Table of Contents

Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction

PART I - Chaos
Chapter 1 - The Fall of Vienna
Chapter 2 - Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central Europe in 1945
Liberation from the East
Liberation from the West
Disputed Areas
Werewolves
Illustrious Bones
Chapter 3 - Berlin
The Soviets in the Saddle
Subsistence
The Arrival of the Western Allies
The Honeymoon is Over
Autumn 1945
Spring 1946
Chapter 4 - Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia
Beneš’s Return
Revenge
Prague
Landskron
Brno Death March
Iglau and Kladno
The American Zone
Freudenthal, Freiwaldau and Bilin
Brüx, Saaz, Komotau, Aussig and Tetschen
Theresienstadt
 Pankrác
Torture
Expulsions
Chapter 5 - Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the Prussian
East
Country Life
Working for the Poles
Rural Silesia
Treks
Transit Camps
Home to the Reich

PART II - Allied Zones

Chapter 6 - Life in the Russian Zone
Culture
Chapter 7 - Life in the American Zone
Political Life
Culture
Chapter 8 - Life in the British Zone
British Military Government
The Beginnings of West Germany in the British Zone
Culture
Chapter 9 - Life in the French Zone
Culture
Chapter 10 - Austria’s Zones and Sectors
Vienna
Feeding the Austrians
German Assets
Culture
Soviet Zone
British Zone
Cossacks and Domobranci
American Zone
French Zone
Chapter 11 - Life in All Four Zones
Children
 Arts
The Press
Attitudes to 20 July
Jews in Germany and Austria
The Fate of Jewish DPs

PART III - Crime and Punishment

Chapter 12 - Guilt
How Could We Have Known?
Re-education through Propaganda
The Fragebogen and Denazification
Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork
Punishment by Starvation
Fringsen
Frat
Chapter 13 - Black Market
Cigarettes and CARE Packets
Chapter 14 - Light Fingers
Chapter 15 - Where are our Men?
The Status of German POWs
The American Camps
British Camps
The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian Civilians in Germany
The French Camps
Belgium
The Russian Camps.
Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia
The Return of the Warrior
Chapter 16 - The Trials
Interrogations
Prison Walls
The Trials
Chapter 17 - The Little Fish
Lesser Nuremberg Trials
Elsewhere
The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis
 PART IV - The Road to Freedom
Chapter 18 - Peacemaking in Potsdam
First Contacts between East and West
Chapter 19 - The Great Freeze
The New Ideologists
The South Tyrol
The Russians Come into the Cold
The Great Freeze
Bizonia
A Thaw in the Weather
Nacht und Nebel
A Solution in the East
Chapter 20 - The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic
Recovery
Currency Reform
Crisis in Berlin
Airlift
Austria
The Federal Republic

Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Index
Copyright Page

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 PRAISE FOR AFTER THE REICH
“In After the Reich, Giles MacDonogh, a British author of several books
about German history, chronicles the final weeks of the war and the
occupation that followed. His ambitious mission: to offer a comprehensive,
unsparing account of what happened to the German people when the tables
were turned. MacDonogh works to assemble a massive indictment of the
victors, and his array of detail and individual stories is both impressive and
exhausting.”
—Washington Post Book World

“In his meticulously researched book After the Reich, British-born Giles
MacDonogh, an expert in German history, offers a different view of this
‘noble’ war’s aftermath. With unsparing detail and ample documentation,
he chronicles the events after the victory in Europe in May 1945 to the
Berlin airlift four years later, and exposes the slippery slope of the moral
high ground many of us believed the Allies possessed during those years. . .
. One cannot read After the Reich without thinking of the phrase ‘winning
the war but losing the peace’ as the book draws a line from the occupation
directly to the division of Berlin and the Cold War that gripped much of the
world and informed foreign relations for the next 60 years. Scars across
Europe from the post-World War II era remain, and MacDonogh has picked
the scab at a time of modern war and occupation when, perhaps, the world
most needs to examine an old wound.”
—Boston Globe

“VE Day on May 8, 1945 mocked the subsequent condition of Europe.

As crowds in London, Paris, and New York celebrated the declaration of
peace, much more misery and death lay ahead. Two, perhaps three million
Germans perished in the years that followed: in captivity; from hunger and
casual violence; and above all, during the expulsions of ethnic Germans
from the east, [on] which the western Allies had agreed with the Russians
before hostilities ended. Giles MacDonogh’s book chronicles this saga from
the liberation of Vienna to the 1948 Berlin airlift and 1949 formation of
Konrad Adenauer’s government in Bonn. It makes grimmer reading than
most war stories, because there is little redemptive courage or virtue. Here
is a catalogue of pillage, rape, starvation, inhumanity, and suffering on a
titanic scale. . . . The book brings together many stories that deserve to be
much better known in the West.”
—MAX HASTINGS, Sunday Times (London)

“Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich is important and timely. He has a

profound understanding of Germany, which he communicates in a humane
and engaging style. Though he is sensitive to the sufferings of the Germans
after the war, he never loses sight of the fact that this was an occupation that
the Western powers got right. After the Reich is a remarkable book, with a
rich cast of characters, and it has oblique relevance to our own problems in
the wider world.”
—MICHAEL BURLEIGH, author of The Third Reich: A New History and
Sacred Causes

“Mr. MacDonogh has given readers the history of an era all too often
ignored.”
—Contemporary Review

“The bitter experiences of a defeated Germany have often been

forgotten. MacDonogh’s book, drawing heavily on the often moving
testimony of those who lived through them, brings them brilliantly into the
light.”
—Sunday Times

“Unique and important.”

—Guardian

“Mass deportations, murder, and brutalization of helpless

noncombatants—these are the crimes one readily associates with Hitler’s
minions as they ravaged their way across Europe. But MacDonogh, a
journalist with particular expertise in German history, convincingly
illustrates that this was the fate of millions of German-speaking civilians in
the period from the fall of Vienna to the Soviets to the Berlin airlift. . . .
Given the horrors visited upon Europe by the Nazis, one might be tempted
to consider these atrocities as just retribution. However, MacDonogh’s
eloquent account of the suffering of these people is, one hopes, able to
evoke strong feelings of both revulsion and compassion from most readers.”
—ALA Booklist

“This absorbing study of the Allied occupation of Germany and Austria

from 1945 to 1949 shows that the end of WWII by no means ended the
suffering. A vengeful Red Army visited on German women an ordeal of
mass rape, while looting the Soviet occupation zone of almost everything of
value. . . . The result is a sobering view of how vengeance stained Allied
victory.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but
here historian MacDonogh examines the darker side of the Allied
occupation of defeated Germany. . . . Of interest to students of modern
Europe, complementing W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of
Destruction (2003) and other studies of history from the point of view of
the vanquished.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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For Joseph Maximilian Cornelius MacDonogh
born 8 December 2002

Absumet heres Caecuba dignior

servata centum clavibus et mero
tinget pavimentum superbo,
pontificum potiore cenis.

OceanofPDF.com
 The author and publishers would like to thank the following for
permission to reproduce illustrations: Plates 1, 2, 8, 21, 22 and 29, Herder-
Institut Marburg, Bildarchiv; 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 15, Sudetendeutsches Archiv;
11, 12, 13 and 14, Oberhausmuseum, Passau; 19, Sebastian Cody; 23, 24
and 26, Private Collection; 25, Provost and Fellows of Eton College; 27,
Bob McCreery; 28, Dennis Sewell; 29, Volkswagen AG; 30, akg-
images/Tony Vaccaro. Plates 9 and 10 are from the author’s collection;
plates 16, 17 and 18 are taken from Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch
1944/1945, edited by Eva-Marie Csáky, Franz Matscher and Gerald
Stourzh, and reproduced with permission. Every effort has been made to
clear permissions. If permission has not been granted please contact the
publisher who will include a credit in subsequent printings and editions.

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 Preface
This book is about the experience of the Germans in defeat. It is about
the occupation imposed on them following the criminal campaigns of Adolf
Hitler. To some extent it is a study in resignation, their acceptance of any
form of indignity in the knowledge of the great wrongs perpetrated by the
National Socialist state. Not all of these Germans were involved in these
crimes, by any means, but with few exceptions they recognised that their
suffering was an inevitable result of them. I make no excuses for the crimes
the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible desire for
revenge that they aroused.
I have tried as much as possible to use individual accounts to give the
flavour of the time. Many of these are by women. There is an obvious
reason for this: there were not many men left. Those who survived did so in
a variety of places, from internment camps to Soviet mines. The subject is
so vast that I have had to use a broad brush. Some elements are immensely
well covered, such as the American Zone and the beginnings of the Cold
War. It was the start of the American century and the end of isolation, after
all. Other parts of the story are hardly told: the French occupation, for
example. Because I wished to give the tenor of everyday life at the time, I
have divided the book into four parts: the first looks at the chaos that
followed the end of the war within the lands that were then Germany, and
the punitive stance of the Allies; the second looks at the day-to-day
existence of the Germans and Austrians; the third examines crime and
punishment; and the fourth introduces the chronology and records the major
political developments from Potsdam to the foundation of the two German
republics. The Austrian State Treaty lies outside the scope of this book, as it
did not occur until 1955.
My ‘Germans’ are the German-speaking peoples as they are massed in
central Europe. I have therefore included Austria, which called itself
‘German Austria’ until it was annexed in 1938, and subsequently became
part of the Greater German Reich. I mention the South Tyrol in Italy,
because Austrians saw that as part of their lands, as well as other satellites
in Yugoslavia, for instance. I have also examined the plight of the so-called
‘ethnic’ Germans who were expelled, mostly from Czechoslovakia, but also
from Hungary and Romania. Elsewhere ‘Germany’ is defined by its 1937
borders, and I have referred to towns and villages by the names Germans
would have known. Where possible I have included the Polish or Czech
names too.
Although it was my first intention to study the German-speaking
peoples as they suffered their chastisements on the ground, I soon realised
that it was impossible to make any sense of what was happening without
reference to what was taking place on Mount Olympus: the Allied
command HQs and the political forces behind them. I had to travel de haut
en bas and vice versa - to examine the effect of the occupation on the
Germans, but also to look upstairs at what the Olympians were doing, and
see what they had in store. On the other hand I have always tried to focus
on Germans, not on the Allies.
The book is the fruit of my long acquaintance with both Germany and
Austria. My interest began during a short stay in Cologne in my mid-teens
and a meeting with one of the two modern German novelists whose
writings have most coloured this book. I was a guest of the Böll family and
one afternoon the later Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll came to tea. He
introduced me to Underberg, the viciously powerful bitters, and I can still
feel the wave of fire travelling up from my stomach to my cheeks. We
argued about Irish Republicanism, which he favoured. It wasn’t until much
later that I began to respect his books, and admire the picture of the returned
soldier in those early stories and novels.
I met Ernst Jünger many years later, through my friend the eccentric
hotelier Andreas Kleber, who was then still in possession of his family
hotel, the Kleber Post in Saulgau in Württemberg (incidentally one of the
first venues for the writers’ group Gruppe 47). One night I had dinner with
Jünger there and the two of us spoke to ZDF television about the meaning
of Prussia. Jünger was a writer from the generation before Böll, but outlived
the younger man by decades. He was a mere ninety-seven when I met him
and had another six years to live. Again conversation turned to drink: the
bottle of Pommard he consumed with his wife every night (he had two-
thirds of it, he confessed), and his real love - Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
He became more serious when he complained that he could not wear his
Pour le Mérite medal, which he had won in the Great War, when he had
been left for dead on the field of battle. He was, I think, the last surviving
military holder of the medal. The Allies had swiftly banned the wearing of
decorations, and the Federal Republic has followed suit. War could not be
officially celebrated, and that went for acts of heroism too. I recalled the
First World War memorial in the little park in Berlin-Friedenau where I had
stayed with friends. The inscription had been chipped off: in Germany such
things were taboo, while in Britain war memorials were still placed at the
focal point of any town or hamlet. In Germany there were no more heroes.
The Germans had lost the right to them.
Friends of mine, even published historians, have often told me that the
Germans ‘deserved what they got’ in 1945: it was a just punishment for
their behaviour in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home.
This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to
expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for
in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or
bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men. What I record and
sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed
to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government
ministers; and that when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the
guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.
It is true that some of the old men and a lot of the women had voted for
Hitler, but it should be recalled once again that he never achieved more than
37.4 per cent of the vote in a free election, and in the last one he was down
to 33.1 per cent.1 That meant that, even at his most popular, 62.6 per cent of
the German electorate were unmoved by his programme. Of course, at that
point it did not propose the slaughter of the European Jews (he never made
any public statement on this subject other than dark allusions that have
become easier to read in retrospect); nor did it mention his desire to
confront Soviet Russia and enslave the Slavs; nor did it hint that he would
eventually bring the roof down on the German house and kill a large
number of its inmates. It is possible that he might have secured more votes
that way, but I think not. To make all Germans responsible for the relatively
docile Hitler of 1933 is to apply the Allied weapon of collective guilt.
Collective guilt makes them all responsible: women, old men and children,
even newborn babies - they were German and they could also be
slaughtered or starved to death. Indeed, the Soviet propagandist Ilya
Ehrenburg exhorted the Red Army not to save ‘the child in its mother’s
womb’.2
There were many Russians, Poles and Czechs who were not ashamed to
feel that way in the heady days of liberation. Some of them were as young
as fifteen at the time they joined ad hoc police squads and they may still be
alive today and healthy; but I think few of them would now own up to the
acts of terrible violence they committed.
If children are included in collective guilt, this could be accepted on the
basis that they were going to grow up to be Germans and therefore possibly
Nazis. Then, of course, we need to determine at what age a child becomes a
German, and can be blamed for the crimes of his country. It is clearly not
twenty-one (when many are already in the army), or eighteen (when they
were likely to have been called up, and were often among the bravest and
most ruthless fighters), or sixteen (when they had already been drafted into
anti-aircraft units or, like Günter Grass, about to be forced into the SS), or
indeed younger (Hitler Youth boys as young as twelve distinguished
themselves in the Battle of Berlin). Maybe in an indoctrinated society a cut-
off point for guilt needs to be imposed at seven, and, if so, a date needs to
be fixed when the child had attained that age. Was it 1933 or 1945 (twelve
years after the last free election)?
Of course the real reason why the Allies imposed the idea of collective
guilt was that it was a useful way of depriving the Germans of rights and
national sovereignty. Once their guilt was assumed, they could be punished.
They were to be at the mercy of the Allies until their conquerors had
decided what to do with them, and in the meantime they could not protest
about their treatment.
Then there is the issue of tit-for-tat. The Anglo-Americans wisely
fought shy of exacting reparations because they realised that they would
then have to pay to feed the Germans; and that if they left the Germans an
industrial base they might be able to feed themselves. The tit-for-tat school
of retribution and revenge goes back a long, long way. Historically minded
Germans might blame the French for the Thirty Years War (which caused
bloodshed on a similar scale to the Great War) or for the territorial
ambitions of Louis XIV. More might recall the Napoleonic invasion of
Germany and the occupation of Prussia. Bismarck was famously intractable
in 1871 when the French demanded mercy, saying there was not a tree in
his country that did not bear the scars of the French years. Then the
jackboot was on the other foot. On each occasion there were territorial
cessions and crippling reparations to pay. Someone needed to cry halt. But
the business surfaced again at Versailles in 1919, and there was the same
punitive peace. After the Second World War most wise men understood that
a peace treaty would have been a farce. It was left to what Churchill called
‘our consciences to civilisation’ to determine how the enemy was to be
treated.
Post-war Germany is a problem that has taxed me for years and it is
hard to know now who has helped me with this particular book. Some,
perhaps many of them, are already dead. Some names stand out in my
mind, others were often nameless people I met on my travels, and who
unburdened themselves over a late-night drink, or a second glass at
lunchtime.
In London my friends Karl-Heinz and Angela Bohrer have been
constant in their encouragement over the years. Karl-Heinz was kind
enough to give me an extensive interview on his childhood in post-war
Germany. Angela long ago gave me a copy of her mother Charlotte von der
Schulenburg’s privately printed memoirs. I also learned much from the
writings of her aunt, Tisa von der Schulenburg, and from my meetings with
her. My neighbour in Kentish Town Nick Jacobs, owner of the German-
specialist publisher Libris, was kind enough to lend books and copy
interesting articles. In Oxford I thank Sudhir Hazareesingh; Robert Gildea
for providing me with some suggestions for reading on the French
occupation of Germany; and Blair Worden for explaining the role of Hugh
Trevor-Roper.
Germany provides me with many memories and much assistance, from
my friend Ursula Heinzelmann in Berlin; Gertrud Loewe; Eva Raps in
Wiesbaden; and in the wine country growers told me of their experiences of
the immediate post-war years. The late Prince Franz von Sayn-Wittgenstein
in Munich sent me his privately printed memoirs; Daria Fürstin von Thurn
und Taxis the unpublished memoirs of her uncle Willy; and Christiane von
Maasburg gave me permission to quote from the Magisterarbeit she wrote
on Nikolaus von Maasburg. A kind lady in Hildesheim recounted harrowing
details of the trek she undertook from Pomerania as a child of six; the
retired border guard Captain Schmidt in Coburg told me no less moving
stories of his childhood in Silesia; an anonymous man in Malbork, Poland,
briefly informed me of how he evaded the Polish authorities after the war;
an ethnic German woman in Opolne offered to pray for me, if I gave her ten
marks; a former Danzig policeman I met in Titisee-Neustadt told me about
his time in an American camp in Passau, surrounded by members of the
French Division Charlemagne.
 In Vienna, enormous thanks are due above all to my friends Christopher
Wentworth-Stanley and Sebastian Cody. Christopher found me literature on
post-war Austria and read a part of the manuscript, as did Ambassador
Erwin Matsch. Sebastian was kind enough to read and comment on a
number of chapters. Johannes Popper von Podhragy sent me articles from
his late father’s archive. Dr Wolfgang Mueller provided me with much help
and a useful book list. On Lake Bled, Janez Fajfar showed me the
wonderful mural in the hotel he has run for decades in the palace where Tito
and Stalin fell out in 1947. In Prague I was counselled by Dr Anna Bryson
and in Sofia by my old friend Professor Evgeni Dainov.
I am also grateful to all those who helped locate or donated pictures:
John Aycoth in Washington, Sebastian Cody and Christopher Wentworth-
Stanley in Vienna, Lady Antonia Fraser, Livia Gollancz and Dennis Sewell
in London, Manfred Pranghofer and Rudi Müller of the Oberhaus Museum
in Passau, Bob McCreery, Klaus Mohr of the Sudetendeutsches Archiv in
Munich, Bengt von zur Mühlen of Chronos Films in Berlin, Eva Reinhold-
Weisz of Böhlau Verlag in Vienna, Elisabeth Ruge of the Berlin Verlag in
Berlin, Thomas Urban of the Herder Institut in Marburg, Mrs C. Skinner at
Eton College, Manfred Grieger and Ulrike Gutzmann at Volkswagen in
Vienna.
My thanks are due to the staffs of the British Library and the German
Historical Institute. At John Murray I am grateful to my editor Roland
Philipps, to Caro Westmore and Rowan Yapp, to Douglas Matthews, for
making me yet another exemplary index; and to Peter James, whose
demanding questions sent me back to my books over and over again.
I would also like to thank my family for their patience, especially in the
last days when my body was over-charged with adrenalin and I was able to
think and talk of little else.

Giles MacDonogh
London, October 2006

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 Chronology

February Yalta Conference

1945
30 March Danzig falls
1945
8 April 1945 The Red Army enters Vienna
9 April 1945 Königsberg falls
13 April 1945 Vienna capitulates
2 May 1945 Berlin falls
6 May 1945 Breslau capitulates
7 May 1945 Germany surrenders
23 May 1945 The Dönitz government is arrested
5 June 1945 Germany is divided into zones
9 July 1945 Austrian zones finalised
17 July-2 Potsdam Conference
August 1945
22 July 1945 Western Allies move into Vienna
30 July 1945 First meeting of the Allied Control Council
15 August The end of the Second World War
1945
September London CFM (Conference of Foreign Ministers)
1945
25 November Austrian general election
1945
December Moscow CFM
1945
5 March 1946 Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech
July 1946 Paris CFM
September Paris Peace Conference
1946
6 September Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech
1946
22 October Berlin elections
1946
12 December New York CFM
1946
16 January London CFM
1947
25 February Prussia abolished by Control Council Law 46
1947
March 1947 Moscow CFM
June 1947 Robert Schuman president of the council in France. Paris
CFM. Marshall’s Harvard speech
November London CFM
1947
6-7 December People’s Congress for Unity in East Berlin
1947
17 March Brussels Pact and Prague Coup
1948
17-18 March Second People’s Congress for Unity in East Berlin
1948
20 March Russians leave the Control Council
1948
31 March-2 Little Berlin Blockade
April 1948
April to June London CFM
1948
7 June 1948 London Agreement
17 June 1948 The Russians quit the Kommandatura
24 June 1948 Motorway blocked to Berlin
25 June 1948 Introduction of the D-mark
1 July 1948 Berlin cut off from the West
27 July 1948 London CFM agrees to create a West German state
9 September Reichstag demonstration in Berlin
1948
11-12 May Traffic resumed to Berlin
1949
OceanofPDF.com
 Introduction
In the years 1945 to 1946 Germany was a collection of denouncers, black-marketeers, prisoners,
refugees from justice and tireless whingers. The Allies announced that the Germans needed to be
handled with a rod of iron. It was pure nonsense.
Franz Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge durch die Landschaften meines Lebens, privately printed, Munich 2000, 166

The war had been the bloodiest yet, particularly for civilians. Laying
aside some three million dead German soldiers, by 7 May 1945 at least 1.8
million German civilians had perished and 3.6 million homes had been
destroyed (20 per cent of the total), leaving 7.5 million homeless; and the
bloodshed was going to continue for a lot longer. As many as 16.5 million
Germans were to be driven from their homes. Of these some two and a
quarter million would die during the expulsions from the south and east.1a
It was called die Stunde null (Zero Hour), though it was nothing of the
kind. Germany was wrecked from top to bottom, but memories were still
acute, the country had a past, and a large body of people who had supported
the ancien régime needed to be assessed and rendered harmless. As it was,
like Weimar, many of them were carried over into the new post-Nazi
world.2 There were simply too many of them, and most had lost their faith
in Hitler when his armies were defeated at Stalingrad.
In May 1945 National Socialism was as good as dead. Apart from a few
desperate ideologists, as anxious to save their skins as defend their creed,
the vast majority of Germans had already come to the conclusion that it had
been founded on a terrible fallacy. Defeat was one thing, but, as the
dramatist Carl Zuckmayer pointed out a few years after the end of the
conflict, Germans - even those in the Hitler Youth and the Waffen-SS - were
already conscious of the country’s ‘moral bankruptcy’. The defeated
Germans surprised their conquerors by their docility. They offered next to
no resistance to them. They did what they were told. Of the promised
Werewolves - Nazi guerrillas trained to fight in occupied territory - there
was virtually no sign.
To some extent Germans believed the Allied propaganda: the Russians,
the Americans, the British and the French had come to ‘liberate’ them. The
Allies may have freed the Germans of their National Socialist shackles, but
they did a lot of other things to them first. The novelist and psychiatrist
Alfred Döblin records a conversation he had with a well-brought-up girl in
the Black Forest. ‘We received the Allies with so much joy’, she told
Döblin, ‘as liberators. And in the first week everything made us happy. The
Allies were so lucky with us. Then they started requisitioning rooms, hotels,
flats; we could take nothing with us. That took the wind out of our sails.’
Döblin told her that the war wasn’t over yet. She asked him when it would
be concluded. He said: ‘When the ruins are knocked down and the rubble
cleared away, and when new houses have been built where everyone can
have a home and they can come out of their shelters and sheds. When the
economy has taken off once more, when politics are stable again. Fräulein
E., you are young. You will live to see the peace. Later, when you look back
on the present time, you will be astonished that you were young enough to
believe that it was peace.’3
For some Germans defeat was what they were waiting for: it fulfilled
their most eager hopes. In his dark first novel, Kreuz ohne Liebe, written in
the years immediately following German defeat, Heinrich Böll explores the
feelings of an anti-Nazi who has been fighting in the army from day one.
Christoph Bachem’s brother has been shot. He is a Nazi who repents in the
end and saves Christoph’s life. Christoph’s best friend has spent the war in a
concentration camp, a victim of the same brother. Christoph enjoys a brief
sojourn with his wife, Cornelia, before losing her for good after deserting
and fleeing to the west. He indulges his feelings of utter nihilism. ‘No,’ he
said tiredly, ‘I want no more. It is horrible to have been a soldier in a war
for six years and always to have had to wish that it would be lost; to see the
collapse, and at the same time to know that whatever power succeeds it, and
kicks the daylights out of the corpse of this state, will quite probably be
equally diabolic; the devil possesses all the power in this world, and a
change of power is only a change of rank among devils, that I believe for
certain.’b Bachem has no faith in the Allies either. As he tells Cornelia,
Do you believe, then, that these people who are about to conquer us
with their rubber soles and tins of Spam, will ever understand what we have
suffered? Do you believe they will understand what it feels like to be
showered with their bombs and shells and at the same time to be sullied by
this diabolic state; what it means to be crushed between these two mill-
stones? They simply cannot have suffered as much as us, and since Christ’s
death there has been a hierarchy of suffering in which we will remain the
victors, without the world ever learning or understanding what it was we
felt.4
The Allies may have chosen to style themselves as ‘liberators’ but they
came in hate. In the cases of the Russians, French, Poles and Czechs, this
was understandable. To be occupied is to be violated, even when it is not
coupled with regular atrocities. The atrocities committed by the SS and the
Wehrmacht in Poland and Russia were horrendous, and they were not
lacking in France and Czechoslovakia either. It is hardly surprising that
there were acts of revenge. Any SS man found in the east was liable to be
subjected to the most fabulous torture and death. Such things we may
understand, but surely never condone.
As the Soviets chose to introduce their own brand of ideology along the
way, controlled ‘revolutions’ were carried out too, by the ‘Lublin’ Poles
(those patronised by Moscow rather than the West) and the Czechs. The
middle and upper classes were ruthlessly dispossessed. Their homes were
sequestered, while they themselves were imprisoned, tortured and in many
cases killed. In the Prussian east the old, Junker squirearchy was wiped out
without mercy.
The French worked the hatred out of their systems in a few acts of
grisly violence. Demonstrations of gross brutality were comparatively rare
in the British army. For a few years Germany became another colony,
dealing with the Germans a burden placed on the Christian white man. It
was like India all over again. The Americans, however, saw it differently:
although both the British and the Americans used films and photographs of
the camps to encourage their soldiers to be hard-hearted and to chastise
Germans, it seems to have had more effect on American GIs, who took their
brief that much more seriously - that is, until the politicians decided the
German people were to be wooed. There was a PR war to win now, against
the new enemy, the Soviet Union.
With the exception of the death camps in Poland, which had already
been closed and blown up by the Germans, all the most infamous
concentration camps together with work camps were put back to use by the
Allies: Auschwitz-Birkenau,5 Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald for the
Russians; Dachau for the Americans and Bergen-Belsen for the British, not
to mention the grisly Ebensee in the Salzkammergut, where the Americans
kept 44,000 SS men. This strikes us as disgusting now, but there were
obvious logistical reasons for using them, together with an understandable
temptation to ‘rub the Germans’ noses in their own mess’. Central Europe
was teeming with homeless DPs (displaced persons) who were in the
process of resettlement after ethnic cleansing. Millions of POWs were also
held in camps. In the east they were earmarked for work details and they
needed to be housed. Some were to be allotted a more sinister fate. They
too needed to be put in a secure place until their destiny was decided.
While the fate of the Jews shocked the British and the Americans and -
particularly in the case of the Americans - sharpened their attitudes towards
the conquered nation, the Soviet authorities made little of it. The
anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin, for example, was surprised: ‘no
Russian has so far reproached me for the German persecution of the Jews’.6

When the Allies invaded Germany in the first half of 1945, they came
bearing war aims and plans. They had gone to war because they had been
provoked by the Axis powers. Now the desire was to crush Germany and its
allies. ‘Their effort to emerge victorious included neither an aim to destroy
any segment of the German population nor a plan to save any part of
Germany’s victims,’ one historian has written. ‘The post-war punishment of
perpetrators was largely a consequence of afterthoughts. The liberation of
the survivors was almost entirely a by-product of victory. The Allies could
harmonise with their war effort all sorts of denunciations of the Germans,
but there was no disposition to deviate from military goals for the
deliverance of the Jews. In that sense the destruction of the Jews presented
itself as a problem with which the Allies could not effectively deal.’7
The Allies needed to win first, before they could even think about how
they would clear up the mess. The first war aim was to establish security,
which the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had singularly failed to do. At first
there were only the British. When Churchill came to power in 1940
‘appeasement’ was already a dirty word. ‘Vansittartism’, which saw the
Germans as a tribe of incorrigible louts from the time of Tacitus to the
present day, had become the dominant thinking in governing circles. It was
developed by the diplomat Lord Vansittart, who spent part of the war giving
radio broadcasts which examined different Germans in turn, pointing out
how nasty they all were. Vansittartism inspired historians to search archives
for further evidence of the deep-seated evilness of the Germans. To some
extent it is still alive today.8
The first Vansittartite directive to emerge from Whitehall was ‘absolute
silence’. Officially, at least, Her Majesty’s Government would not talk to
Germans. With time ‘absolute silence’ gave way to ‘unconditional
surrender’. There was to be no negotiated peace this time. The opposite
school was that of the historian E. H. Carr, who thought that a civilised
Germany was merely a question of finding the right man. In Britain’s first
studies for a post-war Germany there was discussion of reparations:
Germany would thereby be deprived of the means to make war. From the
summer of 1943 the task of planning the occupation was handed over to
Clement Attlee, who would become one of the ‘Big Three’ at the Potsdam
Conference9 when the Conservatives lost the July 1945 election.
The Western Allies tended to agree with Robert Vansittart that the
Second War had been largely caused by the perpetrators of the First, and
that meant Prussia. It was a long time before they came to terms with the
idea of Nazism as a non-Prussian movement. The Atlantic Charter of 14
April 1941 had a little flavour of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points
twenty-three years before. An expression of the principles on which the
peace was to be based, it was drawn up by Churchill and amended by
Roosevelt. The American president added the passages condemning
aggressive war and calling for German disarmament.10 It was followed by
the Declaration of the United Nations signed by twenty-six governments on
1 January 1942, an agreement to uphold the Atlantic Charter.
The first meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt to discuss war aims
was held in Newfoundland in August 1941. Churchill was more pragmatic
than Roosevelt; the American leader was much more hostile to the
Germans. He had been partially educated in Germany and he had come
home with strongly held anti-German views. He had no desire to meet a
member of the German resistance who came to see him at the beginning of
the war.11 The two leaders decided that there would be no annexations after
the successful campaign, and no territorial changes would be effected that
did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.
The high-minded principles expressed at that time formed the basis for the
Atlantic Charter - Pax Americana. Future wars would be prevented by
stopping Germany from disturbing the peace. Germany was to be
demilitarised, denazified and made to restore the land it had poached from
its neighbours.12
German and Austrian émigrés played an important role in shaping
American thinking after 1941. Many of them worked in the Research and
Analysis Branch (R & A) of Military Intelligence (OSS). Prominent were
the historians Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert, the politicologues Otto
Kirchheimer, John Herz and Franz Leopold Neumann and the philosopher
Herbert Marcuse. The most important of them was Franz Neumann, the
author of Behemoth: The Structure and Practise of National Socialism.
Neumann argued for a radical reconstruction of Germany to avoid repeats
of Hitler’s coming to power. One key plank to his doctrine was the
establishment of some sort of European Union. The traditional Germany
was to be removed by a social revolution.13 There was only a brief window
when the Western Allies tried to woo the Jews. This corresponded to the
time of the first Nuremberg trials. When East and West fell out for good, the
Allies - the West in particular - were prepared to sweep a good deal under
the carpet in order to groom their new German ally and relieve themselves
of the unpleasant business of censuring its people for their past conduct.
The Allies had nonetheless been influenced in their designs by a
sizeable body of literature penned by exiles. Books by Hermann
Rauschning and Konrad Heiden, and Sebastian Haffner’s Germany - Jekyll
& Hyde, instructed the Allies on how to deal with a post-Nazi Germany.
The bacillus (to borrow a word from the Nazis themselves) had to be wiped
out completely. Haffner wanted to see Germany broken up into small states,
a much more extreme solution than the eventual Federal Republic, which
created autonomous regions. For the British the Prussians were still the
enemy. Churchill, for one, wished to see the south Germans more mildly
treated than the ‘Prussians’ in the north: Nazy tyranny and Prussian
militarism ‘must be absolutely destroyed’.14
By 1943 the Allies knew they were going to win. Stalingrad and the
subsequent collapse of Hitler’s Russian offensive made that abundantly
clear. The Allies could now sit down and decide what they were going to do
with Germany. The military plan was enshrined in Operation Eclipse. In the
winter of 1943 the European Advisory Commission or EAC met to work
out how Germany would be administered. It met again on 18 February
1944, and by this time the cake had been properly portioned out: Soviet
Russia was to receive 40 per cent of Germany’s land mass, 36 per cent of its
population and 33 per cent of its productive capacity.c Britain and America
took the remainder. Likewise Berlin was to be divided in three.
Stalingrad engendered a new mood among the Allies. Both the
Americans and the British were smitten with Stalin and the great progress
he was making. The Americans now saw themselves carving up the world
with the Soviet Union and were worried that the Russians would not
approve of their close relations with the British and their ideologically
unacceptable empire. Churchill was worried - and continued to be worried
even after victory - that the Americans would not stay in Europe and would
leave him to face the Russians across the ideological divide.15 At the
Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the Allies decided that Germany
was to surrender ‘unconditionally’. What that meant Churchill explained to
the House of Commons on 22 February 1944. The Allies would not stain
their ‘victorious army by inhumanity’: ‘unconditional surrender means the
victors have a free hand . . . If we are bound, we are bound by our own
consciences to civilisation.’16 What else that meant was not really clear to
anyone, but it gave Churchill room for manoeuvre.
The American who was urging the greatest retribution against the
Germans was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau - although
the text of his plan was largely written by his assistant Harry Dexter White.d
Morgenthau was ‘touched by atrocities against the Jewish race’.17 His idea
was a ‘peace of punishment’ which involved splitting the country into four
states that would be almost entirely agrarian. Austria was to be cut in two.
The secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, thought this idea of
‘pastoralisation’ unnecessarily harsh, but ‘the President’s vindictiveness
kept the Treasury proposal alive’. At that time Roosevelt was still keen to
see the United States and Soviet Russia rule the world together.18
Germany was to be reformed by the ‘four Ds’: decentralisation,
demilitarisation, denazification and democracy. The US War Department’s
Civil Affairs Division (CAD) was responsible for post-war planning. The
army also liked the Morgenthau Plan as it promoted the sort of chaos that
suited their strategic aims: it was therefore at the heart of the crucial US
Joint Chiefs of Staff document JCS 1067. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had
their moments of flirtation with the draconian plan. In August 1944
Roosevelt for one had lost patience with the Germans. ‘The German people
should be taught their responsibility for the war and for a long time they
should have only soup for breakfast, soup for lunch and soup for dinner.’
His then secretary for mobilisation, James Byrnes, added: ‘It did not sound
like President Roosevelt. He was very angry.’19
In these moments Churchill played along. Roosevelt’s Morgenthau
mood reached its height at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, when he
expressed his approval for an eliminatory ‘Carthaginian Peace’. At the time
he pretended that he only wanted to shore up Britain; to ‘keep Britain from
going into complete bankruptcy at the end of the war’. The Ruhr was going
to give Britain the means to survive.20
At Teheran (28 November to 1 December 1943) Britain agreed to a
change in Poland’s eastern borders. Later Churchill would make a great
play of the fact that he had tried his best for Poland, but he gave himself
away in the House of Commons on 27 February 1945 when he offered
British citizenship to any Poles who did not wish to return to their country.
He knew that they were not to regain their liberty, or even all their territory.
Roosevelt was more cautious about accepting Stalin’s demands for a
ratification of the treaty signed with Hitler: there were elections coming up
and there were lots of Polish Americans who might object. He didn’t like
the idea of Stalin annexing the Baltic States either.21
Roosevelt began to backtrack about the Morgenthau Plan after the
meeting in Quebec. It was not Morgenthau but the cooler Byrnes who
accompanied him to the Yalta Conference from 5 to 11 February 1945. By
that time the idea of splitting Germany up into autonomous regions was no
longer so popular. The US was for a federal system. At the Teheran
Conference the call had been for five pieces; by the time the leaders met in
Moscow, they were down to two. Roosevelt’s vice-president and successor
Harry Truman was not at all keen on the Morgenthau Plan, which he
branded ‘an act of revenge’. ‘My aim is a unified Germany with a
centralised government in Berlin.’ Morgenthau himself was rather miffed.22
Stalin was also a supporter of the Morgenthau Plan, but the noises he
put out to the West altered several times: at Teheran he was in favour of a
divided Germany; at Yalta he wanted unity, but Allied zones of occupation;
at Potsdam he argued for a single economic unit. He feared that the German
beast would rise again and seek revenge if it were not well and truly slain.
He was also keen to satisfy Russian public opinion by granting a ‘day of
judgment’, when the Germans would feel the full weight of their
conquerors’ fury. The West was afraid that he meant ultimately to extend
communism to the Rhine, or even the Atlantic, but if he was to export it to
central and western Europe he would need support on the ground: the
punishment of the Germans could not go on for too long, as he needed to
have them on his side.23 Stalin also feared the West. He believed that Britain
and America were planning to make a separate peace with the Germans and
would use the German army to attack him. It was only when the Americans
fought the bloody campaign in the Ardennes, which ended in January 1945,
that he was satisfied that the West would not sign a separate peace.24
France had yet to join the top table and for the time being French goals
were subtly different. When the EAC met in February, France was still
occupied by the Germans. The French nonetheless drew up a list of war
aims: German surrender, withdrawal from occupied territory, the
destruction of the Wehrmacht, Allied occupation of Germany, punishment
of war criminals and large-scale reparations, particularly in German coal
and coke.25 There was not much new from Clemenceau at Versailles. This
changed a little at the liberation. Now France’s chief concern was its
recognition as a great power. It was quick to field an army to that effect. Its
wartime leader in exile, Charles de Gaulle, wanted to grab what he could
while the going was good.
The Soviets’ aims have been the subject of prolonged discussion, as
their apparent desire to inflict communism on the whole of mainland
Europe was the reason for the Cold War. What documentary evidence there
is has been examined since the end of that war by - among others - Vojtech
Mastny. We know, for example, that the plans were drawn up by a team
composed of Maisky, Litvinov and Voroshilov. Assistant foreign minister
Maisky was responsible for Germany and reparations, while Litvinov
handled peace treaties and Voroshilov was in charge of military planning.
According to Mastny, Stalin was flexible and pragmatic, ‘lest he ask for too
much, or too little’.26 Though there was no master-plan, there were
minimum war aims: Stalin wanted to retain Russia’s western borders as
established by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. That meant hanging on to
Poland east of the Bug, as well as the Baltic States; he wanted no repetition
of the small power blocs that had dominated eastern central European
politics in the 1930s. The Soviet Union was to be the sole military great
power in mainland Europe - this included France and Italy - a policy that
caused friction with Tito, who aspired to that position.
Stalin also wanted to see the establishment of strong communist parties
in all the lands occupied by his armies and was keen for these parties to
play important roles and to be active. On the other hand they were not to
bring about revolutions and they were not to follow the Soviet model. He
told Maurice Thorez, the French communist leader, that he was to find
friends. So far as Germany was concerned, Stalin was open on all issues but
the Polish one: he wanted to compensate the Poles with German land. He
also sought to avoid recreating a German ‘pressure-cooker’ by hemming the
country in with antipathetic neighbours. However, he was anxious not to
breed a lasting desire for revenge. He wanted reparations. He told Maisky
to take as much out of Germany as he could without starving its people.27 It
was obviously also to be deprived of its military might, but Stalin was
indifferent to the form of regime: multi-party democracy or communist
party.
In his relations with the Western Allies, Stalin sought a co-operative
Realpolitik to allow for Germany’s reconstruction. Europe was to be carved
into two interest blocs controlled by the Soviet Union and Britain. Russia
would extend its sphere to include Sweden and Turkey, whereas Britain
would take in all of western Europe to the Rhine as well as Greece. At the
centre would lie a neutral zone made up of Germany, Austria, Italy,
Denmark and Norway. Stalin told German exiles in Moscow that he had
opposed the repackaging of Germany in small states. Even so, he wanted to
exploit central Europe for his arms programme. The Cold War was
definitely not desired by the Soviet leader, although his distrustful and
antagonistic nature may have contributed to worsening relations. The Soviet
consolidation of eastern Europe was in response to the Marshall Plan,
America’s programme of economic aid launched in 1947.28
The reduction of Germany to a number of states was another project
that failed to come to fruition after the First World War. Splitting Germany
up into manageable units had been advocated by Haffner, as already noted.
The French were keen to wrest away the western regions. On 12 August
1944 de Gaulle proposed an indefinite occupation of ‘Rhenania’, expressing
a policy that had been at the heart of French ambitions in central Europe
since the Thirty Years War. He reiterated his determination in January 1946:
‘we hold on to the Rhine’.29 There should be no return to a centralised
Reich. The Russians were less keen on breaking up Germany, and were
unimpressed by de Gaulle’s projects for ‘Rhenania’, despite the French
pandering to them by advocating the cession of German regions east of the
Oder to the Poles and the Russians.30 In October 1944 de Gaulle pushed for
a separate zone of occupation for France. He would achieve ‘Rhenania’ by
hook or by crook. He demanded the Rhineland north of Alsace, the Saar
and the west bank of the Rhine as far as Cologne, as well as the Palatinate,
Baden and all the Hesses. The British pledged him part of their zone.31
De Gaulle rejected Morgenthau’s proposal to ‘pastoralise’ Germany. He
felt it would create an economic crisis, and besides France needed the
produce of German industry. He also had to reckon with a French desire for
revenge. A poll taken early in 1945 showed that 76 per cent of the French
wanted Germany split up; 59 per cent wanted a proportion of all Germans
deported; 80 per cent supported General Leclerc’s proposal to shoot five
Germans for any attack on French army personnel; two-thirds were in
favour of annexing the Saar; 87 per cent thought the Soviets would be able
to punish the Germans properly; while only 9 per cent had any confidence
in the Americans.32 De Gaulle was still wrestling with proposals for massive
changes to the shape of Germany and, if needs be, shifting huge numbers of
Germans. Silesia was to be given to the Poles, while the Rhineland and
Westphalia would be administered by the Allies. Originally he thought that
the fifteen million Germans living in the latter could be moved out, but then
decided that the project would be ‘too grandiose’.33
There was a an element of bella figura too. As Georges Bidault, the
head of the resistance organisation, put it, the French had to play a major
role in the war after the liberation, otherwise ‘the Germans will not look on
them as conquerors’.34 Unfortunately the Americans, Roosevelt in
particular, were unwilling to equip the French army to play that major role.
At the end of 1944, de Gaulle tried his hand in Moscow. Stalin managed to
get de Gaulle to recognise his ‘Lublin’ Poles over the London government
in exile as the price for a Franco-Soviet treaty.
The Allied zones were ratified at Yalta in February 1945. France was
once again excluded. Russia was making strides towards winning the war.
Its troops were poised to cross the Oder while the Western Allies had yet to
cross the Rhine. Churchill argued for including the French among the
victorious powers. Stalin reluctantly agreed. He did not think the French
had pulled their weight and in 1940 they had let the Germans in. France
might have a zone, ‘but only as a kindness and not because she is entitled to
it’.35 Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to Paris to sugar the pill:36 the French
were to have a small zone in the west, carved out of the British and
American portions. An Allied Control Council was to be set up to deal with
questions affecting all four zones. It would meet in Berlin.
In April 1945 the Western Allies had second thoughts. The Americans
had pushed far into Saxony, which had been allotted to the Soviets; and the
British had taken a sizeable chunk of Mecklenburg. Some people were
hoping that the Western Allies would push on, take Berlin and turn on
Soviet Russia. Chief among these was Hitler himself, and his propaganda
minister, Goebbels. As it was, the British and Americans did not turn on
their Russian ally - possibly because Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were so
anxious for them to do so; but they did hang on to their booty for a while,
and Churchill for one was anxious to use it as a counter for Soviet
assurances about their territorial acquisitions. The new US president -
Roosevelt died that April - Harry Truman would not listen, however, and
the Russians moved into Mecklenburg and Saxony without providing
satisfactory assurances about Germany’s borders or the status of Berlin.
Stalin prevaricated for as long as he could so that he might strip Berlin bare
and install his toadies in all the worthwhile positions of power.
The French were still worrying about their own status as their troops
marched into Germany with the Anglo-Americans. A total of 165,000
troops under arms meant a lack of labour at home. Germans would have to
be sent to France to carry out the work in the same way as the French had
been obliged to toil in Germany. De Gaulle spoke of needing two million
Germans, although he never managed that. He was still keen to annex the
Rhineland. As Maurice Couve de Murville, a member of the French
provisional government, put it pathetically, ‘If we do not achieve this we
have lost the war.’37 France’s attitude led to friction, particularly with the
Americans. When French troops occupied Stuttgart - which was meant to
form part of the American Zone as the capital of Württemberg - the
Americans ordered them to leave. De Gaulle refused, saying he would stay
put until the zones were finalised. The French were causing problems in the
Levant too, and in an act of bravura against the Italians (who had taken
back Haute Savoie and Nice during the war) they occupied the French-
speaking Val d’Aosta. The American solution was to offer them some bits
of Baden and Württemberg while keeping the lion’s share for themselves.38
In Berlin on 5 June the Western Allies formally came into the zones and
sectors, but it was not until 26 July, while the Big Three were deliberating
at Potsdam, that the Soviets finally recognised the French Sector of Berlin.
The French were still clamouring for more of Baden and Württemberg.
They had been given a curious territory along Germany’s western borders
with two big lumps sticking out to the east. It was mocked as ‘the
brassière’. e
There were other nations which expected to be in the running for
something at the peace, principally the Poles and the Czechs. They placed
their hopes on the tit-for-tat cessions and annexations that had become a
feature of the twentieth century. The process had started with the population
transfers between the Bulgarians and the Turks in 1913. In that instance
50,000 people had voluntarily switched lands. In 1923 the exchange of
Greeks and Turks was more acrimonious, and the figures more disturbing:
400,000 Turks went east, and 1,300,000 Greeks took their place in what
was to become a mono-racial homeland. In the spring of 1943 Roosevelt
told Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, that the transfer of
Germans from East Prussia would be similar to the business with the Turks
and Greeks. In 1945 Stalin wanted revision of the Treaty of Riga of 1921,
which had created three Baltic states out of Russia’s old Baltic territories.
The expulsion of the Germans from the lands east of the Oder and Neisse
rivers came down to that, and the fact that Roosevelt had always been
prepared to give Stalin what he wanted: Russo-American cooperation was
to become ‘the cornerstone of the new world order’. Britain tagged along in
the hope of hanging on to its great-power status.39
Stalin was not going to relinquish Poland east of the Bug. With a blank
cheque from the Russians as far as their western borders were concerned,
the Poles were keen to recoup as much as they could by acquiring German
territory. The idea of advancing to the Oder - and beyond - went back to the
neo-Piast thinkers, Roman Dmowski and Jan-Ludwig Popławski.40 As
Germany walked into Poland again, the idea became more and more
attractive. Hitler was seen as Prussia, and Prussia needed to be docked.
Berlin was mentioned as a fitting ‘showplace for Prussia’s death’.41 In
London Władysław Pałucki began clamouring for the Oder-Neisse line as
early as 1942. It can have been no surprise when Stalin adopted this view
too, at Yalta.
Poland’s eastern borders, with the Soviet Union, presented a trickier
problem. At Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt were slightly at variance over
the Curzon Line, first proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord
Curzon in 1920. Roosevelt held out for Lvov, a city that was chiefly Polish.
Churchill was prepared to abandon Lvov to the Russians. As regards the
western borders, Stalin made his feelings abundantly clear. When the
Anglo-Americans expressed their doubts about the size of the German
population to be evicted, he stood up and in an impassioned voice declared:
‘I prefer the war should continue a little longer although it costs us blood
and to give Poland compensation in the west at the expense of the Germans
. . . I will maintain and I will ask all friends to support me in this [that] . . . I
am in favour of extending the Polish western frontier to the Neisse river.’ It
was at this point that Churchill uttered his line about stuffing the Polish
goose so full that it died of indigestion. The figure of six million Germans
was conjured up as the number who would be required to move. In private
Churchill told Byrnes that it was more like nine million. 42 Poles would
have to be resettled too, from Lvov and the lands east of the Bug, but the
population was mixed, with the Poles in the towns and owning the big
estates, which was hardly the case in East Prussia, Pomerania or Lower
Silesia.
Edvard Beneš, head of the Czechoslovak government in exile, had taken
a long time to recover from the humiliation of Munich. He had spent seven
years in exile. It was his plan from the beginning to reduce the size of the
minorities in the young republic: Hungarians and Germans in Bohemia and
Moravia. The Germans made up some 23 per cent of the Czechoslovak
population. Other lessons he had learned from the rape of his country were
the need to co-operate with the Poles (who had grabbed the region of
Teschen while the Czechs were prostrate and defenceless), and to secure the
patronage of the Soviet Union. The Poles could be accommodated in
Freistadt (Fryštát) and he would expel two-thirds of the Hungarians in
Slovakia. As for the Germans, his ‘5th Plan’ provided for the cession of
certain border regions with an overwhelmingly German population. That
would relieve him of a third of his Germans; a third more would be
expelled. He would keep the Jews, democrats and socialists.43
Later the plans were adapted. The three cantons he was prepared to cede
to Germany - Jägerndorf, Reichenberg and Karlsbad - grew smaller. The
border adjustment would still leave him with 800,000 Germans. He decided
that some of these would flee, some would be expelled and the rest
‘organised for transfer’. When the peace came he quite forgot about the idea
of losing territory and actually claimed land from Germany, but the Allies
did not respond.44 For much of the war Beneš had clung to the idea of a
reduction in the number of his German subjects. He had the backing of the
British. On 6 July 1942 the war cabinet ruled that the Munich Accords were
invalid and agreed in principle to the idea of a transfer of the German
populations of central and south-east Europe to the German fatherland in
cases where it seemed ‘necessary and desirable’. Ten months later
Roosevelt also came round to this view, although American military
planners thought it could be done more humanely by transferring six small
territories to Germany. Stalin too agreed to the transfer on 12 December
1943 after the Czech ministers Jan Masaryk and Hubert Ripka spoke to the
Soviet ambassador to the exile regimes, Bogomolov.45
Austria

Hitler’s armies went into Austria on 12 March 1938. Very soon the
Germans made the place intolerable for certain groups of people. The Jews
were an obvious target, and the Nazis introduced a regimen that was far
more extreme than that current in Germany - at least until November that
year, when Berlin turned up the heat with the ‘Reichskristallnacht’, when
mobs throughout Germany smashed Jewish properties. Adolf Eichmann
was placed in charge of antisemitic activities in Austria and went about his
business with all the diligence that Himmler expected of him. But it was not
just Jews: in two great trainloads the ‘Prominenten’ were also shipped out
to Dachau. These were the members of the governing elite who had banned
the NSDAP or Nazi Party and thrown its members into Austria’s own
concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria. They had executed a
few of these Nazis for their part in the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss four
years before. It was time for Nazi revenge. The fates of the Austrian elite
are in part recounted in Bruno Heilig’s book Men Crucified: ministers, civil
servants and magistrates, most of them of an age when they were no longer
capable of hard labour, were physically broken and beaten to death. Some
of them went on to Buchenwald, others to Mauthausen. Those who survived
returned as martyrs. No one begrudged them that title.
Despite the treatment of their leading politicians, many on the right and
left in Austria might have been prepared to back Hitler. Perhaps 10 per cent
of the country’s adult citizens joined the NSDAP, but a certain Teutonic
heavy-handedness failed to win them all the friends they might. Austrian
industry was appropriated by Göring’s Four Year Plan and increasing
numbers of Germans swanned about their newly acquired territory all the
while, treating Austrians with a disdain they have yet to forget. Worse,
Austrians tended to be despatched to the toughest theatres of war. For the
Allies, however, Austria was now part of Greater Germany and they were at
war. Exiles tried to guide their hands, and plead that the Austrian case was
different. Many Allied leaders found that hard to take, but for political
reasons they evolved the idea of Austria as a victim. Although no one had
seriously considered granting it a government in exile, the Allies had to
entertain the idea that Austria had an exile community that wished to meet
and discuss the country’s future, and there might be added benefits if their
discussions caused problems for the German administration.
There were five possible solutions for a post-war Austria. The first was
a simple reversion to the independent state it had been between 1918 and
1938. The second proposed leaving Austria in bed with Germany. A third
involved making some sort of Danube Confederation based loosely on the
most positive side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and a fourth was that
favoured by the Morgenthau plan: a separation of Austria’s provinces with
perhaps the Vorarlberg going to Switzerland, the Tyrol and Salzburg to
Bavariaf (which would then be detached from Germany) and the eastern
parts attached to a federation of Danubian lands. A fifth possibility was
simply to roll up Austria and Bavaria together to make a Catholic south-
German state.46
The Allies probably felt that a little confusion would do some good - it
did not pay to let the Austrians feel they were completely off the hook.
They would have to labour to show their love before they could receive the
prize of renewed independence. This ambivalence was enshrined in the
Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943: ‘Austria, which was the first
victim of Nazi aggression, must be liberated from German domination.’47
The Anschluss, the annexation of 15 March 1938, was declared null and
void: ‘Austria is nonetheless reminded that it bears a responsibility from
which it may not escape, for having participated in the war on the side of
Hitler’s Germany and that, in the final reckoning, the role that it plays in its
own liberation will inevitably be taken into account.’48 The Austrians were
not so much to be exonerated from the roles they had played in the
‘Movement’ and war as encouraged to rebel against the Germans.
The pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Otto von Habsburg,
blamed the Russians for the mealy-mouthed nature of the Declaration, but it
is likely that Edvard Beneš had a hand in it too.49 The Declaration also
rejected the idea of a Danubian Federation and put paid to the hopes of a
Habsburg restoration. This was Stalin’s work. Otto himself had left for
America in 1940, leaving his brother Robert in London to campaign for the
cause there. Otto’s name figured on a Nazi hit-list. He went first to New
York and then to Quebec. Naturally he was hoping that the Allies would
look favourably on a Habsburg restoration, but there was little chance of
that. He found certain figures remarkably unsympathetic in their attitude to
Austria. One of these was Churchill’s foreign secretary Eden, who had
apparently defined the country as ‘five Habsburgs and a hundred Jews’.
Otto wanted to change Roosevelt’s mind. It will be recalled that the
president was smitten with the Morgenthau Plan at Quebec. Otto claims that
he was able to bring both Churchill and Roosevelt round.50
On 25 October 1944 the Soviets asked for an acceleration of the
Austrian solution. They wanted to stipulate their future zone. At that point
the French were neither particularly interested in Austria nor included in the
handing out of the spoils. It was only later, when they located some of their
own industrial base in Austria, that they started to clamour for reparations
along with the Russians.51 As far as territory was concerned, the Soviets
plumped for Burgenland and the eastern half of Lower Austria. They also
wanted to keep the eastern half of Styria together with Graz, where the
main industries were located - many of them outhoused from Germany at a
safe distance from Anglo-American bombers. The British would have to be
satisfied with the western half and Carinthia; the Americans would have the
rest. The Viennese Sachertorte would be cut in three, but Russia would take
the inner-city 1st Bezirk or district, the 3rd Bezirk and the northern parts
that abutted the Danube. Even then they intended to control traffic on the
river. The other slices would go to the Anglo-Americans. 52
Meanwhile Austrian exile groups met to discuss the future. In Britain
there were as many as 30,000, of whom 90 per cent were Jews.53 The
Austrian Centre was based in Westbourne Terrace in Paddington and had its
own restaurant, library and reading room, as well as a newspaper,
Zeitspiegel. Before the full horror was known and even as late as April
1945, there was an active campaign among exiles to make the Jews return.
That month appeared the pamphlet Vom Ghetto zur Freiheit. Die Zukunft
der Juden im befreiten Österreich (From the Ghetto to Freedom: The Future
of the Jews in a Liberated Austria). It called for the punishment of those
who had committed crimes against the Jews and the restitution of their
property. 54
Austrian exile groups began to plan for a non-Nazi, independent Austria
even before the war started. In June 1939 a discussion group had called
itself ‘Das kommende Österreich’ (The Coming Austria). It was not just
among the British exiles that such discussions took place. One of the most
influential figures was Ernst Fischer, who led the Austrian Communist
Group in Moscow. In 1944 he published The Rebirth of my Country in
which he advocated the complete economic divorce of Austria and
Germany after the war and suggested alliances with Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia.55 With the establishment of the provisional government in the
autumn of 1945 he was made minister of education.56
F. C. West, president of the Austrian Centre, brought up the question
that loomed largest in the minds of most exiles with his lecture ‘Zurück
oder nicht zurück - das ist keine Frage’ (To return or not to return, that is
not the question). Most Jews had reservations, and these were positively
encouraged by Zionist groups. Willi Scholz (who was not a Jew) was at
pains to reassure Jews that not only would the new Austria welcome them,
they were needed there - ‘Österreichische Juden, geht nach Österreich
zurück!’ (Austrian Jews, go back to Austria!).57 In 1941 the Free Austrian
Movement (FAM - it became the FAWM, or Free Austrian World
Movement, in March 1944) was founded as the political voice of the
Centre. It was dominated by the communists, and very soon the monarchists
and even the social democrats withdrew their support. 58
Young Austria with its slogan ‘Jugend voran’ (youth forward) was a
dynamic movement for those under twenty-five. At its height it had a
thousand members, and a hundred of these fought in the British armed
forces.59 Jews, social democrats and communists signed up. The
communists had been declared illegal by Dollfuss in February 1934 and had
been driven into exile even before the Jews. Austria’s biggest party before
the Anschluss was the Christlichsozialen or Christian Socialists, but these
were as good as unrepresented in the exile colony. They were often
antisemites, and would have been put off by the heavy Jewish presence.
Monarchists, supporting the candidature of Otto von Habsburg, were not
without influence, but this bore fruit with the Gentiles, not with the Jews.60
 Otto von Habsburg had tried to raise an Austrian battalion in America in
1942, and the recreation of a post-war independent Austria gave
monarchists leave to hope.61 Legitimists such as Baron Leopold Popper von
Podhragy were pushing for a National Committee and an Austrian fighting
force. The legitimists were often noblemen (nobles figured largely in the
early Austrian resistance groups) and were among the first to fall out with
the Nazis, who treated them with disdain, and vice versa. The British
Foreign Office was lukewarm about the creation of an Austrian force.
Eden’s response was merely to stress that German influence was to be
removed; besides he did not think that he had the proper cadre among the
30,000 Austrians in London.62 A year later the Foreign Office was able to
invoke bad experiences in America as a reason for not raising such a
battalion. A document dated 15 March 1943 shows how divided Austrians
in London were.63 64
The leaders of Austrian Social Democracy, Viktor Adler and Otto
Bauer, had also fled from Paris to New York. At first the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact had thrown a predictable spanner into the works, but the
position altered after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Russo-
British Alliance, and it was once again respectable to be left-wing. The
Social Democrats had traditionally taken the line that Austria was not
capable of a wholly independent existence and had tarred their image by
supporting union with Germany. Initially Young Austria stood for the
liberation of ‘Germany’: ‘Ohne ein freies demokratisches Deutschland -
kein unabhängiges Österreich’ (Without a free, democratic Germany, no
independent Austria). They encouraged a worldwide levée-en-masse to
overthrow the Nazis with violence. The most important thing was to make
the British authorities recognise their right to fight - their right to possess,
like the Poles and the Czechs, their own fighting units.65 Communists were
powerful behind the scenes in almost all the British-based organisations.
Their plan was that Soviet Russia would form the basis of a system of
security that would prevent further warfare and protect the smaller states of
south-eastern Europe from German aggression.66 Towards the end of the
war there were sheaves of publications describing the political form of the
new Austria, though in order not to frighten the monarchists - who had been
liable to Nazi persecution from 1942 - the word ‘republic’ was avoided .67
They had no desire to fall out until Hitler was beaten.
 The communist journalist Alfred Klahr was a leading theorist of a new
Austria divorced from Germany. Klahr advocated a rewriting of recent
Austrian history to emphasise unity and resistance to Hitler. It was
necessary to tread gently when it came to the Ständesstaat or Corporate
State, which replaced democratic government in Austria in 1934, to limit
the traitors to a mere handful of high-ranking collaborators. Germany could
not sell itself as a victim - it did not possess this card.68 One of the tactics
used was to describe Austria as a culturally separate entity to Germany,
which meant concentrating on writers who were anti-German, like
Grillparzer. Music was also big: Austria could claim to be more
international, that musicians from all over the world had lived in Vienna;
that the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the setting of the Ode to Joy
was a Viennese incarnation. The nationalistic, antisemitic Wagner was
billed as a purely German phenomenon.
On 19 February 1942 Churchill promised to free Austria from the
‘Prussian yoke’. He had actually overstepped the mark, and his speech was
disowned by the Foreign Office, but it had an encouraging effect in exile
circles. Finally, the independence of Austria did become a war aim, as
recognised by the colonial secretary Lord Cranborne in the Lords in May
1942 and Eden in the Commons in September. This line of argument was
eagerly lapped up by the Austrian exiles, who were more anxious than ever
to put the blame on the ‘Piefkes’, ‘Preussen’ or ‘Nazipreussen’. The
Austrians who occupied positions of power, they argued, were denatured
opportunists: true Austrians had nothing to do with the regime.69 Any small
act of resistance or non-cooperation was held up in triumph. When they
returned to Austria after the war, they had to admit that they had been living
in cloud-cuckoo land.70
In their hearts and minds, Foreign Office officials remained
unconvinced by the exiles. In November 1942 Roger Makins spoke in his
master’s voice and cast doubt on the importance of a group principally
composed of Jews and royalists, while others pointed to the communist
influence and were sceptical as to whether Austrians would accept its
decisions. The presence of so many Jews on the committee could only
damage its credibility.71 On the other hand some progress was made through
their champions in Britain like Sir Geoffrey Mander, and there were voices
raised in Parliament for the creation of Austrian fighting units in the Allied
armies.72
 Austrian exiles had the French example before their eyes after June
1944. The French were rapidly accorded the right to organise their country
behind the lines and escape from the threat of military occupation and
government. The exiles were deluding themselves in making this
comparison, but this did not prevent their dreaming.
The non-political Jews, who made up the bulk of the exiles, were less
likely to be convinced of Austria’s lamb-like innocence, because many of
them had witnessed the barbarity of the Austrian Gentile population in
1938. They were also unconvinced by attempts to ‘relativise’ the atrocities
perpetrated against the Jews by including them in a host of other brutalities
as a way of focusing on the general monstrosity of the Germans. They were
also doubtful of the Austrian Centre’s picture of the Jews as loyal Austrians.
Their ideal would have been a popular uprising against the Nazis. At the
very end they were successful and there was a small-scale mutiny when the
Russians loomed at the border. Hitler sent the Austrian-born Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, head of the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of
the SS, to put it down, and three officers were publicly hanged in
Floridsdorf.73
Soviet Russia clung to the idea of an independent Austria within its
1938 borders, but the power in east central Europe was to be
Czechoslovakia. Austria was to be ‘neutralised’ and also to be refused any
form of confederation with its neighbours, as the Russians feared a revival
of a Catholic or Austro-Hungarian empire. Nor were there to be any
concealed unions, of the NATO or EU sort; in return Austria was not to be
brought into the communist camp. The zones were also mapped out: the
Soviets wanted the industry (particularly the arms industry) in the east. The
east also had the railway hubs for their planned satellites in Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.74
The Allies connived at the ‘myth’ of Austria’s victimhood,75 but this
was largely dictated by their own convenience. For the Jews the ‘liberation’
was the moment of truth. The Marxists had failed to come to terms with the
genocide because such things had nothing to do with class struggle. When
they were faced with the facts, they were speechless. The Anschluss and the
war nonetheless strengthened the Austrian sense of independence. In the
1930s this had been at best half formed. Now all Austrians accepted the
idea of the independent state, and rejected the notion of Grossdeutschland.
It is an attitude which colours Austrian minds to this day, to the degree that
the flirtation with Germany that started with the pan-German antisemites
like Schönerer and Lueger and reached its height between the wars is all but
forgotten. It was being put away in the recesses of the Austrian collective
memory as the Red Army mustered at the gates of Vienna.

OceanofPDF.com
 PART I
Chaos
OceanofPDF.com
 1
The Fall of Vienna
14 April 1945 A shocking view from the Graben:
the marvellous high-pitched roof of the cathedral with
its eagle-motif has disappeared and the lefthand
incomplete tower has been burned out. The finials and
gables appear miserable and black against the heavens.
Only the tower is still standing, the symbol of my
beloved city.
Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch 1944/1945, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar 1992, 160

As the Russians approached the former Habsburg capital the Austrian

Centre and the BBC together tried to dispel the fears of the population. The
Austrian Centre even went so far as to stress the Red Army’s reputation for
good behaviour. Marching from the Hungarian town of Koszeg the 3rd
Ukrainian Front under Marshal Tolbukhin crossed the frontier on Maundy
Thursday, 29 March 1945, at Klostermarienberg in South Burgenland, and
moved towards Rechnitz. Graz lay at the end of the Raab Valley, but the
Red Army predictably wheeled right towards Vienna. On 1 April the battle
for Wiener Neustadt began. After a fight lasting a week, the capital ceded
and the Red Army entered Hitler’s ‘Fortress Vienna’ on 8 April. The
Austrian Centre was jubilant: Zeitspiegel described the brotherly greeting
given to the conquerors, with both the Red flag and the red, white and red
flag of Austria on prominent display. Once more they were out of touch
with reality.
The women of Vienna were not so enthusiastic, to say the least. Joseph
Goebbels had made it abundantly clear what would happen to them. Some
people dismissed his warnings as ‘terror propaganda’, but it was sadly true
that the Red Army raped wherever they went. They even raped Russians
and Ukrainians. The worst and most aggravated rapes were perpetrated
against the women of the enemy - first the Hungarians, then the Germans.
Bulgarian women, however, were spared some of the worst excesses,
possibly because Russians and Bulgarians generally feel empathy for one
another. The Red Army raped Yugoslav women too, although they were on
the same side. It was not likely that they would spare the Viennese just
because the Moscow Declaration had made them ‘victims of fascism’.
There has been much discussion of why the Russians raped and
murdered so many women on their march to the River Elbe. They were
certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists who saw
rape as an expression of hatred, and therefore good for morale. Soviet
soldiers had also been shown pictures of the Nazi victims of Majdenek,
where the dead had simply been identified as ‘Soviet citizens’. The
Germans had been in Russia; they had burned their towns and villages and
posed as a Herrenvolk - a nation of lords.g The Slavs were racially inferior,
no better than helots.h In the circumstances rape must have seemed an
irresistible form of vengeance against these ‘superior’ women and the best
way to humiliate them and their menfolk. The worst offenders, it seems,
were soldiers from Belorussia and the Ukraine - areas invaded by the
Germans. The older soldiers and those having higher education were the
least likely to rape. The higher the standard of living the Russian soldiers
encountered, the more they raped. They were disgusted by the plenty, the
comfortable houses and the well-stocked larders they found, which stood in
such contrast to the poverty they knew from home.1 The manor house or
castle was particularly prone.
Commanders generally turned a blind eye to the rapes. When the
Ukrainian Jewish intellectual Lev Kopelev tried to intervene to save a
German woman from a group of rampaging soldiers, he was accused of
‘bourgeois humanism’ and imprisoned for nine years.2 It was only much
later that any punishment was handed out. The reason why Russian generals
accepted such appalling lack of discipline was that rape was condoned at
the very top. Stalin told the Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas,
‘Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres
through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some
trifle?’3 Added to the semi-official sanction, the Red Army was sex-starved.
Its soldiers had been fighting for four years, and in most cases they had not
received compassionate leave. The raping became worse again after 23 June
1945, when many female soldiers were sent back to Russia. It became a part
of everyday life in the remote villages of Burgenland and Lower Austria
where it continued until the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947.4
The Germans had been pulling out from the 6 April 1945, and they took
most of the police with them. They had been made up of elderly soldiers
anyhow, mostly unfit for service at the front. The real Viennese police had
been incorporated into the SS and sent to Russia. The departure of the
ersatz police exposed the city to even greater dangers when the looting
started. Later an auxiliary squad was formed by the Russians and issued
with armbands, but by then the damage had been done. It was not only the
police who had vanished: the prudent Nazis had also quit the city, leaving
their homes at the mercy of the plunderers.5
The Red Army appeared in the wake of the retreating Germans. The
Viennese were in the dark. The wireless had ceased to function and the last
newspapers appeared on 7 April - some were printed on the 8th, but they
were not distributed. There was then a total news breakdown until
communications were restored with the issue of the communist-backed
Neues Österreich on the 15th. All that remained was Mundfunk - a play on
Rundfunk or radio station, but meaning word of mouth, or gossip.6 ‘On the
7th the Red Army occupied the giant Anker bakery in Favoriten, cutting off
the city from its main source of bread. For the next ten days the Viennese
were reduced to 250 grams of bread each daily. It got worse: citizens had to
make do with 500 grams to a kilo of bread a week: ‘A slice of bread was a
considerate present.’7
On 8 April there was a rumour that the Russians had reached the
Zentralfriedhof or main cemetery. On that day the economist Eugen
Margarétha was still living off his well-stocked larder: he had a slap-up
Sunday lunch of ‘wonderful’ potato soup with vegetables and meat, a plain
pork schnitzel, which was a little too salty, and risipisi,i which his wife had
not salted, to compensate for the pork. There was a cream dessert and
Turkish coffee. After that he smoked a Swiss cheroot.8 Margarétha lived in
the Bossigasse in St Veit in the plush suburb of Hietzing. There were still
SS units operating in the centre. The next day he noted a Russian scratching
at the door opposite. Then he heard the sound of rifle butts hammering on
his own door. The Czech-speaking housekeeper Franek was sent to deal
with them. A whole troop of Russians came in carrying their heavy machine
guns. They disappeared into the cellar and then went upstairs, where they
took up positions, firing at the SS from the windows.
Margarétha noted in his diary that they were ‘nice chaps’. A Russian
NCO gave Franek six cigars after he had assured him the householders
were not ‘Germanski’ but Czechs. One of the soldiers took a fancy to
Franek’s watch. The housekeeper pleaded that he was a poor man and had
but one watch. Another soldier told his comrade to give it back. Most of the
shooting came from the Russians. There was just a little desultory gunfire
from the SS. When the Russians departed, Margarétha went upstairs to find
they had broken around twenty window panes. They had helped themselves
to food and cigarettes. They had also wrecked Margarétha’s precious
typewriter, and broken the wireless set and the bathroom scales. In one
bedroom the mirror on the dressing table had been smashed with a bayonet.
They had cut the wires on the telephone and smashed it. It hadn’t
functioned for six weeks. They had taken two bicycles. ‘All in all the
soldiers were not wild but disciplined . . . Really many worse things might
have occurred.’ Later he was able to replace some of the broken panes with
the glass from his picture collection, and his ‘remembrance certificate’ from
the Great War.9 Elsewhere the first wave of Red Army troops considerately
warned Austrian civilians about the occupation troops that followed. They
advised them to bury their valuables.10
The Viennese received the Red Army with a degree of innocence. It was
to be their first experience of occupation since Napoleon’s time. In the
Josefstadt the Russians were ‘joyfully and amicably’ greeted ‘by women
and girls who sometimes kissed or embraced them, a warm-heartedness that
was often misunderstood’.11 Josef Schöner had been a member of Austria’s
diplomatic corps before March 1939, but his distaste for the Nazis led to his
retirement. The new broom retained very few of the Austrian elite: in the
Foreign Office only 10 per cent of the officials continued to serve under the
Nazis. Schöner survived by working for his parents, who had a number of
restaurants and cafés in the city. They had made the mistake of applying for
Nazi Party membership. Schöner did not. After the war he was ambassador
to Bonn and finally London.
On 10 April Schöner noticed a brace of Russians wearing fur hats in the
Siebensterngasse in the 7th Bezirk. The German army was withdrawing
from the centre. He watched the behaviour of the locals. They tried to speak
to the new arrivals using any Slavic language they knew, generally Czech,
and offered them cigarettes, which the Russians refused. ‘The longing for
peace is so widespread that no one believes there will be prolonged
resistance in Vienna.’12 Schöner was struck by the appearance of the
Russians. Many of them carried swords, but none seemed to possess a
scabbard. The Viennese were remarkably at ease: ‘everywhere gay, warm
faces, there is not a hint of fear or mourning’. The Russians asked if the
houses in the street concealed any soldiers or Germans. The Viennese
replied with the pride of the liberated: no, just Austrians.13
As soon as it became clear that the German army had abandoned an
area, looting would begin. Margarétha thought it had started in Penzing, in
the 14th Bezirk, but it spread to neighbouring Hietzing where the ‘mob’
emptied the grocer Meinl and the fashion shops Wallace and Oser. A
neighbour, the engineer Kienast, complained they had also stolen his gold
watch, and given him an inferior one in return.14 There were relatively few
Austrian men about: those aged between twenty and fifty were generally
away and there were huge numbers of foreign workers in the city who had
been drafted in by Hitler’s labour organisation to allow all good Germans to
go to war. They were suspected of playing a major role in the looting. In
Favoriten or Floridsdorf, on the north bank of the Danube, you were more
likely to hear French or Greek than German. After 9 April the foreign
workers were armed, and sometimes identifiable by armbands. The
communist Franz Honner estimated there were as many as 700,000 of these
in Vienna in April 1945 and that the bulk of the looting had been carried out
by them, but he did not discount the Viennese population. Together with
Austrian natives the foreigners formed the ‘mob’ that performed ‘various
acts of violence’. Sometimes they would strip the premises clean, at other
times they were more selective. A building used by the Hitler Youth was
denuded even of its decorations. The veteran socialist politician Adolf
Schärf j was anxious to point out that the looters were often men of good
standing, ‘even people who prided themselves on their titles of nobility in
their everyday life’.15
Schöner noticed it first at the department store Herzmansky in the
Mariahilferstrasse. He thought the Viennese more reprehensible. A few
foreign workers joined in. They had already been active in sacking the
outlying suburbs.16 Schöner watched sick at heart as bales of cloth, suits and
women’s dresses came flying out of the building. One man was not in the
slightest embarrassed to try on a stolen suit in a doorway. The day before
the same mob had attacked the food shops on the Gürtel, the ‘belt’ road
surrounding the inner boroughs or Bezirke. ‘So it wasn’t the Russians, but
the dear Viennese themselves.’17 A boon to the Russians and the looters
were the big wine houses in Döbling and Heiligenstadt. The Russians
emptied the great tun in Klosterneuburg and then sprayed it with machine-
gun fire when it would provide them with no more solace.18 People were
seen carrying off wine from Heiligenstadt in large vessels.19
Schärf had been in hospital when the city fell. The patients had been
transferred to the hospital cellars. He noted the mendaciousness of his
fellow citizens during those days. One of his fellows was a butcher from
Ottakring, who later put it about that he had been a leading member of the
resistance and had shot at the SS from under a car. The truth was that he had
been lying on his back at the time, like Schärf. There was a gentle
‘revolution’ in the hospital: pictures of Hitler were taken off the walls and
the hospital’s administration was arrested. The military personnel had
discarded their uniforms and fled. On 10 April a Russian soldier appeared
in the courtyard. The war was over.20
Schärf made his way home on his daughter’s arm. All the jewellers’
shops in the Alserstrasse had been looted. A curfew had been imposed,
starting at 8 p.m. No one was clear as to whether Vienna had fallen. In the
morning of the 9th the Russians had advanced to the Gürtel. By the evening
German soldiers had abandoned the city centre. This gave the Austrian
resistance movements their cue and they proudly emerged from the
woodwork wearing red, white and red armbands. The most active of these
had been the small group headed by Major Carl Szokoll, three of whose
members had beenf hanged shortly before the Red Army occupied the city.
Szokoll takes the credit for saving Vienna from Hitler’s ‘Nero Order’,
which required the city’s destruction, but in reality the German army was in
no position to carry out the order. Sepp Dietrich joked that his Sixth Tank
Army was so named because he had but six tanks. Most soldiers had no
more than a few rounds of ammunition.21
The resistance made the Palais Auersperg their headquarters. The red-
white-red Austrian flag flew from the roofless Rathaus. In the Schöner
household they ‘ate in a very light-hearted mood at midday and drank a
toast to our beloved Austria’. That afternoon the main body of Red Army
troops followed the advance guard into the city. Again it was a remarkable
sight. They came in every form of transport, horse-drawn coaches and
dogcarts. They held harmonicas and waved to the people as they passed.
The Viennese waved their handkerchiefs and doffed their hats. The
Russians shouted and blew kisses at the women.22
Schöner and the other Viennese were prepared to give the Russians the
benefit of the doubt: ‘The fear of rape repeatedly promised by the
propaganda seems to be not so great in the case of the Viennese.’ Schöner
tried to make it into the centre of the city - the 1st Bezirk - but, at the sight
of the inner Ring at the bottom of the Burggasse littered with the detritus of
war, he decided not to attempt it. Russians were already stealing bicycles.
He was stopped by some Red Army men outside the Exhibition Centre (the
former royal stables and riding school) and was forced with others to dig a
grave for one of their dead comrades. They had found a German corporal in
the complex of buildings and shot him. One of his fellow gravediggers
complained that the soldiers had stolen his gold watch and leather coat.23
Work details of this sort had become a hazard. Johann Böhm was appointed
state secretary for social administration in the heady days after the Russian
arrival. Detained in the street by a soldier, he showed him a paper attesting
to his new dignity. ‘Papier nix gut!’ said the Russian (Your papers are
worthless). He was then set to work. The wiser citizens found means of
deterring the Russians. Some put their arms in slings, while others went to
the extremes of having a plaster cast put on a good arm.24
Nazism had become a solely German commodity and Nazis were
therefore Germans, or honorary ones. Threatened with plunder, the
Viennese had directed the soldiers to the homes of the Pgs.k It was open
season on the Nazis, and many of them who remained in the city tried to
cast out the evidence as best they could. Large numbers committed suicide,
like the coal merchant whose business was in the same building as
Margarétha’s aunt, or the banker Josef Joham’s friends, the Böhm-Bawerks.
The husband had fled. His wife, sister and daughter all took their own lives.
The Russians shot a neighbour, Christoph Bauer, son of a well-known
architect, presumably because they believed him to be a Nazi. His mother
had to bury him in the garden. The Soviet secret police or GPU flushed out
another called Hackmüller from the house next door. He was alleged to
have been the Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach’s secretary.25 Schöner
prudently left his watch at home and went out in a curious combination of
clothes that was meant to remove any suspicion of bourgeoisie: skiing
trousers, hobnail mountain boots and a Styrian hat. Later he added an old
coat made in the 1920s and was careful to leave his tie at home. Wearing
spectacles was also risky. The Russians saw all men in glasses as fascists or
‘burschuj’, and picked on them.26
The Styrian hat was an informal symbol of resistance among the
Austrians, or rather an emblem of resurgent national pride. When Schöner
went to the Palais Auersperg he found that many if not most of the men
present were wearing such hats. The Palais Auersperg was owned by
Princess Agathe Croy, and it was thronged with members of the old
nobility. The resistance leader Willy Prince Thurn und Taxis was a cousin,
and Nikolaus von Maasburg was related to the Croys by marriage. There
were many G’schaftlhuber and Adabeis in the building which served as a
refuge for well-heeled women during the wild days of the liberation.l It was
also the HQ of O5,m which had become the most important resistance group.
There was an air of unreality about the place. O5’s chief Raoul Bumballa
was handing out ministerial portfolios to various noblemen and receiving
the Russians as if he were already head of state.27
The real aristocracy of the resistance in the palace were the ‘Dachauer’,
members of the pre-1938 governing elite who had been shipped out to
Dachau en masse. Many of them were still there, if they had not died as a
result of their treatment. Schöner met Major Stillfried at the Auersperg. He
had been the camp commandant at Wöllersdorf. His job had been to punish
both leftwingers and Nazis, and for this last reason he was despatched to
Dachau as well, the gamekeeper had become a poacher.28 He must also have
been uncomfortable to see the many communists and socialists who were
coming out of the woodwork. A Russian officer was incredulous at the sight
of the princes and barons of the resistance: ‘I had imagined the anti-fascists
somewhat differently.’ Later the men acknowledged their mistake: they
should have chosen more plausible leaders. Maasburg was subsequently
arrested when he tried to make contact with some mild Nazis. He managed
to escape to the West.29
If middle-class Austrians wore curious clothing, that was nothing to the
garb the Russians were wearing. The rare officer possessing operatic
epaulettes reminded Schöner of the Serbians in the First War. Many were
sporting trophies too, such as SA or SS daggers. The rest could not be
described as wearing uniform. ‘Handsome human material,’ wrote Schöner,
‘many tall and blond (“Teutonic”!), and among them lots of Mongolian
faces.’ Margarétha also noted their blondness and blue eyes. They were
powerful people, aged between eighteen and twenty, with a number of
fourteen- to fifteen-year-old boys in their train. He, on the other hand,
estimated the Mongol element to be a mere 2 per cent.30
 The Viennese were still enjoying a honeymoon with the Red Army.
Schöner’s father gave a soldier a bottle of wine from the restaurant’s cellars.
The soldier offered to pay. That night Schöner went to bed full of optimism:
‘God give us a peaceful night and a better future.’ The night passed
comfortably, but Schöner’s father had made a fatal mistake in giving the
soldier drink. Now his comrades came back for more. In Hietzing some
female neighbours of Eugen Margarétha expressed concern about what
might happen to their ‘innocence’ should the soldiers drink wine.31 Adolf
Schärf had the same thought: ‘The great provision of wine and schnapps in
Vienna, above all in the vineyard areas, possibly provided a foundation for
the raping of the women when it took place.’ It is true that some of the most
aggravated instances were in the great cellars of Döbling, where Austrian
sparkling wine or Sekt is made, and the wine ‘village’ of Grinzing.32
At midday the Schöners sat down to a lunch of goulash, potatoes and
red cabbage, and Josef tried to console his mother. In the Mariahilferstrasse
the Hotel Windsor was burning. There was no water to put out the flames.
Schöner made another attempt to reach the centre. On the Ring he saw that
the dealer Kasimir (who had robbed the Jews of their art collections in
1938) had been looted himself. Schöner’s objective was the cavernous
Hotel Astoria on the Kärntner Strasse, where the restaurant was franchised
to his sixty-seven-year-old aunt. In the foyer a Russian offered him wine:
‘Austria karascho!’ (Austria will be all right).33 The hotel was still
functioning, although a shell had hit the third floor. His aunt seemed in
control. She was feeding the Russians, while the officers practised old-
world manners. So far they had left the chambermaids in peace, but Aunt
Mili had been propositioned by a first lieutenant who had asked her up to
his room.34
The fighting continued in the areas of the city that bordered the Danube.
The Russians were across the canal in the Leopoldstadt - the 2nd Bezirk -
which explained the terrible damage done to the quay as the two sides
continued the shelling. On the 10th the Russians moved into the Prater Park
and occupied the race-track at the Freudenau without a fight. The Germans
were only cleared from the Leopoldstadt on the 13th. A day later they were
flushed out of Brigittenau, and the city was finally at peace.35 Schöner was
free, however, to wander on towards the cathedral. On the corner of the
Stock-im-Eisen Platz the Haas Haus was burning. No one attempted to put
out the flames. Soldiers stood around watching. It was not known who had
started the fire: German shells or Viennese looters. A third possibility was
the Russians.n At the time it was common to blame Werewolves: the wicked
Nazis were destroying the Austrian capital from motives of revenge. Later
Schöner thought it might have been plunderers with candles. The looters
had broken into the premises of the up-market grocer Wild on the Neue
Markt. Margarétha heard that a Russian general had threatened to shoot
anyone caught looting, but that seemed not to deter them. Schöner was
offered schnapps by a soldier on the Marco-d’Aviano-Gasse. The soldier
told him that Stalin had ordered that ‘Austria should not be treated as an
enemy but as a liberated land. It will be much better for us than for the
Hungarians or the Germans, no one is going to be shot.’ When Schöner
returned to his house he found a cart outside. Russian soldiers were
emptying the restaurant cellars of schnapps and Sekt. Two Viennese stood
by, watching with ‘malicious pleasure’.36
It was the time to settle scores. In the factory where Margarétha had
been working, the foreign workers were demanding the head of the boss,
who had prudently disappeared. One of the Schöner cooks had returned
from suburban Oberlaa. He reported that the women there had been
repeatedly raped. ‘The rape chapter that we had previously - and even at the
beginning of the occupation - lightly placed on the German propaganda
ledger, had become stark reality.’ The victims were now reporting to the
doctors. Neither age nor social status provided any protection. The Russians
are reported to have raped women as old as eighty. Schöner heard a story
from Ober St Veit that one woman had complained to the Russian
commandant, who had laughed in her face. In general officers excused their
men on the grounds of ‘long abstinence’. Even the ‘first victims’ were not
immune: the Austrians were not going to enjoy the taste of liberation. 37
The Russians had located the rich stocks of alcohol in the Schöner
cellars and the banging on their door never ceased. They thanked their God
for the massive door on their old Viennese house. The women were
naturally terrified. ‘Sleep was out of the question.’ On 12 April, Schöner
found that the Russians had plundered their Café Fenstergucker, opposite
the famous Hotel Sacher. Before setting it alight they had removed all the
wine and schnapps. There were reports of plunder and rape on all sides, so
much so that they were forced to admit that Goebbels had ill prepared them
for the truth. The most awful revelation, however, was even harder to
swallow: in almost every case of rape or plunder, the Russians had been
guided to their quarry by foreign workers or by the Viennese themselves.
The chosen victims were the middle classes. There were the predictable
consequences too: women committed suicide after the event; many
contracted venereal diseases; others became pregnant and had to seek
abortions. Doctors who had refused to terminate pregnancies in the past
were now prepared to waive their moral objections. The only women who
would not hear of it were the nuns, who stolidly awaited their fate in a
Viennese hospital. Women responded to the danger by dressing down: ‘all
the women are inelegant; most forgo hats or stockings. It is a lot safer on
the streets than it is in the houses at night . . .’38
Vienna’s famous gawping Adabeis had assembled before the Schöners’
house in the Siebensterngasse to watch the spectacle. ‘The scene of our
looting attracts hundreds of spectators, who are constantly trying to push
their way into the house to lend a hand.’ They were hoping to receive a few
scraps from the Russians’ table. ‘In the hall lie the fragments of a few dozen
bottles of Veuve Cliquot and Lanson.’ One Croat tried to steal Josef ’s
watch, but he was so drunk he could not stand up and had to support
himself by clasping Schöner round the neck. The Russians were
accompanied by some women, who guided them towards the older
vintages. Their advice was rewarded with some bars of ‘couverture’ or
cooking chocolate. The raiders found 200 more bottles. ‘Another group is
sitting around a table in the courtyard knocking back our old bordeaux from
coffee cups.’ Josef ’s parents complained to a first lieutenant, who
responded by distributing some of the bottles to the waiting crowd. The
Schöners joined the queue and were rewarded with a few bottles of their
own wine. To add insult to injury, a member of the resistance came to see
Schöner’s father and accused him of making the Russians drunk, thereby
placing the city’s women in jeopardy.39
The Margaréthas in Hietzing were luckier. The gourmand economist
was trading ‘liberation wine’ for endive salads. They hung up a sign in
German and ‘Cyrillic’ saying ‘Unarmed civilians’. Russians came up the
garden path to demand drink. Margarétha’s wife gave them water. Later
Franek set up a buffet to distribute water to any Russian with a thirst,
although that was certainly not what he wanted. They camped in the garden
and when it was time to eat they supped from their helmets, which doubled
as mess tins. The helmets were unlined, and the soldiers wore woollen or
fur hats underneath. They cut their meat up with their bayonets. Margarétha
still found them friendly, even if they tended to keep their distance from the
Austrians.40
He was plundered for all that, if not badly. He returned from doing his
deal with the gardener to find the door wide open. Franek had been put up
against a wall. All three of the servant’s watches were gone. The Russians
had been upstairs where they had created a wild disorder. They had filched
a bottle of German brandy, but left the Dreher-cognac from Hungary. They
had nabbed his wife’s wedding ring, two cameras (one was then rejected -
he found it in the neighbour’s garden) and a brooch, which they had
subsequently returned. More Russians came for his car, but he was able to
tell them that it had been requisitioned by the Wehrmacht a year before.
‘You are powerless in the face of such attacks,’ he reflected. A notice had
appeared outside the Café Gröpl in Hietzing telling all Germans aged
between sixteen and sixty to report to the Russians.41
The Germans and the Russians were still fighting on the outskirts, in the
industrial areas along the Danube. Marshal Tolbukhin issued a proclamation
on 12 April: the Russians were not fighting the Austrian people; they had
come to restore the country as it had been before 1938. Simple Nazis, it
said, would not be prosecuted; private property would be respected!42
Meanwhile the city was putting together a form of government. Schöner
heard a rumour that Schärf had been named mayor. Two men wearing red-
white-red armbands had indeed been to see Schärf and told him he was
needed urgently at the Palais Auersperg. He found the place filled with
‘feverish activity’. The man in charge was Raoul Bumballa, head of the
resistance group O5. The Russians found the Austrian resistance hard to
quantify: they dissolved O5 and packed a number of military opponents of
Hitler off to the Soviet Union.
It was decided that Tolbukhin could not restore the Austria of 1938
without bringing back the ‘Austro-fascists’. The men in the Palais
Auersperg wanted a return to 1933. Schärf was not offered the mayor’s job
- that eventually went to the Russian-speaking socialist General Körner. He
was offered instead the subaltern position of mayor of Josefstadt, which he
declined.43 Körner learned who the real bosses were when he tried to take
possession of the Rathaus on 18 April. He found his path blocked: the
Russians were searching the vast building for weapons. He was obliged to
sit on a park bench until they had finished.44
 The Muscovites had also checked in: Ernst Fischer, Johann Koplenig,
Franz Honner and Friedl Fuernberg. For the past few years they had been
living in Moscow’s Hotel Lux with the privileged German communists.
Honner was an ex-intern of Wöllersdorf. He had left early to raise two
‘freedom’ battalions to form the Green Division of some 2,000 men, which
had campaigned alongside Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. He was a former
miner and shoemaker from Grünbach who had fought in the Spanish Civil
War. Fischer was the intellectual and poet - the Austrian equivalent of the
later cultural commissar of the Russian Zone in Germany, Johannes R.
Becher - and was the son of a colonel and a staunch patriot. Fischer was
expecting Stalin to allow him and his fellow communists to play a major
role. He was apparently furious when he heard that the Russians had sought
out the former chancellor Karl Renner and were going to allow other
parties, like the hated socialists,o to coexist with them.45 The Western Allies
were also eagerly awaited: there were rumours that they would be in Vienna
as early as 22 April. Schöner had heard that the Americans were already in
nearby Mauer and had flown into Baden-bei-Wien.46
On 13 April the Russians had reached Linz: ‘the city that had nurtured
the Führer was evacuated without a fight’. The Schöners had managed to
bury a small part of their cellar in the garden. Locking the door no longer
kept the Russians out - they blew in the windows. The first wave came with
a Viennese gunwoman who directed them down to the cellar where they
found more wine, breaking some two-litre Doppler bottles in the process.
The next wave came through another window accompanied by cries of
‘Wino!’ The Russians had been to the banks and forced the clerks to open
the safes. One of the Russians gave Schöner a RM1,000 note for a roll-up.
When the family at last ran out of wine the Russians took eggs, bread and
butter.47
They were still heady times. On one of his walks around the city
Schöner was struck by the sight of a female Red Army soldier directing
traffic in the Wiedner Hauptstrasse dressed in a very short skirt. Margarétha
had admired these women too, particularly the blondes. The traffic in
question was Russian carts loaded with booty. These lined the Rennweg.
Cows and foals were tethered behind and the vehicles were piled high with
suitcases, balalaikas, sewing machines, radios and gramophones: ‘it was the
picture of a gypsy train’. The Russians had even stolen the tyres and
engines of the cars. As Schöner walked on he witnessed a horse being
skinned on the Wollzeile. The Stephansplatz was all burned out from the
Haas Haus to the Rotenturmstrasse. The Hotel Bristol near the Opera had
been gutted by fire. There were no fire engines to extinguish the flames.
When the Viennese found a pump it was so weak that the water hardly
made it to the first floor.48 Cardinal Innitzer’s palace had been pillaged, and
the primate had fled. Schöner doffed his cap at the sight of the cathedral,
denuded of its roof. It had been set alight after the departure of the
Germans. ‘It is a sight that grabs everyone by the heart.’49
The Palais Auersperg had become the place to jockey for power in the
provisional government. Not all the solicitors were respectable. Schöner
noted that Vinzenz Schumy had swum with the tide after the Anschluss, and
was more or less compromised. Yet he too was looking for a ministerial
portfolio. Schöner thought the palace was full of Nazi spies. Former Pgs
were looking for victims of the Nazis in the hope that they would give them
a good reference once the witch-hunt started. Margarétha had been
dismissed from his job, and his son had married a Mautner-Markov, a
member of a prominent, ennobled, originally Jewish family. Schöner went
back to his old job at the Foreign Office. The building had been badly
damaged in the bombing, but it was still functioning. They put him in
charge of the grandfather clocks. There were more and more signs that life
was returning to normal.50
Margarétha was obliged to join a work detail. Along with the rest of the
men he had to clear streets of obstacles and repair bridges. The first stint
was not so bad. He worked all day and found it no more tiring than doing
four hours in the garden. He came to the conclusion that the Russians were
kinder to civilian workers than the Nazis had ever been. It got tougher.
While he was working near his house his wife brought him a snack of a
couple of sandwiches. The bread was already two weeks old, and he had to
drink a lot of black coffee to swallow it. The detail worked for twenty-four
hours this time. When they let him go he slept for ten hours.51
With the hostilities at an end and the Nazis gone, Margarétha and his
wife joined the resistance. This presumably meant no more than that they
could prove themselves to have been consistently anti-Nazi during the
Third Reich. Once they had signed the register they were issued with red-
white-red armbands. There was a political opening for Eugen in the
fledgling, Christian democrat Austrian People’s Party or ÖVP. This was
being formed from a wide base: the white- and blue-collar workers were
under Leopold Kunschak and Lois Weinberger, the peasants’ league was
being led by Leopold Figl and Schumy, and the middle class by Julius
Raab. For the time being it was respectable to be on the left. The
‘Liberation Movement’ was made up of 50 per cent socialists, 40 per cent
communists and just 10 per cent ‘bourgeois’ parties.52 Schärf was one of the
men behind the recreation of the Austrian socialists. At their session on the
14 April they rejected the idea of calling it the Social Democratic Party and
plumped for the Austrian Socialist Party, or SPÖ instead. That way it was
hoped people would forget that it had condoned the Anschluss. It very
quickly fended off Soviet-backed moves to amalgamate with the
communists. Fischer had returned from Moscow with instructions to
eschew Marxism-Leninism for the time being. The stress was to be on
Austria: ‘The glorious Austrian past must be given its true worth . . . The
Radetzky March must become a national song, sung in schools.’53
The economist Margarétha noticed that most of the shops in the 1st
Bezirk were boarded up, with ‘Empty’ written on the shutters. Foreign
workers were free-wheeling their carts piled high with loot. Both the
Parliament building and the Ministry of Justice were partly burned out.54
Schöner too resumed his walks. On the 18th he stopped to admire a fresh
Russian grave on the Heldenplatz which was festooned with flowers.
Drunken Russians in the Burggasse were pummelling on doors, but the
Viennese knew their game by now, and no one opened up. There were long
queues outside the butchers and bakers: meat had virtually disappeared and
bread was a rarity. A day or two later the Austrians’ mouths began to water
when they saw a hundred or so Hungarian cows with strange horns driven
through the centre of the city by Red Army soldiers.
The Viennese were making trips out to the woods with prams and
wheelbarrows to gather wood and to look for wild mushrooms or crayfish.
The Café Fenstergucker had been plundered again, but the raiders had not
taken the schnapps. Schöner concluded that they had been robbed by the
Viennese: the Russians would not have left the alcohol, and some precious
tea had gone. It was generally easy to tell who robbed you for that reason.
The Russians wanted drink, gold or watches. If anything else went, the
authors were civilians. At the Hotel Astoria, Aunt Mili was driven to
distraction by the nightly hunts for chambermaids. The Astoria was more
fortunate than the Hotel Metropol, which burned down on the 19th. It had
ceased to be a hotel in 1938, when it became Gestapo Headquarters.55 No
one regretted its passing.
On 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, the eighty-three-year-old Graf Albert
Mensdorff came into the Foreign Office to offer his services. He had been
Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Court of St James’s in 1914. Schöner
recalled the count expressing very Nazi views in the Jockey Club two years
before.p He died of starvation on 15 June 1945. The Austrian Foreign Office
was ready for action, although it was touch and go whether the Russians
would allow its officials to do anything. Schöner had been given a pass by
the city council, but another diplomat who had presented his to the Red
Army sentry had seen it rudely tossed into the canal.56
The following day Schöner learned that the Americans had reached
Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of
the Western Allies. They had all had enough of the Russians, who were
certain to install Karl Renner as chancellor. Everyone chose to remember
the open letter in which he had pledged his support for the Anschluss in
1938. On 23 April news of the arrest of the former German ambassador to
Austria, Franz von Papen, was a cause of jubilation. He had been in Vienna
in 1938: ‘he deserved something for Austria’s sake’, wrote Schöner.57
The refurbishment of Renner was Stalin’s idea. As Austria was being
discussed one day he asked, ‘Where is that social democrat Renner now, the
one who was a disciple of Kautsky? For years he was one of the leaders of
Austrian social democracy and was, if I recall, president of the last Austrian
Parliament.’58 No one knew the answer at the time, but as soon as the dust
had settled the Russians had gone looking for the vintage socialist who had
brought in the First Republic. They considered him the sort of soft
ideologist who would allow their men to move safely behind the scenes.
They didn’t trust him, and were aware that he had voiced his support for the
Anschluss. They found him on 3 April when, as luck would have it, he
protested about the behaviour of Soviet troops to the Russian commander in
the Lower Austrian village of Gloggnitz. Gloggnitz was close to Wiener
Neustadt, where the Red Army met heavy resistance for the first time. The
Russians scooped him up with his family and installed him in the nearby
Schloss Eichbüchl.59 Renner proceeded to heap praise on the Soviet system,
and claim that ‘liberation’ by the Russians was all they - and he - had ever
dreamed of. The Social Democrats, together with the Communist Party, of
course, would now be in a position to provide the necessary political
security.60 His puppet-status inspired distrust in the West, and he played
innocent when the Americans asked him later how big a role the Russians
had had in his appointment. He insisted that the Russians did not interfere
with his decisions, but the American agent who saw him in August 1945
was all too aware of the Russian captain who sat in on their interview.61
There was a meeting at Renner’s Viennese home in the Wenzgasse in
Hietzing on 23 April. The idea was raised of freely distributing the under-
secretaries of state among the three interested parties: socialists,
communists and conservatives. Renner made his first stab at a cabinet on
the 24th. A controversial choice was the Muscovite Honner for minister of
the interior and chief of police. It was, however, standard Stalinist practice
to place a communist in this role. Joham at finance was controversial in a
different way: he had been friendly with the Nazis during his time at the
Credit Anstalt. Dr Gerö was nominated minister of justice. Schöner noted
that he was a ‘Mischling’ - he had Jewish blood. That other Muscovite,
Ernst Fischer, was also to be given a job.62
Schöner was not so unhappy about Honner. It was a ‘thankless and
difficult post’ and with any luck he would prove unpopular. The Russians
were pushing for the reopening of the theatres and cinemas. Because of the
war damage, most of Vienna’s great cultural institutions had to make do
with what space they could find. The Burgtheater performed in the
Ronacher.q The Opera had been bombed out. Klemens Krauss was
appointed chief conductor amid widespread disappointment. Krauss had
blotted his copybook in 1934 when he had emigrated to Germany at the
time of Dollfuss’s assassination by the Nazis, and his scandalous behaviour
had not been forgotten. The first post-Nazi newspaper came out, but that
was a disappointment too, as it looked too much like Goebbels’s Völkische
Beobachter - short on news and big on propaganda. It was no surprise that
the editor was the communist Fischer.63
News reached Schöner on the 24th of a new Andreas Hoferr fighting the
Nazis in the Tyrol. The man gave his name as Plattner. He seems to have
been a flash in the pan, although it was true that the Tyroleans were pushing
the Nazis out before the arrival of the Americans. With Austria the ‘victim’
and Italy a former Axis power, ‘everyone was waiting for the return of the
South Tyrol’ to Austria. There was a rumour that reached the ears of both
Schöner and Margarétha that the former chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg
had been poisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As it was he was
on the way to the South Tyrol himself.s On 26 April, an interim government
was formed under Karl Renner.
It was an attempt to balance the interests of the Christian socialists, the
socialists and the communists, albeit dominated by moderate socialists like
Renner and his vice-chancellor, Adolf Schärf. Of the communists, Fischer
was given the important portfolio of ‘popular enlightenment, education and
culture’ and Honner was made minister of the interior. The Christian
Democrat minister Kunschak was a notorious antisemite, which made the
Jews who formed the bulk of the Austrian Centre reluctant to go home.64
Margarétha heard about it when a girl gave him a copy of the Soviet-
sponsored Neues Österreich which contained the details of Renner’s cabinet
and the proclamation. He thought the latter ‘excellent, a real masterpiece’.
It declared that Austria would return to the constitution of 1920. The
Anschluss, said the proclamation, had been involuntary; it had been
imposed on Austria and was therefore null and void. Margarétha then
repaired to the Naschmarkt, where he was able to purchase some precious
root vegetables.65
On Friday 27 April the representatives of the permitted political parties
signed a declaration of independence from Germany. The Soviets
recognised Renner’s regime, but only as far as the Danube, because
Tolbukhin’s troops were still fighting in the Weinviertel. The Second
Republic was born under the aegis of the Red Army. That afternoon
Schöner abandoned his old coat and skiing trousers for a silk shirt and a
dark suit. The Vienna Philharmonic was going to play its first concert since
the liberation. At 4 p.m. there was a private performance at the Large
Concert Hall, as the Musikverein building had been damaged. The hall was
only three-quarters full, but a substantial number of Adabeis had gathered to
watch the arrival of civil servants, communists and Russian army officers.
The orchestra was heartily applauded, Krauss audibly less so. Some people
even hissed. The programme was Schubert’s Unfinished, Beethoven’s
Leonore 3 and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony: ‘A tribute to the immortal
spirit of Vienna and the great, classic time of Viennese music and to the
musical genius of Russia.’ The Philharmonic played the Schubert ‘without
soul’; they were better at the Beethoven. The Tchaikovsky was ‘brilliantly
played’.
In the interval the assistant mayor, the communist Steinhardt, made a
speech in which he thanked the Red Army for liberating them from the
‘brown plague’. There was loud cheering. He then announced a full
programme of cultural events: there was to be a performance by the
Burgtheater company of Sappho on the 30 April and the State Opera
company would do The Marriage of Figaro at the Volksoper. At the
Akademie Theater they would have Nestroy’s Mäd aus der Vorstadt. The
stress was clearly on ‘Austrian culture’ for the time being. The Raimund
and Josefstadtt theatres were to reopen together with nine cinemas. In
reality this meant showing a lot of Soviet films without subtitles.66
It was only at the end of April that the Western Allies appeared at the
Austrian border. The Americans took Innsbruck, Salzburg and Linz; the
British came up through Italy on the 28th and marched into Carinthia and
Styria before meeting up with Soviet forces. That same day the Nazi fellow
traveller Joham was rejected as a member of the provisional government.
Loudspeakers played ‘O Du mein Österreich’. The Russians stood by and
tacitly blessed the regime they had ushered in. The British, however, had
had their worst fears confirmed, and promptly refused to recognise
Renner’s government. The Americans followed suit. Renner responded by
hailing Stalin as the ‘greatest military commander of all time’. Later
Schöner met a friend who had just returned from suburban Weidling. There
had been persistent raping at his country house. A seventeen-year-old girl
who had tried to defend herself had been shot. ‘On the periphery it is much
worse than it is in the inner city.’67
On the 29th five tramlines began to work again. Renner appeared in the
company of two Russian officers at the Foreign Office dressed in a stiff
collar, a tie with pearl pin, grey spats and an old brown hat. He had a white
goatee beard stained with nicotine from his diet of cigars68 and boasted a
small pot belly. He was ready for his detractors. He did not deny that he had
been in favour of the Anschluss, only that he had wanted union with the
Nazis. He was keen to do down the Austro-fascists of the Corporate State.
He told the diplomats that Dollfuss people were as unwelcome in the new
Austria as Nazis. He let it be known that he wanted the Austro-fascists
excluded from the suffrage for ten years. As it was, it proved easy to restock
the ministries with untainted civil servants: all they had to do was reappoint
those prematurely retired in the time of the Corporate State.69 Naturally,
most of them were socialists, and Wöllersdorf old-boys.
It was May Day, and a big parade was laid on for the Russians. Austrian
flags had been made out of old swastikas, and the women had fashioned
headscarves out of the same material. The people wore red carnations and
greeted one another with the word ‘Freiheit’ or ‘freedom’, rather than the
usual ‘Grüss Gott!’ The Russians made the city a present of tons of
provisions. The Viennese said it was all food they had plundered from them
in the first place.70 The gift was supposed to last for a month. It meant a
daily ration of 1,620 calories for heavy workers, 970 for white-collar staff
and 833 for children.71 The French arrived in Bregenz on Lake Constance
that same day. On 6 May they had established themselves in a small part of
their zone, the Upper Tyrol. By the time of the German capitulation on 8
May, the whole of Austria was occupied. Just in case anyone was to forget,
the French put up signposts for their own troops: ‘Ici Autriche, pays ami’
(This is Austria, these are our friends).72
The Western Allies were still a long way off. There were rumours that
the Americans were making difficulties for Austria because of Stalin’s
sponsorship of the Lublin Poles. On 3 May a story did the rounds about the
partition of Vienna. The British, it seemed, were going to receive the 1st
Bezirk. It was the first time the Viennese had heard that the French too were
to have their slice of the cake. Schöner was later told that the French were
to receive central Vienna, and also the 7th Bezirk where he lived. The new
communist police president, Hautmann, decreed that all foreigners and
forced labourers had to leave Vienna. They were to assemble in Wiener
Neustadt until transport could be arranged for them. The Schöners lost their
two Ukrainian servant girls and an Italian cook.73
The Führer had committed suicide on 30 April, but the Wehrmacht and
the SS were still fighting. Schöner was appalled to see that the Austrians
were among the most dogged. ‘In the end it is once again apparent that the
Austrians, providing they are really Nazis, are also the most unremitting
partisans of Hitler. German generals from the Reich are capitulating; the
Löhrs and Rendulicsu in the south and the north are fighting on.’74
The British and the Yugoslavs had finally come to blows over Trieste,
which the former were keen to award to the Italians. Meanwhile the
Russians had begun to deport 500 Austrians from Floridsdorf in the
suburbs. Field Marshal Alexander was thought to be in Vienna, staying at
the Hotel Imperial, and between Stockerau, Tulln and Korneuburg in Lower
Austria the Wehrmacht and the SS were still holding out on 6 May.
Vlasov’s army was leaving its positions in Prague and heading south to
Lower Austria, and it looked as if fighting could flare up again. Vlasov and
his Cossacks had been fighting alongside the SS, and he did not wish to be
captured by the Red Army who would have executed him immediately as a
traitor. His departure coincided with the Soviet-inspired uprising in Prague.
On the 7th Schöner heard a distorted rumour that Hitler’s successor
Admiral Dönitz had surrendered unconditionally in Copenhagen.
Eisenhower had said the war was over, but there was still gunfire to be
heard. Margarétha concluded that it was Vlasov’s army fighting a path to
the Western Allies.75 The truce was pronounced at 2 p.m. that day, but there
was no more champagne to celebrate with. They made good with meatballs,
and in the evening ‘goulash, like in peacetime!’76

