Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (41 page)

This was also why they reacted with growing hostility to the Russian insistence on dismantling German industry, as had been agreed at Potsdam. There is no doubt about the wastefulness of much of the Soviet dismantling effort. (A good example was provided by the dismantling of the Meissen china works: the benches and kilns were smashed, while the iron fragments were sent to a Russian china factory near Leningrad where they rusted away for several years.) Intensified by bureaucratic competitition, the plundering of German resources—not just in the Soviet zone—created enormous confusion and unemployment. Yet it is striking that economic conditions in the Eastern zone in 1945 were no worse than in the West and quite possibly better, thanks to the rapid implementation of economic planning. Despite the high level of reparations shipments, industrial growth started relatively early. Perhaps because of the land reform, the population in the Eastern zone was relatively well fed, at least until 1947.
⁵⁷

Reparations, however, became the issue which led most directly to the collapse of Four-Power government. The Potsdam agreement had provided for the Soviet Union to receive 15 per cent of usable capital equipment from the Western zones “as is unnecessary for the German peace economy.” During the winter of 1945–6, however, food shortages forced rations down dangerously low and the prospect of mass starvation loomed. Relief problems were exacerbated by the millions of refugees entering Western zones from the East. As the Western military governments coped with this manifold social crisis, they began to insist upon the need for a new approach to German reconstruction. On 27 May 1946 they halted reparations deliveries to the Soviet Union from the American zone until such time as a general agreement was reached on the German economy as a whole. With the Soviet authorities refusing to scale down their reparations demands, economic traffic across zonal boundaries quickly dwindled. Just as after 1918, reparations threatened to tear apart the understanding among Germany’s conquerors.

The dispute over reparations was stimulated in the first place by the appalling food shortages and economic dislocation of the immediate post-war period. But behind the American-Soviet rift lay the great
gulf in their wartime experiences. The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the German war effort and had suffered enormous damage as a result. By 1945 over twenty million of its citizens were dead and much of its territory was devastated. It was natural for Moscow’s policy to be guided above all by the desire to exploit German economic resources for its benefit. The United States, in contrast, had seen its economy boom as a result of the war. It had suffered few casualties at German hands and there was in its relations with the Germans none of the racial antagonism with which the Nazis had invested their
Vernichtungskrieg
in the East. In Washington, policy towards Germany had been split between those who argued for a punitive peace and those who wanted—as they saw it—to avoid the mistakes of 1918 and favoured a more supportive and less radical approach. Up to Potsdam, the first group exerted the upper hand; by late 1945, however, they were losing ground as the scale of the economic crisis became more widely known.

The reparations quarrel should also be seen in the context of political developments in Germany. Just a fortnight after the formation of the Soviet Military Administration, the Communist Party was officially registered in the Eastern zone. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet authorities registered several other political parties. The Western authorities were far more cautious, only permitting parties to act on a local basis until much later. They thereby rebuffed many groups keenest to cooperate in reforming existing structures, preferring to rely on more conservative, ostensibly apolitical administrators. The strict control of Communist Party activities in particular suggested much uncertainty about the loyalties of the electorate.
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The Soviet political strategy for Germany became evident as early as 15 July 1945, with the formation of a four-party anti-fascist bloc. By pressing at Potsdam for a common Allied approach towards party activity—a policy resisted by all the others, most notably by the French—the Russians were permitted to present themselves as sponsors of those forces in Germany that wished Germans to be granted a greater measure of political responsibility. The Communist Party underlined its commitment to a parliamentary democracy for Germany through a “bloc of antifascist democratic forces.” Nationalism and parliamentary democracy was a persuasive combination in the
aftermath of defeat: at this time it must have seemed to many Germans that the Soviet Union was no less likely than the Western allies to provide it.
⁵⁹

With the emergence of SPD activity in the Western zones during the summer and autumn of 1945, Soviet policy switched from urging the creation of several separate parties to insisting upon the unification of the SPD and the KPD (the Communists). The poor performance of Communist Parties in elections in Austria and Hungary may have prompted this shift. So, undoubtedly, did the increasingly independent and assertive line taken by the SPD leadership. At the end of February 1946, the fusion of the two parties was announced. Social Democrats in Berlin protested, and when the new Socialist Unity Party (SED) held its first rallies in April in the Eastern zone, it failed to carry the entire SPD with it. As a result relations in the Western zone between the SPD and the SED were frosty, while the Allies became increasingly suspicious of Soviet tactics.

In the following eighteen months, relations between the Soviets and the Allies worsened. A public dispute between Molotov and his American counterpart Byrnes over the Polish-German frontier was followed in October 1946 by elections in the Eastern zone and Berlin, which revealed the strength of feeling against joining the SED by SPD members. Just over a month later, the US and British zones were fused, and pressure was applied to the French to join. The Four-Power Control Commission had more or less stopped working, unable to agree on much more than the abolition of the state of Prussia. Against this background, it is not surprising that the Conference of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in March-April 1947 failed to agree upon a basis for a German peace treaty. That failure, which coincided with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, marked the start of a more decisive and openly anti-communist policy by Washington towards Europe. It also marked the beginning of the Cold War.
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Suspicion of
Germany
was with surprising speed ceasing to become the defining factor in post-war international relations. The 1947 Treaty of Dunkirk, signed by the Benelux countries, France and the United Kingdom, had been directed against Germany, which was still regarded as the main threat to peace in Europe. But the Treaty of Brussels signed the following year was less specific about the potential
aggressor. East-West relations followed a dialectic of suspicion. Russia regarded the Marshall Plan as an attempt to subvert its rule in eastern Europe. The British and Americans were alarmed by the establishment of the Cominform in September. But probably the key event which turned Russia in Western eyes into the main threat to European security was the Communist
coup d’état
in Prague in February 1948.

