cclxvii Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a committed anti-Nazi from the outset of the war. Once in prison one of his guards asked him why he believed in God, to which he answered, “The question is not does God exist but how do I avoid him?” An answer lost on those who finally executed him at Flossenberg concentration camp. He died holding the belief that acknowledging God means accepting responsibility for one’s actions.
cclxviii Morgenthau’s family were of German Jewish origin and understandably, after what had happened to Germany and Europe’s Jews at the hands of the Nazis, wanted a punitive settlement imposed on post-war Germany. Morgenthau’s plan foresaw the deindustrialisation of Germany, ostensibly for the eradication of its war-making effort, but in practice the plan had more far-reaching consequences. Germany was not self-sufficient in agriculture to feed herself and depended on her industrial and manufactured exports to pay for the import of the food she needed. The situation was made more acute by Stalin’s handing over of Germany’s eastern agricultural territories to Poland to an extent that had not even been forseen or recommended in Morgenthau’s own drastic vision of a redrawn post-war map of Germany. Germany’s industrial areas were to be annexed by France and Poland with the Ruhr becoming an international zone in Morgenthau’s plan. Germany’s industrial capacity was to be severely restricted. Morgenthau followed up his success in getting the Allied leaders’ agreement to his plan by publishing a book in November 1945 entitled Germany is our Problem.(32) The plan and its ‘level of industry’ agreements were rigorously enforced and the effects of the Morgenthau Plan lasted until the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49.
cclxix JCS 1067 was effectively in operation in Germany from April 1945–July 1947. The US Senate Judiciary Committee would later conclude that, ‘During the first two years of the Allied occupation the Treasury (Morgenthau et al.) program of industrial dismantlement was vigorously pursued by American officials.’ In 1947, the US Congress warned of the consequences were these policies to be continued, ‘… [they] can only mean one of two things: (a) that a considerable part of the German population must be “liquidated” through disease, malnutrition, and slow starvation for a period of years to come, with the resultant dangers to the rest of Europe from pestilence and the spread of plagues that know no boundaries; or (b) the continuation both of large occupying forces to hold down “unrest” and the affording of relief mainly drawn from the United States to prevent actual starvation.’ Truman, after intense lobbying from members of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals Clay and Marshall, finally rescinded the punitive JCS 1067 directive in July 1947, realising that European economic recovery could not take place without the recovery of its German motor, especially not if the rest of Europe had to pay for the feeding and maintenance of Germany. Better to let her feed herself, make goods to sell to be able to buy what she needed and allow her markets be opened again to others.(34)
9
The Aftermath: A Nation Disappears
As the final catastrophe loomed, there was an awful sense of foreboding; relentless columns of exhausted refugees flooded in from the east, with their harrowing accounts of rape and murder, and retreating soldiers warned of the dams of revenge and retribution about to burst upon Germany. The rhetoric of Allied leaders left few in doubt of what fate had in store for the survivors. President Roosevelt had stated, ‘We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. You either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in such a manner so they just can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.’(1) Dwight Eisenhower, who was the then Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, stated, ‘Our primary purpose is the destruction of as many Germans as possible. I expect to destroy every German west of the Rhine and within that area that we are attacking.’cclxx (2)
THE OCCUPATION
Winston Churchill could match Stalin in his bloodthirsty tirades against the German people, whether in calling for poison gas to be used in the bombing of German cities,(3) or when considering the fate of those Germans to be forcibly expelled from their eastern homelands. The British conservative newsletter Review of World Affairs, quoting from a confidential internal government memorandum, stated:
Since the end of the war about three million people, mostly women and children and over-aged men, have been killed in eastern Germany and south Eastern Europe; about fifteen million people have been deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About twenty-five per cent of these people, over three million, have perished. About four million men and women have been deported to Eastern Europe and Russia as slaves… It seems that the total elimination of the German population of Eastern Europe — at least fifteen million people — was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta.