OceanofPDF.com
 2
Wild Times: A Picture of Liberated Central
Europe in 1945
On 8 May Germany had surrendered
unconditionally and was occupied by the victorious
powers. Everyone was freed from National Socialist
tyranny. Those whose lives were in danger from the
regime were finally spared. But for many others,
however, the misery and risk of death had not
disappeared. For countless people the suffering only
began with the end of the war.
Richard von Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten: Erinnerungen, Berlin 1997, 95

Liberation from the East

What was true of Vienna applied, to a lesser or greater extent, to every
town and city in Germany and Austria: if they had not been knocked flat,
they had been at least partially destroyed. Many insignificant market towns
and villages had been reduced to piles of rubble as well, victims of the
Allied advance, and the process continued until the Allies believed they had
wholly subdued the enemy. Besides the terrible loss of human life, much
treasure was gone for good, and cities that had been the glory of central
Europe were no more.
There were the Residenzen, the former court capitals: Dresden had been
smashed to smithereens as a Valentine’s Day present to the Red Army; in
Munich the destruction of so many cultural monuments prompted Richard
Strauss’s most moving composition, Die Metamorphosen; and the baroque
gem of Würzburg, Dresden’s equivalent in the west, had been reduced to
rubble by the USAAF in the last days of the war. The Welf capitals of
Hanover and Brunswick had suffered the loss of their palaces;v Bayreuth
was the victim of its Wagner-cult; two-thirds of Weimar was flattened on
account of Goethe and Schiller. Cassel was so badly damaged that the ruins
were bulldozed. The lack of any remaining infrastructure obliged the
American army to plant its HQ in the spa town of Wiesbaden, which had
come out of the war only slightly mauled, because bad weather had caused
the air force to drop the bulk of its payload on the outlying woods.
 Not all Germany’s gems had been homes to small courts. There was
Hildesheim, where the wooden houses burned for a fortnight before the
flames could be extinguished, and where the two largest Carolingian
churches went up in smoke. Hamburg had been the testing ground for
Britain’s and America’s weapons of mass destruction in 1943: in two days
of bombing, 50,000 had died. The ancient centre of Frankfurt-am-Main was
gone; a few façades on the latter’s Römerberg recalled the glories of what
had been before. Little remained of the centres of the former Roman cities
of Cologne and Trier, or of Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen, where the
baptistery lay open to the skies; the Bavarian cities of Augsburg and
Regensburg had been pulverised. Leipzig, the capital of the German book
trade, was badly bruised; Breslau smouldered long after the end of the war
as the Russians lit fires in the ruins. The medieval cores of Stettin and
Danzig had been levelled by Soviet artillery. The list is endless.
The inhabitants of urban Germany were dead or scattered. The survivors
generally headed west, hoping to reach the Western Allies who - they
believed - would treat them more fairly than the Red Army. Only a few
brave souls ventured east. One of these was Ursula von Kardorff, who
undertook a mission to Berlin in September 1945 and listed the shattered
cities as she went: ‘Darmstadt, Mannheim, Hanau - a landscape of craters
provoking extreme sadness. Add to this the prison camps surrounded by
barbed wire and their watchtowers, the ruins, the detonated bridges and
autobahn viaducts. Scorched earth, just as Hitler dreamed up for his
people.’1
East Prussia
East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army, and
to some extent the worst treated. The first incursion, at Nemmersdorf on 21
October 1944, was to be a foretaste. In the course of a single night the Red
Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had
been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had
been crucified. Gauleiter Koch refused to allow the population to flee.
Hitler wanted East Prussia to prove the resilience of the German people.
That autumn the East Prussians watched the departure of the birds: ‘Yes,
you are now flying away! And us? What is to become of us and our land?’2
Then in January 1945 the Soviet offensive began. The Russians broke
through the German lines on the 17th. Insterburg was the first to fall,
followed by Tilsit and Gumbinnen. Koch, who had been named commissar
for the defence of the Reich, finally gave permission for the civilian
population to leave. Almost simultaneously, however, the Red Army
reached Elbing on the Baltic, thereby cutting East Prussia off from the
Reich. The East Prussians resorted to every conceivable means of leaving
the beleaguered territory and reaching what was believed to be the safety of
the west bank of the Vistula. Trains, however, ran head on into the Russian
advance and were stopped in their tracks. Passengers froze in the icy
temperatures, and the dead were thrown from the windows.3
Ships fared no better. They were sunk as they left the harbour of Pillau
outside Königsberg. Hundreds of thousands of refugees trekked across the
ice that covered the inland seas of the Frisches and Kurisches Haff in
heavily laden carts and proceeded towards Danzig. The Russians warned
them they would fire at the ice from their warships on 15 February. The
shells hit men and horses. Where the ice was smashed, the trekkers put up
temporary bridges and persevered. The night was pitch black. All they
could hear was ‘Shooting, screaming and screeching’. When dawn broke
they realised the full horror: body upon body, man and horse; and every
now and then the chassis of a cart sticking out of the ice. Those who
succeeded in making it to the thin strip of land that borders Haff and
Nehrung had a choice of heading north to the ships at Pillau or south-west
towards Danzig.4
One family that left an account of the crossing headed south to Stutthof,
the home of the infamous concentration camp to the east of Danzig. The
road to Danzig was barred; one of the horses went into labour; and the
Russians continued the bombardment of the refugees from the sea. The
family was lucky enough to reach Hela Point. From there they were shipped
to Jutland. They did not see Germany again until they were repatriated from
Denmark in November 1948.5 The noose tightened around Königsberg on
26 January 1945. Very soon the road to the sea and Pillau was cut off. The
city held out until 9 April. The first the surgeon Hans Lehndorff knew of
the fall of Königsberg was when Russians soldiers broke into his hospital
and robbed his patients of their watches, beating up anyone who stood in
their way. Fountain pens were the next craving. The sick and injured were
tipped out of their beds, bandages ripped from their wounds, and papers
burned to create more light to steal by. All the hospital’s provision in food
was consumed or squandered in a matter of hours.6 One of the attackers, ‘a
really young fellow, suddenly burst into tears because he had yet to find a
watch. He struck three fingers in the air. He was going to shoot three people
if he did not get one at once.’ They found him a watch.7
General Laschw capitulated the next day and swarms of soldiers attacked
the population as they ventured out of the warrens they had inhabited
during the long siege. They were beaten, robbed, stripped and, if female,
raped. The women’s screams could be heard everywhere: ‘Schieß doch!’
they shouted. ‘Go on, shoot!’ The sisters in the hospital were raped by
‘blood-crazed children’, sixteen years old at the most. The pious Lehndorff
could feel the women’s souls dying. ‘Is not every word an accusation
against me? Is there no opportunity to throw oneself between them and
through it to find an honourable death?’8 Some of the women were laughing
hysterically. One of the conquerors was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He wote
of the rapes in a poem called ‘Prussian Nights’:
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman.
A woman turned into a corpse.9
Bunkers and shelters were simply torched with flame-throwers. A very
large number of Königsberger took their own lives to escape the indignity
of Soviet revenge. That night the surgeon looked out into the hospital
courtyard to see it filled with horses and caravans. It could have been
deepest Asia.10
Lehndorff was touched by the help he had from the French forced
labourers. They too were robbed by the Red Army. ‘Adieu, docteur!’ one of
them cried out as Lehndorff successfully ran away from a Russian soldier
with a submachine gun who was angry that the surgeon had pushed him out
of the way, making him fall on his back. Lehndorff removed his white coat,
and the soldier did not recognise him again. Episodes of this sort did not
make the business of treating the sick and wounded any easier. The
instruments were pilfered off the operating table. One glimmer of light
came when they were visited by a Russian major who wanted a wart
removed. After the hospital staff cut it out, he gave them temporary
protection.11
Worse was to come when the Russians found alcohol. On 11 April they
located the Menthal distillery. They now set fire to the undamaged parts of
the city. The bad mood of the Red Army was made more acute by syphilis
and gonorrhoea. The soldiers ran back to the hospitals and demanded
treatment at gunpoint. In their wilder orgies, however, they had smashed the
dispensary to smithereens. Even Lehndorff could not resist a moment of
Schadenfreude.12 It did not last long. His soulmate - designated simply by
the name ‘Doktora’ - was dragged from the operating table and raped.
Lehndorff had not been there at the time, and at first he did not notice the
change in her. She stood at the table, binding wounds in the same way: ‘but
these eyes! A barb stuck into the remains of my soul.’ A little while later
she came to him in her torn tracksuit. She asked for her Bible. She had put
pills aside for when she needed them. The horror had yet to abate, and she
fought off three more attacks. Finally when she burst into tears Lehndorff
was relieved: ‘I am happy that she has finally given in.’13
The city was burning. Once the fun was over the remaining citizens
were assembled for forced marches to camps. Anyone who was too old or
too ill was shot there and then, either in their beds or in the gutters. On 12
April Lehndorff was one of those rounded up and marched out of the city.
As he walked out, the Russians cheered, shouting, ‘Gitlair Kapoot!’
(Hitler’s had it!). He marched for twenty-five kilometres. With the help of
Polish auxiliaries the women were dragged away from the column with
cries of ‘Davai, suda!’ (Come, woman!). Before he left the hospital
Lehndorff had found a female patient with a head wound who had been
raped countless times without ever being aware of it.14
They were marched to camps, some of which were in Königsberg itself,
like the one in the garage of the Rothenstein Barracks. On the promise of
better treatment, some Germans acted as kapos - prisoners who had wormed
their way into positions of trust - dealing out blows for their Soviet masters.
A number of these were allegedly communists, who believed their day had
come.15 Had they expected to become masters of the city now that the Nazis
had been deposed, they were deluding themselves. Königsberg had been
awarded to the Soviet Union and it was now administered as a Soviet city.
The German population would be at best deported, at worst exterminated.
The remaining buildings that had escaped the British raid in August 1944,
or which had not been filled with Soviet political bureaux - like the
Kommandatura, or military command, in the Ziethenstrasse and the old
Gestapo Headquarters - were rased to the ground. A Soviet city would be
built on the site of the old capital of the Teutonic Knights.
 The Russians were expecting to find the Amber Room from Tsarskoe
Selo in the shattered Royal Schloss. The invading Germans had packaged it
up and sent it back to a secret location in Germany.x Later it was put on
display in the Schloss, where Marianne Günther visited it on 15 March
1943. The Russians appear to have accidentally incinerated the room
themselves in their zeal to put the city to the torch; they then accused the
Germans of hiding it to cover up its wanton destruction by their own men.16
It is estimated that there were as many as 110,000 Germans left in
Königsberg on 9 April. When the Soviets conducted a head count in June,
73,000 remained. Graf Plettenberg maintained that the Russians had
actually tied Hitler Youths to horses and torn them limb from limb, but in
the absence of any other reports of this taking place in Königsberg, it has to
be discounted.17 Nonetheless, as one Königsberger maintained, ‘a man was
worth less than the watch he wore’.18
Valiant efforts were made to preserve life against all odds. Professor
Wilhelm Starlinger ran a hospital for Germans in the Ziegelstrasse until he
was deported to Siberia. It handled 13,200 patients until it was closed in
1947. Of these around 15 per cent died, chiefly of typhus and malaria.
Others were treated at the Barmherzigkeit, or Sisters of Mercy, a bombed-
out building administered by Professor Arthur Böttner. He was assisted by
Lehndorff and the hygienist Hans Schubert. Both left records of their
experiences in Königsberg. Lehndorff ’s are possibly the most moving
account of human suffering written anywhere and at any time.
Those who lived in the villages of East Prussia fared no better than the
townsfolk. A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl
who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine
in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.19 Another woman
tried to take the last train from Mohringen, but it was derailed and the
passengers proceeded on foot, only to run into the Russians. She describes
these soldiers breaking into a farmhouse and finding an Iron Cross, Second
Class. The owner of the decoration and his wife were taken out and shot in
the back of the head. The narrator herself was raped around twenty times
the night she was captured, but there was worse in store. She was carried off
by two officers and seven men, whom she suspected were deserters, or
temporarily estranged from their unit. They lodged her and eight other
females, including a fourteen-year-old girl, in a house in the forest, where
they raped them for a week. Their ordeal came to an end only when the
GPU, the secret police, found the house. The woman was then taken to
Insterburg and shipped beyond Stalingrad to the north-eastern Urals. She
was in a carriage with fifty women for three weeks. During that time she
had only two hot meals. The guards gave them salted herrings. They were
so thirsty that they licked the condensation off the window panes. Five of
the women had died by the time they reached their destination. They were
suffering from typhus, dysentery and facial erysipelas. In August 1945 she
was sent back to Germany.20
Christel Beckmann reached Mecklenburg, whence she sent the teacher
Marianne Günther news of the tiny village of Gertlauken at the end of 1945:
Hildegard Schustereit was dragged off with the other girls and
died in the Urals. In the village practically all the old people are dead.
My cousin Ingrid Iwahn is also dead, so are Aunt and Uncle
Matschull, my classmate Lotte Jakobeit and her mother, Lies Wallat
and Eva Gronwald. Siegfried Schwarm has also died, his mother
buried him in the gutter. Herr von Kohs was killed, Frau von Kohs
came back to the village and died of typhus. Their children have been
shared out: little Franka has gone to Frau Kather, one of the boys is
with Frau Schwarm, the other with Frau Fröse. My dear cousin Herta
was frequently raped, the other women too. The Russians behaved
badly in Mecklenburg, but it was nothing to what they did at home.
The farms lie dormant. The land is overgrown with thistles and thorns.
They all have to work in Deimehöh, Gertrud Beckmann and my cousin
Herta too. As regards animals they have only dogs, cats, mice and rats;
there is not a cow, a pig or a hen. They have all lost their things: the
last bed, clothing, shoes, everything; they have just the rags on their
bodies.21
Pomerania
The war had ended much earlier for the Krockows at Glowitz in eastern
Pomerania. The Russians came in March, announcing their arrival by
setting fire to the manor house. At the time no one could understand why
they should destroy a useful building. They attributed the Russian wrath to
a portrait of an ancestor, resplendent in his uniform as a colonel of the
hussars, that had made the invaders think of Hermann Göring. It was more
likely, however, that the manor excited a class-hatred among the Russians
and accounted for their cheering from the elegant parterres as this symbol
of hated Junkertum went up in flames. The Junkers fared no better on the
whole. Even an implacable opponent of the Nazis, like Eberhard von
Braunschweig, was hauled out with his family and shot.22
The refugees and the Russians had arrived with plagues of disease,
venereal and other (dysentery, typhoid and spotted fever). Not even the
animals were spared: the cows caught foot and mouth disease, the pigs
erysipelas and the horses equinia. Not that it mattered much. The Russian
arrival had been the cue for hecatombs in every farmyard. The beasts were
butchered and salted away. No one knew when food would be available
again. The farms and houses were stripped of everything. There was even
an order issued that all musical instruments be delivered to the railway
stations. There they lay, braving the elements, until children began to take
them back, anything that was still workable.
To protect themselves against the Russians the women covered
themselves with ashes to make themselves look old, hobbled around on
crutches or painted on red spots to feign disease. In a village near
Greifenberg, in the western part of East Pomerania, the squire’s wife Käthe
von Normann took the precaution of removing her false front tooth to make
herself look older, and dressed herself in peasant costume. The other
women adopted the same attire. It rarely worked - the Russians were none
too choosy anyhow, and the victims ranged in age from tiny children to
great-grandmothers. Others kept their children by them at all times. Libussa
von Krockow had recently given birth, and the baby at her breast proved a
disincentive to Russian attacks. The Russians were often very taken with
the German children, hugging and kissing them and giving them things to
eat.
Käthe von Normann saw her first Russians on 5 March. An officer
asked for her gold watch, telling her that his own had been destroyed when
his hand was wounded. Frau von Normann tried to ascertain whether this
was true or not, but he hid his hand. The next thing he needed was a race-
horse. Her horse was led out and she began to cry. ‘Why woman cry?’ the
officer asked in fractured German. ‘About an animal, it is war, and about
people.’ A short while later the horse returned by itself, having thrown its
Russian rider.23
The next visitors were a couple of grimy soldiers demanding shoes.
Philipp von Normann was obliged to hand over his own. When they noticed
his wife one of the men uttered the terrible words, ‘Frau, komm!’ Käthe von
Normann did not know what he wanted and ran behind her husband,
sobbing. The man shouted to her again to come, but his companion began to
yell at him, and both left. Herr von Normann had to explain to his wife what
was at stake: ‘It might happen now that I will have to protect you, and then
I shall be shot.’ They assembled the family in one room and prepared for
the siege.24
The Russians moved into the house, together with an interpreter, who
counselled them to lock themselves in at night. That night they were
helpless to prevent the Russians from stealing the silver, making off with it
over the sleeping children. Next they found the schnapps. Frau von
Normann’s mother was obliged to try each bottle first, lest it be poisoned.
She replied with a few lines of broken Polish that had no effect on the
Russians. They drank three of the four bottles, then fell asleep, and the
Normanns were relieved to hear their snores. Käthe’s mother had indeed
prepared poison, but for them. Philipp von Normann refused to countenance
suicide: ‘It is still a sin, and even if we can justify it for ourselves, the three
children have a right to live. We cannot justify it to God.’25 Dawn was an
age coming. While Herr von Normann went out into the farmyard, his wife
went to the kitchen where she found Russian women soldiers with unruly
hair, washing themselves. The boarders had run through a stock of some
3,000 eggs that had been destined for the military hospital; the lavatories
were a sight to behold.
The Russians were becoming ever bolder in their demands. Philipp lost
his watch, his wedding ring and his signet ring. Then he was interrogated.
Although he had not been a member of the Party (the Polish estate workers
confirmed this), his military ID was enough to condemn him. He was taken
away. He hugged his wife and children: ‘God protect you!’ He died of
dysentery in a Russian camp in Schwiebus in May.26
It was Käthe von Normann’s turn next. She was told to go with the
soldiers. She sent for a worker who could translate: she would go only with
her children, otherwise they should shoot all four of them straight away.
The Russians reconsidered: she and her family had five minutes to pack and
get out of the house. Soon afterwards she saw the Russian general arrive.
As the women of the estate left en masse to find a refuge, the Russians
kept coming back to search for arms and watches. Then they caught sight of
a Frau Westphal and tried to drag her away. She was defended by her ten-
year-old son with an axe, until the Russians finally desisted and merely
robbed her of a pot of lard. The women made for comparative shelter in the
woods, although the weather was bitterly cold and there were frequent
snowfalls. Eventually they found quarters in one of the many farmhouses
abandoned by Germans fleeing across the Oder. The usual news came in
from the neighbouring villages: a woman raped twenty times, and she was
not the only one. Frau von Normann looked at her son. ‘He doesn’t cry, but
the sight of indescribable misery in the eyes of my ten year old I shall never
forget so long as I live.’27
On 12 March rumours reached Käthe von Normann that Polish units
had occupied some of the local villages. She drew the wrong conclusions -
she thought they would want to see the farms working again under their
industrious German owners. She had no inkling, any more than anyone else,
that her land had already been promised to the Poles.
It was on 30 March that General Berling’s First Polish Army raised their
flag on Danzig town hall. The fighting had come to an end, and the people
were gradually emerging from the cellars where they had lived through the
Russian shelling. The Western Allies were informed that a Wojewoda or
provincial governor had been appointed. Only later did the Americans
realise that this was all part of the fait accompli, and that Danzig was going
to be incorporated into a Polish state shifted westwards, to allow the Soviets
to hang on to the territory they had negotiated over with Ribbentrop in
1939.28
The Soviets estimated that 39,000 dead bodies lay in the city. They had
captured 10,000 German soldiers. Others held out on the tip of the Hela
Peninsula where General von Sauken was performing a remarkable job in
transporting citizens and troops to Schleswig-Holstein. Some 1,200,000
escaped the Red Army in this way before Sauken capitulated on 9 May. Not
all of them survived the crossing. Two out of four barges containing
prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp at the mouth of the Vistula
failed to make it: one was scuttled by the SS, the other was bombed by the
RAF. The two that reached Neustadt, north of Lübeck, were fired on by SS
men and naval personnel.29 The Russians did not actually bother to enter
Stutthof until 9 May, more than a month after the fall of Danzig. Stutthof
was just one of 2,000 camps, great and small, liberated by the Allies
between the autumn of 1944 and the late spring of 1945. Most of the
prisoners at Stutthof were women, and most of the women Jews. About
3,000 had been shot or thrown into the icy waters of the Bight in January.30
 Germany’s prisons were also evacuated. Once again it seemed that the
Nazis did not want the world to know what they had been perpetrating. In
November prisons had been emptied on the left bank of the Rhine. A month
later they emptied the gaols of Königsberg. The inmates were transferred to
penal institutions in central Germany. Prisoners were divided into three
groups: those who could be released; those who could be despatched to
army formations; and those who were under no circumstance to be
liberated. This last group was largely made up of racial types that were
anathema to the Nazis: Jews and ‘half-Jews’ above all, but gypsies, Poles
and Czechs as well. Also in this category were the worst criminals -
murderers and psychopaths. These could be shot if necessary.31
The marches took place in a fiercely cold winter, and many died.
Nonetheless the death rate was not as high as on the similar treks that took
place on the closing of the extermination and concentration camps. It has
been estimated there were fifty-two of these ‘death marches’ involving
69,000 people, of whom 59 per cent perished.32 Women prisoners proved
frailer, and many were raped by retreating German soldiers, or captured and
killed by the Red Army. The prison warders who accompanied the treks
were not as brutal as concentration camp guards, and up to a third of the
convicts managed to escape. More closely watched were the ‘NN’ or Nacht
und Nebel (night and fog) prisoners, who had simply been abducted and
never formally tried. At best they were to be transferred to a concentration
camp; at worst shot.33
In Danzig it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They
raped, murdered and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and
seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were
pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and
raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the
hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same
outrages after the soldiers drank surgical spirit. Nurses were raped over the
bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the
women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply
gunned down. The Poles behaved as badly as the Russians. Many Danzigers
took their own lives.34 The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into
the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were
despatched to Russia twice daily.
 The scene is familiar from Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum of 1959.
Grass was a Danziger, and, although he was serving with the Waffen-SS
when Danzig fell, he speaks with authority. When the Russians break into
his ‘presumed’ father’s grocers shop they rape the widow Greff while
playing with little Kurt. Rapists and child-lovers - two clichés of the
invasion. Not all Red Army soldiers spared children by any means, and not
all of them were rapists either. The protagonist Oskar Matzerath’s father
famously swallows his Nazi Party badge to conceal it, choking to death in
the process: a powerful metaphor for Germany in its hour of defeat.35 In his
2002 novella Im Krebsgang about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff at the
end of January 1945 Grass has returned to the theme. The ship was being
used as part of the efforts to evacuate the German population. Anything up
to 9,000 people died in the icy waters, many of them children. It was the
worst maritime tragedy of all time.36
Silesia
As the Red Army approached German Silesia it liberated the camps at
Auschwitz. The sight that confronted its soldiers doubtless sharpened their
resolve when it came to the Germans. The Russians arrived on the heels of
the retreating SS, which had been busy destroying the evidence of what had
gone on there. Twenty-nine out of thirty-five storerooms had also been
destroyed, but in the six that remained there was more than enough
evidence to condemn them: 368,280 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats
and dresses and 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes. In the tannery they found
seven tons of human hair. Seven thousand inmates survived to greet them.
Their places were taken by German POWs and Silesian civilians.
The rest of the victims of Nazi terror had been hurriedly marched
towards the Reich to the more political camps that were in German and
Austrian territory. Mauthausen, which had not been a Jewish camp before,
suddenly became one; Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald were
similarly transformed. Belsen was crammed to bursting point with Jewish
prisoners, many of them already suffering from typhus. Other camps that
were restocked in this way were Dora Mittelbau, Gross Rosen and
Flossenbürg. Thousands died en route.37
The Russians reached the old Silesian frontier as early as 19 January
1945. The Gauleiter had proclaimed, ‘They will not cross the Silesian
border.’ The next day he authorised the departure of 700,000 Breslauer,
most of them women and children who marched off to Germany in
temperatures of twenty degrees below zero.38 Some arrived in Dresden and
were camping in the streets when the Anglo-Americans destroyed the city.
Others went to Berlin, where they were burned to death in the great
February raids. The capital of Lower Silesia, Breslau was surrounded on 16
February; it finally surrendered on 6 May. The day before, Hitler’s last
favourite, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, marched his troops away
leaving the commander of the garrison, General Niehoff, to go to the Villa
Colonia to sign the capitulation. Niehoff ’s soldiers were led off to captivity
in the east. The city had been one of Hitler’s Kesseln: fortresses to be
defended to the last drop of German blood. It had suffered horribly, and so
had its people. Now they hung white flags from their windows and prepared
for the ordeal.
Those who escaped from Breslau crossed the Neisse river at Görlitz.
Conditions were so bad there that it has been described as ‘the worst city in
Germany’ at the time. In one appalling incident thirty women were driven
into a barn and raped. When one refused she was shot. The local Soviet
commander heard about the atrocity and went to the barn and shot four of
his own men. In another incident eight Russian soldiers died after drinking
methylated spirits. Forty more were struck blind.39
Apart from hunting down women to rape, the Russians were anxious to
weed out the major Nazis of Breslau. On 7 May the Red Army deliberately
started fires in the ruins. What was left of the city was looted. On 10 May
the library of the university or Leopoldina for which Brahms had written his
famous Academic Festival Overture went up in flames; on the 15th it was
the turn of the city museum. On the same day the twin towers of one of the
city’s great Backsteingotik churches - St Mary Magdalene - were blown up.
Rival units fought over the remaining food left by the Germans. ‘The idea
that Breslau had been completely destroyed by the siege was a post-war
fiction.’40
The occupation followed the usual pattern of three waves: first came the
bombardment and the armies; these were replaced by the second force that
took possession of the land, and anything else for that matter, including the
women; and finally the Poles came in their wake. The last chunk of Silesia
to be taken was the county of Glatz and the Riesengebirge mountains,
which fell to the Red Army only after the ceasefire, so that at least the
quaint villages and the town of Glatz were spared destruction.41 After the
initial rage and lust abated, the Soviet armies turned their hands to
demontage. On 1 June they dismantled the power station at Kraftborn. The
major factories went next, followed by street lights, overhead cables and
freight trains. The soldateska continued to steal watches, window frames,
wheelbarrows and bicycles. They also took every piano they could find.
In the Upper Silesian town of Steinau one mother of two small children
frankly described her ordeal at the hands of the Red Army: ‘A young
Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me. I have to admit that I
was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my
bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least. You got used to it soon enough
and realised there was no point in putting up a fight.’42 Later she went with
her heavily pregnant sister to see a Russian doctor, believing that he would
be a civilised man. They were both raped by the medic and a lieutenant,
even though she herself was menstruating. That was no disincentive either.43
The soldiers raped every female they found; one twelve-year-old girl
complained of the terrible tearing they had caused her. On another occasion
when all the surviving Steinauer were taking refuge in a cellar and the
women were once again threatened with gang rape, this same mother gave
her children coffee that had been laced with poison. But the dose was not
strong enough to do them any harm. She thought she was doing the right
thing then: ‘I can only assure people that a mother never believes herself
more holy than at that moment.’ When she was subjected to what she feared
would be rape by an entire platoon, she remembered a Russian word for
‘child’. The rapist got up and escorted her from the room, before the eyes of
the others waiting their turn. The Steinau woman repeated the story - often
told - that the Russians treated children with kindness. She had seen a tank
come up to a child in the middle of a road and the driver climb out and pick
up the boy and place him on the pavement.44
Peace came to Europe two days after the Russians took Breslau. The
Breslauer scarcely noticed. The remaining German citizens were well
behind the lines. Their fate was mostly decided: unless the Western Allies
were capable of pulling a rabbit out of a hat at the Peace Conference,
Prussia’s second city would fall to Poland and they would be driven west.
Brandenburg
The Red Army encountered death in all its forms on the road to the
German capital. At the Sonnenburg Prison - ‘die Sonne’ as it had been
known to its inmates - they found that 800 chiefly foreign prisoners had
been slaughtered as recently as 30 January 1945, and it had not been
deemed worth while to repatriate them across the Oder.45 The last batch of
prisoners to be executed at Brandenburg-Görden were killed on 20 April,
Hitler’s birthday. The Russians liberated the prison a week later. The
Russians, accompanied by Polish soldiers, chanced upon Sachsenhausen
concentration camp as they moved to invest Berlin. The camp was in
Oranienburg, and the fall of that former royal borough brought it home to
Hitler that his days were numbered.
There were just 5,000 prisoners left in Sachsenhausen of a population
that had reached 50,000. The rest had been taken on ‘death marches’.46 As
in most concentration camps, a number of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners had
been out-housed, in this case in smaller camps in Lieberose and
Schwarzheide in the Mark Brandenburg. This had been the fate of many of
the Jews brought to Sachsenhausen from Slovakia and Auschwitz. As the
Russians closed in on the Mark, the prisoners were marched out of the
camps towards the coast. Many were beaten to death or shot on the way.
The camp administrators, including the notorious Obersturmbannf ührer
Höss, also fled from their HQ in Ravensbrück. They ran to the comparative
safety of Flensburg to seek out their master Himmler. The latter advised
Höss to save his skin by crossing into Denmark. Höss received false papers
as Able Seaman Franz Lang, but was caught and hanged for all that.47
In the middle of May, the writer and journalist Margret Boveri finally
made it to her country cottage in Teupitz in the Spreewald. She and a Frau
Becker undertook a hair-raising journey on bicycles, dodging - successfully
and not so successfully - the Soviet troops who wanted to appropriate their
valuable vehicles. They found it sinister that the place names had been
crossed out and rewritten in Cyrillic script, which they took for a sign that
eastern Germany was to be incorporated into the Soviet Empire.
The place seemed to have died, even if most of the houses seemed
undamaged from the outside [in the square a few corpses in uniform were
lying around, stiff like giant puppets]; the house was completely wrecked
behind which we moor the boat on our trips into the little town, the next-
door property likewise. On Kohlgarten (our peninsula), I spoke to one man
only. He said, ‘My child is dead, my wife in the hospital.’ In my house I
found the usual picture of destruction: everything was shattered, smashed
and plundered, and the three boats were gone. The clothes had all been
taken, just like the food, down to the last grain of salt; the last naturally
snatched by our dear compatriots. My archive portfolios were strewn about
the place. The oil paint for painting the house had been emptied out and
everything was stuck to it. In the flower beds cows and horses had grazed
and for the first time we found some proper manure.48
The Schloss had taken the brunt of the destruction: the lords had fled,
presumed dead, and the Russians had turned the building into a hospital;
despite that they spent the night bawling and brawling and playing
gramophone records. The two women made their way back to Berlin. The
normally resilient Frau Becker was reduced to tears by the sight of German
civilians being marched into captivity. Those who straggled or stumbled
were beaten with whips.49 Ruth Friedrich and her doctor friend Frank went
on a journey into Brandenburg in pursuit of food. They stopped at a country
inn. Eventually a woman came out with a headscarf pulled down over her
brow: the usual device to conceal her age from the rapists. Here and there
they could see some soiled straw, but nothing else. They asked the peasant
woman if she had food. She told them it had all been stolen. ‘Russians or
Germans?’ Frank asked. ‘Thieves,’ the woman replied impassively. The
pair ran into a trek on the road. These unfortunates were aged between
twelve and thirty. One of the children told her, ‘We are all going to die . . .
Why not? Death is not the worst thing.’50
Liberation from the West
The Rhineland
The Rhineland was the first part of Germany to be liberated from the
west, and the first city was Aachen. The place of Charlemagne’s coronation
had been pitilessly pummelled by Anglo-American bombers so that there
was little left of it. Of the 15,000 homes in the city only a fifth were
vaguely intact. The American-installed administration estimated that they
could make the damaged properties habitable within a year, but to rebuild
the city would take twenty.51
One of the first Americans into Aachen was Saul Padover, who was
then working for the Psychological Warfare Division. He followed behind
the troops, interviewing Germans to compile a dossier on their affiliation to
Nazism. His memoirs of the campaign provide a variety of snapshots, but
many of them are coloured by the anti-German propaganda he was cooking
up as he went. In Jülich he found two Flemings who had been living the life
of Riley in an air-raid shelter. They believed themselves the only civilians
left in the bombed-out town, and had a huge stock of champagne and
cognac, tins of food, eggs and chicken. In their ‘drowsy moments’ they read
travel books or romantic novels.52
Padover was keen to record the moral loucheness of the German
survivors. Wiesbaden ‘was packed with German civilians, many of whom
were gaily attired. There were lots of pretty girls, and they smiled at us
broadly and invitingly.’y The Americans had entered the spa town on 28
March 1945 and the defenders had prudently tossed their weapons into
whatever expanse of water they could find. The Americans fenced off the
centre of town with barbed wire and moved into the Hotel Rose.
Denazification began on 10 April, when all Pgs and SA men were asked to
report to the American authorities.53
Missie Vassiltchikov managed to get herself attached as a nurse to a
convoy of children from Bremen who were returning home. They had been
sent to Austria after the destruction of the city by bombing. For the
Russian-born Missie it was the first time she had seen her country of
adoption for a year. The train passed though Munich in the middle of the
night. All that remained of the station was ‘a huge iron skeleton’. She
caught a glimpse of Nuremberg, Bamberg and Würzburg. They looked
much the same - ruins. She jumped train at Fulda and eventually made it to
Hanau, Frankfurt and Geisenheim by hitching lifts from engine drivers. She
was trying to reach the Metternichs at their bombed-out home among the
vines of Schloss Johannisberg in the Rheingau. Her sister Tatiana was
married to Prince Paul von Metternich. ‘It took me quite some time to reach
the ruined castle. It, too, was a sorry sight. Only one of the gate-houses still
stands.’54
The Americans had moved into the Mumm property next door. They
were behaving badly - throwing furniture and china out of the windows and
giving away the clothes from the wardrobes to the ‘Fräuleins’. Brat von
Mumm had just been released from a POW camp near Rheims. He had
been arrested at the champagne house that he had taken over in 1940 in the
wake of the German advance. It had been seized by the French state in 1914
as a ‘bien d’ennemi’. He was living elsewhere as his house had been
declared off-limits. There was not much to eat, but the wine was a
consolation. The majordomo served Missie exquisite things, muttering each
separate vintage in her ear.55
Elena Skrjabina was another Russian, if not quite as grand as Missie, a
relative of the composer. She had been pressed into labour service by the
Nazis in Russia and put to work in a factory in Bendorf on the outskirts of
Koblenz where she seems to have been well treated. When the Americans
arrived in April the Russian girls all feared the worst. Drunken GIs
hammered on the door. When that failed they tried to lure the women away
from their friends and plundered their meagre possessions. As with the
Russians on the other side of the country, alcohol tended to amplify the
dangers: ‘The Americans found large supplies of Rhine wine which had
been kept for years in the cellars . . . they were dreadfully drunk.’ Later
Elena confirmed that the Americans had ‘emptied all the cellars’ as they
passed through.56
Before they left, a friendly American doctor brought the Russian
women ‘cotton-like’ bread that proved - to their evident surprise -
‘completely edible’.57 Koblenz and its environs were picked over by a
number of nations before the area settled down to being French. First the
Russians came up from the local camp and tried to throttle the factory
manager. They then smashed anything they could find. In June the area was
occupied by Belgian troops. On 2 July worried Germans declared ‘with
horror that we would be occupied by the French’.58
Carl Zuckmayer was a Rhinelander by birth. He had fled Germany after
the Nazis burned his books and became an American citizen in 1939. The
sight of the burned-out shellz of his parents’ house in the cathedral city of
Mainz brought home the scale of the destruction and made him aware of the
enormity of the task ahead. Germany was still full of contrasts: ‘From the
vision of the destroyed Badger-houseaa to the completely unchanged
farmhouse parlour in the Weismühl, from Heidelberg to the German
Theatre, from the town park in Schöneberg to the Riemergasse, from the
first night in Zurich to the morning celebrations in Vienna, from the
outrages and obscenities with our “Intelligence” and so forth - how can a
heart bear it.’59 Zuckmayer listened to the German soul among the ruins that
winter. He went to Frankfurt-am-Main and gazed at the remains of the
Römerberg, the medieval core of the city. A woman caught him gaping in
astonishment at the extent of the damage and said in a dialect he had known
from childhood: ‘Yes, that’s what we wanted all right, and that’s what we
got.’60
Karl-Heinz Bohrer was ten when the Americans arrived in the village
where he was living in his grandparents’ holiday home near Remagen
Bridge. The Wehrmacht had famously failed to blow up the bridge, and the
Americans were able to form an impressive bridgehead on the eastern bank
of the Rhine before the structure collapsed. Young German boys had been
taught that the Americans were cowards, who fought wars by dropping
bombs. Karl-Heinz had seen the disembowelled body of a black airman in
the snow. The Americans took him prisoner briefly, because he was wearing
a steel helmet to take some milk over a dangerous meadow. The village was
searched for arms. Meanwhile the old men and young boys were lined up
against a wall with their hands up. Karl-Heinz did not find the experience
frightening, but rather exhilarating. The first indication that peace had come
was the silence. The war had gone elsewhere, across the Rhine, towards the
centre of Germany. Where he was, it was over.
Bavaria
The East Prussian writer Ernst Wiechert had been waiting for this
moment. He had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, who had thrown him
into Buchenwald. Now he could muster a brief moment of happiness: ‘The
patient had been stronger than the strong.’ American forces passed through
the village. One moment they were there, the next they were gone, but ‘with
the dust behind their vehicles an era sank; one of evil, darkness and bloody
violence and we didn’t have to think of the past, but of what was to come . .
.’61 Wiechert was refreshed by the thought that the guillotine would cease its
bloody business, that the gallows would rot, that death would cease its
nightly visits to women and children in cellars. His wish was not to be
granted at once.
Once Wiechert explained to the Americans who he was, they treated
him with kindness. The CO sent up a couple of men to keep watch over his
house and one of them killed a deer for him - ‘so that you don’t go hungry’,
he said. It was a world of humanity Germans had forgotten over the past
dozen years. But not all the Allies proved such perfect gentle knights. When
the French came four days later they surprised the house while the guards
were off duty, locked the Wiecherts in the kitchen and stole everything of
value: silver, jewellery, watches and typewriters.62
Wiechert was a celebrity and now he received visits from the literary
world in uniform: ‘Captain’ Auden, one of Thomas Mann’s sons-in-law,
Mann’s son Golo, and Pastor Niemöller (another German who had suffered
under the Nazis) and his wife, together with numerous journalists. Wiechert
was not happy with his own people, however. His outspoken attitude to
Nazism and the privileged treatment accorded to him by the Americans
aroused the envy of the locals. His writings were deplored and the man who
had preferred inner emigration, and criticised those who had actually left,
was forced to flee to Switzerland, at a time when other exiles were drifting
home.
The Jew Victor Klemperer had made a miraculous escape from the
ashes of Dresden. He had kept his head down in a small Bavarian village
until the war ended. On 11 May he also expressed his shock at the German
attitude to the very recent past.
The people are absolutely without history, in every respect. In the
evening a young woman came . . . young, not unintelligent. She seemed to
be originally from Munich, and had been by bicycle to Munich for a day . . .
I asked the woman if she had heard anything of Hitler and the other big
names of the NSDAP: no, she had not had time to ask about that, in other
words: this did not interest her any more. The Third Reich is already as
good as forgotten, everyone had been opposed to it, had ‘always’ been
opposed.63
Klemperer naturally saw things from his perspective. Like many other
Germans, the Munich woman had evidently lost faith in Nazism some time
before; with the terror apparatus halted, she could now breathe freely.
Jewish prisoners in an outside dependency of Dachau could not believe
their eyes when they saw American tanks flying white flags. They
wondered if they were imagining things. They thought at first it might be a
German trick. Once they had conquered their apprehensions they went
down to the streets where the Americans were waiting. They tidied up their
prison uniforms on the way.64
The French reached Jettingen on 26 April. It was a pretty old town filled
with half-timbered houses. Ursula von Kardorff, a former journalist from an
old Prussian noble family who had been in contact with many members of
the opposition to Hitler, had taken refuge there since fleeing Berlin in
February. Her decision to head for Jettingen had been influenced by the fact
that it was the home town of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who
had placed the bomb at the Wolfsschanze in the July Plot against Hitler of
1944. Suddenly the main street was filled with men in khaki uniforms. The
next day they politely requisitioned her room at the Hotel Adler and evicted
her friends from the Schloss, although the officer in charge said that the
valuables could be locked up in the dining room, and they could take the
key away with them.
The gloves were off the next day when ‘two nasty characters’ came
round to her digs in pursuit of eggs and ‘snaps’. Ursula von Kardorff was
firm with them. ‘Wir die besten Soldaten of the world!’ they shouted at her.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she replied. Later she had a furious argument with a
Gaullist officer, who offered her coffee for all that. He told her that the
Berliners would suffer the same fate as the Russians under German
occupation: ‘I became angry. I told him that the fate of the Germans would
not be so easy to deal with. I had not risked life and limb for twelve years
fighting against the Nazis in order to be held to account for all the crimes
committed by the SS. Both my brothers fought in Russia and one died there,
and they would never have behaved as the French are doing now at the
Klingenburg [Schloss in Jettingen].’65 The French captain was impressed.
The plunder ceased, and Ursula von Kardorff was able to indulge a few
long-cherished ambitions, such as throwing a collection of Party badges
into the River Mindel. “We are now free from the Nazis, there is no Gestapo
now to summons, disturb, arrest, torture or persecute us. We cannot praise
our good fortune enough for this; but even now we are not free, we must
still obey and comply with the curfew, and follow the orders as they are
posted.’66
The other occupying army (the Americans had arrived in the wake of
the French) presented few problems at first. Ursula von Kardorff was
concealing the identity of her friend Wilhelm Bürklin, who was a colonel of
the General Staff. In the eyes of the Western Allies a General Staff officer
was an even more pungent commodity than a high-ranking Nazi. Bürklin
had learned to keep his mouth shut when the Americans were present. They
brought the women chocolate and spoke to them about politics in
‘fabulously bad English’. Her friend Erna Bähr washed a uniform jacket for
one of them, and received packets of tea and soap. Later they also received
buckets filled with slops from the mess. These were granted to a stylish
Berlin woman of their acquaintance, to feed her wolfhound. What the dog
didn’t want was given to them. Once they had volunteered to wash and iron
the Americans’ uniform blouses the women received unheard-of treats: real
coffee, meat, salad and chocolate pudding, such as they had not eaten for
years.67
 Unlike some, Ursula von Kardorff lived those first moments of
occupation in relative calm. She had found peace after the struggle and its
aftermath that had seen so many of her friends strung up in Plötzensee
Prison after the July Bomb Plot. The Allies were courteous towards this
member of the old governing class, at least, and she had wine as a
consolation in her ‘small, warm island in the chaos’.68
Not everyone had been so lucky. When the women visited a
Stauffenberg castle that had apparently been set on fire, the tenant took
them over the plundered, windowless property and stopped to show them
the bed where his daughter had been raped by American soldiers and the
bullet holes in the wall. ‘In a way I am not so unhappy about the
plundering, it shows that soldiers will always be soldiers and that the others
are therefore also not necessarily better than us.’69
One of Ursula von Kardorff ’s friends was Gräfin Alexandrine von
Üxküll-Gyllenbrand, who was the sister of the Stauffenberg brothers’
mother. The children of Claus and Berthold had been taken away by the SS
after their fathers’ arrest, and given new names and identities. A French
POW had tipped off Ursula and Bärchen that the children were in Bad
Sachsa. The two women set off on bicycles to obtain a pass for Gräfin von
Üxküll so that she could go and fetch the children. They rode as far as
Günzburg to see the local American commander, Captain Herrell. While
they waited, two Americans made indecent propositions. Herrell had not
heard of Graf von Stauffenberg, but examined the women to find out if they
were ‘good Germans’. They passed muster, and the Stauffenberg children
were recovered in June.
On the night of 1 May, Ursula von Kardorff and her friends listened to
their wireless set in secret. Hitler was dead.
This is the moment that I have so hotly awaited these last years, and that
for which I have prayed and implored. And now? As the National Anthem
was played just now I stiffened as I have not done for years. Is that just
sentimentality? Jürgen’s death, the deportation of the Jews, our defiled land
. . . Fritzi Schulenburg, Halem, Hassell, Leber, Haeften, Stauffenberg . . .
Mutius, Mandelsloh, Wolf Schulenburg, Raschke, three Schweinitz
brothers, three Lehndorff brothers, Veltheim - all of them who have lost
their lives either here or out there, but for Germany?ab
But we will manage. We will work, be happy with our lot, modest - and
trust in God. Maybe one day there will be a new, admirable Germany again.
The death of so many by the bullet or the rope - was it in vain? Or was there
a deeper purpose?70
The Americans liberated the terrible camp at Flossenbürg on 26 April.
Just 2,000 half-starved prisoners remained to welcome them. Another
15,000 had been marched off, many of them shot along the way.71 It was not
until the 29th that the Americans reached Dachau. They were appalled by
what they saw. Dachau was the original concentration camp - a vast place
and the centre of 240 subsidiaries, some of which had operated for barely a
month, others for years.
Buchenwald had been built around Goethe’s oak, Dachau had been set
up in a former artists’ colony complete with Schloss, the Bavarian Barbizon
- famous for the misty light that rose off the marshy plain. Dachau boasted
the full range of prisoners, apart from the Jews, who had been sent east
when ‘facilities’ were created for them there. At the end of the war they had
returned and made up around a third of the inmates.ac In essence there were
two camps at Dachau: a work camp with comparatively healthy prisoners,
and another, more sinister division, a ‘Little Camp’, housing the bedraggled
transfers.
Dachau was liberated by the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th US
Division, as well as by the 222nd of the 42nd, which converged on the town
to take a bridge that would bring them to their prize - Munich. They wanted
to rescue the Prominenten, who had been housed in the ‘Special Building’,
but they were already gone.ad Various plans had been aired to kill the
prisoners by bombing the camp or by poisoning their soup, but fortunately
these had proved unfeasible in the chaos of the time.72 There was a little
resistance from the SS units guarding the place, but that was soon wound
up, then the Americans found freight trains filled with as many as 2,000
corpses from the ‘Little Camp’. There were the usual scenes of revulsion
and physical sickness brought on by the sight and stench of the living and
the dead. The Americans described the neat stacks of bodies as looking
‘like cordwood’.
It was said that an SS man briefly turned his submachine gun on the
prisoners who left their huts to watch the arrival of the Americans. This led
to fury on the part of the conquerors, who shot anyone they found
defending the complex and flushed the guards out of the watchtowers and
killed them. They were left with an initial bag of 122 prisoners. One
American shot the lot with his machine gun. Just as he was killing the last
three who were standing - two with their hands up, the other defiant with
his arms crossedae- an officer arrived and kicked him in the head. ‘The
violence of Dachau had a way of implicating all, even the liberators.’73
At first the prisoners indulged in an innocent game of making the
guards dance to their tune. They shouted ‘Mützen ab!’ And the SS men had
to doff their caps. Then the Americans aided and abetted the prisoners in
their revenge. One soldier lent an inmate a bayonet to behead a guard. A
kapo was found lying naked with cuts all over his body and a gunshot
wound to his head. They had rubbed salt into his wounds. Another was
beaten to death with spades. Other guards were shot in the legs to
immobilise them. Later reports drew a veil over what happened then,
although it is clear that some of the Germans were ripped limb from limb. It
seems that around forty more guards and kapos died this way.74
Once enough blood had been let to satisfy occupants and occupiers, the
Americans were shown over the camp. The crematoria and the gas chamber
were an important part of the tour, although it was never clear whether the
latter had been put to use. The normal method of execution was the
Genicksschuss - a shot in the back of the head - and there was a special part
of the camp where the killing took place.75 To gas the Dachauer, the usual
method was to transfer them to Hartheim, across the border in Austria. Over
3,000 died in this way.76
The prisoners were moved into the SS barracks, but they continued to
die in droves. In May alone, 2,266 perished.77 Later the Americans
intercepted a party of 3,000 prisoners from Straubing Prison that had been
sent to Dachau but had been forced to turn back when the warders learned
that Dachau had been liberated.78
In the bombed-out towns and cities a humanitarian disaster loomed. In
Bayreuth, for example, the water was contaminated, the sewers fractured.
Typhus and diphtheria swept through the town. There was no medicine left
to deal with the epidemic.79
Holstein and Hanover
Germany capitulated unconditionally on 8 May 1945, but it wasn’t quite
true that the Allies were the only power in the land. For the time being
Hitler’s chosen successor Admiral Dönitz still dressed himself with the
trappings of authority in Flensburg on the Schleswig-Holstein coast, albeit
surrounded by British troops under Field Marshal Montgomery. The
arrangement of his ministerial portfolios had been bequeathed by Hitler in
his political testament, but Dönitz tore up the list and appointed his own
government of technocrats. Speer was one of only two survivors from the
old elite, the others had been at most junior ministers: Stuckart, Backe,
Seldte and Dorpmüller. Dönitz sought to divorce his regime from the Party.
He chose Hitler’s finance minister Graf Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk to be
his foreign minister and chancellor, a man with strong anti-Bolshevik views
like his master. Dönitz liked the idea of a return to the political thinking of
1933-4 when President von Hindenburg was still alive. He would have an
active chancellor, and in himself a president who applied the brakes.80
Schwerin von Krosigk refused to be chancellor, however - he didn’t like the
name. He became ‘leading minister’ instead.81
Everywhere Germans were laying down their arms. In Italy Kesselring
surrendered on the 2 May. Dönitz was in Plön at the time, with the British
army rapidly advancing on him. His government decided to move to the
Baltic coast and Flensburg. Dönitz and Schwerin von Krosigk spurned the
worst Nazis when they came looking for work. Alfred Rosenberg, the Party
ideologist, was one of these. He consoled himself with drink, and was seen
about Dönitz’s HQ, as drunk as a lord.82 Himmler visited on the 3rd, 4th and
6th, but Dönitz considered him to be a political liability, and he was shown
the road.83 When Admiral von Friedeburg returned from Rheims he brought
back some of the pictures of German atrocities that had circulated during
the signing of the peace.84
Churchill tolerated the Dönitz government for a while until the Soviets
began to clamour for its elimination. He was of the view that the Germans
could look after themselves to some degree. A campaign organised by
Stalin appeared in Pravda. The Russians demanded an end to the
‘militarist-fascist clique’ around Dönitz.85 Radio Moscow even suggested
that Dönitz was trying to blackmail the West. That was on 18 May, when
the Allies started to get tough with the admiral. Two days later Pravda,
Izvestia and Krasnaya Zvezda demanded that Dönitz be deposed at once.
Dönitz had been pleading with the West to launch a joint crusade against
the Bolsheviks, and the Soviets naturally got wind of it. They also knew
that the British had simply placed German arms at a distance from the
captured men. Churchill must have been considering his options. If the
Russians did not convince him, Eisenhower did, when he ordered Dönitz’s
arrest.86 The Americans were not prepared to work with the relics of Hitler’s
regime, and there was JCS 1067 - the Joint Chiefs of Staff document laying
down that no Nazis were allowed to continue in office.87
The Times postulated that the new German government consisted of
nothing more than Dönitz, Schwerin von Krosigk and a microphone, and
that the microphone had been the most important member.88 Admiral Dönitz
was not popular with Germans - Margret Boveri called him an Obertrottel,
a supreme idiot - but many could see some good in Schwerin von Krosigk,
who had entered the Cabinet under Franz von Papen in 1932 and seemed
for the time and circumstances not only moderate but intelligent. This cut
no ice with SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.
If Dönitz and the Flensburg government had any role it was only to disarm,
disband and feed the Wehrmacht.
The Dönitz government must have been feeling over-confident of
British love when on 11 May Field Marshal Busch gave a broadcast on
Radio Flensburg to announce that he was in charge in Schleswig-Holstein,
‘with the agreement of the British’.89 The Allies had been using various
high-ranking military officials to help them shut down the Wehrmacht and
its organs,90 but JCS 1067 made it clear that no Nazis were to remain in
authority. Busch’s broadcast aroused fury among the other Allies who
suspected that Montgomery had recognised the Dönitz government.91
Not just the other Allies - the Daily Mail was outraged by this
‘mysterious station’. Busch had let the cat out of the bag and Dönitz had
sealed his fate.92 Dönitz was giving himself airs and graces as well. British
soldiers had to salute high-ranking German officers, which angered many.93
The next day Churchill sent his ‘Iron Curtain’ telegram to Truman. He was
worried, he told the American president, about what would happen when
America transferred its forces to the Pacific and he was left alone with the
French to face the Russians. The inference is clear: he might need German
help.94 There were a million German soldiers chewing the cud in Schleswig-
Holstein; their weapons had been taken from them, but they were not far
away.
Sir Bernard Montgomery had just returned from the Russian lines at
Wismar. He gave orders that German weapons should not be destroyed, ‘in
case they might be needed for any reason’.95 It may be that the sight of the
Russians at close quarters had confirmed his worst fears. The Russians, on
the other hand, were not pleased to learn that ‘the Flensburg criminals’,
Hitler’s designated successor and his ministers, were walking freely about
the streets of the little port.96 On 13 May the Allied Control Commission
came to collect the chief of the German Armed Forces High Command (the
OKW) Field Marshal Keitel and bear him off to captivity. Dönitz thought it
prudent to remove a bust of Hitler from his office. He also ordered the end
of the Hitler salute, but he drew the line at the Allied request that the
Germans should cease wearing their medals. Admiral von Friedeburg was
apprehensive about what the Allies would do, but Dönitz assured him that
they would observe the Geneva Convention.97
On 17 May a Soviet officer joined the Allied team on the SHAEF
passenger ship Patria and Dönitz was invited to appear before them in
Flensburg harbour. He was received with pomp and had an interview with
Bob Murphy, political adviser to SHAEF. Dönitz turned to his favourite
theme: the Bolshevisation of Europe, and how the Germans were needed to
prevent it. The Allies were also worried, but they didn’t like it coming from
him, any more than they had from Himmler. Albert Speer had decided to
jump ship. He resigned from Dönitz’s government and retired to his family
in the doubtless palatial surroundings of Schloss Glücksburg.98
A day later - on the 18th - the Allies returned the visit to the seat of the
Dönitz regime in the barracks at Mürwik. Their delegation was led by the
British brigadier E. J. Foord and the American major-general Lowell
Rooks. On 22 May Dönitz was summoned aboard the Patria for 9.45 the
following morning. The Allied generals had received their instructions from
Eisenhower. If Dönitz felt he had any claim to immunity as a head of state,
he was rapidly disillusioned. He was told to consider himself a prisoner.
General Lucius Clay of the Allied Control Commission had said that Dönitz
was on the list of war criminals and would be treated as a POW. The Allies
sent the Germans away: ‘Pack your bags!’ they said.99 Clay made it clear
that all war criminals would pay for their acts with ‘their lives, freedom,
sweat and blood’.100
Three battalions of British troops commanded by Brigadier Churcher
surrounded the government’s HQ in the Mürwik Barracks and finally
stormed it brandishing sten guns and grenades. The leading minister’s
cabinet meeting had just begun. ‘Hände hoch! Ausziehen!’ (Hands up!
Strip!) The participants and their secretaries were put against a wall and
strip-searched: Dönitz, Jodl and the rest. Schwerin von Krosigk allegedly
found a Tommy tugging at his trousers saying, ‘Bitte - please?’, although it
is hard to believe that they had any problem communicating with the former
Rhodes Scholar.101
The leading minister tells the story differently: ‘as nothing went
unexamined, the blood went to my head. General von Trotha, who was
standing next to me, noticed that I was on the point of turning round and
lashing out with my fist. He whispered to me: “Keep smiling.”’ Schwerin
von Krosigk felt Trotha had saved his life.102 Some sources claim that the
men were forced to strip naked, as well as the female secretaries the British
had found in the other offices. Others suggest that their examination was
confined to the areas below the waist.103
A British sergeant equipped with a surgical glove searched anuses and
other orifices of ministers, officials and secretaries. Speer had been fetched
from Schloss Glücksburg and was subjected to the same indignity. He
thought it was because Himmler had slipped though the British net (by
biting on a cyanide capsule) and they were determined it would not happen
again, but Himmler died only later that day.104 The idea of humiliating the
prisoners could not have been far from their minds either. Admiral von
Friedeburg poisoned himself in a lavatory to escape the defilement, as did
Dönitz’s secretary. Squaddies plundered Friedeburg’s body.105
The only other person to be let off was the deputy chief of operations at
the OKW, whose boots were so tight the Tommies couldn’t get them off.
The captain commanding the operation was so angry he ripped the German
officer’s Ritterkreuz from his neck and stamped on it.106 Watches and rings
vanished into the British soldiers’ pockets. Dönitz’s baggage was rifled and
his bejewelled admiral’s baton stolen. Schwerin von Krosigk also
complained of theft. For three-quarters of an hour photographs and
newsreel films were taken of the Germans while they stood in the courtyard
with Tommies peering at them over the sights of their weapons. The
pictures appeared in the British papers showing some of the men and
women en déshabille. The headlines suggested that the Herrenvolk had
been caught napping. The truth was they had not been given time to cover
up after their examinations.107 When Churchill heard the story, he was
scandalised and wrote Montgomery a letter of protest. The Flensburg
government had lasted three weeks.108
 Charlotte von der Schulenburg knew the war was over when she saw a
British jeep in Testorf, where she had taken refuge after her flight from
Mecklenburg. East Holstein was to be turned into a huge detention camp for
captured German soldiers. Chaos reigned until September when the post
was restored and she was able to make contact with others in her situation.
She learned that her mother and sister were still alive in the Russian Zone
and hiked to Bremen to see Mausi Lehndorff, a member of the noble East
Prussian clan, whose husband had been another of Hitler’s victims
following the abortive plot. The worry was how she and her children were
to survive. She had lost everything in the east. Then she received a letter
from one of her late husband’s cousins. Jonny von der Schulenburg lived in
the original family Schloss at Hehlen on the Weser. He invited her to stay
and to bring her children with her. She was not altogether convinced: she
had heard that the Hehlener Schulenburgs ‘hätten nicht alle Tassen im
Schrank’ (an idiomatic translation would be ‘A sandwich short of a
picnic’.) She went to inspect the house with Marion Gräfin Dönhoff - later
editor of Die Zeit.
They set off for the ruins of Hamburg. A bus took them to Hanover,
where they were able to pick up a train to Hameln. The bridges over the
Weser were all down and there were no trains leaving in that direction.
Then she saw two men, one in a military leather coat, waiting on a low cart
on rubber wheels drawn by a chestnut. This was Mathias von der
Schulenburg and his cousin, the owner of Schloss Hehlen, Jonny. The house
was filled with former German POWs that Jonny had invited back to live
with him and drink up the contents of the cellar.
The house resembled so many that had been occupied by soldiers. In
places the electric wiring had been pulled out; windows had been smashed;
the books in the library lay scattered on the floor; there were empty bottles
everywhere. Jonny gave Charlotte a lift back to Hanover the next day in a
Fiat Topolino without doors in which he sat on a wobbly milking-stool. The
servants often had to push it to get it started. Sometimes it needed a horse.
That autumn she moved into Hehlen with her six children and the few
belongings she had been able to take from the family Schloss at Trebbow in
Mecklenburg. Their journey to the Schloss was an adventure in itself.
In Hamburg they were arrested for breaking the curfew and spent some
days in a barracks with more POWs, who shared their meagre rations with
the children. The latter were delighted with English white bread and ersatz
honey. Antediluvian figures speaking an unintelligible language jumped on
the bus seeking a lift to Bremen and were finally shaken off near Bergen-
Belsen. In Celle they found quarters in a Red Cross camp that had been set
up in a gym. In the ruins of Hanover they met Jonny - an apparition in a
white linen suit.
Charlotte and her children were allotted a tower and a kitchen in the
servants’ quarters, so that they could maintain their independence from the
wilder shores of the castle. A gemstone proved enough to procure a stove
on the black market. With Jonny’s permission, they collected furniture from
other parts of the house. When Charlotte had finished, her tower room was
so lovely that visitors compared it to the Marschallin’s bedroom in Act One
of Der Rosenkavalier.
In 1946 the entire population of an evacuated Upper Silesian village
was accommodated in a back wing of the Schloss. The men were found
work in the village and oven pipes protruded from the windows as they
installed kitchens in their rooms. The bridge and courtyard buzzed with
women and children dressed in traditional headscarves. That Christmas
Charlotte organised a nativity play at the Schloss in which her children and
the Silesians performed the roles. It was the village’s first taste of post-war
ecumenicalism, as the Silesians were all Catholics and the Hanoverians
were Lutheran to a man. British soldiers came to hunt at the Schloss and
paid for their pleasure in cigarettes and alcohol - much to Jonny’s delight.
The parties at the castle were as mad as ever as he drove his motorbike
round the knights’ hall and hurled bottles at the portraits of his ancestors.109
In the chaos that was Germany in 1945, it was hard to know if the writer
Ernst Jünger had survived. Many of his friends and admirers had perished
on Hitler’s gibbets. Others had fallen victim to bombs and bullets - both
soldiers and civilians. Jünger, however, was at home in his house in
Kirchhorst near Celle in Hanover. He watched the American advance in a
detached way. It literally passed him by. The black soldiers in the American
army were the subject of much gossip. A little boy of nine told Jünger, ‘I
am frightened of him.’ He meant a black GI. The Negroes were accused of
perpetrating several rapes, in one instance of a fourteen-year-old girl in the
village of Altwarmbuch.110
Americans and Poles searched Jünger’s house, but he had wisely hidden
incriminating objects such as his weapons (in the pond) and his hunting
rifle (buried) and stashed away his collection of burgundy where he thought
no one would find it: ‘It would be a criminal offence to let nectar like this
fall into the hands of the Kentucky men.’111 Sadly for him, some GIs were
billeted on him. The usual bands of DPs were stealing and murdering -
coming for spirits, meat and bicycles - but Jünger had the Americans on the
ground floor to protect him: ‘downstairs is Wallenstein’s Camp:af
loudspeakers announce news of victory, patrols bring in prisoners whom
they have tracked down in the bog’. Jünger read his way slowly through the
Bible, turning to the poet Rückert and others when he wanted a break. He
was relieved to hear that the Americans were not allowed to talk to the
Germans.
All around him order was breaking down, and the Allies were doing
little to restore it while they advanced on Berlin. On 28 April the owner of
the neighbouring estate was killed by DPs looking for benzene. He had
been tortured first. Another local had been tied to a car and dragged along
the road. The villages were full of drunken American blacks with women
on their arms, looking for beds. DPs would visit the men-less houses and
‘feast like the suitors of Penelope’. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s deaths
prompted more classical references: ‘We are living now in the time of the
fall of Galba, Otho and Vitellius, repeating events in every detail . . .’112
Some things could not be found in the lives of the later Augustan
emperors. On 4 May he had two prisoners from nearby Belsen to breakfast,
and was fascinated by their yellow faces and parchment-like skin. One of
them had had one of the best positions in the camp: he was the kitchen-
kapo, and if there were any food, he had first pick. On 6 May Jünger was
visited by six Jews from the camp. The youngest was a boy of eleven. He
watched the child devour a picture with his eyes. It was not just food they
craved. And then the child was in raptures when he saw the Jüngers’ cat.113
The novelist Jünger was calmly jotting down the stories brought to him
by refugees. A woman from the east told him how prosperous Prussians had
committed suicide en masse. During their trek they would look in at the
windows of large houses and see a ‘party of corpses sitting around a table
covered with a cloth’.114 Two American journalists came to see him; the day
before they had visited a ‘concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar’.
Jünger had not heard of Buchenwald. They told him about the crematorium
and the sign that read ‘Wash your hands. In this room cleanliness is a duty.’
The job of the journalists was to ‘put together a sort of spiritual stock-taking
in our field of rubble’. He had seen no journalists for six years: it was the
‘first thread in a new weave’. When they left they gave him some of their
food.
The war ended for the Kaiser’s only daughter, Victoria Louise, on
Hitler’s Birthday, 20 April. She was living with her husband the Duke of
Brunswick in Blanckenburg in the Harz Mountains when the Americans
arrived. Soon after the Americans had paid a visit to the Schloss, the British
came by. They were interested in some cases that had been lodged in the
cellar. After the British left, Americans arrived to carry off the cases. They
were unconcerned when they were told that the British had already claimed
them. One of the Americans who came for them had been brought up in
Potsdam, where he had played golf with the crown prince, William, and had
been present at the arrest of her Nazi brother, Auwi, in Frankfurt.
Victoria Louise was much struck by the arrival of blacks - ‘niggers’, as
she called them. They were, in her report, friendly and cheerful. To the
princess’s staff they shouted, ‘We are slaves, now you are slaves!’ The
Americans behaved well in general, but the British who relieved them left a
bad impression. The colonel ordered the duke and duchess to report to him;
failed to get up when they entered the room; and threatened to shoot them
because they had concealed weapons. Victoria Louise observed that it was
not à propos to shoot a prince of the Hanoverian royal house, which was
Britain’s own! The guns in question had been locked up by the Americans
in a wing of the house and the keys removed to the command post.115
Princess Victoria Louise opened the door one day to find her brother
Oscar standing before her. He had left his house in Potsdam on foot and
walked to safety. He was ‘at the end of his strength. He had battled through
the advancing American forces, through fields and thicket, from hiding
place to hiding place, in constant fear of being taken prisoner’. Prince Oscar
had begun the war as a regimental commander, and there had even been a
suggestion that he should receive a division, until Hitler slapped it down.
He wanted no heroes among the princes. Oscar’s eldest son had been the
first of the Hohenzollerns to die in action, in 1939. When there was a
massive demonstration of royalist sympathy in Potsdam at the burial of the
crown prince’s eldest son, William, the following year, Hitler resolved to
dismiss the princes from the armed forces.116
The British had their first experience of a Nazi death camp near Celle as
they advanced towards the Elbe in the second week of April 1945. The 11th
Armoured Division was pushing towards its military objectives when its
forward troops were met by a Mercedes staff car containing two Wehrmacht
colonels. They had come to offer them Bergen-Belsen camp, where, they
said, the inmates were dying of typhus. It was three days before the British
entered the camp, and they were naturally horrified by what they saw.117
Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Treblinka or
Majdanek. It had been set up as recently as 1943 to house ‘exchange Jews’.
These were Jews with non-German passports who Himmler believed could
be bartered for money or for German nationals in Allied captivity. The idea
of selling Jews to the West went back to the abortive Evian Conference of
1938. Conditions at Belsen had been as good as any until the end of the
war, when the SS began driving the inmates of the camps west, in order to
prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Red Army. As much as
possible, evidence of the Final Solution was to be destroyed. Hitler was
furious with Himmler when he learned on 13 or 14 April that the Americans
had liberated Buchenwald and found 20,000 prisoners the SS had failed to
evacuate or shoot. Hitler had barked into the telephone at the SS chief: ‘. . .
make sure that your people don’t become sentimental!’118
Large numbers of former prisoners from eastern camps were shipped
into Belsen. They were not only Jews. Estimates for the number of Jews in
Belsen at the time of the liberation vary, but at most they were not much
more than half. There were prisoners from all over Europe as well as the
usual concentration camp inmates: political prisoners, ‘anti-social elements’
and criminals - including homosexuals - who had contravened Article 175
of the Prussian Legal Code. Not only were the food and medical supplies
inadequate to deal with them, but they brought typhus. Lack of food had
resulted in outbreaks of cannibalism. By the time the British had made up
their minds to go in, the plague had reached epidemic proportions. Over the
next few weeks a quarter of the 60,000 inhabitants would die. Most of these
were deemed to have been beyond medical care, but some died because the
British were at a loss to know how to treat and feed them.119 In hindsight it
is easy to accuse them of negligence, but they still had military objectives.
There was a war to be won, and a pressing need to prevent the Red Army
from absorbing the whole of Germany. Himmler knew that many Britons
wanted to push on and fight the Russians, and while he bartered Jews with
the Swedish count Bernadotte, he hoped that he himself might be retained
in the fight against Bolshevism.
 The living skeletons of Belsen wrought their revenge on the hated
kapos, throwing some 150 of them out of first-floor windows under the eyes
of the British soldiers.120
Baden and Württemberg
The Badenese university town of Heidelberg was liberated by the
Americans on 30 March. The philosopher Karl Jaspers recorded the event
in his diary. He had been put out to grass because he refused to divorce his
Jewish wife Gertrud - or Trudlein - and they had lived through recent years
in mortal fear that she would be deported to the east.
No electricity, no water, no gas. We are trying to equip ourselves. A
spirit stove will do for a short time. Water can be fetched from the spring at
the Klingentor. The young people are in the best mood. It is magnificent fun
for them to live like Indians . . .
. . . this morning the Americans arrived on the Neuenheimerlandstrasse,
they found all the bridges destroyed and stood in front of them with tanks.
They discovered the boathouse near the new bridge, took the paddleboats
and paddled across the river, landing at the grammar school where they are
stationed. They must have arrived upstream by the Neckar.
Frau von Jaffe came to congratulate us that at last our Trudlein is free: a
moment without words. It is a miracle that we are still alive.121
Jaspers clearly enjoyed the spectacle of the limp German resistance. It
was not long before the Americans sought him out as a representative of the
‘other Germany’ and gave him responsibility for the university. Jaspers had
none of the misgivings about the liberators that Germans felt elsewhere;
when he delivered the principal speech on the reopening of parts of the
university on 15 August, he dwelt on the experience of liberation. Most
likely his attitude towards the Americans was one of heartfelt gratitude. 122
The end of the war found the future mayor of Berlin and president of
the Federal Republic Richard von Weizsäcker at a family chicken farm near
Lindau on Lake Constance crammed full of family members, almost
exclusively women. There was his sister, a refugee from East Prussia,
whose husband had been missing since 1944 and was never to return; his
aunt Olympia from Breslau, with her two daughters - both sons had been
killed and her husband interned like his brother, the physicist Carl
Friedrich. In the summer another pair joined them - his sister’s parents-in-
law, the eighty-year-old Siegfried Eulenburg (who had commanded the First
Foot in the Great War) and his wife. They had come from their estates in
East Prussia in an old landau driven by three horses.123
The town of Pforzheim had suffered horribly in the bombing. With great
interest Alfred Döblin, novelist and psychiatrist, watched people climbing
on top of heaps of rubble: ‘What was their business there? Did they want to
dig something out? They carried flowers in their hands. On the heap they
set up crosses and signs. These were graves. They put down the flowers,
knelt and said their prayers.’124 Another writer, Ernst Jünger, witnessed the
scenes in Pforzheim that year. He too saw the walls of rubble, the white
crosses and the flowers for those who had been buried alive.125
Baden was also an objective of French forces, and it was in the Black
Forest that their behaviour got out of hand. The French were officially
supposed to follow behind the Americans, but, with the backing of de
Gaulle, the commander de Lattre de Tassigny disobeyed orders. De Gaulle
had told him, ‘You must cross the Rhine even if the Americans are not
agreeable . . . Karlsruhe and Stuttgart await you.’126 The French II Army
Corps had taken Speyer before advancing to Karlsruhe. On 12 April they
reached Baden-Baden before entering the Black Forest and heading for
Freudenstadt. A further French army was to join them there after liberating
Strasbourg. Whether the French commander was in some way influenced
by the name of the town is not easy to say now, but Freudenstadt (it means
‘town of joy’), the so-called ‘pearl of the Black Forest’, was subjected to
three days of killing, plunder, arson and rape.
There had been reports of a band of Werewolves under a Hans
Zöberlein, who had recently killed German civilians he considered had lost
some of their National Socialist zeal. The town, however, was undefended,
and filled with hospitals, but it may be that the French were unaware of
that; or it may be that the very absence of soldiers gave them the idea of
getting their revenge for countless barbaric acts committed by the Germans
during their occupation of France.127 One of the French officers is supposed
to have said, ‘We are the avengers, the SS of the French Army.’128
On 17 April they shelled the small town, completely destroying the
centre. The units that entered Freudenstadt were made up of French soldiers
from the 5th Armoured Division, Foreign Legionaries and Moroccan and
Algerian troops from the 2nd Moroccan and the 3rd Algerian Infantry
Divisions. It is reported that local Polish workers joined in. From the first
the French made it clear that the people were going to be properly punished.
There would be three days of plunder. A sergeant said that the troops would
be released from discipline, and a quartermaster added, ‘In the next few
nights no woman will go untouched.’129
The patients were robbed of their watches in the hospitals, and a
Frenchman they found there was gunned down in his bed. The surviving
houses were systematically destroyed with benzene: 649 were burned down
in this way. It was now open season for any women aged between sixteen
and eighty. It is generally said that the Moroccans behaved worst.130 Anyone
who tried to stand in the way was simply shot. One of the victims was a
stout lady lorry-driver called Sofie Hengher who tried to stop the soldiers
assaulting her children. After the French passed on, some 600 women
reported to the local hospital. Ten per cent of those examined were
pregnant. Seventy people had been killed. Freudenstadt was certainly the
most prominent example of a breakdown of discipline in the French army,
but there were others, and the French were not above threatening
Königsfeld and the university town of Tübingen with similar treatment.
French soldiers’ behaviour in Stuttgart, where perhaps 3,000 women
and eight men were raped, was thought to have added to American fury at
their overstepping their lines.ag A further 500 women were raped in
Vaihingen, where the French army found a large number of dead and dying
in a satellite concentration camp. The villagers in nearby Neuenbürg were
cleared out to make way for the sick and the French garrison.131 In all these
instances the Moroccans were blamed.132 The American general Devers
wrote to complain to de Lattre. Freudenstadt had not added to the reputation
of the French army.133 Later the Germans wanted to know who had allowed
the troops to run riot in this way. The commander in Freudenstadt appeared
to have been a swarthy southern type called Major Deleuze; but a Captain
de l’Estrange was also mentioned, as well as a Major Chapigneulles and his
adjutant, Poncet from Lorraine, who was a famous beater. Tortures were
carried out by one Guyot and an alleged former Jesuit called Pinson. The
British press blamed the atrocities on a Major de Castries, a scion of one of
France’s oldest families.
The French dug in at Stuttgart and refused to budge. On 13 May they
held a provocative Joan of Arc Festival.134 It was just a leap and a bound to
the old university town of Tübingen. The 5th Tank Division arrived on 19
April. Tübingen had been saved by declaring itself a hospital town, but
there was rape and pillage before the French calmed down. One of the first
men to beard the French in the town hall was the professor of law, Carlo
Schmid. His mother was a Catalan from near Perpignan and his perfect
French must have made the invaders feel at home. He probably spoke less
about his time in the administration of Lille during the war. On the 23rd he
was denounced as a Werewolf, however, and locked up in a lavatory for two
days. The French searched his house and found the texts of his Baudelaire
translations.135
On 9 November that year a Frenchman came home to Germany. It was
the anniversary of both the Beer-Hall Putsch and Reichskristallnacht. Alfred
Döblin had left Germany on 3 March 1933 and, after a harrowing escape,
spent the war years in Hollywood. His ship docked in Le Havre. From the
deck he watched ‘a body of men, all dressed the same, disappearing into the
belly of the vessel; they reappeared dragging casks and cases . . . They were
Germans, prisoners of war. That is how I saw them again.’136
He had become a French citizen after leaving Germany. One of his sons
had died fighting in the Vosges. After he had seen his friends he crossed the
Rhine at Strasbourg. In the waters of the river ‘there lay a felled elephant:
the shattered railway bridge’. He was now in Germany. ‘You see the fields,
well laid out in an orderly land. They had cleaned up the meadows and
swept the paths. The much lauded German woods: the trees were bare, a
few still wearing the colourful autumn foliage . . . But now it became more
clear: heaps of rubble, holes, grenade or bomb craters, the remaining backs
of houses, then fruit trees again, bare with supports. A saw mill intact, but
the houses next to it in ruins.’ His train passed though the Black Forest:
‘Then I see your misery and I see that you have not yet learned from what
you have learned. It isn’t easy. I’d like to help.’137
Upper Austria
As the Americans crossed into Austria they were able to paint a bigger
picture of the Nazi death camps. In the last months of the war Jews had also
been shipped from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen to Mauthausen in Upper
Austria. A large number of them died or were put to death on the way. Up
to now Mauthausen had been a criminal and political camp,ah and many
Austrian opponents of Nazism had been sent there from Dachau. Apart
from Stutthof, which the Russians allowed to fester until 9 May,
Mauthausen was the last big camp to be liberated, when the Americans
went in on 5 May.138 The most appalling sight in Mauthausen was the
deadly quarry, where many prisoners lost their lives. It was called the
‘Wiener Graben’ after the thoroughfare in Vienna, because from here the
stone was excavated for the streets of the capital.139
The Americans found a fully formed committee waiting for them
composed of Hans von Becker of the Fatherland Front, the communists
Ludwig Soswinski and Heinz Duermayer - who had fought in Spain and
was later chief of police in Vienna - Hans Maršálek of the Vienna Czechs,
Bruno Schmitz, the son of the mayor of Vienna, and the former minister of
justice Baron Hammerstein-Equord. Once again the concentration camp had
formed a cadre for later Austrian political life.140
The Americans also liberated the camp at Gusen on the 5th. Gusen was
part of the wider Mauthausen complex, which had around fifty satellites
including Ebensee. There were between eight and ten thousand inmates
including some 1,200 Jews housed in a separate compound. Roughly 3,000
of the prisoners were made up of the ‘work-shy’. The Americans found
evidence that inmates had been killed with gas: Russian typhus victims had
been sealed up in their huts and gas canisters had been thrown in.141
The third big shock for American forces was Hartheim, which had been
used principally for the extermination of the mentally ill. Some of the
victims were housed in Niedernhart near Linz, but they were taken to
Hartheim to be killed. The Americans compiled a report on the activities in
Hartheim, and found evidence that the mental patients often fought their
warders after their arrival in the Schloss, and that the Nazis suffered minor
injuries at their hands.142
Tyrol
One dramatic discovery made by the Allies was the location of a clutch
of Prominenten at Schloss Itter near Kitzbühel. This had been the prison for
the French presidents Reynaud and Daladier and the generals Weygand and
Gamelin, as well as trade-union leader Léon Jouhaux, Michel Clemenceau,
the son of the statesman, the tennis star Jean Borotra, the politician and
résistant Colonel de La Rocque and Madame Alfred Cailliau, sister of
Charles de Gaulle. The Luftwaffe picket guarding the French had run away
at the approach of the Americans, but it was feared that some local SS
would harm the prisoners or seek to use them as bargaining tools to ensure a
safe passage out of Austria. On 5 May the Schloss was indeed attacked by
an SS unit that blew up an American tank. The prisoners helped defend the
building. An Austrian, Major Gangl, was killed in the attack.143
 One of the most bizarre liberations that April took place in the South
Tyrol, Italian since 1919, but whose population was still largely German
speaking. On 24 April a lorry - one of several - left Dachau concentration
camp for Munich. It contained the former Abwehr officer and Munich
lawyer Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ai Müller. Müller looked at the others squashed
on to the benches in the back of the lorry: there were Hungarians like the
former prime minister Miklós Kállay, his interior minister Peter Baron von
Schell, the Dutch minister Dr van Dyck, the Greek field marshal Pagagos
and his staff officer, the German generals Halder and Thomas, the former
president of the Reichsbank Schacht, Stalin’s nephew Kokorin, General
Pjotr Privalov and eight RAF officers.
The lorries went south after Munich, crossing the old Austrian border
near Kufstein before proceeding to Innsbruck and the concentration camp at
Rosenheim. There the prisoners were taken out. In all, the lorries contained
136 people from seventeen nations. There were fourteen Britons, including
a captain bearing the name of Churchill, although no relation, and a ‘Wadim
Greenewich’ from the Passport Control Office - that is, MI6 - as well as his
colleagues from the 1939 Venlo Incident, Stevens and Payne Best; there
were five Russians; the French included the former prime minister Léon
Blum and his wife, Gabriel Piquet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, Prince
Xavier of Bourbon-Parma and the writer Joseph Joos; the Poles included a
Zamoyski; there were four Czechs; the Greeks sported their field marshal
and no fewer than four major-generals; there was the Dutch minister and six
Danes, a Norwegian, a Swede, a Swiss, a Latvian and four Italians,
including the partisan Garibaldi - a descendant of the Risorgimento leader -
and his chief of staff Ferrero; in the Hungarian team there was not only the
prime minister but Admiral Horthy’s son and his secretary; the Austrians
numbered the former chancellor Schuschnigg and his wife and the pre-
Anschluss mayor of Vienna, Schmitz, as well as the writer Konrad
Praxmarer. The biggest delegation was naturally from Germany: State
Secretary Pünder, Prince Philip of Hesse, Halder and his wife, the former
military governor of Belgium General von Falkenhausen, the pastor Martin
Niemöller, Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, Fabian von Schlabrendorff
and Fritz Thyssen. Another group was made up of Sippen, that is relatives
of the 20 July plotters: various Goerdelers, Stauffenbergs, Hammersteins,
Lüttwitzes, Plettenbergs and one Gisevius (Hans Bernd had managed to
escape), together with relatives of Jakob Kaiser, Isa Vermehren and Fey
Pirzio-Biroli, the daughter of the hanged former ambassador to Rome,
Ulrich von Hassell.144
The men and women were hostages of the SS: so-called Prominenten to
be killed or bartered for freedom as the Allies tightened their grip on
Germany. At Rosenheim the Austrian Prominenten in particular were
horrified to see Austrian SS guards mercilessly beating members of the
Tyrolean freedom movement. The Austrians had themselves been in
captivity since March 1938. For Schuschnigg it was ‘difficult to keep one’s
self-control’, but there was the pleasure of seeing Schmitz again and
meeting the two ‘saints’ on the transport: Niemöller and Piquet.145
After three days at Rosenheim the prisoners were reloaded on to buses
and driven to the Brenner Pass. Their guards amounted to thirty more or
less docile SS men under the command of Obersturmführer Stiller, and
another twenty or so heavily armed ‘sinister types’ led by Untersturmführer
Bader. Bader had instructions to liquidate the prisoners. Müller had been
singled out as one to die. The SS showed Schuschnigg the list, with the
names of himself and his wife neatly inscribed.146 The buses entered Italian
territory in driving rain, passing Bruneck and the Pustertal before coming to
a halt before the village of Niederdorf. Stiller allowed some of the prisoners
to go into the village with him where Müller soon ran into a Wehrmacht
general in full uniform. This led the prisoners to hope that the SS might
respond to a superior officer, so they went back to fetch Falkenhausen: he
was another general, after all. Meanwhile Müller was shouting,
‘Schuschnigg is behind me! Schuschnigg is behind me!’, knowing that the
South Tyroleans had an affection for the former Austrian leader.147
The general had few soldiers with him, but a ‘prisoner of honour’
Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin was able to put through a call to General
Heinrich von Vietinghoff in Bolzano. When he informed the commander of
the presence of the Prominenten, Vietinghoff despatched troops to protect
them. They were not due before dawn, however, and Bader’s men were still
eager for blood. The prisoners went to a hotel on the market square where
Frau Heiss, manager of the Hotel Elefant in Brixen, regaled them with
Kaiserschmarrnaj - a great treat after the food they had eaten in their various
concentration camps. Bader, however, had not given up: ‘Müller raus!’
(Come out, Müller!). Colonel von Bonin, however, had been allowed to go
into captivity with his pistol. He drew it and aimed it at the SS man: ‘Ich
zähle bis drei, bei zwei sind sie eine Leiche!’ (I’ll count to three. On two
you are a dead man). Bader’s men took the hint.148
Meanwhile Sante Garibaldi had established contact with the local
partisans. They wanted to hang Stiller from a window in the hotel, but
Müller talked them out of it. Instead Müller was made a member of the
Tridentine Division of the partisans. This involved eating a piece of raw
eagle’s flesh, decidedly less palatable than the Kaiserschmarrn. On Sunday
30 April the prisoners were finally rescued by the Wehrmacht under the
command of a Captain von Alvensleben. On 4 May they were liberated by
the Americans, who took them to HQ in Caserta, and thence to Capri.
Disputed Areas
Thuringia
Yalta had decreed it otherwise, but Thuringia was liberated by the
Americans. It was here and not in Bavaria that the Americans came face to
face with the horrors of the Third Reich. It was not quite the first time they
had been exposed to evidence of Nazi barbarity. During their advance
through Alsace they had come across Natzwiller camp, but the Nazis had
evacuated the buildings. When the French liberated it in November 1944, it
had been empty for two months. American reporters had also flown to
Lublin in Poland in September 1944 where they were told of a warehouse
containing 800,000 shoes, but it did not prepare them for what they were
going to see in sleepy Thuringia.149 They first came across its Jewish
victims in Nordhausen-Dora, working on the V2 rocket. The camp was one
of many dependencies of Buchenwald. Among the liberators was an
American Jew who was repelled by the sight of his fellows. ‘These people
are something else,’ he wrote. ‘I am not one of them.’150 Some 12,000
people were living in tunnels, with forty to seventy-five dying daily. The
Americans found 3,000 corpses as well as 700 people who were clinging to
life by a thread. Many of the Americans were sick. In the town Germans
were evicted from their flatsak to make room for clinics, and 2,000 locals
were rounded up to bury the dead in long trenches.151
But Nordhausen was child’s play compared to Ohrdruf. The village near
Gotha was the location of another branch of the more famous Buchenwald
camp. It was a labour camp, containing around 10,000 slaves. One of the
liberators was the Jewish American war reporter Mayer Levin. The first
indication that they had chanced on a camp was when they spotted some
skeletal figures coming towards them along the road. They said they were
Poles, and told the soldiers to enter the town and rescue the camp inmates.
They spoke of deep caves and death squads. The Americans feared an
attack and waited until daylight. When they finally reached the camp they
found heaps of bodies in striped uniforms. Each one had a hole in its skull:
a sign that they had been executed by a single Genicksschuss. In another
place was a stash of naked prisoners, their corpses flat and yellow like
planks.152
Many hardened soldiers vomited at the scenes that confronted them,
above all on encountering the nauseous smell. The survivors could hardly
be classed as humans. They behaved like animals - showing no inkling of
goodness or friendship, they merely grabbed at the food they were offered,
ran off with it into the corners and lashed out at anyone who approached
them. The Nazis had robbed them of their most precious possession,
dignity. 153 On 12 April the camp was visited by the big three of American
army command: Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley. The latter recalled, ‘The
smell of death overwhelmed us before we passed through the stockade.’
They were shown the corpses of 3,200 naked, emaciated men. Patton was
physically sick.154 It was a bad omen: it was the day President Roosevelt
died. Patton turned to an aide: ‘Still have trouble hating them?’ Eisenhower
ordered all units not in the front line to visit Ohrdruf: ‘We are told the US
soldier doesn’t know what he’s fighting for. Now, at least, he will know
who he is fighting against.’155
Ohrdruf established a policy and a gloves-off treatment for all Germans.
The most famous city in the hilly region, Weimar, was taken on the 12th.
Buchenwald was so close to Weimar that its ancient trees had been the
object of Goethe’s daily walks, and yet the Weimarer insisted that they had
not known what was happening behind the barbed wire. To some extent this
was true, but prisoners were used for menial tasks around the town and had
been involved in the often mortal work building the new Adolf-Hitler-Platz
between the old town and the railway station. Even if they had been unclear
about the extent of the brutality, they knew full well that the prisoners were
abused and maltreated. Buchenwald had its soft days in the early 1940s.
The Jews were sent east, and the inmates - particularly the ‘greens’ or
criminals - tended to look after themselves. The commandant, Koch, was
proved to be corrupt, and was executed by the Nazis. His wife was the
infamous Ilse: ‘the Beast of Buchenwald’. Saul Padover was shown the
famous collection, supposedly assembled for Ilse Koch, of lampshades and
trophies made from human skin and organs. He also saw a card index in
which the causes of death were dutifully recorded: the victims all died of
two ailments, heart or pneumonia.156
The place was used as a distribution centre for labour, and a lot of
French and Belgian prisoners were brought in. The saddest cases were
confined to the Little Camp where they were left to die in their own filth. In
the last ten months the camp had filled up with 20,000 or so inmates from
the east, bringing numbers up to 45,000-50,000. Another 20,000 were
transferred to other camps - Flossenbürg, Theresienstadt and Dachau.
Meanwhile communist prisoners conspired to take over the camp. Shortly
before the Americans arrived the order had been given to kill the prisoners,
but Himmler had failed to carry them out. He was still hoping to use the
Jews to save his own skin. Hitler appears to have ordered Himmler to kill
all the prisoners in Germany. There was plenty of evidence around to show
that some of his men took these instructions seriously.157
The prisoners Himmler had failed to kill broke out of the camp after the
liberation and began to plunder Weimar. Hitler was furious when he heard
this, and renewed the orders to kill the concentration camp inmates. It was
the beginning of the end of Hitler’s relations with his SS chief.158 Some of
the leaders of this small-scale revolt were roving around when the
Americans arrived on 11 April. Padover treated the German communists
with disdain. They weren’t real prisoners, being the aristocracy of the camp,
and they looked down on the others. ‘Being Germans, they had been made
trusties by the SS.’ Some prisoners had pinned guards to the ground with
stakes. About eighty of the guards were massacred, ‘sometimes with the aid
and encouragement of the Americans’. It was reported that the Americans
looked on while a prisoner beat a German soldier to death with a four-foot
log.159
The Allies were slow to liberate the Little Camp. The stench was
appalling. They found a number of children there when they finally braved
it, including a three-year-old boy. The inmates died in large numbers even
after the Americans began to feed them. The liberators learned that they
could function only by repressing all emotion. On 16 April George Patton
decided that the inhabitants of Weimar should know what had been
happening on the Ettersberg. His men made a thousand or so inhabitants
line up in the Paulinenstrasse and marched them off to the camp a kilometre
away. Among them were some of the Nazi bigwigs of the city. American
cameramen were on hand to film their reactions. The Americans wanted the
full propaganda effect, and news of the site-inspection spread as far as
Vienna.160 On the way to the camp there was much amused talk, particularly
from the women and girls dressed for the occasion in their last finery. They
showed no sign of knowing what to expect.
Their cheerful mood vanished when they saw the heaps of bodies
covered with quick-lime. Women began to weep and faint. The men
covered their faces and turned their heads away. Many of them huddled
together for comfort. One of the inmates who had been spared Hitler’s order
to murder the last inhabitants of the camp was Imre Kertész, the Hungarian
writer, then aged fifteen. He remembered the scene: the Americans had
given him some chewing gum, which he belaboured with his jaw while he
gazed lazily from the typhus isolation huts to the mass graves in the
distance. Suddenly he was aware of the:
society of ladies and gentlemen. Coats were flapping in the wind.
There were flamboyant ladies’ hats and dark suits. Behind the society
were a few American uniforms. They reached the mass-grave and fell
silent, assembling slowly around the ditch. The gentlemen’s hats came
off one after another. Handkerchiefs were pulled out. There were one,
two minutes of mute stillness, then life came back to the stunned group
portrait. The heads turned to the American officers. Arms lifted and
spread out at shoulder height, then fell again to the upper thigh before
coming up again. The heads shook in denial . . . they knew nothing
about it. No one knew anything about it.161
That the Weimarer knew nothing was the message delivered in
Superintendent Kuda’s homily in church that Sunday, the church where the
enlightened philosopher Herder once officiated, and where Goethe and
Schiller had once been parishioners. ‘In Buchenwald events have come to
light about which we knew absolutely nothing before now . . . so we must
confess to God that we played no part whatsoever in this atrocity.’162 On 1
May the Americans appointed Fritz Behr, a Buchenwald man, as mayor.
Saxony
As the Americans advanced they found more and more evidence of
lawless bands of DPs who were terrorising the countryside in the absence of
Nazi law. In Brunswick there were more alluring women waiting to tempt
Padover up to their lairs. ‘I live all by myself, would you like to come up
and see me?’163 Lower Saxony was, like Mecklenburg, originally taken by
the Western Allies. It was the Americans who crossed the Harz Mountains
and seized the ruins of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, which the Anglo-
American air forces had only recently reduced to heaps of ashes.
Padover and his men had a comic exchange with a ten-year-old boy on a
scooter in Magdeburg. He explained that his mother was a schoolmistress
and that his father had fallen in Russia. Padover began his usual
interrogation-banter, but was possibly surprised by the reply to the question
‘What did he think of the Führer?’ The boy said: ‘Der Führer kann mir den
Arsch lecken’ (He can lick my arse). They supposed he was unaware that it
had been the Anglo-Americans who had levelled his home town, but the
boy was ready for them: ‘The Führer made you do it . . . and he is
prolonging the war when everybody knows it’s hopeless.’ The boy told
them he wanted to go to America and join the ‘American Luftwaffe’. Then
he would come back and bomb Germany. They asked him why he wanted
to bomb his fatherland: ‘Oh . . . the Russians will be here then.’164
In Gernrode the people had some weeks to study the Americans at close
range. When the Russians arrived in July they compared the Red Army to
the American Negroes. The latter were ‘less like victors and more like
fellow sufferers of aggression and humiliation’.165 The American armies
discovered yet more evidence of Hitler’s last-minute orders to exterminate
concentration camp inmates and slave labourers. In Gardelegen they had
driven the men into a barn and set it alight. At Wolfsburg, where the big
Volkswagen factory was located, the prisoners had been able to free
themselves at the last moment, and had seized weapons from their guards.
Some had died from eating raw flour in desperation; others had raided a
vermouth factory and made themselves hopelessly drunk. They were so
light and weak that when they tried to fire their weapons they fell over
backwards. They nonetheless managed to kill a number of German
civilians, including a mayor.166
There had been another bloodbath in Thekla, a suburb of Leipzig. It had
been a labour camp staffed with political prisoners. When the SS left they
had shot and set fire to the men, some of whom had been burned alive.
There was the usual rage directed at the locals, but at Thekla the Germans
proved helpful and showed how appalled they were by the massacre. As
one of the Americans put it, ‘ninety-nine out of a hundred Germans seem to
eat and breathe as we do, seem to react to the same emotions, seem to be
perfectly human and responsive.’167
Marianne Günther was a schoolmistress in Penig near Chemnitz, close
to the Czech border, when the small town was taken by the Americans on
15 April. The US troops found a camp there too, filled with starving
Hungarian Jewesses. They immediately imposed a curfew. Polish and
Russian forced labourers ran wild in the streets. A month later Marianne
Günther was able to continue her diary - her illusions had been shattered:
‘The monstrosities that we have heard about the concentration camps - I
didn’t want to believe it. The atrocities are far worse than I imagined. Who
could have planned such devilishness? . . . And now the ghastly stories
from Bohemia! When the war ended on 8 May the horrors began. A whole
nation [has been] driven homicidal mad, [they are] murdering innocent
women, murdering children. You can see the terror on the faces of the
refugees.’168
Before coming to Saxony she had been at the school in Gertlauken, an
exceptionally quiet village in East Prussia. She got out before the Russian
breakthrough. Gradually she learned the fate of her pupils and colleagues as
rare letters broke through. Fifteen-year-old Christel Beckmann had made it
across the frozen Nehrung to Danzig, and then walked through Pomerania
to Mecklenburg, where she and her family believed they had found
comparative safety. Then on 3 May, the Russians arrived. The girl wrote:
‘For four weeks we found a place in the hayloft and stayed put. We looked
dreadful. Herta’s face was covered with scales. In the night we heard the
screaming and wailing of the village women. No man could protect his
wife, he would have been beaten half dead had he tried, and the women
were threatened with guns, they had to obey. We were almost crazy . . .’169
Mecklenburg
Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg’s sister Tisa was also liberated by the
Americans. She was living in the large manor of her first husband in
Mecklenburg together with 120 refugees. The German army wanted the
house too, to billet soldiers retreating from the Russian advance. For days it
was touch and go whether their liberators would be American or Russian.
Then six American jeeps appeared: ‘we were free’.170 Free, but not without
worries. ‘Waves of liberated P.O.W. and Polish workers swept over the
countryside. They broke into farms and country houses, looted, beat the
proprietors and chased them away.’171 The Russian Zone began only five
miles away. ‘Sometimes they paid us short visits, robbing and plundering
on the way.’172 If the Poles and Russians were not enough, Tisa was
threatened by the Germans who remained on the estate, who found her
fraternising with former French forced labourers disgraceful.173
Americans ran across the transit camp at Woebbelin near the grand-
ducal palace of Ludwigslust. Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Russians and
western Europeans had all ended up there after being moved out of their
original camps. No one had fed them and there were cases of cannibalism.
The soldiers can hardly have helped them much by giving them sweets, but
the thought was there. The American commander pursued the usual policy
of making the townsfolk responsible. All inhabitants of Ludwigslust over
ten had to come and view the dead. Photographs show trenches filled with
corpses stretching far and wide before the gates of the Schloss.174
The Americans made way for the British. Very soon Tisa began to hear
rumours that the zones were to be adjusted, and that the Russians would be
taking over her part of Mecklenburg. Once she heard confirmation of the
story she hitched up a caravan - a former army signals wagon - and
prepared to flee. One day she had a visit from a Polish officer who arrived
brandishing roses. He wanted to thank her for the way she had treated Poles
and other prisoners. ‘But get out! The Russians are coming here.’175 She
needed no more prompting. As soon as she had received the appropriate
papers, she drove her caravan to Lübeck in the British Zone.
Eastern Mecklenburg had been captured by the Russians. In Carwitz
and Feldberg, where the family of the writer Rudolf Ditzen (Hans Fallada)
were living, the Honoratioren - the town’s elite - committed suicide. The
chemist killed his children first. There were rapes, and Ditzen’s estranged
wife Suse was not exempted.176 In September Ursula von Kardorff finally
traced her mother Ina, who had last been heard of on her estate at
Böhlendorf in Mecklenburg. She arrived in Berlin, with the usual tale to
tell. She and her husband, the painter Konrad von Kardorff, were old, and
were not prepared to run from the Russian advance. Konrad expired in
March, and was saved from the bitter experience of the rest of his family.
They had lived modestly, slaughtered few animals and drunk little from the
collection of wine in the cellar, and despised all those who cut and ran.
Even when Stettin fell, the Kardorffs stayed put. They hoped that it
would be the English that conquered them: ‘gentlemanly types, and sort of
cousins’. Long lines of refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania passed
the gates and, despite the implorings of relations, they would not budge.
Then one May morning the Cossacks appeared on the horizon: ‘they came
en masse, with tanks, on motorbikes, on foot, on horseback, even on sleighs
drawn by teams of four dogs’. They fell on the wine cellar, so prudently
preserved; then the destruction began, of furniture and pictures. Aunt May
and Uncle Willi committed suicide. As May put it to Ina, ‘The Kardorffs
have been at home here for five hundred years, what could we do
elsewhere? I think God will have mercy on us.’ Ursula’s uncle Egon,
former commander of a cavalry regiment, saw the bodies in the wood and
went to Ina: ‘Now I will have to leave you alone. I can’t bear a life like this,
and I have no fear of death.’ He went to his parents’ grave in the wood,
where Ursula’s father was also buried, and took poison.
Ursula’s mother was now on her own. She packed some things in a
rucksack and walked. In the local villages the same scene repeated itself:
drunken soldiers, dead nobles. A woman had shot fifteen members of her
family single-handed then drowned herself. Ina von Kardorff was robbed of
her watch and her last possessions. In a small town she was given lodging
by some artisans and a pastor’s wife until she was ordered to leave again.
She arrived in Güstrow, and found an attic room with a baker’s wife.
She painted pictures and gave drawing lessons, sewed and embroidered.
She even helped a painter do a portrait of Stalin. All around her were the
sick and dying, and disease. At night houses were searched and she heard
the screams of women, followed by shots. In the church on Sundays the
pastor announced long lists of the dead. She spoke to Ursula of Russians,
too, some of whom were good and generous, and gave things to the people.
Some even went to church.177
Werewolves
Underground resistance to the occupation either petered out quickly or
failed to materialise at all. The Werewolves, who had been formed in
October 1944 to make life impossible for the Allies, committed the odd
dastardly deed such as the murder of the American-appointed mayor of
Aachen, Franz Oppenhoff, carried out by two men dressed as paratroopers
in March 1945. After that, they fizzled out. The killing of Oppenhof
remains controversial: Goebbels was naturally pleased, and described the
men as partisans, but his lack of prior knowledge would suggest that the
mayor was not killed by direct orders from Berlin. Others have stated that
he was killed as a rendement de compte of mere local significance.178 It
might instead have been the work of an SS hit-squad rather than
Werewolves. In Austria, Franz Fehrer had been given the job of training
Werewolves in Wiener Neustadt, but as foreign troops crossed Austria’s
borders the Gauleiter, Eigruber, gave orders to discontinue the training and
not to attack the American forces. The American OSS came to the
conclusion that there were no more active cells of Werewolves in Austria in
July 1945.179 Carl Zuckmayer claimed that the spirit of the Werewolves
collapsed at the same time as Germany, and not a trace remained. Certainly
Lucius Clay could find no trace of anyone trying to form a ‘Nazi
underground’ in early July 1945.180
There were, however, some very isolated incidents. In Glowitz in
Pomerania a forester called Drambusch, a fanatical Nazi, withdrew to the
forest where he built himself a bothy and planned to recruit others in his
fight against the conquerors. No one listened and later the Russians tracked
him down and shot him. He died of his wounds soon after in Stolp.181
Goebbels had made a loud noise about German resistance and there was
still a jittery feeling about Werewolves in May, which the Russians used as
an excuse to slaughter any young men they found. The Czechs were even
less kind than the Russians. Dr E. Siegel heard about the arrival in the Little
Fortress of Theresienstadt (now Terezin in the Czech Republic) of twenty-
one men branded Werewolves. They were stood against the wall. During
the night the doctor heard the usual screams and cracking of whips. Later he
heard that prisoners had cleared the gatehouse of blood, brains, teeth and
hair and had to scatter fresh sand. The men were officially listed as ‘dead on
arrival’.182
Accusing someone of being a Werewolf could seal his or her fate, and
there must have been many cases where individuals sought revenge in this
way. In Dalliendorf in Mecklenburg in the SBZ (the Soviet Zone, or
Sowjetische Besatzungszone), twenty-six-year-old Paul Schröder had
emerged from concentration camp wearing the green triangle of a criminal,
but he quickly converted his record to make out that he was a former
member of the Communist Party. He told the authorities that a Frau
Westphal, the owner of an estate in the village, together with two men
called Holst and Redicke, were Werewolves. All three were shot on 2 July
1945. When it transpired that Schröder had been lying, he too was shot.183
 There was a little bravado at the beginning when battle-hardened
soldiers observed the punier members of the Allied armies and imagined
how easy it might be to overpower them.184 In general, however, the Allied
soldiers were more a danger to themselves, as the writer James Stern, an
Englishman in an American uniform, discovered when he chanced on an
American cemetery on the way home from Bamberg to Nuremberg in the
summer of 1945. The war had been over for two months, but the caretaker
told him that bodies came in at an average of thirteen a day. Stern was
incredulous, but it seemed that drunken and reckless driving was the chief
cause, together with suicide.185
Illustrious Bones
The arrival of the Allies, the Red Army in particular, had initiated a
series of bizarre journeys - bones were shifted from ancient vaults to escape
desecration. The first to go were of comparatively recent date: those of
Hindenburg and his wife, who had been laid to rest in the Tannenberg
Monument in 1934.al The retreating German army exhumed Hindenburg’s
corpse in January 1945 and blew up the monument before they left. The
corpses were conveyed across the Baltic on the cruiser Emden.
Once landed, the Hindenburgs’ remains were driven to Potsdam, and
stored in Luftwaffe HQ Kurfürst in Wildpark near by. They joined the royal
refugees that had been extracted from the vault under the Garrison Church:
Frederick the Great and his austere father, Frederick William I, who had
been taken from the crypt by candlelight one night in February. At the same
time Wehrmacht officers had removed all the captured standards. The
Garrison Church was destroyed on 14 April 1945, and the bodies escaped
the bombing and subsequent firestorm as a result.186
By the time of the Allied raid, the Hindenburgs, Frederick William and
Frederick had already left Potsdam.am On Sunday 11 March Hauptmann
Wilfried Seegebarth received orders to take them to a salt mine in Thuringia
along with the standards and other precious objects associated with
Prussia’s most famous son: musical instruments, tapestries and Frederick
the Great’s library. In the late afternoon of the 13th, the transport had
reached Bernterode in Thuringia. The coffins were lodged in the mine and
concealed behind blocks of salt. All those involved were sworn to secrecy.
American soldiers reached the mine on 27 April and found the coffins.
When they left Thuringia in keeping with the decisions taken at Yalta and in
preparation for the meeting at Potsdam, they carried the dead bodies off
with them. They took them to the university city of Marburg where they
were initially housed in the cellar of the Schloss, before being brought to
the basement of the city archive.
On 21 August 1946 the royal bodies were secretly reburied in the St
Elisabeth’s Church in the city. A few days later they were joined by the
Hindenburgs. The pastor agreed to lodge the bodies under pressure from the
Americans and Oskar von Hindenburg, the president’s son, who had
commanded POW camps during the war and had been arraigned as a war
criminal. He was let off with a fine.187 The royal bodies were finally walled
up in the church on the 21st, in the presence of Prince Louis Ferdinand of
Prussia - the crown prince’s eldest surviving son - and his wife, Princess
Kira.an Somewhere along the way an act of petty larceny had been carried
out against the person of Frederick the Great: his Order of the Black Eagle
had been pilfered, probably by an American soldier. You could still see
where it had been by the star-shaped patch of pure Prussian blue on his
otherwise faded uniform tunic.ao

