After the Reich (64 page)

Attitudes to 20 July

The Allies introduced a term for the victims of National Socialism, which should have secured privileges. In practice this did not happen much at first. They were called ‘Opfer des Faschismus’ (victims of fascism) or OdF. In theory at least Greta, the widow of the poet Adam Kuckhoff who had been executed as a member of the communist-inspired ‘Red Orchestra’, and Marion Gräfin Yorck, whose husband perished on a gibbet after 20 July, should have received higher rations. The OdFs had their own relief organisation. It was not alone - there was a rival body in the VVN, or Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes.

While he was attached to an American unit researching the nature of Nazism, the poet W. H. Auden heard the story of the Scholls for the first time and their touching but ultimately hopeless attempt to resist Hitler: ‘Those who condemn the Germans for their lack of opposition . . . should have spent six months here during the war.’
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Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorrell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and Professor Kurt Huber had brazenly printed leaflets attacking Hitler and the war and scattered them throughout the lecture halls of the university in Munich. A branch of this ‘Weisse Rose’ Movement had been formed in Hamburg too. They had all been beheaded for their pains - and eight more in Hamburg.
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Auden and his friends went to see the family of ‘Schurik’ Schmorrell to learn the story at first hand. It proved a harrowing and emotional moment as the father, mother and sister of the young medical student rehearsed the story of his arrest and execution. The sister, Natascha, had been tortured and lost an eye in the process. This did not protect them from the American army of occupation. James Stern later learned that the Schmorrells, father, mother and sister of a hero of the resistance, had been kicked out of their home to provide accommodation for servicemen and their families.
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However much Stern wished to deny the idea of ‘good Germans’, the subject exerted a sort of fascination for him. Spurred on by what Auden had discovered about the White Rose conspirators, he paid a visit to Prince Fugger von Glött in his vast palace near Memmingen. The prince had been designated governor of Bavaria in the event of Hitler’s death on 20 July 1944, as he was connected with the two Jesuit priests who had taken part in the discussions of the opposition. He had been arrested after the failure of the Plot and had been one of the few survivors. As he told his harrowing tale the scales began to drop from Stern’s eyes.

The BBC’s Hugh Carleton Greene made an early sympathetic programme about the Plot broadcast on its first anniversary on 20 July 1945. Greene had been a journalist in Germany before the war and an intelligence officer during the conflict. After the war he directed the German-language service of the BBC and as control officer for the media exerted an important influence in the intellectual reconstruction of Germany. Ursula von Kardorff, who had been closely connected to many of the plotters, described the programme as ‘very fair, no one could have done it better’. From it she learned the sad news of Nikolaus von Halem’s death.
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German attitudes were more complicated. Until May 1945 these men had been traitors; now ordinary Germans had to get used to the idea that they were actually heroes. For those who had been peripheral to the plotters’ circle this was not a problem. Ursula von Kardorff was particularly interested to know the fate of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. The BBC or the Allied station in Calais had put it about that he was still alive. His wife Charlotte had also held out hope. Immediately after the war she had gone to the British CO in Plön to ask whether there was any truth in the broadcasts. She was received by a Jewish liaison officer who promised to look into things. Later he appeared at Testorf where she was living. ‘That was just propaganda’ with no foundation in fact, he told her. Her husband had been hanged in August 1944.
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Also in Lübeck was Fritz-Dietlof’s sister Tisa. On the day of Greene’s broadcast she suffered a complete nervous collapse: ‘The memory of the past year. All the tears that I had failed to shed at Fritzi’s death came out unexpectedly in an unstaunchable deluge, I was defenceless. All my brothers were dead. My home was lost.’
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One exile who had a fully open mind about the German opposition to Hitler was Carl Zuckmayer. Zuckmayer had been a Heidelberg contemporary of Carlo Mierendorff, one of the chief plotters who had been killed in an Allied bombing raid on Leipzig in December 1943. He had also been a friend of Helmuth James von Moltke, great-nephew of the Great Moltke, Prussian chief of staff in Bismarck’s wars, and nephew of the Lesser Moltke, who as chief of staff bungled the German advance in 1914. Helmuth James’s manor at Kreisau (a gift to the older Moltke from his grateful king) had been used for meetings and debates by members of the opposition, who were later known as the Kreisauer Kreis, or Kreisau Circle.