During the negotiations in Moscow between the London Poles and Stalin in the autumn of 1944, when Mikołajczyk (the exiled Polish Prime Minister) protested against forcing Poland to incorporate so much of eastern Germany, Churchill had reassured him, ‘Don’t mind the five or more million Germans. Stalin will see to them. You will have no trouble with them: they will cease to exist.’(5) But Churchill was also the first Allied leader whose ardour against the Germans began to cool when reports reached him of the atrocities that the Soviets were committing, and the stranglehold they imposed on the territories they overran. Churchill felt the Germans might yet be useful, and that they might need to be pressed into service against the relentless westward expansion of the Soviet Union, telling Anthony Eden, ‘We mustn’t weaken Germany too much — we may need her against Russia.’ As the Russian advance gained momentum, this concern overwhelmed him. Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, wrote in his diary in September 1944, ‘The advance of the Red Army has taken possession of his mind.’(6)
However, Churchill was soon out of office and again became a lone voice in the wilderness.cclxxi Only three months after VE Day, speaking to the House of Commons as leader of the opposition, Churchill said, ‘It isn’t impossible that a tragedy on a prodigious scale is imposing itself behind the Iron Curtain which presently divides Europe.’(7) Churchill had adopted a term first coined by Joseph Goebbels, who predicted that a Soviet victory would impose an ‘Iron Curtain’ through the heart of Europe. However, no one in the West had the appetite for another war, and particularly not against a glorious ally who had been affectionately named ‘Uncle Joe: the Victor of Stalingrad and Berlin’ by the Western media. The truth about the horrors of Soviet communism — its purges, Gulags, deportations and forced collectivisations — was covered up as part of the propaganda war against Nazi Germany. And after the discovery of the horrors the Nazis had inflicted at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps, and the worldwide media frenzy this caused, any talk of reasonable treatment of Germans increasingly fell on deaf ears.
Where German civilians could expect scant sympathy for their plight, men in uniform, irrespective of the fact that the vast majority had been drafted, could expect none at all. The appalling treatment by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of their respective POWs is well documented. Of the 5.75 million Soviet POWs taken by the Germans, over 58 per cent, 3.3 million, died in captivity, many being starved or worked to death. Over 3 million German soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Russians by the end of the war, and although the official Soviet figures show ‘only’ 460,000 died, with 266,000 of these dying after the war had ended, many never even made it to the camps, dying on long death marches through the sub-zero temperatures of a Russian winter, or on the freight trains that ferried them to the Gulags in the far flung outposts of the Soviet Empire. The Soviets were never as officious at keeping accurate records as the Germans were. Over 2 million German soldiers were reported as ‘missing in action’; the most recent German report on the issue estimated that half died in action and the other half died in Soviet custody. Until recently, German POW deaths at Soviet hands were estimated as having been between 30 to 40 per cent of the overall tota
l, but if one factors in those ‘missing in action’, this suggests that German POW casualties in Soviet hands were closer to the numbers of Soviet POWs who died at the hands of the Nazis.(9) To avoid the fate that lay in store for them at the hands of the Russians, in the last stages of the war many German soldiers sought to break out west to be taken prisoner by the Anglo-Americans. By May 1945, 7.5 million were in Western hands alone. This was confounding as it hugely exceeded the estimated 3 million prisoners General Eisenhower had planned for.cclxxii
In the first year of captivity, the Allies simply could not cope adequately with the vast numbers of German soldiers and Volkssturm they had to incarcerate; many were held in open fields behind barbed wire fences with no food, medicines, hygiene or protection against the elements. The death toll of German POWs in Western Allied hands is still a matter of debate; not all their deaths were registered amidst the chaos of Germany’s final collapse. Many German POWs in Western hands were simply released without formal discharge, and for a period these missing POWs were the subject of heated speculation about the possibility of a much higher death toll. The final death toll of German prisoners taken by the Western Allies in Western Europe is now widely agreed to have been between around 80,000–100,000, which is much lower than some previous estimates, the majority dying in French and American camps.cclxxiii At the time, one of the most vocal critics of the way the Allies were treating German POWs and the Germans as a whole was General George S. Patton, who noted, ‘I’m opposed to sending POWs to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular France) where many will be starved to death… It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defence of the rights of man, and the civil war to abolish slavery, and have now gone back on both principles.’(12) And Ralph F. Keeling of the Chicago Institute for American Economics compiled one of the first reports on post-war Germany, which he went on to publish in 1947, outlining not only the sheer vindictiveness of Allied Occupation policies but also their economic cost to Europe and likely outcomes were they to continue, a number of examples of which are cited in this chapter. Others, including the former US President Herbert Hoover, would sit up and take notice and undertook their own investigations into the chaos that was post-war Germany.
