Exorcising Hitler (46 page)

This problem remained largely undiscussed, at least in public, but it did not go away. Former President Hoover’s adviser on press and relations with the Military Government in Germany, Frank E. Mason, returned early in 1947 to Washington and spoke with, among others, General Eisenhower, who was now Chief of Staff. Shortly after, Eisenhower wrote to Clay about his conversations with Mason, who had told him:

. . . that many of our civilians are German-speaking people of a rather undesirable type. Among other things they say that many of these people have been citizens of the United States for only two or three years and are using their present positions either to communise Germany or to indulge in vengeance. One very conservative man recommended that we should allow no one to be in our Military Government unless he has been a citizen . . . for at least ten years.
³⁷

The coded message seems to have been read and understood. On 7 April Clay gave secret instructions to reduce the number of German-born refugees in the employ of the American Military Government. His deputy, General Frank L. Keating, sent out a ‘highly confidential’ memorandum to the effect that Clay had ‘decided we shall not employ anyone or renew the contract of anyone who has been naturalized since 1933’. Even where special technical expertise was required, ‘we should try to find a way out’. In carrying out this instruction, Keating continued, officers must ‘refrain from general discussion of the subject or issuance of any orders. It is not necessary for us to indicate why we do not intend to rehire anyone [but] see that diplomacy is used in handling each case.’ The document in the file was later marked ‘recalled’ but a sudden wave of dismissals among AMG officials of a certain background ensued.

In the British Zone, too, and in the British sector of Berlin, there were worries in certain circles about ‘over-zealousness’ on the part of Jewish officers and men of the Military Government. George Clare, a Jew who had left Vienna at the time of the
Anschluss
, was now, eight years later, a British Army officer involved in denazifying the cultural sphere in Berlin and Hamburg, with special attention to press and radio. One day in 1946, Clare was called into his superior’s office. Major Sely discussed Clare’s new role – the young man had just been in London on a course and getting his British naturalisation papers – and then unlocked his desk and handed him a letter he had been keeping safe for this moment. Clare read it carefully and recalled later:

Addressed to Colonel Edwards, Deputy Chief of PR/ISC,
*
it was from Public Safety, the CCG’s police division. Couched in somewhat more diplomatic language than my summary of it, its author, a Public Safety Commander, accused our section of denazifying with – in his words – ‘excessive zeal’. Was PR/ISC Group aware of this, he enquired, or – and there was the sting – the fact that the officer in charge, a Major Sely, his Hamburg representative, a Mr Felix, as well as his man in Hanover, one Staff-Sergeant Ormond, were all of German-Jewish extraction, which might well incline them to act in a spirit of revenge? Did PR/ISC consider it advisable that such a delicate task should be entrusted to people of such background?
³⁸

Clare asked Sely if he should therefore pack his bags and take the next train back to London.

The major laughed. No, Colonel Edwards, a fiery Welshman, had already sorted out the ‘bloody ignorant jumped-up bobbies’, telling them that he chose his own staff and they had his full confidence. ‘And since,’ Sely added, quoting their boss, ‘they had his full confidence he had to refute the Commander’s aspersions on their integrity with the same determination with which Public Safety had refuted reports that it allowed former Gestapo officers to seep back into the German police.’

Apparently, no more was heard from Public Safety on this issue.

*
Kreis
= District in German. An administrative area between state (
Land
) and community level. In modern Germany there are around 420 of these for a population of 81,000,000, urban and rural, giving an average of slightly less than 200,000 per
Kreis
.

†
Oberlandesgericht
= Higher Regional Court.

*
The demobilisation process depended on a system of ‘points’, which were awarded for length of service, length of overseas duty, number of children, decorations and citations earned by men and their units, etc. Generally, a total of eighty-five guaranteed a man his return to civilian life.

*
PR/ISC = Public Relations/Information Services Control.

11

Persil Washes White

The determined denazifiers were lucky in one sense. Unlike Patton, the otherwise conservative General Clay held on to his conviction that a political purge of the occupied areas was a necessity.

Clay believed in business, he wanted to modify JCS 1067 as much as he decently could so that Germany and its industries could pay their keep, and he was decidedly in favour of a capitalist post-war Germany. All the same, he also felt strongly about cleansing the political Augean stables in the zone as thoroughly – but also as quickly – as possible so that the country could genuinely move on to a democratic as well as a more prosperous future.

That much of the policy carried out by the AMG and its officials in the summer and autumn after the victory was very tough is hard to deny. There were officers, like Patton, who sympathised with the Germans (though perhaps not in quite such extreme terms), disliked the DPs (sometimes with good day-to-day reasons) and thought that denazification was paving the way for communism. There were equally many, if not more, who believed passionately in the most thoroughgoing of purges.

Certainly, the effects of investigation by the AMG’s denazification teams could be devastating so far as incriminated individual Germans and their families were concerned. From the substantial town of Kempten in Allgäu, south-western Bavaria, AMG officials reported:

1. On 31 Oct 45, Dr Bernhard Wagner, former city treasurer, and his wife and child attempted triple suicide. Morphine had been taken by all three but the dose was lethal to the child only. Since the morphine failed to kill, Frau Wagner opened the veins on Dr Wagner’s wrist. He died the next day in hospital. Frau Wagner is recovering and will be tried for attempting suicide and murder.

