EXORCISING
HITLER
The Occupation and
Denazification of Germany
Frederick Taylor
To Götz Bergander, Joachim Trenkner and Helmut Schnatz, who were born to a regime founded in war and intolerance but, along with so many others, helped to build something much, much better in its place.
All the time I am asking myself why this misfortune came over me. How have I deserved this? What have I done that one has to treat me like a criminal? That so many people died in Belsen – I could not alter that any more. It is all my fate and maybe I shall even be punished for that.
– Josef Kramer, commandant of Belsen concentration camp, in a letter to his wife before his execution
Lily the Werwolf is my name.
Hoo, Hoo, Hoo,
I bite, I eat, I am not tame.
Hoo, Hoo, Hoo.
My Werwolf teeth bite the enemy,
And then he’s done and then he’s gone,
Hoo, Hoo, Hoo.
– the song ‘Werwolf Lily’, broadcast to ‘German youth’ by the radio station of the Nazi Werwolf resistance, spring 1945
Your attitude toward women is wrong – in Germany. You’ll see a lot of good-looking babes on the make there. German women have been trained to seduce you. Is it worth a knife in the back?
– booklet for the guidance of GIs in Germany, late 1944
German people, you must know that if the war is lost, you will be annihilated! The Jew with his infinite hatred stands behind this concept of annihilation. And if the German people loses here, then its next ruler will be the Jew! And what a Jew is, this must be known to you. And if anyone doesn’t know about the revenge of Juda, let him read about it. This war is not the Second World War, this war is the great racial war.
– Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Harvest Thanksgiving Speech,
Berlin Sportpalast, 4 October 1942
God, I hate the Germans.
– General Dwight D. Eisenhower in a letter to his wife Mamie, September 1944
Contents
Maps
Introduction
1 Into the Reich
2 Hoo-Hoo-Hoo
3 The Great Trek
4 Zero Hour
5 Through Conquerors’ Eyes
6 Hunger
7 The Price
8 To the Victors the Spoils
9 No Pardon
10 The Fish and the Net
11 Persil Washes White
12 Divide and Rule
13 Hope
Epilogue: The Sleep Cure
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright Page
Introduction
In the spring of 1945, the four major powers that had defeated Hitler’s armies took an unprecedentedly drastic step: they abolished Germany’s sovereign government and took direct control of its territory. A few months later, Allied Military Administration was also imposed on Germany’s main co-combatant in the Second World War, the Japanese empire. With these acts, the victorious Allies undertook what most people at the time thought of as an exceptional and final exercise in foreign military occupation of hitherto independent peoples. From now on, with the world cleansed of aggressive war, such measures would no longer be necessary.
Partly due to pressure from America and Russia, the two ‘post-colonial’ superpowers created by the Second World War, the British, French and Dutch empires soon began to dissolve. India, Burma and Indonesia quickly gained their independence, to be followed, as the 1950s and 1960s progressed, by huge areas of Asia and Africa. The model for the post-war world would, so the largely American-sponsored orthodoxy had it, be one of national sovereignty and self-government. Aggressive wars of choice, campaigns of gratuitous conquest, would no longer be tolerated, and those on the enemy side who had conducted, in the view of the Allies, such a war between 1939 and 1945 would be punished. Hence the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials that followed the surrenders of Germany and Japan.
There was, of course, a key difference between the occupations of Germany and Japan after 1945. Although in the case of both countries the Allies had demanded unconditional surrender, the Japanese were in the final analysis – for pragmatic reasons –permitted a condition, which was that they could keep their emperor. Only in the case of Germany was all government, from the highest national level to the most parochial, taken, at the moment of surrender, completely into the victors’ hands, and the German people thereby entirely delivered up to the mercy of their erstwhile enemies.
Who, more than sixty years ago, would have ever thought that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, two of those Western powers would be again conducting military occupations of formerly sovereign states? And who would have predicted that those new occupations, after the crucial learning experiences of 1945, would be so halting, so clumsy, so violently problematic?
The invasion of Iraq by America and its coalition allies brought the swift demise of Saddam Hussein’s pseudo-fascist Ba’athist state, and the country’s occupation by foreign forces. In many respects, the victorious coalition’s strategy, such as it was, seemed to resemble that employed by the Western Allies for their occupation of Germany in the wake of Nazism – that is, immediate demilitarisation of the defeated, along with temporary abolition of sovereign government, pending elimination of security threats and political cleansing, in this case ‘De-Ba’athification’. Then, finally, punishment of those guilty of political crimes, to be followed by step-by-step introduction of Western-style free institutions and representative government.
It is no spoiler to state here and now that after 1945 this recipe for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the defeated nations was, with hindsight and in the longer term, a success. All we need to do is look at twenty-first-century Germany. There were reasons for this, some obvious and some not. First, to stick to Germany, it was true that the country in May 1945 was absolutely defeated. In November 1918, by contrast, though exhausted and starved and already in the throes of internal revolution, Germany had still been fighting stubbornly on French and Belgian soil when she conceded the truce that eventually brought the First World War to an end.
