The Anglo-American Alliance went much farther at Quebec in September 1944. Roosevelt convinced Churchill to sign the post-war plan for Germany, which had been drawn up by Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, for ‘Germany’s conversion into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.’ Senior advisers to the President, such as Henry Stimpson, Secretary of State for War, and his assistant John J. McCloy, viewed what became known as the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ as an attempt at the ‘conscious destruction of Germany’s economy’ that would only achieve ‘a state of impoverishment and disorder’.cclxviii The plan was a godsend for Goebbels’ propaganda machine and led to uproar in the Allied media and within government circles. General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of American Forces, warned Morgenthau personally that his plan was increasing German resistance. Allen Dulles, America’s ‘man in Switzerland’, told Roosevelt the same, and the Washington Post wrote, ‘If the Germans suspect that nothing but complete destruction lies ahead, then they will fight on. Let’s stop helping Dr Goebbels.’(30) Stimpson and McCloy attempted to water down the Morgenthau Plan in the SHAEF Handbook on Germany and the main Directive 1067, with only limited success.
The JCS 1067 Directive prohibited US occupation authorities from providing Germany with any kind of an economic or restructuring aid. The plan focused on denazification and the destruction of heavy industry. It stopped the production in Germany, as well as the import of fertilisers, which only further exacerbated the food crisis. It also led to the Allies dissolving the German Red Cross and preventing any international relief agencies, and even the Vatican, from providing any supplies and more importantly refused any food aid to be delivered to starving German civilians. In March 1945, when Roosevelt had been informed of the consequences of JCS 1067 on the regions of Germany already in American hands, he replied that they should let the Germans ‘stew in their own juice… let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!’ Asked if he wanted the German people to starve he said, ‘Why not?’(31)
After Roosevelt’s death Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, asked Truman not to make the directive public, following the propaganda disaster that ensued after the publication of the Morgenthau Plan which had stiffened German resistance and had even forced Roosevelt to distance himself from the plan before his death. However, the plan was not formally abandoned until it became clear just how catastrophic it was proving for the German civilian population, to the Allied occupation and for the future prospects of a European recovery.cclxix (33)
ccxxix America would go on not only to be the ‘arsenal of democracy’ as Churchill called her but also furnished the supplies that would keep Soviet Russia in the war. The enormous material resources the United States put into the war were the essential grist to the mill in terms of the blood price the Russians paid in human lives to defeat Nazi Germany.
ccxxx British and Commonwealth forces scored their own vitally important material and psychological victory over Axis forces in North Africa at El Alamein. Rommel lost over 90 per cent of his 150-plus tanks. In retreat one of his adjutants asked the mechanics how many were still serviceable and the lieutant replied: ‘I told Rommel we had seven, in fact we have fifteen but if I told him that he’d immediately have ordered a counter attack!’(1) With minimal resources and limited opportunities for resupply, the North African campaign could be no more than a sideshow tying down Allied military manpower and resources and delaying the establishment of a second front in Europe. The death blow came with the arrival, for the first time in significant volume, of American men and equipment from November 1942 into the North African theatre. The Allies had overwhelming superiority in everything and their superiority grew as each day passed. When the sideshow ended, these Allied troops would be embarked for the campaign in Sicily and then Italy in the summer of 1943. Mussolini was ousted by his Fascist council and Italy sued for peace. Already overstretched German forces then had to be rushed to Italy to block the Allied advance into Southern Europe.
ccxxxi At Stalingrad the Germans lost another 91,000 soldiers taken prisoner at the final surrender. It is estimated a third of these died within weeks, only 5,000 ever saw Germany again. The last of them were released in 1956.
ccxxxii Hamburg was bombed a further sixty-nine times before the end of the war. Although many other destructive raids followed, the mix required to create a firestorm was hard to conjure up.
ccxxxiii Eisenhower, however, wisely decided against the race to Berlin, much to Churchill and Montgomery’s frustration, as he saw no reason to expend more American and Commonwealth lives to capture a zone already allotted to the Soviets.
ccxxxiv The population of eastern Poland included large numbers of Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Jews and had numbered approximately 6 million before the war. Poles made up the majority in a number of the big cities in the regions such as Lwów (Lemberg), which became part of Ukraine and Vilna (Vilnius), which became part of Lithuania. The Poles forced to leave these cities were mostly ‘transferred’ to Breslau (Wrocław), Danzig (Gdansk) and Thorn (Toruń) respectively.
ccxxxv Aachen had refused to surrender until after it had been destroyed by an Allied air raid on 21st October, another senseless piece of destruction for the sake of holding up an unstoppable offensive.
ccxxxvi Only half of one of these cities would remain part of Germany — Frankfurt an der Oder — the rest became part of Poland and Russia.
ccxxxvii The surviving German minority in the Silesian village of Gottesdorf were not able to commemorate their dead until after the fall of the wall in 1989. The village church now commemorates over 200 names of those massacred, a list which includes entire families.(29)
ccxxxviii Albert Speer reported in his memoirs that Hanke left Breslau in one of the new prototype German helicopters. But this cannot be substantiated. Neither can what happened to Hanke. There are reports of him trying to escape through Bohemia and being caught up in the wild ethnic genocide against Germans that took place there, or being interned in a camp in Bohemia and shot whilst trying to escape, and then again there are reports, as with so many other leading Nazis, that he was sighted in South America.
