The Western Allies tended to agree with Robert Vansittart that the Second War had been largely caused by the perpetrators of the First, and that meant Prussia. It was a long time before they came to terms with the idea of Nazism as a non-Prussian movement. The Atlantic Charter of 14 April 1941 had a little flavour of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points twenty-three years before. An expression of the principles on which the peace was to be based, it was drawn up by Churchill and amended by Roosevelt. The American president added the passages condemning aggressive war and calling for German disarmament.10 It was followed by the Declaration of the United Nations signed by twenty-six governments on 1 January 1942, an agreement to uphold the Atlantic Charter.
The first meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt to discuss war aims was held in Newfoundland in August 1941. Churchill was more pragmatic than Roosevelt; the American leader was much more hostile to the Germans. He had been partially educated in Germany and he had come home with strongly held anti-German views. He had no desire to meet a member of the German resistance who came to see him at the beginning of the war.11 The two leaders decided that there would be no annexations after the successful campaign, and no territorial changes would be effected that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. The high-minded principles expressed at that time formed the basis for the Atlantic Charter - Pax Americana. Future wars would be prevented by stopping Germany from disturbing the peace. Germany was to be demilitarised, denazified and made to restore the land it had poached from its neighbours.12
German and Austrian émigrés played an important role in shaping American thinking after 1941. Many of them worked in the Research and Analysis Branch (R & A) of Military Intelligence (OSS). Prominent were the historians Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert, the politicologues Otto Kirchheimer, John Herz and Franz Leopold Neumann and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The most important of them was Franz Neumann, the author of Behemoth: The Structure and Practise of National Socialism. Neumann argued for a radical reconstruction of Germany to avoid repeats of Hitler’s coming to power. One key plank to his doctrine was the establishment of some sort of European Union. The traditional Germany was to be removed by a social revolution.13 There was only a brief window when the Western Allies tried to woo the Jews. This corresponded to the time of the first Nuremberg trials. When East and West fell out for good, the Allies - the West in particular - were prepared to sweep a good deal under the carpet in order to groom their new German ally and relieve themselves of the unpleasant business of censuring its people for their past conduct.
The Allies had nonetheless been influenced in their designs by a sizeable body of literature penned by exiles. Books by Hermann Rauschning and Konrad Heiden, and Sebastian Haffner’s Germany - Jekyll & Hyde, instructed the Allies on how to deal with a post-Nazi Germany. The bacillus (to borrow a word from the Nazis themselves) had to be wiped out completely. Haffner wanted to see Germany broken up into small states, a much more extreme solution than the eventual Federal Republic, which created autonomous regions. For the British the Prussians were still the enemy. Churchill, for one, wished to see the south Germans more mildly treated than the ‘Prussians’ in the north: Nazy tyranny and Prussian militarism ‘must be absolutely destroyed’.14
By 1943 the Allies knew they were going to win. Stalingrad and the subsequent collapse of Hitler’s Russian offensive made that abundantly clear. The Allies could now sit down and decide what they were going to do with Germany. The military plan was enshrined in Operation Eclipse. In the winter of 1943 the European Advisory Commission or EAC met to work out how Germany would be administered. It met again on 18 February 1944, and by this time the cake had been properly portioned out: Soviet Russia was to receive 40 per cent of Germany’s land mass, 36 per cent of its population and 33 per cent of its productive capacity.c Britain and America took the remainder. Likewise Berlin was to be divided in three.
Stalingrad engendered a new mood among the Allies. Both the Americans and the British were smitten with Stalin and the great progress he was making. The Americans now saw themselves carving up the world with the Soviet Union and were worried that the Russians would not approve of their close relations with the British and their ideologically unacceptable empire. Churchill was worried - and continued to be worried even after victory - that the Americans would not stay in Europe and would leave him to face the Russians across the ideological divide.15 At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies decided that Germany was to surrender ‘unconditionally’. What that meant Churchill explained to the House of Commons on 22 February 1944. The Allies would not stain their ‘victorious army by inhumanity’: ‘unconditional surrender means the victors have a free hand . . . If we are bound, we are bound by our own consciences to civilisation.’16 What else that meant was not really clear to anyone, but it gave Churchill room for manoeuvre.
The American who was urging the greatest retribution against the Germans was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau - although the text of his plan was largely written by his assistant Harry Dexter White.d Morgenthau was ‘touched by atrocities against the Jewish race’.17 His idea was a ‘peace of punishment’ which involved splitting the country into four states that would be almost entirely agrarian. Austria was to be cut in two. The secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, thought this idea of ‘pastoralisation’ unnecessarily harsh, but ‘the President’s vindictiveness kept the Treasury proposal alive’. At that time Roosevelt was still keen to see the United States and Soviet Russia rule the world together.18
Germany was to be reformed by the ‘four Ds’: decentralisation, demilitarisation, denazification and democracy. The US War Department’s Civil Affairs Division (CAD) was responsible for post-war planning. The army also liked the Morgenthau Plan as it promoted the sort of chaos that suited their strategic aims: it was therefore at the heart of the crucial US Joint Chiefs of Staff document JCS 1067. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had their moments of flirtation with the draconian plan. In August 1944 Roosevelt for one had lost patience with the Germans. ‘The German people should be taught their responsibility for the war and for a long time they should have only soup for breakfast, soup for lunch and soup for dinner.’ His then secretary for mobilisation, James Byrnes, added: ‘It did not sound like President Roosevelt. He was very angry.’19
In these moments Churchill played along. Roosevelt’s Morgenthau mood reached its height at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, when he expressed his approval for an eliminatory ‘Carthaginian Peace’. At the time he pretended that he only wanted to shore up Britain; to ‘keep Britain from going into complete bankruptcy at the end of the war’. The Ruhr was going to give Britain the means to survive.20
At Teheran (28 November to 1 December 1943) Britain agreed to a change in Poland’s eastern borders. Later Churchill would make a great play of the fact that he had tried his best for Poland, but he gave himself away in the House of Commons on 27 February 1945 when he offered British citizenship to any Poles who did not wish to return to their country. He knew that they were not to regain their liberty, or even all their territory. Roosevelt was more cautious about accepting Stalin’s demands for a ratification of the treaty signed with Hitler: there were elections coming up and there were lots of Polish Americans who might object. He didn’t like the idea of Stalin annexing the Baltic States either.21
Roosevelt began to backtrack about the Morgenthau Plan after the meeting in Quebec. It was not Morgenthau but the cooler Byrnes who accompanied him to the Yalta Conference from 5 to 11 February 1945. By that time the idea of splitting Germany up into autonomous regions was no longer so popular. The US was for a federal system. At the Teheran Conference the call had been for five pieces; by the time the leaders met in Moscow, they were down to two. Roosevelt’s vice-president and successor Harry Truman was not at all keen on the Morgenthau Plan, which he branded ‘an act of revenge’. ‘My aim is a unified Germany with a centralised government in Berlin.’ Morgenthau h
imself was rather miffed.22
Stalin was also a supporter of the Morgenthau Plan, but the noises he put out to the West altered several times: at Teheran he was in favour of a divided Germany; at Yalta he wanted unity, but Allied zones of occupation; at Potsdam he argued for a single economic unit. He feared that the German beast would rise again and seek revenge if it were not well and truly slain. He was also keen to satisfy Russian public opinion by granting a ‘day of judgment’, when the Germans would feel the full weight of their conquerors’ fury. The West was afraid that he meant ultimately to extend communism to the Rhine, or even the Atlantic, but if he was to export it to central and western Europe he would need support on the ground: the punishment of the Germans could not go on for too long, as he needed to have them on his side.23 Stalin also feared the West. He believed that Britain and America were planning to make a separate peace with the Germans and would use the German army to attack him. It was only when the Americans fought the bloody campaign in the Ardennes, which ended in January 1945, that he was satisfied that the West would not sign a separate peace.24
France had yet to join the top table and for the time being French goals were subtly different. When the EAC met in February, France was still occupied by the Germans. The French nonetheless drew up a list of war aims: German surrender, withdrawal from occupied territory, the destruction of the Wehrmacht, Allied occupation of Germany, punishment of war criminals and large-scale reparations, particularly in German coal and coke.25 There was not much new from Clemenceau at Versailles. This changed a little at the liberation. Now France’s chief concern was its recognition as a great power. It was quick to field an army to that effect. Its wartime leader in exile, Charles de Gaulle, wanted to grab what he could while the going was good.
The Soviets’ aims have been the subject of prolonged discussion, as their apparent desire to inflict communism on the whole of mainland Europe was the reason for the Cold War. What documentary evidence there is has been examined since the end of that war by - among others - Vojtech Mastny. We know, for example, that the plans were drawn up by a team composed of Maisky, Litvinov and Voroshilov. Assistant foreign minister Maisky was responsible for Germany and reparations, while Litvinov handled peace treaties and Voroshilov was in charge of military planning. According to Mastny, Stalin was flexible and pragmatic, ‘lest he ask for too much, or too little’.26 Though there was no master-plan, there were minimum war aims: Stalin wanted to retain Russia’s western borders as established by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. That meant hanging on to Poland east of the Bug, as well as the Baltic States; he wanted no repetition of the small power blocs that had dominated eastern central European politics in the 1930s. The Soviet Union was to be the sole military great power in mainland Europe - this included France and Italy - a policy that caused friction with Tito, who aspired to that position.
Stalin also wanted to see the establishment of strong communist parties in all the lands occupied by his armies and was keen for these parties to play important roles and to be active. On the other hand they were not to bring about revolutions and they were not to follow the Soviet model. He told Maurice Thorez, the French communist leader, that he was to find friends. So far as Germany was concerned, Stalin was open on all issues but the Polish one: he wanted to compensate the Poles with German land. He also sought to avoid recreating a German ‘pressure-cooker’ by hemming the country in with antipathetic neighbours. However, he was anxious not to breed a lasting desire for revenge. He wanted reparations. He told Maisky to take as much out of Germany as he could without starving its people.27 It was obviously also to be deprived of its military might, but Stalin was indifferent to the form of regime: multi-party democracy or communist party.
In his relations with the Western Allies, Stalin sought a co-operative Realpolitik to allow for Germany’s reconstruction. Europe was to be carved into two interest blocs controlled by the Soviet Union and Britain. Russia would extend its sphere to include Sweden and Turkey, whereas Britain would take in all of western Europe to the Rhine as well as Greece. At the centre would lie a neutral zone made up of Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark and Norway. Stalin told German exiles in Moscow that he had opposed the repackaging of Germany in small states. Even so, he wanted to exploit central Europe for his arms programme. The Cold War was definitely not desired by the Soviet leader, although his distrustful and antagonistic nature may have contributed to worsening relations. The Soviet consolidation of eastern Europe was in response to the Marshall Plan, America’s programme of economic aid launched in 1947.28
The reduction of Germany to a number of states was another project that failed to come to fruition after the First World War. Splitting Germany up into manageable units had been advocated by Haffner, as already noted. The French were keen to wrest away the western regions. On 12 August 1944 de Gaulle proposed an indefinite occupation of ‘Rhenania’, expressing a policy that had been at the heart of French ambitions in central Europe since the Thirty Years War. He reiterated his determination in January 1946: ‘we hold on to the Rhine’.29 There should be no return to a centralised Reich. The Russians were less keen on breaking up Germany, and were unimpressed by de Gaulle’s projects for ‘Rhenania’, despite the French pandering to them by advocating the cession of German regions east of the Oder to the Poles and the Russians.30 In October 1944 de Gaulle pushed for a separate zone of occupation for France. He would achieve ‘Rhenania’ by hook or by crook. He demanded the Rhineland north of Alsace, the Saar and the west bank of the Rhine as far as Cologne, as well as the Palatinate, Baden and all the Hesses. The British pledged him part of their zone.31
De Gaulle rejected Morgenthau’s proposal to ‘pastoralise’ Germany. He felt it would create an economic crisis, and besides France needed the produce of German industry. He also had to reckon with a French desire for revenge. A poll taken early in 1945 showed that 76 per cent of the French wanted Germany split up; 59 per cent wanted a proportion of all Germans deported; 80 per cent supported General Leclerc’s proposal to shoot five Germans for any attack on French army personnel; two-thirds were in favour of annexing the Saar; 87 per cent thought the Soviets would be able to punish the Germans properly; while only 9 per cent had any confidence in the Americans.32 De Gaulle was still wrestling with proposals for massive changes to the shape of Germany and, if needs be, shifting huge numbers of Germans. Silesia was to be given to the Poles, while the Rhineland and Westphalia would be administered by the Allies. Originally he thought that the fifteen million Germans living in the latter could be moved out, but then decided that the project would be ‘too grandiose’.33
There was a an element of bella figura too. As Georges Bidault, the head of the resistance organisation, put it, the French had to play a major role in the war after the liberation, otherwise ‘the Germans will not look on them as conquerors’.34 Unfortunately the Americans, Roosevelt in particular, were unwilling to equip the French army to play that major role. At the end of 1944, de Gaulle tried his hand in Moscow. Stalin managed to get de Gaulle to recognise his ‘Lublin’ Poles over the London government in exile as the price for a Franco-Soviet treaty.
The Allied zones were ratified at Yalta in February 1945. France was once again excluded. Russia was making strides towards winning the war. Its troops were poised to cross the Oder while the Western Allies had yet to cross the Rhine. Churchill argued for including the French among the victorious powers. Stalin reluctantly agreed. He did not think the French had pulled their weight and in 1940 they had let the Germans in. France might have a zone, ‘but only as a kindness and not because she is entitled to it’.35 Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Paris to sugar the pill:36 the French were to have a small zone in the west, carved out of the British and American portions. An Allied Control Council was to be set up to deal with questions affecting all four zones. It would meet in Berlin.
In April 1945 the Western Allies had second thoughts. The Americans had pushed far into Saxony, which had been allotted to the Sovie
ts; and the British had taken a sizeable chunk of Mecklenburg. Some people were hoping that the Western Allies would push on, take Berlin and turn on Soviet Russia. Chief among these was Hitler himself, and his propaganda minister, Goebbels. As it was, the British and Americans did not turn on their Russian ally - possibly because Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were so anxious for them to do so; but they did hang on to their booty for a while, and Churchill for one was anxious to use it as a counter for Soviet assurances about their territorial acquisitions. The new US president - Roosevelt died that April - Harry Truman would not listen, however, and the Russians moved into Mecklenburg and Saxony without providing satisfactory assurances about Germany’s borders or the status of Berlin. Stalin prevaricated for as long as he could so that he might strip Berlin bare and install his toadies in all the worthwhile positions of power.
The French were still worrying about their own status as their troops marched into Germany with the Anglo-Americans. A total of 165,000 troops under arms meant a lack of labour at home. Germans would have to be sent to France to carry out the work in the same way as the French had been obliged to toil in Germany. De Gaulle spoke of needing two million Germans, although he never managed that. He was still keen to annex the Rhineland. As Maurice Couve de Murville, a member of the French provisional government, put it pathetically, ‘If we do not achieve this we have lost the war.’37 France’s attitude led to friction, particularly with the Americans. When French troops occupied Stuttgart - which was meant to form part of the American Zone as the capital of Württemberg - the Americans ordered them to leave. De Gaulle refused, saying he would stay put until the zones were finalised. The French were causing problems in the Levant too, and in an act of bravura against the Italians (who had taken back Haute Savoie and Nice during the war) they occupied the French-speaking Val d’Aosta. The American solution was to offer them some bits of Baden and Württemberg while keeping the lion’s share for themselves.38 In Berlin on 5 June the Western Allies formally came into the zones and sectors, but it was not until 26 July, while the Big Three were deliberating at Potsdam, that the Soviets finally recognised the French Sector of Berlin. The French were still clamouring for more of Baden and Württemberg. They had been given a curious territory along Germany’s western borders with two big lumps sticking out to the east. It was mocked as ‘the brassière’. e
After the Reich Page 3