OceanofPDF.com
 3
Berlin
When I rode through the area around the
Tiergarten yesterday, I thought to myself: one day they
will talk of May 1945 in the same way as they describe
the Sack of Rome. Naturally, it was different to 1527,
because Berlin was already half finished, but had it not
been for the lunacy of the defence it would not have
been so much of a battlefield. It was only when we now
see what the Russians are taking away that we can see
how fundamentally rich we were.
Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Frankfurt/Main 1996, 140-1

There was no shortage of bones in Berlin on 2 May 1945 when General

Weidling signed the ceasefire in that city. The Russians had finished the
business a day late: they had hoped to have defeated the Germans by - if not
on - May Day;1 but still, the enemy was soundly thrashed. Of the 150,000
homes in the centre of the city, only 18,000 were undamaged, and 32,000
were completely destroyed. After Goebbels had incited Berliners to fight to
the last, his deputy Fritzsche told them to stop: 134,000 soldiers laid down
their arms.2 Ruth Friedrich, who had been a member of a low-key resistance
group, thought the Third Reich had vanished like a ghost. She exulted in the
deaths of Hitler and Goebbels: ‘Go to hell, Führer and Reich Chancellor!
Tempi passati! You don’t interest us any more.’3
At least, Berliners might have imagined it was over, but they knew what
to expect. The only thing Goebbels had not mooted were the occasional acts
of kindness. Charlottenburg, where the journalist Margret Boveri lived, was
an affluent area, and one of the last to surrender. She became aware of the
change in the situation when she ventured out on to the streets to obtain her
last quarter-pound of butter. She found Russians already sniffing at the
queues. Most of the Berliners had thought it prudent to don white
armbands. They openly complained of the Party for the first time. When she
got home she found that German soldiers had broken into a neighbour’s
cellar to steal civilian clothes. They intended to make a break for the west:
no one wanted to be caught by the Russians.ap
The Russians picked over the city, exploring their new prize. The
impotent and ruinous Reichstag building became the symbol of Russian
victory. It had ceased to function as a democratic assembly soon after Hitler
came to power. Marshal Zhukov added his signature to the others on the
stonework of the interior.4aq The journalist Konstantin Simonov wandered
around the Tiergarten. He looked in at the Zoo to see the dead and
emaciated animals lying beside the bodies of SS men. He went to the huge
Anti-Aircraft Tower that had fought to the last. Inside there had been
drunken orgies as the last act had been played out. There were the bodies of
suicides everywhere. In one cubicle he found a dead SS general, his
uniform tunic unbuttoned and a bottle of champagne between his legs. He
had committed suicide with his mistress, who lay beside him in a pretty
white blouse and skirt. He went on to the Reich Chancellery where agents
of Soviet Military Intelligence, or Smersh, had already identified the bodies
of Goebbels and his wife and children. Hitler and Eva Braun eluded them
for the time being.5 Schwerin von Krosigk spoke on the airwaves: ‘The
world can only be pacified if the Bolshevik wave can be prevented from
overwhelming it.’6
The Russians were drunk, and not just with victory. ‘Woina kaputt!’
(The war’s over!) and ‘Gitler durak!’ (Hitler’s a blockhead!). The terror
began quietly in Margret Boveri’s Charlottenburg. ‘Ich Pistol!’ announced
the soldiers. ‘Du Papier!’ That meant that they had guns, and no amount of
paperwork was going to do you any good if you wanted to hang on to
property or virtue. ‘There is nothing in this city that isn’t theirs for the
taking,’ reported another woman who lived near Neukölln in the south.7 At
first the Russian soldiers came for watches. With a cry of ‘Uhri! Uhri!’ ‡
they snatched, sometimes discarding the previous acquisition, which had
simply stopped and needed to be rewound. This anonymous ‘Woman’ saw
many Red Army soldiers with whole rows of watches on their arms ‘which
they continuously kept winding, comparing and correcting - with childish,
thievish pleasure’.8 For the Russians, Berlin - even in its ruinous state - was
the picture of sophistication. They thought that the light was captured in
lightbulbs and unscrewed them to send them home. They were fascinated
by lavatories with flushes - and allegedly used them to wash their potatoes
in. Little things, like cigarette lighters, were not only new, but utterly
enchanting to them.9
Some Berliners came out well from the experience. One
Charlottenburger was seized and stripped of his elegant leather jacket. The
Russian assailant tossed him his windcheater in return. His initial
despondency at the exchange soon turned to jubilation: in the pockets of the
soldier’s garment he found two watches and two pieces of jewellery,
including a valuable ring. Ruth Friedrich watched a Mongol soldier, who
had befriended them, empty his pockets of wristwatches, lighters, golden
rings and silver necklaces, ‘like a child, calling them “trophies”’.10 Margret
Boveri remarked that the men of the Red Army:
were like children in their glee over the new watches. One of
them gazed alternately at his wristwatch and then pulled a pocket
watch out and held it to his ear; we watchless ones, on the other hand,
could only guess at the time. They sang and danced and played mouth
organ and harmonica . . . and then they played ancient German records
on a stolen German gramophone. The scene in the courtyard was
reminiscent of the description of the Cossacks in Memories of an Old
Manar . . .11
The Woman saw her liberators discard a collection of classical 78s,
including Lohengrin and Beethoven’s Ninth, in favour of a record playing
an advertising jingle from C&A in the Spittalmarkt.12
Nicolas Nabokov had a clear memory of Berlin at this time: ‘In front of
the Adlon [hotel] stand two trucks. The first one contains a mountain of
brass: tubas, trumpets and trombones covered by heavy Bokhara rugs. On
top of the rugs sit three sullen-looking Mongoloid soldiers. Their uniforms
are tattered. They are eating bread. The second truck stands half-cocked on
three wheels, blocking the traffic. It contains thousands of naked
typewriters, and standing in their midst a cow moos . . .’13
Gramophones were the Russians’ special delight. They played them
non-stop until they were broken and then they had to purloin another. The
Russian inability to master anything technical was ‘an inexhaustible
chapter’.14 They stole all the bicycles they could find. The Woman saw
them take them up to a street near the Hasenheide where they practised
riding them. They sat ‘stiff on the saddles like chimpanzees in the zoo’.15
They frequently fell off before they mastered the use of the two-wheeled
beast. Many bicycles were broken in the process and the wreckage strewn
over the street. Ruth Friedrich’s friends collected up the bits and assembled
new vehicles from them.16 The Russians were in the main ‘as good-natured
as children. Some of them were sadists for all that.’17
Later they came looking for all stocks of food the Berliners had so
carefully amassed. They liberated any alcohol they could lay their hands on.
Drunk, they were even less easy to control. Then they amused themselves
by setting fire to buildings. Anything they did not steal they destroyed:
valuable antiques and musical instruments, elegant clothes and works of art.
Flats were requisitioned for the use of officers, the occupants chased away
with knives and pistols. But on that first day the Charlottenburger were
more frightened of what the Americans would do; it was thought they were
even more bent on revenge than the Russians.18
Then the rape and slaughter began in earnest. Conservative estimates
place the number of Berlin women raped at 20,000.19 It began in Neukölln
at 6 p.m. on 27 April. In the Woman’s cellar they went for the distiller’s
wife first, as she appeared to promise two pleasures; after that it was the
baker’s wife. The Woman thought the fattest were most in danger, because
fat, for a Russian, represented good health. The rapists left the scrawnier,
half-starved Berlin women until last.20 Anxious parents hid their still
virginal daughters in lofts, in cupboards or under sofas. The Woman
described the dislocated experience of rape. The feeling was more of
paralysis than disgust. She felt an utter coldness, ‘the spine seems to be
frozen, icy dizziness encircles the back of the head . . . It’s like sinking
through the floor.’ When her attacker left he tossed her a packet of
cigarettes.21
Margret Boveri first came face to face with it when she visited some
friends in plush Dahlem in the south-west of the city. They had been
‘liberated’ several days before. The worst cases involved very young
children or elderly ladies, and the victims were often killed afterwards.
Sometimes they took their own lives. In one instance soldiers raped the
sisters who worked as nurses in the military hospital, infecting them with
syphilis at the same time.22 It was rumoured that the severity of the rapine
was caused by the fact the Russians had sent in units made up of criminals -
such as the Nazis had used at the time of the Warsaw Uprising - but this was
later revealed to have been untrue. Rapists were threatened with gruesome
punishments, but the prospect of satisfying their lust proved stronger than
the fear of chastisement.
That the Russians had received some sort of order was made clear to the
Woman, who spoke a rudimentary Russian and could understand some of
the exchanges between the conquerors. One officer reprimanded a soldier
with the words ‘ukas Stalina’ (Stalin’s orders), but the man answered back,
saying the Germans had raped his sister. While the Woman was raped later
by two Russians, a female soldier interrupted her comrades. When she saw
what they were doing she merely laughed. The Woman promptly
complained to another officer, but he dismissed her. They had not done her
any harm, and all his men were healthy, he said.23
Ruth Friedrich was spared, largely because her lover, the conductor Leo
Borchard, spoke fluent Russian. She visited a friend who had been raped by
seven soldiers, ‘one after the other, like beasts’. ‘We need to commit suicide
. . . we certainly can’t live like this,’ the friend said.24 Ruth’s friend Frank
addressed the Russian need for women: the euphoria of victory manifested
itself in the flesh of Berlin’s womenfolk; the Russians took bodily
possession of German soil, bit by bit; and bodily they consumed German
flesh, night by night.25
The preferred form of suicide was poison, and there was much
discussion of the best and most painless way to quit life. The discussions
had started before the Russians arrived. It had been a favourite topic of
conversation between Hitler and his secretaries at their nocturnal teas.26
Berlin women, it seems, were short of food, but well provided with poison.
There were instances of mass-suicide by poison. The actor Paul Bildt and
some twenty others despatched themselves thus, only he woke again and
lived for another dozen years. His daughter was among the dead. Attesting
once more to the incidence of suicide among the nobles, especially those
who lived on isolated estates in the Mark Brandenburg, the writer cites a
number of cases showing how far the old families would go to protect the
dignity of their daughters: death was preferable to dishonour.
Elsewhere the rapes soon became routine and when it was not
accompanied by violence it could eventually be laughed off. A kind of
gallows humour grew up that was encapsulated in the expression ‘Besser
ein Iwan auf dem Bauch als ein Ami auf dem Kopf!’ (Better a Russki on the
belly than a Yank on the head!), meaning that rape was preferable to being
blown up by a bomb. The Woman’s friend, a widow, was over fifty when
she was raped by an unbearded boy. He later paid her a compliment, saying
she was considerably tighter than the women of the Ukraine. She was proud
of the remark and repeated it to other women.27 One journalist of Margret
Boveri’s acquaintance, for example, was able to make light of her rape,
even if she had cried at the time - ‘in retrospect the story sounded very
funny: the hanging water bottle and all the other bits of equipment getting
in the way, the inexperience of the young man and the speed at which it was
consummated’. 28 Margret commented: ‘Middle-class people have never
spoken so frankly about sex before. Are they really sympathising with the
victims, or is it more erotic titillation? There is a good deal of longing for
love in our city, deprived of men, and there are many unconscious ways to
compensate.’29 Her friend Elsbeth, herself a victim of a savage rapist who
had not only cracked her skull but knocked out most of her teeth, lost her
middle-class prudishness with the experience. Such matters were discussed
openly for the first time: ‘naturally there is lots to laugh about’.30
In a frightful twist in the gallows humour of the time, Berlin children
used to play the ‘Frau komm mit!’ game, with the boys taking the part of
the soldiers and the girls their victims. In normal times the children had
mimicked ‘Zurücktreten, Zug fährt ab!’ (Stand back! The train is leaving!),
a line they heard every time they took the U- or S-Bahn, Berlin’s metro
system. During the war it had been ‘Achtung! Achtung! Schwacher
Kampfverband über Perleberg in Richtung auf die Reichshauptstadt’
(Warning! Warning! A light enemy squadron is over Perleberg, flying in the
direction of the Imperial Capital).31as
Very few escaped the rapine, although the Swiss Max Schnetzer
reported areas that were spared ‘like a hailstorm that only destroys part of
the harvest’.32 One acquaintance of Margret Boveri’s who refused was shot.
Another, who was left miraculously alone, explained this by telling the
writer that the Russians didn’t like women who wore spectacles. The
presence of very small children cooled off the lusty Russians on occasion.
As we have seen, Russian sentiment about children was well known. Also
pregnant women were avoided. The Russians were ‘horribly normal’ and
the Woman could think of no instance of ‘Man come!’ There was a lesbian
living in her block who dressed as a man, and who was never molested.33
Men didn’t help much. In some instances they told the women to go
quietly so as not to put their own lives in jeopardy. Some gallantly but
bootlessly tried to come between the rapists and their women, like an Aryan
man who had protected his Jewish wife throughout the war, and who bled to
death while his wife was raped.34 There was a trade in stars of David, which
sold for up to RM500, but in the end the Russians couldn’t care less if the
woman was Jewish or the house they plundered had a Jewish owner. They
had not gone to war to protect the Jews after all.35
Sometimes the presence of a husband was a deterrent, but it was a risky
business, particularly if the soldier was drunk.36 The Russian-speaking Leo
Borchard was able to save one girl by saying she was his daughter. He sat
up drinking schnapps with the Russians and, by doing so, was able to
protect the female members of his gang, while down in the cellars the
‘victims squealed like stuck piglets’.37 Men receive a bad press in
contemporary accounts, but it must have been an emasculating experience
for a man to see or hear his loved one violently raped and be unable to stop
it. One man, who had witnessed his wife laughing and drinking and
sleeping with the Russians, killed her before shooting himself. Others
tortured themselves with reproaches about their passivity at the crucial time.
The women complained that their men spurned them after the experience,
but conversely many women became frigid after being raped and rejected
their husbands and lovers. The fact that the victims discussed their
experiences with other women within their husbands’ earshot cannot have
made it easier.38
Canny Berlin women learned quickly that it was wisest to give in and
receive the Russians one at a time than to have to put up with terrifying
gang rapes. The wisest found an officer and stuck with him: a ‘wolf’ to
protect you from wolves, and as high-ranking as possible. In return for
sexual favours he was able to prevent any attacks by the routine soldateska.
This was true for an eighteen-year-old in Klein Machnow who had been
raped sixty times. She found a captain and they left her in peace.39 The
Woman in Berlin did likewise. After a few tussles with soldiers she found a
sympathetic lieutenant, and finally a major, who wanted more
companionship than sex. She described the blissful sensation of lying
fearless at his side. When she was later asked the standard question about
how many times it had happened to her she could not say with certainty:
‘No idea. I had to work my way up through the ranks as far as a major.’40
 Even those who laughed about the rapes in retrospect found their nerves
ground down by the nightly attacks. Most of the rapists in Charlottenburg,
Margret Boveri discovered, were simple soldiers sleeping rough in the park.
Those who had been properly billeted behaved better. She resorted to
sleeping pills to get though the night, and didn’t wake when the Russians
knocked at her door. Only in the morning did she hear the grim news from
the neighbours.
The rapes continued throughout the time the Russians had Berlin to
themselves, but they slackened off markedly after 4 May. Their initial lust
sated, some Russians, at least, looked for greater refinements. Margret
Boveri’s pretty journalist friend Frau Zetterberg was confined to a hospital
for some time after a two-hour session with a drunken chauffeur. Another
acquaintance suffered a particularly disgusting attack. Margret spares us the
details, but reminds us of the line of the Empress Theodora, who had
regretted that God had given her just four ways to satisfy her lust.41at
Even when Berlin women were not driven so far as to take their own
lives, the rapes had inevitable consequences in the form of disease and
babies. On 18 August Ruth Friedrich noted that there would be an epidemic
of babies in six months’ time ‘who don’t know who their fathers are, are the
products of violence; conceived in fear; and delivered in horror. Should
they be allowed to live?’ Some of these unwanted babies were placed in a
home in Wilmersdorf. In 1946 it was estimated that one in six of the
children born out of wedlock had been fathered by Russians.42 Coping with
syphilis and gonorrhoea without antibiotics was part of a woman’s life at
the time. Ten per cent of those raped were infected, and antibiotics cost the
equivalent of two pounds of coffee.43 Eventually the Russians decided to
treat the local population themselves. Most of the unwanted Russian
children were aborted, although there was the usual rumour that Stalin had
forbidden the women to dispose of their children because he wanted to see
an alteration in the racial mix. Abortion was a crude business, normally
carried out without anaesthetic and costing about RM1,000. Many women
performed the act on themselves, with inevitable consequences. Despite the
massive incidence of abortion, it is estimated that between 150,000 and
200,000 ‘Russian babies’ survived to see the light of day.44
Despite the terror and the rape, sometimes there were sympathetic
moments between the conquerors and the largely unprotected Berlin women
in those first days. Margret Boveri recounts the story of an impromptu
dinner party when Russian soldiers, whom she and her friends had fed on
turnips, returned the favour and arrived bearing wine, still and sparkling,
bread and other edibles and gave the women news of the probable division
of the country into zones of occupation. Such largesse was a common
experience. As the Woman put it, ‘they love to play Father Christmas’.45
The daily threat of rape petered out only when the Western Allies
arrived in July, and when the Soviet authorities realised that it was
damaging their chances of political success among the civilian population.
When the first free elections were held it became clear that the Red Army
had not won over ‘hearts and minds’ and that Berliners, like the Viennese,
wanted anything but a Moscow-inspired communist regime.46
By the time Ursula von Kardorff returned in September, she called
Berlin a ‘city without Eros’. ‘Women over thirty look old, frustrated and
sad. Make-up covers up so little. “Frau komm”, the cry that rang through
the city as the victor called for his rights to rape, plunder and shoot, rings
still in every ear.’ She heard her fair share of rape stories: of a girl of her
class who was raped by five Russians and abandoned by her noble fiancé;
and of a friend in Zehlendorf who hid behind a coal dump from the
Russians but was given away by another women who sought to protect her
own daughter. She was raped by twenty-three soldiers and had to be sewn
up afterwards. She could not imagine having sex with a man ever again.
Ursula heard another story, of a girl who had found a lover in an English
soldier. One day she had pointed to a German soldier in rags, called him a
‘prolonger of war’ and slapped him. The English soldier gave the man
cigarettes and abandoned the girl on the spot.47
The Soviets in the Saddle
Officially peace came to Berlin on 8 May. Despite the terror of the past
two weeks, Ruth Friedrich was still positive: ‘free from bombs, free from
blackouts, free from the Gestapo and free from Nazis! . . . pax nobiscum!’48
It had taken a while to bring in the other Allies to sign the surrender
document: the Briton Tedder, the American Spaatz and the Frenchman de
Lattre de Tassigny.au They came with a band of accredited journalists.
Zhukov represented the Red Army. The German side was represented by
Field Marshal Keitel, Admiral von Friedeburg and air force General
Stumpff. It was Keitel’s last public engagement before Nuremberg.
 The location was the Soviet HQ in an old military engineering school in
Karlshorst in the east of the city. At 10 p.m. - midnight Russian time - the
German delegation was ushered in. Looking like ‘Boris Karloff’, Keitel
handed over a document signed by Dönitz confirming the unconditional
surrender arranged in Rheims the day before. Keitel allegedly trembled as
he signed the Allied paper, and his monocle fell out. The Germans were
bundled out again before a dinner was thrown for the Allied
plenipotentiaries. It was now 1 a.m. Russian time. The party and dancing
went on until the morning. The generals danced, Zhukov performing a
Russkaya. There were four full hours of toasts and many of the soldiers
were literally under the table.49 When the festivities came to an end there
was a massive cannonade, which some Berliners misinterpreted, imagining
the war had started up all over again.50 The Soviets had known where to
find the wine: 65,000 bottles of claret had been located to this end, and
others beside. They had taken it from a walled-up section of the cellars of
Berlin’s best hotel, the Adlon. The fate of the hotel was sealed by the
discovery of the wine cellar. Russian lorries came to take away the contents,
and very soon a fire broke out that was to destroy one of the few buildings
in the street that had survived the conflict.51
The ‘Muscovites’ came home in three waves: first the Ulbricht Group,
who arrived behind the 1st Belorussian Front on 27 April; secondly the
Ackermann Group, which followed on the heels of the 2nd Belorussian
Front on 1 May; and thirdly Gustav Sobottka’s men, who landed in
Mecklenburg on 6 May. The Ulbricht Group was the cream of the
Muscovites. They had been housed in Moscow’s Hotel Lux. Ten of them
were flown back to Germany as the Russians moved in for the kill. They
landed at Bruchmühle, thirty kilometres east of Berlin. On the beautiful
spring morning of May 1, as the Red Army concluded its operations in the
capital, a German woman told them of the widespread rape that had
accompanied the Soviet advance. The Muscovites dismissed her claims as
fantasy.52 Later Walter Ulbricht conceded that such things might have
happened, but he was not prepared to discuss the matter: ‘Any concession
to these emotions is, for us, quite simply out of the question.’53 Whether that
meant these matters were trivial in the long term or that he did not have
enough power to take it up with the Soviet authorities is not made clear.
Ulbricht emphasised to his colleagues what the task ahead would be.
They were to create cells - ‘our task will be the building of German
agencies for self-government in Berlin’. The group made its way into
Berlin. It was ‘a picture of hell’. They noticed the women around the pumps
with their white and red armbands, confirmed both their peaceful natures
and their friendliness to the Soviet Union. No one was ever in any doubt
that the red had been taken from redundant swastika flags.54 The
Muscovites had been given the task of finding a means of supplying food to
the survivors: there was a propaganda role as there were hearts and minds to
be won. The rations for Germans were to be similar to those in the USSR:
300-600 grams of bread daily.55 Not only did they want to know where food
and water were to be procured, but Ulbricht was anxious for news of the
comrades who had gone into hiding in the city.56
Before 1933 the communists had jockeyed for supremacy in Germany.
In the last free elections of Weimar Germany in November 1932, they had
won 100 seats to the Nazis’ 196. Some had subsequently gone over to the
NSDAP, becoming ‘beefsteak Nazis’ - brown on the outside, red in the
middle. Some had merely observed the forms. Others had gone
underground and many went into concentration camps. For Ulbricht these
men would provide the material he needed to set up his administration.
Some of the communists were distinctly primitive rebels. They wanted to
change the day of rest to Friday and replace the greeting ‘Guten Tag!’ with
‘Rote Front’. The Muscovites were generally more urbane. Some had been
in the Russian capital for years and had taken out Soviet citizenship. Some,
like the later spymaster Markus Wolf, had been brought up in Moscow.
Hans Klering, the actor appointed to run the DEFA film studios, had been in
Russia for fourteen years and had a Soviet wife. The Russian colonel
Alexander Dymshitz said ‘He is really a Soviet actor.’57
Muscovites were strategically placed in every administration. At the
head they installed a ‘harmless idiot’ who could be guaranteed to rubber-
stamp the decisions taken by the Russian commandant. So the man installed
as mayor of Berlin was the sixty-eight-year-old architect Dr Arthur Werner,
‘who, coughing and slurping, is hardly capable of delivering his Goethe-
quotation-filled speech during the five-minute council-meeting’. Because
the Russians had controlled the city since May, the Allies were not party to
the appointments and had to put up with a Soviet fait accompli.
Communists occupied 100 council seats of the 230 in Berlin.58 It was the
same pattern as Vienna, only a little more so.
 The Muscovites’ policy was revealed after the defection of the youngest
of their number, Wolfgang Leonhard. In his book Child of the Revolution he
gave the flavour of Ulbricht’s style of government. Ulbricht determined
matters. As Berlin could not be openly communist, it was decided against
placing communists in charge. They could get away with it, perhaps, in
Wedding or Friedrichshain, because both areas had always been ‘red’. ‘In
working-class areas mayors as a rule should be social democrats and in
middle-class precincts - Zehlendorf, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, etc - we
need men of bourgeois background, former members of the Zentrum
[Catholic party], the Democratic or the German People’s Party. Best, those
who have a doctorate and anti-fascist past and are prepared to co-operate
with us . . .’ Attention was also paid to the mayors’ comrades: ‘The first
deputy mayor, the head of personnel and administration and the man who’s
in charge of education must be our chaps. And you’ve also got to find one
comrade who’s totally trustworthy. He’s the one who takes over the police .
. . it’s got to look democratic, but all that really matters must be in our
hands.’59
Ulbricht had been behind the selection of Dr Werner. When he had first
aired the name his fellow Muscovites, Maron, Gyptner and Winzer, had
been less than enthusiastic. Werner was too old, and it was suspected that he
was ‘not quite right in the head’. ‘What’s the matter?’ retorted Ulbricht.
‘The deputy will be our man.’ So it was that the pliant Werner became the
first post-war Oberbürgermeister of Berlin, and Karl Maron became his
deputy, albeit with extreme reluctance on Maron’s part. He wanted to be top
dog.60
As the Russians consolidated their power in Berlin prior to the arrival of
the Western Allies, Zhukov on 12 June authorised the formation of
bourgeois anti-fascist parties like the conservative CDU and the liberal
LPD. Politically the British and the Americans lagged hopelessly behind.
The British first flexed their muscles when on 17 August they acted to
curtail the political power of the block and street wardens - communists
who had inherited the job from the Nazis. Four days later the Americans
scrapped the posts altogether, which had really only been about spying and
denunciation.
The Muscovites set out to eliminate the hated socialists who had
dominated Berlin for most of the Weimar Republic. Fusion was the answer:
the SED or Socialist Unity Party was formed with the compliance of the
leader of the SPD - socialist party - in the SBZ, Otto Grotewohl. Grotewohl
was increasingly compromised: he had run off with a new woman. She had
been in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BdM - the female version of the Hitler
Youth) and a Pg, and the Russians knew it. Local elections were held in the
first half of September 1945. Heavily monitored by the Soviet authorities,
they must have resembled Hitler’s last cynical stab at democracy in the
spring of 1933.
The bourgeois parties were permitted to field candidates only in certain
constituencies. The CDU ran less than 20 per cent of those presented by the
SED, and the LPD a little over 10 per cent. The results came as no surprise
to any one: the SED won with an aggregate score of 57.1 per cent, having
received more than half the votes in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg - once
the bastion of reaction.61 Kurt Schumacher, who led the Socialist Party in
the Western zones of Germany, was incensed by the Soviet emasculation of
the SPD; nor were the socialists won over in Berlin’s Western sectors. In
March 1946 the call to join the SED was rejected by 82.2 per cent of
socialists. In the east they were not consulted. The German Social
Democrats had rejected a system intended for all Germany, and made the
first move towards creating a separate state outside the SBZ.62
With virtually all men of an appropriate age dead, missing or interned,
the Allies created a gerontocracy, using politicians who had been tried and
tested in the Weimar Republic and who had been impotent during Nazi
times. The heads of the CDU in Berlin, for example, were Messrs Schiffer
and Külz. Külz was an ambitious seventy-year-old, while Schiffer was more
than ten years older and a contemporary of Friedrich Naumann. Andreas
Hermes, who created the CDU in the Soviet Zone, was a sprightly sixty-
seven, but he had been a minister as far back as 1920. After 20 July 1944 he
had been arrested, but then released.
Wolfgang Leonhard had been given his instructions. He provides a good
example in his appointment of a mayor to the middle-class borough of
Wilmersdorf in Berlin. He met a man in the street who had been put in a
concentration camp after 20 July. Leonhard wanted to appoint him mayor,
but the man refused the job. The man in the street knew of another man, a
Dr Willenbucher, who completely fitted the description Ulbricht gave to his
lieutenants. Willenbucher was the usual wrecked figure who had crawled
out of a hole after 2 May, but when he was summoned to meet Ulbricht and
have his appointment ratified, he appeared in a black suit, and stood
upright: ‘he was no longer bent, and there was a new dignity in his walk’.
Ulbricht broke open the vodka to celebrate his appointment.63 In Berlin-
Zehlendorf, the first post-Nazi mayor was a Werner Witgenstein; a man
with vision who wanted to turn the borough into a centre for the arts and
culture. Cultural policy was in the hands of a Herr Rühmann, an actor of a
very average ability who naturally put the weight on cinema and theatre. A
Herr Glum (a former general director of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gesellschaft)
sought to start a university - a difficult undertaking when books were being
systematically impounded and taken to Russia.
The authorities in the SBZ were better when it came to marshalling the
talents of prominent pre-war Berliners to help in specific sectors. Thus the
former minister for the food supply, Dr Hermes, was responsible for food;
the great surgeon Sauerbruch was given the health portfolio; and the
architect Hans Scharoun was assigned building. In the first weeks of June a
fresh delivery of Muscovites included the prudish Wilhelm Pieck, Fred
Oelssner, Paul Wandel, the expressionist poet Johannes R. Becher, Edwin
Hörnle and Marthe Arendsee. The former exiles lived a communal life at 80
Prinzenallee, which fairly buzzed with activity.64 Their final destination was
76-79 Wallstrasse. Their arrival was the cue to refound the KPD or
Communist Party, except it was now to be ‘antifa’ or anti-fascist, and not
Marxist. Of the sixteen founder members at the meeting on 12 June,
thirteen were Muscovites.65
The Berliners were largely without news. Snippets of gossip were
exchanged around the pretty Wilhelmine pumps that stood in all parts of the
city as the people went to fetch water to wash and cook. The Soviets
remained in sole custody of Berlin for a couple more months, however,
claiming that the texts did not make it clear how the Western Allies were to
have land access to their sectors of the city from the Western zones, even if
the air routes had been mapped out - a detail that was to prove
advantageous to the West during the airlift of 1948-9.66av
The Soviets divided their conquered world into Nazis and non-Nazis.
Suddenly the number of people prepared to admit to having been among
Hitler’s nine million began to drop. In Wannsee, for example, the first post-
war headcount established just eighty members. By July that figure had
risen to a thousand, largely as a result of denunciations.67 The Pgs were at a
disadvantage in what was already a desperate situation: they received no
rations, and had to spend their days in Schippen, the process of clearing
away the debris and dismantling industry to be shipped back to Russia. The
politically suspect had to assemble at the labour exchanges at 7 a.m. Details
were sent off to clear rubble, bury corpses, clean streets, clear drains and
prepare bricks for rebuilding.68 There was a rumour that the so-called Alte
Kämpfer - the people who joined the Party even before Hitler achieved
power - were treated the worst, and had to carry out the most back-breaking
work in exchange for bread and water.
They worked hard. Margret Boveri reported that ten days after the fall
of Berlin the piles of rubble left by four years of bombing had been cleared
from the streets. Once again the women bore the brunt. ‘Rubble-women’
formed chains with buckets which they filled with broken bricks and
mortar. The few men that were involved in the clearances only worked
when the Russian supervisor looked on. The Russians were quick to create
an infrastructure in Berlin. Financial and cultural institutions were set up.
Sporting fixtures were arranged.69 The time became Moscow time, and it
was light at midnight as a result. By 13 May a bus route was working again
and on the 14th the first U-Bahn set out since the fall. The airfields were
patched up and put back to work.70 The Soviet authorities treated with
consideration petitioners who came to them wanting to set up essential
businesses. Bakers were encouraged to go back to work, and flour was
promised to help them make bread. On 16 May the anonymous Woman
diarist was attached to a Russian officer who had been sent to get the
banking system working again. He suddenly began to speak to her in
French, and she realised he was a Biwsche - a survival from the pre-1917
ancien régime.71
The Soviet authorities were severe when it came to Pgs. Before the
Western Allies arrived, they closed 1,400 shops owned by Party members
and sacked nearly 12,000 functionaries. Nacht und Nebel kidnappings also
removed nearly 5,500 Berliners, many of them members of the press and
the police. A number of former resisters headed east into captivity as well,
such as Alexander Werth, who had been incarcerated by the Nazis and
worked with Adam von Trott in the Information Department of the German
Foreign Office; and Horst von Einsiedel, a member of the Kreisau Circle
around Helmuth James von Moltke who was to die in a Soviet prison camp
in 1947. Another was an unnamed Baltic baron who had been in Admiral
Canaris’s Abwehr or military intelligence and who was kidnapped in the
British Sector. Sometimes the Soviets arrested their own men, as was the
case with Makar Ivanov, a culture-boffin who had contacts with the British
through Leo Borchard.72 The police in the SBZ were run by Paul Markgraf,
a former Wehrmacht colonel who had been captured at Stalingrad and who
converted to communism during his imprisonment by the Russians.73 There
were exaggerated rumours: the actor Heinrich George had been shot and his
colleague Gustaf Gründgens arrested. George had been the Intendant of the
Schiller Theatre and, as such, a fellow traveller. He didn’t die for another
eighteen months, when he succumbed to the treatment he received at the
liberated Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The killing had continued
under new masters.
Gründgens had been taken in, but he fared better than George. He had
run the State Theatre during the Third Reich, but used his position to
protect a number of people who had fallen foul of the regime. The Russians
released him soon after. The danger was denunciation. The Russians
encouraged people to denounce others in order to save their own skins. The
Soviets were especially anxious to discover the whereabouts of the top
officials of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Pleading innocence did not help.
If you could not provide an answer you were led away and never heard of
again. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry (‘ProMi’) had been responsible for
seemingly harmless organisations such as the Foreign Press Club, but as far
as the Russians were concerned anyone tarred with its brush was liable to
arbitrary arrest. Working for the Press Club had had advantages, as had the
Press Department of the Foreign Office, which was Ribbentrop’s rival
organisation to the official Information Department - journalists received
bigger rations. It did not necessarily follow that the people who performed
the relatively menial roles within these organisations were members of the
Party, though many were.
A small number of Jews had gone through the war unscathed - they
were the so-called U-Booten or submarines. One man, whom Margret
Boveri encountered on her bicycle, turned out to be a rabbi, who had lived
in comparative peace under an assumed name. Another case she unearthed
was a certain Frau Nerwig, a pure Jewess whose Aryan husband had died in
1939, but who had married an English Mr Lind pro forma and had therefore
survived the war. As a Mischling, her son Klaus was exempted from army
service and obliged to go to the Todt construction organisation, where he
would have surely died had he not fled at the right moment. The boy was
powerful and blond, and the Russians refused to believe that he was not an
SS man in disguise. The mother responded by pulling the commanding
officer on to the sofa with her. Klaus thereby survived.
A Viennese Jew in British army uniform, George Clare found another
Jewess who had survived the war because her Aryan husband had refused
to divorce her. He had been the headmaster of a Berlin Gymnasium or
grammar school. The Nazis forced him out of his job and he had to work as
a commercial traveller. Then the Russians came and he refused to hand over
his bicycle, so they shot him.74 Later the Russians were keen to use what
Jews they could find to fill important roles in the city. The machinist Walter
Besser was put in charge of a hospital. The last Berlin Jews were all lodged
in the Jewish Hospital in the Iranische Strasse. They included twenty or so
informers who had been protected by the Gestapo, as well as a further 800
‘privileged Jews’ married to Gentiles. As early as 6 May a religious service
was performed in the hospital by the Rabbi Kahane and five days later the
Sabbath was celebrated at the Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee.75 On 21 June
there was a Jewish cultural evening at the Levetzower Strasse synagogue.
That month the Soviet authorities appointed the dentist Moritz Blum as the
first head of the Jewish Governing Board based in the ruins of the old
synagogue on the Oranienburger Strasse.
Subsistence
Food was an obsession for all Berliners. Ruth Friedrich and her friends
had been thrown out of the billet where they had spent the last weeks of the
war. They moved into a deserted house hoping to find food. Onions was all
there was. Later they located a cache of sherbet powder, sweet chews and
stock cubes. Their Mongol friend was not impressed when he came to call.
With Russian help, however, they killed a cow. As they hacked the beast
into manageable pieces they were astonished to see people creep out of
holes in the ground with buckets in their hands and beg for a slice of bloody
meat. ‘Give me the liver . . . Give me the tongue!’ they cried.76
The Russians provided some food from the beginning. There were fixed
and mobile canteens serving hot soup. In three months they delivered
188,000 tons of food to Berlin. Baking began again on 9 May. It was black
and wet, but it was bread of sorts. Ration cards were introduced on the 17th.
The cards were graded I-V. Later a card VI was printed. The largest rations
went to the workers who were eligible for card I: 600 grams of bread, 30 of
fat and 100 of meat; Nazis and housewives received the ‘Hunger Card’ -
number V: that meant 300 grams of bread, 7 of fat and 20 of meat. Ruth
Friedrich knew a woman who had card V. Her husband had been a Pg, and
she had five children. As they received the food, she lay in bed, because she
was too hungry to stand. She weighed just forty kilos.77
Margret Boveri lists the contents of her larder and the occasional feasts
she ate during those meagre days. A surprise visit from Elvira von Zitzewitz
was used as a pretext to bring out some of the best things she had: soup
made from a stock prepared from the lung of a horse slaughtered in the
street below, in the last moments of the war; then potatoes boiled in their
skins; the remains of some pasta e piselli; and, to finish, a dessert made
from ‘pudding powder’ and some cherry compôte that had begun to
ferment: ‘a meal for the gods!’78 Many Berliners grew potatoes among the
ruins. Others had window boxes filled with chervil and borage.79 The
Charlottenburger seem to have had the pick of the horses. When Ruth
Friedrich walked down the Chaussee (now Strasse des 17 Juni) on 17 May
the street stank of rotting horse carcasses. The bones were picked quite
clean.80
It could only get worse. Shortage of milk drove mothers in Neukölln to
the local Russian command, or Kommandatura. They said their children
would die without milk. The Soviets replied that it made no difference if
they died now or in a year’s time. At the end of June the Russians rounded
up the ninety cows in the model farm in Dahlem. Their milk had been
largely reserved for them anyhow, but it was bad for morale to see them
leave for Russia. The animals were suffering from foot and mouth disease,
and it was questionable whether they would make it alive.81 That being said,
the Russians stressed from the beginning that they intended to feed the
Berliners; they created a political structure and encouraged cultural activity.
They did not treat the Germans as the Germans had vowed to deal with
them. The Germans were not to be exterminated.
Those who acquiesced when it came to marauding Russian soldiers
could do considerably better. After a visit by the usual posse of Russians,
the Woman counted her blessings. She had bread, herrings (they had been
cut up on the mahogany table), tinned meat and the remains of a flitch of
bacon, all brought by her visitors. When the Russians left, they took only
the alcohol away with them: ‘I have not eaten so well in years,’ she
concluded. Later a Russian arrived with a couple of small turbot. Even
more astonishing was a later visit when one of her admirers brought her a
bottle of tokay.82
By mid-June the prices of food on the ‘free’ market were astronomical:
strawberries (then in season) were 7.50 Reichsmarks a pound; a kohlrabi,
50 Pfennigs, but you had to queue for four hours to get one and the chances
were that the shop would be sold out. On the black market a pound of meat
fetched 100 Reichsmarks, and by July the price of a kilo tin of dripping had
risen to RM500. Watches and jewellery could be exchanged for food from
the Russians in the Keithstrasse.83 The wartime staple had been potatoes.
Margret Boveri’s last delivery had been in October 1944, which she eked
out until mid-July, by which time they were quite blue inside. Every now
and again she and her friends alighted on a windfall crop in a park or
garden. On 18 July she made a list of what she had been able to obtain so
far that month: two kohlrabis, a small lettuce, 250 grams of blackcurrants,
600 grams of sugar, ‘and for 500 gm worth of coupons, 300 gm of meat.
There are no potatoes and no fat. There is neither salt nor vinegar. Now,
however, I can queue up for bread.’ By the end of the month there had been
much promised, but little received: no fat, meat, fruit, vegetables, vinegar,
ersatz coffee or salt all month; just a part of the potatoes, bread, 620 grams
of sugar, 600 grams of flour and seven stock cubes.84
Berliners felt totally cut off from the outside world. There was no
transport (all bicycles and cars were liable to requisition) and there was no
telephone. Meanwhile the Russians were pulling up one set of railway lines
on every track and taking these away with them. Anyone who had illegally
retained their wireless set had to reckon with highly irregular power. The
effect in the long term was to alter the nature of Berlin, from being the
industrial powerhouse that it had been since the nineteenth century to being
a city devoid of industry in the late twentieth.
Two things were important for the dignity of the new helots, particularly
the women: hairstyling and flowers. Margret Boveri took pride in the flower
arrangements she created in her bombed-out house. During the Berlin Blitz,
there had been hairdressers on hand in the flak towers ready to groom the
women until the all-clear sounded. Fuel was another problem. With time the
Berlin parks - the Tiergarten and the massive Grunewald - would be shorn
of their flora. Even in the summer of 1945 the Grunewald was being cleared
of fallen branches, while others looked for blackened beams in the burned-
out buildings.85 Electricity was restored on 25 July, however, and on 5
August a limited postal service began to function. Berlin was no longer
isolated from the rest of Germany. But the agony was not over. After the
blights of murder, rape and starvation came disease: by mid-June a hundred
Berliners a day were dying of typhus and paratyphus carried by human lice,
and Berliners were forbidden from entering premises commandeered by the
Western Allies.86
The Arrival of the Western Allies
Everyone waited for the Western Allies in the hope that their arrival
would improve matters. Stalin, however, was playing for time so that he
might remove anything valuable from the city, and sink trusty communists
deep into any positions of power. Had he been able to renege on the deal to
allow the Anglo-Americans in, he would have done so. Soviet permission to
proceed to Berlin hung on the Western Allies retreating to the demarcation
lines drawn up at Yalta. The Anglo-Americans were to fall back behind the
Elbe.87
On 2 June Lieutenant-General Lucius Clay, who was to head the
American mission in Berlin, had yet to receive instructions. The
Americans’ first attempt to reach Berlin failed utterly. On 17 June Colonel
Frank Howley left with a reconnaissance party of 500 men in a hundred
vehicles. He was well prepared. Behind him he had left a pool of 2,000
college-educated Berlin women who were to be his secretariat in the city
and he had acquired a Horch Roadmaster - Germany’s best car - and draped
it with the Stars and Stripes. As he crossed the Elbe at Dessau in his Horsch
the Soviet authorities insisted he reduce his train and continue with just
thirty-seven officers in fifty vehicles. The convoy, Howley later wrote,
reached ‘Babelsburg [sic] . . . a sort of German Hollywood’ near Potsdam
under Soviet escort where it was forced to stop and eventually return to the
west. Howley was allowed to go up and look at the future American airfield
at Tempelhof. No one else had been permitted to leave their cars.88
Howley went back to a Schloss near Halle and sulked. ‘Gentlemen,’ he
told his officers, ‘we are never going to Berlin.’89 On 29 June Clay and his
British counterpart General Sir Ronald Weeks and the civilian advisers
Robert Murphy and Sir William Strang landed in Berlin to discuss
arrangements with Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov. At that
meeting the frail land lines were established that were to become the Allied
routes to the city until 1989. Howley made another attempt to reach Berlin
on 1 July with 85 officers and 136 men. This time he got through - although
the Russians made him less than welcome when he started putting up the
Stars and Stripes in the American Sector.
Howley says the Americans celebrated their arrival with a fist-fight with
the Russians in a restaurant: a Polish American major apparently floored six
of his Russian allies.90 Attitudes were clearly beginning to change: the
Germans did not seem such a bad lot after all, and the Russians were not
exactly the sort of people you wanted to have as allies. Summing up his
initial feelings about them in 1945, Howley was to recall that he had
thought of them as ‘big, jolly, balalaika-playing fellows, who drank
prodigious quantities of vodka and liked to wrestle in the drawing room’.91
The British too made a move on 1 July, only to be told that Magdeburg
Bridge was closed. They found another bridge and slipped into Berlin, but a
full entry was still delayed until the 4th. Officers later recalled the shock of
seeing the lakes in the prosperous west filled with the corpses of women
who had committed suicide after being raped. It was weeks before the
Anglo-Americans achieved a real military presence, even if Ruth Friedrich
reported seeing an American in the Schlossstrasse in Steglitz on 3 July.92
The main force of the Anglo-Americans arrived on Friday 6 July after
withdrawing their troops from the disputed parts of Saxony, Thuringia and
Mecklenburg - much to the chagrin of their inhabitants. The Control
Council had been created in November 1944, and its seat was to be a
‘jointly occupied’ Berlin. As yet no one knew how that was to be managed.
Would there be checkpoints between the sectors? Were Berliners to be
issued with passports?93 It was agreed that the presidency of the
Kommandatura would be rotated. Zhukov allegedly informed the
Americans that he would not guarantee food for the Berliners, but visitors
to the Allied conferences were well looked after. The Soviet marshal
claimed that twice as many officers attended the Russian-hosted meetings
because of the quantities of caviar and vodka that were laid out. This feast
was apparently known euphemistically as ‘tea’.94
Howley relates that the Americans were much taken up with the abuse
of Berlin women by the Russians, conveniently forgetting the widespread
incidence of rape by American soldiers. A Russian general excused his
countrymen, admitting that the rapes had done his country’s reputation no
good, but it was nothing to what the Germans had done in his country. As
the Russians had had Berlin to themselves for two months, they had haunts
in the American Sector they were loath to give up. On one of these
expeditions a girl was killed by some Russian sailors. The Americans
complained, but the Russian commander told them there were no Russian
sailors in Berlin: they had to be bad Germans in stolen Russian uniforms.
The atmosphere grew tense. The Americans self-righteously decided that
they were allowed to shoot to kill when women were involved. Changing
their tune, the Russians excused their conduct by suggesting the men had
been drunk or that they were deserters. In an exchange of fire in a railway
station, some Russians were killed. At this the Russians launched a
complaint. They cited a British sergeant who had knocked a Russian’s teeth
out and dumped him across the border. That was an appropriate
chastisement; it was wrong to shoot. Howley claimed the shooting ceased
with the end of Russian rape and looting.95
In Berlin the Russians received the more populous working-class areas
to the east, while the Western Allies carved up the richer districts to the
west. There were enclaves and exclaves: the radio station was in the British
Sector, but remained in Soviet hands; and the village of Steinstücken was
included in Berlin. There were other anomalies that persisted until 1989: the
Soviets had to be able to tend their war memorial in the Tiergarten, and
each army had the right to monitor the others, which meant issuing passes
to one or two privileged intelligence men who had the right to roam in a
Western or Eastern sector or zone.
The Americans proved a disappointment. The Berliners had the feeling
that they did not know why they were there. Margret Boveri, who had
worked as a journalist in the United States and had been interned there at
the beginning of the war, discovered that many of them spoke less English
than she did. It was better to speak Spanish. Sometimes a little French
helped. Other women were initially relieved that they could sleep in peace -
unbothered by Russian interlopers; but, if that was true in the main, there
were exceptions on both sides. Margret Boveri recounts the case of an
estate-owning family on the edge of Berlin who were out walking when the
Russians arrived and so ran back to the house petrified with fear as to what
the soldiers would do to their daughters and their friends. They found to
their surprise that the Russians had touched nothing and had been
exceptionally polite. When the Americans arrived, however, one of the girls
was so brutally raped that it took her years to recover from the shock. In
general, however, Margret Boveri thought that whatever occupying army
controlled your sector was the worst in the eyes of the Berliners. Every
inhabitant envied the soldiers of their neighbours. The Americans were
particularly naive. Dr Hussels, medical chief for Zehlendorf, was asked to
provide 2,500 beds. She asked where they thought she could find them. The
officer replied, in the hospitals. She had to inform him that the Russians had
already taken them.96
The chief excitement was what could be gleaned from American dust-
bins. Margret Boveri was working for the publishers Ullstein, where she
came across a review of an American book that said the average American
threw away more than the consumption of a Russian civilian. It was
American policy that nothing should be given away and everything should
be thrown away. So those German women who worked for the Americans
were fantastically well fed, but could take nothing for their families or
children. A woman who had put some cheese-parings on a windowsill to
take home received a tremendous dressing down, and even the unfinished
coffee was poured down the sink at the end of the day. The Americans were
outraged that the starving Berliners should dare to help themselves to their
food. Colonel Frank Howley had arrived in Berlin with a couple of tame
wild boars the army had adopted on their drive east. When a German tried
to eat one of the boars he was brutally knocked to the ground. Howley’s
fellow officers, however, impressed on him that the boars were more
trouble than they were worth, and the Americans ate both.97
Margret Boveri’s friend Elsbeth together with her sausage-dog Batzi
came across a real treasure trove discarded in Grunewald. Bread of a
whiteness Berliners had not seen for years, wrappers from butter and
margarine packets, firm onions; but the Americans found out that someone
had raided their refuse and were more careful after that. There were still
finds to be made, however, and Elsbeth managed to live for five days on a
rice pudding that she had filched out of an incinerator. That pudding had the
makings of an epic. Margret Boveri was still singing its praises days later.
Then she also received some chicken bones, and had the pleasure of making
a soup with a little more body than the vegetable broth she more habitually
used. The supreme delight, however, came when Fräulein Roscies found a
half-eaten sponge cake and a dish of a sort of ‘tapioca-white-bread pudding’
that contained half a squeezed lemon: ‘a proper, grown-on-a-tree lemon’.
The eating of this plunder runs to a long paragraph in her account.98
 Despite the largesse to be found in rubbish bins, there was still a
considerable shortage in the third week of July. So far they had had no meat
that month; it was the sixth week without fat and probably the twenty-fifth
without milk or eggs. Margret Boveri consoled herself by picking some
magnificent flowers and setting them up in her airy if smashed-up room. In
1950, Howley nonetheless claimed that the Americans were spending their
time worrying about the subsistence of the Berliners. He criticised the
Russian rye loaf, which required 100 lb of flour to make 145 lb of bread. It
was too wet, he said, and rotted.aw It is somehow unconvincing, in the light
of later events at least, when Howley reports a conversation with the French
colonel Dalade in which he asks whether food can be political. The
Frenchman replies, ‘Of course!’ Howley and the Americans were already
fully immersed in the war for hearts and minds, and started teaching Berlin
children baseball and basketball.99
The refusal to look kindly on the starving Berliners was part of the same
policy that forbade ‘frat’ or socialising with the enemy. Initially frat was
punishable by six months’ imprisonment. Soldiers were forbidden to shake
German hands or give presents and were to treat them as a conquered race.
Very soon the Americans in particular were out in pursuit of ‘Fräuleins’,
and there were a few curiosities to see. The wife of a former foreign
minister, Frau Solf, for example, who had been condemned to death by the
Nazis for having operated an oppositional salon and spent over a year in
Ravensbrück, began to receive visits from the British and the Americans;
but, although she was no more than skin and bone, they brought her nothing
to eat.100 The Anglo-American policy on frat stood in sharp contrast with
the Russian one, whereby contact with the civilian population was
informally permitted as a reward for the one and a punishment for the other.
Some Berliners believed that the Russian policy was kinder than the
ostracism decreed by the Anglo-Americans. Some even went so far as to
say that the Berlin women had been relieved by their attentions - they had
been so long deprived of their own menfolk.
Treating the Berliners like a conquered people engendered sympathy for
the former Nazis. No distinction was to be made between good Germans
and bad Germans, so the good Germans began to muck in with the bad. In
some cases only the names had changed. The Blockwart, the resident sneak,
of Nazi times had briefly reappeared as the Hausobmann. Margret Boveri’s
emerged with the denazification questionnaire, the Fragebogen, in his hand,
crippled with anxiety at the thought that the authorities would discover he
had been a Pg. Ruth Friedrich was stormed by ex-Nazis asking for
testimonials that they had helped Jews.101 When the people had joined the
Party as a matter of routine, of officious lip-service, even anti-Nazis were
prepared to help them.
Worse than the ban on frat was the requisitioning of houses in the
smarter western suburbs such as Zehlendorf and Dahlem. This was the
American Sector, and the area where there were the most comfortable
villas. The US authorities even briefly requisitioned the Titania Palast as an
officers’ club until Leo Borchard succeeded in getting it back. The
Muscovites took over big houses in a largely unscathed Pankow, while the
top Soviet brass settled in Karlshorst. In total some 3,000 flats and houses
had to be made available. ‘Whether anti-Nazi or pro-Nazi, whether rich or
poor, whoever had to get out, had to go,’ wrote Ruth Friedrich.102
By the autumn of 1945 the Berliner’s living space was reduced to less
than ten square metres.103 The French had finally pitched up after they were
allotted a morsel of the British Sector in Reinickendorf and Wedding on 23
July, and found themselves a few nice villas in Frohnau, Wittenau and
Tegel. The British came out of it the worst, as there were fewer palatial
residences in Wilmersdorf or Spandau. Wherever, the grabbing of houses by
the Allies led to acute misery on the part of the stricken population. Not
even Jews who had returned from the camps were immune and were thrown
out at pistol-point. The victims were given a few hours to pack up their
things. The result was that they had to find some space in a friend’s flat
until that too was grabbed by another officer of the garrison. Meanwhile,
women who had once led a privileged life in Germany struggled to find a
place as a servant or cleaner to the invaders. One Berliner who had been
kicked out of his house commented bitterly that first the women had been
raped by the Russians, now they had to wait on the Americans’ whores.104
Despite their superior airs the Americans wanted to be greeted as liberators
and resented the fact that they were not. Their cold-blooded approach
contrasted strongly with that of the Russians.
Preaching in Dahlem in July the anti-Nazi theologian Otto Dibelius
drew attention to the mortality figures for Berlin. In normal times, the daily
rate was around 200; in the war it had risen to nearer 250 as a result of the
bombing; now the figure was around 1,000, and this in a far smaller city.
The famine was becoming acute. People, chiefly men, were falling like
flies. The final killing spree and the high mortality rate after the cessation of
hostilities meant that there were lots of dead to bury. There was nowhere to
put them and no coffins, and the Allies would not help. Families had
interred their loved ones in the ruins or laid them out in mortuary chapels.
Berliners resorted to using large wooden cupboards or simply wrapping the
body in a horse blanket tied up with cord. Ruth Friedrich records seeing an
instance of this: a bundle with a pair of yellow, wooden-seeming feet
protruding from the end.105 All over the city there were ad hoc graveyards.
In front of the cinema opposite the Woman there was a collection of
crosses. The first to be buried there was a girl who had leaped from a third-
storey window to avoid being raped. Fresh crosses began to appear soon
after.106 Questioned, the Russian general Gorbatov said the famine was the
result of the Nazis, who had sabotaged supplies. 107
The Honeymoon is Over
At the beginning there was some feeling of community among the
victorious Allies. Frank Howley, who liked to think he had understood the
Russians’ bad faith from the first, cites his superior officer Clay saying
naively, ‘I like Sokolovsky [the Soviet assistant commander], he wouldn’t
lie to me.’108 It didn’t take long for the Allies to fall out, not only causing
friction between the soldiers, but also creating a danger for Germans who
showed too much sympathy for one or other of their conquerors. A German
who worked for the Russians was likely to be harried or imprisoned by the
Americans. Germans who threw in their lot with the Americans needed to
be careful when they entered the Russian Sector.
A tragedy occurred on 23 August that highlighted the fickle relations
between the Allies and the difficulty in bringing culture back to the
shattered city. Leo Borchard, the first post-war conductor of the Berlin
Philharmonic, was shot by an over-zealous American sentry. The
orchestra’s chief conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, had fled to Switzerland
at the end of the war, and the Western powers had banned him from the
stage. His crime was to have performed before Hitler, both in Berlin and at
Bayreuth, despite his early resistance to the cultural policies of the Third
Reich. During the war Borchard been a part of an underground resistance
group called Onkel Emil. He had managed to charm the Soviet authorities
by speaking their language (he was born in St Petersburg). Having obtained
the Russians’ trust, on 12 May he cycled across Berlin with his friends to
have a look at the Philharmonie Concert Hall. He was going to steal a
march on Furtwängler and take advantage of his Swiss exile to conduct the
Berlin Philharmonic. Ruth Friedrich wondered if Furtwängler had ever
pitched up at the concert hall like this. ‘A gruesome still life revealed itself
among the shattered arcades’ - where Bruno Walter (and more recently
Furtwängler) had once directed the orchestra, there lay a dead horse.109
Borchard knew how to deal with the Soviets. He obtained larger rations
for the Philharmonic’s musicians: ‘you can’t blow a trumpet with a
rumbling stomach’.110 By 26 May he was performing Mozart,
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer
Night’s Dream in the Titania Palast to an audience of starving, ragged
Berliners.111 He conducted the orchestra twenty-two times before his death.
That fateful Thursday he and his mistress, Ruth Friedrich, had been invited
to dinner with a music-loving British colonel. It had been a real treat:
sandwiches made from white bread filled with proper meat, and whisky.
They talked passionately about Bach, so much so that they missed the
curfew which came into force at 11 p.m. The colonel decided to drive them
home himself. The night before there had been shots exchanged between
Russian and American soldiers, and the Americans had issued orders to
stop all cars heading towards the Eastern Sector. The sentry failed to notice
that the vehicle was British because the headlights were too bright and
signalled the colonel to stop as he drove under the S-Bahn bridge towards
the Bundesplatz. He had meant to aim at the tyres, but managed to shoot
Borchard through the head. He was killed instantly.112
Autumn 1945
Berliners had got used to conditions in their city by September, but it
came as a shock to others, especially those who had enjoyed relative
prosperity in the south-west. Ursula von Kardorff finally made it back to
Berlin at the beginning of the autumn, having left in February. Food was
very scarce, and the people shared the same, half-mad look as a result of
their experiences since the Russian conquest. She stayed with her friend
Bärchen on the Savigny Platz, in a room without an outside wall. Berliners
called such buildings Sperlings-Lust, or ‘Sparrows’ Delight’, because at any
moment you might take off into thin air. She went out on the
Kurfürstendamm. The ban on frat was not being closely observed: she
noticed elegantly dressed German girls milling around the American,
British and French soldiers. There was jazz playing in establishments
offering hot drinks but no solid food.
Ursula von Kardorff borrowed a bicycle to look at the city centre. The
Wilhelmstrasse had vanished, the Foreign Office was just a ruin. Only the
ProMi was still undamaged. On the Pariser Platz the Adlon Hotel was a
burned-out shell. Her own house had collapsed. On the square there was a
huge statue of Stalin.
The two guardhouses flanking the Brandenburg Gate were piles of
rubble. Soldiers from the four powers walked around adding a living aspect
to the landscape of ruin. Around the Reichstag building a black market had
grown up. There were Russian graves on the Ranke Platz and abandoned
tanks on the pavements. The latter served as kiosks, announcing dance
schools, new theatres and newspapers and toys for urchins reminiscent of
the pictures by Heinrich Zille. The Franziskus Hospital was the only
undamaged building, and the nuns looked timeless in their habits, as if they
had emerged from somewhere on the Castilian Meseta. Near by, the
Tiergarten was a blackened shambles, looking more like a battlefield than a
landscaped garden.
Fräulein von Kardorff ran into a former colleague from the DAZ
(Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung) newspaper, Ludwig Fiedler, who told her a
typical story. At the end of the war he had been drafted into the Volkssturm,
or home guard, like any other man between fifteen and sixty. This last
remaining human material was charged with defending Germany in a
guerre à l’outrance. In the ruins of the pub Gruban und Souchay, he had
come up against a Russian officer who was about to shoot him. Fiedler had
produced some ‘disgustingly sweet’ schnapps and the Russian and he had
sat down in the middle of the battle and got drunk. The Russian was so
befuddled that he began to kiss his German enemy, then he wanted to kill
him again, then he was so drunk that he forgot all about it.113
One day Ursula von Kardorff went to see her aunt Kathinka, the wife of
the politician Siegfried von Kardorff-Oheimb. She lived in an elegant villa
near the Tiergarten that had miraculously retained some of its contents even
if it too had lost part of the outer wall. They went to the Hotel Esplanade
near by, the only grand hotel to have partially survived the war. Only one
reception room survived. They had to pay a deposit of 80 marks for the
knives and forks, because so many had been stolen. The potato soup they
ate cost as much as an entire meal in the past.
 After lunch they went to the Russian Sector as Aunt Kathinka wanted to
visit her friend Friedrich Ebert, the corpulent, alcoholic son of the first
Weimar president, and ‘a sort of Gauleiter of Brandenburg’ for the
Russians. He looked shabby and hungry. He said he was envious of Ursula
von Kardorff because she was going to return to Jettingen, ‘but I love this
city so much that I want to help it’.114
Everyone was tense in Berlin. People you hardly knew fell upon you
with delight on seeing that you were still alive. Everyone was Du where in
the past a strictly formal style of address was maintained in circles like
Ursula von Kardorff’s. The theme of every conversation was who had
survived. Someone had killed himself, but no, he had been arrested by the
Gestapo or the GPU, or perhaps he made it to the British Zone. Another
was shot by the SS because he had hoisted the white flag ten minutes too
early. A third had been polished off by a drunken Russian because he could
not provide him with alcohol. A fourth had spent several days with the GPU
and had then been released. She heard stories that made her blood run cold;
of Gerhard Starke, who was the liaison between her newspaper and the SD,
and a man who had kept the authorities off their backs. He had been
arrested by the Russians and condemned to die from a bullet in the head.
His captors made him kneel, get up, kneel again, get up until finally they
brought him to a door and opened it. He could scarper, while he still had the
chance.
Old Graf Hardenberg, who had shot himself in the stomach after 20 July
1944, had found his way out of the concentration camp in Oranienburg
where he was being held. Despite his terrible wounds he had fled and
hidden in the woods, while the guards killed out of sheer spite anyone who
might have contributed a positive element to a new Germany. It had been a
miracle - the whole family had survived, even the son who had been
punished by being sent to Courland where, as a result of Hitler’s pig-
headedness, many divisions sat idly by until they were herded together by
the Red Army and led into captivity. He had also chosen his moment to
run.115
At another time Ursula von Kardorff’s attempts to write were disturbed
by the arrival of one of Bärchen’s cousins, with four little girls. She had
arrived from Poland. The little boy had died on the way: ‘He looked like a
little angel, a little angel,’ she repeated mechanically. The woman’s head
was shaved, and she looked drawn and starving. The surviving children
were covered in pus and lice. Bärchen washed, brushed, deloused and
bandaged them one by one.
Renée Bédarida was a former résistante who had been sent to work in
the administration of the French Sector. On 15 October she communicated
some of her first impressions of the city to a friend in France. The Berliners
were ‘dirty, badly dressed, and always carried a bag of potatoes or a bundle
of kindling . . .’ The canal that runs along the Charlottenburg Chaussee
‘stank to high heaven of corpses’, and yet she thought the Germans were
getting more meat than the French, even if she was shocked to see children
begging for bread and chewing gum.116
She made visits to the black markets in the Tiergarten and on the
Alexanderplatz.ax Five cigarettes procured a film for a camera or an iron
cross. One of the opera houses was still standing and she went to see
Rigoletto. She was amazed to find the Berlin women all dressed up in their
finery: ‘how could these women dare to walk through Berlin dressed this
way?’ With another French administrator she watched German POWs
arrive at the Stettiner Bahnhof: ‘We felt disarmed, the temptation to despise
them or hate them became impossible at the sight of these miserable people,
they were also victims of Hitler’s madness.’117
Renée lived in Frohnau in the French Sector. It had come through the
war more or less unscathed, but the requisitioning of houses and rooms had
created bad blood. The French were an odd and suspicious collection: there
were old resistance hands, civil servants on secondment, ‘Vichy men
hoping that France would forget about them who had come to wipe the slate
clean on the other side of the Rhine, adventurers and profiteers’. The
French perpetrated a few acts of childish spite: they mutilated a few
inscriptions on the Siegessäule - or Victory Column - in the Tiergarten,
which commemorated German triumph in the Franco-German War, and
festooned it with French tricolours. In Schwanenwerder they found a
fragment of the Tuileries Palace which had been burned down by the Paris
Communards in 1871, and removed a high-minded panel that talked of the
fate of nations.118 The Germans themselves did not waste much time on the
French - they realised they were second-division conquerors.119
Libussa von Krockow arrived from Pomerania in February 1946. It had
been two years since she had lived there, monitoring BBC broadcasts for
Ribbentrop’s research bureau. She recognised the troglodyte dwellings of
the Berliners by the stove pipes protruding from the ground. She was so
dishevelled that the maid of one of her mother’s friends offered her a 50
Pfennig piece and slammed the door in her face. Her body finally gave way
after her ordeal: she was ill for a week.120
Spring 1946
The military train delivered George Clare to Berlin in the spring of
1946. It had been a perishing winter with poor shelter. As it got
progressively colder the lack of amenities had begun to pinch. Berliners
collected wood from the ruins and bought candles on the black market.
They scavenged for coal. Infant mortality stood at 80 to 90 per cent. As
there was no glass in the windows, the cold wind came howling through the
damaged buildings. Berliners still went in droves to see Macbeth when it
was below zero in the auditorium. Lady Macbeth shivered with cold on the
stage. At Christmas, there was no warmth, no presents and no tree.121
When the spring came a semblance of normality reappeared: there were
excursions to the cherry orchards of Werder. A Russian stripped off and
leaped into the waters of the Havel, excusing himself this time - it was ‘very
hot’.122 Attitudes to the conquerors appeared to have changed. Clare, in
British uniform, says the British were liked most. The ‘Tommies’ still
exuded a feeling of fair play. The Americans - die Amis - came second.
They were tougher and rougher and their Military Police was particularly
feared. The French continued to be treated as something of a joke:
conquerors who had played no part in the conquest. Iwan - the Russian
soldier - was by now universally despised.123
It was not just fresh troops who arrived to restock the Allied garrisons,
exiles gradually returned to look at the city they had once loved. Even more
than a year after the cessation of hostilities, the post-war condition of Berlin
had the power to shock Carl Zuckmayer. Writing to his wife Alice on 24
November 1946, Zuckmayer said the city was ‘unrecreatable and almost
indescribable’.124 Some very different exiles flew in on 19 July 1947 when
seven old Nazis returned to Berlin: the war criminals who had escaped the
noose at Nuremberg were being flown to Spandau. Speer stared excitedly
out of the window of the Dakota as it came in to land. He was able to
discern the remains of his own contributions to the city: ‘the East-West
Axis, which I had completed for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. Then I saw the
Olympic stadium, with its obviously well-tended green lawns, and finally
the Chancellery I had designed. It was still there. Although damaged by
several direct hits. The trees of the Tiergarten had all been felled, so that at
first I thought it was an airfield. The Grunewald and the Havel Lakes were
untouched and beautiful as ever.’125 It would be twenty years before he was
allowed a second look.