2. The suicide was evidently caused by the removal of Dr Wagner from his position and his imminent re-arrest by CIC. He had returned only a few days before from several weeks in an internment camp having been taken into custody by CIC as a mandatory arrest. The day before the suicide, he had been summoned by CIC for another interview and as a result he evidently assumed that he would be interned once more.
¹

By the end of the winter, more than 42 per cent of public officials had been summarily dismissed by the occupation forces. It was all very well cleansing the Augean stables, but who was going to run them once they were cleansed?

With political parties for Germans now licensed at local level, and communal elections set for January 1946, so far as general attitudes in Bavaria regarding denazification were concerned, American intelligence led with several examples chosen to typify different views in the
Land
:

a. Among small and humble Nazis the reaction is mainly one of anxiety and fear. A railway switchman, for example fears that he may lose his job and his home, and reports, in a manner inimitably Bavarian: ‘Ich will meine Ruhe haben’ [I want my peace]. He now sympathises, he says, with the Social Democrats, and hopes to see Germany rebuilt.

b. A middle-aged working woman, wife of a PG [
Parteigenosse
,
or Nazi Party member], and a refugee from the Sudetenland, plaintively asks: ‘How did we earn this? We always tried to do the right thing and didn’t know the party was so bad’.

c. More spirited Nazis are beset by similar fears, but do not deny their principles. ‘The Americans are seeking to destroy Germany,’ says a female high-school teacher bitterly, ‘and this is one of their techniques of doing it’. A former Nazi official says: ‘Yes, we are guilty of being Nazis and must suffer for it’. A former Professor of the alleged science of Rassenkunde [literally: racial lore] warns that the purge will produce an intelligent proletariat which will be communistically inclined and which will prove a menace.
²

The resentment and fear of the power of the AMG was not necessarily combined with a desire by Germans at this point to rule themselves. In fact, another report, from Friedberg, a suburb of the city of Augsburg, stated:

There is frequent comment concerning the handing over of the civil administration from the Military Government to the civilians [that] is being made soon. One comment is that the American authorities are not interested enough in the affairs of their occupation zone and want to release themselves of the burden of responsibility as soon as possible. It is noticed that the semi-step of self-government is being taken only by the American forces.
³

It seemed that, in the eyes of the defeated, the occupiers could not win. The catch was, of course, that without structured German involvement, governing the zone except on the most basic level would be impossible. Similarly, if the Americans persisted in pursuing denazification alone, the process would take several years, perhaps even longer, and would, moreover, always be seen as an alien imposition.

As we have seen, millions of American troops had already been repatriated and demobilised. Final American withdrawal from Europe was still planned for 1947. German self-denazification was therefore convenient, even essential, for the American occupiers, but it was also consciously part of democratisation. The Soviets had been the first to set up (appointed) German-run
Land
governments in their zone in July 1945. The Americans were acutely aware of invidious comparisons, should they – the world’s democratic paragons – delay the transition to German self-rule in their own zone.

The Soviets were also the first to allow the formation of post-war political parties. The Communist Party (KPD) was officially refounded in Russian-controlled Berlin a little more than a month after the end of the war, followed rapidly by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then a Christian Conservative Party (the Christian Democratic Union = CDU) and a Liberal Party (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany = LDPD). However, the uniquely close relationship between the Russians and their ready-made German communist allies – many of whom had returned after years of exile in the USSR – assured the KPD of a crucial, though not yet openly dominant role. The rapid consolidation of the parties in the Soviet Zone into the ‘Unity Front of Anti-Fascist Democratic Parties’ was early evidence of this covert control. On 9 July, the Russians instituted five provinces, or
Länder
, and appointed German officials to head them. In October, the German authorities were supposedly given ‘full powers’.

The US authorities followed piecemeal with their own appointed
Land
governments – in Bavaria, Greater Hessen and Württemberg-Baden – composed of supposedly ‘clean’ German politicians (mostly from the pre-Hitler period) and officials. These bodies also made up a
Länderrat
(Council of
Länder
), constituted under American supervision at a conference in Stuttgart on 17 October. The council’s task was to liaise with and take instructions from the occupiers on a zone-wide level, though General Clay emphasised in his speech to the founding conference that the Germans should assume responsibility for their own government as soon as possible, and that the establishment of a free press and broadcasting system were also a high priority.
⁴

Political parties were permitted, though at first only on a district basis and subject to a licensing procedure to ensure their democratic credentials. Within three months of that, the military administration had begun the process of holding free elections on the American model, the first of the occupiers to do so. Parties on a
Land
level were allowed from January. Organisation on zone level had to wait.

That the Americans took the lead in the race to give post-war Germans the chance to vote freely was hardly surprising, given the almost religious importance the US placed on democracy, but the speed with which the AMG did so was impressive.

In January 1946, elections took place on a village level, in April on the
Kreis
level and in May for city councils. Finally, in June there followed elections to constitutional conventions for each of the
Länder
. It was a consciously decentralised model. Like the individual American states, the
Länder
were to have the right to promulgate their own laws and define their own governmental systems. Referenda on these
Land
constitutions, combined with legislative elections, would take place at the end of the year.