by Kai Bird
There was just one shortcoming: time. Peck could not begin work until July 10 and had to return to the bench by September. Moran was willing to make a preliminary visit to Germany that spring for several weeks to begin work, but essentially the three men would have only forty days to review the judgments in twelve cases involving 104 defendants. Even McCloy had originally thought the review would take sixty days.16 By contrast, Clay’s lawyers had taken seven months to review just one of these cases. Given the time allotted, it just wasn’t physically possible for the review panel to read through the hundreds of thousands of pages of briefs and transcripts. So they didn’t. The transcripts relating to the trial of Alfried Krupp—contained in several large coffinlike packing cases—were hauled into HICOG headquarters but sat unopened all summer. Instead, the Peck Panel, as it became known, simply read the three thousand pages of verdicts and then opened hearings on each of the cases. Moran interviewed each of the convicted war criminals, and the panel as a whole heard appeals from some fifty lawyers representing the defendants. But, in a most unusual procedure, no opportunity was given to the prosecutors, like the chief of counsel to the war crimes tribunal, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, to rebut any of this testimony. One of Taylor’s assistant prosecutors, Benjamin B. Ferencz, was still in Germany, but his offer to consult with the panel went unanswered.17
McCloy was not involved in any of these details; having selected his clemency board and agreed to the forty-day timetable, he now left them to conduct the review as they saw fit.
In the spring of 1950, McCloy was far more worried about the course of the Cold War than he was about the fate of a few convicted Nazi war criminals. In testimony before Congress, he warned that the Russians were exerting enormous political pressure on America’s position in Germany: “The struggle is immediate and intensive. We in Germany feel that we are facing a critical point in history. . . .”18 The Nazis were a residual issue, left over from the war; a resolution of their cases, one way or another, would evoke a certain political symbolism. But to McCloy’s mind, this was nothing compared with the urgent task at hand. Early that year, the Soviets again made an effort to head off the creation of a West German state by offering to hold a plebiscite on German reunification. The prospect of a unified, demilitarized, and neutral Germany still had enormous appeal, both inside West Germany and among some Frenchmen. McCloy was disturbed to see the centrist French paper Le Monde editorialize that spring that all of Europe should become a “neutral third force” between East and West. He hated to see the Soviets seize the initiative on the evocative issue of German unity. It was essential, he said, to convince the West Germans that “integration with Western Europe does not, therefore, connote a writing off of the East.”19 This was to be a hard task, since it seemed clear to all observers that every step West Germany took toward integration with the Western alliance was a step away from unification.
Men like Schumacher and the popular Protestant-church leader Pastor Martin Neimoller were winning substantial support by criticizing Adenauer and the Allies for their lack of progress on unification. In response, McCloy took to publicizing Jean Monnet’s dream of a united federation of Europe. In London that April, he gave a widely quoted speech in which he stated that “no permanent solution of the German problem seems possible without an effective European union.”20 A few days later, he tried to dampen German expectations for unification by bluntly warning that the Western powers might not end their occupation of Germany for another five years. The Allies would not leave until they felt satisfied that they had nurtured a mature liberal-democratic state. The longer the barrel of the gun, he explained to one reporter, “the more accurate the shot.” Many Germans, he said, did not understand that “other countries still distrust them, and at times feel towards them a resistance not far short of revulsion.”21 The Allied occupation, in other words, would not end until the West Germans clearly aligned themselves with the West. Reunification, if it were ever to occur, would have to happen on Western terms, and the resulting German state could in no sense become a neutral, third force between East and West.