OceanofPDF.com
 4
Expulsions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
Yugoslavia
On 4 May complete calm reigned. Even the three
days of public mourning for the death of Hitler decreed
by Secretary of State Frank passed everywhere without
incident. You could never have supposed or expected
that the Czechs, who had in the course of the war never
dared offer even the slightest open resistance to the
German armed forces, would descend into an
unprecedented orgy of horror against defenceless
people after the surrender, that spared neither helpless,
wounded soldiers, women or children.
‘H.K.’, 21 June 1947. Quoted in Wilhelm Turnwald, ed., Dokumente zur Austreibung der Sudetendeutschen, Munich 1951, 18

The so-called Sudetenland and its German population had been one of
the causes of the war. Hitler had taken up the complaints of the
Sudetenländer: Bohemians and Moravians under the leadership of Konrad
Henlein. Their mistreatment had prompted the Munich Agreement of
September 1938, which ceded much of the border area to Germany, leaving
the rest of the country defenceless. In the spring of 1939, German tanks
rolled into Prague.
It is true that the Sudetenländer had their grievances. Former subjects of
the Austrian Crown, their towns and villages formed a deep ring around the
Czech lands. They also made up a large percentage of the populations of
Prague and Brno (Brünn), Iglau and Zwittau. In Slovakia there were Insel
und Streudeutsche (Island and Straw Germans); there were German
communities in the Carpathian Mountains and a colony amounting to just
under a third of the city of Pressburg or Bratislava. In Troppau they were
wholly intermingled with the Slavs and spoke their own patois called
Slonzakische, but in most areas they maintained a fierce division. They felt
they had been duped at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in October 1919 when the
Allies finally refused them a right to ‘self-determination’ as promised by
President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.1 Beneš, representing
Czechoslovakia, had proclaimed that his state would be the ‘new
Switzerland’ with minority rights ensured by a system of cantons. This
never happened.2 All German-speakers (including German-speaking Jews)
were affected by the new state which cut them off from their capital, Vienna
- from their businesses, government, friends and relations.3
The West had granted the Czechs’ leader the historic Czech territory of
Bohemia and Moravia, together with Slovakia. Over the centuries, however,
huge numbers of Germans had settled in the Czech lands and Hungarians in
the Slovak east. The Czechs became the political lords and masters of the
new state, though they amounted to just 51 per cent of the population.ay The
Germans formed nearly a quarter, but the Slavic Slovaks could not be
expected to side with them, so it would always be two against one. Conflict
was ‘pre-programmed’.4 There were even attempts to break up the German
lands by planting Czech colonies.5az
As grieving Germans were quick to point out, their numbers in Bohemia
and Moravia were greater than the entire Norwegian people and almost the
same as the Danes or the Finns. They had their political organisations:
Henlein’s SdP, or Sudetenland Party, represented 68 per cent of the
Germans, and was the biggest party in the Czechoslovak state. There was
also the Sudetenland Socialist Party, which co-operated with the Czechs. If
the Germans could never achieve any political clout, until recently, they still
had topped the bill socially and financially - though many Germans had
been hard hit by the Depression. The Czechs were employed in their
businesses, on their farms. The nobility and captains of industry were
German-speaking as were many lawyers and doctors. In 1945 there were
many instances of farmworkers appropriating German farms, the junior
doctors snatching the German practice, and the junior managers taking over
German businesses - to some extent repeating the process that had taken
place in 1938 when the Germans became top dogs again. There were cases
of pure opportunism: Czechs, who had up till then moved in German
circles, had German wives or German-speaking children, suddenly became
the apostles of Czech nationalism and hunted down former friends. When
the communists took over in 1948, those who had profited from the
Revolution launched in May 1945 lost most of what they had gained.
The events of September 1938 and the occupation of the rest of
Czechoslovakia had made the Czechs more than bitter towards the German
minority. The German-speaking area became part of the Reich, and the
people Germans - this change of nationality was to prove fatal in 1945. The
previously grieving regions were attributed to the nearest German land-
mass: a Reichsgau Sudetenland encompassed the core towns of Troppau,
Aussig, Eger and Reichenberg; the region around Hultschin was attached to
Oppeln in Upper Silesia; northern Bohemia to Lower Bavaria; southern
Bohemia to the new Austrian Reichsgau Upper Danube; southern Moravia
to the newly forged Reichsgau Lower Danube; and Teschen to the
recaptured Polish parts of Upper Silesia centred around Kattowitz.6 In the
remaining areas of the ‘Protectorate’ citizenship was awarded on racial
grounds: ethnic Germans were attached to the Reich. For many German-
speakers the change was tantamount to signing their death warrants.7
It was enough for a lawyer to have practised German law to receive a
death sentence.8 The Czechs had not welcomed Hitler as the Austrians had
and even some members of the German-speaking population had been more
than apprehensive: socialists, Jews and the large number of Germans from
the Reich who had sought refuge in Prague. When the tide turned in the war
the Czechs looked forward to the moment when they could deal with the
‘German problem’ once and for all.
When he felt that victory was certain, Beneš had left London for
Moscow. Before he went he told the British ambassador to the Czech
government in exile, Philip Nicols, that he would need to effect the transfer
of the German population and deprive them of their citizenship, otherwise
‘riots, fights, massacres of Germans would take place’. Molotov assured
him that the expulsions would be but a ‘trifle’. Beneš received the necessary
assurances from Stalin: ‘This time we shall destroy the Germans so that
they can never again attack the Slavs.’ He also assured the Czechs in
Moscow that he would not meddle in the domestic affairs of a Slav nation,
which, in retrospect, gives a rather clearer idea of how much his word could
be relied upon.9
Beneš’s Return
Beneš left Moscow on the last day of March 1945. On 1 April he was in
the Ukraine. His goal was Košice in Slovakia where he remained for thirty-
three days while the Russians and Americans carved up the country and the
Czechs rose up in their wake. Patton’s American troops moved up rapidly
behind Field Marshal Schörner’s 800,000-man army. On 4 May they
crossed the mountain passes from Germany to assume their preordained
positions along the line Carlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis. The American general
had been told that Prague was out of bounds. He stopped in Beraun. The
Czechs wanted to grab the credit for the liberation of the capital. On the
night of 8 May the Red Army formed a protective shield around the city
allowing the uprising to take its course.10
On 6 May the Red Army reached Brno. The day before Beneš heard
that Prague had risen against the Germans. He moved on to Bratislava. The
progress of the Russians was the signal for most of Vlasov’s divisions to
head south into Austria;ba the Cossacks were in two minds about being
captured by the Red Army, although some did go into Prague, and
effectively liberated it before the regular Russian forces.11 In Prague the
resistance formed the ČNR (Česka národni rada, or Czech National
Council). The first Red Army tanks entered the city on the 9th and military
operations ended two days later when Schörner retreated. Beneš did not
make his triumphal entry until the 16th. His excuse for coming so slowly
had been his own safety - there were German snipers about.12
Beneš showed his hand first in his Košice Statutesbb of 5 April 1945:
‘Woe, woe, woe, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate you!’ he
intoned on the wireless. There followed his famous decrees. Number five,
for example, declared all Germans and Hungarians to be politically
unreliable and their possessions were therefore to fall to the Czech state.
The Košice Programme unleashed a ‘storm of retribution, revenge and
hatred . . . Wherever the troops of the Czech General Svoboda’s army -
which was fighting alongside the Russians - and the Revolutionary Guards
(Narodni vybor) emerged, they did not ask who was guilty and who was
innocent, they were looking for Germans.’13
On 12 May Beneš repeated his threats in Brno: ‘We have decided . . .
that we have to liquidate the German problem in our republic once and for
all.’14 On 19 June came the first of the ‘Retribution Decrees’: ‘Nazi
criminals, traitors and their supporters’ were to be tried before
‘Extraordinary People’s Courts’. These were primitive tribunals. It took all
of ten minutes to try a man and send him down for fifteen years. There were
475 ‘official’ capital sentences. Thirty death sentences were handed out for
those involved in the Lidice Massacre.15 A national court would examine
war crimes. On 21 June came the next decree: all persons of German or
Hungarian nationality, traitors or Quislings were to lose their land.
Germany would pay reparations. There was to be no compensation for loss
of citizenship or property. The last measure was the so-called ‘Little
Decree’ of 27 October which laid down the punishment for those who had
offended against national honour.16 On 6 August Beneš had spoken at
Prague University, a discourse that had particular resonance for Germans,
not least because it was considered Germany’s oldest seat of learning. He
had hardened his heart against all pleas for humanity: ‘We know that liberal
society is in theory and practice an anachronism.’17 Already 800,000
Germans had been chased out of the country.
To implement Beneš’s various decrees there were ‘judicial volunteers’
and a Central Committee of Investigation (Ústřední vyšetřujicí vybor).
There were a fair number of KZler, or former concentration-camp inmates,
among them, graduates of Dachau and Buchenwald. Many of their acolytes
were mere ‘half-grown’ boys.18 Those who suffered agreed that the sixteen
to twenty-five-year-olds were the worst.19 By September they had around
100,000 prisoners: 89,263 German-speakers, 10,006 Czechs and 328 others.
They had released 1,094 Czechs and 613 anti-fascist Germans. The most
pernicious decree was the ‘Little’ one, employed for ‘settling various
personal accounts’, although the process had started long before. Beneš
himself was not immune, and wrought his revenge on various Czechs. His
apologists admit a popular desire for retribution;20 it was the ‘duty of the
government to turn the turbulent mood’, however.
Instead, many politicians, including Beneš himself, exploited it. As
another historian puts it, the atrocities ‘were not driven from above, but
without the toleration of the authorities in Prague they would hardly have
been able to persist into the summer months’.21 In the end even the British
(who had encouraged the purge) protested to Beneš about ‘excesses’ and
there was a distinct turning down of the heat while the Big Three met in
Potsdam.22 Expelling the Germans was a vote catcher, but not a measure
likely to make friends - except possibly with the Poles. In retrospect it has
been hard to find mitigating circumstances to excuse Beneš, apart from the
fact that he was old and ill and thought he might defeat the communists by
unleashing the terror himself.23
Revenge
For seven years the Czechs and Slovaks had suffered humiliation at the
hands of the Germans. In the extreme Nazi view all Slavs were
Untermenschen and the German regime treated them as second-class
citizens. As in other Slavic lands there were plans to ‘Germanise’ parts of
the country, no doubt partly in response to the cold wind that had greeted
the Germans after 1919, which had - for example - seen the decline of the
German population in the city of Brno from 60 to 20 per cent. In Znaim the
number of Germans had also dwindled after 1918, but had increased
sharply after 1938. A Bohemian and Moravian Land Company had been
formed to find areas for settlement by Germans. The company ran a model
farm. During the Protectorate 16,000 agrarian holdings were confiscated,
totalling 550,000 hectares. Some 70,000 Czechs lost their homes. At the
beginning of April 1945 treks were organised to evacuate the German
colonists and take them back to the Sudetenland.24 The numbers of Germans
had been further expanded by evacuations and the advance of the Red
Army. There were around 600,000 of the former and 100,000 Slovakian
Germans together with 1.6 million Silesians taking refuge in the region.25
Some of the Slovakian Germans had already gone to Lower Austria.26
The resistance had been wiped out as early as the autumn of 1941, and
was unable to re-form until 1943 and 1944, when there was an uprising in
Slovakia. Nazi brutality was measured: apart from the massacre at Lidice -
provoked by the British-masterminded assassination of the deputy protector
Reinhard Heydrich - there were no startling atrocities.27 The country was
hardly touched by the aerial bombardment that struck terror into the rest of
Europe.28 The French bore far worse, and behaved better towards the
defeated Germans; but then again, the French were not considered to be
racially inferior.
The clue to the severity of the post-war response is the Revolution. This
was to be revenge for everything that had happened since the Battle of the
White Mountain in 1620 when Imperial troops wiped out the native
Bohemian nobility. Germans were still the masters, the Czechs the servants;
the nobility was all German- or Hungarian-speaking and gravitated towards
Vienna or Budapest. Prague’s old university was German once again, and
there were German Gymnasiums and Realschulen. The Czechs resented
these institutions as many of their own had been closed during the
‘Protectorate’. It is significant that these were turned into ‘wild’ or
unofficial concentration camps in May. Brno too had its Technische
Hochschule, German institutions, shops and pubs. With the backing of the
Red Army, and a clear idea that the Western Allies would turn a blind eye to
all that happened, the Czechs would seize their moment for some
spectacular ethnic cleansing.
Measures were introduced consciously aping those taken by the
Germans against the Jews: they could go out only at certain times of day;
they were obliged to wear white armbands, sometimes emblazoned with an
‘N’ for Němec or German;29 they were forbidden from using public
transport or walking on the pavement; they could not send letters or go to
the cinema, theatre or pub; they had restricted times for buying food; and
they could not own jewellery, gold, silver, precious stones, wireless sets or
cameras. They were issued with ration cards, but were not allowed meat,
eggs, milk, cheese or fruit. The Germans also had to be ready to work as
slaves on farms, in industry or in the mines.
There were two waves of atrocities: Russian liberators, who raped and
pillaged, and the Czech partisans who arrived in their wake. As elsewhere,
the Russians had been given carte-blanche. The Czechs were less prone to
sexual crimes, but were often accused of acting as talent spotters for their
Soviet friends. There are several reported instances, however, of the
Russians putting a stop to the worst excesses of the Czechs.30 The Czech
atrocities committed in the following weeks and months were led by the RG
(Revolučni Garda) and the special police or SNB (Sbor Národní
Bezpečnosti) who wore German military trousers and SA shirts, together
with the army, or with civilian mobs bent on plunder and sadistic violence.
The reports read like some of the most gruesome moments of the French
Revolutionary Terror.
For prosperous Germans a striking aspect was blatant theft. The Czech
partisans took anything that appealed to them and piled it up on a waiting
lorry which then disappeared into the Protectorate. Sometimes they simply
moved into the house, adopting the former owner’s possessions and putting
on the banished Germans’ clothes. The train from Prague to the north was
called the ‘Alaska Express’, alluding to the gold rush, and those who took it
were zlatokopci or ‘gold-diggers’.31 Once the wilder days were over, the
new Czech Republic moved to regulate the plunder so that the booty came
to the state. In 1947 the expellees assessed the value of the stolen effects at
19.44 milliard dollars.32
Prague
 At the end of the war Prague contained around 42,000 Germans native
to the city, together with a further 200,000 or so ‘Reich’ Germans working
for the various staffs and ministries, as well as refugees.33 The streets of
Prague were quite used to hearing the German language spoken - many of
Prague’s Jews communicated in German. As soon as the battle for Prague
ended, Czech partisan units began to imprison German civilians and intern
them at various points around the city. The morning of 5 May 1945 was
quite calm. Germans still walked the streets in uniform. The mood changed
at 11.00 a.m. Suddenly there was a great cry and people began to wave
Czech flags. Arms were being handed out at Buben railway station. Some
units of the Vlasov Army appeared. A hospital train was shot up. The
insurgents captured the radio station and began broadcasting the slogan
‘Smrt Němcům! Smrt všem Němcům! Smrt všem Okkupanten!’ (Death to
the Germans! Death to all Germans! Death to all occupiers!). There was to
be no mercy for old men, women or children - even for German dogs:
Margarete Schell’s was stoned by Czech children and had to be shot. It was
the first day of the Revolution.34
It was the day Margarete Schell was taken into custody by a ‘nasty
butcher’ of her acquaintance. The RG were attended by people who knew
the Germans and could show them where they lived. Margarete was well
known - a voice on Prague Radio and an actress. She was incarcerated in a
cellar and then transferred to Hagibor Camp. It was March 1946 before she
was taken in a goods wagon to freedom in Germany. As a born Praguer, she
did not know how to answer the ‘Gretchen Question’:bc ‘Why do you admit
to being a German?’ She was a Prague German. Doubtless there were
Prague Germans who thought it wiser not to say; and some of these would
have escaped denunciation. Another ruse was to make out you were an
Austrian. The Austrian ambassador appeared in their temporary prison to
reclaim Austrian subjects, but his intercession did little for the 40,000
Austrians who were living in terror outside the capital.35
Many of the city’s most notable Germans were put to death during this
bloodletting. Professor Albrecht, the last rector of the German university,
was arrested at the Institute for Neurology and Psychiatry. He was beaten
up and hanged outside the lunatic asylum. The director of the Institute for
Dermatology suffered a similar fate. Hans Wagner, a Prague-born German
physician attached to the German army, last saw his former colleague, the
dean of the German Medical Faculty, Professor Maximilian Watzka, in
Pankrác Prison. The German-speaking nobles were also targeted: Alexander
Thurn und Taxis was thrown into a wild concentration camp with his
family. He and his two sons had to watch while his wife, her mother and the
governess were repeatedly raped. When the sport was over he was marched
off to a Russo-Polish run Auschwitz.36
A truce was declared at midday on the 8 May when the German army
began to leave the city. No adequate arrangements had been made between
the Czech National Council and the Wehrmacht for the transport of sick and
injured soldiers and some 50,000 soldiers were left behind. On the 9th the
Red Army finally appeared in Prague and Germans were told to bow when
they saw a Soviet car.37 The physics graduate ‘K.F.’, who had been
imprisoned on the 5th, was taken out and forced to clear the barricades
which had been built by the Czechs as they rose up against the garrison and
which were preventing the Russians from getthing their tanks down the
streets.38 Germans were beaten bloody with iron bars and lead pipes by a
civilian mob and made to remove their shoes and run over broken glass.
The biggest barricades were 2.5 to 3 metres high, and made up of paving
stones, iron bars and barbed wire. They had to dismantle the obstacles and
repave the streets.
Women too were forced to clear the barricades. Helene Bugner was first
beaten by the porter of her block of flats, then a Professor Zelenka drove
her and twenty other women off to clear the streets. ‘Here, I have brought
you some German sows!’ said the professor. Their hair was cut with
bayonets and they were stripped of shoes and stockings. Both men and
women died from the beatings. A large crowd of Czechs stood by and
cheered whenever a woman was struck or fell. At the end of their work they
had to tread on a large picture of Hitler and spit on it. Margarete Schell saw
people being forced to eat pieces of such pictures as she too was put to
work on the barricades.39 As they were driven off, one woman heard a
Czech tell another, ‘Don’t hit them on the head, they might die at once.
They must suffer longer and a lot more.’ When Helene Bugner returned that
evening she was unrecognisable to her children.
Marianne Klaus saw her husband alive for the last time on the 9th. She
received his body the next day - the sixty-six-year-old had been beaten to
death by the police. On the same day she saw two SS men suffer a similar
fate, kicked in the stomach until blood spurted out; a woman Wehrmacht
auxiliary stoned and hanged; and another SS man hung up by his feet from
a lamppost and set alight.40 Many witnesses attested to the stringing up and
burning of Germans as ‘living torches’, not just soldiers but also young
boys and girls. Most were SS men, but as the Czechs were not always too
scrupulous about looking at the uniforms, a number of Wehrmacht soldiers
perished in this way too. In part this savagery was a response to a rumour
that the Germans had been killing hostages. There was reportedly a repeat
performance on the day when Beneš finally arrived in Prague: Germans
were torched in rows on lampposts.41
The Ministry of Education, the Military Prison, the Riding School, the
Sports Stadium and the Labour Exchange were set aside for German
prisoners. The Scharnhorst School was the scene of a massacre on the night
of the 5th. Groups of ten Germans were led down to the courtyard and shot:
men, women and children - even babies. The others had to strip the corpses
and bury them. Alfred Gebauer saw female SS employees forced to roll
naked in a pool of water before they were beaten senseless with rifle butts.
There were as many as 10,000-15,000 Germans in the football stadium in
Strahov. Here the Czechs organised a game where 5,000 prisoners had to
run for their lives as guards fired on them with machine guns. Some were
shot in the latrines. The bodies were not cleared away and those who used
the latrines later had to defecate on their dead countrymen. As a rule all SS
men were killed, generally by a shot in the back of the head or the stomach.
Even after 16 May when order was meant to be restored, twelve to twenty
people died daily and were taken away from the stadium on a dung wagon.
Most had been tortured first. Many were buried in mass graves at Pankrác
Prison where a detachment of sixty prisoners was on hand to inter the
corpses. Another impromptu prison was in a hotel up in the hills. This had
been the Wehrmacht’s brothel. A number of Germans were locked up in the
cellar, and the whores and their pimps indulged in a new orgy of sadism and
perversity. German men and women had to strip naked for their treatment.
One of them was Professor Walter Dick, head of a department at the
Bulovka Hospital. He was driven insane by his torturers and hanged himself
on a chain.
One witness who was too ill to work was sent to the hospital camp at
Motol, where there was an SS ‘cellar’. This contained eighty to a hundred
men who were brought out every day for beatings. A local speciality was to
get the men to beat one another. In this case they had to slap one another
round the face. They were often stripped naked prior to the torture and then
literally booted down the steps to their cell once the guards had tired of
their fun. The SS cellar contained a number of Hitler Youth boys of
fourteen. Whenever it was deemed to be too full, guards fired at random
though the bars to create more space. Gebauer swore that Czech
collaborators were also badly treated, particularly women who had had
German lovers. Thousands of dead Germans were buried in the cemetery in
Wokowitz.42
Some German Bohemians eluded arrest by helping the Russians and
Czech authorities. Hans Wagner indicated a Dr Rein from Postelberg, a
prison doctor who was especially cruel. The Russians wanted the pick of
the women. In the cellar where Margarete Schell was imprisoned, a plump
doctor - possibly a Jew - came to take some of the women to safety before
the Russians made their tour. A woman wanted to bring her children:
‘Kinder hier lassen, Kindern tun sie nichts,’ he said (Leave the children
here, they won’t do anything to the children). When they returned the
Russians had taken four girls who returned exhausted in the morning.43 Acts
of kindness by Czechs were numerous. Some risked their lives to protect
friends and acquaintances. ‘Hansi’ Thurn und Taxis reached safety in
Austria through the intercession of a Czech general. He was assisted at the
beginning by a Russian forced labourer on his estate.44
One wounded German officer had been in the Oko cinema since the 6
May. After helping tear down the barricades that day he was taken back to
his temporary prison. There was no peace that night: the Russians and
Czechs came for the women. Men who tried to protect them were beaten
up, children who would not let go of their mothers’ skirts were dragged out
with them and forced to watch. Several women tried to commit suicide. The
officer remained in the cinema until Whitsun. That day the cries of tortured
Germans coming from the Riding School mingled with the voices of
churchgoers next door, ‘praying for mercy and neighbourly love’.45
After Whitsun the officer was taken to the Scharnhorst School. There
was an ominous sign over the door reading ‘Koncentrační Tabor’. ‘There
they tried to surpass in everything all that they had learned of concentration
camps.’ Cinemas were popular sites for ‘concentration camps’. The Slavia
in Řipská ulice was also used for around 500-700 prisoners.46 The physics
graduate ‘K.F.’ was taken there too and tortured. On the 10th he was taken
off to Wenceslaus Square and driven towards three naked bodies hanging by
their feet from a billboard. They had been covered with petrol and set
alight, their faces punched in and the teeth knocked out - their mouths were
just bloody holes. With others he was then obliged to drag the corpses back
to the school.
Once they had laid down the bodies, one of the Czechs told the
graduate: ‘To jsou přece vaší bratrí, ted’ je políbejte!’ (They are your
brothers, go on . . . kiss them!). Scarcely had he wiped the blood from his
mouth than he was taken to the ‘death cellar’ to be beaten to death. They
despatched the young Germans one by one. The graduate was the fourth in
line. After the second killing a door opened and a Czech man came in. The
graduate learned later that this was the nephew of the minister Stránský. He
asked them who they were, and led out the graduate and a seventeen-year-
old Hitler Youth, because they were the two that spoke Czech. In general,
knowledge of Czech helped, but no one was immune: former officials,
police officers and German-speaking Jews were subjected to imprisonment
- even if they had just emerged from Nazi concentration camps. The
minister’s son told them with a grin on his face that they were the only ones
who had ever emerged from the cellar alive.47
Anna Seidel was a sixty-seven-year-old engineer’s widow living in
Prague-Smichow. On the 9th she was rounded up with three other ladies,
two of them of her age. They were robbed and beaten black and blue; their
hair was shorn, their foreheads daubed with swastikas; they were then
paraded through the streets on a lorry, shouting ‘My jsme Hitler-kurvy!’
(We are Hitler-whores!). If they did not shout loudly enough they were
beaten again. After four weeks in Pankrác they were taken to
Theresienstadt, where they remained for a year. Helene Bugner was taken
away to Hagibor, which was seen as one of the better camps. From there
she went to Kolin where the younger women were raped by Russians, some
of them as many as forty-five times in a night. A Czech woman working for
the Red Cross had set herself up as the talent-spotter. The women returned
from these nightly sessions badly bitten by their paramours. Helene Bugner
was released from agricultural work after three and a half months following
complaints by the British: she had been a secretary in the legation for
twelve years.48
Hans Wagner went to the Russian commander to beg for more beds for
the sick and wounded. He took the precaution of going with a Czech
colleague, Dr Dobbek. The Russian general Gordow was not in the slightest
bit interested: ‘If you have no room for your wounded, throw them in the
Vltava, there is plenty of room for them there!’49 Wagner went for a walk on
the afternoon of the 14th. Hanging from the sign to the famous restaurant U
svatého Havla were the half-carbonised remains of a German soldier who
had been strung up by his heels. His right arm was missing from the
shoulder. Wagner concluded that he was an amputee. Everywhere he noted
the signs that the communists had taken over, under the shadow of the
liberating Red Army. After popping into the Elekra, the family coffee
house, he went towards the railway station. A blonde woman was being
attacked by a mob. She was shouting in perfect Czech, but in a moment she
was surrounded and stripped of her clothes. A dray wagon came by, and
each of her limbs was attached to one of the horses. The beasts were driven
off in opposite directions.
With the re-establishment of government, the wild concentration camps
in Prague’s cinemas and schools were wound up and the prisoners
despatched to proper camps. One woman who had been in the Slavia
cinema and claimed to have been spared from lynching by a semi-
miraculous thunderstorm was taken to the main station on a sort of death
march, which saw many German Bohemians beaten to death to the applause
of the local mob. They were pushed into coal trucks where they were
robbed one last time and then taken away. Others endured the death march
to Theresienstadt. It is estimated that only 10 per cent of those who set out
from Prague survived.50 Modřany was another infamous Czech camp,
mostly populated by Prague Germans; another was Bystřice, where
Margarete Schell went on 28 July. The prisoners were welcomed by a
demonstration of brutality. Anyone with professional titles was singled out
for extra beating. She was whipped. She began to despair: ‘We will never
get out of here, this is the last stop.’51
The fate of the Prague Germans slowly became known to the outside
world. The Austrians were busy trying to show the Allies that they had
never had any affection for Germany and the Nazis, and they had their own
problems. In Vienna the former diplomat Josef Schöner was visited by a
Prague Czech on 18 May who gave him a misleading report that all the
Germans had been interned or were working on rebuilding. The German-
speakers were finished; they had defended themselves fiercely during the
uprising, particularly the women, while the Russians had plundered the city
like Vienna. They had also looted freely in Bratislava, and there had been a
high incidence of rape, ‘so that the first elation at liberation had much
abated’.52
Many Germans spent a prolonged period in Pankrác Prison. Wagner
claimed that a special treat for visiting Russian bigwigs was to be taken
over the prison and witness a German being beaten to death. Another was to
toss a prisoner from a second-floor parapet and shoot at him while he
plummeted to the ground. Some boys from Reichenberg were accused of
being Werewolves. They had to fight one another until they were bloody
and then lick up the blood. When that resulted in vomiting, that too had to
be licked up. When they had cleaned up the mess they were stripped and
beaten with whips until the skin hung from their bodies. Then they were
tossed into a cellar. Those who did not die from their wounds were later
hanged.53
Caught up in the massacres were not just Prague Germans but refugees
from eastern Bohemia and Moravia. Wagner saw a miserable troop of old
men, women and children from Ohlau. He tried to give them milk but the
RG dashed the bottles out of his hands and threatened to shoot the children
who were prepared to lick it up from the pavement. International
condemnation had little effect. In the ‘revolutionary’ days, the International
Red Cross was too frightened of the Russians to act. In Prosecnice camp
there was an IRC inspection in April 1946. As soon as the visit was over,
the treatment of prisoners became worse.54
Landskron
The massacres were by no means confined to the capital. As soon as the
Russians had liberated a town or village, partisans arrived to administer
revolutionary justice. The primary targets were members of the Nazi or
Sudetenland Party (SdP), or members of those organisations Beneš decreed
had aided the Nazis in their tyranny. Partisans also listened to denunciations
from local Czechs before they struck. The rich were particularly vulnerable.
Also susceptible were doctors, grocers, butchers and publicans, and anyone
who might have denied credit, or schnapps. In many places all Germans
were considered guilty. In other places the action was coloured by some
German outrage. In Littau near Iglau, the German-speaking pocket south of
Prague, the Waffen-SS had torched the Czech village of Javorička in March
1945. The partisans responded by driving the Germans into a forester’s
house and the Schloss and murdering them.55
 In Landskron the fighting stopped on the 9 May. The Russian liberators
were chiefly interested in the townswomen, whom they pursued into the
night. There were few Czechs to speak of, and they were mainly concerned
to protect their own property from plunder. This idyll changed when on the
17th some lorry-loads of armed Czech partisans arrived. All the male
German inhabitants were hunted into the main square. By the early
afternoon there were as many as a thousand. The Czechs amused
themselves by drilling them, forcing them to lie down and get up, all the
while walking among them, spitting and kicking them in the groin and
shins. Those who fell during this humiliation were taken to a water tank and
drowned. Any who bobbed up were shot. Meanwhile a ‘People’s Court’ had
been established with a jury composed of local Czechs. The Germans had to
crawl to the bench. Most of the men then had to run a 50-60 metre gauntlet.
Many fell and were beaten to pulp. The next day the survivors were
reassembled. One man was strung up from a lamppost. The court adjourned
only when a horrified woman set fire to her house which threw the crowd
into a panic. Twenty-four Germans had been killed. An even greater
number committed suicide.
Brno Death March
Brno was another German enclave. Before the Great War it was
considered to be a ‘suburb of Vienna’.56 Even with the post-war migration it
contained 60,000 Germans, and there were many more between Brno and
the border. The Russians reached the city on 25 April. There followed the
usual scenes of rape and violence. The next morning all Germans had to
report for work. Czech partisans established their HQ in Kaunitz College,
where the city’s leading Germans were beaten and tortured. Sometimes they
were forced to go on all fours and bark like dogs. When the Czechs had
finished with them they were delivered to the hospital, where they were
thrown into a cellar. A Red Cross nurse examined a German who had
indescribable wounds to his genitals. Before he died he was able to explain
his crime: he had sold vegetables to the Gestapo.57
At 9 p.m. on 30 May began the Brno Death March. It was the Feast of
Corpus Christi, normally a day for solemn processions, and the largely
Catholic Germans did not fail to draw comparisons. The 25,000 marchers
had fifteen minutes to pack a bag and to assemble in the Convent Garden,
where they spent the night. At dawn they were driven into the courtyard and
relieved of their valuables before marching to the camp at Raigern in the
pouring rain. The procession included inmates of the old people’s home, the
hospitals and the children’s clinic and one Englishwoman who had been
married to a local Nazi. Her case naturally excited the interest of the Daily
Mail correspondent Rhona Churchill, who filed a story on 30 May.58
Stragglers were beaten with truncheons and whips and those who failed
to get up were shot and their bodies stripped and plundered. Survivors were
strip-searched before being driven on to a camp at Pohrlitz, about halfway
to the Austrian border.59 The Red Cross nurse claimed that a thousand had
already died. Another said that the camp claimed a further 1,700 lives. One
mother recounts that two of her three children died on the march.60 The
marchers were lodged in a car factory. The younger women were raped by
the guards. Those still capable of walking were pushed on to the border the
next morning, leaving behind about 6,000, who were thrown into grain
silos. The Red Cross nurse stayed with them, and her reports do not make
pleasant reading. It may be that some of the atrocities committed have been
exaggerated in retrospect, but there is more than enough corroboration to
make it clear that the Czechs behaved with inhuman cruelty.
The Pohrlitz camp was evacuated on 18 June. Sixty to seventy people
had been dying daily, largely from typhus. Nutrition consisted of stale bread
and rotten root vegetables. The Russians came every night at 7.30 and
stayed until 2 a.m. They raped the women, even a seventy-year-old. When
the Red Cross nurse tried to protect a tender eleven-year-old, she herself
was taken away to ‘suffer the consequences’ and was raped by five soldiers.
Another witness said that the youngest raped was seven years old, the oldest
eighty. Some of the healthier ones escaped and made their own way to the
border. It was evidently desired that Brno should be free of Germans in time
for Beneš’s five-day visit in July. As it happened, the Czechs had failed to
round up all the Germans, while others who had broken down on the march
were returned to the city. When Beneš arrived they were forced out into the
sand dunes without food or water. Many died, others went mad.61
The first to leave Pohrlitz were the sick, who were driven away and
dumped in the marshes by the River Thaya on the Austrian border. No one
knew they were there and according to the Red Cross nurse they starved to
death. The corpses were photographed and shown in newsreels in Britain
and the United States. The Czechs responded by saying that they had been
killed by the Austrians. There was another massacre at Nikolsburg, where
the bodies of 614 men were thrown into a mass grave.62
Iglau and Kladno
The German-speaking pocket around Iglau ( Jihlava) in western
Moravia was also a sore subject for the Czechs. When the town fell on 5
May it was the signal for a mass suicide of Germans: as many as 1,200 took
their lives, and perhaps 2,000 were dead by Christmas. Between six and
seven thousand Germans were driven into the camps Helenental and
Altenberg. When Helenental was closed, the inhabitants were plundered
and herded south towards the Austrian border. Some 350 people are said to
have lost their lives on the way. They were detained in another camp in
Stannern where hundreds more perished.63
The Germans in Kladno were subjected to the full severity of the
Revolution from 5 May onwards. Erika Griessmann’s father was taken
away and never returned. She herself was beaten for refusing to tell the RG
where the family jewellery was buried. A few days later she saw Germans
being chased across a field like hares, gunned down by partisans with
submachine guns. Her family was thrown out of their house on the 9th and
made to run the gauntlet down their street while the crowd lashed out at
them. She spotted some of their neighbours weeping at their windows at the
sight.
They joined a group of refugees. Many of them were bloody, after
Czechs had hurled grenades into their midst. For the second time the
seventeen-year-old Erika heard that she and the better-looking Germans
would be raped by the Russians. They apparently had first refusal. The
Russians, however, treated her well. She fainted, and was pulled into a car
by the hair. She woke on a sofa bound hand and foot. Five high-ranking
Soviet officers asked her if she were hungry, and where she wanted to go.
She said she wanted her mother. They took her to the football stadium
where she found her mother and younger brother.
After threatening to shoot them all, Czechs took the Germans to
Masshaupt where they had to stand in a ditch while a crowd spat on them
and pelted them with stones. They were then returned to the football
stadium on a lorry. There were German soldiers lying all around with bullet
wounds in their stomachs and heads. Erika’s party were strip-searched and
taken to a barracks. Bodies were strewn everywhere, even small children
whose parents had cut their throats to save them from further tortures.
On the 10th they prepared to march. Before the gates of the barracks a
jeering crowd had assembled. A Czech read a speech: all Germans were
criminals. Hand grenades were once again tossed among the refugees,
producing another bloodbath. A Czech priest appeared to administer the last
rites. Many of the dying refused his blessing. Erika and her mother
managed to get into an ambulance and someone gave Erika a Red Cross
nurse’s hat. Russian sentries accompanied the German wounded as they left
Kladno. One of the Russians recognised that Erika was no nurse and
demanded she go with him. The injured in the ambulance took her side. He
then requested either Erika or their watches. The heavily wounded German
soldiers gave the Russian their watches and rings and Erika was bought
free. That way they reached comparative safety in the American-occupied
zone.64
The American Zone
It was the Americans rather than the Russians who liberated western
Czechoslovakia. Whatever the Bohemian Germans might have wanted to
believe, however, the Americans did not meddle in the activities of Czech
partisans. The most that can be said is that the expulsions from their zone
were generally more humane than those that took place east of the line.65
They finally left in December 1945.
One woman did however report that Americans helped her cross the
border; in another instance a woman was returned to Brno from Germany as
a Czech national, and as a German had to suffer the consequences. In Bory
Prison in Pilsen, the torture stopped when the Americans came to inspect,
and started again the next day. The writer Ernst Jünger had a letter from his
friend Sophie Dorothea Podewils on 10 October 1945. She had been in the
Pilsen prison. ‘What took place in the German and also in the Hungarian
part of Czechoslovakia is a tragedy that is only comparable to what the
Jews had to bear here.’66
In Mies near Marienbad, Czech partisans and American soldiers
searched German houses together. Later the partisans shot twenty-five
Germans in their camp. Elbogen (Habartov) was the seat of the Control
Commission, which granted permission to Czechs to cross to the other
Allied zones, but its decisions were not always respected by the partisans.67
Franz Weinhand was picked up by the militia in Gfell and taken to the
castle in Elbogen. He and his fellow Germans screamed so loudly during
their whippings that they began to annoy the American sentries a hundred
metres away. One of them fired his machine gun at their window. Two days
later members of the American Commission arrived at the castle and took
photographs of the Germans’ naked bodies. Weinhand and the others dared
not say a word for fear of reprisals. After four weeks the Americans took
the political prisoners to Landshut in Bavaria. In September they were sent
back to Czechoslovakia.68
In Schlackenwerth a German clockmaker called Müller was tortured to
death. He came from the resort of St Joachimsthal (Jáchymov), where a
Herr Steinfelsner, the owner of a sawmill, was hanged before the town hall
in the presence of the townsfolk. The body hung there until some
Americans came by in a jeep and forced the partisans to take it down.69 In
Bischofteinitz (Domažlice) the usual scenes occurred when the men were
rounded up. Thirty-five of them were called out and butchered. In Blatna a
girl who had dallied with the Americans even had her head shaved after
their departure. The Americans were also in Chodau (Chodov), where the
luggage of departing Germans were plundered almost as systematically as
they were across the border in Poland. 70
There were Czechs working and living in German areas, and Germans
in the towns which lay in the middle of largely Czech areas. České
Budějovice or Budweis in south-western Czechoslovakia was in the Czech
heartlands. Until the nineteenth century the Germans had dominated the
town. There was still an active minority in 1945, who were put to work in
the mines. Most of the atrocities took place around the labour exchange.
Large numbers of Czech women cheered as the Germans were beaten
bloody. The priest, Pater Joseph Seidl, was one of them - he had apparently
committed no other crime than being German. The beds in the military
hospital were taken over by the Czechs. One severely wounded soldier was
given a lethal jab. SS men aged between eighteen and twenty-one were
dragged into the courtyard and beaten to death. In Pilsen, another largely
Czech city, Franz Wagner, a former communist who had spent a term in
Dachau, was robbed and beaten up before being expelled from the
country.71
Freudenthal, Freiwaldau and Bilin
 Reports indicate that Czechs particularly loathed German innkeepers
and physicians. Innkeepers perhaps looked down on Czech customers, and
physicians either refused to treat Czechs or were suspected of being
involved in Nazi genocide. Carl Gregor was a general practitioner in
Freudenthal (Bruntál) in the north-eastern sector of the Czech lands. He was
taken to the Freudenthal camp and accused of having murdered 150
foreigners. He laughed off the accusation, and was tortured by eighteen men
who beat his back so badly that the skin burst on his buttocks.
In Freudenthal all the inmates had to witness the executions, which took
place behind the barrack block. Gregor’s knowledge of Czech and Slovak
meant that he had to translate the orders given by the commandant. On one
occasion twenty men had to dig their own grave and then climb in. They
were shot in the back of the head. One man had to be shot three times, yet
he was still alive when the prisoners filled in the grave. The excuse for this
slaughter was an accident with a grenade that killed a Russian. The Czechs
then told the Russians that the death had been the result of a German-laid
time-bomb and demanded that a hundred hostages be shot in reprisal. The
Russians allowed them to kill just a score.72
In Freiwaldau (Jeseník) they marched the camp inmates to the border
and pushed them into Germany. The ordeal took seventy-two hours, while
the Germans were beaten with whips and pistol butts.73 Alfred Latzel was
the proprietor of a large sugar refinery and farm. On 20 June he was
dispossessed and warned that he would have problems were he to remain in
Czechoslovakia. He felt he had done no wrong and decided to brave it. He
was taken in for a short interview by the local police, at the end of which he
was delivered to the Camp II Jauernig - a former RAD or
Reichsarbeitsdienst camp. Latzel learned much later that he had been
incarcerated because he had allegedly denounced communists during the
Third Reich. He denied it. At Jauernig, the gaoler was a German
communist. German denouncers were also present at the torture sessions
egging on the others.
After four days Latzel was taken to another camp in an old work-service
barracks at Adelsdorf, a former POW compound. Here his father-in-law, the
estate owner Dr Erich Lundwall, was the representative for the prisoners.
The partisan guards wore old SS uniforms, although they sported red stars
in their caps together with the letters KTOF - Koncentrační Tábor Okres
Frývaldov (Concentration Camp Area Freiwaldau). The same legend hung
over the door of the camp, but later this was changed first to ‘internment
camp’, then ‘collection point for internees’. The restructuring of the
Freiwaldau camps by the authorities in Prague was not popular with the
partisan guards. In the period of the wild camps, the partisans not only
wielded power, but allegedly amassed quantities of valuables, food and
drink, some of which might have been intended for the prisoners. New
arrivals were worked over by the guards, beaten with whips and rifle butts.
Latzel describes two boys of fifteen or sixteen who tried to escape and were
brought back to the camp by their own communist fathers. They were
slowly tortured to death after swastikas were carved into their buttocks.
They were finally shot in front of two prisoners chosen from each hut. A
Nazi greengrocer was selected for special treatment. He eventually
vanished. It was assumed he had been killed. The guards also enjoyed
whipping a seventy-year-old man. After each stroke he had to say ‘Děkuji!’
(Thank you!).74
Once the camps were taken over by the regular gendarmerie, the
brutality was moderated, if never exactly stopped. The bourgeois Latzel was
given unusual work to do outside the camp. He ploughed the fields and
worked in the woods and factories; he plundered farms and factories and
dismantled machines. Nothing was ever entered in an inventory. The food
improved with time. To a diet of dried-potatoes-and-water soup
unbelievable delicacies were added: vegetables and pearl barley and, once a
week, meat. Every now and then there was jam, and cakes at Christmas.
Eventually there was even a visit from a priest, though he was not allowed
to deliver a homily, and some amateur dramatics were permitted, as well as
a cabaret. Some mild, anti-Nazi propaganda appeared, such as an obituary
for the Third Reich that was intended to be witty. The Nazi Karl Froning
thought it tasteless and silly. When they were shown films of the Nazis’
victims they thought they were falsified (a common enough reaction at the
time) - ‘most of us had seen enough of these atrocities ourselves and
suffered them on our own bodies’.
There was a third camp for men in the Freiwaldau area at Thomasdorf; a
fourth, Biberteich, housed around 300 women. Karl Schneider spent a
gruelling fourteen and a half months at Thomasdorf after he was accused of
shooting a Czech. He was tortured and had the usual beating from another
prisoner, Franz Schubert from Niklasdorf. Schubert did not hit him forcibly
enough and was clouted so hard as a result that he fell dead to the ground.
The same night the Czechs killed two others after hours of torture. One of
them was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. The commandant greeted the new
arrivals with the usual smashing of heads and limbs. When one was seen to
bleed profusely he remarked, ‘German blood is no blood, it is pig’s shit!’
The commandant’s name was Wiesner, which suggests he might have had
some of that non-blood himself.
The Pg and SA member Karl Froning was the former administrator of
Thomasdorf in the days when it had contained Russians. He seems to have
fared reasonably well by comparison to others, possibly because some of
the Czech passion was spent by the time he arrived in the camp in July. He
remembered the Czech lessons in the open air, calculated to humiliate
Germans who had always refused to learn that language. Effusions of
violence were not unknown, however, and the guards had a particular
animus towards a Freiwaldau physician called Dr Pawlowsky, who was
obliged not only to lie in his own excrement, but to consume it too. He
eventually collapsed before his torturers and died. In four weeks, Froning
estimated, some 10 per cent of the 200 inmates died from one cause or
another.75
In Bilin (Bilina), north-west of Prague, they had the good fortune to be
taken directly to the border without being subjected to a Czech camp. Anton
Watzke nonetheless saw appalling scenes along the way with the Czech
soldateska killing German women. They even shot the priest. In another
instance the witness Adolf Aust remembered seeing a man shot who had
paused to relieve himself.76
Brüx, Saaz, Komotau, Aussig and Tetschen
It was the Poles who liberated the town of Tetschen (Děčín) in the north
on 10 May. For five days they raped, looted, torched and killed. A grocer
was taken off to the water tower and thrown in. They shot at him and
missed. Finally one of the Poles fished him out, saying he had done well
and his life was saved. The Poles reportedly killed scores of POWs; the rest
were taken to the camp at Jaworczno where they were sent down the mines.
Other Sudeten Germans were deported to Glatz in Silesia, which had been
awarded to the Poles. Here they went through their agonies all over again
until they were re-expelled with the Silesian Germans - this time to the new
slimmed-down ‘Reich’.
 According to Franz Limpächer, there was just one Czech in his village
of Kleinbocken: Stanislaus Mikesch had moved there from Kladno, married
a German girl and become a great enthusiast for Hitler. After the arrival of
the Poles he re-emerged wearing a good many red stars and announced that
he was now the local commissar. He immediately confiscated his
neighbour’s belongings. More Czechs arrived from Prague, Tábor and
Pardubice and took over the houses of the Germans.77
In the small town of Brüx (Most) near by, Dr Carl Grimm was attached
to the Czech police as a doctor for Germans. He said Brüx had 30,000
inhabitants, of whom two-thirds were Germans. Some of the worst raping
and pillaging was carried out by Russian DPs who had been brought in to
work at a local dam. Part of Grimm’s work was to certify the causes of
death, and he therefore took note of the number of suicides in the months of
May, June and July. At its high point, some sixteen Germans committed
suicide daily, often entire families. Few could shoot or gas themselves as
the Germans had been obliged to hand over their weapons and their gas had
been cut off. Most had hanged themselves from whatever convenient perch
they could find for that purpose. Grimm thought the total number of
suicides amounted to between 600 and 700 - about 3 per cent of the German
inhabitants.
Grimm’s work with the local police delayed his imprisonment. The
other Brüx men were taken off to a camp at Striemitz, half an hour away on
foot, while the women were taken to the Poros glassworks in Brüx itself,
from which a thousand were eventually marched to the German border at
Deutschneudorf. Some of the men were put to work in the mines and at the
hydrogenation works. Others were taken to Concentration Camp 28 at
Maltheuren.78 Germans who worked in heavy industry were often protected
by the Russians who requisitioned the factories. When the factories were
handed over to the Czechs, the Germans who worked there were put into
Camp 27. German mine directors were shot: Czechs had been forced to
work there during the war.
Householders were simply at the mercy of Czechs who appeared at the
doors and forced them out. Apart from a thirty-kilo suitcase (which would
be stolen from them anyhow), they were allowed to take nothing with them.
The Czechs were protected by soldiers who then took the Germans off to
‘evacuation camps’ like Negerdörfel in Brüx, which had formerly been an
anti-aircraft barracks. Some of them were quickly invalided out to
Germany.The worst treatment was naturally meted out to former Nazis,
together with the owners of important buildings or impressive houses. They
were either taken to Camps 27 and 28 or locked up in the barracks, the
police HQ, the local court or Striemitz. Once again the men had to box one
another, with the guards standing by to make sure they hit hard.
The terror in Brüx started late, on 1 August. The rest of the German
men were rounded up, beaten and marched off to Camp 28. Grimm gives a
full list of the camps in the borough of Brüx: 17/18 and 31/32 near
Maltheueren, Rössel camp and Camp 37 near Brüx itself, 22/25 at
Niedergeorgenthal and 33/34 at Rosenthal. These camps provided workers
for the hydrogenation works, which normally employed 35,000 workers.
There were also camps for the mines, which employed a further 25,000, but
Grimm didn’t know their names. He estimated that there were around thirty
camps in all in that part of Czechoslovakia. During the war, the mines and
the dams had been staffed by foreign workers - Dutch, French, Italians,
Croats, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians. Now they were to be
replaced by Germans.
Grimm himself was in Tabor - or Campbd - 28, with a fluctuating
population ranging from 500 to 1,400 souls. The inmates were not just from
the local towns and villages of the Sudetenland; there were Germans from
the Reich too and Hungarian Germans. The camp was made up of wooden
huts, with around thirty men to a cell. The fury of the Russians and Czechs
had not abated. In the interests of maintaining health, fifteen men who were
suffering from tuberculosis were shot. Beatings were a matter of course and
the work was gruelling enough: eighteen hours a day at the hydrogenation
works with six hours’ sleep. Work was a two-hour march away, and a two-
hour slog home. The march was all part of the planned humiliation. It was
led by two ‘court jesters’, one wearing a top hat and the other a Prussian
Pickelhaube. The prisoners with white swastikas and ‘KT 28’ on their
backs had to sing German nationalist songs. One of the jesters came to a
sticky end when the ‘Kadle’ (commandant) Vlasak tried to shoot through
the top of his hat as a joke, and hit him in the head by mistake. When he
was laid out in his coffin he was found still to be alive and was shot two
more times through the heart.
‘Kadle’ Karel Vlasak liked to be called ‘Tgyr’ or ‘Tiger’. The prisoners
had their own name for him: ‘The Beast of 28’. He walked around the camp
with a revolver in one hand and a nagaika or cat-o’-nine-tails in the other.
He liked to strike the prisoners with his entire forearm. When they fell, as
many did, he would kick them in the stomach and the testicles. His
compatriots cheered at the sport. Eduard Kaltofen recounts a story of his
beating a crippled solder to death with his own crutch. On another occasion
four men had to prepare their own coffins before they received a shot in the
back of the head. Vlasak was later arrested - not because of his behaviour
towards the prisoners, but because he had taken property from them and not
handed it over to higher authorities.79
The occupation of the famous hop town of Saaz (Žatec) and nearby
Postelberg (Postoloprty) followed similar lines. On 9 May the liberating
Russian armies raped and shot a few of the overwhelmingly German
citizenry. Some Germans hanged or poisoned themselves, others vanished.
The Russians were replaced by Czech soldiers under General Svoboda on 2
June. In the meantime, the locals had been praying that the Anglo-
Americans would step in to create some sort of equitable division between
the Czechs and the Germans. That never happened. On the 3rd it was
decided to rid Saaz of its Germans. Before the war there had been some
16,000 people in the town. Five thousand men and boys were herded into
the market square. Anyone who struck the Czechs as unusual was savagely
beaten. The men were then marched off to Postelberg fifteen kilometres
away, where the population had already been evacuated. The journey took
two hours. If a man collapsed he was shot - boys in front of their fathers,
fathers in front of the boys. The Saazer males were installed in an old
barracks building. Another 150 men were left behind in Saaz Prison where
they were subjected to more sophisticated brutality. They were taken off to
Postelberg later that day, leaving only the anxious womenfolk behind.80
The following day there was a small-scale massacre in the Postelberg
Barracks. A detail was formed to bury the dead in gravel ditches that would
from now on serve as the camp latrine. The men were then robbed of any
valuables they had about them. Later a detail went through the prisoners to
locate doctors, pharmacists, priests, members of the important professions,
useful skilled workers, half-Jews, men married to Jews and any former
inmates of German camps. They were transferred to the camp in Saaz.
The hoi polloi spent the night in the stables. In the morning the doors
were opened with a cry of ‘Rychle, rychle!’ (Quick, quick!). Those who
tarried were gunned down. The dead and wounded were tossed into the
latrine. The remaining men were sifted politically. All members of the SS,
SA, Nazi organisations, the Wehrmacht and the National Socialist Party had
to come forward. The shootings continued throughout the day and night.
Five boys of around fifteen who had tried to escape were beaten bloody
with whips and executed before the eyes of the others.
The survivors, numbering perhaps 275, were crammed back into the
stables. It was four days before they received any bread and by then some
had gone out of their minds. When the doors were finally opened, one of
the men emerged stark naked and pranced around like a ballet dancer. A
German captain begged the chief torturer, Police Captain Marek, for the
right to die like a soldier. Marek made him kneel down to shoot him in the
back of the head. He fired and missed. The German officer turned and said,
‘Shoot better!’ Marek took two more attempts to finish him off.81
For the former soldier Ottokar Kremen from Komotau (Chomutov), the
Russians were sweetness and light compared to the Czechs. Returning from
the army on 7 May, he found the town occupied by Russian soldiers. They
assured him they would not be staying long and allowed him to take away
some clothes. When he discovered that his bicycle had been stolen while he
was inside, the Russian major commandeered a motorcycle from another
Russian and gave it to him, together with a laissez-passer in Russian.
Kremen then went to his sister-in-law’s house in the nearby village of
Gersdorf. He was not alone in finding the Russian soldiers more
understanding than the Czechs. Dr Siegel in Theresienstadt said the
Russians were often ‘notably more decent’. A Russian doctor treated the
wounds of those that came out on work details and helped others to flee.
Siegel used to tell girls who wanted to escape the misery of the nightly
rapes to make friends with a Russian and clear off with him.82
Nearly a month later, at the beginning of June, the Czechs came to
Gersdorf and arrested Kremen. He was interrogated and asked whether he
had been in the SS, the SA or the Party, all of which he denied. The Czechs
seized the motorbike and everything else they could find and took him to an
inn where he had to box other Germans. Then he was escorted to the former
Hotel Weimar in Komotau where he was locked up in a room with sixteen
others, including an eleven-year-old boy who was later shot with his father,
the owner of the local bell foundry. They were taken from the hotel-prison
to the camp that had been set up in the former Komotau State Farm. As they
left, a Czech held a bust of Adolf Hitler and they were told to salute it.
Kremen heard one Czech say to another that anyone who made the so-
called Hitler Greeting would be shot. Kremen told the others and no one
raised their hands. At the camp they had to strip. Any good clothing was
carted off and they were given rags that had belonged to those who had
already perished; very often they were covered in blood. Kremen was led to
a large room with seventy-eight other men. They were drilled all day -
including men of eighty. Anyone who did not march properly was beaten.
Kremen found his knowledge of Czech useful. He was able to take over
the drilling, and at his own request he taught the prisoners Czech, which
meant they could sit down for a while. The SS and SA members were later
picked out, beaten up and shot. The other men had to clean up the yard and
scatter sand on the blood. The survivors were then sent to the ‘infamous’
concentration camp in the former French POW camp at Maltheuren. But
Kremen and a few others were spared. They were put in the old glassworks:
him, a doctor called Lockwenz, an engineer, an Austrian who was known to
have shown goodwill towards Czechs, a Yugoslav, a staff captain from the
Czech army and a local postman. The Austrians and the Yugoslavs were
sent home. Meanwhile the glassworks filled up again with more Germans,
so that the inmates totalled 360 men and eight women. A lot of local
worthies were among them: directors of local industries, including the
sausage maker, who was later beaten to death, a priest and a gamekeeper,
who also perished. They were put to work on the railways, with Kremen as
interpreter. While he was at work, Kremen met a young Czech railwayman
who had been offered a three-room flat in Komotau. He had refused. He
didn’t want someone else’s flat. ‘Where will it all lead?’ he said. ‘I am not
going to take any of the flats here, they have all been stolen.’83
Back in the camp the beatings and torture continued. One Latvian could
hardly make himself understood, as he knew little German and less Czech.
He claimed that his membership of the SS was an accident. He was shot. A
German colonel who had served in the Czech army until 1924 was beaten to
death. A geometer who had a Polish-sounding name also died a hideous
death. There had been little love lost between the Czechs and the Poles
since 1938, when the Poles had seized the moment of the Czech diplomatic
defeat to march into the Tetschen area and appropriate it.
Kremen had been lucky he was not in Komotau when they celebrated
the Revolution there. All the men aged between thirteen and sixty-five were
made to assemble in the square. There were between five and six thousand
in all. The area was then cordoned off. The men had to remove their upper
garments to see if there were the usual SS markings. Anyone found to have
the tattoo was stripped naked and beaten to pulp. One young, blond boy put
up a fight. They prized open his legs and destroyed his genitals before
beating him to death.
The survivors were marched out through Görkau, Eisenberg and
Kunersdorf. On the way they passed a half-dead local official who had been
strapped to a telegraph pole. They spent three nights in Gebirgsneudorf
before moving on to Brüx and Maltheuern. Here they were given their first
food for four days. The Germans worked in the hydro-electric works. When
the anniversary of Lidice came round the camp commandant personally
slaughtered the Komotau optician and his two sons and another boy in front
of one another. Germans were forced to beat each other up. Their Calvary
came to an end when 250-300 of them were sent to Germany in August
1945.84
The Czechs indulged in a little orgy of shooting in the small town of
Duppau near Kaaden (Kadan). First they shot the soldier Franz Weis and
threw his body on to the town square; shortly afterwards it was the turn of
two SS men who had been invalided out of the army, Josef Wagner and
Franz Mahr. The headmaster of the secondary school, Andreas Draht, and
his assistant teachers, Damian Hotek, Franz Wensich and Rudolf Neudörfl,
were next in line. The Czechs then turned their attentions to the chief
postmaster, Karl Schuh. The men who carried out this little massacre were
Captain Baxa and Lieutenant Tichý. In the village of Totzau close by they
killed thirty-four Germans because they found arms, although permission to
keep them had apparently been granted by the American Army Command
in Karlsbad. In another place they shot the wife of the roofer Holzknecht
because she looked out of the window at the wrong moment. In Podersheim
they killed the farmer Stengl, and another eighty Germans were massacred
in the Jewish cemetery. None, according to the witness Eduard Grimm, was
associated with the Nazis. Josef Jugl was accused of being a Werewolf, and
hauled off to the camp at Kaaden. On the way the Czech guard took pity on
him. ‘Kaaden Prison bad,’ he said, ‘you still young.’ He told him to scarper,
and Jugl did.85
On 30 July there was an explosion in Aussig (Ustí nad Labem). The
Svoboda Guards had arrived that night in the town, forcing the Germans to
wear white armbands and walk in the gutter. About 300 young men from
Prague turned up. At about 3.30 a.m. the eyewitness heard a terrible bang,
and thought a cupboard might have fallen over. He climbed on the roof and
saw smoke billowing from somewhere behind the Marienberg: it was a
huge ammunition dump, filled with captured German weapons. Later the
Germans were accused of having sabotaged it. He went out on to the street.
Luckily he wore no armband, for the explosion was also the signal to attack
the Germans with whatever weapons came to hand. As the town
commander allegedly put it: ‘Now we will start the revolution against the
Germans.’ He saw men and women with prams thrown twenty metres off
the bridge into the Elbe and then shot at by the SNB guards with machine
guns. Any that managed to reach the bank were beaten with iron bars.
Eventually some Russian soldiers succeeded in clearing the streets and a
curfew was established. About 400-1,000 people had been killed.86
Anti-fascists did not necessarily have any advantages. As one Czech
told Herbert Schernstein, ‘Němec jest němec’ (A German is a German).
Schernstein had just returned to his home town after seven years in
concentration camps as a communist. He had endured Theresienstadt,
Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. His friend Willi Krebs, who had been the
founder of the Prödlitz Communist Party, had been robbed of his shop.87
Near Aussig were the concentration camps Lerchenfeld and Schöbritz.
Heinrich Michel was actually working as a policeman for the newly
appointed police director Douda when he was arrested on 16 May. Douda
was a Muscovite who had been employed in the local gym. He had gone to
Russia in 1938 and therefore had the complete confidence of the new
regime. After insulting Michel, he had him thrown into a cell in the
courthouse prison with a painter, a gunsmith, a lawyer and others. On the
second day the cell began to fill up. One man brought a ‘bestial stench’ with
him. It soon became clear why: he was seeping excrement from his trouser
legs to his collar. When they undressed him they found no appreciable part
of his body that was not covered in blood. He had been caught trying to
escape and suffered the consequences.
After drinking three-quarters of a bottle of schnapps, the lieutenant
commanding decided he would show them how to treat an SS man. The
doors to the cells were thrown open, including that housing the SS. He
chose Willi Künstner, an honorary member of the SS and personnel
manager of the firm of Schicht, a major employer in Aussig. He was so
badly beaten that he had to be taken away to hospital where he died without
regaining consciousness. The courthouse gaol was the feeder for the local
concentration camps. Michel was taken to Lerchenfeld where he was made
a kapo. A former Luftwaffe camp that had been manned by Hungarians and
wrecked by the Russians during their advance, it was run by a Commandant
Vrša. All new arrivals had to sing the ‘Deutschlandslied’ and SA songs
while a picture of Hitler was paraded before them. Then they had to run a
forty-to-fifty metre gauntlet while they were lashed with bullwhips. SA men
received an extra twenty-five stripes on the bottom.
With time the population of Lerchenfeld camp grew to 3,500. Michel
himself was severely beaten by a Czech guard. When he asked him why he
had treated him that way the guard said it was because he had once reported
him for stealing a cake when he was twelve years old. When the Russians
took over Lerchenfeld in October, the inmates were moved to Schöbritz.
They had to build the camp themselves and that meant spending the first
night in the open air. In Böhmisch Leipa (now the ‘Czech’ Česka Lipa), a
camp was erected for around 1,200 Germans. In the savagery of the Czech
takeover the innkeepers of the area seem to have come out badly, while the
local Landrat or councillor had his face pushed in his own excrement until
he died from that and other beatings. Two hundred and fifty-one prisoners
perished within twelve months.
Theresienstadt
The most notorious camp in Czechoslovakia was Theresienstadt, the
Nazis’ show camp where inmates had been required to purchase living
space in a ‘model ghetto’. Many of Germany’s, Austria’s and
Czechoslovakia’s most famous or most talented Jews had been holed up
within the eighteenth-century walled town. They died in droves, either from
neglect or when they were shipped out to Auschwitz or Treblinka.
On 5 May 1945 Theresienstadt was taken over by the Red Cross. The
commandant, Karl Rahm, tried to escape and the last Jewish administrator
(the Jews had their own governing body) tendered his resignation.88 A
typhus epidemic kept the prisoners in the ghetto for the time being. The
Czechs saw a new use for the citadel: it would be filled with Germans.
Some were put to work tending the sick Jews. On 24 May there was a
delivery of 600 Prague Germans of both sexes, including Red Cross sisters
from the clinics. They were taken to the Little Fortress about a kilometre
away from the fortified town. It had a long, dark history. It was here that the
murderers of Archduke Francis Ferdinand - Princip and Čabrinović - died in
1918. They had been too young for execution and had succumbed to TB.89
In Nazi times the Little Fortress had been largely devoted to political
prisoners. The SS had their amenities there, including a swimming pool and
a cinema. In 1943 the Little Fortress was expanded with the construction of
a fourth courtyard. The 600 Germans were taken there.
The prisoners were separated into four groups: men, youths, children
and women. The entrance was through a low archway covered with grass.
Once inside the dark tunnel leading to the cells the RG lashed out at the
men with truncheons, beating them to the ground. Anyone who failed to get
up was fertiggemacht (finished off). In the courtyard they had to run the
gauntlet. Those who fell were dealt with in person by the Camp
Commandant Alois Pruša, who beat in their kidneys. He was occasionally
assisted in his work by his daughter Sonja, a girl of around twenty. Another
source attests to his having two daughters, both equally brutal. One boasted
that she had killed eighteen Germans with her own hands. Pruša’s own
viciousness might have been explained by the fact that he had been detained
in Theresienstadt by the Nazis. Another inmate, Eduard Fitsch, maintained
that the guards were all former concentration camp prisoners.
Those who had been ‘finished off’ breathed their last in their own
appointed cell. Between fifty-nine and seventy of the 600 died in those first
few hours. Two hundred more succumbed in the next few days. Pruša and
his assistant Tomeš did not give much hope to the survivors, who were told
that those who had entered the Little Fortress would never leave it. All their
papers, photographs and other - non-valuable - effects were put on a heap
and burned. The man who commanded the fourth courtyard was a Pole
called Alfred Kling. He claimed that he was an expert in killing and could
simply decide by the number of strokes how long a victim would survive
his beating. As he put it, ‘We have reduced you to such a state in two
months that the Gestapo would have needed five years to achieve.’90
Dr E. Siegel, a Czech-speaking general practitioner working for the Red
Cross, was subjected to the full initiating ceremony. Not only was he
beaten, but there were attempts to dislocate his arm and break his bones. A
truncheon was placed in his mouth to knock out his teeth, and he was told
to confess he was a member of the SA - which he continued to deny. When
they had finished with him he was thrown on a concrete floor in a pool of
his own blood. There he lay for three days until a Czech ‘colleague’ visited
him. This man picked him up by the hair and dashed him to the ground
again. He still failed to die.91
Siegel was made camp doctor. Not that he could do much for the
moment. As a result of his torture he could neither stand nor sit. With his
left hand he needed to hold up his head, otherwise it fell on to his breast - so
badly damaged were the muscles in his neck. His left eye functioned only
when he looked straight ahead, and he could hardly hear as a result of the
blows to his ears. His heart gave him trouble, but another doctor was able to
give him some injections. They were not short of medicaments - according
to Siegel, they lay in heaps around the former ghetto.
Once he was able to walk again, Siegel was ordered to kill a number of
allegedly elderly prisoners in Cell 50 by lethal injections as it would be a
pity to prolong their agonies. He tried to get out of the order, even going so
far as to hide the poison. In the account he wrote later, he says he was saved
by a visit to the camp by a Czech doctor who proposed the creation of a
typhus ward. Siegel was put in charge. It was set up in the old SS cinema on
6 June. Later he had the chance to look into Cell 50 on his rounds. He
discovered its occupants to be aged between sixteen and eighteen, and
apparently members of the SS. Many of them had freshly amputated legs
and dislocated joints. Their bandages had come off and their stumps were
septic. They were so thickly crammed into the cell that their bodies
touched. They begged for their dressings to be changed, but Siegel was
forbidden to touch them or mention that he had seen them, lest he be locked
up with them himself. He said that these miserable boys were Pruša’s pride
and joy, that he would literally jump around like a clown at the sight of
them - although he was careful to show them only to his special friends and
not to the authorities from Prague.
The hundred or so children under twelve had a special building to
themselves. At first this was used for propaganda purposes as there was a
courtyard for them to play in and a place to hang out their washing.
Journalists were brought to the camp to see the children and note how well
they were treated. It was a case of history repeating itself: there was a
famous film produced by the Nazis in Theresienstadt, made to show the
outside world how humane it was. At the onset of winter, however, the
children were not so happy, because their quarters offered them little or no
protection from the cold.
 Pruša maintained that everyone in the camp was a member of the SS or
the Gestapo. When the Russians expressed doubts about a number of boys
aged from twelve to fourteen, he replied that they were detained as the
children of SS or Gestapo men and that one of them had managed
singlehandedly to kill eleven Czechs. A similar story was retailed by the
Czech Ministry of the Interior: Theresienstadt contained only SS, despite
the fact that half its inmates were women of ages ranging from suckling
children to one old lady of ninety-two. There were also a number of blind
people who had been brought to the Little Fortress from Aussig after the
massacre. Much of the savagery stopped when Pruša was replaced by a
Major Kálal, who had no time for Germans but had, at least, a proper
soldier’s dislike of torture.92
Pankrác
One September evening in Pankrác (Pankratz), Hans Wagner had a little
performance to distract him from his sufferings: public executions. A gibbet
was set up outside the prison. Children stood on the cars to get a better view
of the hangings and there was a crowd he estimated at some 50,000. After
each execution they cheered.
The first in line was Professor Josef Pfitzner. He was followed by an SS
Gruppenführer Schmidt from Berlin. Next came the lawyer Franz
Schicketanz, who had prepared the case for the Sudeten Germans presented
to the British mediator Lord Runciman in 1938. Then it was the turn of Dr
Blaschtowitschka of the German Special Court. His father, the president of
the Prague Senate, died of hunger a few days later. Among the other victims
that day were Dr Franz Wabra, who headed a unit for internal medicine at
the hospital in Beraun, and an insurance official called Straněk. The Czechs
were killing some of their own collaborators: General Blaha, the founder of
the Society for Czech-German Friendship, together with its president,
Richtrmoc and its chief executive, Major Mohapl. The first two were
condemned to death. Mohapl was sent down for twenty years.
The most prominent denizen of Pankrác was Karl-Hermann Frank.
Wagner saw him exercising in the yard every afternoon. The former
Reichsprotektor had been handed over by the Americans and was publicly
hanged on 22 May 1946. At the beginning of 1947, another group of
German Czechs were strung up: Ernst Kundt, Hans Krebs and Hans Wesen.
The leading doctor, Karl Feitenhansl, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The cases against Rudolf Jung and Dr Rosche were dropped - both had
already died from hunger in prison.
There were German Jews in Pankrác too. Dr Karl Loewenstein, once a
prominent Berlin businessman and former marine officer, had been in
charge of the Theresienstadt ghetto police. The Czechs accused him of
collaboration, assisting in the deportation of two Jewish policemen to
Auschwitz. Loewenstein remained fifteen months in the prison. He was cast
as a ‘typical Prussian officer’ who fulfilled his duties with an unbending
zeal. He remained in Pankrác despite letters of protest from the Jewish
leader Leo Baeck in London and others. He shared a cell with other
Germans, chiefly SS men. There was so little food that the prisoners ate
grass and eggshells. In March 1946 the Czechs finally decided that the
accusations were groundless: Loewenstein was simply a disciplinarian who
had done more to alleviate the sufferings of the Jews than to aggravate
them. He was released from Pankrác but not freed. He went to the camp at
Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), where once again he was surrounded by the race
that had locked him up in the first place and slaughtered his friends and
relations. He was not released from his Czech captivity until January
1947.93
Torture
Torture appears to have been the rule. In Prague, Johann Schöninger,
who had been based in London before the war, was hit with iron bars and
had nails driven into his feet. His assistant, Schubert, was beaten to death.
In Domeschau Johann Rösner had lighted matches pushed under his
fingernails. In Komotau, the torture seems to have been similar to the rack.
A Waffen-SS man’s penis and testicles had been so worked over that the
former had swollen to 8-9 cm thick and the latter were septic. The whole
area round to his anus was filled with pus and stank. In Theresienstadt one
woman observed a female SS member being forced to sit astride an SA
dagger: ‘I can still hear her screams.’ The chief torturers in the Little
Fortress were two guards named Truka and Valchař. Guards used a variety
of instruments for beating and lashing their victims: steel rods sheathed
with leather, Spanish pipes, rubber truncheons, iron bars and wooden
planks. In Klattau (Klatovy) one man had wooden wool soaked in benzene
put between his toes and set alight so that it burned his sexual organs.
Siegel thought they must have had orders from above, because the methods
used in all Czech camps were broadly similar.94
The first time the activities of the Czech torturers ever came to court
was in Germany itself, with the trial of Jan Kouril, one of the most brutal
guards at Kaunitz College. Kouril had later been assistant commandant of
Kleidova camp. He made the mistake of trying to sell gold fillings to a
German dentist in Munich. The dentist recognised him as one of his
torturers, and Kouril was tried and sentenced to fifteen years in prison by a
court in Karlsruhe. During the trial the grave-digger from the College gave
evidence that 1,800 bodies had been removed, including the corpses of 250
soldiers. While Kouril could find not one witness in his defence, 200 came
forward for the prosecution.95
In June 1945 a law was introduced to stop beatings in the camps. It was
not always heeded, but it alleviated some of the sufferings. The Czechs also
punished commandants and warders who overstepped the mark. By all
accounts this had less to do with the prisoners than with the pocketing of
their effects. Dr Siegel tells us, for example, that the ‘monsters’ Pruša and
his two daughters, as well as Kling and Tomeš and others from
Theresienstadt, were tried in the court in Leitmeritz.96
Expulsions
The end of the nightmare was the beginning of another: the march to
Germany or Austria. The deportations were sanctioned by Article 13 of the
Potsdam Accords, although it was stipulated that the expulsion of the
civilian populations should take place in the most humane manner possible.
Hans Freund went to Dresden in the blistering heat of June 1945. No water
was provided and many of the older Germans died.97
It went relatively smoothly for Margarete Schell, who found herself on
the same train as her mother and stepfather. She arrived in Hesse ‘a beggar,
homeless, outlawed - but free!’ They had been allowed to take just thirty
kilos of possessions with them (later this was increased first to fifty then to
seventy kilos) and were assigned to a numbered goods wagon. In each car
there was a little stove to warm them, but not enough room to lie down.
Right up to the last moment there was a worry that the Americans were not
going to let them in. They were Czechs, not ‘Reich’ Germans after all.98
The expulsions did not cover all Germans. Some were left to rot in
Czech prisons. Alfred Latzel’s father-in-law, for example, was sentenced to
eighteen years by a People’s Court in Troppau, to be served in Mürau bei
Hohenstadt, a medieval castle once the most dreaded prison in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. During the war it had been used to house Czechs and
Polish prisoners suffering from TB. The death rate had been alarmingly
high. Other Germans were retained after 1946 to work in the mines or
forests. The People’s Courts were painfully reminiscent of their namesakes
in Nazi Germany: justice was summary, death sentences ten a penny, life
imprisonment was an option, otherwise the culprit received five or ten years
in the mines. Max Griehsel had worked at the main office of the DAF, the
Nazi forced-labour organisation. He received a five-year sentence. The trial
was over in ten minutes.99
The Sudeten communists, who had never supported Henlein and who
had suffered under the Nazis, fared no better. Like the new Poland,
Czechoslovakia would not suffer minorities (except Slovaks). About 10,000
of them were expelled. It was a rare example of a deportation that followed
the rules laid down at Potsdam. It was orderly and relatively humane.100
Less so were the first organised shipments of non-communist Germans in
the summer of 1946: pictures show some of the 586,000 Bohemian
Germans packed in box cars like sardines.101
The behaviour of the Czechs and Hungarians created more frustrations
for Lucius Clay. He was worried about the definition of ‘German’ in
February 1947, especially as a number of pure Czechs were seeking refuge
in the West to escape from the communist shadow that had been cast over
their country. The expulsions were suspended for a time. When the Soviet-
inspired communist coup took place in 1948, many Czechs followed the
path of the Germans across the border. They became refugees in their turn.
As Clay was quick to point out, they were ‘not loved in Germany’ as a
result of the expulsions.102 From Hungary came ‘Swabians’, a development
which perplexed him.be
The process was revived on 1 September 1947 at a rate of twenty trains
arriving from Czechoslovakia every month.103 At the end of the official
expulsions the Americans asserted that they had received 1,445,049 Czech
Germans to settle in their zone, of whom 53,187 were anti-fascists; the
Russians had accommodated 786,485, including 42,987 anti-fascists. The
rest came in dribs and drabs, as many were still held to work in the mines.
In 1950 the Czechs admitted to having 165,117 German-speakers, but the
figure was probably somewhere between 210,000 and 250,000. The
expulsions had caused an economic crisis in Czechoslovakia. Despite the
pickings for the Czechs, whole villages remained empty and the fields
around lay fallow for want of labour.104 It is thought that 240,000 Germans,
German Bohemians and Moravians died at the hands of the Czechs.105
The Hungarians began to expel their Swabians on 1 November 1946.
The Germans were spread throughout the country and at first no one
thought of them as suspicious. Many were dragged off to Russia to work in
Siberia, along with Hungarian men - the Russians could not so easily tell
the difference. Then the minister president Béla Miklos decided that the
Germans would be sacrificed in the interests of better treatment for
Hungary. He would distance himself from his former German ally. A wide-
ranging land reform was instituted and Germans were interned, as the
Russians themselves had suggested in the spring of 1945.106
In May 1945 the authorities in Hungary identified between 200,000 and
250,000 Germans they wanted to expel. They were to be allowed up to 100
kilos of luggage. The Americans had allotted them an area near
Württemberg. The process continued until August 1946 when the
Hungarians began to lose interest and some Germans came out of hiding.bf
Not all had been banished by any means.107 The terrible winter led Clay to
suspend the process until the spring. Already 168,000 had settled in the
American Zone. The usual reports came in of their miserable state.
According to the American journalist James K. Pollack, they too had been
robbed down to their wedding rings and arrived wearing all the clothes they
possessed.108 The number of refugees in the American Zone was becoming
a problem. Clay wanted to send some back across the Oder-Neisse, but that
was impossible. For six months of 1946 he had suspended the reception of
ethnic Germans into the American Zone because he did not feel the
expulsions complied with Potsdam’s call for a ‘humane and orderly’
resettlement. This was a double-edged sword, as it prolonged the misery of
the poor souls trapped in the east.109
Romania was also ready to evict its 600-year-old German community
(there had been 745,421 German Romanian nationals in 1930). Border
changes at the so-called Adjudication of Vienna had shifted some of them
on to Hungary, but there were still over half a million Germans, mostly in
the Banat and the Siebenbürgen. In one town, Braşov or Kronstadt on the
western side of the Carpathians, they formed a slender majority. Hitler had
already launched his plans to move them to the Reich, a scheme that had its
echoes in the policies of the Federal Republic after the war. The Romanians
were less harsh to their Germans than other central European countries
were, although they were briefly interned; they were well treated on the
whole.110
There were also major expulsions from Yugoslavia, where there were
more than half a million Germans in the census of 1921. Many of these
were in Krain, which contained the German-speaking pocket of Gottschee.
The 35,000 Gottscheer had already fallen victim to Hitler’s alliance with
Mussolini, as the western half of Slovenia had been annexed by Italy in
1941. In the winter of 1941 to 1942 they had been resettled in Lower Styria
and in Carinthia in an instance of ‘ethnic rationalisation’. Those Germans
who remained behind in 1945 were pushed into camps such as Gakavo,
Kruševlje and Jarek (the latter took in most of the Batschka Germans),
while Rudolfsgnad and Molidorf were reserved principally for Germans
from the Yugoslav Banat. In Rudolfsgnad nearly two-thirds of the 30,000 or
so inmates died of typhus. About 6,000 more died in Jarek.111 Czechs
continue to deny that any wrong was committed against the German
Bohemians after the war, but they have a word - odsun, ‘spiriting away’ -
which is used to describe the ridding of their land of Germans at the time.
There was no exchange but expulsion ‘without ifs or buts’.112 It is described
not as an act of revenge, but as an ‘historic necessity’. There were a few
voices raised against the process at the time; notably two Catholic papers
Obzory and Lidové Listy and the journalist Helena Kozeluhová, who was
eventually required to emigrate.113 Then came the communists, and with a
brief hiatus for the Prague Spring there was an official silence about the
matter. Some exiles from communism did mention it, however. One of
these was the former minister Jaroslav Stránský, the uncle of one of the
Prague torturers, who had fled to London. Blame was laid at the feet of the
communists.114