ccxxxix Gauleiter Forester had only briefly delayed the justice of the gallows. He was picked up by the British in Hamburg and handed over to the Polish authorities in August 1946. He was executed in 1952.
ccxl The Winter War against Finland also resulted in another expansionist land grab by the Soviet Union, depriving the Finns of 10 per cent of their territory, their second largest city, their defensive fortifications and seeing the expulsion of 12 per cent of their population.
ccxli On 19th June 2008 the security council of the UN passed resolution 1820 which finally made rape and other forms of sexual violence in wartime a war crime.(51)
ccxlii Not till the big three meeting at Yalta in February 1945 were the fundamental principles of the Atlantic Charter ‘reinterpreted’ to state that they did not encompass enemy nations.(2)
ccxliii It is worth recalling that Bismarck’s family estate of Varzin was in Pomerania, as were those of many other old Prussian families.
ccxliv The eastern territories of Poland that Stalin insisted on keeping were nearly half of their territory, even if the least densely-populated part of pre-war Poland. The Polish east was not of any particular economic importance but it did carry great cultural significance for Poles. Their national poets including Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki, had been born there and the landscape was dotted with castles and stately homes of the Polish nobility. Lwów and Wilna were, after Krakow and Warsaw, the greatest cultural and historic centres of Poland.(4)
ccxlv General Anders, though wedded to the Polish cause, had significant German ancestry. His father, Albert Anders, was a Baltic German and his Polish mother even had a German name, Tauchert.
ccxlvi The Pripet Marshes were part of the eastern territories of Poland that Stalin insisted on keeping.
ccxlvii The Polish government in exile in Londo
n had since 1940 laid claim to all the territory of Germany up to the Oder-Neisse (even though they eventually signed off on a lesser deal in 1942), a territorial gain which contained a population of over 9.5 million Germans. To this figure you needed to add the displacement of the circa 2 million ethnic Germans who had either remained in territory that had been part of Germany before the First World War or been transported into the territories, which Germany had annexed from Poland — a staggering 11.5 million people to move, to make way for an eventual movement west of less than 2 million eastern Poles.
ccxlviii If Poland had a claim to East Prussia, why not then also to Saxony? Both claims were of equal absurdity. Had the Poles laid claim and gained Saxony, the Anglo-Saxons might have had to go in search of their ‘Polish roots’!
ccxlix The part of Ruthenia that had been allocated to Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War contained neither Czechs nor Slovaks but had been ceded to Czechoslovakia to give her a strategic border link to her ally in the Austro-Hungarian carve-up — Romania. As Romania had sided with the Axis in the Second World War, Stalin saw this link as having become redundant.
ccl British forces met up with their Russian comrades to the east of Denmark on Germany’s Baltic coast at the ancient Hanse port of Wismar, thereby cutting off the Russian’s advance further west and blocking Stalin’s ambitions in the Baltic. Wismar was a picturesque setting, but much of the beautiful medieval town was senselessly destroyed in an RAF raid on 14–15 April 1945. Thankfully Wismar and Stralsund, another town along the Baltic coast, have been painstakingly restored and since 2002 been designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
ccli This meant the western of the two Neisse rivers, the Lausitzer Neisse. There was confusion and hope on the part of many Germans in Lower Silesia for some time after the war that what was meant was the eastern Glatzer Neisse, which would have left most of the population centres of Lower Silesia in Germany and seen Breslau divided by the Oder, with the old town centre remaining in Germany. The industrial areas of Upper Silesia would still have fallen to Poland but there would have been 3 million less Germans to expel; a more logical solution, but logic was not the order of the day.
cclii At Potsdam the Allies also decreed that the German people were to be used as ‘forced labour’ to help rebuild what had been destroyed and much of Germany’s industry was to be dismantled and shipped east as part of reparations to the Soviet Union.
ccliii The fact the Red Army had 300 divisions in East Germany and was creating facts on the ground and that the American delegation took its eye off the ball in Europe to focus on finishing the war in Asia, were the deciding factors.(12)
ccliv Delimitation meant minor changes. More importantly the Potsdam Declaration fell far short of a declaration of legal annexation of Germany’s territories east of the Oder and western Neisse rivers.(13)
cclv The Western Powers were willing to use the former German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line as a bargaining chip. During the exchange of notes initiated by Stalin from March 1952, he sought to avert the re-arming and insertion of West Germany into the Western Alliance system, and put forward proposals for a final peace settlement. Stalin proposed a united but demilitarised and neutral Germany within the borders of the Potsdam Agreement. The Allies replied by insisting on all German elections being internationally monitored, arguing a united Germany must be free to choose whichever alliance system it wanted to join and they refused to accept the Oder-Neisse border, reiterating this could only be formally and legally agreed to as part of a final peace conference.
