by Kai Bird
When “Der Alte” arrived at the front door of the Petersberg on the rainy afternoon of September 21,1949, the commissioners were not there to greet him. Their meeting was running late, so McCloy just sent word that Adenauer should make himself comfortable in the hotel’s lobby. The old man took this as an insult and refused to come in out of the rain. McCloy was quickly apprised of the situation and went out to make amends. After walking up to the stiff figure standing outside, he whispered, “I can well imagine what you’re thinking. Surely you’re thinking of Canossa.” Adenauer looked at him for a moment, and then cracked a thin smile. He was astonished that any American could recall how in the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII had similarly humiliated the German King Henry IV by keeping him waiting outside the Italian castle of Canossa for three days.58
Once inside, the three commissioners lined up on a carpet placed in the middle of a large drawing room. Adenauer immediately read some symbolic significance into the carpet, if only because he and his delegation of five Cabinet members had been asked to stop short of it while the speeches were made. So, when the French high commissioner, François Poncet, stepped forward to greet him, Adenauer seized the moment and advanced onto the carpet himself. Having claimed for himself what he took to be equal ground, he then went on the offensive with a well-prepared speech urging the high commissioners to revise the brand-new Occupation Statute in a “liberal and generous manner,” transfer greater authority to his government, and thereby “hasten the further political development of our country.”59
Once he had thus served notice that he intended to negotiate long and hard for greater sovereign powers, Adenauer handed the commissioners a copy of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Champagne was served, and it was only forty-five minutes later, as the German delegation was leaving, that the commissioners remembered that they had forgotten to hand Adenauer his copy of the Occupation Statute. A French diplomat rushed up to Adenauer’s personal assistant, Dr. Herbert Blankenhorn, and pushed the offensive document into his hands, saying, “N’en parlons plus—Let’s not talk about it any more.”60
Adenauer could be petty and difficult, but over the next two months McCloy began to acquire a genuine respect for this hard man’s patience, physical stamina, shrewdness, and biting wit. The chancellor still disliked coming to the Petersberg Hotel. On one occasion when they were about to enter its foyer, McCloy rather disarmingly explained that he “felt at home” in the mountain retreat. Adenauer stopped in his tracks and quipped, “In that case, Mr. McCloy, after you.”61
McCloy found it more difficult, if not impossible, to establish a cordial relationship with Adenauer’s chief political rival, Kurt Schumacher. The SPD chief had all of Adenauer’s faults and few of his graces. A Prussian Protestant and lifelong bachelor, Schumacher was a dedicated socialist and fierce anticommunist. During World War I, he had lost an arm, and as the result of twelve years in a Nazi concentration camp, which he survived with considerable courage, he had to have a gangrenous leg amputated. He moved about physically supported by a strikingly statuesque blonde woman named Annemarie Renger. Much later, she became a president of the Bundestag, but at the time her constant presence accentuated the already bizarre appearance of this one-armed, one-legged man. He was a proud, stubborn individual, an impassioned and gifted orator, and a politician impatient to inaugurate Germany’s inevitable “socialist reformation.”62 Unlike Adenauer, whose obeisance to the goal of reunification was perfunctory, the socialist leader considered the re-establishment of the Germany pulled together by Bismarck a major priority. This goal set him at cross-purposes with McCloy’s agenda.