OceanofPDF.com
 5
Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the
Prussian East
The recommendation that the expulsion of the
German-speaking people from Poland, Bohemia,
Hungary and Rumania - about twelve million in all -
and their resettlement in the overcrowded ruins of
Western Germany should proceed in an ‘orderly and
humane’ fashion was somewhat reminiscent of the
request of the Holy Inquisition that its victims should be
put to death ‘as gently as possible and without
bloodshed’.
Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, Harmondsworth 1987, 812

If the expulsions from Czechoslovakia and the banishment of German

communities from other areas of east-central Europe involved transferring
huge numbers of people, they were a drop in the ocean compared to the
deportations from within Germany’s pre-1937 borders. For hundreds of
years Germans had lived east of the River Oder, sometimes in regions such
as Pomerania, East Prussia and Lower Silesia, where the population was
almost exclusively Teutonic, or in areas of mixed population such as Great
Poland, West Prussia and Upper Silesia. At Yalta the decision was made to
award these regions to Poland, with the exception of East Prussia, which
was divided up between the Russians and the Poles. The inhabitants faced
an uncertain fate: banishment by death march. It was the end of an ancient
civilisation - of hardy peasants, of German merchants and academics in
their own quarters and universities, of German nobles maintaining their
culture in Slavic lands.bg
Apologetic German historians are keen to point out that the Nazis had
provided their own precedent for the terrible deportations that followed
Germany’s defeat. Europe’s Jews had been ‘transferred’ to the so-called
General Gouvernement (the puppet state set up by the Germans in Poland)
or the Baltic States, where they were liquidated. In two instances of Hitler’s
pragmatism, the German-speaking population of the Baltic States had been
encouraged to come ‘home to the Reich’ to allow Stalin a free hand, and the
South Tyrolean and Gottschee Germans in Slovenia were also transferred to
allow Mussolini to consolidate his territory. Poland was to be partly
Germanised, above all in the Warthe and in Danzig-West Prussia. Over a
million Poles were resettled.1
The Nazis aimed for the ‘creation of a racially, spiritually, nationally
and politically unified German population’. All those elements that could
not be Germanised had to ‘be ruthlessly swept away’. This was the nasty
idiom of the Treaty of Versailles, which championed nation states. The idea
had gained a doubtful respectability in the Bulgarian-Turkish exchange of
populations of 1913. Churchill expressed his approval in the House of
Commons in December 1944, saying that the expulsion of the Germans was
a satisfying and lasting means for ensuring peace.2 The San Francisco
Conference at the end of 1944 made it clear that German expellees were
exempted from international aid. No one was to be allowed to interfere.3
The post-First World War regimes of the new east-central Europe had
all longed for racial purity, and to some degree persecuted their minorities.bh
Whole villages had been emptied of Germans in West Prussia in the wake
of Versailles. Possibly because half of East Prussia was now Soviet
property, no effort was made to keep any of the Germans alive. There are
striking similarities between the way the population of East Prussia was
handled and the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks in the early
1930s. The rations received by East Prussians did not contain enough
calories to sustain life. They were notably smaller than the already pitiful
amounts of food doled out to Berliners.4
The East Prussian ordeal was to last until 1948, when trains brought the
last bedraggled remnants of the population into Berlin. Most would try to
forget what they had suffered in the intervening years - not just the brutality
and rape, but also the plagues, disease and vermin that had been their daily
lot. Deprived of soap, they were as much the victims of lice as of their
Soviet conquerors, and lice brought typhus. As no water was available, the
Königsberger drank from infected wells and bomb craters and fed on
sparrows and mice when they could, or on discarded potato peelings and
trash from Russian kitchens; boiled ox bones and cattle pelts, glue and the
carrion of dead and buried animals.
Graf Lehndorff woke up in Soviet captivity on his thirty-fifth birthday,
13 April 1945. One of his fellow prisoners around the potato pot had a piece
of bacon that she shared with him. Despite the freezing cold of an East
Prussian spring this proved the calm before the storm. He spoke to a Polish
interpreter who had lived in Königsberg for two years and had made a
decent living. He informed Lehndorff that he would be sent to Moscow or
Odessa to work in a Russian hospital.5 The kid-gloves approach was
discarded within hours. Lehndorff learned that he had been classified as
‘dangerous’. The women were taken off to be raped and the men piled on
top of one another in a hollow in the ground. It was bitterly cold and there
was still a good deal of snow about. ‘Cold is much worse than hunger, in
your wet things, you try as much as possible not to move.’ The one
consolation in the spectacle of burning buildings all around him was that it
aroused the thought of heat. The animals had all been driven away or killed.
The only ones that remained were a few half-mad dogs.6
The men were brought to their feet and together with the women were
marched along the road to Rauschen. In better days it had been a seaside
resort popular with people from Königsberg. Hans Lehndorff took
advantage of the lackadaisical Russian guards and fled into the woods.
Once he had shaken off his pursuers he sat down and enjoyed a moment of
reflection. Less than a year before he had met his cousin Heinrich
Lehndorff, who had tried to convince him to join the opposition to Hitler.
Graf Heinrich Lehndorff had been arrested after the July Plot, but like Hans,
had slipped away from his guards - in this case the Gestapo - and gone on
the run. He was ultimately betrayed, however, and hanged with the others in
Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.7
Hans Lehndorff was also caught. He was put in a barn with a number of
old people, women and children. They were the remnants of the population
from the villages within a twenty-kilometre radius. Their shoes were worn
through, their clothes in shreds, and they were covered in filth. Many of the
younger children had already died, but there was no time to mourn -
Lehndorff thought that that might be years in coming. Meanwhile they
looked after their surviving offspring as best they could. The women were
still prey to the Russians, who took them away from their children and
raped them in a house by the roadside. The Germans were moved along. On
the road to Rauschen, Lehndorff met a woman pushing an old, blind man in
a wheelbarrow. He didn’t like the Russians in Rauschen; he wanted to go to
Königsberg. Lehndorff didn’t have the heart to tell him it was worse there.8
 It was 20 April - the Führer’s fifty-sixth and final birthday. Pillau had
yet to fall and was being subjected to a heavy artillery bombardment.
Lehndorff was taken to Rauschen. The prisoners were quartered in a motor-
repair workshop and taken off for interrogation. On the 21st the Russians
told Lehndorff to ‘Go home!’ He was not fooled: it would be only a matter
of time before they picked him up again. Where was home anyway? He
went to Palmnicken with a fifteen-year-old boy called Helmut. The next day
he was arrested again.
Lehndorff was taken to Rothenstein camp, a former barracks which had
come through the war unscathed. He was put in a hall containing some
3,000 other souls. He learned that the daily ration consisted of a cup of
groats and a slice of bread. There was no water. There were no latrines. His
neighbour made a little space for him and gave him two coffee beans. To
his relief someone recognised him and he was fetched and taken to the
doctors’ compound where he was looked after by the sister. She cleared up
the mystery of the lavatorial arrangements: it was the space between two
barracks blocks. Dysentery had broken out and many of the prisoners
collapsed and died as they squatted in the alley. Once again Lehndorff
permitted himself a reflection: ‘to have lived one’s life and to croak in this
place, literally in the shit!’9
The dead were taken away and laid out before the guard post. When the
Russians began to worry that they too might catch the infection that had
killed the prisoners, they earmarked an area of the camp for the sick. On the
first night of the new arrangements, thirty-six people died. One was found
dead sitting on a bucket. The other prisoners descended on the dead to strip
them of their clothes, so it was difficult to establish their identity.10 On the
day that Hitler took his own life, Lehndorff delivered a camp inmate of
twins: ‘Life goes on, as it is so aptly said.’ Both children later died of
hypothermia.11
The Russians were weeding out the Nazis by means of interrogation.
The big fish had either fled via Pillau or had committed suicide; what
remained was decidedly small fry. Confessions were beaten out of the men,
and many died. Those Pgs that survived were taken to holding camps in
Gumbinnen or Insterburg before being marched off to the Soviet Union.
Someone informed Lehndorff that there were a number of Old Masters
being kept in a damp room in the camp, which would be ruined if no one
did anything about them. Lehndorff was unsympathetic: ‘Let them be used
for temporary window-panes, or find some useful end in an oven.’ He was
more impressed by the bravery of the women: ‘It is always astonishing
what man will put up with.’ That day he heard that the war was over.12
A daily grind set in at Rothenstein camp. Lehndorff was the doctor once
again, a man you needed. If you are wise you don’t kill the doctor. A
Russian woman came to him for treatment. She had also been raped, and
now she had VD. In gratitude she brought him food - margarine for the
potato soup. One woman he treated - known only as Wanda - had been
raped 128 times. They brought in an old man who was so covered in lice
that he looked like an ant-heap. He turned out to be the local railway
director. He died an hour later.13
At the beginning of June, Lehndorff had a surprise visit from Doktora.
She was still working at the German hospital and nurtured plans to get her
friend out of Rothenstein to work alongside her once more. There were a
thousand Germans being treated in the former Finance Department in
Königsberg. The Nervenklinik had been turned over to those suffering from
plague. When typhus broke out the victims were taken to the hospitals in
the Yorckstrasse and the Elisabeth Krankenhaus. There were 2,000 cases
lying two to a bed, four in the case of children.14
Doktora brought him wheaten biscuits. Three days later she was back
with Lehndorff’s rucksack filled with his things. They included a pistol with
fifty bullets. This was carefully hidden. After that she came almost daily.15
The commandant allowed him out one day, and he went foraging looking
for medicine. ‘The city is really fantastic. The eye no longer attempts to
reconstruct it, but rather allows itself to be overpowered, drawn in by the
entirely transformed landscape.’ He found the red-rimmed glasses in which
he had drunk his last glass of Martell cognac. As the Russian car took him
back to the camp he spotted Doktora on the city walls, picking flowers to
take to him.16
In the middle of June Lehndorff was released through Doktora’s
intervention and was allowed to work with her in the German hospital. The
Finance Department was one of the few undamaged buildings in the city.
There was food of sorts - a grey pea soup, typical of East Prussia.17 The
summer was slightly better, when grasses and dandelions could be gathered
by the roadside, rye grains could be filched from the fields and mussels
from the overgrown city pond. The idyll did not last long. Once again it is
difficult to avoid the impression that the Russians were hoping that the
Germans would die, to rid themselves of the responsibility of feeding and
repatriating them, although a little fat was made available for children.
Lehndorff’s German hospital was turfed out of the Finance Department.
They had twenty-four hours to move 1,500 patients into the old
Barmherzigkeit - the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy.
The chief problem was famine now. Lehndorff was forever seeing
patients suffering from oedema who were skeletal from the waist upwards,
but whose legs were filled with water. The only solution was to amputate,
but how were the Germans to live in post-war Königsberg without legs?
Was it not better just to let them die? ‘Famine leads to a remarkable death.
There is no fight. The sufferer gives the impression that death is already
behind them.’ One woman was brought to him who had lain ten days in a
market garden eating unripe blackcurrants. She was completely blocked up.
She nearly died while Lehndorff endeavoured to sort her out. Blackcurrants
were quite a boon that summer - there was a glut of them in the allotments
behind the now ruinous houses.18 Somehow the hospital acquired three
cows, providing valuable milk, for the children in particular. It was not
long, however, before they discovered that the throat of the best milker had
been cut. Later the animal’s udder was found floating in a vat of soup.
Officially the hospital received thirty-five kilos of meat daily, but the
Russians interpreted this to encompass heads and feet, hooves and horns.
One recipient of the precious flesh was the dying mother superior, who had
had to live through the worst of it while her nuns were constant prey to the
Russians.19
There were plenty of books in the ruined houses, and literature was
consolation for some, but there was next to no food. Cases of cannibalism
were reported, with people eating the flesh of their dead children. Of the
73,000 Königsberger alive in June 1945, only 25,000 survived the
experience. 20 Hermann Matzkowski, a communist sawmill worker the
Russians installed as mayor of the Königsberg suburb of Ponarth, reported
that 15,000 Königsberger had disappeared or died in the main prison during
May. On 20 June 1,000 people were beheaded before his eyes.21
Lehndorff and Doktora made an expedition to suburban Preyl. They had
no shoes and went barefoot. On the way they plucked cornflowers - the
floral symbol of Prussia. Russians were supplementing their diet by fishing
in the vast Schlossteich that provided water for the city. Later Lehndorff
saw two boys swimming in the pond. Given how malnourished they were,
he was amazed by their energy. When he told them not to swallow the
water, they replied in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Oh, what does it matter how we
die, no one is going to get out of here!’22
When they reached their goal they found the house of Doktora’s
relatives burned out. She began to cry. They hitched a lift to Juditten in the
suburbs where Doktora’s house was. There were Germans living in it.
When Doktora tried to enter they attacked her. Lehndorff ’s beloved was
losing her will to live. She discovered that she was infested with lice - the
final indignity. When he went to see her in the morning she had taken
poison. Lehndorff was shocked at his lack of emotion. He too would find a
more appropriate time to mourn.23
Autumn 1945 arrived. There were rumours that the Königsberger were
to be shipped west under Western supervision, typhus cases first. Hopes
were temporarily raised. The news caused a drop in prices for winter
clothes as the city-dwellers thought they would be out before the bad
weather started. A woollen jacket could be obtained for six potatoes, a coat
for a tin of meat. You had to be careful, however, as fraudsters had found a
way of replacing the contents of tins with clay and leaves. Meanwhile the
ripe corn rotted in the fields as there was no one to harvest it.24
The fate of those living in the villages was no kinder than that of the
Königsberger. The distinguished journalist Gräfin Marion Dönhoff was the
daughter of one of the region’s great magnates. The family home,
Friedrichstein, was the local Versailles. In 1945 it was burned to the ground.
In 1947 Gräfin Dönhoff received her last letter from home. It described
what had happened in her village when the Russians came. They arrived on
a Tuesday, setting fire to various houses and shooting two old coachmen
and the bell-ringer who summoned the workers to the fields. Her
correspondent wrote:
A few days later they shot Magda Bohaim, Lotte Pritt and her
child and Grandma Plitt; in Wirrgirren they killed five workers on the
estate and the forester Schmidt’s wife, who took eight days to die and
must have suffered terribly. Old Plitt then hanged himself. In February
they began the transports to the Urals. My husband went with them; as
did the innkeeper Dreier and his daughter Ulla, Stellmacher’s two
daughters, Frau Jung, Frau Krüschmann, Frau Oltermann, the four
Marx girls, Christel and Herta Heinze and the smith’s daughter. I
received news from Karl Marx [sic] a few months ago that my
 husband and most of the others died in the Urals. You can see how
death has moved into our little village. First of all the lads all died at
the front and now the old, and even the girls.25
Typhus had cut a swathe though the population of the village. Sister
Hedy, who had nursed them through the epidemic, had now been ill for a
fortnight. They had all had to change their lodgings many times, as more
and more surviving buildings were requisitioned by the Red Army. Marion
Dönhoff’s correspondent had lived at the mill, until her lodger, the
Oberinspektor (senior estate manager), had been shot in the stomach, and
she had moved back into the village in fear for her life. She took the
wounded man to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. ‘The women from
Wittgirren lent a hand, for it was no easy task, moving the heavy old man
who was suffering from terrible pains. We laboured for four hours. At the
[parish] boundary he asked us to stop, saying “Women, let me see my
beautiful Quittainenbi once more.”’ He was dead by the time they reached
the hospital.26
The way to survive was to work for the conquerors. Marion Dönhoff’s
informant was one of them. The only ray of light in her slavery was the
sight of Sister Hedy’s two-year-old daughter while she waited for
permission to go to the new Germany across the Oder. The Soviet
authorities were gradually repopulating their new territory, but there were a
few menial jobs to be performed. There was a little work to be had in the
hospitals and factories, and there was an industrial outfitter and a baker
where casual labour was required. Germans worked in the power stations
and in the carpenters’ workshops until they were replaced by Russians. One
man made a living by selling the books he dug out of the rubble. A number
of priests and pastors continued to operate in Königsberg, as their work -
particularly for orphaned children - was tolerated by the Russians. Nine of
the clergymen died of starvation or dysentery; three were killed.
On 4 July 1946 Königsberg lost its ancient name. It became
Kaliningrad. With the change of nomenclature came Russian physicians to
replace the Germans operating in the hospitals, and Russian workers took
over from the Germans in the factories. A few roubles could be made from
teaching the Russians German or to play the piano. A sort of calm reigned
in which Germans could read their own newspapers, listen to broadcasts in
their own language and send their children to their own schools. There was
even a German Choir made up of doctors, nurses and others at the Yorck
Hospital.
This lasted until repatriation began in the summer of 1947. The
transports took off in earnest on 22 October that year. On 10 September
Ruth Friedrich recorded the arrival in Berlin of 6,000 Königsberger, people
who had lived on carrion and rubbish and were ‘more cattle than human
beings, more dead than alive’. Their advent in the capital was followed by
the last remnants of Breslau’s German population.27 By the time they had
finished, no Germans were left in what had been Königsberg. A 700-year
history had drawn to a close.bj
Country Life
Hans Lehndorff had left Königsberg two years before the transports
removed the remaining Germans, because he had heard a rumour that he
was about to be arrested. He made a wise choice even if the story was false:
on 6 and 7 November 1945, the Russians celebrated their Revolution by
beating the Germans bloody and raping the women again. One of the
victims was Mayor Matzkowski’s seventy-one-year-old mother. The only
women spared were those carrying Russian babies.28 As Lehndorff fled
through the shattered streets he watched Russian soldiers clearing Germans
out of their houses near the Friedland Gate. From now on they had to live in
the allotments. He wanted to reach the Polish half of East Prussia and find
out what had happened to his family, particularly his mother, who was the
daughter of the right-wing political wheeler-dealer Elard von Oldenburg-
Januschau. In Hanshagen he was taken in by two old ladies who revealed
their hidden hens. He hadn’t seen a hen for six months. They put him to bed
and fed him on wild mushrooms. Later he found boletus mushrooms in the
woods and ate them raw with sugar.29
He headed for Ponarien, near Allenstein, where some of his relatives
had lived. Near their estate he ran into the retainer Preuss, who gave him
the usual news of rape, murder and suicide. Poles had moved into the big
house, but he found his aunt, Frau von Stein, living in the gardener’s
cottage. She had initially left the house to make way for the Russian
commandant, who had since pursued the war to the west. Finding his
mother’s sister was a source of great joy: ‘To see a person again now who
belongs to me, after all that has happened, is like a foretaste of our reunion
in heaven.’30 He learned of his cousins: two of Frau von Stein’s daughters
had been interned with their father; the sons had been at the front and she
had no news of them. The women, his aunt included, had developed a
modus vivendi with the Poles. They worked as agricultural labourers in the
fields and received in payment half a litre of skimmed milk every day. The
women brought home two basketfuls of potatoes. These were sorted by
variety in order to make the diet less monotonous. The furniture from the
big house was being gradually broken up to feed the fires.31
It seemed better to stay put for the time being. Lehndorff heard of the
perils of deportation to Germany, of the brutality of the Polish guards and of
the marauding bands that robbed the refugees in the trains. In November
1945 CARE parcels began to arrive from America, providing some extra
food for the starving Germans.bk Together with what he could glean from
grateful patients, the small German community in Ponarien could survive.
Danzig had been one of the first German cities to fall. On 3 May the
German men inhabiting prisons and camps were brought out and marched
down ‘Victory Alley’. All men aged between sixteen or seventeen and fifty-
five were required to go to Russia and work. The women came out to watch
the departure of their menfolk, and strewed the streets with spring flowers.
Of those men (and a few women) who were taken from Gleiwitz in Silesia
to Rudlo near Stalino, many were to die before they reached their
destination. Their bodies were stripped naked and buried by the side of the
road. Most of the men of Gleiwitz were put to work in the mines. The lucky
ones returned to a town depopulated of Germans in October. Many failed to
return at all. Of the Gleiwitzer a third of the 300 men died.32
The large camp of Laband in Silesia held between 30,000 and 50,000
men, most of whom were deported to Russia to work in the Siberian mines.
Few had returned by the end of 1946. The lucky ones escaped the mines
and worked on large kolkhoz farms instead.33 In Gleiwitz, Hans-Günther
Nieusela’s father was marched off to Kazakhstan, and did not return until
1948.34 German and Polish women were impressed into clearing the streets
of rubble. Reusable bricks were set aside, establishing the pattern for other
German cities. Even the Jews from Stutthof camp were made busy with
restoring Danzig’s beautiful façades. More than 60 per cent of the city had
been destroyed.
At the end of May a Special Commission had been convened to
‘Polonise’ the place names in the district. Langfuhr - ‘long drive’ - was
somehow rendered as Wrzeszcz, or ‘you scream’. The place names were
altered some two months before the Allied leaders met at Potsdam. It was
clear that the conference would not alter the de facto situation.
For the most part the famous Junkers lived in large if modest manor
houses and farmed their own estates. There were relatively few grand
houses or absentee landlords. The grandest of all were the Grafen Hochberg
or Princes Pless, who lived at Fürstenstein in Upper Silesia and owned a
large chunk of the coal mines. Their estates had been split between
Germany and Poland after the First World War, and a prolonged legal
dispute had robbed the last prince - Hansel Pless - of most of his income in
the 1920s and 1930s. During the war the castle was inhabited by Magda
Goebbels’s lover, Gauleiter Karl Hanke, who carried off anything of value
he could find once the Russians appeared on the horizon.
The Russians arrived on 5 May. Later, the last chatelain, Paul Fichte,
went back to the castle to survey the scene:
I crept over to Fürstenstein to see what went on . . . Everything
broken up and robbed, our flats were totally empty, all windows
broken. All inhabitants were expelled by the Russians so that
Fürstenstein could be pillaged, it didn’t look as if humans had been
there, indescribable. The beautiful fountains on the terraces are broken,
the Donatello Fountain was pulled down. The library was loaded to go
to Moscow. The most valuable books, even the Sachsenspiegel
[thirteenth-century book of law], had been walled in but they were
found and burned. The old castle also burned down.
Now the family mausoleum was also plundered, the sarcophagi
broken into, the contents thrown around. We had quickly buried
Princess Daisy outside the vault, but she was dug up and robbed.
Scholz had planted such pretty flowers on her grave that it attracted
attention. We reburied the Fürstin [princess] straight away . . . But the
mausoleum had been broken up and couldn’t be closed again. Now a
migration of people to the mausoleum began. Everyone wanted to see
what it was like inside, most of them became scared and ran off, for
the contents of coffins lay on the floor. The skeleton of a Fürstin née
Kleist we couldn’t find any more, only the head lay there. Andersek
from the stud shot himself and his family. The stable boys buried their
bodies behind Kummer’s goat shed.35
The Poles made off with the late princess’s jewellery.
 Käthe von Normann heard a rumour that Berlin and Stettin had fallen
on 5 May and that both Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide. The
next day she had news that Germany had laid down its arms. The
Frenchmen billeted in the same house celebrated with barley coffee and
began to sing. Rumours were running wild. On the following day she heard
that Pomerania would remain German as far east as Stolp, and that her
family had a chance of hanging on to the Barkow estate. Uncertainty meant
that a lot of people who had fled at the appearance of the Russians made
their way home again. More than a million people did this, only to be
driven out, once and for all.36 The stories were confirmed by a Polish
policeman on the 8th. That night the Normanns sang the Leuthen Chorale:
‘Nun danket alle Gott!’ Since Frederick the Great’s time it had been
Prussia’s unofficial national anthem.
As Lehndorff had discovered, the French were generally sympathetic to
the defeated Germans, despite the indignities they had suffered during the
war: ‘their opinion of the Russians and the Poles is just as bad as ours’. One
of them, a tall, blond young man, gave Frau von Normann a present of
some much needed clothing material. He wanted a crust of bread in return,
but she had none to give, just a little butter and a liver sausage. He told her
that the French had been hiding a few German noblemen in their ranks. She
thought he might also have been German.37
The big city of Breslau had yielded only on the 6th. Two days later the
war officially ended. It made little difference for the survivors. On the 9th a
party of thirteen Poles arrived to claim the city for their country. They
moved into a house on the Blücherstrasse and set up a Polish eagle over the
door. On the 10th more Polish pioneers joined them, together with a group
of men from the Polish Office of the Public Security.38
On 13 May a delegation of ‘Lublin Poles’ headed by Bolesław Drobner
travelled to Sagan in Silesia to report to their Soviet masters. Edward Ochab
had already been appointed plenipotentiary for the euphemistically named
‘Recovered Territories’. Such men were as much ‘Muscovites’ as the
German communists who landed outside Berlin as the Red Army took the
city. They assumed power with nil popular support; their mandate based on
nothing more than Soviet patronage. Their claims to much of the Recovered
Territories derived merely from Soviet policy.39
The Russians and Poles divided the spoils, with the best bits naturally
going to the former, which resulted in their occasionally coming to blows
over the booty.40 Meanwhile the Red Army was still scavenging, with no
regard for leaving any useful equipment behind for the puppet state they
were setting up in Poland. In some instances the Poles and the Germans
made common cause in order to preserve something that would otherwise
have gone east.41 The Poles also fell out with the Czechs over the Teschen
pocket of Silesia.
In Neustadt in Upper Silesia a thousand head of cattle went east, leaving
around a score to feed the locals. The harvest for 1945 was confiscated.42
Treks had been straggling through the towns and villages of the region for
months now. At first they were made up of Germans from the General
Gouvernement who had fled at the Russian advance. Now they were joined
by the Silesians themselves. Some Upper Silesians fled to the Sudetenland,
like the doctor Theofil Peters from Pitschen who went to Leitmeritz before
the Czechs threw him out. It might have been worse for him: he was opting
for the fire in preference to the frying pan.43
Later in May Käthe von Normann heard that the British and the
Americans were already releasing POWs. This was not true, but it gave her
leave to hope that her own husband might return. The absence of men was a
torture to the women in more senses than one. They were nightly victims to
Russian bands, which, even if they did not succeeded in capturing their
quarry in the form of female flesh, food or valuables, nonetheless shattered
all hope of sleep. After the troops had been there a few days, the attacks
died down, but each new billeting renewed the problem. When Frau von
Normann decided to go to the local town of Plathe to receive treatment for
blood poisoning, she learned that the German doctors had been replaced by
Russian and Polish medics who were not allowed to treat Germans. She
found a German doctor in a pitiful state in her own flat - she had a three-
year-old daughter, and was pregnant with another, Russian baby.
In the vicinity of Stolp in eastern Pomerania the Krockows and the
Puttkamers were less well informed than the Normanns. The first indication
they had that the war was over came a fortnight later at Whitsun. The
Russians paraded through the villages shooting into the air and shouting,
‘Woina kaputt! Woina kaputt!’ Whether it was true or not, no one could tell.
They had no newspapers and no wireless sets. Even if they had managed to
hide a wireless, there was no electricity to make it work.
The Pomeranian gentry heard a good deal about ‘Russki kultura’ which
decreed cleanliness and order in the villages and towns behind the Oder-
Neisse Line. Pigs had to be scrubbed until they gleamed. Pomeranians of all
classes were put to work cleaning the pigsties or milking the cows (until
they, like so much else, went east), and sometimes they earned a crust of
bread for their pains. A squire’s wife like Käthe von Normann had to learn
how to milk a cow, although she had to admit that she was less proficient at
it than the meanest peasant girl.44 Many of the cows were sick, suffering
from foot and mouth disease, and looked bad. When the cattle were driven
off to Russia Frau von Normann was relieved of the chore of looking after
them and producing milk and butter. In Ermland, where Lehndorff was
holed up, there were a few well-concealed hens, and here and there a ‘milk-
ewe’ or a pig hidden in a cellar, but the situation there was much the same.45
Yet the formal relationship between squire’s wife and peasant woman
continued for the time being, despite the fact that both were very much in
the same boat - preyed upon by Russians and Poles, and, when not sexually
molested, obliged to work as their slaves. Käthe von Normann thought it
inappropriate that one former worker should call her ‘gnädige Frau’ rather
than Frau von Normann. She thought the use of ‘my lady’ silly when they
were both milking cows, feeding pigs or mucking out sties together. But the
old forms of address died hard. Even when Frau von Normann was finally
banished from the family fief, pushing her few belongings on a cart towards
a transit camp, she called out to the coachman of her nearest grandee
neighbours to ‘tell both the baron’s daughters that we have all been told to
leave Barkow!’46
The male sex was restricted to old men and boys. Even in May, a few
ancient landowners were still living in their houses, often protected from
the Russians by their former workers. The wisest policy was to stay away
from the manor or its ruins, and as much as possible to disguise yourself as
a peasant. All agricultural instruments and machines had been carried off.
The fields were lying fallow for want of implements to farm them. Between
Dangeröse and Stolp the railway lines had been taken away and there was
no access to the provincial capital. Lehndorff had a similarly frustrating
journey when he attempted to get to the town of Allenstein. The Russians
had already carried off one set of lines.47
The suicides continued. In the village of Horst, Käthe von Normann
heard that the sixteen-year-old Christel M. had been repeatedly raped by the
Russians. The next day she drowned herself in the Stau Lake. In Ermland a
woman responded to her daughter’s abduction by the Russians by revealing
the presence of all the concealed girls in the village.48 Frau von Normann
was even more distressed when she heard her eight-year-old son Henning
say that Christel had done the right thing. Leni S. poisoned herself and her
‘cute’ children, but a Russian doctor brought her back to life - but not her
offspring. Frau von Normann wondered whether he had really done her a
service.49
Death could come at any time. An old couple in the Krockows’ village,
were chased into an icy pond and forced to stay there until they drowned; a
man was tied to a plough and driven until he fell, then finished off with a
submachine gun. The nobles were often the first to go: Graf Lehndorff’s
mother and brother were killed by the Russians as soon as they learned who
they were. The lord of Grumbkow, Herr von Livonius, had his arms and
legs cut off and was tossed into the pigsty to be eaten by its denizens. Frau
von Normann’s neighbour, Baron von Senfft, was found beaten to death in a
swamp in June. He was still dressed in his coat and shoes. His orphaned
daughters had been to see her just the day before. They were living in the
coachman’s house and working in the garden. Frau von Thadden-Trieglaff,
of the family of Bismarck’s pietist friends, was still living unharmed,
however, in the village of Vahnerow. She and her daughter inhabited one
wing of the manor while the Russians inhabited the rest with their cows.
Another Fräulein von Thadden together with a young Seckendorff girl
brought Käthe von Normann news of the fate of other local Junkers. The
von der Marwitzes from Rütznow, famous from the time of Frederick the
Great, had seen their manor burned to the ground, and the father shot in
Greifenberg. Frau von der Marwitz had been put to work with the cows, and
was in a pitiful state, weighing under thirty-five kilos. The Blanckenburgs
had a similar tale to tell. Property no longer had any real meaning.
Lehndorff was not upset to find shirts embellished with his relatives’
monograms on the bellies of his patients. When he treated the Polish
commandant he sent him home on a horse with a valuable package that
included money, white bread, eggs, stockings and a shirt bearing his uncle’s
initials.50
The women, children and the few remaining men assembled at the
sound of a bell at 6 a.m., seven days a week. For their labours they were
given a little skimmed milk and 250 grams of corn a head (150 grams for
non-workers and children) to make bread. This was far less than the
Berliners, but then there were no Westerners around to monitor what was
going on, and no propaganda war to win. There was no meat, butter, curds
or vegetables to be had, but this was the country, and diets could be
supplemented by the odd wild boar or stag, fish from the many lakes and
wild mushrooms. Lehndorff even found some morels.51
Working for the Poles
The Polish Miliz also materialised - a cross between a militia and a
police force. It was variously reported to be made up of young boys of
nineteen or twenty who had been in the German ‘work service’, KZler or
partisans. 52 Their desire for revenge made them even more ferocious than
the Russians.53 They took over the job of rounding up Germans from the
Russians. Women and children were herded towards Germany, while any
remaining men were put to work.54 The shops in Käthe’s local town of
Glowitz were now also in Polish hands, and accepted złotys, not marks. The
inhabitants of the villages began to form the impression that they were
living in an inverted version of the Nazi General Gouvernement. Even in
October, inhabitants of Eastern Pomerania had no idea whether their ‘zone’
was German or Polish.
Faith was deep-rooted in the old Prussian East, particularly among the
Pomeranian and East Prussian gentry, where there was a tradition of Pietism
exemplified in the journals of Graf Lehndorff. Käthe von Normann’s diary
reveals a profoundly religious woman who gathers her children around her
in daily prayer and sings hymns with them. Every night their missing father
is remembered in their orisons. Apart from marauding Russians, hunger and
the strains imposed by forced labour, the Normanns seemed to suffer most
from lack of shoes. What they had formerly possessed had been taken by
the Russians, and the children’s feet were growing. Two pairs of stockings
replaced shoes, but they were torn and filthy and no protection against the
pelting rain of a Pomeranian spring.
Many of the Poles who settled on German land were refugees
themselves, driven from their homes east of the Bug, which was now to
become Soviet territory. In May offices were recreated in Breslau to find
housing for the expellees. On 6 July, eleven days before the conference
opened in Potsdam, the first 800 Germans were expelled from the city.55 For
the time being the Germans cleared rubble, buried bodies and cleared
mines. The Soviet authorities had little consideration for the Poles, even
those who had been slave labourers under the Nazis. Some were packed off
to the mines at Waldenburg.56
The Potsdam Conference that summer proved an acute disappointment
for the Germans marooned east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. The Western
Allies turned a blind eye to the Poles as they reshaped their domain. At first
the Germans welcomed the news that the Poles were to be their masters -
‘that, instead of the “Godless” Russians, from now on the Catholic Poles
had taken over the regime’.57 The level of ‘Polonisation’ came as a shock to
every German. In the cities German ‘antifa’ groups emerged to help in the
work of denazification only to discover that the Poles wanted them out
too.58 New names had to be found. Henceforth Breslau was ‘Wrocław’ - like
‘Gdansk’ a name so obscure it was new even to the most fanatical Polish
nationalists. On 15 May the bishop of Katowice, Stanisław Abramski,
visited the priests of the Breslau Cathedral Chapter to tell them that Poland
would brook no racial minorities.bl ‘Breslau and Stettin are to become
thoroughly Polish; Lvov with its university is coming to Breslau; Wilna
with its university is moving to Stettin.’59
Each of Breslau’s fine, red-brick medieval churches was to be invested
with the traditions of a church in Lvov. In all four and a half million ethnic
Poles were to be resettled in this way. On 12 August 1945 the Polish
primate Cardinal Hlond arrived to break the news to the German Catholic
clergy that they were not welcome either. When Father Helmut Richter
received a pastoral letter on 11 October 1945, half of it was in Polish, a
language he couldn’t read. Latin would have been a more obvious choice.
Father Joachim Konrad delivered the last German sermon in the
Elisabethkirche on 30 June 1946, closing the German chapter in the history
of Breslau. The Catholic hierarchy (both in Poland and in the Vatican)
behaved in a particularly craven way - the Church had forgotten about
universality.60
In Danzig, too, the German clergy were told to leave as early as July
1945. Masses were celebrated in Latin, so inside the churches there was no
apparent persecution for the time being. The bishop was, however, informed
that all Germans had to leave Danzig as the Polish Miliz went from street to
street clearing the last Germans out of their houses. The bishop objected
that this meant Reich Germans, not Danziger. He was put in his place: it
meant the Danziger as well.61
 The monks in the Benedictine monastery of Grüssau fared no better.
The massive baroque building had been a favourite stopover for Frederick
the Great during the Seven Years War. In 1810 the monks had been cleared
out, but a religious community from Prague had settled in the buildings
after the Czech government had dissolved the abbeys in their new state in
1919. The Nazis had thrown them out in their turn and they had taken
refuge in a nearby nunnery. Now it was the Poles’ turn to expel them.
Because they were ‘Germans’, only one monk was allowed to remain - he
was from the South Tyrol.62
At the end of 1945 there were still 300,000 Germans in Breslau. They
outnumbered the incoming Poles by five to one. Nine months later the
position was reversed. By March 1947 the Germans comprised less than 10
per cent of the population. Because all Silesian roads led to Breslau, there
was little hope of avoiding the city of rubble, and the arrival of more forlorn
Germans was seen as a further pretext for plunder.63 While the politicians
bargained their city away in Potsdam, Germans were dying at a rate of 300
to 400 a day. Some of these were suicides, but we learn that the number
would have been significantly higher had the Germans had access to
cooking gas. A few months after the city fell infant mortality had reached
90 per cent. The Russians and the Poles had made it clear they were not in a
position to feed the Germans, but a little was dished out all the same -
German rations amounted to half to a third of that given to the others. The
złoty’s exchange rate with the Reichsmark began at parity, then was pegged
at two marks. Exchange remained at best capricious. By the summer the
Poles were operating a black market in the city, and Germans could trade
their last articles of clothing for food. A good dress, for example, could
yield between one and a half and two kilos of butter.64
The Germans had to make way for the Poles as they arrived. For those
children who possessed good health there were exciting times to be had
among the ruins. Twelve-year-old Friedhelm Mondwurf, for example,
would sing songs for the Russian soldiers and then beg for food. His parents
were appalled when he came home with a sack full of klebba - black rye
bread - but they could see the advantages. The boy also went out to the old
allotment, which had been mined, and pulled the fruit from the family trees,
although the area was littered with dead soldiers.65 Again the old contempt
for the Poles materialised. The priest in Alterode near Breslau expressed the
view that ‘The Pole is with few exceptions completely subject to the demon
drink.’66 When Ukrainian and Galician Poles came to Gleiwitz and kicked
the Germans out of their comfortable homes, Hans-Günther Nieusela
commented that they preferred houses with bathrooms: ‘in these places they
like to keep their goats and poultry’.67
As the Poles came in, Germans were evicted and resettled in the cellars
of ruined houses in what were ghettos in all but name. Typhus and
diphtheria raged, killing many children. Medicine to deal with the epidemic
was made prohibitively expensive to the Germans. Father Helmut Richter
reported that a Polish doctor (who was actually no more than a nurse) was
injecting typhus cases with carbolic. When asked why, she said it was
because they were going to die anyhow.68
Rural Silesia
Every Silesian town went through the same process with more or less
the same degree of savagery. In the Catholic areas of Upper Silesia the
churches and their ministers were an obvious target. In Preussisch-Kramen
Poles broke into the church and prised open the tabernacle. The dove above
the altar was shot down and the saints decapitated. In June 1948 they
deported the priest, but the villagers evidently looked Polish enough, and
were allowed to remain for now.69 In Ritterswalde near Neisse the priest
was shot, but not killed, at the altar of his church. Sixteen other Silesian
priests were killed.70
Klosterbruck in Kreis Oppeln is a particularly well-documented case.
The Russians arrived on 21 January 1945. The priests and local nuns had
taken refuge in the convent chapel together with a young woman and her
child. The usual rape and pillage went on in the streets outside. Any woman
who refused to lie down was shot. The priest whose account we have was
contemptuous of the Russian conquerors. ‘Go back to Russia,’ he wrote,
‘and sit outside your wattle and daub cottage, chew sunflower seeds and
you will become amiable again.’71 Some were not so bad: a Muslim officer,
‘a good chap’, brought them a bucket full of soup and some sugar after they
had slaughtered the hogs; but then a crazed older officer took a nun behind
the altar and tried to rape her. He was interrupted by a younger officer who
seized the man and had some soldiers throw him out like a bag of flour. A
guard was posted at the door to the chapel. On Ash Wednesday that year the
girls paid particular attention to the practice of smearing themselves with
ash. They wanted to make themselves look old and ugly.
 This did not help the nuns, who had now become the object of Russian
attentions again. At the beginning of Lent four of them were taken off and
raped. The Poles arrived on 14 March and banned the use of German.
‘Satan is back!’ wrote the priest. ‘The new Satan seems almost more
dangerous. He claims to be Catholic and keeps talking about
Czestochowa.’72 Three days later all the nuns who had been spared were
raped, including one of eighty. For some of them the new experience was
coupled with a further unpleasantness: venereal disease. The Russians now
proudly claimed there were no more virgins in Klosterbruck. The plight of
the nuns was particularly galling in that the new Polish doctors refused to
treat Germans. Some of their torments came to an end when they were
expelled on 25 May.73
Ukrainian Poles arrived in the wake of the Miliz. They had been driven
out by the Russians. The priest thought them ‘good people’. Upper Silesia
was considered a special case because the population was mixed German
and Polish and almost entirely Catholic. For Poles it was an article of faith
that they were all Poles, and in many cases only pretending to be German. It
was an evident reversal of the Nazi policy, which had stressed the
‘Germanity’ of Upper Silesia at the expense of the Poles. Wasserpölnisch -
the local patois - had been banned since the 1930s. In consequence the
children no longer understood it.74 It was useful to know Polish after the
population was banned from speaking German. As Ursula Pechtel reported,
‘A single German word would have been sufficient to have us thrown into a
Polish extermination camp.’75
In Schönkirch near Oppeln, in the more German part of Upper Silesia,
the Russians spent all day calling for ‘wodka’, ‘cebula’ (onions), ‘ogorki’
(gherkins) and ‘panienka’ (girls). They had no apparent preference, as long
as whichever one it was came ‘dawaj, dawaj’ (quickly). The locals
cunningly set to work distilling vodka. With one to two bottles they could
buy back a stolen cow; with two to three, a horse. Of course they were
promptly stolen again.76 In Hindenburg, the Poles arrived bringing along the
old name, ‘Zaborze’, for the town, and proceeded to strip it of anything the
Russians had left. Their zeal exceeded even that of their patrons. Many of
the Germans pretended to be Poles in order to hang on to their property. In
some towns like Schönwald, the expulsions took place in three waves: at
the end of October 1945, in June 1946 and in May 1947.77
 Like Hans Lehndorf, Theofil Peters in Pitschen found that being a
doctor could save your life, or at least postpone death a while. The Russians
were grateful for the services he performed and brought him bottles of
schnapps. On 2 October 1945, however, he was expelled with the rest. A
member of the Miliz arrived at his door to tell him, ‘You will be expelled on
the basis of the Potsdam Accords.’ His medical instruments were
‘confiscated, property of the Polish state’. He was loaded on to a goods
wagon where his last few possessions were taken from him. Peters pleaded
for his stethoscope, but they wouldn’t listen. ‘You don’t need a stethoscope
for Hitler any more, you German pig!’ said the militia man, and punched
him in the face.78
He spent twelve days on the train, shunting around Silesia. Twelve
people died in his carriage. The bodies were unloaded at the next halt.
Finally the odyssey finished some twelve kilometres from Görlitz, the
crossing point for Germany. The people were too weak to walk, however,
and were foully treated by militia men wearing second-hand SS uniforms.
Two thousand Germans had to line up for a last body search. Peters was
given the job of loading the dead on to a dog cart and taking them to the
Neisse. ‘In communist Poland,’ they told him, ‘nobody dies of hunger.’79
Officially classed as ‘autochthones’, Upper Silesians were given the
chance to ‘opt’ for Poland. There were advantages to this: Irene Zelder’s
aunts in Ratibor told her ‘they had “opted” for Poland in order to live,
because it was the only way to obtain ration cards’.80 There were
disadvantages too: if you opted for Poland you could not ‘go to the Reich’.
Many Germans were stuck in Poland and therefore unable to join their
families. This was the case with Hans-Günther Nieusela’s two sisters, who
were not able to leave until 1955.81 One Upper Silesian who was not given
this choice was Carl Ulitzka, the ‘King of Upper Silesia’, who had spent
much of the war in Dachau. He was expelled by the Poles, because in 1919
he had led the resistance to Polish annexation in the wake of Versailles. The
Miliz took brutal revenge on anyone suspected of having stymied their
attempts to annex Upper Silesia in 1919.82
Opting for Poland did not necessarily protect you from Russians. As in
rump-Germany, the most dangerous run for a woman was the journey to the
pump to fetch water. The Russians lay in wait, hiding in the shadows ready
to pounce. Irene Zelder had a disagreeable experience with one soon after
her return to Ratibor, but managed to get home and lock the door after
abandoning her pail in the street. The Russian hammered on the door with
his rifle butt shouting, ‘Wodka! Panienka!’, but he eventually gave up when
no one complied.83 The acute time for rapes was the two months from mid-
March to mid-May 1945. Girls were generally safer in the villages than in
the towns, where typhus also raged and carried off significant numbers of
Germans.84
Neisse - ‘the Silesian Rome’ - was 80 per cent destroyed in the shelling.
When the Russians arrived they robbed the city’s many churches and,
according to a priest, raped nuns as many as fifty times. The expulsions
began in the middle of June, but some of the citizens were locked up in a
grim fortress constructed in the time of Frederick the Great.85 Neisse’s fort
was one of the six concentration camps operated by the Poles in Silesia.
The others were in Breslau (Kletschkau Prison), Glatz, Lamsdorf, Trebnitz
and Wünschelburg. Lamsdorf (now called Łambinowice) between Oppeln
and Neisse was the most notorious of the camps. Heinz Esser, who acted as
an unofficial camp doctor, called it an ‘extermination camp’. There were
6,488 violent deaths, 828 of them children. Many of those who were not
beaten died from disease, starvation or cold, or from a combination of the
three. The priest who left the account related that the ‘commandant’ was a
youth of eighteen. His years were evidently the only tender thing about
him.86 Esser does not provide any indication of the man’s age, but gives his
name as Cesaro Gimborski,bm and added that he was assisted by about fifty
members of the Miliz. The most brutal of these was the sixteen-year-old
executioner’s assistant Jusek who murdered ‘to order’, until he too was
brutally killed by his peers.87
The ferocity of the guards might be explained by their schooling - some,
at least, had recently been released from German camps. Their methods
were certainly reminiscent of Dachau or Buchenwald.88 There were
‘morning exercises’ during which many of the older, half-starved inmates
predictably collapsed. Men were beaten to death for trifles: a teacher for
wearing spectacles, a mayor because he was tall and therefore might have
qualified for the SS. Men and women were stripped naked and forced to
perform sadistic acts on one another or eat excrement; girls had to press
burning banknotes between their legs. There were many small children in
the camp. Some of these were later taken away and given to Polish foster
parents.89
 There was virtually no food. Esser says they were given three or four
potatoes a day, a total of 200 to 250 calories. He recalled one day, 8 June
1946, when the figure soared to 530 calories, because there were so few
inmates in the camp.90 Ursula Pechtel from Hindenburg in Upper Silesia
drew a short straw and was packed off to Auschwitz. She worked in the
factory of the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, dismantling the machines
for the Russians. They were savagely beaten by the guards and at night the
women were sent up as entertainment for the officers. Max Marek had been
in Neu-Schönau camp near Zittau before he too was sent to Jawiszowice
work camp near Auschwitz. This was named Jawischowitz by the Nazis: it
was one of the Auschwitz satellites built in 1942, in this case to serve the
mines at Brzeszcze.91
In Beuthen there were rare reports of kindnesses on the part of the
conquerors. The Russians would give the children food, and even rides in
their lorries. There was the usual black-comic spectacle of Russians
learning to ride bicycles and falling off, then taking it out on the inanimate
machine. One Russian in Beuthen expressed his bewilderment at the
Germans going to war: ‘Why you war? In Germany all there. In your
country you can rob from a house more than a whole village in ours.’92
In Eastern Pomerania Libussa von Krockow was at first unaware of the
incursion of the Poles. She became conscious of them only when she
applied to the Russian commandant to move into the gardener’s cottage on
the family estate after the Schloss had been burned to the ground. The
commandant had told her to apply to the Polish ‘mayor’. The only Poles she
had noticed up to then were prisoners of war or forced labourers working on
the farms. Now the farms were being turned over to them, so that servant
had become master, and master servant. Ermland was on the old ‘West’
Prussian border and there had always been more Poles. The Germans were
Catholics who spoke some Polish. They hoped to be able to cling to their
homes by keeping their heads down.
Käthe von Normann found the Poles more sympathetic. Their military
units had actually fought alongside the Russians near the town of Plathe,
and Polish officers had kept her informed of what was going on in the
Russian camp. The Poles rounded up the last of the men - anyone who had
enjoyed a smidgen of authority in the old days, and any nobles who had
been missed by the Russians. In the case of Jesko von Puttkamer, he was
taken to Stolp and thrown into the former Gestapo prison, with ten or
twenty to a cell, just two beds and virtually no food. His stepdaughter had
to walk thirty kilometres to bring him an occasional crust of bread until he
was transferred to Danzig, out of her reach.
Food, never plentiful, dwindled to nothing. People survived by
scrumping and theft. Potatoes, introduced to Pomerania by Frederick the
Great, became the delicacy. Frau von Normann had to provide milk, butter
and eggs for the mayor and garrison; anything remaining was for the
Germans. Generally, however, there was next to nothing left over. Even so,
with her little butter, milk, eggs and corn, she was well off compared to
urban Germans. In the autumn the pitiful amounts of milk given out to
nursing mothers were stopped. Germans who broke the law by trying to sell
goods were put in the stocks. Poles were incited to spit on them, but
generally merely voided their rheum on the ground.
Treks
Silesia was to be made free of Germans and that meant gathering up
what you could carry and heading west. On 5 October 1945 intelligence
reached General Clay of the plight of the German refugees from east of the
Oder-Neisse and the Sudetenland. The figure of 9,000,000 he felt was
conservative, it was probably more like ten. Of these he assumed that 65-70
per cent had already been deported. Of these, three-fifths had settled in
Saxony, a sixth in Brandenburg and a sixth in Mecklenburg. ‘Undoubtedly a
large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and
disease.’ Many were ‘deported by force . . . others fled from fear’. They all
converged on Berlin, where there were around forty-five camps. The
numbers knocking on the doors of the old capital amounted to between five
and six hundred thousand a month. Over 40 per cent of these were children,
‘many of them without parents’.93
From 20 February 1946 the British demanded (and the Poles agreed)
that the deportees be placed at assembly points and that trains and ships be
laid on to collect them at fixed times. The size and weight of the luggage
was to be predetermined. They were to be permitted to bring food for the
journey and money. The Poles had to provide disinfectant. Seriously ill
Germans or pregnant women could not be moved. In the case of the latter
they had to remain if within six weeks of their confinement. If one member
of the family fell ill, all of them had to remain behind until he or she got
better. It was very high minded, and quite ineffectual. At the end of
December 1946, the junior minister responsible for German and Austrian
affairs, John Hynd, had to admit to the House of Commons that twenty
trains had recently arrived in Berlin without heating. On one of them twenty
corpses were found and 160 people suffering from frostbite.94
It was time to leave, but the decision to make the trek west was not an
easy one. You risked losing all your possessions, further physical abuse and
death. The worst danger was for small children, who often died en route. As
early as the third week of March 1945, Käthe von Normann had seen one
trek come to grief when they were shot at by the Russians and forced to
return to the village. In May even those Germans who had made
considerable progress towards to the west were returned to the villages they
came from. Frau von Normann received a new family at Whitsun, who stole
her little remaining soap. She wondered if she too could return to her manor
house. She was eventually sent back to Barkow, but only after she had been
denounced to the militia by one of her fellow Germans. She never
discovered her crime. In Barkow she had the advantage of being among her
own people, and the two Polish estate workers who now had the job of
running the place looked after her and the children.
The Puttkamer-Krockows determined to go to the provincial capital,
Stolp, to find out whether there was a legal means of escape. They walked
the ten kilometres in a morning. The sign announcing the town had been
crossed out, as it had already been awarded a Polish name: Słupsk. At first
sight, not much had changed on the Bismarckplatz, except that the Iron
Chancellor had been knocked off his pedestal and beheaded. Inside the old
city, however, it was a scene of desolation: rubble lay all around and the
Gothic cathedral had been gutted. There had been no bombing. The
Russians had wrecked Stolp. They found a man in authority. To go to the
‘Reich’ they needed permission from their Polish mayor and an attestation
that there were no known charges against them. They could pack one
suitcase only and take provisions for three days. It was a while before
permission was granted. Another winter was to be spent in the new Poland.
The nights were long, there was no light, but then there were no books to
read. They amused themselves by remembering epics, but they stayed clear
of Prussian patriotic poetry - celebrating victories such as the Battle of
Sedan was meaningless now.
News came in curious echoes, which might have had a bearing on the
truth had anyone known how to interpret it. In Barkow on 27 May 1945
they heard stories that the Allies had fallen out, and that American troops
had landed in Stettin and Danzig. The inevitable fall-out between the Allies
was still as eagerly desired in Pomerania as it had been by Goebbels in
Berlin in the last days of the war. On 12 March 1946 Lehndorff heard that
the Russians were in a warlike mood. Stalin had made a critical speech
against Britain.95 A month later new rumours circulated through the Polish
police which gave a more accurate picture of their fate. The towns of
Greifenberg and Plathe were to be evacuated, and Cammin had already
been cleared of Germans. The Greifenberger were indeed expelled with just
15 kilos of kit, and left for days to forage in the Cammin woods before they
were rounded up again.
The Silesian expulsions were now in full swing. As the bishop of
Katowice had put it, ‘The sooner they leave of their own free will, the better
it will be for them.’96 Except that free will played little part in the process.
Officially Silesia was to be ‘German-free’ by June 1946. In reality the Poles
wanted to hang on to industrious artisans for a little longer yet.97 Streams of
civilians were forced from their homes at gunpoint from the ancient
German towns of Görlitz, Glogau, Sagan and Liegnitz late that spring.
Every form of locomotion was brought into service: prams were a popular
way of transporting a few bare necessities. One witness saw a cart being
drawn by six children, with a pregnant woman pushing from behind. The
destination was the Lusatian Neisse, which formed the new de facto border.
The town of Forst served as an assembly point for crossings. Here they
were held back until the Poles could rob them of the little they still
possessed.98 The authorities in Görlitz on the German side were desperate to
keep them out of the town, as they had no food for their own people,
something which exacerbated the misery of the expellees. Meanwhile
Polish border guards combed the columns for young girls, who were to be
retained, ostensibly to help bring in the harvest. While the Germans waited
at the river, they left messages on trees, indicating to friends and family
which way they were heading, and who they had lost.99
Grünberg in Lower Silesia suffered because of the amount of alcohol in
the town. Not only had it been the centre of Silesia’s small vineyard area,
but the Nazis had made it their repository for wine - still and sparkling - and
cognac, which they had shipped in from Hamburg, Bremen, the Rhine and
the Mosel. The brutality inspired by the contents of the cellars led whole
families to commit suicide. One priest estimated that a quarter of the
population died in this way. The Poles came on 12 May 1945. On 24 June
the remaining population was informed that they had six hours to pack their
bags.100 In June and July that year a total of 405,401 Germans were
expelled. The last official expulsions occurred in 1950 when 1,329 Germans
were thrown out of Swinemünde.101
While the stench of death and brutality pervaded the German regions
east of the Oder, one old German was allowed to live unmolested in his
home. The new Soviet-Polish masters in Silesia showed a remarkable
reluctance to expel the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Gerhart
Hauptmann, who had lived in a palatial villa on the Wiesenstein in the small
village of Agnetendorf in the Riesengebirge since 1902. The
Riesengebirgebn had been ‘Germany’s air-raid shelter’ and the Foreign
Ministry had been evacuated to a ski-resort in the mountains. The old man
was counting his days surrounded by the works of art he had collected over
the years: the bust of Goethe by David d’Angers had pride of place in the
Paradise Hall with its murals by Johannes Avenarius.bo Hauptmann ambled
about wearing a frockcoat with his order Pour le Mérite in his lapel.102 He
had been in Dresden on Valentine’s Day and had been badly knocked about
by the blasts from the bombing. Months later he had still not recovered. 103
Hauptmann’s amanuensis, the writer Gerhart Pohl, went to see the
Soviet commander in nearby Hirschberg. The streets were festooned with
posters repeating Stalin’s comforting words: ‘Hitlers come and go . . .’ Pohl
explained that Hauptmann was living in his old house up in the mountains.
The officer expressed surprise: ‘Hauptmann, the author of The Weavers?’
The first collected edition of Hauptmann’s works in Russian had been
published as early as 1902. As a Russian major told Pohl (with a degree of
hyperbole for all that): ‘Every schoolchild in the Soviet Union knows the
writer of The Weavers.’ Visits by literary-minded Soviet officers began soon
after. Hauptmann dealt with them patiently and flattered them with his
admiration for Tolstoy and Gorky.104
A Polish professor came to see him from the Ministry of Art and
Culture in Warsaw. He was Galician, and spoke German fluently with an
Austrian accent (Galicia had been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
until 1918). He told Hauptmann, ‘Germany’s fate is hard, but not entirely
undeserved. Think about the horrors perpetrated against my people. These
are undeniable facts . . .’ The professor returned to his ministry to arrange
for Hauptmann’s protection. The papers arrived on 7 August, five days after
the break-up of the Potsdam Conference.105
For a while Hauptmann’s presence rallied the inhabitants of the nearby
artists’ colony of Schreiberhau, where the Germans continued to live by
selling off their possessions to the Poles. Ruth Storm sold her foalskin coat
for 500 złotys and managed to procure two kilos of bacon, a pound of butter
and a smoked sausage. She supposed that they were left in peace because
Hauptmann received visits from foreign journalists.106 It was a brief respite.
One day in the street Pohl recognised an old man in a dressing gown as one
of his former teachers. It was Eugen Kühnemann, the biographer of
Schiller. He had been robbed of all he owned and turned out of his house.107
Hauptmann continued to live on the Wiesenstein with his Polish
protection papers. No one was allowed to enter Haus Wiesenstein or its
grounds on pain of punishment. That didn’t always stop them. Some
heavily armed Russian soldiers explained that they meant no harm: ‘Wir
nicht machen bum-bum . . . Nicht machen zapzerap, bloss mal gucken. Du
erlauben bitte?’ (We no make bang bang . . . no do stealing, just have a
look. You permit please?).108 Some bogus journalists forced their way in on
one occasion and ran about the place pocketing small objects. ‘Suddenly
they stood in the Biedermeyer Room . . . before the old man . . . “Come
closer, gentlemen! Your youth cheers my ancient heart. You wanted to visit
my house at an unusual hour. You have had your wishes come true. How
might I help you now?”’ Pohl sought clarification of Hauptmann’s position
in the midst of all this harassment, and like many other Silesians he wanted
to know what the future held for them. He decided to pay a call on Johannes
R. Becher in Berlin. The future East German minister of culture
chainsmoked nervously, while Pohl tried to pin him down. He mentioned
the Potsdam agreement: that Silesia was under Polish administration until
the peace treaty. Did that mean it would return to Germany? ‘Mann,
verlassen Sie sich darauf nicht!’ (I shouldn’t put your faith in that, old
man!).109
Becher consented to visit Hauptmann on the Wiesenstein. He wanted to
win him over for his Cultural Alliance and Germany’s literary renewal. It
was not easy to get there. There were no trains, and he and his Russian
friend Grigori Weiss had to set out in two cars followed by a lorry
containing food and benzene. It took two days to reach Agnetendorf.
Hauptmann told the poet, ‘I am an old man, I have no more ambitions, but
the fate of Germany concerns us all.’110 He nonetheless pledged his support:
‘I will go along with you . . . That is my national duty. Together with my
people I shall dedicate all my last strength to the business of Germany’s
national renewal.’111
He resisted all moves to shift him across the border, however - he
wished to die in Silesia. The chief concern was the dwindling stock of
brandy in Haus Wiesenstein. The old man was used to a life-saving glass
every day, and now there remained just a few drops left in the last bottle.
Becher and Weiss decided to do Hauptmann a last good turn and headed
into Liegnitz to see the Soviet commander. Naturally this Russian knew
Hauptmann by reputation too: ‘In the evening we returned to Agnetendorf
with a whole car full of food and with twenty bottles of cognac [sic] of the
best Caucasian brand.’112 Hauptmann finally expired on 6 June, three days
after uttering his last words ‘Bin - ich - noch - in - meinem - Hause?’ (Am I
still in my house?). The Poles preserved the great man’s residence, turning
it into a children’s home. His body was expelled along with the living and
the dying. Contrary to his wishes he was buried at Hiddensee on the Baltic
coast.113
Transit Camps
The Normanns received their marching orders on 29 June 1946. Barkow
was to be evacuated within two hours. The 200 or so inhabitants were to
pack for two weeks. Accompanied by Polish soldiers and policemen they
went as far as Plathe in the gruelling heat. The first stop was to be Wollin,
where they were to stay in a camp until they could be shipped across the
Oder.
Transit camps like Wollin existed all over the new Poland. Once
notified, Germans had to assemble in their town or village squares with one
suitcase. Some Poles were worried what the outside world might think of
them: Lehndorff was asked to speak to the 400 Germans in his camp to
explain that their treatment had been ordered from above, and that it only
imitated what the Germans had done to the Poles.114 For the people of
Breslau, the camps were at Freiburg Station and Kohlfurt. Once the
railways were ready to handle them, they were put in bolted railway trucks
to be taken west. For those living in the depths of the country, the journey to
the transit camp was an ordeal in itself. Frau von Normann’s cart lost a
wheel in the next village, but she was lucky to find help from the old Polish
village policeman, Dombrowski, whose wife she had protected from the SS.
He loaded her belongings on to his bicycle. The twenty or so Polish soldiers
who accompanied the troop were not too hard on the refugees in general.
Treks of this kind were hindered by disputes between the Russians and
the Poles. When Frau von Normann’s posse arrived in the village of
Trieglaff, the Russian garrison ordered them back to Barkow, blocking off
the road with men brandishing machine guns. Night fell and the refugees
squatted together on the road. Then came the order to return. It had all been
for nothing.
Home to the Reich
The Krockows’ decision to leave was prompted by an unseasonal
descent by a pack of Russian soldiers demanding ‘Uri!’ The watches had all
gone months before. One of their number panicked, however: she knew of a
watch. It was up in the attic. It had belonged to Robert von Puttkamer,
Libussa von Krockow’s grandfather, a right-wing minister of the interior
whose sacking in 1889 had been the only successful action of the so-called
liberal empire of the Emperor Frederick’s English-born wife Vicky. The
watch had been a present from Emperor William I, and it had the imperial
signature engraved on the cover. The loss of this one last contact with a
more glorious past prompted them to make the journey. Libussa would go
first, to see how the land lay.115
On 20 November 1945 the Allied Control Council had worked out the
finer details of the Potsdam Agreement. The ‘orderly and humane’
deportations were to go ahead. The first tranche covered 3.5 million
Germans from the east. Of these one and a half million were to go to the
British Zone and the other two to the SBZ. Another two and a half million
were coming from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary and
150,000 from Austria. These were to be housed in the Soviet Zone
(750,000), the American Zone (2.25 million) and the French Zone
(150,000). A year later the British Zone had grown by 3.1 million souls, the
American by 2.7 and the Russian by 3.6. Berlin’s population had risen by
100,000 and the French Zone had taken in 60,000. The population of
Germany in its reduced state had grown by 16.5 per cent.116
By mid-winter 1946 Stolp possessed a proper office with ‘Emigration’
written in German over the door and an official who spoke the language
without a hint of accent. Forms had to be filled in using the new Polish
names: Rumbske (which was Slavic anyhow) had become Rumsko;
Pommern or Pomerania, Pomorze. The applicant had to swear that he or she
was leaving of his or her own free will, and would not return on pain of
punishment. The certificate cost 150 złotys. That was two months’ wages
for Lehndorff, once the Poles began to pay for his services. A kilo of bacon
cost 400 złotys, and 500 grams of sugar, 90.117
It looked deceptively simple: there was a train leaving that morning at
10.14 arriving in Stettin at two. From there it was only an hour or two to
Berlin. The ticket cost another 150 złotys. Already half Libussa’s money
had been spent. She was taken to a cattle truck, the door was pulled open,
she was pushed in, and then it was slammed shut. In the gloom she began to
pick out the shapes of other refugees - women, children and old people. The
train stopped at the main towns: Schlawe, Köslin, Belgard. With every halt
the door flew open and more refugees were crammed into the crowded
space. It was dark by now. Then it came to a stop. A shot rang out. Then
there were more shots.
The door was ripped open - cries of terror, lanterns flickering, a horde
surging in: wild figures dimly glimpsed amid the chaos and the confusion,
men, but also youths and women, savage women, perhaps the worst of all,
screaming, slavering, striking, snatching. More pistol shots, right over out
heads, booming like cannon in the small space, numbness, knives and axes,
fists, kicks, feet trampling over bodies, and always this bellowing, and the
cries of fear and pain. Suitcases and crates, boxes and bundles, sprouted
wings, flew up in the air and out of the door. The horde followed them out,
and the door banged shut.118
The bandits had done their business in a matter of minutes, perhaps five
at the most; but it was just the first attack. At one point militiamen opened
the door and pretended to be concerned. When the Germans said they had
been attacked, the men laughed. As they no longer possessed suitcases, the
next wave went for the clothes on their bodies, stripping off coats, jackets
and dresses. Libussa lost her precious rucksack in the second attack, her
złotys in the third and her boots in the fourth. The train stopped in Stargard.
So much for the timetable: they reached Scheune, near Stettin, in the middle
of the night.
Stettin, on the left bank of the Oder, had been awarded to Poland, but
many would have seen it as a safe haven. It was anything but. After the
train had been shunted around for a while the doors were opened and
everyone ordered out. There were guards with submachine guns ordering
them to line up in twos. It was snowing hard. A crowd of some 400 was
marched towards an old sugar factory, and beaten with rifle butts to make
them move faster. One girl understood Polish. She told Libussa that anyone
caught with letters would be punished, as a spy. Libussa tore up her letters
and threw them into a hedge. The Poles did not want the world to know
about life in the Recovered Territories. The sugar factory offered no more
than a concrete floor and broken windowpanes, with a couple of full
buckets for bodily needs. Dawn came, they waited, then sunset. The Poles
‘needed darkness for whatever they had in mind’.119 The Germans were
marched out in pairs. They were beaten with rifle butts again until they
reached a hall half lit by candles. Behind a table sat an official. He had a
book in front of him and a pile of valuables. They were told to strip naked
and throw their clothes to two men who were ready with knives to discover
any hidden valuables. Libussa lost her last RM2,000.
They dressed from the pile, lucky to find something of their own. Then
they had to sign the book that their money and valuables had been lawfully
deposited. Libussa managed to steal a bit back while the attention of the
official at the desk wandered over to two women stripping on the far side of
the room. As they left, more militiamen examined them by lantern light,
sizing them up. Fearing the worst, Libussa escaped through a window and
hid in a ruined tank until dawn. Then she saw her fellow passengers coming
out of the sugar factory. She caught up with them as they marched back
towards the railway line. They had been robbed of all but a few rags.
Women were sobbing hysterically. There was a train, and an old-fashioned
German conductor in a uniform with a cap: ‘All right, it’s all right,
everything’s going to be all right . . . Climb aboard please, all aboard, we’re
leaving soon, going home.’120 The refugees admitted they no longer had
money for tickets. The conductor assured them that this time it was free.
The train took them to Angemünde, where they all had to get out. A
Russian gave Libussa a piece of bread. Then a new train was put together to
take them to Berlin.
Libussa von Krockow’s experience was not the worst. The refugees
were often packed so tightly that they could not move to defecate and
emerged from the trucks covered in excrement. Many were dead on
arrival.121 During the winter months the near-naked expellees literally froze
to death. Women went insane as they watched their children die and they
had to be tied up with rope to prevent them from clawing the other
passengers. When they arrived in the remains of Germany they tried to
carry off the corpses of their infants; they didn’t want to believe they were
dead.122 One of the Germans reported that her baby had been dashed against
the wall as it had come between her and her rapist. Children had been
robbed of their swaddling clothes and allowed to freeze to death.123
Libussa had still not had enough. At the end of March 1946, together
with her friend Otti von Veltheim, she decided to go back and rescue the
remaining members of her family. After crossing into the Russian Zone,
they reached the comparative safety of Zehlendorf in the American Sector
of Berlin. Near the old Stettin Station they found an East Prussian girl who
had an impressive document in Russian that allowed her to go ‘home’,
although where ‘home’ was was not stipulated. It cost them a packet of
Luckies. There were no more friendly Russians in the railway station in
Angermünde, just Russians with their minds on rape. Libussa and her friend
escaped again. They found a friendly Russian commandant who assured
them, ‘Poles bad. Very, very bad. But Russians good. Just ask Russians.
Russians always help against Poles.’124
After an initial reluctance to countenance the trip, they had won over the
reluctant German railwaymen who were due to drive the train to Stettin. It
would be a chance to put one over the Poles. Potatoes stolen from the
Russians were cooked up in the locomotive steam and after an hour or two
the signals turned green and the train set off. The Russians tried their luck
with the girls, but accepted their rejection manfully enough and carried on
protecting them from the Poles until the train reached Stettin harbour and
the sugar factory. The Russian lieutenant even escorted them past the Polish
guards outside the free port, before leaving them to fend for themselves in
the bombed-out city.
Stettin was not yet cleared of Germans. They could be recognised by the
tatters that served as clothes and by their furtive looks. Libussa and Otti
found an old lady who offered them a room and very soon after a purported
Graf Heinrich Kinsky from Prague who was working as a lorry driver for
the Poles. German POWs who were fitting up the building for the Polish
authorities provided them with furniture, heat and bedding. The next
morning, however, the count disappeared, never to return. They found a less
fabulous lead in a Polish railway official from Posen, who had fought in the
German army in the First World War and who had been in the Polish
resistance in the Second. He obtained tickets for them to Stolp and issued
them with a couple of Polish newspapers as camouflage.
The journey went relatively smoothly. When the militia arrived they
feigned sleep. The only really tense moment came when they lit up their
Luckies and the unfamiliar smell appeared to arouse suspicion among their
Polish fellow travellers. One was bought off with a cigarette. The journey to
Stolp, which had taken the Royal Prussian Railway a mere three and a half
hours, took the new Polish authorities closer to ten. When the train reached
the outskirts of the city, they panicked and rushed for the door. One of the
passengers said to them in German, ‘Try the other side, Fräulein!’ The
women froze, but the Poles in the carriage were laughing. In a chorus they
said. ‘Auf wiedersehen!’125
Libussa waited for mid-summer to bring the rest of the family back to
the ‘Reich’. By then a new administrator had arrived and gone to live in the
manor house in Zipkow. The women found him courteous, and he spoke
excellent German. Indeed, much was familiar in his office: the desk was
from Libussa’s house and on the wall was a portrait of one of the Glowitz
Puttkamers. The Pole asserted that the reason he had hung it there was that
he numbered Puttkamers among his own forebears. Likewise Lehndorff was
able to impress Polish officials that his family had once borne the name
Mgowski, and he was issued with a pass in that name.126
The sympathetic - and aristocratic - Polish official had friends in the
railways in Stolp. The mood was changing in Poland. A camp had been set
up at Neu Torney near Stettin to process the refugees. Attacks on the trains
had come to a complete halt, he maintained. The Germans from Pomerania
were to be taken to the British or Soviet zones; most wanted to go to the
latter. The British authorities were horrified by the physical state of the
Germans when they reached the end of their journey. In April 1946 they
issued a formal protest, and began to refuse to accept refugees under these
conditions. In December they stopped accepting refugees altogether.
Whole villages were being shipped out now. They all had to wait at
assembly points until the order came to join the train. The train Libussa and
her family took required two days and two nights to travel the 237
kilometres to Stettin. They were allowed out at the stations, and there were
indeed no attacks. The end of the journey was a DP camp. There Libussa
found her friend Otti and her relatives, one of whom had already gone out
of his mind. They spent three weeks in the camp.
 When in mid-March 1946 Käthe von Normann heard that her
deportation was nigh, it was time to pack and conceal the last remaining
objects of value. Cushions were suspended from the rucksacks so that they
could travel more comfortably in the cattle trucks, and a bucket was found,
for the long hours in the train. A gold pin was hidden in a matchbox, rings
wrapped in wool, necklaces sewn into bags or concealed in the food. A
pearl necklace was rolled in oats, a wedding ring sewn into one of her son’s
clothes.
They left on Good Friday. They walked to Greifenberg where they were
taken to a camp beside the railway line. The train departed on Easter
Sunday with some twenty refugees to a truck. Someone had the good idea
of securing the doors with wire from the inside to prevent the bandits from
opening it. This proved wise, because there were attempts to rip it open as
the train went slowly. The Polish guards obliged them to sing. They opened
up with ‘Eine feste Burg’. They came to Kreckow, a suburb of Stettin,
whence it was a two-kilometre hike to the camp. They were driven on by
militia men who threatened them with rubber truncheons. The following
day they were all beaten on their way to the luggage inspection: ‘the
children were beside themselves with terror’.127 At the counter the Pole
failed to locate Frau von Normann’s remaining jewellery. They seemed
more interested in the bacon that others were carrying. Leaving in May
1947, Hans Lehndorff seems to have had a reasonably easy time of it, or
maybe it seemed like nothing after everything he had been through in the
previous two years.
Käthe von Normann had suffered much, but possibly the greatest
sufferers had been the East Prussians. One transport that left in 1945
crammed 4,500 people into forty-five cattle trucks. In the witnesses’ wagon
there were 116 men, women and children. The train took eleven days to
reach the new German border. During that time there was robbery upon
robbery and two or three people died every day. The Poles did not just strip
them of their possessions; they took the young girls as well.128 A third of the
East Prussians were dead by the time they reached their homeland. On 28
October 1948 a survey was carried out among young East Prussian girls in
Rüdersdorf camp. There were 1,600, most of them country girls who had
been taken to Russia before being brought back to Germany. Between 50
and 60 per cent had died on the way, and more had perished since. Their
average age was 19.7 years and their weight 45.38 kilos. Most no longer
had monthly periods; 48 per cent had been raped, 20 per cent more than ten
times and 4 per cent over a hundred times.129
Back in the train that night, plunderers descended on the Normanns and
the other impotent refugees, trying to steal their cases. They waited two
days and then were marched back to the station and driven back into the
cattle trucks. The train set off towards Scheune, where Libussa von
Krockow had had such terrible experiences. From there a train took them
directly to Pöppendorf near Lübeck in the British Zone. The British Zone
was also the principal destination for Silesians heading west.130
Nor was the search for valuables as draconian as it had been. When
Libussa crossed the border for the second and last time she had managed to
conceal some family effects in a false bottom to her daughter’s pram. The
effects of camp food on the baby’s stomach had been so terrible that the
official declined to search it. To their glee, the train took them to Lübeck in
the British Zone. At Lübeck they arrived to find that tables had been set up
under the trees and that hot soup was being served to adults and porridge
and hot milk to children. Bananas were handed out to the children
afterwards. One of them, suspicious of this novelty, refused: ‘What the
farmer don’t know, he don’t eat.’131
It was the same treatment that Käthe von Normann had received. After
all she had experienced, Frau von Normann was speechless. A British
officer went between the tables offering seconds. The women were so
unused to this solicitude that they burst into tears and tried to kiss his hand.
It was not the satisfactory food that relieved them so much, but the feeling
of security: ‘We were human beings again, and treated as human beings.
Who can understand this feeling? To be honest, only those who had been
through the many months of horror we had suffered, and from which we
had now escaped.’132

OceanofPDF.com
 PART II
Allied Zones
Prologue

Germany was formally divided into zones on 5 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; the Americans had
68 per cent of the car industry; while the Russians had all the kaolin needed
to supply the various porcelain manufactures that were the pride of the old
German Residenzen.1 They were very different parts of Germany. As far as
the Western Allies were concerned, the joke ran round that the Americans
had been given the scenery, the French the vines, and the British the ruins.2
The Allies squatted in their zones offering greater or lesser degrees of
co-operation with their neighbours. The Anglo-Americans worked
reasonably well together and, as comrades in arms, they went on to create
Bizonia at the end of 1946 by uniting their zones. This became Trizonia
when the French finally agreed to the merger. The French saw their piece of
the German cake differently - almost as a conquered fiefdom. Naturally the
Russians would brook no interference with their slice and their purposes
were more similar to the French. What concord existed came at the
meetings of the Allied Control Council in Berlin, which met for the first
time on 30 July 1945 and issued its initial proclamation exactly a month
later. The ACC convened three times a month, bringing together the four
‘elements’, as they were called, on the 10th, 20th and 30th at the old
Kammergericht in the American Sector. During the Third Reich this was the
seat of the notorious Volksgericht or People’s Court, which had tried
offences against the state and had handed down huge numbers of death
sentences.
After Potsdam the Kommandatura was set up in the Luisenstrasse in
Berlin. It was the one Russian word that was palatable to all the Allies. That
the Soviets took precedence was clear to all and sundry: the Western Allied
flags had second place under a giant red star and hammer and sickle. The
Russian commandant was General Gorbatov, while Zhukov’s chief of staff,
General Sokolovsky, sat in on the meetings. The British representative was
General Lyne. The spadework at the ACC was done by the deputy military
governors or DMGs, leaving the governors proper to deal with their
governments. Each meeting was chaired by a different power, which also
provided the ‘light refreshments’ that followed. They generally were light,
except when the Russians were the hosts. The first British DMGs were
General Sir Ronald Weeks (who retired through ill-health in August 1945)
and General Sir Brian Robertson. The French sent General Koeltz, followed
by General Noiret. The governor, Pierre Koenig, came to Berlin ‘as seldom
as possible’.3 Clay was the Americans’ emissary. The DMGs also regulated
the work of the 175 different committees. A DMG typically spent the mid-
week in Berlin and the weekends in the zone. It was different for the
Soviets of course: Berlin was in their zone.

OceanofPDF.com
 6
Life in the Russian Zone
Die Preise hoch
Die Läden fest geschlossen.
Die Not marchiert mit ruhig festen Schritt.
Es hungern nur die kleinen Volksgenossen,
Die grossen hungern nur im Geiste mit.
Komm, Wilhelm Pieck, sei unser Gast
Und geb, was Du uns versprochen hast.
Nicht nur Rüben, Kraut und Kohl
Sondern was Du isst, und Herr Grotewohl.

The prices high

The shops are firmly shuttered
Famine looms with steady marching pace
Only poor comrades eat their bread unbuttered,
The bigwigs are quick to stuff their face.
Come Bill Pieck, and be a gent:
Give us some of what the Party’s sent.
Not just turnips, swedes and weeds
But the things old Grotewohl thinks he needs.

