After the Reich (90 page)

The Americans pulled the plug on denazification on 8 May 1948. By then US, British and French courts had tried over 8,000 cases and sentenced a tenth of the accused - 806 - to death. Fewer than half of those were commuted, and 486 went to the gallows. The Americans tried 1,672 people for war crimes. Of the 255 they executed at Landsberg-am-Lech, 102 were skilled workers, thirty-seven civil servants, with a few academic titles here and there, twenty-three were academics, twenty-two workers, eleven soldiers, and the rest were made up of the professions, Nazi functionaries and schoolboys. The oldest was Dr Schilling at seventy-four. (Twenty more died from naural causes.) All the lifers were eventually released, with one exception - Hess.
⁵⁴
German courts reopened in the summer of 1945, and they too passed judgment on former Nazis. Between 1945 and 1950 the courts sentenced only 5,228 defendants for Nazi crimes. Sentences were either short or the criminals were swiftly pardoned. In the years from 1951 to 1955 there were only 638 convictions. It is now clear that many of the worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not punished at all.
⁵⁵

PART IV

The Road to Freedom

18

Peacemaking in Potsdam

18 July 1945 Now it will be decided whether we can carry on living in Europe or if we must try to live our lives as a refugee God knows where. A year has elapsed since the [assassination] attempt of 20 July. A year filled with blood and misery which might perhaps have been avoided. But our people had to drink the cup down to the dregs, and in the end, it was all for the good.

Ursula von Kardoff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 1942-1945, Munich 1994, 337

T
he wartime conferences had calmly discussed the Germans’ fate, but at the Potsdam Conference the Allies finally realised that ‘Uncle Joe’ had stolen a march on them. He would call the shots. The Allies met from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at the palace of Crown Prince ‘Little Willi’, the Cecilienhof in Potsdam. The Western Allies were able to see their handiwork for the first time. In a fifteen-minute raid on 14 April they had flattened the centre of Frederick the Great’s
Residenz
.
¹
The town centre had lost ‘
everything
that was historic, a memorial or artistically important’, according to Hanna Grisebach.
²
There were consolations: ‘The voices that we have had to listen to for over twelve years have been silenced.’
³

Hanna Grisebach was a Jewish convert to Protestantism married to a Heidelberg colleague of Karl Jaspers. For many of the same reasons as the philosopher, her husband was forced into retirement in 1937. The couple moved to the so-called ‘von-Viertel’, the aristocratic quarter, of Potsdam. Frau Grisebach was taken into the circle of the largely royalist nobles like the Wedels, Schulenburgs, Buddenbrocks and an old Princess Trubetzkoy who lived in Potsdam, many of whom subscribed to the ‘confessing Church’ and were wholly opposed to Hitler’s regime. Like Gertrud Jaspers, Hanna Grisebach spent the last few days of the Third Reich in hiding.
⁴

On 24 April Hanna noted ‘the first Russian in our house’. Their Polish maid Marja was able to interpret and shoo the Russian away, saving the life of her young son. Her teenage daughter she now dressed as a boy, cutting off her long plaits to save her from being raped. By now the Germans had retreated, leaving a sorry spectacle of destruction: ‘battered vehicles, shattered cars, discarded pieces of uniform and weapons of every kind lie scattered around . . .’
⁵

The Russians showed more respect for Potsdam’s cultural monuments than the Anglo-Americans. During the battle for Potsdam the business of safeguarding the palaces in the park of Sanssouci was given to Yevgeny Ludshuveit, an art historian. He sent a radio message to German High Command to ask them to cease shelling the park: ‘I was very worried about the treasures, and wanted them to be preserved.’
⁶
The Glienecke Bridge, which connected Potsdam with Greater Berlin to the north, was another victim of the bombardment. You might still cross to the Wannsee side, but only by means of a ‘hair-raising climb’ over the pylons that had previously held up the suspension bridge. In their destructive rage the SS had set fire to all the fine boats belonging to the Imperial Yacht Club moored on the Havel.
⁷