In other comments that spring, he stated that the West might soon be prepared to end the enemy status of West Germany, but only if the Germans “behave themselves.” He told Adenauer that a revision of the Occupation Statute would depend on the “progress Germany makes toward democracy.” As part of his carrot-and-stick strategy, he made it clear that Germany could regain control over its Ruhr Valley heavy industry only if it agreed to the French “Schuman Plan” to share steel and coal production with its West European neighbors. Crafted by Jean Monnet, the Schuman Plan was specifically designed as the first step toward the creation of a single, unified West European market. Adenauer had no problem with the idea, realizing that its economic benefits would do much to help him persuade his constituents to bury century-old antagonisms against the French and to cast their lot with the West. At a time when West German unemployment had hit a high point of 13.3 percent, any plan that would allow the Germans to increase steel and coal production was a Godsend.22
In myriad other ways, McCloy constantly used his sweeping powers to intervene in German affairs, prodding Bonn to institute the most elementary reforms in democratic government. When he was told by his staff that Germans who had served on the de-Nazification boards were now being blackballed by their countrymen as “traitors,” he ordered the state governments to guarantee these individuals jobs in the civil service.23 In April, he forced Adenauer to adopt a “co-determination” law, requiring large employers to give their workers some participation in corporate decision-making. He also angered the prickly chancellor by vetoing a tax bill that gave high-income taxpayers an enormous break. He initially vetoed a bill on civil-service reform that he thought not sufficiently democratic, and only relented when Adenauer promised that the law would be liberally applied. In a speech in late May 1950, he again lectured the German people on their “moral obligation” to restore to Jews that property “which is justly theirs.”24
At times he encountered such astonishing displays of German arrogance that he lost his temper. In mid-June, he addressed an elite group of fifty industrialists in Düsseldorf and afterward was incensed when the president of the Essen Chamber of Commerce stood up and publicly complained about high occupation costs, excessive taxes, and the failure of the Allies to solve the economically costly problem of absorbing the tens of thousands of refugees pouring in from East Germany: “If Churchill and Roosevelt,” said the German business leader, “felt like giving Stalin presents at the expense of Germany, then the Americans and British should foot the bill.” McCloy, his voice shaking with anger, interrupted, “Don’t forget that America’s high taxes are the result of German aggression. Don’t forget who started this war. Whether or not you gentlemen here are responsible personally for it, remember the war and all the misery that followed it—including your own—was born and bred in German soil and you must accept the responsibility.. . . Don’t weep in your beer.” The stunned industrialists sat in silence and then applauded him loudly. He went on to predict that someday the Ruhr would again be “big and strong,” but in the meantime the world would be watching to see whether German industrialists would use their power to support or to stifle the country’s fragile democracy.25
Afterward, Shep Stone, a witness to the scene, wrote in his diary, “Boss gets mad and hits him so hard all Ruhr is groggy.. . . Some of them [German industrialists] aren’t such poisonous eggs. Some even understand that democracy might mean good business, even if they don’t get the idea that it is a wonderful thing in itself.”26
Nine days later, on June 25, 1950, hundreds of thousands of North Korean troops poured across the armistice line McCloy and Dean Rusk had once drawn across the 38th parallel to divide the communist-occupied North from the American-occupied South Korea. McCloy was as shocked by the attack as anyone, and immediately realized that the war in the Far East made a military buildup in Western Europe an urgent necessity. But t
hree days after the attack, he could not get out of his mind the image of the Düsseldorf industrialists whining to him about their problems. In what was to be his last letter to Henry Stimson before his beloved “Colonel” died, McCloy vented his worst feelings about the Germans, telling Stimson that “the arrogance of their thinking was the greatest crime of all because they had the capacity to know.” And though he acknowledged that there were “strong liberal elements in modern Germany,” he could not bring himself to support the creation of a German army. To do so, he feared, “would mean the abandonment of all serious efforts to nurture the German state into a liberal constructive element in Europe.” In the past, he wryly observed, “Germany always had two bosses: one, the General Staff, and the other the Rhine industrialists.” Referring to his recent encounter in Düsseldorf, he told Stimson, “We still have the latter [the industrialists] only a little chastened. Let us not take on the other for a while.”27