The two men got off to a bad start soon after McCloy’s arrival. Hearing that Schumacher was scheduled to speak at Roemer, outside of Frankfurt, McCloy drove over and stood at the back of the crowd. Later, when Schumacher learned of McCloy’s presence in the crowd, he accused the high commissioner of spying on him. McCloy soon determined that Schumacher was a “powerful hater and rabid nationalist,” and even a “dictator” when it came to ruling over his party.63
By comparison with Schumacher, McCloy soon realized that Adenauer was a compatible partner. They had terrible disagreements over narrow policy questions, such as when the high commissioners ordered a 20-percent devaluation of the German mark. And yet, as Adenauer tried to accelerate McCloy’s timetable, they shared the larger goal of creating a strong West German state wedded to parliamentary democracy and free-market economics. For this purpose they were knowing coconspirators; Adenauer deftly used Schumacher’s pan-German nationalism to portray himself as the “reasonable” German, while McCloy used Adenauer’s intransigence to persuade his fellow commissioners to make the next concession toward greater German sovereignty. This was to be a pattern for the next three years. The press, the German people, and indeed sometimes even Washington did not always understand the nature of their collaboration. The New York Time’s C. L. Sulzberger later concluded that Adenauer “pulled plenty of wool over McCloy’s eyes. . . .”64 Some wags were soon calling the chancellor the “Real McCloy,” so often did it seem that the chancellor was manipulating the high commissioner.65 At the same time, Adenauer’s political opponents at home and his critics abroad portrayed him as an American marionette.
On October 1, 1949, the Soviets officially protested the formation of Adenauer’s government as a violation of the Potsdam agreement. One week later, an “All-German Government” was formed in Berlin; it was dominated by members of the Communist Party, but the Foreign Ministry and several other Cabinet posts were given to members of the Christian Democratic Union of East Germany. A manifesto was issued demanding the abolition of the Occupation Statute in West Germany, an end to the dismantling of German industry, the withdrawal of all foreign troops, the restoration of German sovereignty, and the unification of East and West Germany. An SPD collaborator of the East German communists, Otto Grotewohl, was named chancellor of the German Democratic Republic.
These events underscored for McCloy and Adenauer the difficulty of keeping Germany divided. The East German manifesto spoke to all the resentments West Germans felt over the continuing occupation, and particularly toward the dismantling of German factories. In the wake of the challenge posed by the formation of an East German government, Adenauer escalated his demands for greater sovereignty by calling for an end to all dismantling. He knew that McCloy was already receptive to a change in policy.66
Eric Warburg had returned to Germany to reclaim the family banking business in Hamburg. Immediately after the war, Warburg had been part of the U.S. Army team that had interrogated Hermann Goering. His family had tried to dissuade him from returning, but Eric, despite his American ways, was still very much a German. He and McCloy frequently talked that autumn of 1949, and Eric was shocked to learn that his old friend believed the Allies should complete their dismantling program. The Germans, said McCloy, should be treated as “the Romans did the conquered Germanic tribes, by breaking their swords over your knee in front of them.” This comment sparked a violent argument between the two men, with McCloy insisting that “something has to be done after all that has happened.” After a heated discussion, they parted company. Warburg thought that he had been unable to budge McCloy from his position. But the next morning, McCloy called and asked Warburg to consult his friends in the German business community and draw up a list of those factories that he thought should be spared.67
Over the next few weeks, McCloy orchestrated a campaign to persuade Washington and his fellow commissioners to change the policy. Early in October, he told a German reporter that the dismantling program was a “lost cause,” and when that created a storm of protest, he suggested that he had been speaking off the record. But soon afterward, the London Times quoted him as criticizing what he called “aimless dismantling.”68 Acheson jocularly complained that “McCloy just can’t keep his mouth shut.” McCloy, in the meantime, was telling Acheson that German opposition to dismantling was “not inspired by Nazi influence.�
�� On the contrary, he said, its harshest critics came from the left and center of the political spectrum. “We [should] avoid the mistakes that we made after Weimar,” he warned, “where we were rather hasty to give up to the wrong government things we had long begrudged to a better one.”69
