The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (35 page)

A success story? Perhaps. Yet these same interviews also revealed a remarkably ugly side that the some- what comical Pocket Guide had presciently predicted. The Bombing Survey asked each respondent why they thought Germany had lost the war. Many referred to America’s better equipment and the use of heavy bomb- ing; others spoke of the large alliance arrayed against an isolated, encircled Germany. A common explanation for Germany’s defeat in the war was treachery: “Hitler was surrounded by traitors who deliberately sabotaged his plans,” said a thirty-two-year-old secretary from Nuremberg. “Let me tell you one thing,” said a twenty- year-old housewife and mother from Hamburg. “ You all misunderstand Adolf Hitler. He was really an ide- alist and wanted the best for Germany.” Hitler “was a competent leader and it is not his fault that he didn’t win the war.” The army “worked against Hitler,” who in any case was “a genius.”
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Often, explanations for Ger- many’s defeat centered on the Jews. The persecution of

the Jews had harmed the war effort, many concluded. A thirty-eight-year-old housewife from Hamburg, whose husband was in the army, asserted that since Britain and America were controlled by Jews, they went to war against Germany to save them. “Everyone knows that,” she said. The Nazi leaders “should not have forced the Jews to leave Germany,” said a twenty-six-year-old woman from Darmstadt, with a husband in the army. “ They should have taxed them very heavily and let those who wanted to leave go and the rest stay here. Do you think that the Americans, who have always stuck together with the Jews, would have bombed our cities if they had known that there were Jews living there?” Persecuting the Jews had been a “political mistake,” mused one twenty-four-year-old student in Munich who had served in an artillery unit in Russia. The Nazis started out fine, but “overdid it.” Hitler’s government was “good” and “had been doing wonderful things for the German people before the war broke out,” said a forty-five-year-old nurse who had served in the Ger- man Red Cross in the war. The Jews, “as you know, fought against National Socialism and in time of war that cannot be tolerated.” One young woman in Ham- burg, a mere eighteen years old, expressed disappoint- ment about losing the war because now “the Jews will come back and they will soak us again, like they did before ‘33…. After Hitler threw the Jews out, order and

honesty was in Germany. We will lose that.”
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Having pinned the defeat on treachery, the Jews, or simple political mistakes, many respondents then went on to suggest that the bombing of German cities, while no doubt a kind of payback for German bombings of British, Dutch, and Polish cities, had been tantamount to a war crime. The air raids were “the lowest thing possible…Even the SS would never do that,” declared an outraged twenty-year-old woman in Kempten, who acknowledged that “our leaders were criminals.” “Ger-

many suffered much from bombing,” according to a woman from Nuremberg. “ The war should have been ended to spare the people suffering. The people them- selves always wanted peace but were unable to do any- thing about it.” For a woman from Hamburg who had lived through the bombing of that city, the bombing was worse than Hitler’s atrocities. “It was bad in the concentration camps, but not as bad as seeing human torches running down the streets. I feel the German people have suffered enough through the terror attacks to more than make up for the sins they committed in the concentration camps. The innocent have to suffer for the crimes of the guilty, but they have suffered.” A woman from Bremen sniffed, “I don’t think any people had to suffer as much as the German people. Germany has accomplished miracles.”
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These average Germans, it seemed, had no desire to accept responsibility for the war or its consequences; were prone to self-pity; found it hard to hate Hitler; viewed the Russians and any Communist as the real enemy; continued to blame Germany’s misfortunes on the Jews; and saw themselves as having already paid for their sins by suffering through the Allied bombing. More worrisome, the Germans were not the only ones who expressed some of these views. In September, journalist Tania Long of the New York Times penned

a scathing article about the effectiveness of German civilians in pressing these opinions on American oc- cupation forces. U.S. soldiers were now quite ready “to spout the enemy propaganda line” that the Germans knew nothing about the concentration camps, or that Germany was forced into war by Hitler against the wishes of a peaceful nation, or about how the Germans and Americans must join hands against the Russians. “ The superficial aspects of German life, such as their cleanliness, their higher standard of living and their willingness to work hard, are confused, in the average soldier’s mind, with the whole. The basic factors that govern the German people and have made them the world’s problem children twice within a generation are forgotten in the face of Germany’s modern highways, chrome plumbing, and well-dressed girls.”
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What to do with such a people, who could be gracious, charming, flirtatious, welcoming, obedient, coopera- tive, hardworking, and capable of spouting hateful nonsense as if it were Scripture? Officially, the United States was committed to a policy of exacting heavy rep- arations, dismantling German factories, breaking up large industrial cartels, and controlling every aspect of Germany’s own economic life. Americans planned to arrest war criminals, control education, and remove all members of the Nazi Party—there were twelve million

