After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  Another smell permeated Berlin that winter: the carbide lamp that reeked like garlic. Filth, and washing, was a huge problem. Like Hitler’s victims who languished in concentration camps, it became imperative to retain human dignity that winter. Zuckmayer spoke of the necessity of keeping fingernails clean and brushing teeth. Germans went to extraordinary lengths to polish their shoes, even though there was no bootblack. Despite the outside temperatures, some Germans - particularly refugees from the east - were virtually naked and concealed their shame behind ragged blankets. On their feet they wore bits of planking tied on with lengths of cloth.68

  Vienna was no warmer. General Béthouart recalled the miserable figures stumbling past his Hütteldorf villa returning from the Vienna woods with faggots. The Viennese spoke of the ‘blue hour’ when gas was issued to the pipes to allow the citizens to cook their dinners on a low flame.69 Food was scarce and money no longer had any value. As in Germany, American cigarettes had the greatest worth. Josefine and Leopold Hawelka had managed to reopen their café in the Dorotheergasse. Leopold went off each day to the Vienna woods to find kindling to keep the stove alight and boil the kettle for the coffee. Once Josefine forgot she had hidden some cartons of cigarettes in the stove, and lit it. A great deal of money went up in flames.70

  Bizonia

  Clay was in favour of inter-zonal co-operation from the first. Once more it was the French who stood in the way. He had put his hope in the provision for central agencies that had been decreed at Potsdam, but the French didn’t like the idea of resurrecting the ‘Reich’. ‘If these agencies cannot be obtained and/or the boundaries of occupied Germany are to be changed, the present concept of Potsdam becomes meaningless,’ he wrote in the spring of 1946. There was no exchange of commodities between the zones. Clay thought it essential to have a common financial policy and freedom to travel from one to the other. He was so angry with the French by 16 June that he sued for permission to retire.71

  In Paris on 11 July 1946, Byrnes offered to merge the American Zone with anyone who was interested. The British took up the offer at the end of the month and all the problems were ironed out by 9 August. The joined zones would have a common standard of living, pooled resources and a common export policy, and would fix imports necessary to supplement indigenous resources.72 Heralded by General George Marshall’s Harvard speech that laid the keel of the famous ‘plan’ to relieve impoverished, war-torn Europe, Bizonia kicked off with an Economic Council in Frankfurt in June 1947. For the first time in fourteen years the national tricolour was raised. When the Americans noticed, they objected, and it had to be hauled down. In the course of the Council the Transitional Law was passed that legalised federal authority over the provincial Länder. It was a move towards the creation of a sovereign, federal state.

  A Thaw in the Weather

  In March 1947 milder weather set in, bringing fresh dangers. The hospitals had filled up with cases of broken bones: people who had slipped on the ice; and there was now a great stink to replace the great freeze.73 It was time for the Moscow Conference, which came hard on the heels of the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, which was designed to lure Europe away from communism by stick and carrot. Marshall, who had replaced Byrnes as secretary of state, would develop the policy into the Marshall Plan in his prize-giving speech at Harvard in June. General Mark Clark considered Moscow the most important planning meeting between the Allies since Potsdam. The idea of a peace treaty for Austria was brought up, and returned to the files. There were attempts to conclude peace with Germany as well, which had faltered at Paris and New York in December, and which made no progress in Moscow either.74 Already the London Conference discussions just prior to Moscow had been bogged down by Yugoslav demands. Moscow was a trying time for Clark, who had already made up his mind to go home. During the night he was woken by calls from females asking if he needed anything, so that he had to wrap his telephone in a towel and put it in a drawer. The rooms at the hotel were bugged, and for privacy the American delegates spoke to each other as they walked around the Kremlin walls.75

  Stalin was comparatively unmoved by the Truman Doctrine and still hoped to effect German unity. The French predictably blackballed it. In April that year French policy changed a little, as the French communists left the government which they had haunted since the liberation. It was the Marshall Plan that seemed to threaten Soviet security, in that it extended offers of assistance to countries within Stalinist eastern Europe. Molotov was instructed to break off talks with the West in Paris on 30 June when it became clear that the Anglo-American plans were directly aimed at the Soviet Union. The Soviet satellites were ordered to ignore the siren offers of aid.76 The Soviet response was Cominform. It was intended to keep the Eastern bloc on the straight and narrow.

  Bevin was more fearsome than Marshall in his belligerence towards the Soviet Union. There is a story about the London CFM in November 1947, when Bevin confronted the Russian foreign minister. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded to know. Molotov replied, ‘I want a unified Germany.’ Molotov came to the conclusion that it had been easier to work with the patrician Eden than with this man of the people. After the London meeting Soviet policy changed - the Russians were seeking confrontation. The Cold War had begun.77

  The Carthaginian peace was aired for the last time in October 1947 when the British and Americans announced an unpopular scheme to dismantle all industries that had originally been constructed for the war effort. Adenauer protested, pointing out that industrial production was a third of pre-war levels. Lord Pakenham also had his doubts about the fairness of a policy which was reminiscent of the savage demontage in the Soviet east that had stripped industry down and bled the zone white.