Popular song. Quoted in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in

Germany - A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949,
Cambridge, Mass. and London 1995, 389-90
The Russians created their occupation zone or SVAG on 9 June 1945.
Even after they had ceded a large part of their zone to the Poles the Soviet
authorities could congratulate themselves: they had done well. They had
just under a quarter of Germany’s pre-war industrial base; 50 per cent of the
country’s 1936 tool production; 82 per cent of office-machine manufacture;
68 per cent of textile machines and 25 per cent of car production. They
controlled 24 per cent of the population, but - alas - only 2.2 per cent of the
coal. This was the sticking point at Potsdam, which had failed to iron out
the differences between the Allies.1
The Soviet authorities quietly established a civilian regime in their zone
on 27 July, appointing German civilians to ministerial portfolios in
transport, finance and industry. Stalin was careful not to go too far, and
antagonise his new subjects. From the start there were hearts and minds to
be won. He had told his satraps that they were to create national fronts with
bourgeois parties even though their own system only allowed for a one-
party state. Communists in Germany were to talk of ‘democracy’, not of
socialism. He was pragmatic on the question of satellite regimes in
Germany or Austria: perhaps they would come with time. He was torn,
however, between the idea of a satellite state in eastern Germany and his
desire to get his hands on the Ruhr. He overestimated the ‘anti-fascists’ and
underestimated the lure of Bizonia. He restrained Tito and the Greek
communists who he thought would endanger good relations with the West.
It was not the same in Poland, which he wished to control without
interference from his wartime allies.2
Marshal Zhukov was placed at the head of the administration in
Karlshorst - ‘the Berlin Kremlin’ - assisted by his deputies Sokolovsky and
Serov. S. I. Tulpanov (‘the Colonel’ or ‘the Tulip’) was placed in charge of
propaganda, but he was an economist by training - the Russian version of
Ronald Weeks. The Russians spread themselves out in the old military
engineering school. The intelligence officer Gregory Klimov says that his
boss, General Shabalin, had a desk ‘the size of a football field’.bp Zhukov
liked to see himself as a friend to the Germans. Unlike many German
communists, he made no attempt to deny the rapes. He blamed them on the
demoralisation of his troops, acts that were very different from the crimes
perpetrated by the SS in Russia.3 In the spring of 1946 Zhukov was replaced
by Sokolovsky - the battle commander by a pen-pushing desk general. The
Soviet commander had far less power than Lucius Clay and had to cope
with Stalin’s whims. Stalin was ‘opaque’: his policy directions could be
interpreted in a number of ways. It was not easy to know when he would
intervene and in what way. Another problem the commander had to reckon
with were the activities of the secret service organisations, the
NKVD/MVD, the GPU and Smersh. These were independent of the
military governor’s control. Smersh, for example, had the job of
investigating German civilian employees.4
The SBZ had a panoply of bewildering organs, including GlavPurkka in
charge of political re-education which ran the newspapers and went into the
POW camps to convince the soldiers of the need for socialism.5 Under
Stalin’s ‘divide and rule’ policy, it was always difficult to know who was in
control. There were, for example, 70,000 demontagniki. Klimov came
across some strange Russian troops in weird uniforms, and learned that they
were ‘dismantlers’: ‘They are all dressed up as colonels and lieutenant-
colonels, but they’ve never been in the army in their life.’6 The different
Kommandaturas in Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig reflected the views
of their commanding generals and were often at odds with one another. The
Thuringian command, for example, was harsh, while the Saxon was liberal.
The generals could be sacked and dishonoured on charges of degenerate
behaviour. This normally meant keeping mistresses. From mid-1947 it was
official policy that any general who was caught living with a German
woman would be sent home. By this time all Jewish officers had returned to
Russia, as their presence had been deemed inappropriate.7
Colonel-General Nicholas Bersarin had something of a hero’s status for
Berliners, doubtless helped by his untimely death in a motorcycle accident
at the age of forty-one. He was credited with doing all he could to promote
the rebuilding of the city. He made the production of mortar-producing
Rüdersdorfer Kalkwerke available to Hans Scharoun as a personal gift and
gave the architect considerable patronage. He also put the internationally
famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch in charge of health, Furtwängler of
music and Eduard Spranger of the university. Later the Americans arrested
and imprisoned Spranger for a while in Wannsee. It was not the first time he
had tasted food in gaol - he had been inside after the 20 July Plot - but this
time no one could see a good reason for his arrest, except possibly that the
Americans resented his attempts to revive university life in the Russian
Sector. Bersarin was passionate about trotting, and revived the race-course
at Karlshorst for his favourite sport. Before 1945 Karlshorst had been
famous for its steeplechase. When Bersarin died red flags were hung at
half-mast all over the city. Ruth Friedrich heard of his death from a paper-
seller on the Potsdamer Platz. When she got home Leo Borchard told her it
was a personal misfortune: ‘He promoted art like no other.’ His motorbike
ran into an army lorry. The driver of the vehicle shot himself.8
In the first days Jews and communists were deemed the most
trustworthy administrators. Appointments were often capricious. The
Russians would find some apparently uncorrupted soul and tell him, ‘You
are now mayor!’9 But it was not always easy to see who was uncorrupted,
and a lot of criminals and thieves were placed in positions of authority. In
several instances, writers were made mayors of the communes where they
lived, and not necessarily communist ones. Rudolf Ditzen (better known as
Hans Fallada, the author of the popular novel Kleiner Mann was nun? -
Little Man, What Now?) was put in charge of Feldberg in Mecklenburg for
eighteen months. His ex-wife had been raped by the Russians, but he told
his constituents, ‘The Russians come as your friends.’ Günther Weisenborn
was made mayor of Luckau after emerging from the local prison,10 while
another writer, Hans Lorbeer, became head man in Pieskeritz. When
Margret Boveri went to Teupitz in the Spreewald at the beginning of May
she found that the Russians had left a Herr Susmann in charge. He was
above suspicion, being both a Jew and a communist, but that had not
prevented the Russians from stealing his bicycle - three times - despite an
official document stating that he needed it for his work.11
After Potsdam, the antipathies between the West and the East became
more open. The British complained that the Russians had stolen half the
railway lines to Hamburg and demanded that the second set be put back. In
revenge the Russians plundered the trains and sealed the borders so
hermetically that it cost RM100,000 to make the illicit crossing.
Once the dust had settled, the Russians’ stooges were ready to put
through land reform - very largely on their own initiative. It was introduced
in the autumn, and the big estates were broken up. Wolfgang Leonhard
accompanied the leading German communist, Walter Ulbricht, on a trip to
the country where he canvassed opinion. They stopped in a small village
and Ulbricht addressed the inhabitants. The peasants responded with
silence.12 Some of these reforms appear to have been in conflict with
Stalin’s instructions to play the communist card sparingly, but they proved
popular with many Germans who had grown up believing the Junkers to be
the embodiment of evil, and who also wanted their share of the land. The
Russians were particularly hard on the nobles, setting fire to their manor
houses and raping or killing the inhabitants. Margret Boveri assumed that
the old Junker class was now extinct, and regretted it, as ‘there were a good
many decent sorts among them’. Elvira von Zitzewitz, who belonged to one
of the oldest Prussian families, had told her that her parents had been wiped
out in Templin, and others of her Berlin acquaintance had a similar tale to
tell.13 While they were not exactly extinct, they had suffered. One study of
under 9,000 Junkers showed that nearly 5,000 died fighting in the war, with
another 1,500 killed in other circumstances in 1945. Fifty-eight had died
after the 20 July Plot, leaving just over 2,000 survivors in May 1945. Of
these another 500 died in detention and the same number committed
suicide. Around 15 per cent survived to make their way to the West. Whole
families resorted to suicide. In Mecklenburg, which had a reputation as the
most feudal region of Germany, thirty noble families were destroyed in this
way.14
Owning lots of land could have you placed in one of the nastier Soviet
camps on the island of Rügen. Initially this meant unseating the remainder
of the East Elbian nobility whose lands lay west of the Oder and Neisse
rivers, but the Russians might have been vaguely thinking of the need to
find room for the refugees from the east. In official East German
terminology, these were not Flüchtlinge (refugees) but Umsiedler
(resettlers). The first agrarian law, passed on 3 October 1945, was an excuse
for plunder: all estates over 100 hectares were to be sequestered. Another
7,000 people were thus made homeless in one fell swoop.15 In 1946 the
physical substance of what remained was more or less effaced, so that the
Schloss or Herrenhaus that lay at the centre of the feudal village of old
disappeared from the map - unless, that is, some other use could be found
for it as a club for Party functionaries or secret policemen, a mental hospital
or a home for handicapped children.16
As one recent historian has written, the Junkers played ‘a central role in
the demonology of the Nazi regime’. The Russians equated them with
Nazis, and their German stooges made sure agrarian reform was at the top
of the agenda. Communist Party chairman Wilhelm Pieck coined the phrase
‘Junkerland in Bauernhand’ (The gentry’s lands in the peasants’ hands).17
By 1947 there were 477,000 peasants tilling the new kolkhoz farms.18 Some
people refused to heed the signs. One of these was Hans-Hasso von
Veltheim, a cosmopolitan intellectual with friends in high places around the
globe. He lived in his country house, Ostrau, near Halle. It was the
Americans who were the first to ‘liberate’ him. They placed a guard of
honour on his land. When the Soviet army took over, they too accorded
Veltheim the honour of a guard and offered him a professorship at the
University of Halle. He declined. He had refused to believe he was in
danger before the authorities grabbed his land. Now, extremely ill, he
decided the time had come to flee to the West, rather than end up dying in
prison like other landowners. He had looked on while a mob, whipped up
by the Russians, pulled down the ancient trees in his park and broke open
the coffins of his ancestors to hang the skeletons from the branches.19 Those
who, like the Grand Duchess of Weimar, threatened to resist the
impounding of all their worldly goods were threatened with the Russians.
Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein’s uncle Prince Günter von Schönburg-Waldenburg
was not only robbed, he was packed off to Rügen. Many of them died from
hunger and brutality. When Prince Günter finally escaped to the West he
started a new life as a language teacher.20 Once the nobles quit their houses
they were festooned with congratulatory banners: ‘Junkerland im
Bauernhand’.21
The Soviet authorities were not merely destructive; nor were they only
thieves and rapists. Money was reintroduced as early as 8 May and - in
theory at least - Soviet soldiers had to stop pillaging and pay for their
purchases.22 The work of clearing the rubble in the towns and cities may
have been a punishment, but there was sense behind it: only once the
smashed bricks and mortar were cleared could communications be restored.
In the first nine months of their occupation of Berlin, the Soviets restored
nearly 200,000 homes. In this they had the support and assistance of
Scharoun. They put back the tramlines, and the S-Bahn reopened as early as
30 May.
The Russians began to promote the arts in Berlin that same month by
creating a Kammer der Kunstschaffenden or Academy of Creative Artists
under the presidency of actor-director and star of Der Golem Paul Wegener.
The Academy had departments dealing with music, writing, theatre and
cinema. It had its own ‘star chamber’ with powers to rehabilitate National
Socialists.23
Scharoun tried his best to preserve some of the city’s shattered
monuments, such as the Schloss and the Reichstag.24 For some time the
future of the damaged Prussian monuments hung in the balance. The Berlin
Schloss, the oldest parts of which dated back to the fifteenth century, and
which had been remodelled by the baroque architect Andreas Schlüter, had
been badly shelled during the Russian advance. Many parts were reparable,
but a debate soon grew up about the desirability of preserving relics of
Prussia’s militaristic past. For the time being the White Hall of the Schloss
was patched up and used for exhibitions. The best remembered of these was
‘Berlin Plant’ or ‘Berlin Plans’, which opened on 22 August 1946. It was
organised by Scharoun himself and pointed the way forward to the
reconstruction of the city. It also made the case for keeping the modernised
carcass of the Schloss. Three months later the exhibition was replaced by
‘Modern French Painting’. This was to show Berliners the sort of paintings
that had been denied them as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. On 21 December
an exhibition organised by the earlier, avant-garde National Gallery director
Ludwig Justi displayed the contents of some of the Berlin museums. Many
of the others were in the process of travelling east - to Russia. The last
exhibition to be organised in the ruins of the Royal Palace commemorated
the Revolution of 1848.25 Scharoun argued the case for keeping the Schlüter
courtyard of the Schloss, if nothing else. In the end the ruling SED not only
decided against restoration, they actually destroyed the monuments, starting
with the Berlin Schloss in 1950 and continuing with the Potsdam Schloss a
decade later. The remains of the Garrison Church in Potsdam were
destroyed in 1968.26
The preservation of Nazi monuments was also a sensitive issue. Speer
had been pleased to observe that his New Chancellery was still there. It
was, however, condemned: like all the surviving buildings on the western
side of the Wilhelmstrasse, it was demolished to make it easier for the
Soviets to patrol their sector. A photograph taken in April 1949 shows one
wing of Speer’s gigantic conception being torn down. The stone was used
to build the huge Soviet monument in Treptow Park.27 In the interests of
‘security’ the Russians also pulled down all that was left of their side of the
Potsdamer and Leipziger Plätze.
On the other hand demontage took its toll. Before the Western Allies
established camp in Berlin, more than a hundred companies were shipped
east. Berlin lost around 85 per cent of its industrial capacity, including such
weighty names as Siemens, AEG, Osram and Borsig. As demontage the
Russians took away a very large chunk of the industrial base of what had
been one of the most highly developed parts of Germany. By the autumn of
1945 they had already dismantled 4,339 of the 17,024 major installations in
their zone.28

Fritz Löwenthal was another Muscovite who returned to the SBZ in

1946. As a communist lawyer he was placed at the head of a legal
commission. He fled to the West on 25 May 1947, taking with him a fat
dossier detailing crime and corruption in the Soviet Zone. His account
amounts to an indictment of the Soviet authorities, and a justification for the
young idealist’s flight. Nazis were creeping back into positions of authority
and all sorts of unsuitable characters achieving local power-bases as a result
of toadying to the Soviet rulers.
The local judge at Lieberose, for example, turned out to be a former
cook called (of all things) Bütter. On 3 January 1946 he was delivered up to
the police in Potsdam accused of fraud. A week later he was found hanging
in his cell, but the apparent suicide was contradicted by the state of his
corpse - he had had his head beaten in, to stop him giving anything away at
his trial.29 At Forst on the Neisse, there was a flourishing trade in
contraband across the new border with Poland. Germans, Poles and
Russians were all involved, and the need to prevent the military poking
their noses into the smuggling trade resulted in at least one murder.
Elsewhere in Germany corrupt Soviet officials sold grain to the Germans.
Another German who was able to hoodwink the Soviets into believing she
was anti-fascist was Sonja Kloss, the mayoress of Kolberg bei Storkau. She
turned out to be a former SS interpreter who was protecting her lover, an
erstwhile senior SS man.30
Anyone was in danger of being denounced, as most people had a
skeleton in their closet. Muscovites and others who had co-operated with
the Soviet authorities in Russia were generally above suspicion. In the
sleepy town of Ruppin in the Mark Brandenburg, Landrat Dietrich had
denounced the teacher Schulze in Gransee, whom he accused of having
been an important leader in the Hitler Youth, and of seducing young boys.
Dietrich owed his position of power to the fact that he had been on the
committee of the Free Germany movement as a POW in Russia.31 In
Oranienburg the local dictator was the senior judge, one Fandrich, who
uncovered a former Wehrmacht paymaster hiding in his parish and had him
consigned to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen which ‘the Russians
had brought back to life’. It is not known if he ever re-emerged. Fandrich,
who employed his son as a spy, was not all that he seemed: he was not a
jurist, and he was not even German. He spoke fluent Russian and had
fought in the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War. He had later
lived as a merchant in Warsaw. Like many people who achieved power in
Germany just after the war, Fandrich was a KZler. He had been in
Sachsenhausen himself, where he had worn the green badge of a criminal.
His position in the Soviet Zone allowed him to amass hordes of treasure
handed over by those who did not want their past examined in detail. On
those who were less considerate, he imposed prison sentences. By January
1947 he had become over-confident of his position with the Russians. An
order was issued for his arrest, and, although he was given time to flee, he
felt he was not in danger. He was later put on trial and received a five-year
sentence.32
Many criminals posed as ‘victims of fascism’ in this way, like Werner
Stahlberg, who had been released from the prison in Brandenburg, but who
had been a common criminal. A band led by a Russian-speaking German
Balt named Schröder carried out seventy-eight robberies in a ‘blue
limousine’. They even robbed hospital patients of their valuables. Schröder
had begun his life of crime when his friend and protector ‘Dr’ Werner Zahn,
Oberbürgermeister of Potsdam, was arrested. Zahn was another conman
who had invented his doctorate. Before the war he had sold cinema
tickets.33
Löwenthal lifted the lid on Thuringia. Goethe’s Ilmenaubq was in the
hands of Paul Flieder, a former communist who had nonetheless achieved
high rank in the SS. With him installed in the town hall, fifty-one former
Nazis found gainful employment. In Weissensee near Erfurt power was in
the hands of one Hitkamp, another purported ‘victim of fascism’ who ran a
robber-band, conducting house-to-house searches and confiscating property.
In Eisenach the CID (criminal police) officer Kirchner turned out to have
nine convictions of his own, while Reinhold Lettau, the police president
who hired him, was an old Nazi. There could be tough sentences and quite
arbitrary killings for anyone who fell foul of the Soviets. The Military
Tribunal in Thuringia arraigned one man for being an intimate of the former
Gauleiter, Sauckel, on the strength of a round-robin found in his home. In
truth he was only the local Party cashier. He was tried by Russian officers in
the cinema and sentenced to be hanged. His sentence was commuted by
Stalin: he was shot instead.34
In Saxony, Karl Keller, the Bürgermeister of Zschieschen, was another
‘green’ who had spent eight years in a concentration camp and could boast
thirty-two offences of theft and fraud. He was one of the lucky ones who
got out: the prison population - many of them rounded up after the end of
the war - was dying. When informed of the fact the Soviet commander,
Lieutenant-Colonel Jakupov, dismissed the matter as ‘humanitarian
whingeing’. Another Russian officer complained of naked Germans coming
across the border from Czechoslovakia. They had been stripped, then
pushed over the frontier. The officer said the best he could do was put them
in a cellar. He had no clothes to give them. Some Russian officers were
living a good life. A Major Astafiev was reported enjoying a regime
unknown to tsarist courtiers or boyars: he had a woman to roll on each
stocking in the morning and another to hand him his dressing gown.35 When
in March 1947 the Soviet authorities pushed through land reform in Saxony,
300,000 hectares were nationalised, but only 50,000 were handed back to
the peasants. The rest remained in the hands of the state. Meanwhile life
was cheap in Saxony. When on 16 February 1946 the Russians decided that
informer Helene Mader was no longer useful to them, the killer
Zimmermann was paid the princely sum of 500 cigarettes.36
In the new state of Sachsen-Anhalt, in Niegripp near Burg on the Elbe,
Josef Conrad passed as a political prisoner during his time in a
concentration camp. The Russians were happy with his credentials and
made him both Bürgermeister and police chief. They also gave him a gun
and told him to round up the former Pgs and liquidate them. Conrad
engaged a waiter with a record for theft named Walter Kraft and together
they killed the teacher Seewald, the treasurer Dehne, the landlord Fabian
and the agricultural worker Helmrich by putting a bullet in the backs of
their heads. Their bodies were robbed.37
Rural Mecklenburg had formerly passed for the most reactionary corner
of Germany. After 1945 it was the ‘most bolshevised’, according to Fritz
Löwenthal. The head of the military government, General I. I. Fediunsky,
lambasted the Germans for their lack of efficiency. The Germans were
‘shirkers’. One local Soviet commander, Colonel Serebriensky, he dubbed
‘the prompter at the Schwerin pocket edition of the Moscow world theatre’.
Everything passed under his nose. It was presumably the colonel who
caused the disappearance of Willi Jesse, the provincial secretary of the SED
for Mecklenburg. Under his rule middle-class Mecklenburgers were held
back. At school they were not allowed to progress beyond the ninth class or
attend university. Some locals prospered under his reign, like the notorious
Wilhelm Stange, Landrat in Usedom, who exploited his office to line his
pockets.38
Not all so-called communists were crooks, but there was no shortage of
people who came out of the woodwork in 1945 to claim that they had been
persecuted by Hitler’s regime, and who demanded privilege as a result. The
Muscovite Ackermann wryly observed that ‘It turned out that in the Soviet
Union there were fewer Bolsheviks than there were in Hitlerite Germany.’
These former communists were jealous of the Wehrmacht officers who
were given positions of authority under the Russians, especially those who
had fought in Spain, or who had been in a concentration camp, or both.39
Although the raping of German women had abated in the summer of
1945, it had not stopped. There was a fresh outburst of wild raping when
the occupation lines were redrawn in June. The Russians moved into parts
of Saxony and Thuringia where up till then the women had lived in
comparative safety. There were a hundred rapes in Zerbst, the town that had
seen the birth of Russia’s great queen, Catherine, and similar numbers were
reported in Halle and Weimar. In Weimar a Russian lieutenant walked into a
barber’s shop and proceeded to rape the cashier in front of the customers.
Two other Russian officers had to be found before ‘this animal could be
overpowered’.40 Despite the availability of abortions, many half-Russian
children were born. In the US Ralph Keeling of the Institute of American
Economics in Chicago thundered against the Russo-German bastards and
envisaged ‘Bolshevised Mongolian-Slavic hordes’.41 Apart from the
soldiers, there were around two million former POWs and forced labourers
from Russia who had formed into gangs and robbed and raped all over
central Europe.42
Real security was achieved only when the Red Army was garrisoned in
barracks buildings in 1947-8. Even later the Russians took over whole areas
of towns, throwing the inhabitants out on to the streets. From mid-1945,
however, Russians caught raping women were liable to punishment. They
might even suffer execution. Some were shot in the act, adding a further
trauma to the victim of the sexual assault. A scale of charges was
introduced in the summer of 1945, with ten days for debauchery and four
years for aggravated rape. No German could report the crimes, however.
When a group of young Germans prevented a rape by beating up the culprit,
they were arrested and charged with being Werewolves. It was only in 1949
that Russian soldiers were presented with a real deterrent, with ten to fifteen
years for simple rape and ten to twenty for raping a child, and for group or
aggravated rape.43 The east Germans had been allowed their own police, but
at the beginning these men were armed with nothing more potent than clubs
and they were not encouraged to step in when the crime was being
committed by a Soviet soldier. They were given a small number of guns in
mid-1946.
 The other continuing nightmare of the Soviet Zone was that the
pillaging seemed unending. In Karlshorst pilfering was tolerated within
certain limits and according to rank. A squaddie might steal a watch, a
junior officer an accordion, but woe betide any of them who took more than
he should. Cars were useless - ‘you couldn’t hide a car’ - and besides, it
would have been nabbed by a superior officer.44 Some choice things did get
stolen, especially if they could be consumed on the spot. One MVD officer,
for example, boasted of having some of the finest wines from Göring’s
cellar.45
Worse than the full-scale removal of the industrial base of the land was
the abduction of men and women to develop industry in the Soviet Union.
Some of the more vital scientists had surrendered to the West; the scientists
who had created the V1 and V2 missiles at Peenemünde, for example, gave
themselves up to the Americans in Bavaria. The Russians also found some
useful personnel and they were prepared to overlook a man’s Nazi past if
the scientist were prepared to work for them. They also lured them over
with the promise of better housing. Technicians working at the
Oberspreewerk in the west were offered homes in Hirschgarten near
Köpenick.46
At first the Russians were successful in attracting scientists. The
Germans were less enthusiastic when the round-ups began. They took place
two days after abortive elections on 20 October 1946, when the SED had
been soundly beaten. Soldiers came at 3.00 a.m. to deport all the leading
electricians, toolmakers and engineers. The men and women were
informed, ‘By order of the Russian High Command you have been
mobilised for work in the Soviet Union. You are to leave at once, with your
family. Your furniture and personal belongings will be moved to your new
residence. The length of your stay will not exceed five years.’47 The size of
the operation meant that they had not finished by five that afternoon. One of
the places the Russians cordoned off that morning was Hirschgarten.
The Russians were able to take their pick of the skilled workers from
GEMA (which manufactured range-finders and sights), ETEM (which
made guidance equipment), AEG Kabelwerk (which created radio
transmitters), OKG-4 (which made automatic pilots) and Askania (the radar
manufacturers). Some of the Germans refused to go. In Halle they literally
had to be clubbed into submission. Ninety-two special trains were laid on to
transport the 5,000 men, women and children. Some of them were indeed
back within five years, some came back in 1953. A few stayed until January
1958, about the time the first Sputnik went into orbit. German scientists
were the fathers of both missile programmes, American and Russian.48 The
SBZ did not necessarily approve of the kidnapping of these vital workers,
but they had no control over the military. An attempt was made to stop the
dismantling of Zeiss and the Schott optical works, but it was to no avail.49
The Russians also seized Walter Riedel of the glassworks of that name
in Czechoslovakia. Riedel had invented fibreglass and worked on lenses
and prism glass. His large-size picture tubes were used by the Luftwaffe as
monitoring devices during the war. The Russians deemed Riedel a scientific
VIP and ‘invited’ him to go to Russia after the war. He worked in a
laboratory for a decade before he was allowed to go home. His firm had
been seized by the Czechs. His son, Claus, had escaped detention in Austria
and with the help of the Swarovski family was able to start up the family
business again in Tyrolean Kufstein.50
Until 1946 it was theoretically impossible to cross into the Russian
Zone without an ‘Interzone Pass’. It was a risky business, not least because
of the danger of arrest or, for women, of rape by border guards. Despite that
many people braved the unmanned ‘Green Border’ in order to reach their
families. Margret Boveri crossed to her native Franconia, and Ursula von
Kardorff managed to make it from Berlin, despite being shot at by Russian
border guards. Some guards were more accessible, and were bought off
with bottles of schnapps. The first sight of Russian rule in the east came as
a shock. Germans wishing to travel had to get used to sitting on the roofs of
trains, while Russians in clean uniforms occupied the half-empty carriages.
In tunnels you learned to lie flat and keep your head down. The station
signs were written in Cyrillic script, and policemen’s hats were embellished
with the red star.
The life of the Gulag could be experienced in the Erzgebirge on the
Czech border. This was another part of Germany that had originally fallen
to Patton’s soldiers. The Americans retreated to Mulde on 12 May, but the
Russians were slow to take their places and did not get there before the end
of June. The Russians learned that the region contained uranium ore. This
was an important discovery as ‘the Kremlin urgently requires atom bombs
for its peace policies’. Initially 10,000 men, later 20,000 men and women,
were forced to work in the mines; many of them were ethnic Germans from
Hungary who were driven to work with kicks and beatings, and cries of
‘Davai! Davai!’ (Come on, move). Some of the women were whipped.
At the beginning of 1947 the whole western half of the region was
cordoned off. More and more forced labourers were brought in. Some
20,000-30,000 Saxons were not deemed enough and recruiting offices were
set up throughout the SBZ to procure the 75,000 men the Russians felt they
needed. POWs returning from the east were sent straight off to the
Erzgebirge, where they lived in makeshift barracks and tent camps similar
to the places they had just left. The camps were at a great distance from the
mines, and the workers had to rise at 3 a.m. to start the three-hour journey
to the pithead. The work brought the men into contact with carcinogenic
material and 20,000 people are believed to have died prematurely as a result
of working in the mines. As it was eight men died in one week. The results
were positive for the Soviets, however: on 23 August 1949 they were able
to detonate their first atom bomb, using uranium from the mines at
Wismut.51
In May 1945 the purging and recreation of the police force was the most
important item on the agenda. At first the force was dominated by unarmed
Socialist Party members, as the Allies had stipulated that the Germans were
not to be issued with weapons. This made them vulnerable to the bands of
armed bandits. K-5 was the name of the political police which took over
some of the functions of the Gestapo and would turn in time into the
Ministry of State Security, or ‘Stasi’. The man behind it was Erich Mielke,
a communist who had fled to Moscow after killing a policeman. There were
already over 80,000 police in the SBZ by September 1947.52 If Mielke’s
Stasi was to be the recreation of the Gestapo, another Nazi institution was
to be rapidly dusted down and put back to work: the Hitler Youth. The
youngish Erich Honecker was given the job of forming the FDJ, or Freie
Deutsche Jugend.
Even more sinister were the many camps and prisons. Some of these
had been simply carried over from Nazi times, like Sachsenhausen and
Buchenwald. The Russian general Dratvin explained the facts to some
British visitors: ‘The [Nazi] camps have been liquidated, but the buildings
are being used for housing fascist criminals who have committed crimes
against our country.’53 The traditional Nazi camps were joined by new
creations like Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, which was also in a Soviet
residential ghetto. It was here that Otto Grotewohl, SPD leader in the Soviet
Zone, lived surrounded by Russians and barbed wire. Then there was
Jamlitz was near Lieberose in the Uckermark, Forst in the Lausitz,
Roitzsch-Bitterfeld, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Ketschendorf near Beeskow in
the Mark, Neubrandenburg, Mühlberg on the Oder, Bautzen, Altenhain
(which was used for Russian deserters and former members of Vlasov’s
army), Stern-Buchholz near Schwerin and the old POW camp at Torgau
which had been turned into a political prison. Hardened cases were
transferred to the Soviet Union.
The new (and old) camps were called ‘Spetzlager’, or ‘special camps’.
At Christmas 1946 there were 15,000 prisoners in Buchenwald and around
16,000 in Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen, or Spetzlager no. 7, was closed
down in the early 1950s. Later fifty mass graves were discovered there
which were thought to have been dug after the war, containing around
12,500 bodies. Most of the dead had perished from hunger or disease; about
thirty-five to forty inmates died every day in the winter of 1946-7. Death
began with the over-sixties, who perished from dropsy. When they had
succumbed it was the turn of the fifty-year-olds. In the winter of 1946 to
1947 even the forty-somethings died in droves. Camp 3, Hohenschönhausen
had about 3,000 prisoners, Fürstenwalde 6,000, and Camp 4, Bautzen
18,000. Russian estimates show that, of the 122,671 Germans who passed
though the camps, 42,889 died - that is, more than a third. Only 756 were
actually shot.54
German figures are roughly double the Russian tally: 240,000. Of these
a higher figure of 95,643 perished - over 40 per cent. In these revisions
there were 60,000 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, of whom just over half died;
a little over 30,000 at Buchenwald, where a little under half did not survive
the experience; and 30,000 at Bautzen, where 16,700 died.55 Anyone who
was suspected of Nazi sympathies was liable to incarceration; and a good
many monarchists and conservatives were thrown in too. The chief sugar
manufacturers - twelve in all - were sent to a camp. One survived. Quite a
lot of young people who had been in the Hitler Youth or the girls’
equivalent, the BdM, were sent to the camps. For the major landowners and
Junkers there was Rügen.56 Added to the perils of life in the Russian
concentration camp, Nacht und Nebel abductions had claimed another 5,431
Germans by November 1947, of whom 1,255 were youths.57
For all its dangers the Soviet Zone, like the Democratic Republic that
succeeded it, offered a sort of daily life provided the citizen was not too
demanding. There were times when the inhabitants of SBZ were better fed
than the Germans in the West, but this did not prevent them from
complaining, as in this parody of the nationalist anthem ‘Deutschland über
alles’:
Deutschland, Deutschland, ohne
alles
Ohne Butter, ohne Fett
Und das bischen Marmelade
Frisst uns die Verwaltung weg.
Hände falten, Köpfe sinken,
Immer an die Einheit denken.

Germans, Germans lacking

everything
Lacking butter, lacking fat
The modicum of marmalade
Is mopped up by our brass hats.
Bow your head in humility,
Lie back, think of Unity.
Culture
Two heroic figures emerged in the Russian Zone to promote a brief
flowering of the arts after May 1945. They were Johannes R. Becher and
the Russian art historian Colonel Alexander Dymshitz. Becher was just
behind the front line, ready to implement a policy elaborated in Moscow,
but once again it was not necessarily an exclusively Marxist-Leninist
approach. As early as 30 April 1945 Ulbricht issued a list of writers who
were welcome to publish in the Soviet Zone. They were all exiles from
Nazism: Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas and Heinrich Mann,
Arnold Zweig and Bertolt Brecht.58
The Russians actively promoted not just socialist theatre, ballet, opera
and cinema; they promoted bourgeois arts as well. This was in keeping with
Anton Ackermann’s programme penned in Moscow in June, that the Soviet
system was wrong for Germany, and that it needed to be reorganised on
broad, anti-fascist, democratic principles instead. The programme had to be
in place before the Western Allies arrived for the meeting in Potsdam. For
the first three years after the war, there were no real cultural divisions in the
capital, and the Soviet Zone continued to take the lead in cultural matters.59
Becher returned to Berlin after twelve years and three months of exile on 11
June 1945. Ulbricht had approved his role; he was ‘necessary for the work
among the intellectuals’.60
Becher found his house in Zehlendorf intact, if not quite habitable. He
went off to live in Dahlem, in the home of the Nazi banker Emil Georg von
Strauss. He immediately began to invite old friends over to discuss getting
intellectual life going again in the city. This was to become the steering
committee for the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung
Deutschlands (Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany).
It was meant to function in all four zones. Becher put down his thoughts on
Berlin in a letter to his wife Lily, whom he had left behind in Moscow. ‘It is
really enough to make you howl . . . and Berlin is Berlin. Despite
everything you are not coming back to a strange place. Children sing
German, mothers speak German - and the trees on the streets and the green
on the balconies - I am overjoyed, my most beloved, and the only galling
thing is that you are not beside me!’61 On 3 July the Alliance was launched
at a party for 1,500 people in the hall of Broadcasting House in the
Masurenallee. Becher spoke: ‘We have enough German tragedies in our
history, more than enough, now we want to finally bring an end to German
tragedies . . .’ In the next two years he went a long way towards creating
that renewal until the Cold War made bourgeois writers unwelcome in the
SBZ.
As the Allies prepared to celebrate their meeting in Potsdam, the
Russians reopened the Variété Theatre and in a cinema opposite they
screened the film Dr Mamlock. Where no specific building existed, the
Russians turned over municipal premises to theatre and cinema. A
triumphal arch had been set up in Berlin’s Frankfurter Allee, which was
later to become one of the showpieces of Stalinist architecture. As part of
the festivities Wilhelm Furtwängler gave a concert in which Mendelssohn’s
music was played.br All these events received the hearty approval of
Bersarin. Few Berliners, however, knew they were happening. There were
as yet no newspapers, and communication was by word of mouth.
The Soviet cultural supremo was Colonel Sergey Tulpanov, head of the
Political Department of the Soviet Military Administration. He wanted to
prove that the Russians were not quite as barbaric as May 1945 had seemed
to suggest.62 They tended to look after the German artists and show them
respect, while the Western Allies cavilled, treated them like unrepentant
Nazis and refused to shake their hands. Tulpanov was a huge, ursine
presence, whom George Clare compared to Hermann Göring, many of
whose cultural offices Tulpanov had taken over. By April 1946 more than a
hundred theatres had opened in the SBZ, performing classics such as
Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, Molière’s Tartuffe and works by Offenbach, as
well as Russian pieces. Tulpanov was abetted by Dymshitz. It was
Dymshitz who was behind Die Möwe, the artists’ and writers’ club that
opened in the old Bülow Palace in the Soviet Sector and provided literary
and artistic Berliners with a decent meal, comfort and rest. Later they had
the premises of the old Berlin Club that Becher turned into an artists’
colony with the parquet from Hitler’s Chancellery. Here authors ate
unrationed food and kept out of the cold.63
Dymshitz was a highly cultured man of Jewish origin from St
Petersburg. He had grown up in a house with a Steinway and a library. He
had spoken German, French and English from childhood and attended the
German Reform School, the best in the city before the Great War. He went
on to develop a fondness for the avant garde as a student in the 1920s. He
had little rapport with the Anglo-Americans, but he had a certain amount of
support from the French cultural boffin, Félix Lusset. When the Anglo-
Americans outlawed Becher’s Kulturbund in their sectors, Lusset refused to
follow suit.64
Like Göring, Tulpanov could tolerate satire provided he found it funny.
He revelled in the performances of Günter Neumann, who was reviving
Berlin cabaret at Ulenspiegel in Berlin. Like the Schaubühne in Munich,
Ulenspiegel was a stage licensed to poke fun at the Allies. Even the Nazis
had tolerated some small degree of satire in this form. As George Clare put
it, Neumann lashed out at all the Allies, but without a ‘trace of German self-
pity’. He poked fun at frat, and the desperation to which German girls were
driven by hunger:
Johnny took me like a lady
And we traded - nothing shady,
Two pounds of coffee so I’d do it,
Fruit-juice cans so I’d renew it.
Hot we got with burning skins
For a couple of corned-beef tins
 But for chocolate - Hershey bar
I went further much than far.
Carl Zuckmayer admired the Russian contribution to the arts at the time.
The most prestigious theatre in the Russian Sector was the Admiralspalast,
which had survived the bombing unscathed and now played host to the
State Opera. Zuckmayer found the singers less impressive than their
counterparts in New York, but on the other hand he was very struck by the
talents of the young directors and artists who designed the performances.65
Of the Western Allies, only the American theatre chief Benno Frank came
anywhere near him. He had been a prominent German Jewish actor and
director before 1933. Their British counterpart was Pat Lynch, a Cork-man
and one-time prepschool master with a fondness for Wagner. It was only
much later that the Westerners learned by their mistakes and began to open
cinemas and theatres in their sectors.66
Becher’s office as president of the Cultural Alliance was in
Schlüterstrasse 45, just off the Kurfürstendamm in the British Zone. The
honorary president was Hauptmann. When Hauptmann died and the Poles
could finally dispose of his corpse, Becher, Tulpanov and Pieck travelled to
Stralsund on the Baltic coast. Becher pronounced the obsequy over the late
writer’s coffin: ‘According to your wishes, may you be laid to earth before
sunrise, to become a symbol of German promise! May your decease
become the turning point.’67 Schlüterstrasse 45 had an interesting history.bs
After the Nazi cultural association, the RKK or Reichskulturkammer, had
been bombed out of its premises in the centre of the city, it had moved here.
The building still contained all the files relating to artistic activity in the
Third Reich, and, in the basement, the painting collection of the Jewish
community. Now it became the rallying point for the starving artists of the
occupation who came to Becher for shelter and ration cards.68 In Becher’s
time the house contained the ‘Spruchkammer’, a sort of Star Chamber
where German artists were examined for their reliability by a panel
composed of the four powers. It was headed by the British major Kaye Sely
- born Karl Seltz in Munich.
Becher’s success was so great at this time that even Thomas Mann
condescended to come to him to request a favour for one of his wife’s
relatives, Hans von Rohrscheidt, who was being roughly handled by the
Soviet authorities. In return Becher wanted Mann to bring his influence to
bear in getting CARE packets for his writers. Becher was trying to bring
them all home: Döblin had returned (he was in Baden-Baden, working for
the French) but Anna Seghers, the Manns, Herzfeld and Feuchtwanger were
all hesitating. It was the time of the well-publicised dispute between
Thomas Mann and two writers who had stayed in Germany, Walter von
Molo and Franz Thiess. Thiess had said it was natural to remain in
Germany, and pointed out that it had been harder to remain than to enjoy a
comfortable life in exile like Mann. Mann’s son Klaus called Thiess
‘repulsive’: he had come to terms with the Nazis and earned a packet
working on film scripts. Becher tried to pour oil on the troubled waters,
issuing another invitation: ‘Come home, you are expected.’ On 22
November 1945 he launched an appeal to the émigrés. He did not share
Mann’s view that books published during the Third Reich were worthless,
and refused to allow his writings to appear in a volume of exile literature.
He saw no virtue in exile: it was ‘bitter necessity’, no more. It was an
attitude that made him unpopular with those who had emerged from the
concentration camps.69
With Becher at the helm, and with the backing of Tulpanov for the time
being, the Soviet Zone took a pragmatic approach to denazification in the
arts. Zhukov had not believed that Hauptmann had resisted the Nazis, but
he had given him his entire protection, keeping both his own soldiers and
the Poles off him while he eked out his last days. The Americans were after
Furtwängler’s blood. He had been a Prussian state councillor under the
Nazis - a wholly honorary position given out to a few cultural and
intellectual worthies who toed the line.bt Furtwängler had taken refuge in
Switzerland at the end of the war, partly as a result of his fears for his
safety. He had been close to some of the men who were executed after the
July Plot. As the war drew to a close the Swiss had turned on him and he
had fled to Austria in the autumn of 1945. He was summoned back by the
Russians in February 1946 to take over his old job at the Berlin
Philharmonic. Up to then the reins had been held by Leo Borchard, and by
the temperamental thirty-three-year-old Sergiu Celibidache.
‘Celi’ had taken over the Philharmonic just six days after Borchard’s
death. He was even more obscure than his predecessor: an unknown
Romanian who had arrived in Berlin in the mid-1930s to study composition
under Heinz Tiessen. Before he was relieved of his post by the triumphal
return of Furtwängler, ‘Celi’ conducted the BPO no fewer than 108 times.
The Allies saw him as a ‘political virgin’ and, while disputes raged about all
the other conductors who were to some extent tainted by Nazism, there was
no argument about him.70
As the Philharmonie had been gutted, ‘Celi’ performed in the Titania
Palast in Berlin-Steglitz,bu the Theater des Westens by the Zoo, the Radio
Station and other intact buildings in Dahlem, Tegel and Wedding. He also
performed in other German cities standing in for Furtwängler, who was the
subject of particularly petty attacks by Allied officials - chiefly American.
Before Furtwängler could perform in the Western Allied Zones, he had to
receive his Persilschein - a clean bill of political health - in Vienna,
Wiesbaden and Berlin. Vienna presented him with few problems, but at the
American HQ in Wiesbaden they were reluctant to exonerate him. There
was a persistent clamour from back home, especially from Thomas Mann’s
daughter Erika. He could only proceed to the higher court in Berlin in
December 1946. He was finally absolved in April 1947. During that time
Celibidache stood in for him, but according to Furtwängler’s widow
relations between the two of them were always good.71
Furtwängler returned to Berlin in a Russian aircraft on 10 March 1946,
landing at the Adlershof airfield in the Soviet Zone. He was received in all
pomp by Becher. The Russians provided him with the Pheasantry, his old
grace-and-favour residence in the park at Sans Souci in Potsdam. His
faithful housekeeper was waiting for him, and so was his piano. The West
objected to his performing, however, and his appearance at the concert in
the Radio Station had to be scrapped. That day the orchestra was directed
by Celibidache.
Furtwängler had already been cleared by a denazification court in
Austria and thought that the pardon would be granted automatically in
Berlin. The Americans in the person of General McClure, however, were
not prepared to give in so easily and they reminded the other Allies that
Furtwängler needed an American licence to perform at the Philharmonie,
which was in their sector, and that all Prussian state councillors had been
banned from public life under Control Council Directive No. 24. This didn’t
much impress the Russians, who offered Furtwängler the directorship of the
Lindenoper, which lay in their territory. They even whipped up a press
campaign to bring him back, embellishing their Berliner Zeitung on 16
February 1946 with the headline ‘Berlin calls Wilhelm Furtwängler’. The
conductor refused to be wooed. Knowing that acceptance meant kissing
goodbye to the BPO, he declined the offer.72
 Furtwängler had never been a Pg, but there were plenty of conductors
who had: Karajan, Knappertsbusch, Krauss and the chief conductor of the
Berlin City Opera, the Austrian Leopold Ludwig. Ludwig had denied his
Party membership on the Fragebogen and had been sentenced to a year’s
imprisonment by the British Military Government. Ludwig was not only a
Pg - like Karajan he had joined in Austria where membership was illegal. 73
Knappertsbusch had actually been a protégé of Eva Braun’s, who was
attracted to the conductor’s ‘boyish good looks’. Hitler had not held him in
high regard, claiming he was ‘no better than a military band-leader’. The
Führer did not like Karajan either, because the conductor did not use a score
and failed to spot the errors of the singers. He would have pushed Karajan
aside had he not been protected by Göring. Such was the Third Reich.74
The Russians ceased any pretence at taking denazification seriously for
the arts scene. The civilised Captain Alexander Gouliga was replaced by an
obstreperous Sub-lieutenant Levin who apparently did not even speak
German. The Allied culture boffins had their last meeting with Gouliga in
the House of Soviet Culture where a splendid feast had been prepared:
goblets of Crimean champagne were served by two old German waiters
with Hitler moustaches ‘who looked like a couple of ex-Gauleiters recently
released from a Russian internment camp’. After the sparkling wine came
vodka and beer. Salads were succeeded by smoked fish and caviar, caviar
by stuffed eggs, cold meats and sausages - and those were just the zakuski.
Bortsch and stroganoff and orange cream rounded off the feast.75
As far as opera was concerned, both the Städtische Oper and the
Lindenoper had been outhoused due to bomb damage. Berlin’s City Opera
was now in the Theater des Westens, while the Lindenoper was in the
Admiralspalast in the Friedrichstrasse. Although the former was in the
British Sector, the audiences for both opera houses were principally
Russian. Neither was open to mere Germans. The night George Clare went
to the Theater des Westens in 1946 there was a handful of British officers
and two NCOs (himself and his friend), together with a ‘sprinkling’ of
Americans and a ‘pride’ of Frenchmen. The rest of the audience was made
up of Russians and their wives. The Soviets allowed officers to import
wives and children, which was forbidden for the time being among the
Western Allies - hence the need for frat.76
As ever, music had a powerful effect on the Berliners, who had braved
the bombs to hear the BPO perform during the war. Margret Boveri
remembered her first concert after the war. She heard a choral work of
Bruckner’s in a ‘ruinous hall in [Berlin-]Zehlendorf’. It gave rise to floods
of tears brought on by years of suppressed and concealed emotions.77 When
after two years of trials Furtwängler received his Persilschein on 30 April
1947 and was able to conduct ‘his’ orchestra once again on Whit Sunday
(25 May), the audience clapped for fifteen minutes, summoning him back to
the rostrum sixteen times. It had been an all-Beethoven programme - the
overture to Egmont, and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Erika Mann
carped: it was not the old Philharmonic, but the purged version that had
survived the Third Reich, and even then it had been under-rehearsed. The
conductor replied to her father, modestly pointing out that fifteen minutes’
applause was not unusual for Beethoven in Berlin.78 One Jew who
wholeheartedly stood by Furtwängler throughout the crisis was Yehudi
Menuhin. Menuhin, who performed the Beethoven violin concerto with the
conductor on 28 September 1947, was anxious to break the boycott of
Furtwängler in America. He demonstratively gave the conductor his hand,
and was treated as a traitor in America as a result.79
Brecht, Eisler and Heinrich Mann looked on from their places of exile,
but theatre prospered. Many theatres had been spared the Anglo-American
bombing, and Berlin was in a position to put on plays from the start. Hilde
Spiel was awestruck: ‘What remains is the world of the theatre. Only here
do they [the Berliners] continue to eat and drink, love without worry and
die without cause, swagger, croon, charm, laugh. Only here do the porters
still strut about and the candles still flicker in ornate chandeliers, only here
do the cigars glimmer and the wines flow.’80
The Hebbel Theatre performed the Dreigroschenoper from 8 August
1945. A few days later Ruth Friedrich went along to the ‘Saarlandstrasse,
alias Stresemannstrasse, alias Königsgrätzerstrasse’ - her litany of purges
did not include the last one: the Hermann-Göring-Strasse - and found an
immense queue and the idea of ‘beggar’s opera’ right and fitting for the
Berliners. The line ‘Grub first, then morality’ seemed particularly apposite
to Ursula von Kardorff when she went at the beginning of October.81 The
Hebbel Theatre also honoured the poets and writers of the ‘System time’ -
as Hitler dismissed the Weimar period: Toller, Tucholsky, Brecht, Heinrich
Mann, Erich Mühsam, Lion Feuchtwanger, Leonhard Frank and Ludwig
Rubener.82 The Hebbel, however, was not all it seemed: it was in the
American Sector. Brecht was not altogether kosher as far as the Russians
were concerned. ‘Grub first, then morality’ did not suit them; they wanted it
the other way round. It did not accord with notions of collective guilt either.
Brecht would have to wait for his reconciliation with the Soviet
authorities.83
The most famous man of Berlin theatre, Gustaf Gründgens, was another
state councillor, and was suffering from the same blanket ban as
Furtwängler. Once again, the Russians took no notice, and restored him to
power as Intendant at the German Theatre. Gründgens might have been
deemed to have suffered enough already. He had been arrested as
Generalintendant of the Prussian State Theatres, because - it was said - his
Russian captors had believed his rank to have been a military one, and spent
nine months in Russian camps. Colleagues had finally persuaded Bersarin
that Gründgens was no soldier, but the difficulty then was to find him: the
Russians kept no reliable records of the people interned in their camps and
gulags. Once freed, he became a Russian baby and benefited from their
aegis, to the degree that they denazified him themselves on 27 April 1946,
and declared his character without a stain. Gründgens returned to work,
despite all attempts on the part of the Western Allies to prevent him. His
first role was in Carl Sternheim’s satire Der Snob. It was a great occasion;
‘an event, the most important by far in early post-war Berlin’s social and
cultural life’. Despite the poverty that raged all around, ticket-touts were
able to charge up to RM1,000 for a seat.84
Becher wanted to make the Soviet Zone a refuge for all writers. Authors
were given category-I ration cards. He rescued Rudolf Ditzen, tried to wean
him off the alcohol that was killing him and provided him with a theme for
a novel so that he might start work again. Ditzen’s young wife was addicted
to morphine, which was provided by another writer, the poet and physician
Gottfried Benn, who like Ditzen-Fallada, had made no attempt to emigrate
after 1933.85 The Ditzens were found a place to live in the Soviet enclave of
Pankow and were even brought toys and a goose at Christmas - all of which
failed to prevent a drunken Ditzen from having a go at the Muscovite Party
chairman Pieck at a drinks party that month.
The rehabilitation of writers like Ditzen in the Soviet Zone led to a set-
to with the Anglo-Americans and JCS 1067. Ditzen-Fallada was anything
but squeaky clean, and had earned a handsome crust under the Nazis. The
British denazifiers sniffed and the Western press cavilled. In Munich the
writer Hans Habe called one of his novels a work of fascist literature. This
led to difficulties in obtaining a licence across the Elbe and in resuming
contact with his publishers abroad.86 The Russians also cast a surprisingly
benign eye over publishing in their zone at first. For more than forty years
the Aufbau Verlag shone a beacon of light - sometimes bright, sometimes
dim - from the former premises of the bank Delbrück, Schickler & Co. in
the Französischestrasse.bv The house was created on 16 August 1945, under
Becher’s protecting hand. Becher had been planning new publications even
in his exile. Less doctrinaire than most of his colleagues, he believed that
the Germans had to admit collective guilt, but was less literal in his
interpretation of the Soviet canon. He ensured that the press received the
necessary licence from the Soviet authorities. The running of the press was
taken over by another Muscovite and long-term Communist Party member,
Erich Wendt, in 1947.
Becher was elected to the central committee of the SED in April 1946,
but some people in the Berlin Kremlin did not believe he was a Marxist-
Leninist at all. He certainly did not turn up to all the meetings. The ‘Tulip’
had abandoned him. As Tulpanov put it tactfully after Becher’s death, in
Berlin ‘Nothing remained of the modesty of the war years. He was at home,
completely at home, and he quite naturally expressed the view that he knew
better than we did how to order the German house.’87 Becher was still
protected by Vladimir Semionov and Dymshitz. Dymshitz told Tulpanov
that the Cultural Alliance was not meant to be an ideological organisation.
Tulpanov stayed his hand for the time being, but Alexander Abusch was
placed beside the poet in the organisation as the head of the ‘ideological
division’, to keep an eye on him. The SBZ made sure that the press could
dip into Russian reserves of paper and board for the book covers. Once
again it was Dymshitz who restrained the censor, Captain Filippov. In 1945-
6, only one book fell foul of the Russian authorities, and that was Günther
Weisenborn’s Berliner Requiem. Here not even Becher’s intercession could
persuade the Soviets to allow publication of a work that centred on the
misery of the Berliners in the first post-war days.88
The Aufbau Verlag’s earliest publications were Becher’s Manifest des
Kulturbundes zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands and the first
number of the cultural and political periodical Aufbau. Neither was
calculated to run counter to the ideals of the Russian Zone or to excite the
censor Captain Filippov. A year later the Kulturbund published its own
weekly in Sonntags, with a print-run of 200,000. The Aufbau, however, was
not just a printing press for radical texts: before the year was out it had
published eleven books, including works by Georg Lukács, Max Hermann-
Neisse, Theodor Pliever - whose documentary novel Stalingrad achieved
sales of 177,000, not including those sold under licence to West German
houses - and Heinrich Heine, all of them authors who had the distinction of
being banned by the Nazis. Heine was the only dead author, and the most
eminent of them all.89
Becher came to the conclusion that Aufbau should not be the publisher
of exile-literature, so in 1946 he changed the policy to include writers who
had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi years, but who were not
tarred with the brush of Nazism. They included Ernst Wiechert, Hans
Fallada, Gerhart Hauptmann and Ernst Niekisch. As Germany polarised at
the onset of the Cold War, some of the non-communist writers were pushed
out of the list, while others chose to remove themselves.
Censorship was formally introduced by the Russian authorities in
January 1947, but that year the Aufbau was still printing works by non-
communist authors such as Egon Erwin Kisch and Lion Feuchtwanger, as
well as Victor Klemperer’s study in the Nazi abuse of language, LTI. The
Aufbau only became wholly ideological in its policy once the Western
Allies put through currency reform. Among other things, the move meant a
serious loss of income for the East German publishing house. After 1948
the size of the editions diminished considerably. Many of the Aufbau
authors also belonged to the Cultural Alliance. Other members included
Anna Seghers, Ricarda Huch and the painters Otto Nagel and Karl Hofer.
One of Becher’s projects was to create a new artists’ colony at the
seaside resort of Ahrenshoop as the Cultural Alliance’s Summer Academy
on the Baltic. The Nazis who had been living there were flushed out and a
children’s home was created so that writers would be unencumbered with
parental duties. Becher wanted to build up a new, anti-fascist intellectual
elite.90 The desire to ‘make Germans out of Germans’ by reintroducing
them to their art and literature - some of which had been banned under the
Nazis - sadly gave way to more blatant Soviet propaganda after 1947 and
Becher was unable to contain the ideological tide. Performances of Schiller
and Mozart were replaced by Pushkin and Gogol, Chekhov, Rimsky-
Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. That might have been tolerable in its
way, but soon that too was pushed aside in favour of modern plays which
stressed the value of Soviet culture and the evilness of its Western
equivalent. Plays had to show the Soviet Union in a positive light. Even
Becher came under suspicion for a while until he saved his skin by writing
a few poetic encomiums to ‘the great Stalin’. The drama put on after 1947
was every bit as tedious as the American plays performed in the US Zone.91
On 21-22 May 1946 the Cultural Alliance held a congress with
Tulpanov present. Becher sailed close to the wind again. In a speech he
questioned Soviet policy: ‘demontage and reparations make most people
doubt whether they will still be able to lead a tolerable life’. He called for
more responsibility to be given to Germans to govern their own lives. The
speech did not go down well.92 He pushed on regardless. The first German
writers’ congress was held in the Hebbel Theatre (in the American Zone) at
the beginning of October. As many as 250 writers came, including Ricarda
Huch, but some of the fleurons still evaded his grasp: there was no sign of
the Manns, Brecht or Feuchtwanger. Becher called for unity - there was no
peace without it. A split Germany was not a Germany at peace. He revealed
his hand as an idealist for a united Germany. The congress was the first and
last of its kind.93 Two years later the Cultural Alliance held a congress
which brought together artists and writers from East and West to denounce
McCarthyist America.94 The Western Allies had already disowned Becher,
and they kicked him out of the Schlüterstrasse at the end of the year.
The crack was coming and many of the writers who had found a
Gemütlichkeit in the Soviet Zone were leaving: Pliever went to Munich,
Ricarda Huch to Frankfurt-am-Main. Becher was unfairly accused of being
behind the abduction of the journalist Dieter Friede. He was having to
defend the system more and more. When Eugen Kogon (who had been in
Buchenwald) compared the Russian camps to the Nazi ones, Becher told
him the comparison was absurd. The Western Allies refused him a pass to
travel in their zones. At the end of the year Pieck was describing Becher as
a ‘political ignoramus’. Becher offered to resign in December. His letter
was signed pathetically ‘Mit sozialistischem Gruss!’ (With socialist
greetings!),95 an unfortunate reminder of the Nazi formula. He had been
broken; he was one of the first great casualties of the Cold War.

OceanofPDF.com
 7
Life in the American Zone
They send us chicken feed and expect us to say
thank you.
Johannes Semler. Quoted in Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard, ein Politikerleben, Munich and Landsberg am Lech 1996, 51

The American Military Government in Frankfurt-am-Main was housed

‘in the conquerors’ part of the city’ in one of the sand-coloured sky-scrapers
beyond the main railway station which made up the HQ of IG Farben and
which appeared as an oasis in the middle of the rubble. You needed a
special pass to approach it and, if you were lucky enough to discover a way
in, you found it filled with what the American novelist John Dos Passos
refers to as ‘chicken colonels’bw or pen-pushers.
Dos Passos had lunch there in November 1945. A German maid called
them to the table. He ate venison steak and drank first-rate burgundy1 - a
very different bill of fare to that endured by the helots who milled about
outside, fetching twigs in prams to heat their stoves. They called the place
‘GI Farben Haus’ and gave it a wide berth. Visitors might catch an
occasional glimpse of the god of war himself, General Eisenhower,
accompanied by his Irish mistress Kay Summersby. With some
exaggeration excused by the passing of time she wrote that the IG Farben
building was ‘a small city in itself. It was very elegant - lots of marble and
fountains and indoor flower gardens, great curving staircases and very
luxurious offices, several tennis courts could have fitted into Ike’s office.bx
Bouquets of fresh spring flowers were placed in our offices every day.’2
The Russian Gregory Klimov had reason to visit the American HQ,
where he wanted to talk to Clay. He was struck by the slovenly attitude of
the black troopers, who had their cheeks wadded with gum. ‘The privates
stretched themselves out with their feet on the desk while the generals tore
around like messenger boys.’ Eventually he met a ‘long-nosed little soldier’
who turned out to be Clay - ‘He wasn’t a general, he was an atom-bomb.’3
James Stern was struck by the cute Americanness of it all, particularly the
mess, where the officers pecked at coleslaw and drank iced water.
Homesick Americans could also assuage their spleen with ice-cream.
Stern’s friends in Frankfurt were unimpressed by the authority that watched
over them, filling them with the breath of democracy. ‘Das Pharisäer
Ghetto’, they called it, ‘The Ghetto of the Pharisees’.4
Before he left Frankfurt Dos Passos had a chance to look round and sit
in on a local American Military Government meeting. ‘Frankfurt resembles
a city not so much as a pile of bones and smashed skull resembles a prize
Hereford steer.’ Yet people seemed to be rushing about the streets, doing
some sort of business: ‘They behave horribly like ants when you have
kicked over an anthill.’ At the meeting he heard the reports. Frankfurt was
receiving 2,000 new residents a week; flats were being revamped for them;
there had been five black-marketeers arrested and fish was arriving from
Bremen . . .5
America’s great battlefield generals in the Second World War had been
Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton. Patton captured the imagination not only
of the Americans, but also of the Germans, making him a sort of American
Rommel. He could hardly be restrained from going on to take Prague before
the arrival of the Red Army, using the Czech Uprising as an excuse. He
claimed, improbably, that the Russians would stop it - ‘These patriots need
our help!’ - when the Soviets had very largely conjured it up. What he
meant was that he wanted to take Prague for the West. He was no friend of
the Russians. When a Russian came to him with a pettifogging complaint he
shouted, ‘Get this son-of-a-bitch out of here!’ Zhukov was dismissed as a
‘comic-opera covered with medals’ and Patton was exceptionally proud to
report that he had drunk a Russian general under the table. In this respect
his views were similar to those of Mark Clark, or even Lucius Clay. ‘On to
the Oder!’ he intoned.6
His attitude to the Germans amounts to a metaphor for the American
occupation. At first he was toughness incarnate. He famously displayed his
attitude - and more - by urinating in the Rhine on 24 March 1945 (‘I have
been looking forward to this for some time’),7 and after throwing up at
Ohrdruf not only ordered that local populations should be punished for what
had gone on at the camps in their neighbourhoods, he wanted simple
American servicemen to see the concentration camps. His attitude soon
began to change, however, and it changed more quickly and went further
than any of his colleagues. Like Clay he had no truck with the no-frat order,
and he was clear in making a difference between Germans and Nazis: ‘All
Nazis are bad. But not all Germans are Nazis.’8
 He was made military governor of Bavaria and set up his HQ in the
former SS officer training school in Bad Tölz. On 22 September he blotted
his copy book by appointing Nazis to administrative roles within his
Bavarian command and marginalising their criminality - all in defiance of
JCS 1067. He backtracked a little, saying that he was employing Nazis
because he needed to retain his own men to fight, and because they hadn’t
yet found anyone better.9 A week later, Eisenhower relieved him of his
command.10 It may have been that Patton thought the authorities were being
ridiculously harsh about the run-of-the-mill Pgs, but there was something
more sinister besides. He was prone to antisemitic utterances. Morgenthau
and Baruch were exercising a ‘semitic revenge on Germany’, while the
Jewish DPs were beneath contempt, or ‘lower than animals’.11
He visited Camp No. 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in September, which
was said to contain among its nearly 5,000 inmates the ‘cream’ of the black
- Totenkopf - SS which operated the concentration camps, including guards
from Dachau and Buchenwald (those who had not been killed while the
prisoners were liberated). He was told that some of the people there were
not even Pgs, let alone criminals. At this moment Patton was heard to utter
in frustration, ‘It is sheer madness to intern these people.’12 There is no
doubt that he meant it. On another occasion he said, ‘We have destroyed
what could have been a good race . . . [and replaced it with] Mongolian
savages. All of Europe will be communist.’13 His conciliatory attitude
towards the SS prisoners must have led to the rumour that he had told the
camp commanders to behave more decently towards their captives. A few
months after his dismissal he was injured in a car accident on his way to a
pheasant shoot near Mannheim. He died in Heidelberg on 21 December
1945.14 There have been conspiracy theories.15
After Eisenhower went home, the American commander in chief in
Germany was General Joseph T. McNarney. His deputy was Lucius B.
Clay. Clay, who replaced McNarney as commander of European Command
in the spring of 1947, was an instance of one of Westpoint’s great strengths,
something that neither Sandhurst nor Woolwich has ever seemed capable of
producing - astute political officers. He was a southerner who had spent
seventeen years marking time as a first lieutenant in the engineers. He
missed action in the First World War and never commanded anything with
greater firepower than a desk. Yet he was one of a handful of outstanding
figures of the immediate post-war period. Together with his political adviser
Robert Murphy he refused to concede where his political superiors were
prepared for retreat on all fronts.
Clay had abandoned any pro-Morgenthau feeling he might have had by
26 April 1945. He was already keen to relaunch German industry.16 His
guru was James Byrnes, and he must have profoundly regretted the latter’s
departure as secretary of state in January 1947. Three months later Clay
confirmed his discipleship in a letter. Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech, in which he
announced a new deal for Germany, served as his model: ‘Every word that
you said at Stuttgart became a part of my “Bible” for Germany . . . It was a
living document of hope. I am not pro-German but I hope with all my heart
that in our political warfare with USSR we do not forget that here in
Germany we have 70,000,000 human beings to remember.’17 Clay realised
that his role was to make propaganda for the West. As he told General
Draper in Washington, ‘we do propose to attack communism and the police
state before the German people, whereas in the past we have confined our
efforts to presenting the advantages of democracy . . . Our political
objectives are to promote democracy which must mean to resist
communism.’18
At first civil administrations were created in a similarly haphazard way
to the Russians. The soldiers who occupied a town or village looked for
someone who was untainted by Nazism. In the writer Ernst von Salomon’s
local town they asked the parish priest, who suggested that the pre-1933
mayor had done a good job. The former mayor confessed, however, that he
had subsequently joined the Party. The Americans turned a blind eye to that
and asked him to appoint seven councillors. He told them frankly that he
would be hard pressed to find seven decent men who were not members of
the Party, so in the end they had a council that contained more Nazis than it
had during the Third Reich.19
America disposed of a large body of linguists. These were either
German Americans from the Mid-West or German or Austrian Jews - often
recent arrivals in the States - Czechs, Poles and other educated Slavs who
had lately established themselves across the Atlantic, or soldiers who had
simply acquired the language. There were German writers in uniform, like
Klaus Mann, Hans Habe, Stefan Heym and Georg Stefan Troller, most of
whom worked in intelligence or propaganda. Saul Padower, whose job was
to interview prisoners for the Psychological Warfare Department, spent his
early years on the Elbe. Padower thought his colleague Joe hailed from
Nebraska - although his fluent German should have rendered him
suspicious - but when they reached Bavaria Joe suddenly grew pensive. He
said his parents lived near by. They drove to his village and entered the
house. Joe poked an old man in a chair whose pipe dropped out of his
mouth. He asked the man if he knew who he was. The man had a stab, got it
wrong and tried again. This time he recognised the son who had left them at
the age of twelve: He turned to his wife who was knitting: ‘Hoer mal Du . .
. onser Sepp ist hier, doss ist onser Sepp!’ (Hey, listen you, our Joe is here,
that’s our Joe!).20
American linguists were not always so politically reliable - some 70 per
cent of US army linguists had German relations like Padover’s Joe-Sepp.
Salomon’s friend the Austrian lawyer Diewald was astonished to find that
the local American commandant was Chinese, but his amazement was
unsurpassed when he discovered that the man not only spoke perfect
German, but was a great admirer of the ‘As-As’, as he called the SS.21
Distrust, and the fact that many were only FOB (fresh-off-boat) Americans,
meant that only sixty-five out of 1,500 exiles figured in Military
Government, but that was still more than in the SBZ, and the British did not
believe in making the oppressed victors.22
James Stern arrived in Germany in the spring of 1945. As the aircraft
came in to land he glimpsed Koblenz and the Deutsches Eck, where the
Rhine and the Mosel meet. He was appalled at his first reacquaintance with
the country that he had first known as a teenager learning German:
‘Sections of a shattered bridge stuck up out of the mud-coloured water and
a castle sat perched on top of the vine-terraced hills. Then the plane
dropped, and we looked down into rows of burned out-houses - just shells
of houses, without roofs or rooms, You looked down between their four
walls to their ground floors, on which there lay either nothing or else a
mound of smashed brick, smashed sticks of furniture and garbage.’23
Carl Zuckmayer returned an exile from his native land in the autumn of
1946, just before the great chill. He had emigrated to Switzerland after his
works were banned by the Nazis. In 1939 he became an American citizen.
At the end of the war he was living on a farm in Vermont and making his
expertise on German life available to the War Office. In July 1946 he
became the head of the European unit of the CAD (Civil Affairs Division).
He resigned in May 1947, deeply disappointed by everything he had seen
during a winter in the land of his birth.24 The occupation was eighteen
months old, and he found that his former countrymen viewed the
Americans with mixed feelings. There was ‘a little hatred, some
disappointment and a bit of reasonable, grateful recognition’. What hatred
there was existed chiefly in the hearts of stupid Germans, he thought, men
and women who refused to take responsibility for what had happened.25
German attitudes to Americans were coloured by lack of contact; and lack
of contact meant lack of influence. The Americans tended to live in their
own compounds, or to requisition large sections of the extant middle-class
suburbs of the bigger cities. This was the case in Wiesbaden, where they
moved into the smart quarters on the heights above the town. The
compounds were often ringed by barbed wire, making them into little
fortresses announced by the legend ‘Entry Forbidden to Germans’ - a sign
with a conscious or unconscious allusion to recent German exclusivity
towards the Jews. The Americans bought from their own shops, went to
their own schools and spent the evenings in their own clubs. When they
wanted to know the news, they read it in the Stars and Stripes.
Zuckmayer believed it was important for Americans to go out and meet
Germans, particularly young Germans. Many German boys, he felt, were
reticent about making contact with Americans, but he held out hope for the
girls. By that he did not mean frat, but beneficial contact through discussion
groups, possibly on Sundays. The most dangerous group of Germans were
those who were most hard done by: those who remained homeless and out
of work, and who spent their days idling, looking for trouble, or for
something to steal.26
The American Zone had been fixed long before the end of the war, but
on 12 December 1945 the US increased the size of its holdings in Germany
by taking over the Bremen pocket from the British. The Americans needed
a port to unload supplies for their forces. The news was bad for the famous
Rathauskeller, as US forces adhered to their right to plunder supplies of
wine. Whether the British had helped themselves to the world’s most
famous collection of German wine first is not clear from the official history.
Nearly 100,000 bottles were plundered before an order was received to
deliver a further 300,000 to the American army. German civilians were no
longer allowed to use the cellar and it was turned into an officers’ mess.
American officers could buy wine, but no one restocked the cellar, and
because many American servicemen were not keen on German wine,
whisky was served under the ancient vaults.
 The Americans may have drunk up many vintages from the nineteenth
century, but they left the two most famous wines alone: the cask of
seventeenth-century Rose wine from the Rheingau and the twelve barrels of
eighteenth-century Apostle mosel were sealed and apparently left
untouched. On 15 October 1948 the cellar was handed back to the town hall
at a solemn ceremony at which the mayor, Wilhelm Kaisen, and the head of
the American military, Thomas Dunn, were present. There were many
toasts, so perhaps it was not so solemn by the end. All the Allies helped
themselves to wine. For the owners of prestigious estates and cellars, the
important thing was to protect the most highly prized bottles. At Maximin
Grünhaus on the River Ruwer, for example, the current owner’s
grandmother used to find an excuse to visit the building, which had been
taken over by the Americans. She was a corpulent woman, who used to
dress in wide skirts for the occasion. Once she had found her way down to
the vast formerly monastic cellars, she would pick up some bottles of the
best wines and hang them with cords under her clothes, thereby ferrying
them to safety.27
The cession of Bremen was an instance of Anglo-American
cooperation. In general the British and the Americans worked together from
the beginning, although the Americans often looked down on the British,
and vice versa. John Dos Passos cites an instance of a man requiring a spare
part for his Opel. He was told he needed to obtain it from the British Zone,
but it was no problem - ‘we have good co-operation on things like that’.
Someone asked about the French: ‘If anybody knows any way of getting
anything out of the French Zone they haven’t told me about it.’ Finally the
Russians were mentioned. ‘We don’t talk about the Russian Zone’ was the
answer.28
Due to clever planning and relocation, a lot of German industry had
survived. Clay put the figure as high as 25-30 per cent, but he did not think
the economy was ready to start up again in June 1945.29 The Americans had
come through the war with their wealth, and they turned their noses up at
the idea of demontage. Clay understood what that meant for his country all
too well: ‘rolling stock, livestock and agricultural implements required for a
minimum economy in Germany and which if not available would result in
increased imports into Germany, would militate against the ability of
Germany to pay reparations and inevitably result in calling on the US for
relief’.30
 Zuckmayer was able to witness the first steps taken to re-establish a
professional life in the ruins. He met a young dentist and was intrigued to
know how he would practise his skills in a broken city. He located the
surgery in an area filled with the usual heaps of rubble. The ground floor
was filled with heaps of masonry but an emergency staircase had been built
to give access to the first floor, and on the second a dozen families and their
sub-lessees were living in a few patched-up rooms. From there another
exposed stairway took him up to the remaining rooms of the house where
four dentists had established their practice. Only two of the rooms could be
heated, and the surgery’s hours were limited by the caprices of mains
electricity that came on and went off with distressing regularity. During the
hours that the surgery functioned, it was overrun by patients who lived in
the rubble all around. The nurses were sometimes engaged as assistants,
sometimes as builders helping to render the other rooms inhabitable. They
looked pale and thin, but not exhausted. When they saw Zuckmayer they
did not ask for cigarettes or food - they wanted books. The dentists
themselves had all suffered personal tragedies, their families killed in Allied
raids. One had lost a leg. One was waiting to marry his fiancée, who was
due to walk to Berlin from East Prussia. Her father had been killed and her
mother had committed suicide.31 For others, the full story was only then
coming to light. There was a cleaning lady who worked at Zuckmayer’s
Berlin lodgings, for example. She was actually a pastor’s wife, but the
clergyman had been called up by the Volkssturm in the last days of the war
and had subsequently disappeared. She had three children, two boys in their
teens and a baby boy born towards the end of the war. For their sake she
had to work. She had always insisted that her husband would return. Then
news came that his body had been found in the Grossbeerenstrasse in
Glienicke in the far north of the city, and had been positively identified. It
had lain among the ruins for nineteen months. The elder children had
known their father was dead. Once she had heard one of them praying:
‘Lord, make us loyal and brave to the end, like him.’ It was two hours’ walk
from Zuckmayer’s boarding house to the place where her husband had met
his end, but she still insisted on going, and going on foot. Until that moment
she had been utterly stoical about her fate. Now, finally aware of how
hopeless her position was, she broke down: she wanted to leave Germany -
‘this damned country’. Then she recovered her composure and set out on
her trek to Glienicke.32
 American GIs had been fed a good deal of propaganda at home and on
the way. They had drunk deep from the films of Frank Capra, and had read
the articles of Emil Ludwig, Louis Nizer and Siegrid Schultz; they had
heard Dorothy Thompson. They had been equipped with copies of the
Pocket Guide to Germany. From the first moment they walked on German
soil, they expected to be attacked by Werewolves. They were nervous of
Germans - civilians and soldiers alike. Despite all this, surveys at home
revealed that Americans were more anti-Japanese than anti-German:
German Americans were and are a sizeable part of the US population.33
The order banning frat contributed to the Americans’ brutality towards
the conquered Germans. Public opinion favoured punishment and
Eisenhower had made it clear that there was to be no billeting of American
soldiers with German families, no mixed marriages, no joint church
services, no visits to German homes, no drinking with Germans, no shaking
their hands, no playing games with them, no exchanging gifts with them, no
dancing with them, going to their theatres, taverns or hotels. The penalty
was a $65 fine or a court martial.34
Propaganda had taught the soldiers that Germans - particularly German
soldiers - were subhuman. In the autumn of 1944 the Americans burned
down the village of Wallenberg because they had encountered resistance. In
the spring of the following year they liberated their first concentration camp
at Ohrdruf. Eisenhower was quick to seize on the importance of the camp in
raising American morale and ordered his troops to visit it. Pictures from the
camps were also distributed to soldiers. The Germans were to be treated no
better than dogs. Indeed, in some instances dogs loomed large. A Frau
Sachse told Salomon of a potentially dangerous moment that occurred when
her four-year-old daughter had heard that an American officer’s pet was
called Hitler. ‘All dogs are called Hitler,’ he told her. The bemused child
replied, ‘My dog’s called Ami [Yank]!’ The mother dragged the child away
before the American could respond.35
Salomon gives a highly coloured account of the fate of his Wehrpass at
the hands of a GI - this was the document that showed he was officially
excused from military service. In his south German village a sentry post had
been established in a tent:
one day as I approached the tent [I] saw a man seated on the
stool[.] I automatically put my hand in my breast pocket. Sitting there
outside the tent, his eyes glued on a plump girl leaning on a fence, he
 was whistling a tune of the type the Americans called ‘long-haired’.
This man in his tight-fitting American uniform attracted my attention
because on his left lower arm he wore no fewer than three wrist-
watches, while his lapels were decorated with a great number of those
little gold brooches containing brightly coloured stones such as peasant
or servant girls wear in this part of the world. As I drew near him, this
man, scarcely taking his eyes from the plump girl, signalled me with
an inclination of his head to approach. He took my Wehrpass, glanced
though it in a bored fashion for a few seconds, and then, with a slow
and satisfied gesture, tore it in four pieces which he proceeded to drop
into the gutter. While doing this he did not for a moment interrupt his
long-haired whistling.36
James Stern met a heavily pregnant Frankfurt woman near Kempten in
the Allgäu. She was walking home from Rome, where fascists had allegedly
shot her husband. Stern asked her if she had come on foot all the way from
Italy. She said she had had a bicycle, but an American soldier had stolen it
together with her bag and luggage. The Englishman Stern refused to believe
the story - Americans did not behave like that. It must have been a German
in a stolen uniform.37 The Americans’ fear of Werewolves showed in their
treatment of the civilian population. They were allegedly at their worst in
Bavaria. The half-American journalist Margret Boveri thought the
Americans particularly ignorant of Germany, a sentiment that was
confirmed for her during her time in internment across the Atlantic. They
had not taken the time or the trouble to look into National Socialism, for the
good or the bad.38
The American authorities continued in their attempts to stop their
soldiers listening to the siren calls of Germans. When US troops entered
Frankfurt they were even prevented from speaking to the 106 remaining
Jews. Before the war there had been 40,000. The American Forces Network
put out anti-frat broadcasts: ‘pretty girls can sabotage an Allied victory’.
Some German women from Stolberg were prosecuted for attempting to woo
GIs, although the trial turned into a farce. The first dent in the armour of
American anti-frat policy came when the rule concerning small children
was relaxed. The next exception concerned public contacts with Germans.
The ban was lifted altogether on 1 October 1945. The last remaining stones
in the edifice were interdictions concerning billeting and marriages with
Germans.39
 German men, such as there were, received a cold shoulder from their
women. Poorly nourished, dressed in rags, penniless and morally suspect,
they did not have the heroic smell of the conqueror. Carl Zuckmayer spoke
to two pretty waitresses who worked in an American mess in Berlin.
Neither would have anything to do with German boys. As one put it, ‘They
are too soft, they are not men any more. In the past they showed off too
much.’ The other described German men as ‘worthless’.
The Americans were everything now, the Germans nothing. Natives
who were taken on by Allied garrisons sometimes succumbed to the
temptation to be high and mighty with their less fortunate countrymen.
Some of the worst were the waiters and waitresses who worked in the
messes. For them, the qualification for membership of the human race
began with the right to shop at the American PX or the British NAAFI.
Really superior beings were adorned with the officers’ pips of a foreign
army. Zuckmayer was naturally interested in this phenomenon. As the
author of the successful play Der Hauptmann von Köpenick he had
explored the old German, or rather Prussian, respect for uniforms, which
had made the reserve lieutenant the metaphor for an arriviste in Wilhelmine
society. Zuckmayer was not impressed by these sycophants who chewed
gum, and said he believed that an unreformed young Hitlerite made better
material for the new Germany than some toady who clicked his heels at the
sight of an American sergeant or captain.40 In Heidelberg he discovered that
there was no room at the inn for his driver, the latter being a German
working for the military government. The German hotelier told the writer
that his driver had to sleep in the car - he was not allowed to give beds to
Germans.41
When they weren’t working they went to a nightclub called Feminina in
the ruins of the Tauentzienstrasse in Berlin’s New West. There were
prostitutes there who served the Allied soldiers; the waitresses from the
mess were not averse to selling their bodies either. In the Feminina the girls
met men of the right sort who later took them off to a ‘black’ nightclub and
were prepared to shell out a few hundred marks for a bottle of champagne.
One of the girls would take her men home to the flat she shared with her
parents. Her father was a civil servant. Zuckmayer was anxious to learn
whether they knew what their daughter was doing - ‘Naturally, that is
unavoidable, as our rooms are too close to one another. But the old folks
say nothing, in the end I pay my own rent.’ The playwright reflected that
after the First World War the parents would have thrown their daughter out
on the street, or taken their own lives from shame. Now they just turn the
other way and pretend not to notice.42
Understandably, civilians were shot as Germany was invested in the
spring in 1945, either deliberately or by accident. This happened above all
in the east, but it was a relatively frequent occurrence in the west as well,
and the victims were not always Germans - sometimes soldiers succeeded
in killing some poor foreign worker as well. Billeting soldiers was an
anxious moment for families who were already harbouring refugees from
the devastated towns and cities. The invading armies appeared pitiless.
German armies compared the behaviour of French troops unfavourably with
their own in occupied France.43
When Margret Boveri finally arrived in Bamberg after her long trek on
2 September 1945, she was relieved to find the city largely undamaged.
Only the bridges were down. Also there was food to be had - bread, butter,
cheese and soup made from meat stock. On the other hand the Americans
drove around with a great show of force. Everywhere there were armed
guards.
Carl Zuckmayer came rapidly to the conclusion that American policy
was wrong-headed. In his report to the American War Office he advocated
removing the propaganda role from the army and reinvesting it in the State
Department. The problem was that he and his fellow left-wing German and
Austrian émigrés were falling increasingly under the suspicion of
communism, so that the American authorities tended to hold them and their
suggestions at arm’s length.44 There was also backbiting within the émigré
group in the United States, with the Manns retreating into their corner and
pouring scorn on the efforts of others to restore culture in Germany.
According to Zuckmayer, Thomas was not the worst of them, but he stood
too much under the influence of his hot-headed daughter Erika.
With time, however, the Americans ceased to heed the injunction
against frat. GIs empathised with the Germans, whose lives and values
seemed similar to their own. As one soldier put it, ‘Hell! These people are
cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs . . .’ The feeling that
contact with the natives could have its pleasant side was compounded when
American servicemen began to sleep with German women. Life came out
with a variant on the old line about fires and chimneypieces: ‘You don’t talk
politics when you fraternize.’45
 American policy on the ground changed with new directives from
Washington. On 6 September 1946 James Byrnes delivered his now famous
speech in Stuttgart that announced an about-turn in US policy towards the
conquered Germans. The Russians were now the principal enemy. On the
advice of George Kennan, the ambassador to Moscow, and Clifford Clark,
the special adviser to the president, who continued to warn of Soviet
Russia’s expansionist desires, Truman decided to fight the growing threat of
communist tyranny. The president’s speech of 12 March 1947 marked the
‘official’ beginning of the Cold War.by The phrase derived from the title of a
book published that year by Walter Lippmann.bz On 7 July George Marshall,
who had succeeded Byrnes as secretary of state, replaced the controversial
Directive JCS 1067 of 17 July 1945 that forbade frat. Directive JCS 1779
advocated the creation of a ‘stable and productive Germany’. The
Morgenthau Plan had also been laid to rest.
The émigrés were almost all disappointed by the American policy.
Marxists like Franz Neumann felt that the Americans had also failed to
exterminate the ghost of National Socialism and that they would never
succeed in introducing stable democracy. John Herz, who worked with
Neumann at the Office of Strategic Services, was equally critical: ‘Too
ambitious, because it started with the nonsensical idea of showing up every
German by means of the Fragebogen; and not thorough enough, because at
the same time we were content to give accreditation to the mayor and the
priest - who were doubtless Nazis - and allow them to walk away.’ Herz had
advocated the drawing up of lists of Germans who were 95-100 per cent
sure anti-Nazis.46
Other exiles were harder hitting about American policies. Volkmar von
Zühlsdorff had emigrated to Austria in 1933, departing for America later.
He left with Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein who ran a republican youth
group in Brandenburg for the Social Democrat Reichsbanner organisation,
which vowed to defend the Weimar Republic from its enemies. Zühlsdorff
wanted to help with the rebuilding of Germany. He expressed his outrage in
correspondence with his fellow exile Hermann Broch, the Austrian novelist.
For Zühlsdorff the Potsdam Declaration was a major crime that had been
based on the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Nazi-Soviet Fourth Partition
of Poland: ‘Cutting off large, purely German regions is no less a crime than
the earlier annexation of Czechoslovakia. The complete expulsion of the
German population is a ponderous, international crime.’ Broch was not
opposed to such views, but pointed out that protest against Potsdam meant
war with Russia. The crime could never be resolved. Zühlsdorff felt that
Nazism was burned out by 1945, that the German people were ready for a
complete change. Instead they had been treated to ‘the propaganda of hate’.
What they needed was ‘liberation, reason, peace and human rights’.47
Dorothy Thompson had been close to the hanged resister Helmuth
James von Moltke during her time as a journalist in Berlin. She knew
Germany and its people well, she was a fanatical opponent of collective
guilt, and after the war she continued to press for reasonable policies. Her
views resembled those of the writer Ernst Jünger in his essay Der Friede.
Directly after the war she toured central Europe with her husband, the
Prague-born painter Maximilian Kopf. She was particularly struck by her
visit to Dachau, where she was able to view the commandant’s house and
see that he possessed an edition of Goethe’s works, loved children, music,
art and literature, and lived, to all extents and purposes, a normal family
life.48
The Russians linked food distribution to work, encouraging the business
of clearing up. In the American Zone no one worked because there was
nothing to buy. Soon that position reversed itself and the Russians fell
behind. Russians were also notorious for their light fingers - wristwatches
were always at risk, but the French and the Americans were not so loath to
steal the odd souvenir, or even a watch or three. American official theft was
carried out on a massive scale when it came to seizing scientists and
scientific equipment. This received governmental sanction as ‘Operation
Paperclip’. During their few months in the famous lens-city of Jena, the
American military government or AMG nabbed eighty scientists between
22 and 25 June and obliged them to make their way to the safer, US areas of
occupation in the west.49
The Anglo-Americans were not uninterested in plunder. Margret Boveri
thought the Russian reputation was unfair. True, they had stolen a good
deal, but the Western Allies stole objects of greater worth. The British
received the best press. They were the ‘quietest, slowest and most
understanding’.50 Sometimes they paid. James Stern recounts a visit to a
black market in Kempten where he was received by a dirty greasy little
black-marketeer who tried to sell him some sweet Mavrodaphne. ‘We are
not ladies . . . and we want wine . . .’ said Stern firmly. Through an open
door, however, he saw something more interesting: some cases of 1939
Pfalz wine. A second man said they had been ordered by the Military
Government, but thirty marks seemed to do the trick and the Englishman
went off with a couple of cases.51 The Americans and the Russians were
also trading. James Stern got wind of exchanges of gems for cases of
cognac or American cigarettes.52
Nor were all the rapes committed by the Russians. In Salomon’s local
town, he claims half a dozen women were raped as the Americans took
possession of place and people. Nor was his indictment so far fetched - the
figures bear him out. Rape charges in the US army rose steadily, from 18 in
January 1945 to 31 in February to an enormous 402 in March and 501 in
April, once military resistance had slackened off. With peace the rapes
petered out: there were 241 reports in May, 63 in June and 45 for each
month thereafter. About a quarter to a half of these reports resulted in a trial
and a third to a half of the trials to a conviction. A number of American
servicemen were executed, proportionally higher than any of the other
occupying powers.53
One reason there were fewer reports of rape was that there was far more
consensual congress. German girls would have sex for food or cigarettes.
You didn’t court a German woman with flowers - a basket of food was
more welcome. The Americans were attractive to the Germans, because
they had not suffered the deprivations of war in the same way. Few were
crippled, and they were taller and more athletic. Every now and then the
Germans took it out on the women who spurned them in favour of the
occupiers. It is not hard to imagine the feeling of impotence of the rare
young German who saw his girl making for the American garrison on the
promise of sweets and cigarettes. Zuckmayer believed that this and the
brutal confiscation of property by the military made the Americans
unpopular. He alludes to an incident in the Munich suburb of Harlaching in
the perishing cold of December 1946.
The hatred of the conqueror, however, had no political overtones, and
was by no one politically exploited; and if there was grumbling about the
behaviour of the Amis, there were always people to remind the malcontent
that he would be shot in the Russian Zone, worse fed in the British, and face
more corruption in the French. The American Zone was the easiest place to
obtain cigarettes as well.54 The liaisons naturally resulted in children. It is
estimated that 94,000 Besatzungskinder or ‘occupation children’ were born
in the American Zone under military government. The Germans joked that
at the next war they would not need to send soldiers, just uniforms. These
children - wanted or unwanted - often caused distress, as there were no
paternity orders issued against the servicemen. The situation must have
been alleviated in December 1946 once marriages were finally permitted.
The American soldiers were not slow to show their enthusiasm. There were
some 14,000 GI brides brought home from Germany, a figure only
exceeded by Britain, which saw nearly 35,000 of its girls go home with the
American troops. For Ruth Friedrich and her friends these German brides
were ‘rats leaving the sinking ship’.55
There were 42,000 American blacks in the forces of occupation. They
were particularly enthralled by the Fräuleins - women who were more
prepared to sleep with them than people back home. They were, as one
writer has written, ‘early and enthusiastic fraternisers’.56 During the first
years of the occupation. between two and three thousand mixed-race babies
were born - about 2 to 3 percent of the Besatzungskinder. In Bendorf on the
Rhine the Russian Elena Skrjabina encountered ten ‘half negro’ babies that
had been brought in for adoption: ‘These soldiers quite willingly go with
German girls, the girls are available for all types of rarities such as coffee,
chocolate and so forth.’ The only problem was that the arrival of the
coloured child caused anger in the girl’s family, hence the fact the children
were being offered for adoption.57 Another problem was VD. An American
source related that over three-quarters of the black solders were infected.
Relationships between black soldiers and German girls caused friction with
the natives, and with white American soldiers too. The consequence was
‘bitter hatred among German men. Many of our own [US] soldiers feel
almost as strongly about it.’58 In Asperg in Bavaria there was an incident at
a dance when a fight broke out. A white soldier was killed and four others
wounded. Three blacks were sentenced to death as a result.59
German racial tolerance clearly surprised American blacks. A black
musician came to see Leo Borchard in Berlin and talked to him about Bach.
Borchard sent him off with a score. The musician told Borchard, ‘We are
the most despised people on earth. We are even more deeply despised than
the Jews, or . . . or the Germans.’ He said that people came to his concerts
not to hear him play, but to see the novelty of a black man playing classical
music.60
With time and with the increasing unease between the Western Allies
and the Russians, the Americans sought to win over the hearts and minds of
the conquered Germans. From a policy of forbidding fraternisation,
American soldiers were actively encouraged to look after vulnerable
Germans, reserving their wrath only for the more obvious culprits. In Bad
Kissingen, for example, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia was able to
come together with a Captain Merle Potter to create the first German
American Club in 1946. Louis Ferdinand was the grandson of that famous
militarist, Kaiser William II, who would certainly have failed the test of the
Fragebogen.61
Political Life
While the British were keen to see the Germans issued with a good,
workable constitution that would prevent them from falling into bad ways
in the future, the Americans were obsessed with the need to introduce their
brand of government: every German was to become a good democrat. Once
the Germans had democracy, they would never be tempted by
totalitarianism again. The fact that they had already had democracy, and
that it had dramatically failed in 1929, seems to have been unclear to people
such as James Stern’s colleague ‘the Professor’.62 This attitude led to a deal
of absurdity in the Americans’ pursuit of fairness in the newspapers they
licensed: the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung had to offer leading articles from all
four main political parties, including the communists. One of the movers
and shakers in post-war Bavarian politics was Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ Müller.
Müller returned from Capri in the middle of June 1945 having established a
relationship with the Americans that would stand him in good stead. The
American authorities allowed him to establish a base for anti-Nazi
politicians in Munich that would form the nucleus of a new political party.
The men met on Wednesdays. To observe the proceedings the Americans
sent along Dany Weiss, a Jew who had lost his entire family in the east. The
idea was to establish a party that would cross Christian lines, and not be
entirely Catholic like the old Centre Party.ca Müller also recruited the
leading political figure in Franconia, Adam Stegerwald, and the trades-
unionist Franz Wegner.63
Müller’s ideas echoed those of Jakob Kaiser in Berlin: Germany needed
to learn from the primitive Christians. If their teaching was followed there
would be no need for communism or socialism. It was an idea he had
developed in the Hotel Paradiso in Capri, in conversation with the
American naval officer and Mormon, Dale Clark. These sun-baked
discussions sired the Christlich-Sozial Union or CSU.64 A few monarchists
were easily pushed to one side. Their leader, Eugen Graf Quadt-Isny, had
unfortunately had himself photographed in SS uniform in the company of
the leading Nazi ‘beasts’ after the dissolution of his own Bayrische
Volkspartei or BVP.65 The Americans licensed the CSU on 8 January 1946.
The Americans insisted that denazification be carried out with a
toughness absent from the other zones. Fritz Schäffer, a former head of the
BVP and an old Dachauer, was their first nominee as minister president of
Bavaria. He then fell foul of the Americans because he failed to pursue
former Nazis with the right degree of enthusiasm, even if they already had
46,000 in the can by 3 October 1945. Clay thought him insufficiently liberal
and had him sacked.66 Not even Müller was immune, he who had been in
Flossenbürg and Dachau, had almost been shot, and had witnessed some of
his closest friends being beaten, tortured and murdered for their opposition
to Nazism. As a former member of military intelligence he had belonged to
a ‘tainted’ organisation. Through the new minister president, the
‘remigrant’ Dr Wilhelm Hoegner, and his ‘special minister’ for
denazification, the communist nominee Heinrich Schmitt, Bavaria
established ‘Spruchkammer’ or special courts. They were staffed by non-
professional judges reflecting the parties in power in the Landtag, or local
parliament. Müller’s view was encapsulated in a joke that was doing the
rounds at the time: a former street-sweeper passes a man ineptly cleaning
the pavements on his old beat. As he stares at the new cleaner, the latter
shouts out, ‘I have to clean the streets because I was in the Party!’ The
former cleaner shouts back, ‘I am not allowed to do it, because I was in the
Party too!’67
One outstanding figure who joined Hoegner’s government was Ludwig
Erhard. He was from Fürth in Franconia, making him a sort of Bavarian.
After a chequered academic career as an economist he found himself
unemployed when the Americans came in and volunteered his services in
his home town. He had no Nazi track record and he was popular with the
Americans. When Schäffer’s government fell in October he was appointed
minister for trade. He was not a member of any party and his career in the
Bavarian government came to an end a little over a year later. He went back
into academic life as an economics teacher at Munich University.68
The Americans fished him out again to make him one of seven
members of the Economic Council in autumn 1947. Erhard became
president of the Special Commission for Money and Credit. Germany had
somehow to stabilise its currency, which had no credibility. The
Reichsmark, which was still circulating, was causing terrible inflation.
Erhard’s idea was that the quantity of money in circulation needed to reflect
the quantity of goods on offer in the marketplace. This way prices could be
made constant and there would be something to buy.69 Erhard’s
formulations became the basis for the Homburg Plan for a market economy
which was published on 18 April 1948. Erhard himself became the head of
the economic administration in Bizonia after Johannes Semler’s well-
publicised faux pas in describing the American food aid as ‘chicken feed’.70
Culture
Culture became a way to reinstil notions of civilisation in the renegade
Germans, but at first it was also used to punish them. One of the high
temples of German art, the Festival Opera House in Bayreuth, was singled
out for special treatment. After all, in American eyes Richard Wagner was a
prototype Nazi, his music was banned, his house destroyed by bombs and
his daughter-in-law threatened with a labour camp. In the circumstances the
natural thing to do was to give the Bayreuther some real, democratic
culture: variety shows and revues were put on for the troops in the same
building where - the summer before - weary and invalid troops had watched
Siegfried or Götterdämmerung.
When the American authorities put on an opera, it turned out to be Die
Fledermaus. Meanwhile the Festival Restaurant was baking between
12,000 and 15,000 doughnuts a day. A programme for 12 December 1945
shows that the Bayreuth Symphony Orchestra were billed to perform
‘Music You Love to Hear’, conducted by the elderly operetta composer
Paul Lincke, who had written hit songs like ‘Berliner Luft’ before the Great
War. Not all Americans, however, were unmoved by the heritage of the
Wagners. The critic Joseph Wechsberg found his way into the Opera House
and saw that the stage was set for Die Meistersinger. He sat down in Hans
Sachs’s chair and sang the monologue ‘Wahn’ (delusion) to an audience of
one - the carpenter who had come out to listen.71
Wieland Wagner hoped to enlist Toscanini to come to the aid of the
theatre and of his grandfather’s legacy. The Italian conductor had been
volubly anti-fascist and was in good odour in the United States. The Opera
House was an ‘unprotected shrine’.72 As for the Wagner home, Wahnfried,
the ruined house provided a backdrop for American dances and summer
parties. There were reports that GIs had been seen dancing the jitterbug on
Wagner’s grave.73 With time it became clear that the Wagner legacy could
be saved, providing it was purged of its flirtation with Nazism. Oskar
Meyer, the new mayor of Bayreuth, ensured that some serious, non-
Wagnerian operas were performed under the sacred roof, even if he wanted
to send Winifred Wagner to a labour camp for five years. The three children
who had remained behind in Germany were all tainted by Nazism to a
greater or lesser degree. There remained only the émigré Friedelind.
If the Americans were not as active as the Russians in promoting
culture, their zone was not a complete backwater. Prince Franz Sayn-
Wittgenstein remembered seeing As You Like It performed by the
Shakespeare Company - the forerunner to the Royal Shakespeare Company
- in Wiesbaden. Later he saw Carl Zuckmayer’s play, Des Teufels General,
based on the life of the Luftwaffe general Udet who committed suicide in
1941. Sayn-Wittgenstein became so enraged at the scene when the general
is confronted by an SS officer that he leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Hauen
Sie doch dem Schwein eine in die Fresse!’ (Go on, give the pig a punch in
the gob!). His neighbour sought to calm him down in the local dialect: ‘Ei
beruige Se sich. Es ist nur auf der Biehne’ (Come on, calm down. It’s only a
play).74
Part of Zuckmayer’s job was to report on the state of theatre in the
American Zone. He was impressed by what he encountered in Berlin: ‘with
what seriousness, passion and enthusiasm theatre is performed in this
undernourished and freezing city, how much theatre is fought for, attended
and loved, spoken about and criticised - the whole gamut of artistic events
and projects theatrical and operatic - and, thank God, free cabaret as well,
[cultural life in Berlin] reveals a spiritual, intellectual and physical vitality
that could not be stamped out by robbing the people of liberty for twelve
years nor by the consequences of a collapse without parallel, nor by
dividing [Germany] into four zones.’ Not only did Berliners appear to live
and breathe theatre, they were prepared to forgo much of their paltry
livelihood to attend. In the west you could see people with money to spare,
but in the north-east, 20 per cent of the population attended performances,
although the entrance ticket cost them as much as they would pay for a
small amount of pork dripping or a few grams of butter on the black
market.75
 Looking into theatre meant liaising with the actor-director Benno Frank,
who headed the music, theatre and cinema section of the ICD or
Information Control Division. His assistant was the Eric Clarke who in
civilian life had been the administrator at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York. One, fairly unsuccessful policy was to make German troupes act
translations of American plays that were seen to have propaganda value, but
which offered no criticism of American life. Some of these were of
undoubted interest, such as those by Thornton Wilder, others were less so -
Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, John C. Holm and George Abbott’s
Three Men on a Horse, Paul Osborn’s On Borrowed Time, Samuel
Behrman’s Biography, William Saroyan’s The Time of your Life, Clarence
Day’s Life with Father and Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine. The latter
caused grumbling in Vienna when it was put on by Ernst Lothar with his
wife, Adrienne Gessner, playing a leading role. It was a play about the
opposition to Hitler, but the audience felt the author was uncertain of her
ground.
The heavy-handedness of Allied theatre policy led to a conference in
Stuttgart at the end of February 1947, when it was decided to allow German
theatre more freedom to perform plays it chose and to direct them the way it
wanted. There had been a successful interaction between the French and the
Americans in Stuttgart, which is not far from the ancient university town of
Tübingen in the French Zone. Newell Jenkins, the far-sighted American
theatre officer for Baden-Württemberg, had encouraged these exchanges.
Jenkins and William Dubensky were also successful in ‘liberating’ the
theatres in Stuttgart and Wiesbaden that had been requisitioned by the
American army. They were turned over to their original use. There had also
been a successful exchange between the Americans and the Russians in
Berlin, but that was once again due to Dymshitz. In the American Sector it
was the Hebbel Theatre that led the way, while the Russians encouraged
performances in the Volksbühne in their own sector.
The usual physical problem beset theatres in the American Zone: 60 per
cent of them had been destroyed in the bombing. Added to the lack of
premises was a paucity of actors and directors, many of them having either
voted with their feet in 1933 or perished in the camps. Theatre was
nonetheless best represented in the American Zone. The Western Allies
controlled 70 per cent of the theatres, and in Bizonia the Americans led the
British by six to four. A little bit of invention was necessary. In Munich the
theatre had been destroyed, and performances took place in the Fountain
Court of the badly damaged royal residence. One thriving part of the
Munich theatre was the Schaubühne cabaret which was directed by Erich
Kästner, the author of the Berlin novel Florian. The Americans made him
editor of their Neue Zeitung.76
Zuckmayer also filed a report on the film industry in the American
Zone. It appeared that Germany had become a dumping ground for
Hollywood, and not enough was being done to help revive the native
German film industry that had come under Goebbels’s control during the
Nazi years and had naturally been used chiefly for propaganda. The
German people lapped up the films they had been deprived of during the
Third Reich - that is, all except the bigwigs, who had continued to watch
them in their specially constructed home cinemas.cb German films were
subjected to censorship, sometimes as a result of over-sensitivity on the part
of the American authorities. An example of this was a film on the life of
Louis Pasteur. It showed a group of Russian refugees being injected with a
rabies vaccine. The Americans thought it would remind people of the
experiments carried out in the camps and cut the scene. Such films that
were made under the American aegis were often as tainted with propaganda
as those of Dr Goebbels. They familiarised German audiences with the
problems Jews faced in reaching Palestine, or the living conditions of DPs.
Zuckmayer felt they should sponsor a film on the German opposition.77
Zuckmayer was present at a performance of his most popular play Der
Hauptmann von Köpenick in Heidelberg, and was surprised to find a small
number of young men wolf-whistling. After the play was over he
challenged one of them to explain his behaviour. The play had been
particularly despised by the Nazis because it had poked fun at the Prussian
respect for army uniforms. Zuckmayer discovered that the whistlers were
mostly ex-officers and students, and in no way standard louts. They had
gone to voice their disapproval of plays that devalued German ‘culture’.
Zuckmayer’s role was also to promote American culture and
democracy, and he invited the hecklers to come to see him, and discuss
whatever it was that annoyed them so much about his play. In Bavaria he
was engaged to speak to some of the older children in a Gymnasium about
the benefits of democracy. He was wary, however, of presenting his talk as
such, for fear that the children would see him as a mere spouter of
American propaganda. The children were by no means taken in by the
American profession of disinterested benevolence. They wanted to know
why half the seminars at Munich University had been closed. They also
revealed that some of the children had been threatened that they would get
their comeuppance and suffer ostacism and physical violence once the
occupation was wound up.78 The author had to duck the ‘Gretchen
Question’cc on his many appearances on the podium. Germans were well
aware of the position taken by Thomas Mann, and of the intransigently anti-
German pose struck by Mann’s daughter Erika.
Zuckmayer proved a remorseless critic of American policy until he was
brought down by a heart attack in December 1948. He had always been
adamant that he would not go to Germany to boss Germans around while
posing as an American officer. He wanted to bring the Germans books,
especially those (like his own) that had been banned since 1933. He was
convinced that love was a stronger emotion than hate, and that the Germans
needed encouragement, not the lash. He intended to make a film about the
Nuremberg trials, but in this he was thwarted and pipped at the post by
Stuart Schulberg, who headed the film division of the ICD in Berlin. He had
disapproved of the way the trials had been run, and felt that the real trials
took place in the hearts of Germans.79
There was at least as much enthusiasm for books as theatre, and the
dramatist contended that if the publishers were merely given enough paper
they could instantly sell everything they brought out. The Americans sensed
this and created libraries in the form of twenty-six Amerika Häuser and 137
reading rooms. In Berlin-Zehlendorf, Zuckmayer discovered the publisher
Peter Suhrkamp, who had run the illustrious house of Fischer before the
war, and was to create Suhrkamp in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1950, one of the
most influential publishing houses of post-war Germany. Suhrkamp had
been allowed to move from Potsdam in the Russian Zone and set up in
comparative comfort, although the frigid winter of 1946-7 hit him as hard
as everyone else, especially after his pipes froze. Suhrkamp had had
anything but an easy war. An opponent of Hitler, he had been tangential to
the so-called Solf Circle around Hanna Solf, the widow of the last imperial
foreign minister Wilhem Solf, and had been denounced by the same Swiss
Dr Reckzeh whose testimony resulted in them all being thrown into
Ravensbrück concentration camp and the execution of two of the set, the
Red Cross nurse Elisabeth von Thadden and the diplomat Otto Kiep. He
had been badly treated in the camp and sustained serious injuries to his
back, as well as a near mortal inflammation of the lungs and the skin
covering his ribs.80
The American Zone also silently (or almost) played host to Group 47,
the first post-war school of German literature. The group was the brain-
child of Hans Werner Richter, whose attempts to create a magazine Der
Skorpion were snuffed out by the American censors. The aim was to turn
their backs on everything the Nazis might have taught them: existentialism
was fashionable, and the name of Sartre a leitmotiv in their discussions.
Magical realism reared its head in the writings of Wolfdietrich Schnurre.
One of those early movers and shakers was Nicolas Sombart, the son of the
famous sociologist Werner Sombart. Every six months the members met to
read their works in progress in various bucolic spots around the zone. Very
soon the group began to attract some of the bigger names in post-war
German literature: Alfred Andersch, Martin Walser, Günter Grass and
Heinrich Böll.81
It is probably not surprising that one particular man in an American
uniform was very interested in discovering illustrious fragments of German
culture, and that was W. H. Auden. One night James Stern returned to hear
Beethoven being performed in the gute Stube of the house he shared with
the British poet in Nuremberg. It was a Herr Ledenfels, once the most
famous performer in the city. Auden had picked him up somewhere on his
rounds.82