Zuckmayer had believed that the Kreisauer were the perfect breeding stock for the new Germany, but he sadly realised all too quickly how comprehensive had been the purge after 20 July. Not only Mierendorff and Moltke were dead, but also his friends the trades-unionist Wilhelm Leuschner and the socialist Theodor Haubach. Some, however, had survived; and Zuckmayer felt they should be hailed, and receive a promise of support.
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Many of their names had not even appeared in the newspapers - ‘the footsloggers, the unknown warriors of the resistance’. Zuckmayer cites one example of a widow whose husband had been arrested in June 1941. More than a year later a neighbour drew her attention to a notice in an advertisement column. It informed her and the rest of the world that the man had been executed for high treason. The widow had lived as a post-office cleaner, but when Zuckmayer met her she had no work and no savings. The only thing she had to live on was a modest sum from the OdF. She was bitter, because the Nazis did more for their people; indeed the judges who had sentenced her husband to death received pensions, and so did their widows. She lived in great solitude, her only pleasure had been her wireless set, but the Nazis had taken that away. She was resigned to her fate: nothing could give her back her husband.
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One who survived the general purge was the poet and writer Günther Weisenborn. He had been involved with Harro Schulze-Boysen and the Red Orchestra. The Gestapo lacked evidence against him and his life was spared. He was condemned to life imprisonment. His young wife had endeavoured to maintain contact with him in prison in Luckau. She discovered that he was part of a work detail that was sent out of the prison, so she travelled on the trains that transported the prisoners in order to catch a glimpse of him. She had written and performed music to accompany some of his lyrics, and to attract his attention she whistled one of these tunes. One day she heard the same tune whistled inside the prisoners’ carriage, and knew that he was aware that she was near him. When the Russians came they released the prisoners from their ordeal, but immediately they were assigned roles within the zone. Meanwhile the Battle for Berlin reigned, and she could not find a way to him. The Russians finally dismissed him from his job and he rode on a bicycle to Berlin. Their former home had been destroyed by bombs, and he had not a clue where she might be. Later he was riding though an unfamiliar suburb when he saw another bicycle coming towards him: it was her - ‘They had found one another in the chaos.’
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Jews in Germany and Austria

One way or another, Germany and Austria had lost the Jews, who had been such a noticeable part of their populations. There had been around 450,000 in Germany in 1933. Of these some two-thirds emigrated. The other third perished in the camps and ghettos. In Austria the original figure was around 180,000, with almost all of them living in Vienna. Again two-thirds got away, but the other 65,000 died. Of those whose lives were saved by timely emigration, only a tiny percentage returned. Most of them would have been reluctant to find themselves face to face with the murderers of their friends and relations. But there were Jews in Germany and Austria after 1945 - soldiers and DPs.

