Exorcising Hitler (20 page)

As early as April, Churchill and Truman had jointly proposed to Stalin that a joint Control Council to run Germany, as provided for in EAC agreements signed during the winter, should be set up as soon as possible, even before troops were redeployed into the final zones. Stalin ignored the proposal, merely responding in curt fashion that a ‘temporary tactical demarcation line’ was in order. The British, especially, continued to push for an agreement that uncoupled the formal (and by now urgent) establishment of a Control Council from the question of withdrawal into peacetime zones. Again the Russians stonewalled. It was some time before the issue came to a head.

On 29 May, Ambassador Winant, America’s man at the EAC, suggested that the Allied commanders-in-chief meet in Berlin on 1 June to ceremonially sign the Victory Declaration, thereby bringing into force its stipulations, including the formation of the Control Council, and allowing the protocols on zonal boundaries and administrative machinery to take effect. When General Eisenhower asked what he should do in case the Soviets brought up the subject of Western withdrawal, he was told by his superiors at the Joint Chiefs of Staff that if they did so, he was to tell them that it was ‘one of the items to be worked out by the Control Council’. The first of June, it turned out, was an unrealistic deadline, but when the Soviets finally replied, on 4 June, having kept everyone waiting, they seemed in a hurry. The signing should take place the next day, 5 June.

Not for the first – or the last – time, the Soviets outmanoeuvred their nominal allies. When Eisenhower’s party landed at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, in the late morning of 5 June, the C-in-C of SHAEF was greeted by a battalion-sized honour guard. After completing his inspection, which naturally took a while, Eisenhower was then driven through the shattered streets to the luxury villa that he, like the British and French commanders, had been assigned for the day. The villas were part of a complex requisitioned by the Soviets for their own senior officers, situated in the relatively undamaged lakeside idyll of Wendenschloss, a resort that formed part of the borough of Köpenick.

Eisenhower then had a brief private meeting with Marshal Zhukov at the Soviet commander’s nearby villa. He presented the Russian war hero with the Chief Commander grade of the American Legion of Merit, before returning to his own temporary accommodation. From here, so Eisenhower thought, he would now be conveyed to the signing ceremony at the local yacht club, which had been due at noon and for which they were therefore already somewhat, though not seriously, late.

Eisenhower still planned to be back at his new headquarters in Frankfurt that same evening. Hours passed, however, without a word from their hosts. Only when Eisenhower got together with the British commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and threatened to leave if there were further delays in the signature ceremony, did the Russians react. The American, the Briton and their French colleague, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, were finally transported to the signing venue.
²²

However, if the Western commanders thought that this was the end of the matter, they were wrong. When they finally came face to face with their Red Army hosts, it was to be told that the signing could not take place. A minor clause of the agreement could, they were told, be interpreted as committing the Russians to arresting any Japanese nationals they found in Germany, which, since they were not (yet) at war with Japan, was unacceptable. Eisenhower agreed that the clause could be taken out. Zhukov then insisted on consulting Moscow.

By the time the Soviet government’s assent was received, it was almost 5 p.m., some hours beyond the originally agreed time. Eisenhower had by this time fully realised that the Soviets were playing games with him.

After the signing ceremony, which took place in a blaze of flash bulbs and faux goodwill, the commanders went out on to the clubhouse terrace for a private chat, taking along their interpreters. Eisenhower took the opportunity to suggest that, since the Control Council was now formally constituted, its staff could begin their work forthwith. Zhukov swiftly disabused him of this assumption. But could not an agenda for this be agreed? No, Zhukov said. How could he make decisions when he did not control his own zone? He continued not to give an inch, even when Montgomery intervened. When told by the British commander that things were complicated and chaotic, and the formation of a Control Council was therefore urgent, the marshal simply answered that the war was over, and how long would it take to redeploy the troops? When told, about three weeks, Zhukov said this was ‘very satisfactory’. In the interim they could be organising their Control Council staffs, could they not?

Since neither Eisenhower nor Montgomery was authorised to make any commitments on withdrawal dates, that was the end of the discussion. Except that when they went back into the building, preparations for the habitual elaborate Russian banquet were under way, with vodka glasses being charged for a toast to the day’s ‘success’. Eisenhower joined in one toast. A photograph catches him glaring none too amiably at Zhukov as the latter pours a drink for Montgomery (exactly what this consisted of remains mysterious – the British commander was a militant teetotaller). Eisenhower left immediately afterwards to catch his flight back to Frankfurt. It had been planned for his deputy, General Clay, and a small staff to stay on in Berlin, but the Russians made no offer of overnight hospitality and so they too returned to Frankfurt.

The bad-tempered (and disappointing) session at Wendenschloss led Eisenhower to write a report to Washington in which he confirmed that the Russians would not agree to any progress on the peacetime administration of Germany until they came into full possession of their zone, a point of view that was echoed in Ambassador Robert Murphy’s account to the State Department.
²³
Eisenhower added that the yet-to-be-realised Control Council could well ‘become only a negotiating agency and in no sense an overall government for Germany’. In anticipation of this, he recommended either operating the American Zone as an independent economic entity, or combining it with the other Western zones to likewise manage the government and feeding of their people, leaving the Russians to their own. It was a prophetic suggestion.
²⁴

Meanwhile, despite Churchill’s continuing objections, Washington took steps to expedite the withdrawal of American forces from the temporary demarcation line to the pre-ordained zone borders. The British had no choice but to follow. The several million Germans affected by these changes included the population of major central German cities such as Magdeburg, Erfurt and Leipzig, all of which had been captured by the Americans during the final weeks of the war.