According to the International Red Cross, Britain still held 460,000 German POWs as late as August 1946. A British contractor employing German ‘slaves for skilled work’ stated, ‘When you see how well they do things and how awful our own Ministry of Works (we call the Ministry the OC, short for Organised Chaos) messes things up, it makes you wonder how we ever won the war.’(13) At the same time, the US was exacting forced labour from 284,000 German POWs in the American zone. Large numbers were also being held for forced labour in Yugoslavia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Holland and Poland.(14) During the same period, according to the International Red Cross, France still held 680,000 former German soldiers ‘slaving for her’, 475,000 of whom had been captured by the Americans and turned over to France.cclxxiv (15) The French newspaper, Le Figaro, uncovered the appalling conditions in which their prisoners were held and reported them under the headline, ‘We Should Not Resemble Them’. The article stated:
In certain camps for German prisoners of war… living skeletons may be seen, almost like those in German concentration camps, and deaths from under-nourishment are numerous. We learn that prisoners have been savagely and systematically beaten and that some have been employed in removing mines without protective equipment so that they have been condemned to die sooner or later… People, of course, will point to the Gestapo tortures, the gas chambers and the mountains of human bodies found in the internment camps in Germany. But these horrors should not become the theme of sports competitions in which we endeavour to outdo the Nazis… We have to judge the enemy, but we have a duty not to resemble him.
A young Frenchman, Louis Clair, writing for The Progressive stated:
In a camp in the Sarthe district for 20,000 prisoners, inmates receive 900 calories a day, thus twelve die every day in the hospital. Four to five thousand are unable to work at all any more… I watch those who made you suffer so much, dying of hunger, sleeping on the cold cement floors, in no way protected from rain and wind. I see kids of nineteen, who beg me to give them certificates that they are healthy enough to join the French Foreign Legion… Yes I, who hated them so much, today can only feel pity for them.cclxxv (16)
Large numbers of POWs that the Americans handed over to France were being hired out to French companies, for which the French government collected union wages, an average of 150 Francs per day, per man. The prisoners received ten Francs per day. French authorities took pains to ensure that the men, at least when they were delivered, were in good shape. One report from the time read, ‘They would be lined up and examined, their mouths opened and inspected, their chests thumped, their joints tried, their eyes, ears and teeth looked over, as if they were horses being offered for sale.’ GIs witnessing the spectacle were overheard to remark; ‘Gee, I hope we don’t ever lose a war.’(17)
German POWs were held far longer than necessary, and in contravention of the agreements the Western Allies signed with the Red Cross in 1929. They were a profitable free slave labour force that the Allies were reluctant to let go of. Meek excuses were offered to prolong their detention, including that, as no peace treaty had been signed, there was no German government to return them to. After so many men had been killed, that millions more were held in detention, separated from their families, for years on end, had a terrible effect on the social fabric of German society. Their slavery was not formerly ended until 31st December 1948.(18)
A dispatch from Col T.F. Wessels, the Provost Marshal at US headquarters in Frankfurt from this time, tells a tragic and touching story of the manifest suffering inflicted on the German people by Allied policies emanating from the Morgenthau Plan. His dispatch states:
Hundreds of parcels shipped by German war prisoners in the United States camps to relatives in the Reich via the International Red Cross during the last three years are congesting warehouses here. The Geneva organisation is unable to forward them because no central Red Cross is permitted in Germany… The contents of the packages tell a pitiful story. They contain chiefly wooden toys laboriously made by hand by the prisoners to send to their children.(19)
A member of the Red Cross stated:
It is an iniquitous system and an evil precedent because it is wide open for abuses… German soldiers were not common law convicts — they were drafted to fight in a national army on patriotic grounds and could not refuse military service any more than the Americans could. It is manifestly unjust to buy and sell them for political reasons as the African Negros were a century ago.(20)
THE TEN THOUSAND
The fate of 2 million German soldiers, and up to a million deported civilians, at the hands of the Soviets, remains unknown. The first post that some inmates of the Gulags were allowed to send was a twenty-five-word postcard via the Red Cross in 1950; others had to wait to do even this until after Stalin’s death in 1953.(21) On 4th May 1950 after five years of silence on the issue, the Soviet news agency, TASS, reported that nearly 2 million German POWs had now been returned to Germany, and that only 9,717 sentenced criminals remained, with a further 3,815 court cases pending. This was terrible news for families of the millions of missing German servicemen and civilians who had been waiting for years, hoping against hope that somehow their loved ones had survived, only now to discover that these were all who were left; and for these 13,532 survivors, there appeared to be no prospect for their early release.