Not all Germans had been pleased by the official antisemitism of the Nazi years, by any means. Ursula von Kardorff, who saw a convoy of vehicles emblazoned with Stars of David (they belonged to the Jewish Infantry Brigade) leading off a posse of bedraggled POWs, called it ‘divine justice’ and recalled the moment three years before when she had seen Jews wearing the same stars cowering in the backstreets of Berlin while German soldiers swaggered around in smart uniforms bedecked with decorations.
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By the summer of 1945, the Jews had their own fighting units in Germany. Up to 35,000 Jewish Palestinians signed up for the Brigade - a proper fighting force. For much of the war the British had allowed German and Austrian Jews only to serve unarmed in the Pioneer Corps and many felt profoundly insulted. When former German and Austrian Jews arrived in Germany in 1945 they learned what had become of their relatives and co-religionaries who had stayed behind. They had feared the worst, but few could have imagined that the horror would be as bad as it was. They were still in uniform and very few could do much to help in the circumstances. One exception was Captain Horwell, who became assistant commander of Bergen-Belsen after the liberation, and was able to aid the 10,000 who survived.
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Many German or Austrian Jews had distinguished themselves in the fighting and they were to go on to play important roles under the occupation. One who played a significant political part in the British army was Michael Alexander Thomas. At D-Day Thomas was a liaison officer between the British and the Poles. He was much feared by his staff, who he insisted should shower and brush their teeth daily. Such rigour earned him the sobriquet ‘the Prussian Baron’.
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In Germany he was appointed political officer and made firm contacts with leading socialist politicians such as Karl Severing and Rudolf Petersen in Hamburg. He prevented General Templer from banning Germans from wearing military uniforms, as he pointed out they had no other clothes. Templer found this advice unwelcome. Thomas left the army as a result of the insensitivity of his immediate superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Pearson, who referred to him as a ‘Jew-boy’.

Thomas was not the only Jew holding high rank as a political officer. In Schleswig-Holstein Major Lyndon was head of the Political Department. Jews also performed important roles in Information Departments - that is, propaganda and denazification. Two majors, Calmon and Kendal (born Knobloch), served first in Austria before being assigned the task of finding war criminals. Major Linford was second secretary to Allied Control Commission in Austria, acting as liaison with the other Allies. His counterpart in Berlin was a Captain Lederer. Kaye Sely was chief of information control, first in Hamburg and then in Berlin. Many of these Jews were academics in disguise. The distinguished historian of Germany F. L. Carsten was the son of a Berlin doctor who had Anglicised his first name (Franz) to Francis. He spent his war at the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and performed an important role during the occupation as the author of a handbook explaining Germany to British forces.
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Many Jews spoke German - although they often refused to use it among themselves, having decided that the language was somehow polluted. Even the Poles used Jewish soldiers as interpreters with the Germans in the so-called ‘Recovered Territories’.
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When George Clare went to work in denazification in Berlin in 1946, he found that all his colleagues were German or Austrian Jews or half-Jews with the exception of the Russian. Sely was from Munich. The American, Ralph Brown, was a Berliner.
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The role of the Jews in the British army occasionally caused concern. Kaye Sely showed George Clare a letter from ‘Public Safety’ accusing the Jews of excessive zeal in denazification, citing the fact that most of the leading lights were former German and Austrian Jews who might be acting from motives of revenge.
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There were many more Jews in the American army than in the British. The Americans were much more willing to grant commissions to refugees. The British had qualms about using them.

Most of the Jews employed during the occupation worked as interpreters, and a special school was formed to train them in Brussels. An Austrian, Major Reitlinger, who had been in SOE during the war, was the eyes and ears of General McCreery in Vienna. A Viennese, Sergeant R. Rawdon, was interpreter for the Military Police unit who were the first British soldiers to enter Berlin. Not only Jews, however, were used to make up for the linguistic inadequacies of the British forces. Until they realised who they were dealing with, the British and Americans actually employed members of the Nazi Concordia Bureau and British Free Corps the motley gang commanded by John Amery, son of the colonial secretary Leo. Once the penny dropped, the traitors were shipped back to Britain and tried.
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The Fate of Jewish DPs

The Jewish survivors who drifted towards Germany in the hope of reaching the West or Palestine were put back behind barbed wire in DP camps. Many children were born in captivity. For the Jewish survivors there was a quandary: once they had achieved a sense of humanity once again and could begin to think about the basics of food and clothing, they needed to decide what their future would be, and where. Could they go back to their old homes in Poland or Hungary? These countries had been more or less cleared of Jews. There were no more friends and relations to welcome them, and wherever they went they would be reminded of the scale of their tragedy. And there was the nasty thought of the gentile neighbour, who might look them up and down, surveying them with a mocking smile that said ‘What? Still alive?’
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