Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  In the West, the formerly Soviet-held German POWs arrived to a tumultuous welcome, with crowds lining their route. Soon after their return, the West German government gave them 6,000 Marks as ‘start-up money’. Comparatively, those POWs who returned to their families in the GDR crossed the border to closed stations and only furtive waves from citizens as their train passed by; and although the East German regime gave them 50 Marks on their return, they were still stigmatised as war criminals. Many families waited at Friedland transit camp near Göttingen in the hope of finally seeing their loved ones again. Friedland was the final terminus for Germans returning to West Germany and was known as the Lager der Tränen (the camp of tears). Many waited in vain for fathers, sons and husbands, yet among the joy of family reunions were the tears and anguish for those who did not see their family members walk out to greet them. The fate of those who did not return remained unknown. By the end of 1955, 9,626 Germans had returned; of these, 2,622 were POWs and 5,588 were surviving deported civilians.cclxxvi (24)

  Chancellor Adenauer was an astute and clever politician, and no doubt his conscience was eased by the calculation that his decision was the most that he could realistically achieve, and that it would prove hugely popular at home. Interestingly, Adenauer, always a Rhinelander first and a German second, played along with the Allied notion of ‘Prussian Nazism’, attributing all of Germany’s ills to Prussian-Nazi militarism; it was easier to blame the dead and lay the ghost of Germany’s dark past to rest than focus on the truth: that more leading Nazis came from the south and the west, including Austria and the Rhineland, than ever came from the Prussian heartlands.(25) There are even those who believe that Adenauer was never particularly interested in German unity, that his interests from the outset were firmly rooted in being the leader of a greater Catholic Rhineland state. His stubborn refusal to entertain Stalin’s proposal in 1952, known as the ‘Stalin note’ — for Germany, like Austria, to become unified, demilitarised and neutral, and not aligned to either the West or the East — prompts one of the greatest ‘what if’s of German post-war history. Had the SPD (Socialist) leader, Kurt Schumacher, been in power rather than Adenauer (CDU Christian Democrat), history may have turned out somewhat differently.cclxxvii (26)

  A FREEBOOTER’S PARADISE

  At the end of the war, and in the years that followed, Germany was a state without a government; a shambles, in absolute chaos, and open to abuse from all and sundry. Across the country as a whole, 11 million DPs (displaced persons), former POWs, slave workers and concentration camp victims rampaged in an orgy of destruction, rape, murder and looting. Housing was at a premium in a nation where tens of millions had been made homeless through bombing and millions more refugees were flooding in from the east. The accommodation shortage was made more acute by the need to billet millions of Allied soldiers, who began to turf out German families en masse. If the Germans were very ‘lucky’, they were allowed to remain in a cellar, or in the attic, and to cook, clean and work for the Allies in their own homes. One US infantryman wrote, ‘Isn’t this the life… everything on the house? Want a car? Take your pick. Need gas? Help yourself. Deutschland kaput! (Germany is busted.)’(1)

  The Allied armies, both individually and collectively, helped themselves to unprecedented amounts of whatever they wanted. The looting of national reserves and national art collections by the Nazis is well documented, but it is often assumed that the Allies were whiter than white when it came to appropriating the wealth and remaining cultural assets of the Reich. However, Germany — without a government, a police force or a currency that was worth anything — became a paradise for black marketeers and boot-leggers. Everything was for sale in an environment where logistics, transportation and the normal mercantile system had completely collapsed. Sex and cigarettes were the new currency, and levels of indiscipline among all the Allied armies skyrocketed during the first year of the occupation.

  The Allied Control Council governing Germany was a shambles. Even before the chill of the Cold War set in, the Council was unable to agree on anything. The Russians were not solely to blame for this, the French were equally obstructive when it came to treating Germany as one cohesive economic unit, both for reasons of economic self-interest and because they were determined to see Germany permanently weakened — if possible broken apart. French leaders essentially wanted to turn the clock back to 1648, when a Kleinstaaterei (patchwork of small German states) existed before German unification; they opposed anything that resembled centralised institutions or that would enable Germany to run as a cohesive entity. The Allied Control Council was so paralysed by these disputes they could not even reach a collective agreement on a common German postage stamp.(2) There was a very long path to walk, from the calamitous policies of the first years of the Allied occupation to the arrival of Marshall Aid and the start of the German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle).cclxxviii The Russians were initially intent on suppressing Germany by stripping her of any useful industrial plants they could lay their hands on and shipping parts back east. The massive Krupps industrial empire, which was concentrated in the Ruhr (British zone), Magdeburg (Soviet zone) and Silesia (Soviet/Polish zone), held juicy morsels such as jet aircraft technology and wind tunnels, which were grabbed by all three Allies. German scientists, especially those working on missile technology, were also a favourite acquisition.