The care taken over the remaining monuments was not extended to the private property of Potsdam’s townsfolk. There was the usual hunt for watches and bicycles. The Grisebachs lost eight watches, as well as all their bicycles. Hanna’s son managed to buy another of the latter with a gold watch, but that was also later stolen. Surviving meant helping yourself to what you could. Hanna Grisebach brought back part of a horse and marinated it in vinegar and spices. The dish brought forth whoops of joy. She also received her share of a cow that had trodden on a mine. Possibly the greatest discovery of all was the contents of the cellar of a villa which the owner had thrown into the waters of the Hasengraben, in order to prevent the Russians from drinking it. Hanna’s daughter, together with a friend, had located the booty and they were prepared to wade out to their hips to bring up the precious bottles: ‘top wines from famous sites’. The Grisebachs drank them with relish, while the one who had donated them lay in bed with a cold. The wine put the food to shame. Anything they didn’t want, such as a bottle of Malaga, could be traded with the Russians for bread and bacon.
⁸

On 5 May Hanna heard a rumour that the Americans were coming to Potsdam. Stories of this sort were rife at the time - there was no connection with the Potsdam Conference in July. The first Russian wave was moving on. A baggage train set off, creating a ‘picturesque scene’ reminiscent of Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks
or similar episodes from
War and Peace
. Boys spent their time shooting ducks and riding horses around, while abandoned boats bobbed on the water. The Americans didn’t come, however, and from mid-May there was very little food. Supplies of meat and fat dried up and the Grisebachs lived on potato flakes and whatever fruit and vegetables they could scrump from abandoned gardens. Added to this they caught fish in the Havel or the lake, sometimes picking up a few after the Russians had tossed a grenade into the water - their usual form of angling.

In their hunger they were pleased to hear that professors were equated with manual workers in the handing out of ration cards: they were eligible for the card I. When a field full of potatoes was located twenty kilometres away in Buckow, Hanna and others set off on replacement bicycles they had unearthed. They had to dodge Russian fire to get at the tubers, as the soldiers wanted to distil them. Still, despite several setbacks, Hanna was able to get away with thirty-five kilos.
⁹

First Contacts between East and West

One pretext for the Allied conference was to enforce the zones decreed at Yalta. The Allies had all ended up in the wrong places: the French had been in Stuttgart; the Americans were in Thuringia and had advanced to Halle in Saxony; the British had occupied the western half of Mecklenburg, while other American units had crossed the Harz Mountains to reach Magdeburg on the Elbe. This so-called Magdeburg Pocket was due to the Soviets. The Allied zones remained fluid until just before Potsdam, and there was a good deal of idle speculation about who would fall to whom. Even at the beginning of September it was still not clear to Berliners who was where. It was said that the Russians were to evacuate Eisenach and Jena and that the British had control of the airport in Erfurt (all three were in the Russian Zone). The British were to receive Thuringia, they heard, and the Russians would be compensated in East Asia. The Western Allies were forced to retreat to positions previously agreed by the politicians at Yalta behind the Elbe and the Harz. The generals grumbled. In their enthusiasm to take back their rightful territory, the Russians also attempted to grab Coburg in Franconia, probably because they thought the town was in Thuringia. This led to a stand-off with the Americans.

On 11 July 1945, Margret Boveri reported a fresh wave of arrests connected with the conference. The neighbouring communes were being cleared of Germans to make room for the delegates. Babelsberg was already purged, now it was the turn of Wannsee. Intellectuals were the main targets, Pgs or non-Pgs.
Pace
Hanna Grisebach, there were disadvantages to their academic status.