of them—from public office and even from positions of leadership in private firms. All this was designed, as the Allied powers said at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, “to convince the German people that they have suffered a total military defeat and that they can- not escape responsibility for what they have brought on themselves.”
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In practice these policies, like the fraternization ban, simply could not hold up against the day-to-day pres- sures of restoration and recovery. How, for example, could the American Military Government find capable, efficient Germans to help run local municipal govern- ment and services—as indeed they had to do, given their own rapidly dwindling numbers of Army personnel— while at the same time they were supposed to be ar- resting and interrogating all Germans who had served in such posts under the Nazis? General Eisenhower’s deputy for military government, General Lucius D. Clay, complained to Eisenhower in July that U.S. policy left the average local Military Government officer in a seri- ous bind, for “all too often it seems that the only men with the qualifications…are the career civil servants” who were active in the Nazi Party. Clay needed 300,000 local and municipal employees in the U.S. zone alone; where was he to find so many people without a blem- ish on their record? The Military Government dutifully

prepared a questionnaire, the Fragenbogen, that re- quired Germans to lay out in detail all their previous political affiliations. Military Government eventually collected thirteen million of the completed forms. By September 1945, 82,000 former party members were incarcerated in internment camps, ready to be investi- gated and tried, and an additional 100,000 people had been dismissed from public employment and private enterprise for their previous ties to the Nazi Party.
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But everywhere the Military Government turned to look for capable administrators, they found people who had worked in some way for the Nazi regime. General George Patton, now commander of the Third Army Military Government in Bavaria, spoke for many of his subordinate officers when he said it was “silly” to get rid of “the most intelligent people” in Germany; he then caused a furor by telling a reporter that “far too much fuss had been made regarding denazification in Germany.” Though Eisenhower immediately forced Patton to retract these unguarded comments, his re- marks revealed that U.S. military government officers viewed the denazification process as wasteful and cer- tainly incompatible with restoring order, stability, and security—objectives that Patton said mattered more than “politics.” Although Patton was disciplined for speaking his mind on the subject, he was probably right

that the large-scale political reorientation of an entire nation was not something soldiers had been trained to accomplish. General Clay himself soon realized that the problem of denazification would be a prolonged and painful one, involving thousands of investigations, and it was a problem he felt his administration could not handle. In mid-1946, he handed the whole thing over to the Germans themselves. The results were predictable: of the 3.2 million people the German authorities inves- tigated, only 1,284 were convicted as “major offend- ers.” Another 100,000 people were found to have been “offenders” or “lesser offenders.” The punishments were laughable: about 8,000 people received brief jail sentences; others were fined. The Germans were quick to sweep the Nazi past under the rug, and the U.S. Mili- tary Government supplied the broom.
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America’s growing leniency appeared in its approach to the German economy, too. Despite the severity of the language of Potsdam, the Information Control Division of the U.S. occupation used its English-language news- paper, News of Germany, to trumpet the Americans’ achievements in restarting the German economy. In July, headlines blared “Six Rail Lines Resume Opera- tions,” and “I.G. Farben Factories to Produce Medical Supplies”; in August came news that “33 Trains Arrive, Depart Now Daily from Frankfurt,” while “Bavaria’s

Rapid 3-Months Progress” disproved the prognostica- tions of the Nazis that the American occupation would unduly punish the Germans. The town of Pforzheim, which had been totally obliterated by Allied bombing, was “Rebuilding in the Pattern of Freedom,” the paper reported. “ Wurzburg, 85% Ruined, Rebuilds”; “Osn- abrück Plans Modern City”; “Auto Manufacture Starts Here Soon”; “5 Trucking Firms Operating in Anspach”; “First Steel Plant in US Zone Starts Peace Production”; “More Railroad Lines Restored to Service,” and so on. These were the sorts of indices that American informa- tion officers clearly liked to report—far more encour- aging than charts indicating the number of former Nazis languishing behind bars. It even seemed worth- while reporting the good news that I. G. Farben, which had manufactured the Zyklon-B pellets used to exter- minate millions of Jews, was now helping the occupa- tion by making DDT to keep lice-borne typhus at bay: “Farben-Made DDT Powder Fights Typhus.”
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In a message to the German people on August 6, Gen- eral Eisenhower enumerated a long list of successes that the Americans had achieved in their zone: in ad- dition to crushing Nazism, the Americans had begun to transfer political authority to the German people, started reopening schools, courts, newspapers, and even allowed unions and political parties to form. Not

all the indices, however, were encouraging. Eisenhower acknowledged that “the coming months will be a time of trial. They will inevitably be hard. All signs point to shortages of food, fuel, housing and transport.” Most alarming, “coal will not be available for heating houses this winter. In the next few months you must cut and gather enough wood in the forests to take care of your essential needs.” But Eisenhower told his German sub- jects that “you can redeem yourselves…through your own efforts. It lies in your power to build a healthy, democratic life in Germany and to rejoin the family of nations.”
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And the Germans would not be facing these challenges alone. It is indicative of the shift in Allied opinion about the Germans that military leaders in the British and American zones approached the challenge of feeding the people with great zeal. General Clay, Eisenhower’s deputy, wrote later that he “was certain that we could not arouse political interest for a demo- cratic government in a hungry, apathetic population.” General Bernard Montgomery even dubbed the food effort “the Battle of Winter,” perhaps to evoke the suc- cesses of previous great campaigns like the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Battle of Ber- lin. Success in those great military campaigns required killing large numbers of Germans; success in the Battle of Winter meant feeding them instead.