The remarkable thing about these candid and highly confidential sentiments is that they did not last. Within two weeks of having written these words to his mentor, McCloy was already beginning to shift his position. Given the aura of crisis and uncertainty generated by the events in Korea, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. He had told Stimson that the events in Korea were “too fresh for me to form any conclusions.” But it did not take long before many West Germans and Americans speculated that Korea might just be a rehearsal for a full-fledged invasion of a much more valuable prize—the German industrial heartland of Europe. On July 3, 1950, just a week after the attack, McCloy told reporters, “It has become increasingly self-evident in the last year that the East zone government is nothing more than a puppet of the Soviet regime. Since the attack on South Korea it has become clear to all the world what dangers are inherent in these puppet governments.” He then announced that he was ready to reconsider his rejection only twelve days earlier of Adenauer’s request for a central West German police force of twenty-five thousand men.28
He could not help being affected by the atmosphere of near hysteria all around him. Adenauer’s personal assistant urgently requested two hundred automatic pistols to defend the Chancellory from any possible communist-inspired uprising. A dozen members of the Bundestag visited McCloy’s political officer in Bonn, Charles W. Thayer, and requested permission to carry firearms. “There’s not a gram of cyanide to be bought,” explained one Bundestag member to Thayer. “My colleagues have cleaned out the market to be prepared to take their lives when the Communists come.” McCloy recognized these symptoms of hysteria, and when Thayer cabled Washington an account of the panic sweeping Bonn, he called up his young aide and angrily told him, “Washington is having enough trouble without your worrying it with reports of German panic.”29
He tried to reassure the Germans by announcing that in principle the security of West Germany was synonymous with the security of the Western powers themselves. Twice in the next couple of weeks, he said, “I do not believe there is going to be any attack,” and underscored his conviction by saying that he had invited his eighty-six-year-old mother to visit him in Frankfurt.30 That is what he was saying in public. In private, he had his doubts. On July 12, 1950, he met with Adenauer just before the chancellor left for a much-needed month-long holiday in Switzerland. Since early May, Adenauer had been recovering from a bout of pneumonia. For a while, McCloy had thought he was going to have to find a successor for the elderly German.31 Even now he found him “still a little weak—mentally, morally and physically.” The chancellor had a bleak outlook on the world that summer, and complained of the “real vacumn in all Western preparations. . . .” In the event of a Russian attack, he pleaded with McCloy to allow his people to take up arms. Military preparedness was an argument McCloy never found easy to dismiss, and he was rather taken aback by Adenauer’s deeply pessimistic attitude. If the Soviets intended to duplicate their aggression in Korea, the military equation in Germany was pretty stark: some 110,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Germany that summer, facing a Soviet force which some officials claimed was ten times as large.32 McCloy was not convinced that the Soviets had any such intentions, but he did come away from his talk with Adenauer profoundly impressed by a simple political argument for some form of rearmament, even if it was only a symbolic token force. As he cabled Acheson a few days later, “If no means are held out for Germans to fight in an emergency my view is that we should probably lose Germany politically as well as militarily without hope of regain. We should also lose, incidentally, a reserve of manpower which may become of great value in event of a real war.”33
This July 18 cable quickly caused a small furor inside the State Department. The sudden shift in his thinking gave considerable ammunition to those, like Paul Nitze, Averell Harriman, and George Kennan, who were trying to persuade Acheson to change U.S. policy on the question of German rearmament. In this inner circle of policy-makers only Henry Byroade, head of the German desk within the department, hesitated. The nation’s youngest army general to come out of the war, and now a rising star in the State Department, Byroade disliked the idea of German rearmament. He was particularly uncomfortable with McCloy’s initial idea to allow individual Germans to join U.S. combat regiments. But by the end of July, McCloy and his staff had come up with a more sophisticated plan. Instead of creating German mercenaries or even establishing a national German army, they proposed that German units be mustered as part of a European Defense Force. McCloy thought a “genuine European army” would prove to be far less provocative to the Soviets and, indeed, less worrisome to many Europeans, than a purely German army. He warned, however, that Germany would have to participate in any such scheme as a “substantial equal” with French, British, and other units.34