cclvi Figures of the number of German civilians verschlept (literally dragged away) or deported to Siberia will never be known. The Russians were poor record keepers. Estimates range from 300,000–1.5 million. The lower estimates seem hardly credible when one reads the masses of accounts that report every man the Red Army came across was either killed on the spot, or rounded up for shipment to Siberia. Many did not even survive the journey in cattle trucks, which took weeks or even months to reach their distant destination. As with the Polish deportees the NKVD deported from eastern Poland to the Gulags, most were never seen again.(18)
cclvii There are still very considerable ‘open questions’ with regard to valuable cultural objects from Poland that were looted during the Nazi occupation and which the Polish government insists are in German hands. German authorities have stated that many of these items are simply missing, which in view of the much larger number of German cultural items in Polish hands has elicited the response from Warsaw that further discussion of the matter is superfluous! Some of the items the Germans lay claim to, many of which are housed at the Jagalonian University in Krakow, include large sections of the Prussian State Library (which were moved from Berlin to Silesia for safe keeping during the war). These include works from Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart, as well as from many famous German authors. From the city of Breslau alone, twenty-eight trainloads including 116 container loads of cultural treasures were sent to Warsaw, including a famous Martin Luther portrait by Lucas Cranach (which used to appear on DM German bank notes), along with symbols of the city’s past such as the ‘gotische Zeugnisse’. These have interestingly led to a long and bitter dispute between Wrocław (Breslau) and Warsaw, the latter seeing them as the spoils of war, and the former wanting to claim them as essential parts of the regional history of Silesia, demanding they be returned and put back on display in the city from which they were stolen. The Polish mayor of this former German city is one of the very few in Poland who makes a virtue out of the city’s now dual cultural heritage.(35)
cclviii For more information on the ‘Polish Option’, see the chapter on Forgotten Silesia, which forms part of the Postscript.
cclix The grand country houses of Gross and Klein Steindorf in Upper Silesia are notable exceptions of ruins that were offered to but declined by their former owners but which have been beautifully restored by new owners after the fall of communism. But then Upper Silesia is a notable exception to all the eastern territories, where a large section of the ancient community were allowed to remain and where their love of their region shines through in the formely great state (Silesia) that with few exceptions is now a wasteland of destruction and neglect.
cclx The Russians made off with countless treasures from private collections from stately homes, like the Hardenberg Library, or priceless treasures such as the crown jewels of the Merovingians from public museums. The Poles and Czechs inherited vast treasures not just in terms of the architectural legacy of the German east, but in the contents of all its museums and galleries.
cclxi Recent polls show that over 80 per cent of Polish and Czech citizens still regard the murder, expropriation and expulsion of German citizens from their former eastern territories and the Sudetenland as entirely justified.(47)
cclxii The fact that the Germans are still not be trusted can be seen in the terms of the Treaty of Final Settlement or the Four Plus Two talks (four Allies and two Germanies). To receive Russia, America, Britain and France’s acquiescence for German unification, Germany had to agree to restrict her military to no more than 370,000 men, commit herself to never acquiring nuclear or biological weapons and last but not least agree to Poland’s existing frontier, with no questions asked. Germany then had to sign a follow-up treaty with Poland — the German-Polish Border Treaty on 14th November 1990.
cclxiii The Germans had deported 13 million people to do slave labour in Germany during the war: 8.5 million of these were civilians brought in from the occupied countries, 2.5 million from the Soviet Union (mostly from White Russia and the Ukraine). Of the Soviet civilian labourers who were deported to Germany one in ten did not survive. The ratio of German civilians who were never heard of again may have been as high as four-fifths of those taken.(2)
cclxiv Among the largest number of ethnic Germans were those from Romania where it is estimated as many as 150,000 members of the German minority were deported to Soviet labour camps.(3)
cclxv Fig
ures have had to be revised upwards in recent years. Still not all of the Russian records are available. From one marshalling yard alone, in Soldau in East Prussia, over 101 transports left crammed to the gunwales, with an estimated 200,000 transported east. The total number deported to the Gulags now ranges from between 530,000 to over 1 million. The numbers that died are still disputed but range from 300,000-700,000.(4)
cclxvi The Germans certainly also used bombing in their strategic arsenal and they killed countless tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of Guernica, Wielun, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Stalingrad and numerous other cities in the Soviet Union, both as part of Blitzkrieg tactics, and to terrorise and soften up their enemies. Nevertheless, they never built a heavy bomber fleet, designed to carpet bomb cities. Britain made a strategic decision to do that and it took time to perfect. The Germans never made that decision and never managed put a heavy bomber into the air. Not for a lack of creativity, their focus however remained on building fighter jets such as the rocket-powered Messerschmitt ME163 Komet, the fastest aircraft of the war, or the ME262 jet fighter, the only jet aircraft to play an operationally significant role in the war. The Germans not only lost the war of production, they built too many types of aircraft of too complex a design, which were hard to maintain and above all in too few numbers to affect the outcome of the war. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, the US Bombing Survey came to the conclusion that ‘Germany led the world in aircraft armament, jet propulsion, advanced aerodynamics and guided missiles.’(21)
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