OceanofPDF.com
 8
Life in the British Zone
No German is persona grata with Mil. Gov.
A British officer. Quoted in Charles Williams, Adenauer, London 2000, 296

British Military Government

The British ‘element’ in the occupation of Germany was required to
administer 23,000,000 souls. It was formally governed by a junior minister,
the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who was responsible for both
German and Austrian affairs as head of the Control Office for Germany and
Austria, or COGA. Originally this fell under the Civil Affairs Division of
the Ministry of War, as the Foreign Office disowned it. Later, when Lord
Pakenham was minister, he was given a room at the Foreign Office, which
brought him closer to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, physically at
least. The first minister was John Hynd, a former railway clerk and trade
unionist, who had only been an MP since 1944. It seems his choice was
suggested by the fact he had taught himself German. For obvious reasons
his department was called ‘Hyndquarters’.1
He was shunted on to pensions and replaced by Lord Pakenham, a
quondam Oxford don who was to achieve household fame as the Earl of
Longford, campaigning against pornography and in favour of prisoners. The
left-wing British publisher Victor Gollancz thought Hynd a good fellow:
‘There is no humaner man in British public life,’ but it is clear that he also
thought his humanity of no avail when those above him refused to change
British policy.2 He had less time for Frank Pakenham, who made a speech
in the Lords that was ‘a model of feebleness and futility’.3 The real problem
was not the quality of the men the government put in to look after Germany,
but the amount of power accorded to them to put things right.
According to his own short and self-deprecating account, Pakenham
believed that he had been appointed because he was a Catholic, and a
majority of the Germans in the British Zone shared his religion. This is
unlikely to be true: although there is a majority of Catholics in the
Rhineland, they are not super-numerous in the Lutheran bastions of Lower
Saxony or Schleswig-Holstein. He was appointed in the spring of 1947: ‘I
was filled with passionate Christian desire to see justice done to this broken
people.’ He was taken to a school in Düsseldorf where some of the three
million children in the zone were fainting from hunger. He told them,
‘Never believe the whole world is against you, you’re absolutely right to be
proud of being German.’ Pakenham later claimed that the government
reined him in after that, but he nonetheless visited Germany twenty-six
times during his period of responsibility.4 He did not convince everyone that
his intentions towards Germany were utterly benign, however. Franz Sayn-
Wittgenstein was outraged by a conversation with him in Frankfurt during
which he appeared to extol the virtues of the Morgenthau Plan.5
If Hynd and Pakenham lacked real power it obviously resided with the
foreign secretary, Bevin, and his deputy Hector McNeil, the minister of
state. There was precious little sympathy for the Germans at the top. Prime
Minister Clement Attlee was quite open about it - he disliked the lot of
them, but he and his wife had once had a nice German maid. Bevin had not
forgiven the German socialists for voting war credits in 1914: ‘I try to be
nice but I ’ates them really,’ he said.6 The first military governor was Sir
Bernard (later Viscount) Montgomery, with General Weeks serving as his
deputy. Weeks established a precedent, intentional or otherwise, of planting
men with industrial experience in positions of power in occupied Germany.
Apart from a distinguished record in the First World War, he had only ever
been a part-time soldier, and had risen to become chairman of Pilkington’s
glassworks in 1939. During the Second War he had been appointed to the
General Staff, becoming its deputy chief in 1942, ‘a unique position for a
citizen soldier’.7 It is unlikely that his dual experience was overlooked in
his selection. Britain’s attitude to post-war Germany was to some degree a
reflection of its penury. It wanted the fastest possible economic recovery
prior to Germany’s being granted independence.8
Montgomery was replaced by the former head of Fighter Command,
Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto Douglas, in 1946. Douglas had been head of
BAFO, the British forces of occupation. Like Weeks he was a university-
educated man and had sung in the Bach Choir before the war. He had also
been in the war industry, having quit the RAF during the inter-war years to
work for Handley Page. Douglas presided over the dismantling of the
Luftwaffe and oversaw the British entry into Berlin. He expressed a desire
to reintroduce ‘normal life’ into Germany, and although one of his first
duties was to approve the Nuremberg sentences, he had grave doubts.9 He
resigned in October 1947 over the Bückeburg affair.cd
 His successor was General Sir Brian Robertson, whose father Sir
William had been military governor in Germany in 1918. Robertson was
born in Simla, and on his mother’s side he came from a long line of Indian
Army soldiers. India and the Raj provided some of the inspiration for the
British in Germany. The British sense of innate superiority over their
former enemy was not lost on the Germans, who grumbled that they had
been turned into a Kolonialvolk - a colonial people like the Indians. At the
beginning, some Germans had even connived at a subservient role,
presumably because they believed they would be treated better that way.
There was a move by some politicians in Hanover to reinstate the old
kingdom, divorced from Great Britain when Queen Victoria ascended the
throne.ce That way Hanover would be part of the British Empire, and not of
a defeated Germany.10 Robertson had been educated at the same
Charterhouse School as Weeks before attending the Royal Military
Academy at Woolwich.cf He was commissioned in the Royal Engineers - a
background he shared with Clay. Unlike Clay, however, he had seen service
in the First World War and emerged with an MC and DSO. Between the
wars he had taken leave from the army to become managing director of
Dunlop in South Africa and had befriended Jan Smuts. His role in the
Second World War was largely administrative. He became deputy military
governor in succession to Weeks. After the Bonn government was created
in 1949 he stayed on as UK commissioner for a further year. Bevin worked
well with Robertson, who kept him abreast of what was going on by weekly
letters. The official history says Robertson was a ‘firm but compassionate’
interpreter of British policy.11
Montgomery, Douglas and Robertson had the power of life and death
without any interference from Westminster. They ruled with the aid of the
Control Commission Germany, or CCG. This was jestingly known as
‘Charlie Chaplin’s Grenadiers’ or ‘Complete Chaos Guaranteed’. It had a
gigantic staff of nearly 25,000, five times as many as the American
contingent, and was reportedly venal, overpaid and riddled with scandal.
British officers serving in occupied Germany were sent to Bletchley for a
course. According to George Clare there were superficial lectures on
German history and classes on the function of the Control Commission. The
potential officers were a mixed bunch, including many women speaking
excellent German. Only about a fifth of the recruits dealt with administering
Germany; the rest was made up of senior officers who served in its ‘swollen
bureaucracy’.12 In April 1946 the men were joined by their wives and
families, further inflating the household and leading to the requisitioning of
yet more undamaged homes. In Münster only 1,050 houses remained
undamaged of a total of 33,737. The occupiers promptly requisitioned 445
of them - over 40 per cent.13 After Indian independence Germans feared that
they would receive all the former ICS (Indian Civil Service) men, some of
whom might in fact have been an improvement. There were some able
administrators in the CCG such as the banker Sir Vaughan Berry in
Hamburg, who had studied in Germany and knew the country and its
people.14
Victor Gollancz objected to a Herrenvolk mentality he saw among
British officers, and to the contrast he saw between the accommodation and
food in the officers’ mess and the miserable, half-starved hovels outside.
Much of Germany was uninhabitable. The military governor had a modest
HQ in Bad Oeynhausen, where all the inhabitants had been cleared out of
the spa town to make way for the British, and a country house in Melle; but
there were plans to build something more grandiose in Hamburg. It was to
be a vast military and social headquarters, presumably to rival the Soviet
HQ at Karlshorst or its American counterpart in Frankfurt. The complex
was to include hotels and clubs, as well as lodgings for married and
unmarried officers. Had it gone ahead, an estimated 38,200 Germans would
have lost their homes. The district governor, Vaughan Berry, was
vehemently opposed to the project, and, given the state of British finances
at the time, it must have seemed like so much pie in the sky.15
Au fond the British believed more in re-education than in denazification
and the story of the re-establishment of schooling and university education
in the zone was one of its great claims to fame. Robert Birley took a couple
of years off between the headmasterships of Charterhouse and Eton to
reorganise schools in the British Zone. As an historian he was well aware
that there was no precedent for the Allied position in Germany: ‘We
occupied a country without a government and from the outset our
occupying forces had not only to prevent the revival of a military danger,
they had to rebuild a community.’16 Birley was evidently shocked by the
godlessness of the Nazi state. He had been to Brno, and seen the chapel in
the Spielberg fortress above the city. The SS had turned it over to paganism.
The altar had been mounted by a giant swastika containing a copy of Mein
Kampf and an immense eagle decorated the wall in the place of a reredos.
The British needed to change the minds and outlook of the people who did
such a thing, and who had suffered a ‘complete moral collapse’. Birley
stressed, however, that the German malaise was not an isolated
phenomenon but another manifestation of the ‘diseased condition of
western civilisation’.17
Nothing was easy: the three Rs took a back seat to the three Fs (food,
fuel and footwear) and the three Ps (pens, pencils and paper). Birley
thought shoes the greatest of these.18 He took heart when he saw a German
desire to get on. In cities laid waste by bombing he saw young men as old
as twenty-three trying to pass their Abitur to enter a university. They were
so many ‘Peter Pans’, utterly ignorant of anything other than what their
National Socialist instructors had told them. Many had been in the
Wehrmacht. These were prevented from entering higher education before
February 1947. And yet the British were forced to impose a numerus clausa
until 1949. The lack of places was down to the wrecking of the buildings by
bombing and the long-drawn-out process of screening all university
teachers though the Public Safety Branch (the name perhaps an
unintentional evocation of the French revolutionary terror).19
Birley wanted to restore the love of freedom and a readiness to accept
personal responsibility. The most important men for the task, he thought,
were philosophers, and he pointed to the sterling work done at St Michael’s
House near Hamburg. It may have been a coincidence, but at the precise
moment when Wehrmacht men were finally allowed to enter the
universities, the dean of the faculty of philosophy at Cologne University
appealed to those who had emigrated to return to the department.20 It was
not so much the philosophers, however, who tried to reform the German
mind as historians like Birley and Michael Balfour, who had been a friend
of the late Helmuth James von Moltke of Kreisau. Balfour was made
director of Information Services within the British Zone in 1946. He made
it clear that he needed to move quickly: ‘We are not in Germany forever.’21
As it was, he lasted only a year.
One of the most successful British efforts at re-education was Wilton
Park in Buckinghamshire, a former POW camp which had been turned over
to residential courses for Germans run by Heinz Koeppler, Koeppler was a
German who had left his country to study at Oxford in 1933, and had never
gone home. The style was derived wholly from Oxford and Cambridge -
something utterly new to even the most privileged students at the German
universities. They were waited on at table, received tutorials and were
allowed to discuss issues freely. The idea was to make men ready for public
life and to create a new non-Nazi elite. ‘Respectable’ Germans such as the
socialist Kurt Schumacher, Bishop Dibelius, Pastor Niemöller and
Archbishop Frings also addressed the students.22
Another distinguished historian, the expert on the Reformation A. G.
Dickens, was editing the Lübecker Nachrichtenblatt, aided by the inevitable
Viennese Jew.23 There weren’t so many German-speakers around, apart
from these specialised historians. Another purveyor of British civilisation
was the British Council. Its well-meaning, bumbling approach is caricatured
in Wilfrid Hyde White’s role in The Third Man. The screenplay for the film
was written by Graham Greene, whose brother Hugh Carlton Greene ran
the NWDR radio in occupied Germany. The latter expressed a view in total
opposition to that of Vansittart, one which was closer to Balfour: ‘I am here
to make myself superfluous.’ He too thought the Germans merely needed
re-education. Kaye Sely and George Clare interviewed German
denazification candidates in Greene’s office, while Greene sat on the sofa to
make sure they were fairly treated. Greene had saved a little treat for
himself: a magnificent car, the Maibach Tourer that had formerly belonged
to Karl Wolff, Himmler’s chief of staff.24 Greene took over from Rex
Palmer as broadcasting controller to the British Zone. Palmer had been a
disaster - he had run children’s radio before the war, and it showed.
The British needed to take stock of their zone. They had the largely
empty farmlands of Schleswig-Holstein, the industrial and farming areas of
Lower Saxony, and the industrialised but also highly cultural region of the
Rhine and the Ruhr. The area had been very badly damaged by bombing.
Cologne was 66 per cent destroyed, and Düsseldorf a staggering 93 per
cent. Aachen was described as a ‘fantastic, stinking heap of ruins’. The
British reordered their domain, creating Rhineland-Westphalia by
amalgamating two Länder. The French responded with Ordonnance 57
which gave birth to Rhineland-Palatinate in August 1946. Naturally
suspicion was aroused again over the motives of the French. People
imagined they were trying to create independent German states before
annexing them to France.25
The most glamorous posting was Berlin. The military train took the
soldiers into Charlottenburg Station, which was their introduction to the
city, if they were not lucky enough to fly into Gatow. British soldiers in
Berlin wore a flash on their sleeve. It was a black circle rimmed with red -
‘septic arsehole’ they called it. British Control Commission’s headquarters
in Berlin was in ‘Lancaster House’ on the Fehrbelliner Platz. George Clare
described it as a ‘concave-shaped grey, concrete edifice’ in the style of
Albert Speer. Under the British Control Commission there were
detachments in each of the boroughs under British control, together with a
barracks and an officers’ mess. There were messes all over the British
Sector. When George Clare reappeared in officer’s garb on his second tour
of duty, he was assigned to one on the Breitenbach Platz which was large
and lacked social cachet, and resembled a Lyons Corner House. British
Military Government was a large yellow building on the Theodor Heuss
Platz. This was the former Adolf Hitler Platz in Charlottenburg, the name of
which was changed to Reichskanzlerplatz until it was realised that Hitler
too had been chancellor. On the other side of the square was the
Marlborough Club, where officers could be gentlemen. For the Other Ranks
there was the Winston Club.26
Germans had to receive permission to enter HQ Mil. Gov. This was not
issued to former Pgs. The rules were bent only if the person was of interest
to the British - that is, a scientist, a pre-1933 politician or an expert
technician. A German editor seeking permission to start a magazine (such
as Rudolf Augstein with Der Spiegel) or an entrepreneur looking to put on a
theatrical performance had to take his suit to the Berlin Control Unit in the
Klaus Groth Strasse near by. The path to redemption in all cases was the
Fragebogen. The forms had to be filled in, and any membership of Nazi
organisations checked out. With time minor Nazis were let off the hook. As
far as soldiers were concerned, the Wehrmacht members who were not
already languishing in a POW camp were fine. The SS was divided into
grey and black. Blacks (Totenkopf) were interned, greys (Waffen-SS) were
released. Eventually the British authorities learned that separating black and
grey was not so cut and dried.27
The life of an interrogator was filled with unexpected surprises:
charming young men who turned out on closer examination to have been
inveterate Nazis, and rebarbative Prussian militarists who, it transpired,
were anything but. Clare had a visit from the widow of the General Carl-
Heinrich von Stülpnagel who wanted to join her daughter in the British
Zone. He eventually recalled that this general was the one who had locked
up the Paris SS and the Gestapo on 20 July 1944, who attempted suicide
when the Plot failed but managed only to blind himself, and who was
gruesomely hanged with the rest. Frau von Stülpnagel would not hear of
special pleading: her husband was just a German, doing his job.28
Despite the lordly nature of their approach, the British had a reputation
for being more decent people than the other Allies, but that did not mean
they were without sin. Len Carpenter, an escaped POW who had holed up
in the Neue Westend of Berlin until the arrival of the Allies, ran a
successful business as a black-marketeer and pimp (unpaid, he assures us)
to the British occupation forces.29 In November 1947 Speer described one
of the British guards in Spandau who had arrived drunk for work: ‘He
boasted to his fellows of the vast amount of beer he had drunk, and hinted
at pleasant company.’ The party had ended only three hours before. Speer
lent him his bed so he could sleep it off and patrolled the corridor lest a
superior officer appear. The man was still unsteady on his feet hours later.30
One of the oddest briefs given to the British army occupying Germany
was to punish its very soil. This was the case with the island of Heligoland,
which had been British for most of the nineteenth century, but which had
been acquired by the Kaiser in 1890 in what he saw as his first foreign
political coup.31 The island had been heavily armed during the ‘Kaiser’
Reich, and in Nazi times it bristled not only with guns, but also with
submarine docks. The RAF destroyed most of the defences as well as the
town in a raid of 18-19 April 1945. On 11 May, the Royal Navy made a
foray across the waters of the Baltic to see what was left. Despite the
pulverising the island had received during the war, the U-boat shelters were
undamaged, as was the network of tunnels under the island together with
the diesel trains that plied them.32
At Potsdam it was agreed that Germany was to be completely disarmed
and that all German fortifications were to be destroyed. For the British that
meant primarily the naval forts on the Frisian Islands and Heligoland.
British High Command calculated that they would need 48,400 man hours
and 730 tons of explosives.33 They began to prepare for Operation Big
Bang. When this occurred two years later, on 18 April 1948, it was a literal
case of over-kill. Having decided presumably that the previous estimate had
been too low, the British set off 7,000 tons of munitions in what was
described as the ‘greatest non-nuclear explosion in history’. A huge
‘cauliflower’ of smoke shot up 8,000 feet from the catacombs 180 feet
below the surface of the rock, but once the skies cleared it was apparent that
instead of eradicating the hated island, they had destroyed a mere 14 per
cent of its surface.34
For several years the RAF and the American air force based in Britain
continued to use the island as a bombing range. Preparations were made to
test the British atom bomb there and trials were made of chemical
weapons.35 The idea of using the island for nuclear tests was finally
abandoned out of consideration for the population of Cuxhaven, which was
only thirty miles away. The German fishermen who had previously caught
lobsters off the islands were at last allowed to return to their homes in 1952,
largely as a result of a campaign launched by a young theology student,
René Leudesdorff.36 The RAF had proved very reluctant to hand over their
toy.
Many Germans - above all German women - went to work for the
Allies. The sculptress and later nun Tisa von der Schulenburg had fled her
native Mecklenburg, leaving behind her the ancestral manor of Tressow and
Trebbow, the Schloss where she had lived with her husband, C. U. von
Barner. Tisa settled in Lübeck in the British Zone and went to work as a
secretary to Heinz Biel, the half-English industry officer in the Military
Government. She endured the endless complaints and applications, the
dispossessed seeking to repossess, the petitions to restart local businesses
from Niederegger Marzipan and Schwartauer Marmalade to the aeronautics
company Dornier and the porcelain manufacturers Villeroy and Boch.
Her boss did not impress her. Had he been purely German, she thought,
he would have rushed to join the Party. Like most other thinking Germans,
Tisa was infuriated by the Fragebogen. She had flown in the face of her
noble, Nazi father, married a Jew and gone to England before the war to
become an artist.37 She left to serve as a social worker in a British military
depot in Glinde near Hamburg. There were two thousand German civilians
there, ‘flotsam and jetsam from every party and province. The former
leading lawyer and a man who had been consul in Australia mucked in with
merchants and workers; it was only about survival, income and bread.’ The
only question they asked was ‘How do I survive?’38 The British had
promised to give her officer-status and she was responsible to the major
commanding. That Christmas the British tried to inject a bit of party-spirit
into the depot: ‘the English [sic] failed to understand that we had no desire
to dance, we had no desires at all; not to dance or to sing’. The soldiers fed
hundreds of children. One of the sergeants told Tisa: ‘The kids bit into the
oranges and ate them skin and all, like apples.’ Tisa not unreasonably
concluded that these children had never encountered oranges.
The situation deteriorated with the weather that winter. The zone had
never been self-sufficient. Even before the war it had produced only half the
food it needed.39 Two workers froze to death for want of warm bedding.
Tisa managed to locate 200 blankets for 2,000 people - a find that was
bound to cause more trouble than it cured. At midday the workers received
a thin, evil-smelling soup. An hour later they were hungry again. A hundred
men were suffering from dropsy. Big men weighed no more than fifty kilos.
One of the British officers allowed them to take the leftovers from the mess
- although this was highly illegal. They procured an oven, milk and potatoes
and in time they were able to lay on a supplementary meal at midday. The
men began to put on weight again. They were over the worst.
Sometimes they walked the fourteen kilometres to Billstedt where there
were trains to Hamburg. Trams took them through vast expanses of ruins.
Even four years after the end of the war the sight of Hamburg moved the
American diplomat George Kennan to reflect on whether it had all been
worth while: ‘Here for the first time, I felt an unshakable conviction that no
momentary military advantage . . . could have justified this stupendous,
careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up
laboriously by human hands over the course of centuries for purposes
having nothing to do with war.’40
It was this barren townscape that struck Victor Gollancz during his time
in Hamburg. He stayed at British officers’ messes and marvelled at the
copiousness of the menus; he went to the town hall and drank rare bottles of
‘magnificent hock’ which a careful concierge had rescued from the Nazis.41
In a hovel he came across the stoic spirit of the north German as they eked
out their days under a picture bearing the legend ‘Lerne leiden ohne zu
klagen’ (Learn to suffer without complaint). It showed a picture of the
Emperor Frederick, who died of throat cancer ninety-nine days into his
reign.42
The British were not frank about demontage. In theory they washed
their hands of it, but demontage was carried out in the British Zone on
behalf of client states. German industrial installations were shipped out to
Greece and Yugoslavia - which received equipment from Krupps.43
Demontage was controlled by the Allied agreement of 24 January 1946
which established the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency, or IARA. America
had ended the Lease-Lend Agreement six months before and presented
Britain with a colossal bill, demanding cash on the nail. The British press
was antipathetic to demontage, and the Americans were shocked at every
British attempt to remove plants. Some of it could be written off as ‘booty’
which was not controlled by IARA, and in other instances it could be
excused by the need to dismantle Category I War Plants (that way they were
able to take home much-needed naval installations).44
The Soviets were desperate to grab what was left of the Ruhr. The
British were supposed to hand over 10 per cent of what was produced. After
1948 those deliveries were stopped. Krupps in Essen was the property of all
the Allies, but Clay in particular was keen to keep the Soviets out. Parts of
the Krupps empire had fallen to the Poles in Silesia and the Russians in
Magdeburg. Jet planes, wind tunnels and other interesting bits of military
equipment were lifted out of the country as quickly as possible. In other
instances Category I was stretched to include plants that might later offer
competition with British industries. The Germans smelled a rat and
suspected that they were seeing the implementation of the Morgenthau
Plan. This led to attacks on CCG officials. Once or twice the British
actually started up a valuable branch of German industry. One case in point
was Volkswagen in Wolfsburg. The Nazis had intended their ‘People’s Car’
or ‘Kraft durch Freude Auto’ (Strength through Joy car) to become the
property of every decent German, and money was docked from their pay for
that purpose, but by the time the war started only two had been built and the
factory was turned over to war work. The British started the project up
again, with Major Ivan Hirst at the wheel, and made 10,000 ‘beetles’ before
October 1946 largely for their own needs. The car became ‘the wheels of
the British occupation’.45
Gollancz watched demontage in the Ruhr and in Hamburg Docks. The
removal of Hoechst from Dortmund threatened to ruin what was left of the
city. In Hamburg large parts of the Bloem and Voss shipyard had been
blown up. It was a short-sighted policy that removed the possibility of work
for the starving people, and wantonly destroyed useful property. Despite
statements by Hynd, Germans were being turned out of their homes. There
was a terrible shortage of space: in Düsseldorf the average home amounted
to 3.2 square metres. Meanwhile the British swanned around in an ugly way
(although they did not force the Germans to walk in the road like the
French). ‘The plain fact is that there are two worlds in Germany today, the
world of the conquered and the world of the conquerors. They meet at the
peripheries, but their hearts beat in an inhuman isolation.’46
Tisa von der Schulenburg’s sister-in-law Charlotte found a moment to
return to her late husband’s family house at Trebbow while the British still
clung to the westernmost reaches of Mecklenburg. She reported to the CO,
whom she found in one of the guest rooms looking out on to the lake. Over
his head hung a portrait of Charlotte herself and the children. She waved the
pass she had obtained in Plön. ‘Ah, the lady in the painting,’ he responded
laconically. Everything had been moved by the refugees and soldiers and
nothing looked right any more. She was not allowed to take the children’s
beds, but she did find the family porcelain - Meissen, Nymphenburg and
Schlaggenwald - and by a ruse was able to enlist some soldiers to carry it
out to the lorry she had got hold of. She found the beds she was looking for
in the forester’s house, as well as Fritz-Dietlof’s armchair. She was able to
retrieve a typewriter, a gramophone and some of her bedlinen. That night
she and the children ate their frugal soup off the finest china. The next day
was 28 June and the British yielded their toe-hold in Mecklenburg to the
Russians.47
Ten-year-old Karl-Heinz Bohrer had seen little of the occupying armies
since he was ‘liberated’ by American troops at Remagen. At the end of
1945 he was taken to Cologne to visit his estranged mother and the doctor
she lived with. He had left the Rhineland city in 1943. Now it was
completely transformed. In the centre not a single building was intact. As
there was no shelter in Cologne, he went to live in southern Westphalia. At
once he was aware of the British. They had already put their stamp on
German life, in the same way as the other occupying powers. He recalls the
pleasure of tinned sardines, white bread and black tea. The British army
seemed to him to be more professional and ‘more military’ than the
American. Its soldiers were calm, where Americans were noisy; he felt he
had nothing more to fear. At school they learned English.
In the winter of 1946-7, Karl-Heinz was taken to the cinema for the first
time by his Irish grandfather. He saw Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in
English, with German subtitles. He cried with happiness at the end, and had
to be taken three times. He fell in love with the English language, which
became an important factor in coming to terms with occupation. Looking
back on the time he felt that the British pursued a sensitive but unflashy
cultural policy in their zone.48 For him, growing up in the west, a new
orthodoxy was developing. Intellectually the period was informed by
Jaspers, Habermas (‘German history starts at Auschwitz’) and Professor
Heimpel of Göttingen. Hartwig von Hentig and Georg Picht proved
influential pedagogues. Education was much discussed and the writings of
Schiller invoked. Germans were not to get into the same mess again. The
Nazis were temporarily cleared out of the universities, but those
establishments remained otherwise unchanged until 1968. For him the
outstanding political figure of the time was Carlo Schmid. What was to
become West Germany sought to identify with the West.
The Beginnings of West Germany in the British
Zone
In the Rhineland the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, had
been forced into retirement by Hitler’s men. He went on prolonged
gardening leave, and resisted all attempts to become involved. He was
suspicious of the July Plot against Hitler, but was imprisoned all the same.
The Nazis had known what they were doing in the last months of the war.
They executed some 5,000 people who might have created the cadre for a
post-Hitlerian Germany. Very few of those killed had any direct
involvement with the July Plotters. The bloodbath was intended to create a
political vacuum.
Cologne’s proximity to France meant that Adenauer was liberated rather
earlier than any politician in Berlin. American tanks were seen in his home
village of Rhöndorf as early as 15 March 1945. The following day two
American officers arrived at Adenauer’s door to ask him to resume the
office of mayor of Cologne. To their surprise he refused: he had three sons
away at war, and he feared reprisals. He must have been aware of what had
happened to the mayor of Aachen (he had been murdered). In his heart of
hearts, however, he might have already been eyeing up a bigger job: that of
post-war German leader.49 Adenauer was put under some pressure to change
his mind. One who wanted him to take up the offer was Josef Frings, the
German primate and archbishop of Cologne. He was interested in the idea
of rebuilding the city, the medieval core of which had been smashed by the
1,000-bomber raid. The ever-cautious Adenauer agreed to run Cologne
once hostilities were over, and he took up his old job on 3 May. In his
earliest statements he was already seeking to make Prussia the scapegoat for
the failure of German democracy, even if it had been as a Prussian that he
had been elected mayor of Cologne and a member of the Herrenhaus (or
House of Lords) in 1917.
He was flattered that the Americans appeared to hold him in such high
esteem and had placed him at the top of their ‘white list’, although - as a
recent biographer has pointed out - this might have had something to do
with the fact that his name began with A.50 After a while, the Americans
lost their glamour in his eyes: he found them childish and was relieved
when authority in the region passed to the British on 21 June. His relief was
premature, however - there was to be no repeat of the more courteous
attitudes of 1918. The ban on frat was still in force, denazification was on
the cards, and - as one British officer put it - no German is persona grata
with the military government.51 What is more, the British were the slowest
of the Allies to allow the Germans to express themselves politically.
Montgomery made a promise to restore party politics on 6 August 1945, but
it was not until 29 September that parties became legal again.52
The French may have started as the poorest and least regarded of the
victorious Allies but it turned out that their plans to atomise Germany
tallied with the eventual solution to the problem. What they were proposing
for the Rhineland had possibilities: there you could erect a state that was
Catholic, free-market driven, anti-Prussian, federalist and dominated by the
Rhenish upper-middle classes. The European and German division along
ideological lines was no more or less than a foundation to build on. The
German state would be made in the west and act as a sponge that might
absorb the other parts of Germany at a later date. This was summed up by
Wilhelm Hausenstern, ambassador to Paris at the time of the founding of
the Federal Republic: ‘Adenauer conceived the Federal Republic on the
Rhenish, or even Lower Rhenish Axis.’ The Rhine was the natural centre
point for the new Europe, the link between Germany and western Europe. It
was an ore that was a conglomerate ‘Catholicism and liberalism, north and
southern Europe, French lifestyle and Prussian virtue’.53
The mayor wanted to readjust the balance, above all by concluding a
sort of concordat with the French. Prussia had had only a marginal role in
the Holy Roman Empire, and Adenauer now chose to make his vision of
Charlemagne’s Europe into the foundation stone for Germany’s future.
Prussia had become a monster to him - he attributed to it all the vices of the
Nazis, despite the fact that Prussia (which had amounted to two-thirds of
pre-war Germany) was notably under-represented in Nazi Germany, and
that most of the leaders of the movement came from the Catholic south and
west. One of the most pungent - Joseph Goebbels - was a man from his
beloved Rhineland. Adenauer was singing a tune that appealed to the
Control Council: they too were keen to make Prussia the black sheep that
had led Germany astray. It was a convenient argument anyway, because
much of the Prussian heartland had been lost to Poland and Russia at
Potsdam. Adenauer could clearly put it on with a trowel if he had to - but he
didn’t have to. On 25 February 1947, the Control Council issued its Law
No. 46: ‘The Prussian State which from early days has been a bearer of
militarism and reaction in Germany has de facto ceased to exist.’ Its
remaining agencies and institutions were scrapped in ‘the interests of
preservation of peace and security of peoples and with the desire to assure
further reconstruction of the political life of Germany on a democratic
basis’.54
It seemed that there was a possibility of an agreement between
Adenauer and the Allies, but the British frustrated him at every turn. It was
then that he turned his attention to the French. They too were victims of the
Allies, perhaps - their vanities were also wounded. But for de Gaulle, they
might have had to brook the ignominy of military rule from London. The
Yalta Conference had carved out a small corner of Germany to be ruled
from Paris. Adenauer pinned his hopes on its expansion to cover Cologne,
as de Gaulle was agitating for a larger slice of the cake. In the summer and
autumn he had a number of meetings with the French arranged by his friend
the Swiss consular official ‘Uncle Toni’ Weiss. The idea was Germano-
French economic co-operation in the Rhineland. He suggested that
Germany should be broken up into three small quasi-autonomous states.
Naturally he would be the ruler of the one that centred on the Rhineland.55
Weiss’s undiplomatic wheeling and dealing caused anger in Berne, and
Adenauer’s flirtations annoyed the British. They may have known little
about his meetings with the French, but they were aware that he was
holding talks with politicians in Bad Godesberg and Königswinter aimed at
creating the political party that would be the Christian Democratic Union,
or CDU, of the post-war German right. His adversary was the head of the
British Military Government in North Rhine Province, Brigadier John
Barraclough, who thought Adenauer increasingly unreliable politically.
Barraclough was a tough soldier, but not necessarily a shrewd political
analyst. On 6 October Adenauer was summoned to appear before
Barraclough and two other officers in Cologne and was denied even the
right to sit down in their presence. They read out a letter dismissing him
from office. He was to be banned from all political activity and was to leave
Cologne as quickly as possible. This put a temporary end to his dalliance
with the CDU, for which he was an obvious leader. Adenauer felt grossly
insulted.56
The British clearly believed that Adenauer was incompetent. Cologne
lagged behind the rest of North Rhine when it came to the business of
clearing up and sanitising the city. As the director of Military Government,
General Gerald Templer, put it, ‘The city was in a terrible mess; no water,
no drainage, no light, no food. It stank of corpses.’57 The decision to sack
Adenauer was regretted almost immediately. In Berlin, Noël (later Lord)
Annan, then a colonel serving in the Political Division of the Control
Council, saw that an awful gaffe had been committed, and both he and
Captain Michael Thomascg were anxious to mend fences. Perhaps fearing
loss of face, Barraclough was not prepared to reinstate Adenauer, but very
soon the British allowed him the opportunity to indulge in politics again,
albeit only within the limits of the city of Cologne. During the crisis, Annan
went to see a badly shaken Adenauer. He broached the issue of the
politician’s attitude to Britain. Adenauer replied that he was not anti-British,
but that ‘he found difficulty in seeing Britain as a European state’.58 As a
result of the interview, the ban on Adenauer’s political activity was
completely lifted, and he was free to come and go in Cologne whenever he
pleased. He could now play his role in the founding of the CDU.
Adenauer had rivals for the time being. Some of the July Plotters
survived and were popular with the German people and, more important,
with the Allies. The Christian trades-unionist leader Jakob Kaiser, who
based his ‘Christian socialism’ on the Sermon on the Mount,59 the former
Centre Party politician and minister Andreas Hermes, and Adenauer’s later
foreign policy adviser Herbert Blankenhorn had been part of Helmuth
James von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle, which had looked forward to the dawn
of a new Europe. At Moltke’s Schloss at Kreisau in Silesia they discussed
dropping notions of hegemony in order to dig out the roots of war. Germany
had been perceived as a European counterweight to the United States as
early as 1942.60 The French right had also listed towards the idea of a united
Europe during the Collaboration; they recognised the fait accompli of
occupation.
 Kaiser’s views did not prevail in the infant CDU, however, because he
saw the French as the enemy. The French consistently opposed German
unity, which they saw as an attempt to restore the venomous Reich.
Adenauer, on the other hand, envisaged working with the French from the
beginning.61 Kurt Schumacher, head of the SPD in the British Zone, thought
the French the enemy for different reasons: they wanted to bleed Germany
of its resources.62 Andreas Hermes was in an uncomfortable position,
fronting the fledgling party in the Russian Zone. Adenauer’s task was to
assert his authority in the British Zone and to take control of the Party.
Hermes was expelled from Berlin for opposing the Soviet policy on
land reform. That meant that Adenauer’s chief rival was Kaiser in Berlin.
Kaiser was backing the wrong horse in the old Reich capital, which was to
be sidelined and virtually eliminated from post-war German politics.
Adenauer was not averse to using pure fabrication to do down his political
enemies. He claimed that Kaiser had been holding talks with Soviet
officials and former Wehrmacht generals, which was enough to discredit
him with the Party. Adenauer’s position was shored up by the arrest of 600
members of the Party in the Soviet Zone in August 1947.63 In the end it
proved very easy for him to grab the presidency of the CDU in the British
Zone and see off any possible challenge from Hermes.
On the left, Adenauer’s rival was Schumacher, a First World War
veteran and front-line socialist politician. He came from Culm in West
Prussia and was the very model of a Protestant Prussian. His mentality
contrasted with that of Adenauer. There was none of the cosiness of the
Rhineland. The Culmer was always on the battlements, watching out for the
arrival of the enemy. He had lost an arm fighting for Germany only to be
rewarded by nine years, nine months and nine days in Hitler’s camps,
including an eight-year stint in Dachau. His solid principles and experience
during the Third Reich made him one of the very few German politicians
with spotlessly democratic credentials.64 He felt very much alone at first: his
colleagues, the fighters, were all dead. The concentration camps, the
bombing and the 20 July Plot ‘have swallowed so many of us’.65
He was soon seen as a potential post-war German leader, but he fell by
the wayside when West Germany moved to the right. As the leader of the
SPD in the Western zones, he might have been expected to find favour with
the ruling Labour Party in Britain, but he was not impressed by British
socialists. The British nonetheless felt responsible for him. When he went to
Berlin in February 1946 he was provided for: ‘The visitor from Hanover
travelled in a British aircraft, slept in a British bed, had a British car with a
British escort at his disposal and was for the duration of his stay in Berlin
accompanied by a British officer with a revolver at the ready.’ This British
patronage was later used by Adenauer to suggest that Schumacher was a
Labour Party puppet.66
The SPD was splitting in two. The leader in the Soviet Zone, Otto
Grotewohl, was taking his faction into the new communist-socialist front,
or SED. It was not a road Schumacher was prepared to take. He had seen
the communists wreck Parliament in 1932, at the time of the
Preussenschlag which brought down the Prussian state government and
opened the way to Nazism. His soulmate in Berlin was Gustav Dahrendorf,
another ‘red’ who had done time in a concentration camp, and a bitter
opponent of the SED. The British had been hedging their bets. At one stage
they were wooing Grotewohl, or ‘Jugo’ (der junge Gott because of his
imposing build and striking looks). The Russians were using both stick and
carrot: to bring over the socialists. Dahrendorf’s son Ralf, later a British
peer, remembered the carrot: it came in the form of ‘pajoks’, food parcels at
Christmas.67
In Berlin that winter Schumacher had talks with Hynd and the political
advisers Sir William Strang and Christopher Steel, and with Clay and
Murphy. The British thought the Russians would kidnap him. He was
evidently a man who inspired protection. Dachau had wrecked him
physically, a fact that was further compounded by his hunger strike at the
concentration camp. His assistants combed the black market for milk and
butter which they thought would assuage his delicate stomach. Yet
Schumacher did little to help by his diet of black coffee and cigarettes.68
This austerity was not everyone’s cup of tea. Like many Prussians,
Schumacher lacked charm. That was where Carlo Schmid came in. He had
the social graces Schumacher lacked, and could bring the SPD into
Germany’s shabby drawing rooms. The half-French Schmid was deemed to
be at home anywhere: talking about Baudelaire, writing poetry, dealing with
points of law as a professor of jurisprudence or eating with the former rulers
of Württemberg off the finest china.69
Schumacher may have taken up the British offer of protection, but he
was bitter about the Allies, whose reputation was less than spotless in his
eyes. He thought the idea of collective guilt an abomination. Writing to
Hans Vogel, he vented his ire:
You could not imagine what a frightful effect the propaganda
attempt to impose ‘collective guilt’ on the German people has had on
the German opponents of Nazism. The men and women in our country
who even before 1933 risked so much in the fight against Nazism and
Big Business, who after the assumption of power, at a time when the
present victorious powers were still concluding state treaties with the
Hitler regime, were working underground and were being put in
prisons and concentration camps; they should recognise their guilt.
They must do this in no way and in no circumstances.
Schumacher felt himself personally defamed by the notion of collective
guilt.70
Adenauer and Schumacher were mutually antipathetic. The Protestant
Prussian was for a central administration, the Catholic Rhinelander for a
federal state. They had difficulty speaking to one another. Michael Thomas
saw it in their lifestyles: Adenauer was gutbürgerlich, while Schumacher
worked from a bombed-out building, and yet his talk was coloured by wit
and irony. The British brought the two men together in Hamburg in March
1946 to tell them they were going to merge the states of North Rhine and
Westphalia in response to the Russians introducing a one-party state in their
zone. Adenauer remembered Sir Sholto Douglas making his entry to ‘drum
rolls and the blast of trumpets’. It was all very colonial: the Germans might
speak, but the British kept all the power in their own hands.71 They
appointed an old schoolfriend of Adenauer’s, Rudolf Amelunxen, to head
the administration. Adenauer remained aloof, as he did when the CDU was
asked to form part of the governing party in the Landtag. In reality the new
Nordrhein-Westfalen was Adenauer’s dream: one of the three quasi-
independent states he had imagined for Germany. He would pick up the
western German remnants of his detested Prussia, and the centre of gravity
for Germany would be shipped several hundred miles to the west.
Schumacher was appalled.
Adenauer had not been singled out - the British behaved in a
supercilious way towards several German post-war politicians. One was
Karl Arnold, Oberbürgermeister of Düsseldorf. He was second only to
Adenauer in the CDU and minister president designate in Nordrhein-
Westfalen, but he failed to grab the top job because he was too modest and
believed his time had passed. Victor Gollancz called him ‘one of the half
dozen best Germans I met’.72 George Clare had arranged to meet him at his
Berlin mess, but the mess butler informed him that Germans were not
allowed. Not only had they not let him in, they had left him outside in the
cold. This occurred in March 1947, some eighteen months before the
restoration of the German state.73
Culture
The British management of the arts was closely bound up with weeding
out Nazis - an admirable aim in itself, but one which had very little to do
with promoting cultural activity. It became increasingly obvious, as well,
that the British were netting just the small fry, and there was more and more
grumbling at home. The complaints about the denazification policy
eventually spread to the Germans, who were annoyed to see the Party big-
shots go free while the authorities continued to harass rank-and-file
members who had done nothing monstrous.74
The British did a few things well, if half-heartedly. They had their own
version of the Russian culture club, Die Möwe. It was a requisitioned villa
in the Branitzerplatz in Neu Westend where they could entertain screen and
theatre people over a whisky. The club had its own chatelaine in the person
of Else Bongers, a former dancer who had suffered under the Nazis.75 The
British also sponsored performances of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
and operas at the Volksoper in their sector. Just like for Margret Boveri, the
first post-war concert proved a memorable event for the Kaiser’s daughter,
Victoria Louise. In her case she heard the Berlin Philharmonic play in
Celle. Celibidache was conducting. As there was no other room available,
they used the riding school of the town stud, and the podium was set up in
the same place as they had once trained the celebrated Celle stallions, while
the chairs were laid out in the sand of the riding school. Music ‘tore us
away from the murkiness of our everyday lives and lifted us into the sphere
of the pure and beautiful. It was like redemption.’ Wilhelm Furtwängler
might not have expressed it better himself.76

OceanofPDF.com
 9
Life in the French Zone
When they at last reappeared, their faces looked as
white as the slips of paper they carried in their hands,
and they were speechless. They had spent that half an
hour arguing with three stubborn, disinterested little
bureaucrats already half asleep with wine. The men had
carefully examined, or pretended to, every paper in
their possession and then insisted on their filling out a
sheaf of forms. Only after these had been carefully read,
checked and rechecked were four Americans given
permission to inhabit two rooms in Stuttgart for the
night.
James Stern, The Hidden Damage, London 1990, 104-5

France’s German policy looked suspiciously like a return to Cardinal

Richelieu and the Thirty Years War. The French were largely indifferent to
the question of whether a German was a Nazi or not, or whether he needed
to be cured; it was enough to be a German.1 They wanted a fragmentation of
the enemy who had invaded their territory three times in under the century.
The man they installed to enforce their will on the ground was a hero of
their African wars, General Pierre Koenig - Scipio Africanus. Unlike
Scipio, however, Koenig was anything but patrician. His civilian sidekick
could not have been more different: Emile Laffon was a brilliant lawyer, a
member of the resistance and an intimate of de Gaulle, albeit a socialist.2
The French were not free of the sort of behaviour more commonly
associated with the Russians. Even after the scandals of Freudenstadt,
Stuttgart and Vaihingen, James Stern heard the testimony of a half-Jewish
woman friend in Seldau in Bavaria. The husband was away working in his
hospital in Munich when the French Moroccans arrived at the farmhouse.
They left the woman alone - ‘by some miracle they didn’t touch her’ - but
the whole house was looted and most of the furniture smashed. They killed
the livestock and stole whatever they could carry.3
 Initially the French were deeply unpopular in Germany because of their
insistence on coming as conquerors. As far as the atrocities were concerned,
they adhered to the policy ‘Never apologise, never explain.’ They had their
grievances: the bits and bobs of Germany that they had received off the
Anglo-American plate continued to make little sense. They had 64 per cent
of Baden4 - the Residenz in Baden-Baden but not the capital, Karlsruhe. In
Württemberg they had Hohenzollern, the minuscule former territory of the
Catholic cousins of the rulers of Prussia and Germany. It was significant
that the capital - it hardly merits such a grandiose description - Sigmaringen
had been the last seat of Pétain’s and Laval’s Vichy government. The
French ruled Sigmaringen, but not the coveted Stuttgart, and they had large
amounts of the Rhineland, including Mainz - but not Cologne or Frankfurt.
They came into formal possession of the ‘Brassière’ in July 1945.
Unlike the Americans, who requisitioned entire areas and fenced them off
from the German population, the French sequestered good houses and villas
but erected no fences. In Baden-Baden they put their administrative bodies
in the best hotels of the spa town.5 Military headquarters was in
Freudenstadt - an extraordinary choice of location - but one that was,
perhaps, in keeping with their possession of Sigmaringen: they were the
best custodians of their own secrets. They continued to voice their
disgruntlement, and tried to swap their portion of Württemberg for the rest
of Baden, which would have afforded them not only a big town in
Karlsruhe, but also a territory that was contiguous with their border, but the
Americans were not willing to do the deal.6 The Americans wanted the
whole motorway that went from Karlsruhe to Munich, via Stuttgart.
Proportionally speaking, the French were the most densely populated of
the Western occupiers: they had eighteen men for every thousand Germans,
the British had ten, the Americans three. They set about the business of
denazifying, politically re-educating and punishing war criminals while
assuring the population that they would have a ‘bearable standard of
living’.7 They also punished at least some of the rapists of Freudenstadt and
Stuttgart. Nothing was said to the locals, but the soldiers were informed that
such acts were not to be tolerated, and death sentences were handed out.8
Being kind but firm was meant to conceal a darker purpose - the French had
not forgotten their aims to sever parts of western Germany like the Rhine,
the Ruhr and the Saar, and they wanted to encourage provincial loyalty
above all. They were frustrated in their attempts to prise the Ruhr away
from the British. Meanwhile they transferred what resources they could to
France, and rounded up all available manpower for their own version of the
STO, the service de travail obligatoire, by which the French had been
forced to work for the Nazis.
The Soviet example of cruelty towards the Germans was one reason for
the milder treatment they received in the ZOF, or Zone d’Occupation
Française. There was a conflict between the two wings of the administration
in Baden-Baden, or ‘Little Vichy’ as the French communists rendered it,
Vichy also being a spa. The communists were alluding too to the fact that
there were quite a few Vichy men lying low in occupied Germany. The
military chief Pierre Koenig was anxious to be tough, while his civilian
counterpart Emile Laffon believed that occupation meant reform, a
difference of approach that led to frequent fights. The French took all they
could: between 1945 and 1947 some 45-47 per cent of the ZOF’s exports
left for France. Their sale in France made the ZOF a healthy profit of eight
million dollars, while the Germans were subjected to heavy taxes, strict
rations and a wage freeze. On the other hand the inhabitants of the ZOF
could boast some advantage over, say, the inhabitants of Brandenburg or
Thuringia: they had a free press, democratic elections and the right to an
education that stressed French and European cultural achievement.9
The Germans did not entirely acquiesce in French rule, especially given
their supposed conquerors’ insistence on their ‘right to plunder’ and their
view that ‘le boche payera’ (the Hun will pay). The half-French professor of
law Carlo Schmid in Tübingen knew how to play the fish. He was quickly
made chief of the ZOF’s Democratic Union and, when governments were
formed in the French provinces, he became minister president of
Württemberg-Hohenzollern.10 Schmid was an outstanding politician, the
father of the basic law (the Federal Republic’s constitution) and no French
stooge. Within the SPD he appeared to be a federalist, but was rather vague
about this when challenged.11 He fought for German rights: ‘Democracy
without sovereignty is a contradiction in terms,’ he told his audiences. He
also railed against the terrible demontage in the zone. He was not alone. In
October 1947, for example, there were strong objections to cutting the
electricity at Tuttlingen Hospital between 7.30 a.m. and noon and again
from 4 p.m. to 8. It was pointed out that operations were being performed
and babies born. On 21 June that year the Baden minister of economics Dr
Lais had complained ‘before God and humanity’ that more machines were
being dismantled and taken to France.12 ‘Unlicensed requisitions’ amounted
to somewhere between fifty and seventy million Reichsmarks in pre-war
values. Ludwig Erhard estimated the value of the machinery going west at
RM180 million in 1945-6 alone.13
Sometimes the French showed themselves more pragmatic than the
Americans. Where the latter had sequestered IG Farben and banished the
directors, the French allowed BASF in Ludwigshafen to remain as it was.
On the other hand they made no bones about pocketing a chlorine business
in Rheinfelden, a viscose business in Rottweil, the Preussag mines or the
chemicals group Rhodia in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and awarding them to
French concerns. In Friedrichshafen they shipped out everything useful in
the Zeppelin works and did much the same at Dornier and Maybach.14 Clay
voiced his frustration at the French ‘living off the land’ in Baden-
Württemberg, but it was to some extent an expression of a more old-
fashioned attitude to war and conquest, where naked self-interest played a
large part.15
The French too managed to pick up a few scientists, whom they wanted
for their missile programme. There had been a research institute outhoused
at Biberach in their zone. The Germans were lured over to work for them by
the promise of excellent conditions. They could live in Germany and work
in France. There was Kehl opposite Strasbourg, and Neuf Brisach on the
other side of the Rhine to Alt Breisach. One of the scientists, Helmut von
Zborowski, invented the coleoptor, a pioneering VTOL aircraft.16
Reading Elena Skrjabina’s account of life near Koblenz in the French
Zone, you would believe all was sweetness and light. The French had not
been present at Yalta, and had made no promises to return Russian
nationals. A Soviet commission for repatriating Russian citizens had been
set up in a nearby castle, but Elena was spared the consequences of
Operation Keelhaul, which probably saved her life. She had spoken French
from childhood, and this evidently made her sympathetic to the officers of
the garrison. They arrived at the beginning of July 1945 and a few days
later she was helping their cook procure veal for the 14 July celebrations.
The Russians quite naturally fared better than the Germans, who were being
rounded up for heavy labour in France, but not all Germans by any means
suffered in this way, and returning soldiers were allowed to go back to their
homes.17
 When Karl-Heinz Bohrer went to school in the Black Forest, he came
face to face with life in the French Zone. At the outset the French were the
most hated of the four occupying powers. They threw their weight around,
requiring Germans to walk in the roads in the university city of Freiburg-
im-Breisgau. Karl-Heinz had heard reports of atrocities carried out by
Moroccan troops. The locals laughed at the operatic uniforms. The French
wanted to have their revenge for the German occupation, and the Germans
resented the political imposition of French ‘victory’. That changed with
time. For Karl-Heinz the next few years were marked by an awakening,
political and erotic. He read Eugen Kogon’s book Der SS-Staat which was
pretty well the first in German to examine the machinery of Hitler’s terror.
He discovered French culture, first of all in the little cinema in the tiny
village of Bickendorf near his school; he saw La Belle et la bête, Les
Enfants du paradis, La Mort de Danton and Sous les toits de Paris. Among
his neighbours, France - Paris in particular - became chic. The antipathy to
all things French disappeared. Boys wore Basque berets and hung French
posters in their dormitories. They longed to be accepted by the French.18
That was a long time in coming. Paul Falkenburger, a Frenchman who
taught at Freiburg University, recalls that it was not until 1947 that there
was any meeting between young Germans and French, and that that first
occasion took place in Titisee in the Black Forest.19
Berets became a potent symbol for post-war German youth. Ruth
Friedrich saw them cropping up like mushrooms in Berlin: ‘Anyone who
felt they had something to say wears a black beret. There have never been
so many berets in the city. They are the Phrygian bonnets of the first post-
war weeks in Berlin.’20

The French acquired the Saar at the four-power conference in Paris in

April 1946. They were once again the keenest to return to the Kleinstaaterei
- the system of small, impotent states that had been Germany before 1806 -
and to this end were reluctant to join Bizonia. French attitudes to Germany
changed radically after the end of the war. At first they wanted merely to
milk the country, but soon they saw the point of wooing the defeated
Germans. President de Gaulle did this as early as October 1945 when he
visited the ZOF and spoke of the need to return to ordinary life, to
reconstruct the economy. The Germans and the French had to work together
‘because we are Europeans and Westerners’.21 Of course the reason for this
was de Gaulle’s spat with Moscow. The Soviet leaders had gone cold on
him, and he could no longer rely on the Russians to get his own way.
De Gaulle was still insisting on a veto for the central agencies at the
Control Council. Koenig was happy to take on the role of opposing any
attempt to reunite Germany, which removed any chance of a centralised
railway system and trades union movement. Koenig came up against Clay,
who was anxious to re-establish sovereignty so that American troops could
go home. Here the French became the unconscious allies of the British, who
feared just that - an American departure. Clay was tempted to proceed
without France, which was deliberately segmenting Germany.
At the New Year of 1946 de Gaulle insisted that Germany be re-created
as a confederation, not a Reich. As the barometer dropped the French were
as pitiless as ever in their demands for coal. Production in the Ruhr had
fallen to 12 per cent of the 1943 level. In June 1945 the British commander
Montgomery had insisted that the coal be kept in Germany ‘to prevent . . .
unrest and disorder’.22 At the Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in
Moscow in December French demands for coal went up again. They
required annual shipments of twenty million tons from 1947. Once again
they dished the idea of central agencies by rejecting the suggestion that
there should be a central body looking after finance. Koenig was prepared
to accept a German commission of experts, providing that it did not operate
west of the Rhine (which the French hoped would fall to them). Clay could
scarcely conceal his annoyance at the Control Council.23 It was suspected
that he intentionally disrupted shipments of wheat to the ZOF.24 Later he
quite openly proposed stopping deliveries. Clay was slow to decide that the
real danger to peace came from Moscow, not Paris.
The central-agencies argument was eventually won by the French when,
as the Cold War broke out, the British for one saw the possibility of
centralised, Berlin-based bodies falling into the hands of the Soviets. The
French remained at odds with the policy of the Anglo-Americans, however.
Their view was that the German economy should serve their needs, while
the Russians wanted to hold it down; as far as London and Washington
were concerned, Germany should have been allowed to enjoy reasonable
levels of industrial activity. To this end Clay halted the dismantling of
industrial sites in his zone in May 1946.25
 France had a chance to show off in July and September 1946. First came
the Paris CFM and later, also in Paris, the much vaunted Peace Conference
that was no such thing. The mood among the victorious Allies had changed
once again after Churchill’s Fulton speech that March. The former prime
minister’s sabre-rattling was not popular at first: his American audience
thought he was showing himself an imperialist. It was now the turn of
Soviet foreign minister Molotov to try to seduce the Germans. In July he
issued a critique of the Western Allies, interpreting the French idée chérie
of detaching the Ruhr as ‘agrarianisation’ in the spirit of the loopy
Morgenthau Plan. Such measures would only breed a spirit of revenge. The
Allies needed to render Germany a peaceful, democratic state.26
In 1946 the outstanding French figure of his time, the apostle of Franco-
German reconciliation Robert Schuman, entered the lists.27 Schuman
seemed almost fated to play his role. He had been born in Luxembourg in
1886, and went to school there before attending four German universities.
He became a lawyer in Metz, in German Lorraine, on the eve of the First
World War. After the war he represented a Lorraine constituency in Paris,
now that the province had returned to France. In 1946 he was made minister
of finance under Bidault and, shortly after that, foreign minister. For nine
months from November 1947, he was president of the Council, or prime
minister. His tenure corresponded to the early period of the Berlin
blockade.ch
At first Schuman’s line echoed that of de Gaulle. He coveted the Ruhr
and opposed German unity, stressing the need for a federal German state.
Germany in a segmented state was less dangerous. Yet he was clear that
Germany needed to be brought back as an equal partner to play its role in
the concert of nations. Provided it could accept its ‘harmless’, federal
structure, Schuman was prepared to see it released from the doghouse. He
also knew that individual European nations had little chance in competition
with the great power blocs: the United States, the Soviet empire in eastern
Europe and the British Empire. They needed to federate themselves in order
to succeed. The first step towards the European Union would be taken with
the formation of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg in 1949. It was at the
then German Strasbourg University that Schuman had presented his
doctoral dissertation.28
The Anglo-Americans were proceeding towards Bizonia: the merging of
their territories which the British believed would cut costs. The pro-Soviet
ministers in the French cabinet kept France out of the arrangement. The
Paris Peace Conference was held at the Palais du Luxembourg, but although
it was billed as an assembly on the scale of the Versailles conference that
had followed the First World War, in reality it was empowered only to deal
with peripheral issues, settling border questions in Italy and eastern Europe.
In September 1946 it was James Byrnes’s turn to wag his finger at the
Russians in Stuttgart. Germany, according to the US secretary of state, was
an economic unit, and the aim was economic revival and democratic self-
government. American troops would stay in Germany until Germany was
secure. Byrnes’s peroration was followed up by Bevin’s in the House of
Commons, which alluded to the presence of PCF (Communist Party)
ministers in the French government. The Ruhr was not up for grabs, and
Britain and America were ready for Bizonia. The American economic
adviser General William Draper proposed that the French enter Trizonia as
a means of goading Russia, but the French continued to hold aloof, even
imposing a customs wall around their zone in the Saar in December 1946,
much to Clay’s exasperation.29
The French had lowered their demands for German coal. They now
pegged their needs at half a million tons a month for 1947, rising to a
million thereafter. It was feared that the German economy might catch up
with France’s. Shipments, however, were fixed by output at the mines: at a
daily production of 280,000 tons, 21 per cent could be exported. This would
rise to 25 per cent only when production passed 370,000 tons.30 French
demands continued to irk Clay. On 6 February 1949 he wrote, ‘Sometimes I
wonder who conquered Germany, who pays the bill, and why?’ He had a
successful meeting with Schuman the following month, however, and
expressed an interest in his project for a Western European Union.31
Culture
De Gaulle’s persistent noises about the Rhineland made most Germans
think he wanted to annex it to France. He insisted, however, that French
policy was only about security, and that the Rhineland was to be a buffer-
zone. Where French intentions were generally treated with suspicion, their
cultural policy was a startling success. This was very largely due to
Raymond Schmittlein, who was director of culture in Baden-Baden.
Schmittlein had been born in Roubaix in the north of France, but his mother
was Alsatian and he had cousins on the far side of the Rhine. He was
agrégé in German, and had studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin,
where he met his wife. He had taught at the University of Kaunas and had
headed the French Institute in Riga. He was a Gaullist. His solution to
denazification was to lure the people away from dodgy ideology through
culture.32
The famous Weimar novelist Alfred Döblin reappeared in Germany in
French uniform and became a literary censor in Baden-Baden. By his own
testimony, towering piles of books were placed before him, written either
during the war or just after. Suppression had not done wonders for German
letters, he thought. With no pun intended (Günter Grass’s first successful
novel, The Tin Drum, was not published until 1959), he wrote, ‘At first the
only thing that grew on the ground was grass and weeds.’33 He founded a
literary journal, and formed part of the delegation that inaugurated the new
University of Mainz. The journey to the inauguration ceremony was an
adventure in itself. As they approached the cathedral city they saw the
wrecks of factories ‘as if brought down by an earthquake’ and then the city
centre: ‘But where was Mainz? All that one could see were ruins, faceless
people, twisted beams, empty façades: that was Mainz.’34 In the old
barracks that was now the university Döblin watched civilians and military
figures leafing through the translated transcripts of the speeches that
morning. There were British and American uniforms scattered along the
rows. An orchestra struck up the overture from The Magic Flute. Men came
in wearing black gowns and mortar boards. Döblin was reminded of a high-
school graduation in the United States. The president of the region gave a
speech in which he described the new university as the key to the material
and cultural revival of the region.35
The invited guests from the Anglo-American zones aside, the French
kept themselves culturally aloof. Mainz newspapers could not be obtained
in Frankfurt and vice versa.36 French art, literature and architecture
remained popular into the 1960s and 1970s, despite the drubbing the
Germans received during the first years of the occupation, and the French
were not embarrassed to export their talent. In Mainz the French architect
Marcel Lods, a pupil of Le Corbusier, drew up the plans to rebuild the city.
French culture remained the legacy of the occupation - the rest has been
forgotten.

OceanofPDF.com
 10
Austria’s Zones and Sectors
The 8 May! The day, the hour when every bell in
Vienna proclaimed peace and the end of the Second
World War. I was lying on an upturned fridge, unwashed
and unshaven, covered in filth in my ‘partisan uniform’
in a coal cellar in the Plösslgasse in the 4th Bezirk. The
door to the cellar was guarded by a Red Army soldier
speaking only a smattering of pigGerman, who played
ad nauseam the first bars of the Volga Boat Song - he
clearly couldn’t manage the rest.
Carl Szokoll, Die Rettung Wiens, Vienna 2001, 380

Vienna
On 9 May 1945 Cardinal Innitzer said Mass for Karl Renner’s new
Soviet-backed administration. All the working bells in the city were set to
chime and celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Vienna was still a sad,
wrecked city. More than 80,000 homes had been wholly or partially
destroyed and 35,000 people had nowhere to live. For the most part there
was no gas, electricity or telephone. Large tracts of the 1st Bezirk had been
turned to rubble in the last months of the war and in the wild looting that
followed liberation. The commercial Kärntnerstrasse was among the worst
hit. The French commander, Lieutenant-General Emile-Marie Béthouart,
described it as a heap of ruins. At one end the gutted opera house, at the
other the roofless cathedral, the Steffl.1
Unlike Berlin, Vienna was still recognisable under the dust and rubble.
The American novelist John Dos Passos came at the end of 1945 and
admitted that the city still ‘wears the airs and graces of a metropolis . . .
Vienna is an old musical comedy queen dying in a poorhouse, who can still
shape her cracked lips into a confident smile of a woman whom men have
loved, when the doctor makes his rounds of the ward.’2
The Russians were still the real power in the city, and Austrians were
required to fetch and carry. When Graf Alfred Sturgkh turned up three-
quarters of an hour late for a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce it was
because the count had had to unload a delivery of potatoes from a lorry.3
Anything might happen: in Hietzing people were being thrown out of their
houses for the benefit of the Russian garrison. The Margaréthas had to move
up to the attic to make room for a general. For the time being they had a
courteous colonel lodging with them who brought them flowers and wine
and went to the ballet.4 The former Nazis were proscribed. Most Pgs tried to
conceal their pasts, some tried to hide themselves, others committed suicide
- such as Josef Schöner’s friend the dermatologist Professor Scherber and his
wife, who came from Komotau in German Bohemia. Now that German-
speakers were being slaughtered with impunity, there was no point in going
home.5
The cautious Eugen Margarétha thought it wrong to be too black and
white about the Nazis. ‘However just the measure might be, it is possibly
going to come down hard on some individual cases who are decent fellows
in themselves . . . men who are hard-working in their domain and
indispensable people will be excluded from the economy.’ There was a little
mutual backscratching to be done. Margarétha’s greengrocer in the
Naschmarkt wanted him to sign an affidavit to say that he had been a good
man - despite membership of the Party. Margarétha received a lettuce for his
pains.6 He had little sympathy for most of the Austrian Nazis. Now they
were saying that they had been forced to join the Party, and that they had
been compelled to ‘torture hundreds of thousands of people to death, to gas
them or kill them in some other way! I am not a vengeful sort, but I have no
patience when I see and hear these now innocent lambs.’7
There was another side to the coin. As the Germans were also well
aware, the concentration camps had housed not just political prisoners and
innocent Jews or gypsies; they had also been used for hardened criminals.
Now all former KZlers were allowed to jump the queue for ration cards, flats
and other benefits. Eighteen thousand homes in Vienna were made available
to them, as well as to the bombed-out and the homeless. Margarétha’s office
had had a visit from a couple of former inmates ‘who have now mastered the
situation and are demanding jobs, accommodation, clothing etc’. They were
‘common criminals. Now you can’t tell the difference between this sort and
the poor devils.’8
Subsistence levels had dwindled to next to nothing. There were
1,500,000 people in the city and around forty lorries available to bring in
supplies. Rationing was reintroduced on 6 May, and on 1 June the daily
intake was fixed by the Russian authorities. The citizens were to have 250-
300 grams of bread a day, with 50 grams of fat and 20 grams of sugar. When
the refugees came flooding in across the Czech border the situation
worsened. Starving German Bohemians and Moravians were not averse to
robbing houses in the north-eastern Weinviertel in the hope of finding food.
The Viennese looked to the Western Allies for succour.9
They were making slow progress. On 11 May the Americans were
reported in Amstetten, the Russians had gone into Graz. Later the Americans
took Klagenfurt in Carinthia. The British were having to contend with
unforeseen changes to their Austrian policy, because in their absence Tito’s
partisans had moved into Carinthia and made it known that they intended to
keep for Yugoslavia part of the territory earmarked for the British Zone. In
Vienna on 16 May the mood was very low, because of the delay in seeing
Western troops in the city.10 After a month of looting and rape the Western
Allies were needed to raise the tone of the occupation. The Viennese
appreciated there might be disadvantages too: the Westerners would seek to
control the administration down to the smallest detail, whereas the Russians
had an ‘Asiatic liberality’ coupled with a sloppiness that allowed the
inhabitants of their zone to get on with what they wanted.11 This was
evidently the version edited for Austria. The Soviets did not behave like this
in Germany. The Austrians were not the enemy, after all. The Russians were
very little interested in the Austrian Pgs, for example. The Western Allies
might just have dug a little deeper. Some people maintain that the Soviets
were more interested in wiping out the opposition, because they impeded the
smooth exercise of power in the zone.12
As it was, a small advance party from the Western Allies did arrive on 3
June, just 186 of them in 140 cars. Field Marshal Alexander declined to go,
and sent Major-General Winterton instead. General Flory represented the
Americans and General Cherrière the French. They were spotted in the
Lainzer Strasse and covered with flowers. The Viennese received them with
jubilation. The Westerners took no notice of this effusion: the no-frat rule
was still in force. The story was now ebbing out: the Allies were going to
treat the Austrians ‘differently’, but not necessarily better. The Russians had
allotted eleven Hietzing villas for the use of the Western Allies. The purpose
of their visit was to work out the partition of the country, but although the
Russians plied them with caviar, they proved truculent when it came to
showing them airfields.ci The Westerners were required to take their leave on
the 10th, but did not depart until the 13th. The Russians were keen to reach
an agreement - they were fed up with paying for the provision of the
Austrian capital.13
 New problems were emerging for Austria: huge numbers of people were
converging on the impoverished country. Around 100,000 Germans from
Prague, Brno and southern Moravia were streaming across the frontier with
their Czech tormenters in hot pursuit. The subject was on everyone’s lips
that June. Austria had no border guards to turn them back; the Russians did
nothing, and they had no food to feed them with. In Krems in Lower Austria
the refugees were deeply resented.14
Renner was in favour of letting them in, even if only 20 per cent of them
had any claim to Austrian citizenship.cj Renner was from Moravia himself,
from just outside Nikolsburg,ck where many of the local Germans had been
massacred.15 The rest of them, said Schöner, were Reich Germans, or
German-speaking Czechs. The communist minister of the interior, Honner,
was keen to throw them out, and - when they woke up to the fact that they
had another 300,000 mouths to feed - the Russians were too. The question
was where could they send them? The Czechs maintained they were leaving
their country of their own free will - like those who were quitting Poland.16
As regards the German-speaking Czechs, the attitude was less sauve qui
peut than on a pu nous sauver! (and to hell with the rest of them). The future
president of the National Bank, Margarétha, had a full report on the
expulsions from a Dr Dyszkant who had visited Brno and Prague. Germans,
‘but Austrians as well, are being chased away and on the road from Brno to
Vienna you see endless columns of refugees in a most miserable state who
pluck the fruit from the cherry trees as their only form of nourishment. In
Prague you hear not one word of German spoken any more.’17
In exchange for the ‘ethnic Austrians’ Austrians wanted to see the backs
of any German nationals left in their country. In 1945 there were 346,000 or
them. Ten years later that number had dwindled to 18,600. They were
‘treated with no consideration, dispossessed, properly seen to and
expelled’.18 The new foreign minister, Dr Karl Gruber, was one of their most
outspoken critics. They had once again asserted their superiority over the
‘sloppy’ Austrians. Gruber wanted revenge: ‘only with difficulty and full of
fury did the Austrians put up with the long years of Prussian condescension
and meddle-o-mania’. Gruber added that he thought that many of the
Germans had come to Austria to escape from the consequences of their
actions at home. There was possibly some truth in the assertion, but it
sounded like a dangerously familiar game of putting the Allies off the
scent.19
 Far from showing sympathy for their ethnic German brothers and sisters
in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, the Austrians now began to
flex their muscles a bit to demand territory for their martyred state. These
demands did not come from the federal government, but they had the
backing of Gruber, especially in his capacity as governor of the Tyrol. If the
Poles could have some more land, why not the Austrians? The newly
recreated Burgenland still hankered after the city of Ödenburg (Sopron in
Hungarian), which had been awarded to Hungary at Saint-Germain and had
failed to come back with the rest of Burgenland because of a ‘falsified
plebiscite’;20 from Josef Rehrl, the governor of Salzburg, came a call to
detach Berchtesgaden and the surrounding region from Bavaria - despite its
ominous past - as well as the Rupertiwinkel, which had been estranged from
the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1809.
When they were not planning a merger with Switzerland (there was
some talk of this in the Tyrol too), the Vorarlberger eyed the Kleine
Walsertal, where the pastures made some of the best Bergkäse; the Tyroleans
wanted their brothers and sisters to the south; Upper and Lower Austria
looked enviously towards southern Moravia and Bohemia, despite the
streams of wretched German-speaking refugees and the certain knowledge
that the Czechs were purging the region of Teutons; finally there were even
discussions in Styria and Carinthia about revising the borders, and not just to
fend off the Yugoslavs, who were keen to wrest away areas of Austria where
there were populations of Slovenians. The Carinthians even mentioned the
Kanaltal and Gottschee,cl where there were clusters of Germans who had
come adrift from the fatherland and who felt insecure in the post-war
world.21 Renner gave a nod to the Foreign Office to pour a little cold water
on these territorial claims; Gruber, however, even spoke of ‘reparations’.22 It
is possibly in response that the story is told of the Germans offering to send
back the bones of Adolf Hitler.
Margarétha, who failed to note Hitler’s death in his journal, referred to
this overweening self-interest on the part of the Viennese in his entry for 14
August:
The Viennese are not interested in the atom bomb, nor the participation
of the Russians in the war [in Asia] . . . nor Japanese surrender; all they are
interested in are the questions: when will the unbearable demarcation lines
within Austria be wound up? When will we be rid of the Russians? When
will the new tram lines be finally ready? When are we going to get meat,
when are we finally going to have something to smoke? When will we have
coal and wood for heating, when gas? When will there be glass for the
window panes? The Viennese are not in the slightest bit interested in
elections . . .23
In London Austria’s territorial ambitions were given short shrift. The
European Advisory Commission limited itself to the job of dividing Austria
up into four zones of occupation. Access to Vienna from the Western zones,
however, was held up until June. In the meantime exiled political groups
continued to put pressure on the Allies, who in turn paid them scant
attention. After Otto von Habsburg returned to Europe in 1944, London was
the centre of legitimist agitation. He had not been a sparkling success. His
agitation in America had upset the governments in exile and the State
Department had had to issue a statement in April 1943 that it had no desire
to reinstate the Habsburgs.24 A leading monarchist was the Jewish nobleman
Baron Leopold Popper von Podhragy. In June Podhragy wrote a pamphlet
attacking Renner under the title An Experiment in Socialism using his
pseudonym ‘Florian George’.25
Renner had laid himself open: he was Austria’s ‘vicar of Bray’, a
communist toady who had begun life as a pan-German, a disciple of the
same antisemite Schönerer who had exercised a seminal influence on the
young Adolf Hitler. In 1918, when Austria had been divested of its subject
states, he wanted it hitched to the German Reich. In this he felt much as the
rest of his people felt at the time. He had also been implicated in the socialist
uprisings of 1919, 1927 and 1934. Podhragy was pro-Dollfuss, the Austrian
chancellor gunned down by the Nazis who himself brutally put down the
socialist revolt. Dollfuss had also scrapped democracy in Austria,
establishing the Corporate State. In Dollfuss’s Austria the press was
censored and arrest arbitrary.26 Podhragy might have had reason to suspect
that both Dollfuss and his successor Schuschnigg had monarchist leanings.
In 1938 Renner had publicly supported the Anschluss with Germany, where
other ‘German Austrians’ had been more reticent about the Nazis.
Renner had been quite open in giving his reasons for supporting the
Anschluss and had urged Austrians to do the same. In an article published in
London in May 1938 he had accused Dollfuss of ‘monarchism and
mediaeval clericalism’. ‘German-Austria’, a word of his own coinage, was
and remained in his view a component part of the German Republic.27 After
April 1945 he did not go back on this and he was as keen as ever to remove
the trappings of the Corporate State. He had also become a Russian puppet.
American intelligence reported that it was almost impossible to get
anywhere near him, as he was always flanked by Russian minders.28
Seven years of German rule had wrought many changes. Whereas in
1938 most Austrians would have supported some sort of bond with Germany
- not necessarily with the Nazis - in 1945 no one would have openly
admitted a pan-German bias. German behaviour in Austria immediately
following the Anschluss - the deporting of large numbers of ministers and
government officials to Dachau; the brutal revenge against anyone who had
been instrumental in repressing the Nazis during the time they were illegal;
the confiscation of over half of the Austrian industrial base;29cm the
deportation of the Jews (although many Austrians were not just indifferent
here, they actively joined in); the privations of war; the deaths of near ones
and dear ones; and finally the capital crime, defeat - had all served to sever
any bonds of affection that might have united the peoples on either side of
the Inn. If there were pro-German Austrians after 1945, they kept mum or
sought some other way out.
The Soviet authorities were playing their usual game and delaying the
entry of the Western Allies. As the American commander General Mark
Clark put it in the hard-hitting Cold War idiom of 1950: ‘They were busy
looting Austria at the time, and didn’t want to be bothered.’30 On 4 July 1945
the Allies came together again to decide the form of the Control Council.
The Western missions were headed by the DMGs: General Winterton for
Britain, General Gruenther for the US, and General P. R. P. Cherrière for
France. The Russian commander was allegedly ill,cn and the Soviet Union
was represented by Colonel General A. S. Zheltov, a political commissar
who was high up in the NKVD and who was famed for his entirely negative
attitude.31 Tolbukhin was actually in the doghouse and was replaced by
Koniev on the 7 July. Stalin was cross because he had allowed the Red Army
to give a negative image of the Soviet Union.32 Fischer was angling for a
German-style SED: a united front of communists and socialists. He had been
inspired by the communal elections in France, which had returned the
communists as the largest party in the country. Schärf feared that if the
Western Allies did not arrive soon there would be a communist putsch.33
The zones were not finalised until 9 July. The Soviet Union clung to its
bastions in the east: Burgenland - abolished by the Nazis and recreated for
the Russians - Lower Austria and Upper Austria north of the Danube. The
United States faced them across the Danube in Upper Austria, as well as
taking on the Salzkammergut. Britain was anchored in the south, with
Carinthia, Styria and the eastern Tyrol. France was left with the rest of the
Tyrol and the Vorarlberg. As in Germany, this meant some adjustment of the
lines. The Russians, for example, had occupied the eastern half of Styria.
Margarétha would have expressed the views of most Viennese in voicing his
unhappiness at the settlement. The Russian slice of the cake ‘meant that the
land around Vienna will be further leeched by the Russians, and that we will
receive no potatoes, no fruit, no milk, no eggs . . .’34
Under the Allied agreement, the city was divided into four sectors like
Berlin. The difference was that the 1st Bezirk, which occupied the medieval
city bordered by the famous Ringstrasse, was managed by all four powers, a
different victor taking on the role every month. Command was represented
by four generals who reigned supreme in their sectors, and who administered
the 1st Bezirk communally. They were the military commissars, whose
presidency was also subject to monthly change. The 1st Bezirk was patrolled
by the famous ‘four in a jeep’: a military policeman from each of the
occupying powers.
Beyond the 1st Bezirk, the Allies all had their sectors, each of which
included a slice of the inner city within the Gürtel as well as some more
suburban areas. The Russians had the old Jewish quarter in the second, and
Floridsdorf bordering the Danube, helping them to maintain their control of
the waterway, Wieden and Favoriten; the Americans received Neubau,
Alsergrund, the Josefstadt, Hernals, Währing and Döbling with its vineyards;
the French had Mariahilf with its famous shopping street, Penzing, Fünfhaus
and Ottakring. Their offices were in the old Military Academy. General
Béthouart was billeted in the villa of Frau Petznek in Hütteldorf. She was the
only child of Crown Prince Rudolf who, after her marriage to a Prince
Windischgraetz, had wedded a socialist politician. The Russians had been in
the villa before him. They had removed much of the furniture and ripped the
crowns off the books in the library. The British controlled Landstrasse, with
its important communications to their airport at Schwechat, Margarethen,
Simmering and Hietzing.
The Allies were the custodians of Austrian sovereignty. According to the
London Agreement, drawn up by the European Advisory Commission in
January 1944, they would continue to exercise executive power until
independence was restored by a state treaty. The Austrian government had to
submit proposals to the four powers, whose decisions had to be unanimous.
The Soviet Union fought off the notion of granting Austria its sovereignty
for ten years, although it was first suggested by US Secretary of State Byrnes
in February 1946, and the project had full British backing. The Russians’
pretext for their veto was that the country had been insufficiently purged of
its Nazis, although they were notoriously lazy about pursuing culprits.35
Renner had never been trusted by the Western powers. His chief rival
was the Dachauer Leopold Figl, who was the first to advocate a return to the
1929 Federal Constitution. Figl, patronisingly described by Mark Clark as ‘a
courageous and competent little fellow’,36 was the first great political figure
of the Austrian Second Republic. A vigneron from Lower Austria, he had
headed the Bauernbund or Peasants’ Union before 1938. He had received a
rough but effective political education in Dachau, spending a total of sixty-
two months in Nazi captivity along with a number of other important
political figures in post-war Austria. His hard peasant head proved an asset
when it came to dealing with Koniev, and he was often seen reeling out of
the Hotel Imperial (requisitioned by the Russian commandant), his belly full
of vodka, after some tough trading. Another Septembriste was Dr Karl
Gruber, who was only de facto foreign minister, because Austria officially
had no right to conduct its own foreign affairs.
Figl was freed on 6 April 1945. On the 17th he went to the Imperial to
make his peace with the conquerors.37 He emerged as the Landeshauptmann,
or governor, of Lower Austria. The Russians had no fondness for Figl, and
his conservative ÖVP,38 but they were hedging their bets, waiting to see if
Austria would fall into the communist bloc, and in the meantime they were
backing a multi-party system. Just to make sure the Austrians did not have it
too easy, however, they also gave credence to Yugoslav demands for
reparations and border changes.
Once the Americans had their feet under the desk in Vienna they too
took stock of the political situation. Renner had moved out of his old home
and into a former SS radio station in the Himmelstrasse in Grinzing. The
Americans knew about his pan-German past and his support for the
Anschluss. His persistent attacks on Dollfuss had angered Figl, who insisted
that the murdered chancellor had been a democrat at heart.39 The situation
was not an obvious one: socialists like Renner had managed to stay out of
concentration camps during the Nazi years, while the leaders of the
Corporate State - which might have been sympathetic to Hitler had it played
its cards right - had spent long, sometimes fatal, spells in Dachau and
Mauthausen. It was not until 6 September that the OSS recommended that
the American government recognise Renner’s regime.
The British were also playing hard to get. On 26 September they told the
Americans they were unwilling to recognise Renner because he was too
much under the thumb of the communists.40 The British thought the
communists wanted to extend their influence over the whole of Austria. The
dashing British political adviser Jack Nicholls (who was known to smuggle
women at risk from the Russians out in the boot of his car) had also
expressed his doubts about Renner’s self-important ways. With time the
British fell in behind Clark, whose view it was that Renner had to be given
time to clean out his stables and make the government more representative.
41