He realized that any such scheme, however gingerly presented, was bound to invite considerable controversy. To prepare the public for a change in policy, McCloy now began speaking to the press, at first vaguely, about German security needs. In late July, he told one radio audience that U.S. troops could defend Germany without any German assistance. But, he added, “I suppose there would be very many Germans who would be prepared and anxious to defend Germany in the event of an attack. . . .” Adenauer thought McCloy was moving too slowly, and upon his return from Switzerland he told the high commissioners that he was “incensed and angry” about their attitude. McCloy tried to assure him that the Soviets would not attack until that long-distant day when they felt they had achieved nuclear parity with America. In reply, Adenauer voiced his doubts about whether Washington would ever use nuclear weapons in the event of a Korea-type attack in Germany.35
These West German doubts about the credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrence were to become a recurring theme in German-American relations over the next four decades. McCloy realized the only policy that could assuage German fears was an increased American commitment of ground troops, a costly alternative. Even Schumacher, who by mid-August had come out for German participation in a European Defense Force, tied that participation to a “powerful increase in the U.S. military establishment in Germany.”36 That would happen in time, but in August 1950 the Truman administration was absorbed by the war effort in Korea, where American troops were taking a beating.
In the meantime, McCloy gave Adenauer his approval in late August for the creation of a ten-thousand-man federal police force. He then called in a group of reporters to his hideaway quarters in Koenigstein, outside of Frankfurt, and held an informal, off-the-record discussion on the rearmament question. After serving some fine German pilsner beer, he outlined his views. When one reporter pointed out that many Germans since the war seemed to be less than enamored with the idea of rearmament, McCloy answered, tongue in cheek, “Why, just give me a brass band and a loudspeaker truck. Then let me march from Lake Constance in the south to the Kiel Canal up north, and I will have a German army of a million men behind me—all eager-eyed.”37 In fact, he was well aware that neutralist and antimilitarist sentiment was on the upswing.38
Th
is did not stop him from taking Adenauer’s case for rearmament to the Truman administration and orchestrating a policy change. Just before he boarded a plane to attend a foreign ministers’ conference in New York in early September, he was handed a long memo from Adenauer proposing that Germany be allowed to establish a quasi-military “protective police force” of some 150,000 men. The document had actually been drafted the previous evening, with the close assistance of Charlie Thayer.39 McCloy was not taken aback by the proposed numbers, but he still favored the political advantages of a European Defense Force over anything that could remotely look like a resurrected Wehrmacht. In Washington, he met with Truman and pushed the EDF concept, and afterward told reporters that the West Germans should be allowed to arm themselves against a possible attack.40 At this point, he was still out in front of the administration, which had not yet decided which way to go. But he couldn’t keep himself from telling reporters what he thought: “It seems so difficult to say to these people [the Germans] that you can’t share in the defense of your country if you’re attacked. If that sounds like rearmament, then it’s rearmament.”41
McCloy and Adenauer collaborated so closely together on rearmament partly, of course, because they recognized that Western Europe could not appear to have a credible military deterrence in the long run without German participation. But both men had political considerations as well. Adenauer saw rearmament as the shortest path to sovereignty. McCloy thought it was necessary in order to stem neutralist sentiments, and—no less important—keep Germany divided. As he had written Truman on September 10, 1950, the occupation could not as a practical matter continue much longer after Germany contributed forces to a European army. Negotiations would have to begin to put the American occupation forces on a new footing. And though he had wished to achieve further “democratization” within the fabric of German society, “certain of the things we would like to see done in Germany will not be completed.” Nevertheless, he argued, “we are forced to accept this as unavoidable in order to attain the larger objective of binding Germany to the West.”42