  At Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance in the French sector, the French made off with industrial plant for the production of Zeppelins, Dornier Aircraft and Maybach cars.(3) The Soviets were also after ‘trophies of war’ to fill their museums. Many of the treasures of the lost city of Troy, discovered by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, were shipped to Leningrad. Massive shipments of classical antiquities from Berlin’s museum island, including 7,000 Greek vases, 1,800 statues, and fifty-four canvasses, including works by Goya, Donatello, Ghirlandaio, along with tens of thousands of other objects, were shipped to Mother Russia. In Potsdam, the art collection of Frederick the Great was packed up, along with the contents of his palace of Schloss Rheinsberg, and sent east. From the treasure troves of the ancient cities of Danzig and Dresden, priceless works of art were taken as spoils of war. They included the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, Rembrandt’s Ganymede and a self-portrait, a view of Dresden by Canaletto, Titian’s portrait of a woman in white, and the coin collection of the Order of the Teutonic Knights from the fortress of Marienburg. The Soviets employed 60,000 German POWs to load 90,000 railway trucks full of loot in what must go down in history as one of the greatest robberies of all time. The list of stolen items is almost endless and still has resonance today.(7) Recently, for example, controversy has been sparked over the Russians exhibiting the stolen Merovingian collection, and the rediscovery of the Hardenberg library. The Hermitage museum in St Petersburg (Leningrad) is still said to have boxes of loot from Germany that it has not even opened yet! On the 22nd December 2008, The Herald Tribune estimated there were still over 2.3 million items looted from Germany being held in Russia. Many treasures were also destroyed, not only during the fighting but also in drunken nihilistic bouts of vandalism. At Hermann Goering’s estate at Karinhall, Soviet soldiers used classical statues for shooting practice. Grand estates were raided for booze and trophies, and ancient sarcophagi in family vaults — including the tomb of Frederick the Great — were exhumed, their deceased inhabitants externed in macabre post-apocalyptic scenes so that the dead could be stripped of their jewellery and ornaments.

  Looting by all of the Allied forces was rampant. Whilst Hermann Goering was unquestionably the greatest individual looter of Europe’s treasures since Napoleon, the level of indiscipline within the Allied armies on this issue put the Wehrmacht to shame, and the organised pillaging of Germany by the Russians would have impressed even Napoleon. As one writer has put it, ‘It was not thought of as looting, but simply as helping one’s self to property the Germans had forfeited by being German.’(8)

  In May 1945, W.H. Stoneman, the foreign corr
espondent of the Chicago Daily News, who was attached to the US Third Army, wrote:

  Frontline troops are rough and ready about enemy property. They naturally take what they find if it looks interesting, and because they are in the front lines, nobody says anything. There are no MPs in the front lines. But what frontline troops take is nothing compared to the damage caused by wanton vandalism of some of the following troops. They seem to ruin everything, including the simplest personal belongings of the people in whose houses they are billeted. Today, we have had two more examples of this business, which would bring tears to the eyes of anybody who has appreciation of material values.(9)

  GIs were allowed to send home up 20-kilogramme ‘loot boxes’. No customs declarations were necessary for packages being sent to the US. Soviet troops were allowed 5-kilogramme parcels for soldiers and 16-kilogramme parcels for officers, which only encouraged wholesale looting of churches, public buildings and people’s homes.(10) Two hundred of Germany’s most famous art pieces were packaged up ready to be sent to the US, ostensibly for ‘safe keeping’, until the US press got wind of this thinly-disguised case of state looting; President Truman himself then publicly promised their safe return. The cathedral treasury of the Saxon Ottonian kings at Quedlinburg was not so fortunate; it was ‘liberated’ by an American officer and sent to Texas. The whereabouts of the bulk of this stash remained unknown, until the officer’s death, when his relatives tried to sell it. Despite international agreements on the prevention of trade in stolen artifacts, the US authorities did not intervene to prevent their sale, forcing the German government to intercede and pay 3 million dollars for their safe return.(11)

  Mystery remains over what the Guinness Book of Records still records as the ‘greatest robbery of all time’ when over 2.5 billion dollars’ worth of gold and currency fell into Allied hands at the end of the war. Over 260 million dollars of German Reichsbank reserves, a billion dollars in Reichsmarks, and a hoard of foreign currency, alongside looted SS art treasures, precious stones and gold (often teeth and rings stolen from concentration camp victims), were also discovered at a salt mine in Merkers, near Bad Salzungen.(12) The contents of what was dubbed the ‘Gold Train’ that arrived at Bad Ischgl in Austria, from Budapest, has also inspired numerous Hollywood movies; the train was laden with over 3 million dollars’ worth of gold and jewellery, and all manner of valuables, which Hungarian Jews had used to try and save their community from being sent to the camps at the end of the war. Although the contents of the train fell into the hands of the American forces and was deposited with the ‘Property Control Division of the American Military Government’ in Salzburg, only 30,000 dollars’ worth was ever handed over to the Jewish Agency.(13)