In their home town in Thuringia, Schlotheim, which had been occupied by the US Army since 8 April, nine-year-old Joachim Trenkner and his family were still, by the standards of the time, living a charmed life. The small town had never been bombed, had fallen to the enemy with scarcely a shot fired, and, highly unusually, none of the family had been forced to serve in the war. Until the Americans arrived, the 4,000 or so citizens of Schlotheim could almost have pretended the war wasn’t happening at all. Even when it did come to them, it was in the form not of shells or bombs but of a metallic grinding sound that the young Joachim recalls to this day. He looked out and saw American tanks clanking along the town’s main street. The vehicles stopped, the GIs got out and took possession of the town. That was it. ‘Nothing else happened,’ Joachim recalls. ‘They were just nice guys.’
²⁵

Initially, there was a problem for his parents, however. Dr Trenkner had been advised by retreating Wehrmacht soldiers that he should wear his Red Cross uniform when the Americans arrived. Perhaps they were influenced by the fact that the figurehead leader of the DRK (
Deutsches Rotes Kreuz
) was the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, a grandson of Queen Victoria and therefore a cousin of the King of England. In any case, it was bad advice.

Under the Nazis, the Red Cross had been politicised and militarised, in effect turned into an arm of the Party, and was already on the list of proscribed Nazi organisations that the invaders carried with them into Germany. The DRK uniform itself was disturbingly military in design. Dr Trenkner was therefore arrested almost immediately. He was saved by the arrival of a group of Serb slave workers whom he had treated, and treated well, when such things were discouraged by the Nazis. The Serbs vouched for him. Within a few hours, the Americans released Dr Trenkner and allowed him to return to his surgery.

Despite this unfortunate beginning, in the weeks that followed, Joachim’s doctor father quickly achieved a good relationship with the American medical staff, who shared his office and surgery space. When it became clear at the beginning of July, after ten weeks or so of increasingly amicable American presence, that the town would soon be handed over to the Russians, Dr Trenkner’s concern for himself and his family was apparent to his guests. He had, after all, been a member of the Nazi Party, if not an especially fanatical one.

So it was that, with the withdrawal deadline fast approaching, the American medical officer suggested that he could supply his new German acquaintance with a permit to accompany the American forces on their westward move, along with his family. Dr Trenkner accepted the offer, and managed to find another practice just the other side of the zone border. The family cart was packed up with their most important belongings, their faithful horse spanned between its shafts (these were the days of petrol shortages) and in the summer sunshine they prepared to head for a new home in the American Zone, whose border lay a mere thirty kilometres away.

Here came the deus ex machina. Or, rather, the man in the upper window. Joachim’s grandfather, also a doctor (and a keen Nazi), had elected to stay in the roomy and comfortable family home rather than uproot himself. Now, with his son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren all ready to leave, the old man appeared and called down imperiously to his son: ‘If you leave, you are disinherited!’ Dr Trenkner paused. A few minutes later, they started carrying their belongings back into the house. Even the threat of the Russian hordes was not enough to overcome the threat of losing everything he stood to gain when the old man died.

The Russians arrived a few days later in Schlotheim, and the nine-year-old Joachim was surprised at his reaction:

My memory was, no fear of them. We sort of pitied them because they looked so poor. Compared with the Americans before. And they had nothing to offer. No more chocolate, no more Camel cigarettes, just those rough Russian cigarettes.

It was not only the Russians who inspired a certain visceral fear in German hearts. In the west, the Americans were due to evacuate parts of the territory their troops had occupied and hand these areas over to the French, whose zone, added late in the day and carved in part out of the British Zone, included the southern Rhineland and part of Württemberg. The sense of disappointment and anxiety was especially strong in Koblenz. Here the Americans had been awaited with a certain complacency by the inhabitants in the weeks and days before the fall of the city in March 1945.

Older Koblenzers remembered the Americans fondly from the period after the First World War, when the US Third Army, first under Major General Dickman and then under Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett, was quartered there as a force of occupation for a little over four years (December 1918–January 1923).

Once the ‘doughboys’ had settled in, relations with the Koblenz natives in the years after the First World War seem to have been friendly. There were the usual romantic liaisons, leading to long-lasting German–American ties (the rakehell American poet Charles Bukowski, best known for the film adaptation of his life,
Barfly
, was born in 1920 near Koblenz to a Polish-American soldier father and a German mother). General Liggett himself was remembered with gratitude for having helped the locals to circumvent the stipulations under the peace treaty by which the Prussian fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, which dominated the right bank of the Rhine at this, its confluence point with the Mosel, was to have been demolished.
²⁶

The French occupation, which followed the American withdrawal and lasted six years until 1929, was not so pleasant an experience. In particular, the French attempt to set up a separatist Rhenish republic at Koblenz, which led to widespread fighting and looting, was held against them.

The actual capture of Koblenz in March 1945, as witnessed by young Helmut Nassen, was not nearly as trouble-free as that of Schlotheim. The Americans had to fight their way into the main city, on the left bank of the Rhine, against quite stubborn resistance, and even after the entire left bank was occupied, by 18–19 March, that left the Germans controlling the right bank. Egon Plönissen, then approaching his fourteenth birthday, spent those suspenseful days, like Helmut Nassen, watching the enemy forces increasing across the river in Koblenz and half loathing them, half longing for them to cross and end the war for him and his family.

The Plönissen family’s level of anxiety was increased by the fact that their father, the town dentist in Ehrenbreitstein, a First World War veteran now in his mid-forties who had briefly served once more in the Wehrmacht in 1939–40 before being released due to his age, had been recalled to the colours in the autumn of 1944 as part of the
Volkssturm
mobilisation. Fortunately, for the moment, Herr Plönissen was permitted to continue his essential dental work part-time (his surgery had transferred to a room in the castle when the family home/practice was bombed during the previous winter) while acting as a provisions officer in charge of supplies to the fortress garrison.