The German state survived this peace, although authoritarian monarchical rule was abolished. The Reich’s government and constitution became democratic, but the official and military classes remained both influential and fervently nationalist, eager to evade the provisions of the harsh Versailles Treaty and secretly longing to avenge what they saw as an unjust defeat – one that they blamed, in great measure, on the revolutionaries who had overthrown the Kaiser.
That pre-war, authoritarian core regained more and more control as the Depression took hold in the 1930s and the democracy set up in 1918 correspondingly lost support to both extreme left and extreme right. It was this elite’s representatives, especially the clique surrounding the senile President (and former First World War field marshal) Paul von Hindenburg, who handed over the reins of government to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party on 30 January 1933.
Many Germans, even non-Nazis, refused to admit that their armies had been vanquished in 1918. These restless millions also saw the ceasefire and the consequent harsh peace as due to treachery by the democratic government that had supplanted the monarchy after the November revolution. Their stubborn opposition, married with the Weimar Republic’s recurrent economic difficulties, had kept the new democracy permanently weak.
In 1918 the Reich had been allowed to retain not just its own government but even its army, which had withdrawn across the country’s borders when peace came, marching back through the Brandenburg Gate in Ber
lin almost like returning victors. True, under the Treaty of Versailles, the size of the army was drastically reduced, but, now called the Reichswehr, it nevertheless remained a key state player. The deadly bacillus (as many foreigners saw it) of German authoritarianism and militarism had thus been permitted to survive, then to recover and thrive.
The result, according to this interpretation, was that a little over twenty years after Germany’s defeat the infection had begun once more to spread its horrors throughout Europe – this time in an even more virulent National Socialist form, which included the added toxicity of racism, and especially a murderous anti-Semitism.
By the time the Allies approached the borders of Hitler’s Germany in the autumn of 1944, they had already prepared for what lay ahead. First, of course, the invasion of Germany itself. Fanatical resistance was expected from many Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, both during the coming battles and even after the fighting within the borders of the Reich concluded. As a consequence, it was even more important that the German nation see itself as comprehensively defeated. The relentless and often indiscriminate bombing of German cities, continuing almost until the very end of the war, although primarily undertaken for military-industrial reasons, was also intended to induce this sense of inevitable and final national collapse and thus help prevent a repeat of what had happened after 1918.
Above all, there were to be no negotiations with the Nazis. Unlike in 1918, Germany must surrender unconditionally, placing its fate and the future shape of its government wholly in the control of the victorious powers. No refuge for the evil bacillus this time.
The unconditional surrender policy seems to have been suggested by a sub-committee within the American State Department and to have been presented by Roosevelt to his initially reluctant British ally during the bilateral conference held in Casablanca, Morocco, between 14 and 24 January 1943.1
Roosevelt himself had already put the case succinctly in his New Year message to Congress a week or so earlier, when he told the American people’s representatives that he ‘shuddered to think what will happen to mankind, ourselves included, if this war ends with incomplete victory’.2
In any case, what could the Allies, collectively or individually, have offered, in the case of a negotiated peace agreement? And to whom? If the Nazi regime remained in place, would they have talked terms to Hitler, or to a putative Nazi successor, such as Himmler or Goebbels or Goering? After all the bloodshed and suffering, this was surely unacceptable. Moreover, it would leave an inherently warlike political system intact. And if the Nazi regime had been overthrown, say by the 20 July conspirators? Were these not the men (and a few women) who had for the most part supported Hitler until things started to go wrong? Though personally often decent, did they not represent the same classes of landowners, officers and industrialists who had formed, most Allied thinkers agreed, the root of the ‘German problem’ even before Hitler vaulted into power in 1933?
From the Allied coalition’s point of view, the logic of unconditional surrender was strong, but like all decisions of this kind it caused almost as many problems as it solved. It provided a propaganda bonus for the Nazi regime, whose propagandists could tell the German people, with literal truth, that the Allies planned to dismantle the German nation state. Aware of this drawback, the Allies were keen to emphasise that the policy did not necessarily foreshadow harsh treatment. At the press conference at the end of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Roosevelt himself said: ‘Unconditional Surrender does not mean the destruction of the German population but does mean the destruction of a philosophy in Germany, Italy and Japan which is based on the conquest and subjugation of other peoples.’ ‘Peace,’ he added, ‘can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.’3
Despite his initial misgivings, Churchill publicly supported unconditional surrender, realising that for all its disadvantages it also forestalled possible sources of division among the disparate Allies. All the final, detailed decisions about how to handle post-war Germany could await the Reich’s defeat. The British Prime Minister’s attempts to minimise the German population’s fears were, however, not entirely successful. Speaking in the House of Commons in London, he said:
Unconditional surrender means that the victors have a free hand. It does not mean that they are entitled to behave in a barbarous manner nor that they wish to blot out Germany from among the nations of Europe. If we are bound, we are bound by our own consciences to civilisation. We are not to be bound to the Germans as the result of a bargain struck. That is the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender’.4
Such clumsy half-assurances were not frequently repeated, perhaps with good reason, for even when couched in ringing Churchillian phrases they were at best useless, at worst counter-productive.
