There is not a country on earth that has done more than Germany to navel gaze, educate and attempt to make restitution for its crimes.ccxcix Yet whilst most modern Germans can find empathy for any group that suffered as a consequence of Nazi aggression, as well as for communities who have become victims of war anywhere on the planet since, the last group they can find empathy for is their fellow Germans, in particular those who lost their eastern homelands, who are often still disparagingly termed ‘Rucksack Germans’. Since the 1970s, the German political left in particular has played its role in crushing any sense of empathy for the Vertriebenen (Victims of the Exodus). What was all the more surprising then was when Otto Schily, one of the left’s leading totems, as Interior Minister (in Gerhardt Schröder’s government), a member of the Green Party and one-time defence lawyer of the leftist terrorist group the Baader-Meinhof/RAF, made such a candid admission when he addressed the assembled members of the Expellees’ Associations at a gathering at the cathedral in Berlin on the 29th May 1999. He said:
It is unfortunately not refutable that in the past, the political left, for a considerable period, turned a blind eye from the crime of the ethnic cleansing, its millions of victims and the suffering they had to endure, be it for reasons of the fear of being accused of revanchism, or in the misguided belief that through our silence and repression of this subject we could more easily come to a resolution with our eastern neighbours. This behaviour was a symbol of our cowardice and timidity. In the meantime, we have learned that only when we have the courage to use plain language and look the truth in the eye can there be a true basis for friendly neighbourly relations.(18)
This is tacit recognition of the fact that attempts at reconciliation on the part of successive German governments, backed with financial restitution, together with never losing an opportunity for the expression of German remorse, have largely failed, and that those who lined up behind the proclamation that ‘German history begins and ends with Auschwitz’ have done untold damage to the Germans’ sense of their own historical identity, and their place in the world.
Germans have come a very long way in recognising and coming to terms with the crimes committed by Nazi Germany, but they have barely begun to come to terms with the consequences of what happened to their nation. The loss of Prussia, Silesia, Eastern Brandenburg, Pomerania and the Sudetenland is an enormous loss for the entire German people; the human, cultural and material cost of which is simply incalculable. As Norman Davies has described, ‘A society unaware of its history is like a person suffering from amnesia. It simply cannot function efficiently.’(19) The author contends that a country that is unaware of its history has no long-term future.
cclxx It was somewhat ironic that the man tasked with the destruction of Germany should himself have a German name and be of German descent. His name literally translated means ‘Iron Beater’, a suitably rugged name for an Allied warrior. When the contents of the Potsdam Declaration (elements of which were inspired by the Morgenthau Plan) became public knowledge and there were those that argued that the terms on the lowering of rations and the standard of living of German civilians should not be adhered to too strictly, Eisenhower responded in a forthright press statement in October 1945, ‘I say let Germany find out what it means to start a war.’(4)
cclxxi Churchill had advocated getting Germany on her feet again quickly after the First World War: ‘In April 1919 he had pronounced Lenin’s atrocities “incomparably more hideous” than the Kaiser’s. He wanted a “strong but peaceful Germany” as a “moral bulwark” against Bolshevism. He told his friend Violet Asquith “Kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”’(8) At Versailles, he had urged mercy towards a weakened and revolutionary Germany now, rather than giving the nation cause for revenge when she recovered. When Hitler broke one provision of the Treaty of Versailles after another Churchill believed that his prophecy had become reality. A vindictive peace had led to a Germany hell-bent on revenge. For all his faults and all his mistakes, no politician of his age had a better perspective of the shifting geopolitical plates and the changing future they heralded.
cclxxii Not all of these 7.5 million were front line soldiers, men in any and all kinds of uniform were rounded up, including clerks, civil servants, Hitler Youth and of course large numbers of Volkssturm (‘Dad’s Army’, the old men who had been put into uniform in the last months of the war). All in all the Western Allies had in their zones 4 million of their own troops, 7.5 million German POWs, 6 million DPs (displaced persons, or former slave labourers shipped to Germany from the occupied countries and the surviving camp victims), as well as the German civilian population to feed, which was being added to daily by the arrival of millions of German refugees from the east. It was a mammoth undertaking.(10)
cclxxiii The lowest number of deaths recorded at less than 1 per cent (about the same figure as Western prisoners who died in German POW camps during the war), were for those German POWs who were interned in Britain and Commonwealth countries, or in the US. Of the 337,000 German POWs who ended up in American captivity in the US, most reported gaining weight, being well fed and treated. That changed after the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps; rations and their treatment rapidly deteriorated. When it came to their repatriation they were not sent back to Germany, as they had expected, but were assigned to Britain and France and other victims of Nazi aggression, as slave labourers, to help rebuild war-damaged areas. Those captured by British forces in Europe and detained in Belgium, were treated appallingly and those captured by US forces in Western Europe after D-Day received the worst treatment by the Anglo-American forces. Among the worst American camps were those at Rheinwiesen, where 557,000 were held under atrocious conditions. Overall it is now estimated that over 40,000 POWs died in American POW camps. The renowned American historian of the Second World War, Stephen Ambrose, stated in an article in Time Magazine in 1989, ‘We as Americans can’t duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of the war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable.’ Among the worst treatment of German POWs by the Western Allies was meted out by the French, where 35,000 German POWs were worked and starved to death in the first year of their captivity alone, where a further 3,000 were maimed and another 2,000 were killed in forced mine-clearing duties. In addition to this, of the 300,000 German POWs in the Balkans (mostly held by the Yugoslavs), the Yugoslavs killed a further 80,000 German POWs, making them statistically the second worst after the Russians. Smaller numbers of POWs held by Czechs and Poles had a similarly terrible fate.(11)
cclxxiv The French were very reluctant to let go of their German ‘workforce’; when put under increasing pressure by the international media, the Red Cross and ultimately by the US to start releasing the POWs the Americans had ‘loaned’ them, they offered the Germans work contracts in 1947 to stay in France.