  Nacht und Nebel

  By 1947 Austria was liberated, but still not free. At the ‘peace conference’ in Paris the previous autumn that settled matters with the ‘satellite’ states which had been allied to Hitler’s Reich, Austria was not considered. Austria was a ‘victim’ when it suited the Allies but most of the time it did not, and the Russians had never really believed in Austrian innocence.78 For the Austrians the situation was highly frustrating, especially as 71 per cent of them thought they bore no guilt for the war, and only 4 per cent were prepared to concede that Nazism had something to do with them; although at least 8 per cent had been members of the Party and a million or so had served in the Wehrmacht - and half of those in the savage war in the east where no one wore kid gloves.

  Austria had also been properly turned over to war work. The Danube had been pressed into service, forty-two airfields and landing strips had been created and 50,000 Austrians had been involved in building war-planes. The Russians in particular were keen to show how many concealed weapons they had found in their zone - evidence that the Austrians were not trustworthy.79 The Austrians countered that there had been 35,000 Austrian victims of National Socialism, and 65,000 Jews had lost their lives (the Jews were generally mentioned when it was deemed convenient). They talked of their resistance and published their Rot-Weiss-Rot Buch in which Austria’s anti-Nazi stance was fully documented. Moscow poured cold water on it, and dubbed it a ‘Viennese Masquerade’ - an allusion to the farce at the heart of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier.80

  The Cold War was now revving up and the Soviets were anxious to hang on to what they had. Attempts to control the police were finally checked by the Western Allies, but the West was not able to put a stop to Nazi-style Nacht und Nebel disappearances which claimed around 400 people over three years. An American report on Soviet kidnappings was submitted on 18 July 1947. The problem became acute that winter when the Russians were turning up the heat in Berlin. On 12 April 1948 Martin Herz wrote, ‘Hardly a week passes in Austria without some person disappearing without trace . . . last seen being invited by uniformed Soviet personnel to enter a waiting vehicle’.81

  The wave began with some Balkan subjects the Russians wanted to talk to. In May 1947 a woman was removed rolled up in a rug. In Decemb
er Dr Paul Katscher, who worked in the Ministry of Transport, was kidnapped as he passed the statue of Goethe near the Hofburg. The next day he had been due to speak in Geneva about the number of Austrian railway carriages that had disappeared in the east. The Russian commander, Kurasov, refused to allow Figl to comment on Katscher’s disappearance - he was suspected of being a British agent. Katscher is believed to have perished in a Soviet prison. Similar charges were levelled against Dr Rafael Spann and Gertaude Flögl, who were also kidnapped. Another woman, Ernestine Sunisch, was arrested on the busy Kärtnerring in broad daylight.

  By the time the Russians kidnapped Anton Marek, a chief inspector of police and former Dachau inmate, on 11 June 1948, the Berlin blockade was in full swing. Marek had annoyed the Soviets by purging the police of its communist stooges. He was grabbed outside the Ministry of the Interior. In Russia he was sentenced to the standard twenty-five years, but was released after seven, at the conclusion of the State Treaty. The gendarmerie official Johann Kiridus suffered a similar fate. Another civil servant kidnapped in this way and also released in 1955 was Frau Ottillinger, head of economic planning. She was taken from the car of her minister, Peter Krauland. She was not in the Soviet Zone. In 1948 alone it is thought that around 300 Austrians were the victims of Nacht und Nebel kidnappings.82

  A Solution in the East

  The GDR was still not a foregone conclusion. There was limited room for manoeuvre at the beginning, and Stalin hung on for longer than the West before creating his puppet regime. The French sat in their corner and clamoured for the Ruhr. The Anglo-Americans had made the first moves when it came to dividing Germany.83 That the Russians were still making concessions is clear from Stalin’s meetings with the German Muscovites. At the end of January 1947 a delegation from the Soviet Zone had visited Moscow to report to Stalin and Molotov. It contained Pieck, Grotewohl, Ulbricht, Max Fechner and the interpreter Fred Oelssner. Stalin toyed with the idea of allowing the SPD back into the Soviet Zone. He was not impressed by Grotewohl’s opposition to this, which he saw as a sign of weakness.84

  Stalin wanted to know what the SED thought of a referendum on the future structure of Germany. Was it to become a united state, or a federal state? Grotewohl estimated a 60 per cent majority for a united state. Stalin did not think that was enough. He wanted to know if there were not more people to win over in the west who were prepared to accept a state that looked east. This idea was at the heart of the pan-German people’s congress at the beginning of 1948 and led to the creation of the NDPD (the National Democratic Party of Germany) in the Soviet Zone. Stalin was still keen to see a structure for all Germany. The KPD was renamed the SED in the Western Zones, but the West refused to accept the change.