The conference proved a chance to survey the behaviour in the Allied camps. There was bad blood on both sides. The Soviets still believed that they had done the lion’s share of the fighting and borne the brunt of the losses. The East did not trust the West, and vice versa. The Russians believed that the Western Allies were merely taking a breather before they attacked the Soviet Union and that they had kept their options open throughout the war by conducting secret negotiations with the Germans. That channels were open is undoubtedly true, and the Soviet authorities had been informed of the fact by the British intelligence officer Kim Philby and others. The Russians said they were not allowed to interview all the prisoners held by the West. But they were allowed to talk to a number of them and ‘the records of the interrogations confirmed that there had been some backstage negotiations between the Nazis and the US and British Intelligence about the possibility of a separate peace.’
¹⁰
The Russians had also held talks with the Germans.
¹¹

There were advocates for war against the Soviet Union in both the British and American camps, but how far up they went was concealed during the Cold War. The
Hitler Book
, prepared for Stalin from interrogations with high-ranking German POWs in 1948, abounds with accusations of Western Allied perfidy.
¹²
Some British generals, notably Montgomery, were anxious to push on against the Russians. This had been supported by Churchill, but the plans would have been leaked to the Russians by Donald Maclean of the British Foreign Office, adding to the feeling of distrust that existed among the Big Three. In 1945 the Russians believed the British were holding back a substantial German army for use in the next campaign and for that reason had omitted to disarm German forces in their zone. At Potsdam Zhukov made a formal protest, claiming the British were keeping the 200,000-man Army Group North in readiness and that a million men in Schleswig-Holstein
^ej
had not been given POW status.
¹³
The Americans were rounding up scientists and taking them back to the United States to use in - among other things - their atom-bomb programme.
¹⁴
That the Russians were hardly averse to this themselves does not figure in Zhukov’s memoirs. The Russians believed that the Anglo-Americans had intentionally failed to bomb targets that would be of use to them later. One example of this was the headquarters of IG Farben in Frankfurt, which was virtually intact - so much so, in fact, that the Americans took it over as their own HQ.
¹⁵

Truman had no desire to continue the war against the Soviet Union and agreed to fall back to the lines agreed by the Big Three at Yalta. Churchill now expressed ‘profound misgivings’ in a cable to the president.
¹⁶
These pieces of territory might have been used for bargaining, for example, on the Oder and Neisse rivers. There was a little warm-up for Potsdam in Berlin on 5 June when Montgomery and William Strang from Britain, Eisenhower, Clay and Robert Murphy from the United States, and the French commander de Lattre de Tassigny were invited to settle the government of the city at Zhukov’s HQ in Karlshorst. The Anglo-American generals were then invested with the Order of Victory, while de Lattre de Tassigny had to make do with the Order of Suvorov First Class.
¹⁷
Clay gave Zhukov the Legion of Merit.
¹⁸

The inferior decoration handed out to de Lattre was emblematic of the status of the fourth ally: France was not invited to Potsdam.
^ek
It was ‘a bitter blow to French pride’.
¹⁹
Truman had given the French assurances that their wishes would be noted and their arguments put forward, but they had not endeared themselves to the Americans through their behaviour: they had occupied Stuttgart and the Italian Val d’Aosta and they had indulged in colonial rivalry with the British in the Levant. The French had forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. In 1919 they had taken 50 per cent of Germany’s reparations; now they demanded machines, coal and labour, as well as the restitution of all that the Germans had taken from them. The French were desperately angling for the Ruhr with its natural resources and heavy industry, but the incoming foreign secretary Bevin and the British in general did not want to give an inch, fearing that the Russians would also claim their pound of flesh.
²⁰

At the Berlin meeting Germany formally ceased to exist as an independent nation. The Allies signed the Declaration of Defeat and Assumption of Sovereignty. The four powers also agreed the form of the Allied Control Council that was to rule Germany, but the Russians made it clear that the Western Allies would not be allowed to take up their sectors in the capital until they had complied with Yalta: they had to fall back behind the River Elbe and the Harz Mountains. Western politicians wanted this decision to be taken by the Control Council, but Eisenhower (who was impressed by Zhukov) was in favour of giving in to the Russians, and Truman’s emissary Harry Hopkins had discussed this
quid pro quo
in Moscow.
²¹
Zhukov believed that the Western Allies were prepared to accept this loss of territory because they were still anxious for the Russians to play a military role in the war in the Far East.
²²
Ursula von Kardorff already had a fair idea of the future Russian Zone on 11 June - Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden - and doubted Stalin’s credentials as a ‘benefactor of mankind’. The zones were ratified on 26 July.
²³