cclxxv Clair went on to quote conditions at camps in France such as those at Orléans and Langres, where ‘All prisoners in this camp have contracted tuberculosis… Everywhere so many have died recently that the cemetery space was exhausted and another cemetery had to be built.’
cclxxvi There were criminals among them, the most high profile of which was Carl Clauberg, who had carried out sterilisation and medical experiments at Auschwitz. He was arrested immediately upon his arrival and put on trial in West Germany (FRG) as were a number of others in the GDR. The overwhelming majority however were ordinary Germans who had been dragged off as slave labour and endured ten years of unimaginable hell in the Soviet penal system. Many found readjustment into normal civilian and family life impossible, most arrived with either chronic physical and/or mental health problems.(27)
cclxxvii Austria’s happier post-Second World War fate was the result of long and hard negotiations, which culminated in her receiving unified, independent neutrality and her occupiers going home in 1955. Germany would remain occupied and divided until 1990. Both German states remained client states of their alliances. Adenauer would
not have been able to negotiate the establishment of diplomatic ties with Moscow for his state had the US president sided with his Ambassador in Moscow who was against it; luckily for Adenauer if not for Germany, President Eisenhower gave him the green light to proceed.(28) Adenauer was far more interested in anchoring the West German rump into the Western Alliance and maintaining his leadership of this state, than he was in a united Germany. A united Germany would have shifted the balance of power in Germany back east and most likely cost him his position as Chancellor (the Socialist SPD had more support in the East). It was a post Adenauer did not relinquish until he was eighty-seven, after he had been in power for over fourteen years. He remained leader of the CDU until he was ninety.
cclxxviii It wasn’t just the Red Army who took whatever it wanted; the number of rapes by French troops in Freudenstadt, Stuttgart and Valingen ran into the thousands. Even GIs were not immune; at the peak, 501 rapes by American soldiers were reported in the month of May 1945 alone. Unlike the Russians however, the French and Americans did get a grip on their men and the worst offenders were executed.(4) German soldiers were also routinely beaten and stripped of their medals. Iron Crosses were a particular favourite, along with their ceremonial daggers, swords or revolvers, of which they were unceremoniously stripped immediately upon going into captivity. A captain with the British Army, D.L. Henry, recalls, ‘We took their Luger pistols and dress swords, I kept a dress sword and dress dagger… smaller groups (of German soldiers) became particularly vulnerable to being held up by our own men and stripped of their valuables and gold rings.’(5) And David Kenyon Webster of the E Company, 101st Airborne, recalled US soldiers regularly stripped surrendering German troops of medals, binoculars, revolvers, even their canteens, boots and clothes, as souvenirs.(6)
cclxxix (See notes on JCS 1067 at the end of the Zero Hour chapter.)
cclxxx By May 1946, the reparations commission in the American zone had earmarked 144 plants for removal to Russia, of which thirty-five to forty were actually shipped.(22) The Western Allies continued to honour their commitments; the Americans being the most efficient in dismantling and shipping 15 per cent of their zones’ industrial plant to Russia, until they began to wise up and realise there was nothing coming the other way.
cclxxxi Just as after the First World War, France sought to make further territorial gains along her eastern border at Germany’s expense. The Saarland was hived off from Germany and ‘administered’ by France until 1957, when after a referendum the region’s population overwhelmingly voted to reunite with West Germany.
cclxxxii During the war, the US forcibly extracted 16,000 Latin American citizens of German origin, in leading economic or political positions of power, obtaining permission to do so by pressures of various kinds applied from Washington, extraditing them without trial (to the US).(29)
cclxxxiii Moshe Lewin in his book, The Soviet Century, revised figures for Stalin’s purges and collectivisation down but added in figures based on the Soviet censuses for population and factored in the massive fall in births, which were attributable to forced collectivisation and the consequences of Stalin’s purges, which moved the figures up again.(3) Had regular and accurate censuses been taken across the German occupation zones between 1945–50 (before large-scale German emigration was allowed) this would have shown a similar pattern to those discerned by Lewin, due to the unprecedented fall in the number of births and the sky-high child mortality rates.