The growing public debate was uncapping strong emotions inside Germany. In some instances, British troops had to protect German workers hired to dismantle some factories. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin accused McCloy of using “pressure tactics.”70 But McCloy and Adenauer kept the pressure up. At a meeting of U.S. ambassadors in Paris—attended by Lew Douglas and David Bruce, the U.S. ambassador to France—McCloy got to the heart of the matter by raising the question of “a united Germany versus a truncated Germany.” The French, he pointed out, were firmly opposed to the reunification of Germany. But if Germany was to remain divided, and the Western portion of it brought into a federation with Western Europe, certain concessions had to be made. The French must learn that a truncated Germany “could hardly be considered” a menace. Adenauer would cooperate, he reported, because he was “strongly and favorably disposed for the federation of Germany into Western Europe.” But he would insist on an “equal partnership in the economic field. . . .” This meant, of course, that what McCloy called the “horrible problem of dismantling” had to be resolved.71
Back in Germany, Adenauer requested a meeting with the high commissioners at Petersberg to discuss the issue again. When François Poncet suggested that the Germans were still not politically enlightened enough to be trusted with heavy industry, Adenauer caustically observed that he did not wish to acquire the reputation of “blackmailing the Council or trying to squeeze concessions from it on the basis of Soviet moves, but that if action were not taken along the lines he suggested, all of Western Europe would fall in the Soviet orbit.”72
In another encounter, Poncet suggested that the chancellor would only be satisfied when the high commissioners were gone altogether. “That’s putting it too strongly,” Adenauer replied. “But I wouldn’t mind if they turned into gay butterflies, or something of the kind.” The Frenchman retorted, “That wouldn’t do; you’d catch us in a butterfly-net.” “In that case,” snapped Adenauer, “you’d declare butterfly-nets to be banned weapons.”73
The situation came to a head when Secretary of State Dean Acheson visited Germany in mid-November. This gave Adenauer the opportunity to sue for Acheson’s confidence and force a new round of Allied concessions. Acheson was charmed by the chancellor. And he was equally struck by the frankness with which Adenauer explained his private support for the continued division of Germany. “Eastern Germany has always looked towards Russia,” he told Acheson and McCloy. He desired wholehearted cooperation with the French and believed the German people would back him on this and reject the nationalist policies of the SPD. In Dr. Schumacher, he told Acheson, one would find a “typical East German.” At one point in their conversation, he turned to McCloy and told him to cover his ears. Then he turned back to Acheson and said that McCloy “had a real warm-hearted understanding of the German problems. . . .”74
Afterward, an incident occurred that became a milestone in Adenauer’s political career. The chancellor escorted Acheson and McCloy to the train station, where a large crowd had gathered in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the secretary of state. When their darkened limousines had sped past the crowd and into the station, Acheson turned to Adenauer and suggested that they really ought to walk back out into the square and greet the people. Adenauer agreed; as the crowd realized what was happening, cheering broke out and then, as Acheson recalled, “everything exploded.” The people surged past the police lines and picked up Adenauer, Acheson, and McCloy and carried them to the high commissioner’s train. After a half-hour of bedlam, the train finally got under way. Acheson and McCloy agreed that, “while we had fouled up the protocol of the departure, we had introduced a desirable element of democratic disorder into the political life of the Federal Republic. And Adenauer had had a popular triumph.”75
With Acheson’s backing, McCloy now forced his fellow commissioners to enter into serious negotiations with Adenauer. Over a period of ten days and long nights, the commissioners hammered out what became known as the Petersberg Agreement. McCloy insisted on the night sessions, hoping to wear down the opposition to any further concessions. The seventy-three-year-old Adenauer kept to the pace, but the French and British officials tired. “Reason would take command and speech falter,” wrote Acheson, “as dawn began to break, and with it, the horror of resumption at ten o’clock the same morning.”76
In the end, the commissioners agreed to the substance of Adenauer’s demands: Seventeen major plants were struck from the dismantling list, and all dismantling was ended in West Berlin. Germany would be allowed for the first time since the war to build oceangoing vessels, and she would be permitted to produce up to eleven million tons of steel annually. In addition, Germany would be allowed to set up consulates abroad and join such international institutions as the World Bank and the Council of Europe. In return, Adenauer made a number of concessions: he pledged to keep Germany disarmed and to cooperate with the Allied Military Security Board; he also agreed to recognize the Ruhr Authority, which had been set up by the Allies to manage this industrial region. Adenauer really had no choice but to accept both of these points. Demilitarization was a given, and as for the Ruhr Authority, it was already an established fact, and German recognition at least gave him representation on the Authority’s board.77