Five more years passed before the issue could be raised by West Germany, the new ‘quasi-independent’ state formed out of the occupation zones of Britain, France and the US. The Soviets wanted to establish diplomatic relations with West Germany and cement the division of what remained of the Reich into two permanent German states, one communist and one capitalist; they saw this as being essential to their security interests. But Konrad Adenauer, the
German Chancellor, wanted a quid pro quo; release of the (by then) surviving 9,626 Germans in captivity, and discussions about German unification, which included West Germany’s refusal to recognise the Oder-Neisse as Germany’s eastern border. The Russians would not broach discussions with what was a German client state of the Western Allies that had just been incorporated into the NATO Alliance, and would certainly not allow discussions to take place based on such preconditions. The German delegation flew to Moscow in any case on 8th September 1955.
Although the welcoming of the German delegation took place amid all the usual pomp and circumstance of a visit by the leader of a foreign state, with honour guards and a visit to the Bolshoi theatre, negotiations were extremely tough and threatened to break down in acrimony more than once. Adenauer exuded self-confidence, if not arrogance, in his discussions with his opposite number, Nikita Khrushchev, repeatedly stating, ‘Please return the remaining Germans in captivity home. It is unthinkable to establish normal relations between Germany and Russia as long as this question remains unresolved.’ In one heated exchange, one of the German delegation repeatedly asked, ‘Where are our missing?’ To which Khrushchev from the Soviet side exploded in response, ‘Where are they? They are in the earth! In the earth! Buried under Soviet soil!’(22). When the German delegation specifically asked about German POWs the Russians replied, ‘What POWs? There are only war criminals in Soviet captivity.’ After the first day, negotiations reached an impasse. The following day, when discussions resumed, Adenauer made a statement to Khrushchev that would be unthinkable for any German leader to make to his Russian counterpart today. He said, ‘It is true German troops invaded Russia. It is true that many terrible things occurred. But it is also true that the Russian army, then in response — I have to state — entered Germany and carried out many terrible actions during the war.’ The statement was made more pointed by the Russian interpreter who, perhaps subconsciously, mistranslated ‘terrible actions’ as ‘atrocities’. Khrushchev was outraged and stated that if such terminology was used again all discussions would be ended forthwith. Both sides appeared to be getting nowhere. Over at the Kremlin, with much hard talking and even more vodka drinking, the Russians came up with a suggestion. If the Germans would formally accept the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in writing, then the Russians would give their word — though no public or written statements would be made — that all the remaining Germans in captivity would be returned. Adenauer accepted, no doubt anticipating the political benefits in West Germany of ‘bringing our boys home’. A day later, the American Ambassador in Moscow, Charles Bohlen, stated that the Germans had caved in and sold German unity down the river by formally legalising the permanent division of Germany. The German Foreign Minister and other leading political figures all agreed it was too high a price to pay, accusing the German delegation of being ‘weak’. The leading German broadsheet, Die Zeit, published an article with a banner headline that read, ‘The Freedom of the 10,000 Seals the Fate of Slavery for the Seventeen Million’, referring to the 17 million Germans in the Soviet Zone, the German ‘Democratic’ Republic (GDR).(23)
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