cclxxxiv The situation was compounded by the coldest winter in living memory in large parts of Europe, the winter of 1946–47. The German civilian intake of calories dropped to as low as an average of 1,000 calories per day, made even more fatal by the lack of heating fuel. By comparison US civilian average calorie intake was 3,300 and UK even with rationing 2,900 per day. Victor Gollancz, the British publisher, reported feeling sickened at seeing the banquets of food he found at British officers’ messes in the British occupation zone, compared to the starving children he saw on Germany’s streets.(4)
cclxxxv Karl Renner, the socialist leader of Austria after the war, like many German Austrians had been pan-German in outlook before the war, no matter what their politics had been. However, after the bombing of Vienna, defeat, Russian invasion with all its accompanying misery of rape, murder and pillage, enthusiasm for Greater Germany waned. The Allies were not initially in agreement as to the fate of Austria, whether to treat her as an ally of Hitler or his first victim. The Russians in particular had difficulties swallowing the fiction of Austria’s victim status. More vociferous elements of Renner’s government began to lap up the idea of this victim status and even felt emboldened enough to ask for reparations from Germany, in response to which it is rumoured they were offered Hitler’s remains! Like Germany, Austria was not allowed to import or trade, increasing the suffering of her people. This embargo however was lifted on Austria in March 1946. The four-power occupation of Vienna and Austria continued until 27th July 1955.
cclxxxvi The former US President Herbert Hoover’s commission established that 2,200 calories were the minimum to maintain health. Someone exercising moderately required in excess of 3,000 calories. Far higher calorie levels were required for those undertaking arduous physical labour of 5,000 upwards.(11) Eventually the generous spirit of the American people, following relentless media reports of the mass starvation of German civilians, resulted in massive aid relief flowing into Germany from CARE, but it came too late for many.
cclxxxvii Senator Albert Hawkes of New Jersey made vigorous appeals to the President to allow private relief packages to be sent to Germany to prevent mass starvation. President Truman replied, ‘There is as yet no possibility of making deliveries of individual packages in Germany because the postal system and the communications and transport systems of Germany are in a state of total collapse.’ But loot packages had no problem flowing the other way! The President went on to say that the Allied and friendly countries came first, ‘Eventually the enemy countries will be given some attention.’(18)
cclxxxviii The Allies’ policies were in any case illegal under article 43 of the 1907 Hague rules of land warfare, which made the feeding of occupied civilians the legal obligation of the occupying powers.
cclxxxix These synthetically-manufactured emotions did not always win through to an educated and sceptical public, as one witness recalled, watching newsreels in wartime Berlin cinemas, ‘Most Berliners didn’t want the war… they remembered how awful the last one had been. So some of the newsreels of victorious Germans bombing innocent foreigners did not go down too well, were watched in complete silence.’ The lady recalling this memory was Edith, a Jewish housemaid, sheltered in wartime Berlin by numerous German families.(1a)
ccxc The Germans lost 202,000 fighting men, killed in all the Western theatres of the war including North Africa, Italy and France (as opposed to 5 million dead, missing and dying in captivity in the Soviet Union).(2) The Western Allies killed over 700,000 German civilians.
ccxci Operation Clarion started on 22nd February 1945, and specifically targeted German civilians for terrorisation, using fighter aircraft to shoot at civilians who ventured into the open on the streets of Germany’s towns and villages.(3)
ccxcii For more detail on the ‘Polish Option’ see the Postscript chapter on ‘Forgotten Silesia’.
ccxciii The Berliners, as ever, maintain a stoical sense of humour about the tragedy that befell their city. When tour groups of old Red Army soldiers are seen in the city, someone will invariably pipe up and say, ‘Did you hear the one about the golden toilet?’
A Russian tour group of Red Army soldiers visits Berlin sixty years after the war and one of them says, ‘I tell you this city was so full of riches the like of which you’ve never seen, I once even took a dump on a golden toilet.’ As they walk down the Unter den Linden, Ivan suddenly says, ‘This is it, it was here, follow me.’ He runs off down an alleyway, hesitates a moment and then standing in front of a doorway of an apartment building rings the bel
l. Four storeys up a grey-haired old lady pops her head out of the window, looks down and then shouts back into the room: ‘Fritz, I don’t believe it, that Ivan who shat in your trombone in 1945 is back!’
ccxciv In November 1932, the Nazis got 33.1 per cent of the vote with a turn-out of 79.9 per cent of those eligible to vote. That meant only one in four Germans actually voted for the Nazis in the last free election. After the war, surveys undertaken by the Allies again showed support for ‘the ideas’ of Nazism to have remained at between a quarter and a third of the population. It is impossible to quantify the true levels of support for the regime from 1933–45, as there were no free elections, but it is also equally nonsensical to assume that the majority of, let alone all, Germans stood foursquare behind Hitler for the ‘ideals’ of Nazism, for war and for genocide.(8)
ccxcv For detailed accounts of Polish plans to annex and ethnically cleanse Germany’s eastern territories long before the war, see Roland Gehrke’s Der polnische Westgedanke, published by the Herder Institute. This book remains the most informed and detailed account of Polish expansionist aims before the Second World War.(9)
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