Exorcising Hitler (23 page)

This joint offensive did not immediately affect the President’s apparently keen support for Morgenthau’s plans. Roosevelt responded to their objections with a jocular reference to Germans’ being ‘fed three times a day with soup from army soup kitchens . . . [so that] they will remember that experience the rest of their lives’.

FDR took Morgenthau to his summit with the British in the middle of the month. When they met Churchill at Quebec on 16 September, with the British leader looking to renew a much-needed lend-lease deal with the Americans, it was almost certainly the Treasury Secretary’s control of the cheque book as well as his eloquence that tipped the balance. That, and the Americans’ assertion that, with German industrial power destroyed and prevented from recovering, a near-bankrupt Britain’s economy would find it much easier to forge ahead once more after the war. For whatever reason, they managed to impose a slightly watered-down version on an initially reluctant Churchill.

The prompt leaking of the text to the press – and a widespread negative public reaction – caused Roosevelt, who was running against the youthful New York Governor, Thomas E. Dewey, for his third re-election in November, to deny that the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ was firm Allied policy.

It also quickly became clear that the Morgenthau Plan was a gift to German propagandists. The Nazi Party newspaper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
, ran a screaming headline: ‘Roosevelt and Churchill Agree to Jew Murder Plan’. Goebbels eagerly began to promote a new scapegoat, Morgenthau, ‘the Jewish angel of hate’. In a speech at the beginning of October he sneered:

Hate and revenge of a truly old-testament character are clear in these plans dreamed up by the American Jew Morgenthau. Industrialised Germany should be literally turned into a huge potato field.
¹⁶

From now on, Goebbels’ journalists and propagandists repeatedly rammed home the simple, stark message: with the Morgenthau Plan now official Allied policy, Germans faced either victory or mass death and starvation.

It seems probable that this propaganda campaign helped stiffen resistance in what was left of the Reich during the final months of the war. Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Boettiger, who visited the front during the bitter fighting for Aachen in October 1944, reported that the troops on the ground had told him the Plan was ‘worth thirty divisions to the Germans’.
¹⁷

Between the Quebec Conference in September and Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945, the momentum behind the Morgenthau Plan slackened. It was the beginning of a painfully slow backtrack that would take up to three years in all.

Churchill may have signed up for the Plan in Quebec, but even before the Prime Minister returned to London, leading figures in his government – especially Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden, who at Quebec had argued angrily with him about it (‘You can’t do this! After all, you and I publicly have said quite the opposite!’) within full earshot of the Americans – started agitating against the so-called ‘Carthaginian Peace’ demanded by Morgenthau.
¹⁸
Eden wrote in his diary that he was ‘irritated by this German Jew’s bitter hatred of his own land’.
¹⁹

Meanwhile, and almost fatally, no alternative policy was developed. There remained strong ‘Morgenthau’ elements in JCS 1067 – particularly regarding the feeding of the country at a basic level no higher than any of the surrounding nations and the assertion that the US would do nothing to stimulate or ‘rehabilitate’ German industry – though some of the most extreme suggestions, such as wrecking German mines and factories, were quietly dropped. Nonetheless, the breathtakingly radical elements contained in Morgenthau’s proposal would impede the ruling and feeding of occupied Germany and alienate many in Germany and elsewhere from Allied post-war policy.

Nor was the matter of Morgenthau’s Jewish identity left out of the picture, even in Washington. Stimson considered Morgenthau ‘so biased by his Semitic grievances that he really is a very dangerous adviser to the President’,
²⁰
while Secretary Hull referred in coded fashion to ‘Morgenthau and his friends’, and asserted that the Plan ‘might well mean a bitter-end German resistance that could cause the loss of thousands of American lives’.
²¹

The other great pillar of the proposed post-war occupation of Germany was the notorious ‘non-fraternisation’ order contained both in the Handbook and in slightly modified form in JCS 1067.

The non-fraternisation policy had been framed in the early months of 1944 and was incorporated into Eisenhower’s order of the day on 3 September 1944, just before the US Army launched itself into Germany proper. Non-fraternisation was defined as ‘the avoidance of mingling with Germans upon terms of friendliness, familiarity or intimacy, whether individually or in groups, in official or unofficial dealings’. Specifically prohibited were marriages, integrated seating at religious services, visiting private homes, attending dances and even shaking hands. To ‘protect’ their men against such temptations, officers were encouraged to keep them occupied by, among other things, intensified training and the promotion of education and sports. Transgressions were punishable with a $65 fine for a first offence.
²²

The order was transposed into what was supposed to be a ‘GI-friendly’ form in the forty-eight-page ‘Pocket Guide to Germany’, some two million of which were distributed to American soldiers for the advance into Germany in the autumn of 1944. Prepared by German-speaking members of the army’s Morale Service Division, and packed with chilling warnings, the Pocket Guide told its readers: ‘Trust no one but your own kind. Be on your guard particularly against young Germans between the ages of 14 and 28. Since 1933, when Hitler came to power, German youth has been carefully and thoroughly educated for world conquest, killing, and treachery . . .’

On the subject of relations with Germans, of whatever age, it was also perfectly clear that ‘you are in an enemy country’:

There must be no fraternization. This is absolute!
[italicised in the original] Unless otherwise permitted by higher authority you will not visit in German homes or associate with Germans on terms of friendly intimacy, either in public or in private. They must never be taken into your confidence.