  The falling out between the Allies was now plain to see. In Berlin the Western Allies felt particularly vulnerable, and they were surrounded by Soviet troops.85 The Soviet plan to erect national German legal jurisdictions foundered at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference. The abject failure of the conference fanned rumours of war. On 6 and 7 December 1947 the People’s Congress for Unity and Just Peace met in East Berlin. Of the 2,215 delegates, 664 came from the Western zones. Their mandates were dodgy, in that they had been selected by parties rather than by a popular vote. The idea was to elect a delegation to go to London to put pressure on the foreign ministers’ meeting there and call for national unity. A delegation was elected, but it did not receive permission to enter the United Kingdom.86

  Before it broke up, the Congress had issued a manifesto calling for a central German administration, the nationalisation of industry in the Western zones and the formation of a united German government once a formal peace treaty had been signed. A standing committee was also chosen to prepare for a second congress in March 1948. Such moves were not rejected out of hand by the Liberal and Christian Democrat parties in the Western zones. The CDU already possessed a ‘working community’ with its Eastern sister and was equally keen to see the establishment of national representation. Even the SPD leadership was prepared to co-operate in principle. On the other hand they would not work with the SED as long as the SPD was banned in the Soviet Zone. It was therefore Grotewohl who stood in the way of progress in this matter, together with the Allied Control Council. The French once more smelled the unity-rat and were particularly adamantine in their refusal to allow cross-zonal political activities. Another negative voice was that of Jakob Kaiser, which prompted the Soviet authorities to banish him from their zone. The SED were left as the sole voice behind the 1948 Congress, which effectively destroyed its credibility.

  As it was the Congress met on 17-18 March 1948 in East Berlin. There were 2,000 delegates, 500 of them from the West. The SED presence was naturally that much stronger, and the percentage of CDU delegates declined from a quarter to a fifth. The Congress created a German People’s Council composed of 300 East German members and a hundred from the West. This was divided into committees, and discussions began on the form of a constitution for a united German Democratic Republic. There was a repeat too of Stalin’s call for a plebiscite. There was an immediate negative response from both the Americans and the French, who refused to recognise the gathering in Berlin. The British tolerated the Congress but nonetheless described the suggestion as ‘useless, unnecessary and uncalled for’. With the Western powers turning their backs on the call for unity, the take-up was almost completely limited to the Soviet Zone.

  The West had already made its decision. A six-power conference meeting in London in February and March 1948 backed the Marshall Plan: American finance would help rebuild Western Europe. Germany had to play its role in this, and could not be plundered for ever. It became clear at the time that the West already had plans to create a separate German state in its zones.87 The Russians were naturally angry that discussions were being held about Germany to which they were not party and called the entire Control Council into question. They saw the Marshall Plan as the embodiment of American imperialism. In February 1948 the bourgeois parties were eliminated from the Czech government, giving a clear signal that the Soviet Union was consolidating its power within its bloc. All over the east the Russians began to show their hand - in Romania, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. When a separate German state was mooted at the Second London Conference that took place between April and June 1948 and a new currency agreed on 18 June, Germany’s split had been effectively achieved.

  20

  The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic Recovery

  24 June 1948 With a rattling din yesterday night an iron curtain fell between Helmstadt and Marienborn.

  Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 236

  Three years after the end of the war, Germany was limbering up for economic recovery. Nineteen-forty-eight was to be the year of German rehabilitation, but there were political problems to face first. Heinrich Böll’s early short stories describe the beginnings of business after the war. In ‘Geschäft ist Geschäft’ (Business is Business), a man spots an acquaintance, a former soldier like himself. After the war they had both been depressed: ‘We had our old army caps pulled down over our brows, and when I had a little cash I’d go to him, and we’d have a chat; sometimes about hunger, sometimes war; and sometimes he gave me a fag, when I was broke; and I occasionally brought him bread coupons as I was clearing rubble for a baker at the time.’ Now there he was in a brand-new, white-painted wooden shop with a corrugated-iron roof at a busy intersection. He was licensed to sell cigarettes and gobstoppers. He looked well fed. The man watched as he sent a little girl packing who didn’t have enough pfennigs for a gobstopper.

  The narrator had not done so well. He thought back to the various digs he had occupied since the end of the war, above all the cellar, which was not too bad when heated with stolen briquettes. Then the newspapers learned about it and took photographs and wrote an article on the tragedy of the returned soldier living in squalor. He had to move. He did occasional jobs, humping and carrying, or cleaning bric
ks. At other times he stole: coal, wood, a loaf of bread. During the war they stole constantly - somebody stole and the others reaped the reward. Now the same was true again. He alone was left waiting at the tram-stop, while the others were already on board heading for their destinations.

  He stood watching the man in the booth. The other gave him no sign of recognition. He watched another man picking up fag-ends. In his POW camp he had seen colonels doing just that, ‘but this one wasn’t a colonel’. He was one of the unlucky ones like the narrator. For some people coming back from the war was like getting off the tram at their stop. The house was still there, if a bit dusty, there was jam in the cupboard and potatoes in the cellar. Life went back to normal; the old firm took them back. ‘There was still medical insurance; you went through the paces of denazification - just like a man going to the barber to have an annoying beard shaved off’. On holidays and holy days they could chat about their medals and about acts of gallantry and come to the conclusion ‘that we were really splendid fellows, in the end just doing what was required of us’.