It was no coincidence that the other major strategic agreement that emerged from Casablanca in January 1943 was for the so-called joint air offensive, a coordinated Anglo-American bombing campaign designed to bring Germany to its knees – or at least to persuade a hard-pressed Stalin, in the absence of an immediate Western invasion of continental Europe, that his allies were establishing another ‘front’, albeit in the air. During the following year, massive, increasingly indiscriminate air raids against German cities cost the lives of around 40,000 civilians in Hamburg and up to 10,000 in Kassel, with 10,000 more deaths caused by the systematic British bombing campaign against Berlin between November 1943 and March 1944. Altogether, in excess of half a million would die in these Anglo-American raids before the campaign was halted towards the end of April 1945. The level of destruction was apocalyptic.
The people of Germany might therefore have been less than fully convinced of the value of the Allied leaders’ ‘consciences to civilisation’. And, of course, those who knew about the full extent of the Nazi atrocities in occupied Europe and Russia had even less reason to trust in the kindness of the enemy strangers beating at the door of the German homeland.
All the same, after Stalingrad many – perhaps most – Germans had become disillusioned with Hitler. It was the final change of mood among several.
It was true that, even in the half-free elections of March 1933, held soon after the Führer came to power, the majority of the country still didn’t vote for him, although with his coalition partner, the conservative-nationalist DNVP, he scraped together a touch under 52 per cent of the total.
Hitler’s urgent action programme, immediately tackling unemployment and the industrial crisis, led to a further surge in popularity that increased even more spectacularly when he succeeded in remilitarising the Rhineland and organising the incorporation of Austria and the Sudetenland into the Reich – all without war. Then, when he pushed his luck too far and war came, not just with Poland but with Britain and France, the mood of his people was subdued, even sullen. Most Germans would tolerate dictatorship, were grateful for full employment and a foreign policy that gave the country back its lost self-respect. But they knew enough – in the case of the older generation remembered enough – to fear another European war above all things.
Then, however, Hitler presented his countrymen with a series of victories they had scarcely dared hope for. Poland was subjugated and divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht took Denmark and Norway, then crushed France, the old enemy, and the armies of the Low Countries. Under Hitler’s leadership, the nation avenged the shame of Versailles, and drove the British into the sea.
By the summer of 1940 Hitler was, for most, the nation’s hero; the greatest statesman since Bismarck, the ‘greatest military commander of all time’. That last laurel had been awarded to the Führer by his Chief of Staff, General Keitel, after the victory over France.
Cunningly amended, this classic little slice of courtier’s flattery would spread itself around in a virus-like fashion after the attack on Russia failed, German troops began to die or surrender in their hundreds of thousands, and the great retreat back into the Reich began. From
1943, Hitler would be referred to sarcastically by ordinary Germans as ‘Gröfaz’ – a play on the regime’s addiction to acronyms – standing for Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten (greatest military commander of all time). Thus began Hitler’s final slump in the estimate of his compatriots, the one that ended only with his death on 30 April 1945. So, whatever the reality, before Stalingrad Hitler seemed self-evidently a genius. After Stalingrad, and especially by the beginning of 1945, to all except a tiny, fanatical minority, the Führer looked like a loser.
Another Nazi leader commonly referred to by a nickname at street level was Hermann Goering, the Reich Marshal and Commander of the Luftwaffe. He had famously commented, when the war began, that if the British ever managed to drop bombs on German soil, then ‘my name is Mayer’.5 Sure enough, as the British, later Anglo-American bombing offensive intensified over the next five years, and Germany’s cities were reduced to ruins, the plump and deceptively jolly-looking Goering became in popular parlance ‘Mayer’.
As with the Führer’s Gröfaz soubriquet, Goering’s transformation into Mayer represented a serious loss of trust in the regime of which he was a prominent figurehead. After 1943, Hitler was clearly losing the war on land, while the once-admired creator of the Luftwaffe could do nothing to stop the Allied bomber fleets laying waste to the cities of the Reich, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians and making many more homeless.
For a regime such as the Nazi one, whose entire ideology embodied the worship of strength and superior force, the one unimaginable, unforgivable fault was failure. In fact, such failure, according to the movement’s racist, socially Darwinist precepts, should have been impossible. The German race represented the very pinnacle of humanity and therefore, if led by the perfect leader (Hitler) and organised in the perfect (Nazi) state, they must triumph. It became clear to most in 1943–4 that this would not be the case. Barring a miracle, at least.
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