Events in Prague pushed the French and the Americans together. In return for pledges of US military and economic support, the French gave up their dreams of obtaining part of the Rhineland. The French zone was merged with Bizonia and the Allies began to plan for currency reform and economic reconstruction within the framework of the European Recovery Plan. The Russians walked out of the Control Commission, which never met again, and blockaded the Western sectors in Berlin. At the height of the Berlin crisis, a separate municipality was created in the Soviet zone. The division of the city anticipated the division of the country. On 23 May 1949, the West German constitution was signed in Bonn; one week later, a rival constitution was adopted by the People’s Congress in Berlin. The German Democratic Republic was officially declared in October.

THE COLD WAR IN EUROPE

The Cold War brought a brutal stability to an exhausted continent and ensured that the revival of political life would take place on the terms permitted by the international balance of power. Contrary to Nazi expectations the Second World War was not succeeded by war between the members of the Grand Alliance. Stalin would scarcely have demanded the Allies invade Europe to form a Second Front if he had aimed then to get them out. Soviet losses—after suffering the greatest wartime destruction in history—and the American nuclear monopoly both made Stalin shy away from belligerence. For their part, both the British and the Americans reluctantly and privately accepted the reality of their partnership with the Russians. They could not help recognizing Soviet military predominance in eastern Europe, and its genuine security interests there. The dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 had been Stalin’s way of signalling the abandonment
of world revolution. If the establishment of its successor, the Cominform, in 1947, marked the deterioration in Moscow’s relations with the Allies since the war, it just as importantly—though it was little noticed at the time—signalled a Soviet policy of conservative consolidation behind the Iron Curtain. For the Americans, too, containment was an essentially defensive doctrine. Dulles’s talk of a “roll-back” of communism in the 1950s was not meant seriously: the Western reaction to the 1953 riots in East Germany or 1956 in Hungary demonstrated how uninterested the West was in challenging the prevailing balance of power. Fear of actual hostilities proved unfounded; despite the tension in relations, especially in 1948, neither side seriously considered using military force to intervene in the other’s sphere of influence. The most dangerous flashpoints were where the Iron Curtain frayed—Trieste, for example, in 1945 (and that largely because of Tito’s belligerence), Hungary and Greece.

One consequence of this division of the continent was that remaining border disputes and minority issues within each Power’s sphere of influence no longer threatened international stability, as they had done earlier in the century. In the West, the Americans sorted out French claims to the Val d’Aosta and to western Germany. It had been decided at the post-war peace conferences that quarrels between, say, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were to be left to the two countries concerned to hammer out. There was to be no repeat of the League of Nations’ attempt to solve minorities problems by internationalizing them. Neither the peace treaties with the defeated Axis partners, nor the United Nations, devoted much attention to minority rights. In a divided Europe, such problems appeared to be of secondary importance. Security from the sorts of border disputes which had plagued the continent in the past was obtained by its subordination to the Superpowers.

There were, of course, high costs to be paid for such stability. The struggle between the Superpowers was henceforth conducted not on the battlefield, but through forms of warfare more compatible with the overwhelming perils of the nuclear era. The covert, psychological and underground warfare which both sides had developed in the struggle against Hitler were now turned upon each other. The spy became the characteristic Cold War warrior. The “gospel of national
security” led to the expansion of vast state organizations for surveillance and espionage. Intelligence activities were no longer regarded as appendages to military operations; they developed their own bureaucratic interests. In western Europe vetting was introduced on the American model, offering a new arena for spymasters to prove their indispensability. The “stay-behind” networks, set up in the late 1940s by American intelligence, determined not to be caught napping by a Soviet invasion, formed malignant anti-communist nuclei in the body politic. Only in the 1980s with revelations about the Gladio ring in Italy would the extent of their activities become appreciated.

The predominance of Cold War anti-communism, combined with the signs of growing popular political disillusionment, gave the democratization of the West a highly conservative cast which troubled liberals and those on the Left in the late 1940s. “The burning question for one concerned with the future of democracy in Europe,” wrote the historian Carl Schorske in 1948, “is the extent to which the loyalty of the middle class to democracy will continue.” In Italy, France and western Germany he noted the rightward thrust of politics since the war and the “signs of a return to anti-democratic authoritarianism” under the pressures of the Cold War. Writing about Germany a year later, another observer was equally gloomy, noting that “the promised democratisation has not yet been effected.”
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Anti-communism in western Europe threatened to make deep inroads into civil liberties and to prevent the social reforms which many had looked forward to. In 1946–7, communist parties were pushed out of government. By 1948–9 the state was drawing upon paramilitary units to stamp out resistance on the Left. The struggle for democracy was now couched in Cold War terms: thus from the Left came accusations that conservative administrations were making anti-fascism suspect and succouring fascists, while Christian Democrats responded by arguing that the real threat to democracy came from the communist attack on freedom. In 1951
UNESCO
mounted an inquiry into the meaning of democracy in the post-war world. It concluded that although everyone professed to want it, a vast gulf in understanding separated the two halves of Europe.

By 1949 the forces of the Free World had triumphed in the West. In Italy and Greece, where violent resistance to the post-war regimes
lasted longest, suspected Leftists entered the prisons even as collaborators were released. Following the critical Christian Democrat victory in Italy’s 1948 elections Mario Scelba’s paramilitary assault units, armed with grenade launchers and flame-throwers, threw hundreds of partisans and workers into jail. A decade after the end of the Spanish civil war, Franco’s police were still mopping up left-wing resisters in the hills. In Greece, the American-trained royalist army, backed by napalm, overcame the communist Democratic Army and interned thousands of suspected sympathizers in makeshift camps.