  Senior RAF officers were alleged to be involved in the disposing of valuable antiques from castles of the German nobility, and flying them out of the country by the plane-load in RAF aircraft.(14) However, the industrial scale looting of German stately homes in the British sector only ever became an issue when it was discovered that relatives of the British royal family were involved, and inhabitants from the castles of Kronberg, Geselfeld and Buckeburg took up the subject of their looted wealth directly with their relatives in London.(15) Scotland Yard and the House of Commons had to open investigations into high-level theft, personal enrichment, and the cheating of the British Exchequer and taxpayer through the mis-declaration of the true value of the sale of German equipment and industrial machinery to third parties by members of the British Control Commission in Germany.(16)

  Sections of the Potsdam Agreement read like a ‘robbers’ charter’ in which the Allies allocated to themselves whatever bits of the German economy they wished. One such example states, ‘The Soviet Government makes no claims to the gold captured by the Allied troops in Germany… The total strength of the German surface ships… including those under construction or repair, shall be equally divided equally among the USSR, UK and USA…’ The same principle of the division of the spoils of war was applied to the German merchant marine and the assets of German companies and private individuals overseas.(17) More importantly, considering the future sustenance of the civilian population, the Red Army wrought havoc on the farming industry; farm animals were carted off, machinery destroyed, seed reserves and fodder stocks scattered to the wind, and any available food and drink downed by soldiers as if their last days were upon them.

  In the immediate post-war period, the Allied governments focused all their attentions on reparations rather than rebuilding. In view of the enormous destruction wrought by the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin — in particular — put reparations at the top of his order of business at the Potsdam Conference, and the Russians demanded and received the largest share; they were allowed to take anything they wanted from their own zone, including valuable industrial plants and equipment, plus they were to receive 10 per cent of whatever was left in the Western zones. Russia was to reciprocate with equivalent amounts in ‘food, coal, potash, zinc, timber, clay, petroleum products, and such other commodities as might be agreed upon’.(18) As a Communist, Stalin had scant understanding of the complex workings of market forces, but it did not seem as though any of the Allies had considered the economic and political consequences of dismantling the largest economy in the centre of Europe, and how it would affect the rest of the Continent. Germany had exported coal, steel and manufactured goods, and had imported raw materials, food stuffs and luxury items in enormous quantities; she had been the major trading partner for most of her neighbours for generations; dismantling her position was a ‘beggar thy neighbour’ policy that could only leave Europe in a state of economic collapse.

  ECONOMIC DISMANTLEMENT

  Giles MacDonogh’s book, After the Reich, describes the dislocation caused by the Allied occupation. He explains, ‘Germany was formally divided into zones on 5th June 1945. They were of course clumsily drawn and certain industries became largely unworkable as a result. Spinning was in British Westphalia, but weaving was in Russian Saxony, cameras were made in the American zone, but the optical glass came from the Soviet and the shutters from the French.’(19) The Morgenthau Plan, and the directives that flowed from it, may have been disavowed by Roosevelt in the negative media frenzy that followed its publication, but no other substantive plans were drawn up to replace it and Directive JCS 1067cclxxix lived on until late 1947. The plan stated:

  Reparations shall be effected by the transfer of existing resources and territories e.g. by the transfer of German territory and German private rights in industrial property situated in such territory to invaded countries… by the removal and distribution among devastated countries of industrial plants and equipment…; by forced German labour outside Germany; and by confiscation of all German assets of any character whatsoever outside of Germany.

  This directly contravened Article 46 of the Hague Convention on ‘Military Authority over the Territory of the Hostile State’, which states, ‘Private property cannot be confiscated.’ Furthermore, Article 53 states that any private property taken during an occupation ‘must be restored and compensation fixed when peace is made.’(20) The Allies paid scant regard to international laws when it came to German property, irrespective of whether the Germans in question were Nazis or not. The objective of removing Germany, not only as a military power, but also as a major international economic competitor for Anglo-American markets, became clear early on.cclxxx

  In Britain, the main focus was on capturing Germany’s former export markets. A paper prepared by the Paymaster General in April 1945, for a Cabinet meeting on post-war Germany, stated:

  We shall soon be occupying the most important industrial area in Germany, devastated by the ravages of war. I trust we shall do nothing to encourage the rebuilding of German industry. It should be possible to reach an agreement with the Russians by which they would take the existing German machinery, raw materials and forced labour, while we should take Germany’s export markets.