These concessions nevertheless led to a great outcry in the Bundestag. One SPD leader charged that it would lead to a “nationalism of a dog on a chain.” Schumacher called Adenauer a “Chancellor of the Allies”—a charge for which he was suspended from the parliament for a period of six months.78 McCloy was appalled by this vitriolic exchange, and yet felt unable to intervene directly. Instead, he quietly called in several high-ranking CDU leaders and suggested that the entire incident had contributed to a “lack of confidence” generated throughout the world in “the ability of the Germans even to conduct serious parliamentary debate. . . .” As a result, the CDU leaders approached Schumacher, who willingly extended an apology, and within twenty days he was reinstated in the Bundestag. McCloy knew it was only a “minor truce,” but it would at least relieve some of the tensions for a time.79
The Petersberg Agreement greatly added to Adenauer’s stature; if there had been any doubt before, Adenauer now acted as if he was indeed the head of a sovereign state. Within days of the Agreement, he spoke out on an issue of extreme sensitivity to the Allies. He did it in his own typical manner, by granting an exclusive interview to an obscure reporter, on this occasion from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Such trial balloons could more easily be denied, if need be, than if he spoke with a resident correspondent. Germany, he said, would never rebuild its own army, but if the Allies wished, Germany might be willing to contribute military units to an integrated European army. There was an immediate outcry, both in America and throughout Europe, against this merest hint of a rearmed Germany.
McCloy was aware that Adenauer was not the first to venture into these controversial waters. The idea of a West German contribution to the defense of Europe had recently been broached by a number of Western military experts. General Clay himself had suggested just such a German contingent in a speech in Boston on November 20. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, had made a similar suggestion, as had Field Marshal Montgomery in a recent talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. Although McCloy was familiar and even sympathetic with the arguments advanced by these men, he still felt that the timing was wrong. He told Adenauer that he felt he would be better off not talking about it at all, that whatever he said would be bound to be misunderstood as simple agitation for a German army. Confidentially, he told an old Wall Street friend in mid-December, “It is a problem that one day we shall have to face. . . . We can’t leave Germany with a Soviet trained East German ar
my to take over the whole country. I frankly do not know what the solution is as yet, but I am quite clear that now is not the time to react to the East German developments on the military side.”80
It was true that the East Germans had been allowed by the Soviets to build up their internal police force into what was beginning to appear to be a small army, even equipped with a few tanks. But the military threat came from the presence of Russian troops in East Germany. Though publicly the Truman administration made much of this potential threat, its intelligence assessments of Soviet intentions dismissed the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. In fact, the CIA feared the opposite, that the Soviets might in 1949 choose to withdraw their troops from East Germany, and thus accelerate the political pressures on Western Europe to disengage from NATO’s military buildup.81
The real threat was political. Early in November 1949, the Soviets had made their policy explicit when Politburo member Georgi M. Malenkov announced that the Kremlin would endorse free elections in a unified Germany if the new state would agree to be neutral and demilitarized.82 If the Soviets made their proposals attractive and credible, the West Germans might find them irresistible. Adenauer said as much to Acheson in November, when he expressed the fear that the Soviets might soon withdraw their troops from East Germany.83
In this context, the issue of whether West Germany was to rearm was not a military question, but one of whether Germany was to remain divided. Schumacher and the SPD were outraged by Adenauer’s suggestion of a German contingent in a European army precisely because they viewed such a step as closing off the possibility of reunification. Adenauer viewed the issue in political terms: “Rearmament might be the way to gaining full sovereignty for the Federal Republic. This made it the essential question of our political future.”84 Content for the moment with having raised the issue, Adenauer now decided, at McCloy’s urging, to let it simmer for a while.85