not have been more different: Emile Laffon was a brilliant lawyer, a member of the resistance and an intimate of de Gaulle, albeit a socialist.
²

The French were not free of the sort of behaviour more commonly associated with the Russians. Even after the scandals of Freudenstadt, Stuttgart and Vaihingen, James Stern heard the testimony of a half-Jewish woman friend in Seldau in Bavaria. The husband was away working in his hospital in Munich when the French Moroccans arrived at the farmhouse. They left the woman alone - ‘by some miracle they didn’t touch her’ - but the whole house was looted and most of the furniture smashed. They killed the livestock and stole whatever they could carry.
³

Initially the French were deeply unpopular in Germany because of their insistence on coming as conquerors. As far as the atrocities were concerned, they adhered to the policy ‘Never apologise, never explain.’ They had their grievances: the bits and bobs of Germany that they had received off the Anglo-American plate continued to make little sense. They had 64 per cent of Baden
⁴
- the
Residenz
in Baden-Baden but not the capital, Karlsruhe. In Württemberg they had Hohenzollern, the minuscule former territory of the Catholic cousins of the rulers of Prussia and Germany. It was significant that the capital - it hardly merits such a grandiose description - Sigmaringen had been the last seat of Pétain’s and Laval’s Vichy government. The French ruled Sigmaringen, but not the coveted Stuttgart, and they had large amounts of the Rhineland, including Mainz - but not Cologne or Frankfurt.

They came into formal possession of the ‘Brassière’ in July 1945. Unlike the Americans, who requisitioned entire areas and fenced them off from the German population, the French sequestered good houses and villas but erected no fences. In Baden-Baden they put their administrative bodies in the best hotels of the spa town.
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Military headquarters was in Freudenstadt - an extraordinary choice of location - but one that was, perhaps, in keeping with their possession of Sigmaringen: they were the best custodians of their own secrets. They continued to voice their disgruntlement, and tried to swap their portion of Württemberg for the rest of Baden, which would have afforded them not only a big town in Karlsruhe, but also a territory that was contiguous with their border, but the Americans were not willing to do the deal.
⁶
The Americans wanted the whole motorway that went from Karlsruhe to Munich, via Stuttgart.

Proportionally speaking, the French were the most densely populated of the Western occupiers: they had eighteen men for every thousand Germans, the British had ten, the Americans three. They set about the business of denazifying, politically re-educating and punishing war criminals while assuring the population that they would have a ‘bearable standard of living’.
⁷
They also punished at least some of the rapists of Freudenstadt and Stuttgart. Nothing was said to the locals, but the soldiers were informed that such acts were not to be tolerated, and death sentences were handed out.
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Being kind but firm was meant to conceal a darker purpose - the French had not forgotten their aims to sever parts of western Germany like the Rhine, the Ruhr and the Saar, and they wanted to encourage provincial loyalty above all. They were frustrated in their attempts to prise the Ruhr away from the British. Meanwhile they transferred what resources they could to France, and rounded up all available manpower for their own version of the STO, the
service de travail obligatoire
, by which the French had been forced to work for the Nazis.

The Soviet example of cruelty towards the Germans was one reason for the milder treatment they received in the ZOF, or Zone d’Occupation Française. There was a conflict between the two wings of the administration in Baden-Baden, or ‘Little Vichy’ as the French communists rendered it, Vichy also being a spa. The communists were alluding too to the fact that there were quite a few Vichy men lying low in occupied Germany. The military chief Pierre Koenig was anxious to be tough, while his civilian counterpart Emile Laffon believed that occupation meant reform, a difference of approach that led to frequent fights. The French took all they could: between 1945 and 1947 some 45-47 per cent of the ZOF’s exports left for France. Their sale in France made the ZOF a healthy profit of eight million dollars, while the Germans were subjected to heavy taxes, strict rations and a wage freeze. On the other hand the inhabitants of the ZOF could boast some advantage over, say, the inhabitants of Brandenburg or Thuringia: they had a free press, democratic elections and the right to an education that stressed French and European cultural achievement.
⁹

The Germans did not entirely acquiesce in French rule, especially given their supposed conquerors’ insistence on their ‘right to plunder’ and their view that ‘le boche payera’ (the Hun will pay). The half-French professor of law Carlo Schmid in Tübingen knew how to play the fish. He was quickly made chief of the ZOF’s Democratic Union and, when governments were formed in the French provinces, he became minister president of Württemberg-Hohenzollern.
¹⁰
Schmid was an outstanding politician, the father of the basic law (the Federal Republic’s constitution) and no French stooge. Within the SPD he appeared to be a federalist, but was rather vague about this when challenged.
¹¹
He fought for German rights: ‘Democracy without sovereignty is a contradiction in terms,’ he told his audiences. He also railed against the terrible demontage in the zone. He was not alone. In October 1947, for example, there were strong objections to cutting the electricity at Tuttlingen Hospital between 7.30 a.m. and noon and again from 4 p.m. to 8. It was pointed out that operations were being performed and babies born. On 21 June that year the Baden minister of economics Dr Lais had complained ‘before God and humanity’ that more machines were being dismantled and taken to France.
¹²
‘Unlicensed requisitions’ amounted to somewhere between fifty and seventy million Reichsmarks in pre-war values. Ludwig Erhard estimated the value of the machinery going west at RM180 million in 1945-6 alone.
¹³