This warning against fraternization doesn’t mean that you are to act like a sourpuss or military automaton. Your aspect should not be harsh or forbidding. At home you had minor transactions with many people. You were courteous to them, but never discussed intimate affairs, told them secrets, or gave them the benefit of your confidence. Let that behaviour be your model now.

The Germans will be curious. They will be interested. Their interest will be aroused by observation. They will notice your superb equipment. They will notice your high pay (high compared to the standards of their own and other European countries). They will observe your morale and the magnificent spirit of cooperation and mutual respect that exists in the American Army and they will ask questions about America and American life.

Within the limits of your instructions against fraternization and intimacy, you can by your conduct give them a glimpse of life in a Democracy where no man is master of another, where the only limit of success is a man’s own ability.
²³

Among other useful, though less worrying, information in the booklet was the revelation that ‘Germany is not as large as Texas’. And it contained tourist stuff – weights and measures equivalents, currency and so on, and a twenty-page phonetic guide to useful terms and phrases for non-German-speaking conquerors:

And moving from this back into worrying territory again:

The entire strictness of the affair, supported by frequent exhortations on American Forces’ radio, which ran regular, recorded warnings, was somewhat undermined by the evidence, as early as the end of 1944, that almost all the German secretaries and housekeepers employed at American military headquarters were very pretty and very young.
²⁴

The British also produced a Guide for their troops and a Handbook for officers. It had more history in it, but otherwise took a similar line. However, the British high command quite quickly showed a more relaxed attitude to the actual practicalities. Judging from the sections dealing with the anti-fraternisation order in the American Pocket Guide, any positive effect from interaction between Allied troops and Germans seemed to be expected to come out of some kind of mime performance or silent-movie routine.

The problem was, of course, that once any soldier, but perhaps especially any American soldier, came into contact with the people hitherto known as the enemy and observed that they both looked pretty much like him and his comrades and also behaved pretty much in the same fashion, there was no preventing fraternisation. And it was hard to see where that fraternisation would stop. The fine for forbidden contact with German civilians was $65, and so asking a German girl out on a date became known as the ‘$65 Question’.
²⁵

Since that same soldier was lonely, frightened, frustrated and bored, in that unique combination that only war service can provide, what was he supposed to do? Within a few weeks of the war’s end, soldiers were told they could loosen up when it came to talking with German children. Well, kids were kids, same as everywhere; they liked candy and a few games. And then there were their unmarried aunts and their grown-up sisters . . . according to one magazine story of the time, GIs, spotting an attractive young German woman, would wink at her and say ‘Good day, child’.
²⁶

At the end of July 1945, the non-fraternisation policy was supposedly modified, so that conversations with German civilians were permitted ‘in public places’. This was widely interpreted as a de facto abandonment of the policy. As a
Time
magazine correspondent reported from a Bavarian lakeside resort (under the headline ‘Ban Lifted’):

One of the first people in this picturesque town to hear about the rescinding of the ban was a 28-year-old blonde, blousy German girl named Helga. She was told about it by the American soldier whose room in one of the local hotels she had been sharing for the past 30 days. Helga’s reaction was mixed. She said she was very happy because ‘now we don’t have to hide it any more’. But the joy was somewhat shadowed, she allowed, because ‘it is much better when it is forbidden’.
²⁷

One Ilse Schmidt, ‘a gorgeous 19-year-old brunette with a figure designed to make men drool’, sunbathing on a local pier, when asked by the same reporter for her views on fraternisation, answered: ‘I never had any trouble. Have you a cigarette, please?’

In fact, it was not until October 1945 that intimate relations with German civilians were actually permitted, but long before that, the order had become a dead letter. The remaining restriction, on marriages with German women, remained until the military authorities finally relented in December 1946. Many thousands of marriages were entered into during the years to come, with around 20,000 German women emigrating to America as ‘GI brides’ between 1946 and 1949.
²⁸
It should, however, be added that this was less than a third of the number of British brides who went stateside to join their American soldier husbands during the same period after the passing of the ‘GI Bride’ Act by Congress in December 1945.

There were also thousands of children born as the result of liaisons that did not lead to marriage, many of them never knowing their fathers. GIs in Germany at that point did not need to pay child support unless they were willing to acknowledge paternity, rendering the obligations of fatherhood entirely voluntary. Many of the children, and their single mothers, suffered severe social exclusion, especially if the children were offspring of relationships with black American GIs.

On the British side, although restrictions on relations with Germans at first seemed equally uncompromising, they were on the whole relaxed more quickly than in the American-controlled areas. The British attitude in general was both a little more cynical and a little more pragmatic. The British C-in-C and, after VE-Day, Military Governor of the British Zone, Field Marshal Montgomery, although himself rather puritanical in sexual matters, pointed out in a letter to Churchill at the beginning of July that if one couldn’t actually speak to Germans, how was one supposed to change them from Nazis to something better, which was, allegedly, one of the post-war aims? And in any case, the Field Marshal continued, in the manner of a boy suggesting that some schoolyard ‘enemy’ be re-admitted to the fold after being temporarily sent to Coventry: