After the Reich
Page 68
The South Tyrol
One issue that was festering in the autumn of 1946 was what to do with the German-speaking South Tyrol. Hitler had been surprisingly pragmatic about ethnic Germans. Where ‘Heim ins Reich’ (home in the Reich) provided a pretext for annexation in most cases, for the German-speaking majority in the South Tyrol and Gottschee it meant ‘come home to the Reich’: Mussolini was to be allowed to continue Italianising this former Austrian territory north of the River Adige or Etsch.es
In 1919 the region had been 95 per cent German, but self-determination was nonetheless denied to its people. The Allies had promised the Italians the Brenner to lure them over to their side in 1915. Some vague noises had been made about autonomy, but once the Italian fascists came to power they were keen to consolidate the region by evicting the natives and replacing them with poor peasants from the south. Mussolini encouraged new industries in Bolzano (Bozen) and Merano (Meran), and brought in Sicilians to man them. The fanatical Ettore Tolomei from Trentino pursued a policy of promoting Italian institutions and banning the German language and place names. Many changed their family names to something more Italianate in order to retain their farms. The experience of persecution had been a bitter one for the South Tyroleans; and they had been only partly mollified in 1943 when the Germans had taken over from the Italians and Mussolini’s drive had abated. The Soviet Union might well have consented to hand over the territory had it not been for Marshal Badoglio’s coup against Mussolini that year. Now Italy was on the winning side again, and would not be penalised in a post-war peace settlement. Similar sentiments were expressed by Churchill’s foreign secretary Anthony Eden: there was more to be gained by sparing Italy further humiliation.36
From May 1945, the South Tyroleans naturally hoped that they would be allowed the chance to join their cousins in the north, and become part of an independent Austria. This was the aim of the SVP (South Tyrolean People’s Party), founded on 8 May. Karl Gruber had been active in reclaiming the South Tyrol from the very moment the Allies arrived in Austria. He felt that Austria had proved its victim status, and could now reap the reward. In September 1945 there had been a demonstration on the streets of Innsbruck, and Figl expressed the view that ‘The return of the South Tyrol to Austria is every Austrian’s dream.’37
The Italian foreign minister Alcide De Gasperi was from Trent and was more prepared to see Trieste fall to the Yugoslavs, however, than the South Tyrol return to Austria. He tried to frighten the Anglo-Americans by conjuring up a vision of a communist Austrian state on the Brenner. This was calculated to have an effect on Truman. In general the Allies were split, with the American Austrian expert James Riddleberger siding with Austria, and the Italian authority Samuel Reber resisting. In Britain Lord Hood and Arnold Toynbee were in favour of Austria, while A. D. M Ross and the historian of the Habsburg Monarchy, A. J. P. Taylor, were against.38
Renner sent notes to the Allies on 6 and 16 September 1945 canvassing their views on a return of the region to Austria.39 In January 1946 the Austrian government issued a note to the Allied Council with a request that it be forwarded to the member governments. The note requested the return of the province of Bolzano-Bozen - its agricultural production was vital to the Austrian economy. The request had support from some unusual circles. In the House of Lords Robert Vansittart spoke in favour of the cession of the South Tyrol to Austria, and the foreign secretary Bevin lent it a sympathetic ear.40 The South Tyrol, however, was not what it had been in 1919. As a result of Mussolini’s transfer of poor Italians from the south and Hitler’s encouragement of the ‘Heim ins Reich’ programme to bring German-speakers to Germany, the Italian minority amounted to nearly 40 per cent of the population, and their presence was particularly strong in the bigger towns.
Gruber had assumed office as foreign minister with a desire to pursue a ‘dynamic foreign policy’ that was mostly thrust at the idea of getting the South Tyrol back.41 A petition was signed by 158,628 South Tyroleans and handed to Figl in Innsbruck. On 1 May 1946 the Allies refused a South Tyrolean request for a plebiscite. The question was deferred to a putative Paris peace conference.
On 5 May 20,000 South Tyroleans gathered in the bailey of Schloss Sigmundskron wearing placards that read, ‘Wir bitten die Siegermächte: schenkt uns unsere Heimat!’ (We ask the victorious powers, give us our home!). Gruber now suggested that the South Tyrol be administered by the United Nations. When Austrian demands were rejected by the Italians, a general strike was organised in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Gruber was invited to ‘air his views’ in Paris in August. By the end of the month his demands had been modified: South Tyroleans were to enjoy political liberty; the province of Bolzano was to have economic autonomy; there was to be a special customs policy between Austria and the South Tyrol.42 The Italians agreed to a different statute for the region within the province of Trentino-Alto Adige. Trentino had also been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but its population was almost entirely Italian-speaking. As it was, the Allies made the decision to evacuate Italy at the Paris CFM on 24 June 1946. On the question of the South Tyrol, the foreign ministers were content to ask Italy for certain guarantees for the German-speaking population. They had eventually resolved to maintain frontiers, where possible, as they had been before the war. The French were more in favour: they had to put away a dream of extending their Austrian zone to the Adige. The decision to maintain the status quo was bitterly disappointing to the Austrians. Renner scrapped a banquet that was to be offered in 1946 to commemorate the victory over Germany.43
The injustice of the South Tyrolean position finally led to a meeting between the Austrian foreign minister and his Italian counterpart De Gasperi in Paris on 5 September 1946. They met to consider a South Tyrolean ‘Magna Charta’.44 The accord guaranteed the rights of the German-speakers. Once again they were to be entitled to German schools, and Germans might occupy a number of local-government positions. Place names could be written in German again. Exchanges between the north and the south of the Tyrol were encouraged with an automatic right for qualified students to study at Innsbruck University. In 1948, however, hopes of autonomy were dashed when the southern region was bound into the new area of Trentino, where Italians had a two-thirds majority.
The Paris Conference proved a humiliating experience for De Gasperi, but good news was on the horizon in the form of Trieste. The British had managed to keep the Yugoslavs out, and the following year the port, with its 80 per cent Italian population, reverted to Italy. ‘Co-belligerency’ with the Allies had once again saved the Italians from the worst punishment. Italy lost its African colonies, and had to cede Fiume and Istria to Yugoslavia and the Dodecanese to Greece. A few Alpine villages were transferred to France.45
The Russians Come into the Cold
Russian attempts to show the Germans they were soft and cuddly did not help when it came to Berlin’s first free elections for fourteen years. The poll, which was held in October 1946, gave very different results to the local elections which the Russians had been able to run by themselves. The SED received a paltry 19.8 per cent, trailing behind the right-wing CDU, with 22.2 per cent, and with less than half the votes of the SDP, based in the Western sectors. For the SPD it was the best score they had achieved since 1925; Berliners perceived the SED as the ‘Russian party’.46 Some saw the behaviour of the Red Army as being partly to blame. A majority of female voters in Austria had certainly refused to support political parties that appeared to emanate from the same place as their rapists. The bourgeois parties in the SBZ had also been able to exploit the women’s plight. The Russian journalist K. Gofman took the matter up with the Bulgarian ideologist Georgy Dimitrov in Moscow, condemning ‘this evil which carries such a huge cost for our local prestige in Germany’.47
The news that the hated wartime coalition might be on the verge of collapse was rapturously greeted in the courthouse prison in Nuremberg. When Churchill began to criticise the Soviet Union, even Hess forgot that he had lost his memory an
d told the other major Nazis that he had always known it would be thus, that the trial would end, and that they would be restored to their high-sounding titles and dignities. Göring too slapped his thighs in glee and exclaimed, ‘History will not be deceived! The Führer and I always prophesied it! The coalition will break up sooner or later.’48
The first calls from the Soviet Zone to create pan-German committees in keeping with the Potsdam Agreement came as early as 1945. They were issued by the LPD or Liberal Democrats. They suggested the creation of a ‘general plenipotentiary’ to act as a liaison man between the different centres of power, or the formation of a ‘party control commission’. In 1946 the Liberal Democrats called for a German Zone Council, and the following year a committee made up of all German parties. That same year the CDU in the Soviet Zone demanded ‘national representation’.49
The Russians were also changing their minds about their wartime partners. A New York Times reporter who interviewed a Soviet general in Dresden, heard him say that the destruction was ‘your work and now it is our work to clear it up’.50 A new froideur had set in with the Allies since the attempt by the Soviets to manipulate the elections. This was the beginning of the squeeze on West Berlin that was to culminate in the airlift and the failed attempt by the Russians to overrun the Western sectors. Berlin was to be ‘a Danzig without a corridor’. What was more, the Western Allies were pathetically understaffed, particularly in Berlin, where the US had no more than two battalions of troops to face the Red Army.51 The day after the poll the NKVD began rounding up over 400 scientists and technicians in the Russian Sector and shipping them back to the USSR. Three days later the British protested against a violation of human rights. In a rare moment of candour Colonel Frank Howley admitted that the Americans too had taken away German scientists. They were ‘hardly in a strong position’ if they chose to protest.52
The Great Freeze
The winter of 1946-7 was possibly the coldest in living memory. In Cologne there were sixty four days in the 121 from December to March when the temperature was below zero at 8.00 a.m. Near Frankfurt further to the south, deep snow lay on the ground until March.53 The puny ‘cannon oven’ was the only source of warmth for most. It was capable of warming one side of the room, but its effect rarely extended to the other. The cannon oven gave off an intense heat, but only for a short period, as the rations of fuel were soon burned up. In the American Zone households were limited to six briquettes, and sometimes there were none at all.
The cannon oven was a way of locating life in the ruins. A makeshift chimney indicated a room under the rubble. The stench was appalling, reminding Zuckmayer of a working coalmine. The inhabitants of these smoky dens were happy for all that - at least they had some sort of roof over their heads. They were lucky, too, if they were not obliged to share a room with another family. Only in the relatively rubble-free western districts of Berlin where the Allies had requisitioned many of the houses could one find fresh air and the scent of pine trees, but even that was spiked with benzene. Fuel was short here, however, and living in an elegant villa meant little if it could not be heated. The privileged inhabitants of Zehlendorf or Dahlem froze with the rest.54
Everything was burned that winter. Germans might have regretted that they had been so quick to put their Nazi literature into the stove. A rumour went round that there were to be public burnings of Nazi books, but the truth was only that the Berlin public libraries threw out the now ideologically suspect material in September 1945, and the others naturally followed suit. Using Nazi paraphernalia as fuel had begun even before the Führer’s death. The anonymous Woman in Berlin was cooking on National Socialist literature on 27 April 1945. Later she burned the Movement’s sacred text to keep warm. ‘I suspect . . . Adolf ’s Mein Kampf will one day become a collector’s item.’55 Christabel Bielenberg, taking refuge in the Black Forest, wondered where the big portrait of the Führer had gone that had previously adorned the walls of the Burgomaster’s office: ‘In the stove,’ she was told.56
By 20 November 1946 the icy wind was causing alarm among Berliners, who were turning up their threadbare collars against the cold. On 6 December Ruth Andreas Friedrich and her friends were wondering if they could hold out. Ten days later it was minus twenty. The pipes were frozen. The women returned to fetching water from the pumps. On 21 December the ice had to be broken in the buckets to make morning coffee. In the American Sector the electricity was turned off for eight to ten hours a day, and the situation was worse in the British. As the lavatories were frozen over, the Berliners packed up their excrement and dumped it in the nearest ruin. Prices rocketed at Christmas. The Andreas Friedrichs were able to steal a tree in Teltow, but a goose at RM1,400 was more than a pair of shoes and much more than they had to spend. A pound of chocolate was RM500, a bar of soap RM40. The maximum monthly earnings were in the region of RM1,000.57
One of the sufferers that winter was the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, who was seriously ill as a result of his confinement in Ravensbrück. His wife was trying her best to treat an inflammation of his lungs by giving him access to fresh air, yet that meant freezing air. Suhrkamp literally risked life and limb every time he ventured to the lavatory. The cold had been so intense that it not only froze the water pipes, but also caused the pipe from the lavatory to explode, leaving the bathroom floor covered in frozen excrement. A hot-water pipe had been fed through the bathroom to afford some feeble warmth. This turned the sewage into a semi-liquid mass the colour of coffee ice-cream. The only way to rid the bathroom of this stinking mass was to scrub it with boiling water, but with the lack of combustible material and the terrible cold, it was not possible to get water that hot. It was weeks before a plumber could effect the necessary repairs; meanwhile the bathroom remained a serious health hazard.58
In the courthouse in Nuremberg the Seven survivors from the first IMT trial felt the cold like everyone else. Speer, who had been ruminating on how Air Marshal Harris had expressed himself when he spoke about the Germans - had he used words like ‘extinction’ or ‘annihilation’? - suddenly began to shiver. On 22 December he sat in his cell wrapped in a blanket, watching his breath. He was wearing his spare underwear around his feet. On Christmas Eve the men buried the hatchet, or at least declared a truce: Funk gave Dönitz a sausage and Schirach handed Speer a piece of bacon as neither had received any provisions from home. Neurath also shared his Christmas biscuits with Speer, while the American chaplain gave them all cigars, cigarettes and chocolate.59
That Christmas the grim news leaked out that a second frozen train had arrived from Poland. Of the refugees, thirty-five had died, stripped of their clothes at the border, 182 were seriously affected by frostbite, and twenty-five more required amputations. Among the victims were thirty children. The Berliners’ stomachs rumbled and they grumbled: under Hitler there had been potatoes. The political risk of letting them go hungry was becoming apparent.60 This might have prompted the reforms in the SBZ. Ration Card VI was scrapped and demontage halted. Seventy-four Berlin industries were returned to the people. On 7 January 1947 the barometer had plunged once again in Nuremberg, this time to minus eighteen Fahrenheit. Speer learned that in Berlin people were burning their last sticks of furniture. The prisoners’ shower had frozen.61 The thermometer sank again on 31 January. The power in Berlin was cut for eight to ten hours a day again. The Berliners went out with their rucksacks to scour the Grunewald for kindling.62
The winter bit everywhere in Europe. Britain had to cut back on its commitment to the fight against communism, so Greece became an American sphere of influence. The Soviets made more mischief at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers of 16 January 1947. Stalin’s advice appears so contradictory it is small wonder that the Western Allies could not get the measure of him. He told his delegation that if reparations obstructed German renewal they should drop their demands,63 yet the Soviets backed the Yugoslav leader Joze Vilfan, who was demanding $150 million, 2,470 square miles of Carinthia (including the provincial
capital Klagenfurt and part of the city of Villach), and 130 square kilometres of Styria (although to the Russians the Yugoslavs said they would be happy with sixty-three square kilometres on the Drau, and an important power station). These areas possessed large Slovenian populations. The Soviets added that they wanted a special statute to protect the Croats in Burgenland. Lord Pakenham dismissed the Yugoslav request, adding that it was not worth the paper it was written on.64 The game came to an end the following year when Stalin and Tito fell out at the Villa Bled.
Business took Ruth Friedrich to Hamburg that winter. She noted a rise in the popularity of the Nazis. People had been scrawling ‘88’ on walls. Someone explained that H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, and 88 stood for ‘HH’ or ‘Heil Hitler’. The British were to blame. They were not sufficiently tough on the Nazis.65 They had lodged many of the bombed-out citizens in Nissen huts, where they froze. The police were turning a blind eye to thefts of coal. They believed that protecting coal supplies was down to the conquerors. Ruth Friedrich was keen to compare prices with Berlin. A half-packet of soap powder cost five marks, a quarter pound of tea a hundred.66 On her return she missed her connection to the military train in Hanover, and had to spend twenty-four hours there before she could catch the next. At first she found a sort of buffet in a bunker where the people smelled of fish and onions. She had to pay a ten-mark deposit for a beaker to drink some coffee. Later she ran across the black market where American soap was changing hands for fifty marks a bar. The hand of the woman who offered it to her was so dirty that she wanted to tell her to use it herself. She made her way to an official doss-house where she was put into the women’s dormitory. There she met a woman who had been raped eight times trying to cross the ‘green border’. She was bleeding badly and stank.67