The British remained obdurate about their entry into Vienna, the
Russians having stolen a march on them once more. They had left the issue
to Churchill to sort out at Potsdam, which he had failed to do. Their refusal
to advance to their sector was ‘almost destructive’.42 It resulted in Stalin
agreeing to feed the Viennese population for the time being, but it was
hardly a humanitarian solution, unless the Russians could be relied upon to
do it properly. As it was, poor Austria was feeding a large number of
strangers. There were around a million refugees within its pre-1938 borders
and around 350,000 troops. The bulk of these were Russian, but there were
also 50,000 Americans, 65,000 British and 40,000 French. That figure had
been reduced to some 65,000 soldiers all told by the end of 1946.
The meeting of the victors at Potsdam in the summer of 1945 failed to
rule on the Austrian question. One thing was agreed, however - that in the
light of Austria’s ‘victim’ status, there were to be no reparations paid. The
French defied this by shipping home some valuable portions of Austrian
industry they found in their zone, but the Russians had a better way of
dealing with it. The day the conference opened, the Daily Telegraph reported
the hypocrisy behind Soviet behaviour. The Russians had already carried
away every machine, all cars and buses and cattle from the city: ‘Austria is
free but looted of all that can sustain or rebuild life.’ For six weeks there had
been no food delivered to the city, and half the newborn children had died.
The corpses of the city’s defenders still lay under the ruins of the buildings
they had fought over.43co
 The Allies had appointed their own high commissioners to govern their
zones. Under these men there were a number of committees dealing with
particular problems such as denazification, the restitution of sequestered
property, DPs, POWs, military issues and disarmament. Once the Austrian
government was recognised after the 1945 elections, the Allied high
commissioners were invested with the rank of ministers in their respective
governments. In fact, despite the reports in the British press, there was some
small degree of co-operation between the Western and Eastern Allies at the
beginning, and some of the ‘German assets’ were run well, while others
were handed back to their original owners. The Allies jointly administered
the country’s oil industry at first, and Marshal Tolbukhin was in favour of
the removal only of Austrian heavy industry.44
Even the staunchly communist parts of the city in Heiligenstadt had had
enough of their Soviet liberators by the summer. For their own part, the Red
Army had found it unbelievable that the Austrian communists had managed
to live in such Gemütlichkeit in their fortress-like blocks of flats. There were
homely lace curtains and soft sofas more readily associated with the
bourgeoisie. Once the scales had fallen from their eyes the usual scenes of
rape and rapine had followed.45 On 22 July 1945, thirty American cars were
spotted in Mauer.46 Three days later a British quartermaster came to see
Eugen Margarétha. He asked the economist politely if he had any room to
spare. The Margaréthas volunteered two rooms on the parterre. It turned out
that the English were expected the next day. That proved to be yet another
optimistic rumour. They had still not pitched up on 5 August. Finally on the
12th a captain in the Coldstream Guards arrived, ‘a nice, well-turned-out
person’, who took pity on them and gave them sandwiches and beer. At the
end of the month electricity was restored and the Margaréthas’ fridge started
to work again, prompting much jubilation in the house.47
The world was at peace from the 15th. On the 19th the bedraggled
former capital of the great Habsburg Empire received a new monument. A
soaring column was set up on the Schwarzenberg Platz in the centre of the
city, surmounted by a figure of a Red Army soldier in a gilded helmet. The
coy Margarétha, who could not bring himself to talk about what the Russians
had been doing since their arrival that spring, said it had already been
dubbed ‘The Monument to the Unknown Looter’. Most of his compatriots
knew it as the ‘Unknown Father’ or, more coarsely, the ‘Unknown Rapist’.
The Russians erected their monument just six days before the other Allied
commanders moved into their digs.48
Koniev had asked the Allies to come to Vienna on 23 August to admire
the ‘Unknown Father’, but he was going to return Clark’s hospitality firstcp
and asked him to visit him in his HQ in Baden, the old summer capital. In
1945 it became Soviet army HQ and Russian officers and men moved into
holiday residences rendered infamous by the stories of Arthur Schnitzler.
The Russians had taken over most of the little spa and fenced off their
quarters with barbed wire. Clark was asked to review the troops, then was
taken back to headquarters and a bottle of vodka. It was the early afternoon.
The Russians were ‘obviously prepared for an afternoon of drinking. My
party was plied with vodka and there was more liquor on the table when we
went to Koniev’s for dinner about 5 o’clock.’ Clark came to the conclusion
the Russians wanted to get them ‘plastered’.
Not unnaturally, Clark was put out that Koniev was matching his shots of
vodka with nips of white wine. He complained, telling his Russian opposite
number that he wanted to drink the same juice as he was having: ‘you see,
I’ve got just one stomach to give for my country’. At ten they finished
dinner and went to Baden Opera House to see a performance of Russian
dancing. Clark had problems staying awake. The dancing was followed by a
propaganda film. Then Zheltov insisted they have another meal before they
went to bed. Clark went to his cot at four or five. Zheltov said he’d be back
at eight so that they could go for a swim. Clark had his black batman wake
him at 7.30 a.m. When he set eyes on his commander, he asked, ‘Boss, did
you drink some of that kerosene too?’49
Clark had no personal objection to Koniev, and they got on quite well at
first. The froideur of the Cold War only set in the following year, but in his
autobiography Clark gives the impression it was there from the start. The
American general cites an example of their mutual understanding when he
told the Russian his opinion of Fischer: ‘I don’t like him because he is a
communist.’ Koniev was completely unabashed. He apparently replied,
‘That’s fine. I don’t like him because he’s an Austrian communist.’50
The American intelligence officer Martin Herz, who interviewed Fischer
in August, understood him better. Fischer was a pragmatic communist.
Unlike Ulbricht in Berlin, he admitted that the Russians had raped women
during the occupation and that the emergency police they appointed
contained ‘many of the lowest, criminal elements of the population’. They
had been partly responsible for the looting. He was not in favour of the
proscription of half a million Austrian Nazis. The number was just too large
and doubtless included a great many hangers-on and nominal Party
members: ‘To outlaw them and make pariahs out of them would not only be
unwise, but also unjust.’ Fischer admitted candidly that National Socialism
was ‘a terror machine that worked with deadly precision and exacted
nominal acceptance from people who conformed only in order to be able to
live’. The Nazi rank and file should be allowed to redeem themselves.51
Clark had a little present for the Viennese before he went back to his
hunting lodge in Hinterstoder. In a mine in the Salzkammergut the
Americans had discovered the crown and regalia of the Emperor
Charlemagne. Now they wanted to restore it to its rightful place.
Unfortunately that meant the Hofburg, the imperial palace in the centre of
Vienna, which was occupied by the Russians. Renner was very much
opposed to the Americans letting it go anywhere near the Russians, so they
kept it in the vaults of the bank building that served as their HQ.52 The
Americans had armed it as if it were the Pentagon itself.53
It was Koniev who put an end to the British intransigence. He announced
on 27 August that he would withdraw his command over the Western sectors
of Vienna as of 1 September and that these areas would then be ‘without
masters’. The ploy worked, and the Americans, British and French took up
their positions on the first of the month.54 They could now look closely at
Vienna, which had been the Russians’ exclusive preserve since early April.
Herz noted that 200,000 Viennese were eating at the soup kitchens set up by
the Russians.cq It was hard not to give the Austrian communists some credit.
They were not tainted by their Austrian past, only by their period in Moscow
and the uncertainty of their instructions. The socialists were compromised by
their support for amalgamation with Germany; the conservatives because
they had been part and parcel of the anti-democratic Corporate State. The
communists had their ‘Immediate Programme’ which called for a purge of
the Nazis, three-party commissions to weed out fascists in the
administration, administrative reform, nationalisation of industry and a
democratic foreign policy. It was not meant to be a revolutionary
programme.55
The first meeting of the high commissioners took place under Koniev’s
roof at the Imperial on 11 September. Clark thought it a shambles. It was
Béthouart’s first chance to meet the charismatic American general, who he
decided resembled a Sioux Indian. The agenda was based on the four-power
arrangement decided in London before the end of the war. The Russians
knew exactly what they wanted: mastery of the Danube, the big oilfields at
Zistersdorf in the eastern Weinviertel, and the Austrian ‘bread-basket’ in
Burgenland.They already had most of the infrastructure - control of the
railway lines, the roads, the airfields and the telephone lines. All
international calls passed through Vienna, giving the Russians the chance to
monitor and control them. Similarly, the RAVAG, or Austrian radio network,
was based in the Soviet Zone. The Soviet forces thus still oversaw important
parts of the Austrian economic infrastructure, not just in the east of the
country, but nationwide.56
From 20 October 1945, the Western Allies thought it prudent to shift the
meetings around the corner to the Chamber of Industry on the
Schwarzenbergplatz (for the time being, Josef-Stalin-Platz). That meant
throwing out the Margaréthas. They found new premises and were helped to
move by black American drivers and Nazi forced labourers who were so
weak from hunger that they could hardly carry the boxes of files. The Allied
sessions took place once a month. They were stiff. For a while the British
high commissioner refused to attend because the Soviets would not allow the
West to bring in food supplies for the half-starved population. There was a
tea afterwards and attempts were made to break the ice. Koniev talked to
Béthouart about Balzac, which he had read in Russian.57
Possibly his interest in French literature led him to invite Generals
Béthouart and Cherrière, together with the civil administrator Alain de
Monticault, to a lunch in his Baden villa. Once again the vodka flowed.
Once again Koniev had an ulterior motive - he wanted to propose an alliance
with the French that would serve both their interests on the Council.58 The
communists were still a power to be reckoned with in French politics, and,
of all the Western Allies, the Russians had the most empathy with the
French.
All the main receptions to commemorate important Soviet feast days
were held in the Hofburg Palace. The feasts were as lavish as those held in
the Russian embassy in Berlin. There was copious vodka and caviar and the
Russians looked far more splendid in their Red Army dress suits than the
Western Allies in their khaki.59 A certain style and an ability to entertain on
an imperial scale may explain the gracious treatment accorded to the former
Austrian ruling house. Franz Joseph’s nephew Hubert Salvator was told that
the Russians would respect his property and person, and he was excused
from the duty of billeting officers. Béthouart relates that the Russians even
helped him put out his relics on Holy Days of Obligation.
The British HQ was in Schönbrunn Palace, where the commander
General Sir Richard McCreery occupied the room that had served Napoleon
before him, a fact that caused the French general de Lattre de Tassigny
considerable annoyance. McCreery, who had served with the British army in
Italy, endured strained relations with Koniev from the outset. Soon after he
moved into a villa near the palace in Hietzing the Soviets kidnapped his
gardener. He was never seen again.60
Each of the four powers was granted an hotel where they could put up
their guests. The Russians took the Grand, opposite the Hotel Imperial,
where the Russian commandant had his lodgings. It had also been Hitler’s
favourite on his visits to Vienna. The portrait of the Emperor Franz Joseph
had been replaced by one of Stalin. The Americans appropriated the smaller
but grander Bristol. The French occupied the Hotel Kummer in the
Mariahilferstrasse, and only later moved into the rather more impressive
Hotel de France on the Ring. The British were in Sacher’s behind the Opera.
The Western Allies all sponsored a newspaper which now joined the largely
propagandist Russian press consisting of Neues Österreich, the
Arbeiterzeitung, the Österreichische Zeitung and the Kleine Volksblatt. Now
the Americans launched the Wiener Kurier, the British Die Weltpresse and
the French Die Welt am Montag.
Clark gradually took on the role of baiter of the Russian bear that was
performed by Clay in Germany. He believed the Americans were ‘selling
Austria down the Danube’.61 When the Russians staked a claim to all
shipping on the river, Clark noted that the vital river barges were in the
American Zone in Linz. Linz was on the border with the Soviet Zone, so
Clark had them taken upstream to Passau, in the American Zone in
Germany. It transpired there were Yugoslav barges among them, and the
Yugoslavs began to complain. It was only when Clark had a direct order
from the secretary of state, however, that he agreed to hand over the
Yugoslav vessels.62
The political scene was beginning to move, and it looked hopeful for
Austria. On 11 September, the Allied Council gave permission for the re-
establishment of the three main political parties: popular, socialist and
communist. On 24 September Renner obligingly reshuffled his cabinet to
include Figl, leading the Western Allies to recognise his government on 20
October. Renner took the hint and resigned following the elections, which
took place on 25 November, eventually becoming federal president a few
days before Christmas when the deputies unanimously voted him upstairs.
On 3 December his place was taken by Figl.
The results of the first free elections since 1930 were announced on 2
December. There had been a 95 per cent turnout. Margarétha, who was one
of the founders of the People’s Party, the ÖVP, called them ‘brilliant’ and
with good reason: communist hopes were dashed and his party headed the
list with just over 1,600,000 votes, representing nearly half the electorate.
The SPÖ, the Socialist Party, won 1,434,898 votes. The communists, the
KPÖ, limped home a long way behind with 174,255 or 5.5 per cent. Even in
‘Red Vienna’ they had come third with just six seats in the regional
assembly. The SPÖ did best, with fifty-eight; the ÖVP won thirty-six. The
communists achieved just four seats in the Federal Parliament. Women, it
seemed, had been their undoing.
Women were now 64 per cent of the electorate, and they had suffered
unduly at the hands of the Red Army. The ÖVP campaigned with posters
that also showed the Russians in their worst light: ‘Ur-Wiener und Wiener
ohne Uhr, wählt ÖVP!’cr Another ruse was to put up posters telling the
Austrians, ‘For all who love the Red Army, vote KPÖ!’63 Missing from the
electorate were around a quarter of a million Austrian dead, 600,000 POWs,
half a million Nazis and sundry other political undesirables. The ex-Nazis
would not have helped the left much. Their half-million votes would
probably have gone to the People’s Party. Margarétha thought the message
would cause relief at home and abroad.64 He was right. The Americans
reported that Austria was now finally aware of the meaning of democracy.
The Figl government was recognised on 7 December 1946.65
The Viennese were cold and hungry. The larger coffee houses had been
taken over by the Americans. Margarétha and his wife had a modest
Christmas: festive Paprikafisch came out of a tin. The British captain was
kind enough to make Eugen a present of a dozen Havana cigars, and in turn
he gave the Guards officer a little bottle of cognac.66 Figl, however, began
his rule on fighting form. To thunderous applause he demanded the opening
of the demarcation lines between the zones, the restoration of Austrian unity,
the return of South Tyrol and the end of the Yugoslav threat to Carinthia.
Austria had never been a second German state.67
 The communists were bitterly disappointed by the results of the
elections, although they were granted the concession of a ministerial
portfolio which went to Karl Altmann. As their Soviet-controlled newspaper,
the Österreichische Zeitung, put it, ‘We have lost a battle, but we are just at
the start of the battle for Austria, and that will be won.’68 Their failure to
endear themselves to the Austrian people may have been behind Koniev’s
departure: he was replaced by Vladimir Kurasov in the middle of 1946. Just
as in the aftermath of the Berlin elections of 1946, the Russians began to
show their teeth, creating petty difficulties for the Western Allies wherever
they could. As far as the Austrians were concerned, they had learned
nothing: the ÖVP were closet fascists misleading the public under a halo of
martyrdom (Dachau and Mauthausen), and the SPÖ were tainted by their
complicity in the Anschluss. Austria quite clearly could not be trusted to rule
itself.69
Feeding the Austrians
When Dos Passos visited Vienna at the end of 1945 he was able to have
a quick look round courtesy of American army public relations. He attended
Mass in the Hofburg Chapel and noted the American, British and French
‘gold braid’ listening to Schubert. The famous cafés, uncleaned and
unheated, served cups of ‘mouldy-tasting dark gruel called coffee’. The
waiters ‘kept up a pathetic mummery of service’ providing the usual glass of
water, but not the cream, although they still had the jugs. The writer plucked
up the courage to ask a waiter what was in the coffee. ‘That’s our secret,’ he
was told. He also wanted to know what the Viennese ate. ‘Bread and dried
peas’ was the answer.70
The winter had set in, provisions were at an all-time low, and there was
no fuel to heat houses and flats. The Allies gave permission for the felling of
large numbers of trees. Feeding Vienna remained a Western grievance. The
Soviets had made off with the arable land and the roads into the capital.
Their zone had produced 65 per cent of Vienna’s food before the war. Clark
said the Americans intended to give the Austrians 1,550 calories (he said the
average American had 3,000), but he admitted that the British had problems
matching that figure.71 As it was, the diet varied considerably across Austria.
In Vienna in May citizens received a piffling 833 calories, which they
presumably supplemented with fresh fruit and vegetables. In the American
Zone it was not much more, and the French complained they had no means
of feeding the Vorarlberger or the Tyroleans.
 Desperation led the Austrian government to moderate the outward flow
of Germans and grant citizenship to one, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist
Friedrich Bergius, who had been trying to extract sugar from tree bark.
Bergius was also promising to make meat from wood, a project that has now
been dismissed as the purest alchemy. Bergius’s citizenship becomes all the
more scandalous given that he was fully in collaboration with IG Farben
during the war, and working for a Nazi victory. He fled to Buenos Aires and
died there in 1949.72
In order to receive foreign aid, Austria had to prove itself a proper enemy
of Hitler. At first it was the Russians who made trouble, charging that the
Austrians had not actively sought freedom from Hitler. After the war, it was
Yugoslavia that vetoed Austria receiving aid from UNRRA (the UN Relief
and Rehabilitation Administration). The aid was only forthcoming from
March 1946. The previous December the British Foreign Office had been
preparing a new four-power agreement for the administration of Austria that
would result in granting the Austrians a degree of self-government, but
holding them in check through vetoes. The Allies - particularly the British
and the French - wanted to scale down their operations in Austria, for the
simple reason that they were expensive.
The agreement was long in the making. At first the British did not tell
the other three of the draft; then the Americans opposed it. When it was
finally signed on 28 June 1946 it was supposed to last for six months, but in
reality it survived until the State Treaty was promulgated on 27 July 1955.73
The Austrian federal and state governments achieved a greater degree of
liberty and were able to use quasi-total power to run their houses. Military
government by the Allies was scrapped and replaced by ‘control missions’.
That the Russians saw the opening of a new era is clear, perhaps, from the
recall of Koniev and his replacement by Kurasov. Clark’s bugbear Zheltov,
however, remained behind.
As much as possible, the Western Allies sought to administer Austria
with the help of apparent anti-Nazis. Ulrich Ilg, who had been a minister in
the inter-war First Republic, was a typical appointee, much as the
gerontocracy had returned to power in Berlin. The French set him up in the
Vorarlberg. The British also worked to redraft Austrian law. An important
British contribution to the re-establishment of a non-Nazi Austria was
BALU - the British Austrian Legal Unit. The body had been formed in 1943
by pulling a number of Austrian lawyers out of the British army and putting
them to work in the War Office. In 1945 they were packed off to Vienna
where they formed part of the legal department of the Control Commission
under the British-born (but of German Jewish origin) lawyer Claud Schuster.
Schuster was assisted by George Bryant, né Breuer. BALU itself was run by
the Viennese Lieutenant-Colonel Wolf Lasky, who had worked in the town
hall until 1938. He was now claiming royalties for legal textbooks sold
during the Nazi interregnum. The Austrians took fright and appointed him to
the bench, so that he now enjoyed the curious position of being a judge in
both Austria and Britain. He never practised in Austria and had no desire to
settle there once his work was done. He later worked as a legal adviser to the
British in Germany.74 The British legal division generally advised acceptance
of the laws voted by the Austrian parliament. 75
In March 1947 a poll taken among the Austrians indicated the popularity
of the Allies - the Soviets, it seems, were not mentioned. The British were
well liked, but the French were no more than ‘perfumed Russians’. Mark
Clark was singled out for veneration for his tough stand against the Soviets,
Figl going so far as to call him ‘a legendary national hero’. Dos Passos
reported that he would wander around the streets of Vienna accompanied
only by an interpreter at a time when the city at night was ‘as in mediaeval
days’ - you went abroad at your own risk.76 The violence was normally down
to the Russians or gangs of DPs. The Austrians voiced their opinions of the
various DPs whose camps were scattered over their land: the Jews were
liked least, followed by the Poles, Yugoslavs and Russians. Quite a few of
these had become lawless bandits, seeking revenge for the indignities of the
lives they had led as KZler or forced labourers. The best loved now were
ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans.77
With little food or fuel, Austria had around 600,000 extra mouths to feed.
There were about 170,000 ‘Danube Swabians’, 151,000 Sudetenländer and
15,000 Hungarian Germans, as well as 15,000 Germans from the
Siebenbürgen and the Banat and 170,000 Jews. It was only after 1949 that
the figures began to drop. The Americans put the DPs into the care of
Austrians, but the British thought they were better off under their own
authority. The Allies used the RAD camps that the Nazis had built for their
forced and volunteer labour force.78
A constant stream of German Bohemians and Moravians gushed into
Austria. The Russians had a camp for them in Melk on the Danube, but it
was grossly overstretched and they ended up becoming a burden to all the
Allied zones. The response was to demand the expulsion of ‘Reich’
Germans. Gruber was particularly vociferous here. By a highly specious
argument ‘German’ was made to mean ‘Nazi’. The expulsion of the
Germans from the Austrian body would purge it of its former evil. On 1
November 1945 the Americans stopped their ration cards in Salzburg.
Austria made a point of celebrating its anti-German past - books were
published, for example, that showed how gallantly Austria had resisted
Prussia in the Seven Years War.
In March 1947 there were hunger marches in Vienna and Lower Austria.
The demonstrators shouted, ‘Down with Figl’s hunger regime! We want new
elections! We are hungry!’ There was a sit-in at the chancellor’s office
orchestrated by the communists. The Viennese police were too terrified of
the Soviets to help. The latter even refused to allow the Allied ‘four-in-a-
jeep’ patrols to interfere. The demonstrations were coupled with the failure
of Gruber and the Austrians to make any headway towards independence in
Moscow.79
German Assets
The restitution of stolen property was part of the work of the Control
Council. The various Allies pursued property claims pertaining to their own
people. The French, for example, were anxious to trace the library of the
former prime minister Léon Blum, which had gone missing in Austria. It
was last seen in Carinthia, but was never found. As regards stolen Jewish
property, restitution was effected only in certain cases and in others the
awards were only partial.80
Restitution was complicated by several factors. One was that the Soviet
authorities were patently uninterested in the fate of the Jews, and were
determined to mop up as much property and money as they could. On 27
June 1946 the Russians seized all ‘German’ assets in their zone in
contravention of the Potsdam Accord. It followed on from similar measures
taken in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland. When the West protested,
the Russians contradicted the spirit of the Moscow Declaration and said that
the Austrians had ‘fought with Germany’.
‘German’ assets accounted for around a fifth of Austrian industry: more
than 62 per cent of Germany’s capital abroad. The total sums for other
countries - Finland, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia -
totalled 188 million dollars, while for Austria the figure was a staggering 1.5
milliard.81 Some of these assets had no connections with the Germans
whatsoever. Others were businesses legitimately built up and developed by
Germans. The Russians interpreted these matters very freely. Of 120
industries taken over in their zone, only 47 were actually ‘German’; and of
the seventy-six agricultural properties they took over, only one had
previously been in German hands. They expressed their intention of taking
over the 27,000-hectare Esterházy estate based in Burgenland, for example,
which could hardly be described as German and which would have fed
(according to the Americans) between 80,000 and 100,000 people. They had
72 per cent of Austria’s oilwells and half the country’s refinery capacity.82
Soviet Russia’s determination to grab all German property included
businesses that had been filched by Germans from Austrian Jews, who had
been either driven into exile or murdered in the camps. The Russians also
swiped a lot of things the Germans had stolen from the Austrian government
and foreign nationals. The demands for compensation by certain very rich
Jewish families such as the Rothschilds were used by the Russians as a
justification for their actions, as they claimed that the Americans would
beggar the Austrians were such claims to go through. They were much fairer
in their approach in that they shared their spoils with the people of their
zone. They sequestered the oilwells, although the equity had been mostly
held by Britons and Americans before the war. Their argument was that the
foreign interests had been legitimately sold to the Germans in 1938 and that
the Anglo-Americans had no right to claim them back.83
They took what ships they found on the Danube. Some of the companies
seized were simply stripped of anything of value that could be sent home to
Russia. Others were run at a profit. USIA (Upravleinje Sovetskogo
Imuščestva v Avstrii - Administration of Soviet Property in Eastern Austria)
was the company the Russians created to administer their spoils. In 1949
USIA was running 250 factories with 50,000 workers and controlled a third
of industrial production within the Soviet Zone. These factories made all
Austrian locomotives and turbines, half of the nation’s glass, fuel and
pharmaceuticals and around 40 per cent of its iron. They also had 157,000
hectares of land. The Russians continued to exploit Austria though USIA for
a decade and their profits over that period are estimated at over a milliard
dollars. The Western Allies protested, but, as no one wanted war, their
protests remained hot air.
Russia was anxious to snatch ‘German’ assets in the west too, but that
came to nothing. Not all the industry was in the east. VOEST was originally
the Hermann-Göring-Werke in Linz. After Potsdam’s ruling on former
German property the huge steelworks, one of the most modern in Europe,
fell to the Austrian state. In the light of Soviet behaviour in the east, the
Western Allies demonstratively waived their right to reparations - in the
French case, somewhat reluctantly.84
The confiscation of the Zistersdorf oilfields gave rise to an act of
resistance by Renner, who refused to sign the agreement.85 The Russians
threatened to report him to Koniev, but he must have known he had the
backing of the Western Allies, Clark in particular, who - like Clay north of
the Inn - could see the propaganda value in exposing Soviet knavery in this
and other instances. Clark also claims to have foiled a Soviet attempt to take
over the building of the Ministry of the Interior.
 January 1945. The inhabitants of East Prussia have finally been allowed
to flee, but the Red Army has cut them off from the Reich at Elbing. In
desperation hundreds of thousands make their way across the frozen inland
sea or Haff. Russian warships open fire on the ice
The ‘treks’ began that winter. These Silesians are making their way west
in any transport they can find. Note the elegant carriage among the carts and
traps
 Over sixteen million Germans left their homes, few of their own free
will. These Sudetenländer are being shipped out in cattle trucks. The manner
of their going was a relief, however, after what many had suffered in the
camps
Conditions on the trains were at best primitive. Everything had to be
done in the carriages. If they were lucky the Czechs or Poles allowed them
to take off the waste
Miserable Sudeten expellees wait to board the train to Germany
 Pious Sudeten Catholics hear an open-air Mass on their way to their new
lives
Silesians assemble in the streets of their town prior to their expulsion.
This was only the beginning of their Calvary: they would often spend weeks
in a transit camp where they would face the most abominable treatment.
Many died
 The Oder at Frankfurt. This was to be the new Polish-German border
after the Western Allies gave in to Stalin’s demands at Potsdam
For the Jews life in the new Poland and the new Czechoslovakia had few
temptations: the ruins of the White Stork synagogue in Wrocław (Breslau) in
1991
 Sudetenländer rounded up in Bergreichenstein (Kasperské Hory) push
their goods to the assembly camp. They are wearing white armbands to mark
them out as Germans

Germans were allowed to take only the basic minimum with them. Here
in Bergreichenstein in eastern Bohemia Czech officials inspect suitcases and
clothing for anything of value
Note that the guard is wearing a recycled German helmet while his
colleague is trampling on the German’s possessions
 A rare of the Little Fortress in Theresienstald with German prisonners.
During the war the Kleine Festung had provided accommodation for the SS
and was used for occasional executions of Crechs and Jews. Now the boot
was on the other foot
 Josef Schöner’s pictures of the ruins of Vienna. The State Opera House
with the Jockey Club behind. The Jockey Club had taken a direct hit in the
last weeks of the war. Hundreds of bodies lay in the cellars

The Cathedral or ‘Steffl’ denuded of its high-pitched roof. No one could

say precisely who had started the fires: the Russians, the Germans or the
Viennese themselves
The Graben shopping street. Life was returning to normal. Note the
woman in her traditional Dirndl: Austrian dress proved you were not
German. (inset) The Austrians had been liberated as the first victims of
Hitler, but the Allies were not entirely convinced
 The Allies had a duty to feed the vanquished Germans. This notice of 13
May 1945 sets out the rations for Berlin. Four ration cards were issued
according to the recipient’s usefulness to society. Workers received twice as
much as children. Later two more categories were invented including the
sixth, hunger card. Needless to say, very little of this largesse was really
available
 Silesian children arriving in the British Zone in Germany after their
ordeals. Many could not believe the benevolent treatment they received at
the hands of the Western Allies
These Silesian children could look forward to a new life in West
Germany
 For others the misery was not yet over. The Allied rations did little to
allay malnutrition. Here Victor Gollancz presents a powerful indictment of
the British treatment of the Germans
 Gollancz was particularly interested in the state of German children’s
shoes
 One of the more positive elements of the Occupation: Sir Robert Birley
(here as headmaster of Eton). He felt that what the Germans needed was re-
education, not denazification
 The Allies leave a positive legacy. It was the British who revived
production of Hitler’s ‘Kraft-durch-Freude’ car. The ‘Beetle’ was to be the
‘wheels of the Occupation’
Lord Pakenham, later Earl of Longford, the second British Minister for
Germany and Austria, gets to grips with the problem
A rare moment of Anglo-Soviet cooperation:Marshal Koniev and
General Sir Dick McCreery award the cups at a race meeting at the
Freudenau in Vienna
Airlift: British Pilot Officer W. K. Sewell crashes his aircraft
 And there was plenty of fun to be had at the expense of the conquered: a
drunken American officer sleeps through a striptease in his Darmstadt mess
in April 1948
Culture
When Carl Zuckmayer revisited Austria, he was aware of the difficulty
of distinguishing between the ‘liberated’ and the ‘occupied’ country. Despite
control by four powers, Austria had its own administration, and licensing
plays for performance was a mere formality. Despite that, the American
authorities imposed a number of their own plays on Ernst Lothar, who was
the author of the immensely successful novel Der Engel mit der Posaune
which charted the rise of Nazism in Austria. Lothar (né Müller), who had
spent the war years across the Atlantic with his wife, the actress Adrienne
Gessner, was an excellent choice as American theatre chief in Vienna and he
was given the job of denazifying the Viennese theatre. Naturally he felt
bitter. He had told Zuckmayer that the Germans should not feel ‘pride’ for
fifteen years. Zuckmayer commented to his wife Alice, ‘How good that he is
only going to Austria, and to what is clearly a secondary position!’86
Zuckmayer concluded that the Austrian film industry was in a state of
‘hopeless confusion’. The Americans had seized control of the studios in
Sievering, in the suburbs of Vienna. Some of the old talent was still around,
like the singer and actor Willy Forst, who had made Wiener Madeln
(Viennese Girls) under the Nazis but never released it, because, so he said,
he had wanted to save it for a non-Nazi Austria.87 The composer Egon
Wellesz did not return before 1948, and then only for a visit. When he was
asked why he had taken so long, he replied no one had asked him. As
Wellesz’s biographer Franz Edler has said, he was ‘The pupil and confidant
of Guido Adler and would have made an exemplary successor to him at
Vienna University, where he had taught before the war, but after 1945 no one
even mentioned the idea.’88 Pace the new mayor of Vienna, Theodor Körner,
many people believed that their race was still a disadvantage in Austria.
Even as late as April 1948, Alfred Rosenzweig could write to Ernst Krenek
in the United States that the Jewish conductor Otto Klemperer had told him
he was unable to procure work in Vienna or Salzburg, adding that ‘Nazis like
Herr Böhm and the Oberstandartenführer Karajan and the like, have got the
lot . . .’ This was despite Allied meddling in cultural matters, with the
Soviets controlling the musical scene in Vienna and the Anglo-Americans
making Salzburg their flagship.89
 Richard McCreery earned a place in the hearts of the old-fashioned
Viennese by bringing back flat racing at the Freudenau track in the Prater,
even though it lay in the Russian Sector. His action allowed the elite Jockey
Club to revive its functions, although its clubhouse opposite the Albertina
had been destroyed by a direct hit in the last weeks of the war. The British
had begun by organising racing in the park at Schönbrunn, which lay within
their own sector. It was not long before they asked the Soviets if they could
use the old course in the Prater. McCreery gave the job of organising it to his
chief veterinary officer Colonel Glynn Lloyd. On 27 October 1945 six
events were planned. In March the following year funds were found to
award prizes. The racing began on 14 April 1946.90
As the Russians had had the run of Vienna for months before the Western
Allies arrived, they had had the pick of the buildings. The French wanted a
palace for their Institut Français. The building on offer was the Palais
Coburg, the magnificent residence of the dukes of Coburg overlooking the
Stadtpark from its bastion on the old city wall. For some reason the French
thought it too remote and coveted the Palais Lobkowitz instead. This had
once been the French embassy, and it was across the way from the Albertina
in a much more central position. Béthouart succeeded in wresting it from the
Soviets in the course of a reception for the twenty-eighth anniversary of the
Red Army. The Russians received - and trashed - the Palais Coburg instead.
Once the French were in possession of their cultural turf they could lay
on concerts and exhibitions. Musicians like Jacques Thibaud and Ginette
Neveu performed in its salons and lectures were delivered by the architect
Le Corbusier and the artist Jean Lurçat. The Paris opera company performed
Pelléas et Mélisande at the Theater an der Wien, the Staatsoper being
bombed out. On 24 March 1947 the Comédie Française performed Tartuffe
and Louis Jouvet’s company staged L’Ecole des femmes. The Viennese were
also treated to French mannerists, fashions from Hermès, the Nabis, Cubism
and more, while the treasures of Vienna’s museums were exposed at the Petit
Palais in Paris.
Soviet Zone
The Soviet Union had always been in favour of occupying the more
industrialised east of Austria. On 29 March 1945, as its troops began to cross
the border from Hungary, however, it considered the southern regions of
Styria and Carinthia as well. A good deal of German industry had been
transferred there during the Anglo-American aerial bombardment and there
was promise of rich plunder. Taking that portion too would weaken the
British and strengthen the Soviet influence over Yugoslavia. As it was the
Russians were able to take most of Styria before the British arrived, and help
themselves to what they wanted in Graz. Not only was their arrival the signal
for Tito’s partisans to enter Carinthia, the First Bulgarian Army moved up
into positions in the wine region of South Styria around the small towns of
Leibnitz, Radkersburg and Wildon.91
With Styria temporarily in the Soviet Zone, virtually all Austria’s
vineyards had fallen into Russian hands. Grape farmers saved what they
could at their approach. In Gols in Burgenland the Stiegelmar family put the
bottles in the well; the Osbergers in Strass in the Strassertal in Lower Austria
resorted to the popular ruse of building a false wall to save their rarest wines.
At Kloster Und near Krems, the Salomons put examples of the best vintages
into the empty tuns, hoping that the Russians would be deterred by the
hollow reverberations when they tapped the casks.92
The Russian forces of occupation continued to be wild and uncontained.
On Victory in Europe Day the Red Army celebrated by a new burst of
looting in the course of which forty-four people lost their lives. Rape was
part of daily life until 1947 and many women were riddled with VD and had
no means of curing it. Burgenland suffered more than any other region of
eastern Austria from the ravages of Russian solders. In Mattersburg the
peasants posted guards to warn women when the Russians were about to
come among them. And yet there were moments when the people had cause
to thank them. For example, it was Soviet troops who built the pontoon
bridge at Mautern on the Danube after the other crossings had been blown
up, allowing communication to be restored between Mautern and the twin
towns of Krems and Stein. It is still there, and locals call it ‘the Russian gift’.
The Allied Zones were self-contained units and it was not easy to move
from one to the other, and well nigh impossible to get from the Western
Allies to the Soviet Zone. Schärf maintained that it was easier to go from the
Marchfeld, north-east of Vienna, to Brno in Czechoslovakia than it was to
reach Salzburg in the American Zone. From Salzburg it was a simple
business travelling to Munich, but much harder to make it to Vienna. To
some extent this was intentional: Stalin desired a buffer zone to his satellite
states in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and wanted to keep the
Western Allies away.93 The Russians kept a huge army in eastern Austria,
based in their HQ in Baden. The command extended all the way to Romania,
taking in Hungary.
The camp at Mauthausen lay near Linz in the Soviet Zone. Many French
deportees had perished there and Béthouart accompanied several pilgrimages
made up of bereaved families. On 20 June 1947 he went with Figl and the
education minister Hurdes, both of whom had been incarcerated in
Mauthausen. The Russians were notoriously half-hearted in their pursuit of
Nazis, and officially left it up to the Austrian civil authorities to hunt war
criminals, although they were always keen to accuse the other Allies of
sheltering them. In March 1947 they claimed that the British were protecting
Nazis in Carinthia. They were still supporting Yugoslav claims to territory in
the southern province.94 The Americans were keeping a record of Soviet
anti-Nazi activity: in Krems the Russians rounded up 440 Nazis and put
former Nazis to work clearing rubble in Gmünd and Wiener Neustadt.cs Half
of Wiener Neustadt had been destroyed and there were outbreaks of spotted
typhus.95
British Zone
The British Zone of occupation was fraught with problems at the start.
The Russians were camping in Styria, and emptying the region of any
equipment of value; Bulgarians were dug in among the South Styrian vines;
and the Yugoslavs had taken large parts of Carinthia. While the Bulgarians
were relatively easy to control, the Russians and the Yugoslavs were a
nightmare. Firstly the Yugoslavs had taken the Carinthian capital,
Klagenfurt, and hoisted their flags over the city. When the local governor
refused to fly a Yugoslav flag he was replaced by a more compliant figure.
Posters announced that Carinthia was now part of Yugoslavia.ct ‘National
councils’ were hastily formed on which Yugoslavs and members of the
Slovenian minority sat. The British were helpless. They were in the second
city of Villach, forty-seven of them: twenty officers and twenty-seven
administrators. Even after the British forces arrived, there were still more
partisans than Tommies. ‘Shooting was out,’ although the Yugoslavs had no
heavy weapons.96
There was at least one comic moment reported by those pioneering
officers in Villach. One of them was reconnoitring in the woods shortly after
the British force arrived and ran into a woman in Luftwaffe uniform. She
made it clear her unit was running out of food. The British officer followed
her to a large underground bunker where women were pushing in and
pulling out telephone plugs. It turned out to be the major military exchange
for southern Austria. ‘They had known perfectly well what was happening,
and had assumed that sooner or later someone would come along and give
them some orders.’97
Carinthia not Styria was the lynchpin of British foreign-political aims in
the region. The goal was to prevent Trieste from falling into the wrong hands
- that meant Tito. At the end of the war the New Zealanders had been sent to
take the port and keep the Yugoslavs out. Trieste was to be granted to Italy in
1947, and in the meantime it was needed to supply the British and Western
Allied garrisons. It was left to Field Marshal Alexander to convince the
Yugoslavs to withdraw. When they refused, the British printed their own
posters, accusing Tito of methods similar to Hitler’s. Byrnes’s predecessor as
American secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, threatened to withdraw aid
from Yugoslavia. Alexander used a line of argument that was current at the
time and assured Tito that territorial settlements would be left to the ‘peace
conference’. The Yugoslavs finally consented to leave on 21 May.
Bankrupt, overstretched and reeling from the blows inflicted by the war,
the British showed a reluctance to be saddled with Austria. From 1943
onwards they were active in seeking a solution that would mean Austrian
independence.98 By October 1948 the British presence had declined to 7,000
men and a thousand civilians. In March that year Bevin had made it clear
that it was ‘out of the question to defend Austria’.99 The British Zone was
made up of Styria, Carinthia and a small part of the eastern Tyrol around the
city of Lienz. Styria presented the new overlords with a problem of what to
do with widespread sympathy for the Nazis, and Carinthia with a quite
different conundrum: how to handle a large Slovenian minority. Besides
these, there was the nagging Yalta Agreement. The British, like the
Americans, had agreed to deport any Russian citizens within their zone of
occupation. They had also told Tito they would return Yugoslav citizens who
had opposed him.
Styria had been having a rough time under the Russians. At first the
locals were merely grateful that the war had come to an end. The future
governor, the farmer Anton Pirchegger, recorded the fact in a typically pious,
Austrian-provincial fashion: ‘Christus lebt und wird wieder regieren’ (Christ
lives and will rule again). A week later the Russians were banging on his
door demanding schnapps.100 They proved less than welcome. During their
tenure, the Russians had raped at least 10,000 women and dragged off
anything up to 500 men aged between fifteen and sixty-one to work in
Siberia. One eyewitness remembered the terrible scenes of looting, and
hearing a German-speaking Russian NCO pronounce one word in
justification: ‘Vergeltung!’ (Retribution!).101
While the Russians seized anything that appealed to them, the British sat
in Bruck-an-der-Mur and waited until the night of 22-23 July when the Red
Army pulled out, to be replaced by the 46th Division of the Eighth Army.
The Oxford-educated military governor, the Australian Colonel Alexander
Wilkinson, installed his military command in Graz, a town which had
expressed a notorious fondness for the Führer. On 24 July General McCreery
issued a proclamation from the town hall. The British regime was strict:
Wilkinson expressed a certain Anglo-Saxon scepticism when he told his
fellow officers that ‘some, at any rate, of the Austrians were fairly lukewarm
Nazis’.102 The homes of all the Nazis who had fled the city were confiscated
and the British continued the process of denazifying the schools. The
Russians had made a fairly lame beginning. Wilkinson’s men removed a
total of around 400 schoolteachers from a body some 3,130 strong.
The priority was to endow the zone with a stable political leadership.
Carinthia had been given a Russian-approved cadre and governor in
Reinhold Machold in May, and various self-styled resistance groups vied for
recognition. The British now ‘liberated them from their liberators’.
Wilkinson dissolved the lot. Henceforth Styria would have political parties,
not resistance groups. He sacked Machold on 25 November and appointed
Pirchinger of the ÖVP.103 A British observer sat in on every session of the
provincial assembly or Landtag from now on and every measure had to be
approved. It was very much occupation, not liberation.104 Austrian law as of
13 March 1938 was to be reinstated, but when that date was challenged (the
Corporate State had done a few questionable things, such as bring in racial
law in 1935) the 1929 constitution was made the fount of legal authority. A
curfew was imposed for Austrians. On 1 August Styria received its own
judicial overlord in the form of the jurist Lieutenant-Colonel H.
Montgomery Hyde.105
The British were occasionally overbearing and arrogant, leaving at least
one Austrian in no doubt about who the real ‘nation of lords’ were.106 One
former British subaltern who entered the zone from Italy remembers
thinking that ‘liberation’ was not quite the word: ‘In our eyes an Austrian
was just a slightly different sort of German.’107 The arrival of the British
nonetheless gave rise to considerable relief, as the Russians had run the
province down. But it was a difficult situation. A local newspaper, the Neue
Steirische Zeitung, was launched to express the British point of view. There
was no food, and there was no transport to deliver bread to the suburbs and
outlying villages. It was so warm that summer milk went bad on the carts
leaving the dairies. There was very little meat or fat and no sugar. Potatoes
were issued at a kilo a week. For anyone who had something to barter,
supplements to this meagre diet could be obtained from the black market on
the Volksgarten. The British authorities made several attempts to break this
up.108 There was also a degree of lawlessness in what was normally a sleepy
province. Over two hundred murders had been committed since the end of
the war - about a quarter of these by Russians in incidents connected with
rape. The historian Donald Cameron Watt served in the FSS (Field Security
Service). During his time in the unit he vetted ninety-two petitions from
local women wanting to marry British servicemen; investigated a Third
Man-style theft of pharmaceuticals; and looked into the festering problem of
white slavery in the DP camps.109
The character of the administration in the British Zone is lightheartedly
summed up by Alan Pryce-Jones, then an intelligence officer in the British
army. Austria, he said, was divided into eight zones, each one of them a
separate state. Four of these were civilian states, four run by the army. ‘In
the background is a ninth state, Austria, the chief function of which is to be
talked about at meetings.’110 The government of the British Zone was part of
John Hynd’s ‘Hyndquarters’. John Mair, who served on the Austrian
Commission, is quick to point out that there was a huge difference in scale
between the Austrian Commission and the German Control Council.111 Hynd
was highly sympathetic but, as in Germany, largely impotent when it came
to changing the government line. At a subaltern level he was supported by
Sir Henry Mack, as well as by Peter Wilkinson, M. F. Cullis and N. J. A.
Cheetham.112 McCreery went home in April 1946 and was replaced by
General Sir James Steele.
The Graz Festival was slightly less spectacular than Salzburg, but it had
a solid tradition. The British were careful to revive it in 1945, and that year
Karl Böhm conducted and the Grazer were able to hear the voices of Julius
Patzak and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. When the festival was staged the
following year, the occupying power lent it a British flavour, and Sir
Malcolm Sargent was brought in to conduct Elgar’s Second Symphony.113
 Cossacks and Domobranci
In Carinthia the British faced a thorny refugee problem resulting from
the Big Three Conference at Yalta. Tito’s partisans had been fighting Croats
and German- and Italian-backed domobranci or home guard in Slovenia. In
both cases their Catholicism made them allergic to the ideologies proposed
by Tito, and they thought fascism a lesser evil. When the war ended both the
Croats and the domobranci justifiably feared reprisals. There was the usual
spate of denunciations, and the wisest fled north across the revived Austrian
border with their families, through the Ljubelj Pass to Viktring near
Klagenfurt.114 According to one source, they went first to Hollenburg on the
Drau, where they joined up with a number of Waffen-SS men.115 Tito’s
partisans had also crossed the border in order to stake their claim to large
parts of Carinthia.
The domobranci ran into their first dishevelled Tommies, who promptly
exhibited the light-fingered approach most often associated with the Red
Army and stole their watches.116 The British were torn between their
sympathy for the Slovenians and their families, and their wartime alliance
with Tito’s partisans who were now showing their colours by raping and
pillaging around Klagenfurt.117 The domobranci thought the British would
redeploy them to fight the communists. They had not reckoned with the
secret arrangements made at Yalta. Sadly for them, the Cold War had not yet
started.118 On 19 May 1945 the British and Tito’s men came to an agreement
to repatriate all Yugoslav nationals. No differentiation was to be made. The
Yugoslavs were not popular with the British and no one was prepared to
stick his neck out for them.119
Under the Yalta arrangements, the British in Austria had to deal with
45,000 Cossacks requested by the Red Army, as well as the 14,000 Serbs
and Croats who were being reclaimed by Tito. The Cossacks had been
recruited by the Germans in southern Russia from POWs, and they had been
joined by some former tsarist officers and their families. These last
amounted to around 3,000 people. Some of them were not Soviet citizens,
and therefore not covered by the Yalta agreement. As POWs they enjoyed
protection under the Geneva Convention. This was waived.120 There was also
the fact that most of the Cossacks had been fighting in the SS. Their last
assignment was to fight with Schörner’s army near Prague. There were
60,000 in the British Zone: ‘They wore German uniforms, carried German
arms, were commanded by German generals, and were an integral part of the
German armed forces.’ One thing, however, complicated the humanitarian
issue: ‘They had with them quite a few women and children.’121
Marshal Tolbukhin had asked for the Russians to be sent back and the
British had agreed. The deportations were carried out by men of the 46th and
78th Divisions on orders from V Corps, following a brief visit by the
minister resident at Allied HQ, Harold Macmillan, on 13 May. On 1 June,
they were lured out of their camps in Spittal, Judenburg and Lienz under
false pretences.122 Once they discovered what was going to happen to them
they refused to budge, which led to some ugly scenes. Women and children
said they preferred to be shot there and then to being handed over to the
Soviets. Some of the women tied their children to their backs and jumped to
their deaths in the River Drau. Tommies used rifles, bayonets and pickaxe
handles to convince them to board the lorries that would take them to the
frontier. When a warrant officer was bitten, the British soldiers beat some of
the Cossacks unconscious. The Argylls were particularly brutal, to women
and children as well.123 The British also ‘returned’ some 900 German
officers, including the commander, General Helmuth von Pannwitz, who was
publicly shot on Red Square in Moscow. The British were forced to use
duplicitous tactics in expelling both the Cossacks and the domobranci, and
this caused them considerable distress.
The British were in a difficult position in Carinthia anyway. All the
Allies had confirmed Austria within its pre-1938 borders. On the other hand,
it appears that Tito had actually backed down on the issue of repatriating the
domobranci, but the British proceeded anyhow.124 There is a suggestion that
the commanders of the British Fifth and Eighth Armies acted on their own
initiatives here, fearing armed conflict with the local partisans. Nigel
Nicolson, a British intelligence officer, later summed the matter up with
cold-hearted clarity: ‘There were many people who felt “Well, so many
millions of young men have died in this war, what does another 30,000
matter?”’125 No one, including Nicolson, knew the precise number of
Cossacks in the British Zone. Only when the moment came to shove the
home guardsmen into cattle trucks was he reminded of prisoners being
despatched to a German concentration camp. As it was, they were told they
were being transferred to camps in Italy, but they do not appear to have
believed it. The British brought up tanks to make sure there was no trouble,
and searched the men’s rucksacks: their last cameras, knives, fountain pens
and other valuables disappeared into the Tommies’ pockets. The officers
were sickened. The Welsh Guards, who had been given the job of forcing the
12,000 men back to their deaths, were reported to be on the brink of mutiny.
The matter was later covered up.126
American Zone
When the Americans marched into Austria in the spring of 1945, they
too saw it less as a ‘liberated’ land than as ‘a part of Germany’. Salzburg, for
example, yielded without a fight on 3 May, but the Americans would tolerate
no red-white-red flags. They were unsympathetic to Austrian complaints
about their treatment and dismissed the stories of widespread rape as ‘Nazi
propaganda’. The Austrians were an ‘enemy people’ and they had only
themselves to blame.127 The famous American airman Charles Lindbergh
noted in his diary that the American GIs had an interesting interpretation of
the word ‘liberation’: it meant helping themselves to anything they could
have without paying for it: cameras, weapons, objets d’art - ‘even
women’.128
There were good men in their ranks. Paul Sweet was a university history
teacher in the OSS. On 27 June he wrote that military government was
inconsistent with the notion of a liberated country: ‘the sooner we give
Austria back to the Austrians the better’. The OSS took the Moscow
Declaration more seriously than some. Sweet outlined the reasons for the
American presence - to demobilise, protect DPs and arrest Nazis. There
should be a minimum of supervision. Austria was needed to stabilise central
Europe.129 When he had been in the job a few months he changed his mind.
Writing to his wife, he said the Austrian people were ‘morally and politically
bankrupt. The only thing about which they seem to have a firm opinion is
that the US should cut loose from the Russians, the sooner the better.’130
One of the most curious situations the Americans found themselves
facing in Upper Austria was the provisional government set up by Ernst
Kaltenbrunner, the Nazi RSHA (Security Service) and police chief, as an
alternative to Renner. Kaltenbrunner had assembled a number of industrial
magnates and enlisted the support of Schuschnigg’s minister Edmund Horst-
Glaisenau and the archbishop of Salzburg, Andreas Rohracher. Talks had
been held with the mayor of Linz, Franz Langoth, and the Gauleiter of the
Tyrol, Franz Hofer. Some Christian Socialists were brought out of mothballs
such as Karl Seitz, the former mayor of Vienna, and his Corporate State
successor Richard Schmitz. Schmitz had sadly died after his incarceration in
Dachau. Figl’s name was brought up as well. The Americans had no truck
with the alternative government. Kaltenbrunner was hanged.131
The US Zone had outstanding political advisers at the second level
resulting from the large German and Austrian presence in America itself.
None of the other Allies possessed such linguists and experts with a first-
hand knowledge of the conquered lands. One of the American experts was
Martin Herz, whose father had emigrated to the United States from Moravia
but had returned to Vienna, so that his son’s entire schooling had been in the
city. Herz was deeply involved in post-war planning for Austria. Certain
things he found silly or preposterous: the ban on frat was one of these. It was
‘distasteful’ and ‘ineffective’. On the question of Austria’s ‘liberation’ he
was of the view that it was a ‘psychologically reasonable and effective
fiction’.132
The American commander Mark Clark has gone down in the annals of
the Cold War as one of its biggest personalities, but he did not fall out with
the Russians or abandon the idea of co-operation until early 1946.133 He
revived the Salzburg Festival in August 1945, and his French opposite
number General Béthouart was helpful in procuring the Clave Quartet and
Jacques Février. He hoped to bash McCreery’s and Koniev’s heads together
and make the British agree to go up to Vienna, but the British remained as
stubborn as ever and Koniev cried off.134 Clark entertained in style, lodging
his guests at his HQ in Schloss Klessheim (called Schloss Claessens by
Béthouart) like Hitler before him. Clark was pleased with Klessheim, and
was under no illusions about its previous role as a guesthouse for visitors to
Berchtesgaden. It had been ‘wonderfully modernised and furnished with art
treasures, mostly stolen from France’.135 The festival was a useful way of
bringing the Allies together and impressing them with American hospitality.
He invited them all for 19 August. Koniev sent Clark’s bugbear Zheltov in
his place. Zheltov wanted to see what was left of Berchtesgaden, and they
visited it in one of Hitler’s own cars.136
Clark had a number of issues to discuss between concerts. Before Austria
could be allowed its independence again, there needed to be talks on DPs,
food supplies (a particularly thorny issue), free elections, and ‘German’
assets.137 Lapses were reported in the US denazification programme. 138 With
time the Americans came to the conclusion that it was not as easy as it had
seemed at the outset. Many of the people they had seen as being as above
suspicion were no more than common criminals.139 In the Salzkammergut
Clark made use of a German interpreter who claimed to have been a big-shot
in the resistance to Hitler. When the German learned that Clark was to take
up residence in Vienna, this man offered him his flat there. Clark says that
the locals eyed him with suspicion when they saw him sitting with Clark in
his staff car. Counter-intelligence was asked to look him up. It transpired that
he was no opponent of the regime, but a senior Nazi, and on the Americans’
own wanted list.140 Clark tells us that he foiled Russian attempts to reclaim
their own citizens who were ensconced in DP camps in the American Zone.
At one point there was a raid carried out by Soviet soldiers in stolen
American uniforms. Clark laid a trap for them and caught them red-handed.
There were 750,000 DPs in the American Zone, not all of them Russians by
any means.141 Clark was being less than frank, of course, about the very
limited protection that the Americans gave to Russians in their zones in
Austria or Germany.
Clark used a great deal of Cold War rhetoric in his account of his time in
Austria, but his mission had largely come to an end before the big decisions
were made. From 1947 the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were
both designed to stem the tide of communism, by liberal use of both stick
and carrot - chiefly financial. Washington’s National Security Council was
also founded at this time, and it was General Geoffrey Keyes, Clark’s
successor, who was the man to enact the full range of Cold War options. As
he pointed out, ‘Prague lies west of Vienna.’ The United States needed to
arm for the Cold War and for the great ‘roll-back’ - the reclamation of
Europe from the Soviets.142
The American authorities were slow to create a proper political structure
in their zone. In October there was still no governor appointed for Upper
Austria.143 They had to deal with the chaos in Austrian industry. Some of the
bigger companies had had installations all over the country and now found
themselves divided up among the Allied zones. The motor manufacturer
Steyr was a case in point. The administration was in Linz, in the American
Zone, but most of the works were in the Soviet Zone, with the exception of
the plant making bicycles and motorbikes, which was in Graz - what was
later to be the British Zone. The Graz factory also made tank engines and
aeroplane parts, which were naturally of interest to the Red Army. The
Russians ensured that they had taken all of these before the British came in
July.144
 Another industrial concern was the Hermann-Göring-Werke, an
enormous conglomerate of sequestered businesses established in Hitler’s
home town of Linz. The works were administered by a Pg called Hans
Malzacher, but the Americans were forced to admit that Malzacher was
universally popular, not only with the governor, Eigl, and the mayor, Koref,
but also with the local communists. The pragmatic solution was to make an
exception and leave him in the job.145
French Zone
The French Zone, which covered the Vorarlberg and most of the Tyrol,
was originally run from French HQ in Lindau on Lake Constance in
Württemberg. Despite the fraternising billboards set up by General
Béthouart, Austrians and the Germans still nurtured fear and resentment of
the French and their colonial troops - the Moroccans in particular.146 The
French had the usual linguistic problems, as far too few of them spoke
German, but they were able to find a few refugees and German and Austrian
Jews in their Foreign Legion.147
The principal problems facing the French were their attitude towards the
Renner government; the form of the constitution created after free elections;
the ratification of the constitution; the revision of Nazi statutes; the
reorganisation of the administration after the necessary purge of Nazi
officials; and how to cope with the thousands of refugees, POWs and
Austrian Nazis.148 The figure who emerged as the clear political leader in the
Tyrol was Karl Gruber, who was credited with having organised a cell of
military opposition to the Germans in the region. On 1 May 1945 he had
managed to close down a number of Nazi organisations in Innsbruck. When
the Americans marched in on 3 May they were offered the rare sight of an
Austrian city festooned with red-white-red flags. The streets were filled with
‘resistance fighters’, often armed to the teeth.149
The French were also planning to reopen schools and universities in their
zone in time for the new academic year that autumn. Before that was done,
Nazi staff had to be purged and Nazi texts removed from the libraries. The
University of Innsbruck was in a parlous state - all the windows had been
blown out and the Faculty of Theology closed on Hitler’s orders. The French
vowed also to restore liberties: individual, political, of assembly and of the
press.
 The French were reluctant to discharge all their POWs because they
wanted to use them as slave-labourers, as elsewhere.150 On the other hand
there was very little active pursuit of the Nazis. Paul Sweet visited the
Vorarlberg in June 1945 and found that no one heeded the ban on frat:
‘everything seems to be much as normal’.151 Instead of the Nazis being
locked up, they were attached as unarmed auxiliaries to troop units.
Marauding DPs were a problem, the Russians in particular. Theft and murder
was not unknown. Two found guilty of killing and robbery were executed by
the French in the Vorarlberg.152
Two early difficulties that the French confronted were the arrival of
Archduke Otto and the South Tyrol. Otto was the eldest son of Emperor
Charles, who had abdicated in 1918 and died shortly afterwards. Otto had
enjoyed a small émigré following during the war and he now saw his chance
to push for a Habsburg restoration. He arrived in the Tyrol in September
1945 and left again at the beginning of 1946. The South Tyrol had been
awarded to Italy in 1918 as a reward for fighting on the Allied side. As Italy
had fought on the wrong side for most of the Second World War, some
southern Tyroleans saw a possibility of returning to Austrian rule.
The Americans moved their troops out of the Tyrol on 7 July, to make
room for the French. When Béthouart arrived in Innsbruck on the 18th he
found a petition from Dr Gruber referring to the ‘bleeding wound’ inflicted
on the Tyrol with the loss of the southern part of the region. On 4 September
there was a demonstration in Innsbruck in which 25,000 to 30,000 people
took part, 12,000 of them in their local costume.153 Archduke Otto arrived on
10 August. Béthouart reported his presence both to his own authorities and
to the provisional government in Vienna. According to Béthouart, Renner
entertained a degree of nostalgia for the great days of empire and merely
shook his head, exclaiming, ‘Oh! But if he does nothing political!’ Renner
put pressure on Béthouart to expel Otto, however, possibly because he had
heard that the archduke had been conspiring with Gruber to convince the
Western Allies to refuse to recognise his regime. Béthouart replied that he
would not fetch and carry for Renner. Otto continued to rock the boat and his
two brothers, Karl Ludwig and Robert, were in the French Sector of Vienna
flirting with the monarchists in the Federal League of Austrians. Eventually
all the Allies with the exception of the French expressed a desire to see the
old Habsburg ban re-enacted. Otto received delegations during the time he
was under the noses of the French. In the end the provisional government
dealt with the problem by reintroducing the ban on the Habsburgs instituted
in 1918. By that time Otto had left of his own volition.154
The first tranche of Nazis in the Tyrol had been eliminated by the
Americans as they conquered the region. They had dealt with the more
notorious cases. On 16 May 1945 all the councils in the Vorarlberg were
sacked, as they were Nazi to a man. Councillors were appointed by the
French until February 1947, when elected councils returned. Half the
magistrates had to be dismissed as a result of Party membership, as were
seven university professors.
It had been decided at Potsdam that all Germans who had entered Austria
after the Anschluss were to be repatriated, together with any German Nazis.
The French approached the task with zeal. Taking their cue from the
expulsions of pro-German Alsatians after 1918, they allowed the Germans to
carry just one case, weighing thirty kilos at the most. Germans were expelled
willy-nilly at first, but the pace slackened off in 1946 after complaints from
the British and American authorities in Germany that they could not
accommodate them all. The French showed how partisan they were by
releasing all Austrian POWs.155 The German minorities in Romania and
Yugoslavia had not been included in the discussions at Potsdam, and they
naturally gravitated towards Austria as former subjects of the Austrian
Emperor. For the time being they were herded together in DP camps.
At the end of 1947 there were still 400,000 DPs in Austria, more than
there had been in 1945. The South Tyroleans had been found homes in the
Austrian northern part of the province. Many had fled from the Soviets, and
the Red Army maintained small staffs with the Western Allies part of whose
work was to track down their own people and repatriate them. The British
had refused to countenance having Soviet officers in their camp at first, but
the Russians had made life difficult for them in Vienna and they had had to
give in. The French refused to agree to Russian requests to yield the refugees
up.
France’s political commitment to its zone in the Tyrol-Vorarlberg quickly
slackened. At the outset the governor, M. Voizard, had a staff of 1,600. A
year later less than half that number remained. By the end of the decade it
had sunk to ninety-three. In 1945 there were thirty-four offices in the Tyrol
alone, in 1948 just eleven. Before the French went home, they performed
their own demontage, removing 3,000 machine tools and 2,700 tons of
different metals to compensate for the 35,000 machines taken by the
Germans from France: a greater prize was the testing equipment for jet
engines in Kramsach and the wind tunnel at Oetztal, which the French
reassembled at Modane. Some French machinery had ended up in
Kapfenberg in the British Zone. The British helped dismantle it and pack it
up for shipment back to Alsace.156

OceanofPDF.com
 11
Life in All Four Zones
Germany today is divided into four zones and
within each there are
two worlds: an army of occupation and a conquered
people.
The former are not just there to supervise and control,
they must
also exert an influence; they are meant to stop up the
spirit of aggression
and nationalism and eliminate it before leading the way
to
democratic self government; civilisation should heal the
smashed and
shaken land.
The first question that comes to mind is what do these
two worlds
know of one another? How do they perceive one
another? What is
the real relationship?
Naturally no one expects an army of occupation to
become an
object of love and adoration, and on the other side, a
conquered
people, whose leaders without question launched the
war, cannot
expect to be treated at once with sympathy and trust.
But the task of reorientation, even successful
administration,
requires an atmosphere of trust and respect on both
sides.
Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 71

Children
As a Viennese Jew returning to central Europe in British uniform,
George Clare steeled himself against feeling pity for the conquered. At the
railway town of Hamm in Westphalia, his mettle was put to the test by a
swarm of infants who appeared under the train windows: ‘Eh Tommy . . .
Please Tommy vat you got? Chockie, sandvich, sveets?’ Clare observed the
‘manna from Britain’ that was tossed out to the urchins: hard-boiled eggs,
sweets, sandwiches, chocolate bars, oranges, apples, even tins of pilchards.
The children fought with one another to get at the loot while the soldiers
enjoyed the spectacle, like ‘throwing nuts to monkeys at the zoo’. Clare
went back into the compartment and fetched his haversack rations. He
jumped down from the train. The four children closest to the door ran away.
‘Hier bleiben!’ shouted Clare - Stay here! They turned back, curious to hear
a Tommy speak German. He shared out his rations among the four of them.
He wondered whether any German had done this in the Warsaw Ghetto and
yet he felt that what he was doing was right: ‘I could not hate all Germans,
as the Nazis had condemned and hated all Jews. No, I neither hated
Germans nor - with the exception of the children - did I pity them.’1
Many German children had become feral. They had lost one or both
parents, or had simply been estranged from them. In the big towns they
lived in holes in the ground like the rest, begging or scavenging for food. At
least one British high court judge began his life in this way, until he was
rescued by a British soldier who took him back to Britain with him and sent
him to school. James Stern remembered the vision of these curious
guttersnipes, clothed in rags - ‘or rather, from head to foot they were
perfectly camouflaged in filth, so that until they moved you could not tell
they were there’. At the approach of an adult, especially a foreign soldier,
they scattered like so many rabbits, disappearing into holes. When they re-
emerged they sniffed and stared around them. ‘And then you’d see that they
carried stones or sticks or bars of iron, and their teeth were black and
broken, or that they had no teeth, that one had a single arm, another a
crutch, and that the only clean spots on their bodies were the whites of their
eyes.’ When he looked into their eyes, however, they were no longer rabbits
to Stern - they were famished, diseased leopard-cubs ‘whose one enemy
was man’.2
Some of these children had homes, but they nonetheless went out and
hunted in packs, stealing what they could from the conquerors. When
Stern’s major was alerted to some theft from their well-stocked larder, he
decided that some children were to blame. The supposed criminals were
hunted down to a dung heap where they had their camp and threatened at
pistol point. The youngest of the boys was around five. The only evidence
they found was a bottle containing some pink petrol: American petrol was
dyed pink. That was enough to convict them. The major ordered a search of
their parents’ lodgings. The flats were searched and at least one of the boys
received a clip round the ear from his father, but no contraband was found,
and the case against the boys was dismissed.3
Nor was it only working-class children who took to crime in this way.
Zuckmayer met a certain Frau Doris von M., a former actress married to an
elderly Prussian nobleman who kept a boarding house for American visitors
to Berlin. ‘My son steals!’ she told the dramatist. ‘And we don’t know what
we should do about it.’ Her son and his private-school-educated friends
stole to trade, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for sport: ‘The only true
Commandment is the eleventh - thou shalt not get caught.’ Jürgen was the
boy’s name. One day he returned with a pound of sugar that he had bought
with cigarettes pinched from a teacher’s pocket. He also had some
chocolate, taken from an American nurse. He proudly delivered these
preciosa to his parents, believing that he had done something useful and that
he was contributing to the family budget. He had two pilfered cigarettes for
his father and was disappointed when he received no thanks. Jürgen had no
religion: ‘The Lord looks after the “Amis”, because they can afford him.
The Ivans don’t need any, because they worship vodka. The Germans are
too poor for either.’
Jürgen’s parents were strict about his thieving, but it was not always so.
Others welcomed a wheelbarrow filled with stolen coal or a pound of
bacon.4 For many more indigent Germans they could hardly have done
without a little help from their children, particularly teenage boys. Heinrich
Böll’s short story ‘Lohengrins Tod’ (Lohengrin’s Death) of 1950 is about a
boy who is shot at by Luxembourgeois soldiers while stealing coal from a
train, falls and suffers appalling injuries. In the hospital they ask if his
parents should be informed, only to find out that his mother is dead, and the
head of the household is his elder brother. Stealing coal was hardly seen to
be a sin: after all, Dr Fringscu had actually absolved the coal-stealers from
his pulpit.5
Children were a considerable problem for the Allied authorities. There
were over fifteen million of them in Germany. Of those born after 1930,
some 1,250,000 had lost a parent in the war, and 250,000 had lost both. Up
to a third had no more contact with their fathers as they were in POW
camps, while a further million and a half were refugees from the east, with
a little under half that number living in makeshift camps. In the case of a
boy arrested for petty larceny in Munich in 1946, it transpired that his
mother had been killed in an air-raid in Essen in 1943, that his father was
missing in Russia, that he had been billeted with an aunt in Dortmund but
had been evacuated to East Prussia. He had moved to Danzig to be trained
to operate an anti-aircraft battery where he had been captured by the Red
Army. The Russians had released him. He had gone to Berlin, but had been
unable to locate the relative he was looking for. He had finally gone to
Bavaria in search of food. Many female children resorted to prostitution to
survive. Boys, too, performed a service for Allied soldiers. In Frankfurt
their most prominent client was the infamous American major ‘Tante Anna’
(Aunt Anna).6
American schoolmasters thought the appropriate policy was to organise
the children in sporting clubs and teach them democracy at the same time. It
was believed that baseball and football might instil a sense of fair play in
small Germans. The sporting life was lost on many of them, but jazz and
dancing tended to succeed where baseball failed: the jitterbug and boogie-
woogie were popular with German youth, as were Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington. Attempts to extend musical re-education to Samuel Barber
and Aaron Copeland proved less successful. The Germans had a musical
tradition of their own. A camp was established at Compiègne near Paris to
train German teachers.7 The Americans made the mistake of trying to herd
German children together in these imitation summer camps. Hitler’s
Volksgemeinschaft had emphasised the community in preference to the
individual, and right-thinking German youth wanted nothing of the
American idea. They loathed all notions of being ‘herded together once
again’.
One visionary was Yella Lepman, a Jewish writer born in Stuttgart who
returned to Germany in 1945 in an American uniform. From 1946 she built
up an international children’s library in Munich which she ran until 1957. In
December 1945 she went before incredulous American generals to demand
cases of books for German children. She stood her ground and eventually
received their blessing to import some. In her memoir she describes the
sight of young children as she first encountered them playing in the bomb
craters before the ruined station. Many were without shoes, and ran around
in their socks or barefoot. It was hard to tell the difference between little
boys and girls; ‘here and there they made an attempt to beg; a ten-year-old
with one leg, the other certainly lost during a night of bombing, hops like a
lame bird around the American canteen, clapping his hands imploringly.
Occasionally a white or black soldier takes pity and throws the child
something: a half chewed piece of chocolate out of his pack, a stale
sandwich, a few cigarettes to barter: that produces a wild commotion,
sometimes a fight, a punch-up.’8
CARE packets were the salvation of suffering Germans like Charlotte
von der Schulenburg. After the currency reform of 1948 which scrapped the
inflationary Reichsmark she exchanged the coffee in the parcels for
Deutsche Marks. She also received second-hand clothes from English and
American families who had heard of her plight. There was always a party
when the parcels came and the maid Klara was proud to take the children
into the village dolled up in their not quite new finery. The collars were
dazzlingly white, their hairbands freshly ironed.
Another charity organisation for the families of the Plotters was founded
by a Swiss doctor, Albert von Erlach. The money was spent on taking the
children of the conspirators and giving them a holiday with a Swiss family.
Two of Charlotte’s children were dressed up in their best tracksuits and
clogs and taken to a Red Cross train in Hanover where they were consigned
to the care of English nurses. The train took off with little Schulenburgs,
Schwerins and Kleists. They came back three months later. One of the
Schulenburg daughters had put on seven and a half kilos. She was smartly
dressed in grey flannel and wonderful shoes. The other had plump cheeks
and a splendid little coat. They called out to their mother, ‘We have brought
you silk stockings and Nescafé!’ The following year two of her other
children went and gorged themselves on oranges and chocolate and other
delicacies that Germans could only dream of. It broke her heart to lose her
children for such a long time, but she had to admit the benefits.9
Arts
German literature was set for a flowering after 1945, once the pressure
of Nazism had been lifted, and Goebbels’s nose pulled out of the pot.
Thomas Mann had adopted a typically high and mighty attitude to any
literary stir-rings that took place between 1933 and 1945: ‘A stench of
blood and shame attaches to them; they should all be pulped.’ Had such
pulping come about, it would have been as effective a form of censorship as
the Nazis ever used.10 Mann’s comments were occasioned by an invitation
to return to Germany penned by the author Walter von Molo in the summer
of 1945.
Please come soon . . . look at the grief-furrowed faces, look at the
unutterable sadness in the eyes of the many who did not take part in the
glorification of the shadowy side of our natures, who could not leave their
homes, because we are talking here of many millions of people for whom
there was no other place on earth other than their own land which was
gradually transforming itself into a huge concentration camp, in which there
would be only different grades of prisoners and warders.
Mann’s rigid stance did not make him popular in Germany, and Hans
Habe, who had returned to Germany in American uniform and set about
castigating his former countrymen, was dismissed as a ‘Morgenthau-boy’.11
Ernst Jünger’s tract Der Friede (The Peace) was one of the most
important pieces of samizdat literature written during the war, and it
continued its illicit circulation after the peace. It was written in 1941 and
revised in 1943, when Jünger was protected by the Army Command, chiefly
in Paris. The following year Jünger suffered a personal tragedy when his
son Ernst was killed near Carrara in Italy. It was Fritz-Dietlof von der
Schulenburg who brought a copy of the text back to Germany and
circulated it among the opposition. More copies were made in March 1945,
and these were distributed in south Germany. The Allies, however, refused
to grant a licence to print the book. In 1948 it was published in Paris,
Amsterdam and New York and in 1949 in Zurich and Vienna.12 On 30
August 1945, Jünger had a visit at Kirchhorst: ‘In the afternoon Axel von
dem Bussche-Streithorst came, a young and severely handicapped major.
He brought with him a copy of my treatise on the peace. I have the
impression that this is the best known of my writings . . . although no press
has printed it, no bookseller has sold it, and no newspaper has published a
review. The whole fame of the book rests on a few copies that I gave
away.’13
Written in Jünger’s mystical style, Der Friede is a work of great
foresight which makes a plea for an honest, workable peace. It is at once
clear why the Allies disliked it: it calls their actions - and their peace - into
question even before they had formulated the terms. For Jünger the blood of
dead soldiers was the seed that would bring forth corn after the peace; and
that corn was for all to share, conqueror and conquered. It must be a peace
in which all sides win. Hatred was poor-quality corn. ‘The good corn that
has here been so finely ground should never be squandered; it must provide
us with bread for a long time.’14 Jünger spared neither side. He talked of the
exterminations carried out by the Germans, ‘where men were killed like
vermin’ or ‘hunted down like wolves’. ‘Dark rumours spoke of horrible
agapes where thugs and torturers . . . waded in the blood of their victims.’
For the foreseeable future these ‘death pits’ would remain in the minds of
man - ‘they are the real monuments to this war like those at Douaumont and
Langemarck’.cv ‘No one can rid himself of guilt.’15 Jünger cast himself as
the ‘decent’ soldier, the respecter of his enemy, for ‘no one can be a hero to
his enemy who does not credit him.’16 Finally, Jünger warned against a
merely technical, non-creative peace. Such a settlement would mean that
‘tyranny would grow and fear with it, the darkness would spread yet further
and in a short while new fronts would open, occasioning new conflicts’.17
Jünger had his fans, although they were not often to be found among the
forces of occupation. He was also under attack from the exiles. He was the
most important German writer to have stayed put, but he wrote no praise of
the Nazis, and when the Nazis offered him a seat in their emasculated
Reichstag he told them he would rather write a good poem than represent
60,000 dolts. His book On the Marble Cliffs was seen as a brave attack on
the dictatorship, and gave solace to many opponents of the regime. Klaus
Mann nonetheless lashed out at him in Auf der Suche nach einem Weg,
calling him a ‘card sharp who tries to mislead people into believing
barbarity was a new way of thinking’.18
Like everyone else in public life, artists and writers had to fill in the
133-question Fragebogen or questionnaire to determine their degree of
collaboration with the regime. Ernst von Salomon sent up the high-minded
and clumsy Allied approach in his highly successful book Der Fragebogen
(The Answers) of 1951. Salomon was naturally an object of suspicion to the
Allies because he had played a role in the assassination of the Jewish
foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. Salomon had been nineteen at
the time, a proudly Prussian, right-wing thug who had been at a cadet
school when the Great War ended and regretted having been denied the
chance to join the scrap and serve his king and Kaiser like countless other
Prussian noblemen before him. He was in and out of prison throughout the
1920s, but his first book, Die Geachteten (The Outlaws) of 1930, brought
him into the literary limelight. He became a successful author and
screenwriter and one of the darlings of the publisher Ernst Rohwohlt.
 Salomon was a Prussian royalist, not a Nazi, but the tone of his books
appealed to the country’s rulers after 1933. He nonetheless dismissed out of
hand their attempts to woo him. When American interrogaters asked him
why he had not pursued what would have been a highly successful career in
the Party, he replied candidly that he had earned three times as much as a
screenwriter as he would have done as a Gauleiter.19 Die Fragebogen was a
huge success, selling a quarter of a million copies in the fledgling
Bundesrepublik. Having been so severely chastised and humiliated by the
Allies, many Germans revelled in its pugnacious treatment of what
Salomon saw as American hypocrisy. Liberals, both in Germany and
abroad, were not so sure. The Oxford academic Goronwy Rees, who
provided an introduction to the English edition, warned readers against the
smoothness of the author’s tongue, but concurred with Salomon’s outraged
contention that ‘to be convicted of National Socialism was necessarily to be
convicted of guilt’.20
What annoyed others more was the absence of apology for the deeds of
the Nazis, or indeed for some of the spicier moments of the author’s youth
(even though he had paid his debt), and his desire to turn the SA leader and
Nazi ambassador to Slovakia, Hanns Ludin, into a decent man and a martyr
to his principles. Despite his diplomatic rank Ludin was hanged, or rather
strangled, by the Czechs in January 1948. It took him twenty minutes to
die.21
But, if some of the arts were to see a flowering, others were dogged by
denazification. This particularly affected music and the persons of
Germany’s two greatest non-émigré composers, Richard Strauss and Hans
Pfitzner. Both had been members of the Nazi Reich Kulturkammer and
were eligible for internment under JCS 1067. The seventy-six-year-old
Pfitzner was put in the camp at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, smack opposite
the gates to Strauss’s villa, in 1945 and was banned from writing. The ban
was lifted the following year, but he had to go before the Spruchkammer or
denazification tribunal in 1947. He died in the same year as Strauss: 1949.
Strauss managed to avoid internment. He had never been a Nazi, and on
1 May 1945 described the Third Reich as ‘12 years of the rule of bestiality,
ignorance and illiteracy, which brought about the destruction of 2,000 years
of German civilisation’. Then Thomas Mann’s son Klaus turned up and
tricked him into saying the sort of things that would make Americans
believe he was an unrepentant Nazi. But not all Americans shunned him,
and famously the oboist and GI John de Lancie commissioned one of his
great late works, the Oboe Concerto of 1945. Denazification dangled over
Strauss’s head too, but he managed to make it to Switzerland. In 1947 he
gave a tour in Britain, although his music was still banned in Germany. He
was finally cleared in June 1948. He had meanwhile become an Austrian
citizen.22
The visual arts were also hampered by the perceived need to avoid
everything that had been practised under the Nazis: representation was out.
Those members of the older generation who struggled on did it with far less
conviction, as was plain to see in the poor late works of Dix and Grosz. One
exception, perhaps, were the ‘unpainted’ works of the right-wing artist
Nolde, who had gone into ‘inner exile’ after his paintings had been declared
degenerate by the Nazis. The Nazi artists, the sculptor Breker for example,
had no appreciable audience now. The coming men were of the Beuys and
Baselitz type, the latter literally standing tradition on its head.
The Press
The new papers after the war in Berlin were propaganda sheets put out
by the Russian army such as the Nachrichten für die deutsche Bevölkerung.
The first proper paper was the Tägliche Rundschau, which appeared on 15
May 1945, edited by SBZ. It was eagerly scoured in hope that it would give
a clue to what the Russians would do next. The next to appear was the
Berliner Zeitung a week later. Initially this was also the work of the Soviets,
but they handed it over to the town hall, and it was edited by Rudolf
Hernnstadt, a Jewish journalist who had enjoyed a good reputation before
the war. The first paper for Berlin was the communist Deutsche
Volkszeitung, edited by a Muscovite. This was followed by the socialist Das
Volk.
Experience and language made German and Austrian Remigranten
invaluable when it came to controlling and editing the new press. Bernhard
Menne became the first editor of the Welt am Sonntag, while Erich Brost
was his opposite number on the Kölnischen Kurier. The Viennese E. H.
Pollitzer - or Pollitt - was editor of the Lübecker Post. At first he worked
under the historian A. G. Dickens before he was allowed to run his own
show. Other returned Germans became prominent journalists. Leo Felix,
who had gone under the name Felix Field during the war, worked for a
number of papers. Peter de (or von) Mendelssohn was the British equivalent
of a Muscovite: he had emigrated to Britain and served in the British army
and helped the British establish the credentials of German journalists after
the war.23 He was editor of Ullstein’s ambitious Neue Zeit. In the end this
came to nothing, and the first paper free from Allied propaganda was the
Tagesspiegel.
For a while the Americans founded their ‘newspaper metropolis’ on the
little town of Bad Nauheim. This was the base for two new papers, the
Frankfurter Presse and the Frankfurter Rundschau. The first issue of the
Allgemeine Zeitung - which was to become the famous Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) - came out on 7 August 1945, after the break-up
of the Potsdam Conference. The editor had instructions from the Americans
not to print any stories about Allied discord. Later Peter de Mendelssohn
ran that too, before returning to London. The Frankfurter Presse got off to a
good start, with the letter from Walter von Molo to Thomas Mann and a
piece by Alfred Kerr. The Liberal Democrats had their voice in Der
Morgen. By September, newspapers were popping up like mushrooms.
There were 150 of them founded between 1945 and 1948.24
The Americans had a considerable success with the Neue Zeitung and
the glossy Heute in Munich. Erich Kästner edited the Neue Zeitung, which
was controlled by Major Hans Wallenberg, a former Ullstein editor who had
emigrated in 1937. Wallenberg was a convinced anti-communist who left
the Neue Zeitung to work for Springer in Hamburg. The paper was a breath
of fresh air in its time, as its aficionados admired the quality of the writing
and ignored its propaganda content. In 1947 it was selling 800,000 copies,
and Wallenberg believed he could easily dispose of one and a half million.
Zuckmayer thought that the Americans could be really proud of what they
had achieved through the Neue Zeitung.25 Another prominent ‘remigrant’
was Hans (Janos) Habe, the son of the Viennese press baron Imre Bekessy.26
Habe ran parts of the press for the Americans and had to deal with the odd
dissenting voice the Americans wanted to ban. One of these was Der Ruf,
which branded the occupation ‘anachronistic, colonialistic and inhumane’.
Habe turned to Thomas Mann for support: ‘These young people hate their
fathers; but they hate the enemies of their fathers even more.’27
The Americans were also successful in creating radio stations with a
distinct propaganda role. One of these was Radio Liberty, launched on 12
August 1946. Another was RIAS (Radio in American Sector), which came
into its own during the Berlin blockade, broadcasting from vans. Clay
believed that RIAS did essential propaganda work, and that the Americans
should grant it funds to continue.28
In the summer of 1947, Tisa von der Schulenburg found work as a
journalist in Hamburg. She paid a call on Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach,
who worked in the office of Die Welt in the city. He had been a chess
partner in London of Tisa’s first husband, Fritz Hess. The editor, Julius
Hollos, was also present at the meeting. She told them she wanted to work
as an illustrator on the Süddeutsche Zeitung. ‘Why not come to us?’ they
said. She was engaged at RM300 a month, as a writer and illustrator.29 She
focused her attention on the Ruhr, where she sketched the miners in the
same way as she had drawn the pits in County Durham in the 1930s.
Everyone was suspicious of her. The British thought she was a communist
agitator, the miners a British spy. When she tried to cover the 1948 London
Olympics for Die Welt the British refused to grant her papers. In despair she
took the veil.30
Where the former owners had been Jewish, newspapers were relatively
free from Allied interference. This was the case of Ullstein in Berlin,
owners of the Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Berliner
Abendpost. Some of the Ullsteins had fled to America and others to
London, where they had created an Ullstein Ltd. The head of the family,
Hermann Ullstein, had died in the autumn of 1944. The only Ullstein
remaining in Germany was Heinz, who remained alive because of his
Aryan wife. Like most Jews married to Christians, he performed hard
labour for the Todt Organisation, but fled at the right moment and survived
the massacre of many of the others. He surfaced just in time to save the
machinery of the press, which the Russians had dismantled but not yet
shipped.
Axel Springer was a creation of the British Zone. The successful
German weekly Der Spiegel began life as Diese Woche, the child of the
twenty-one-year-old Major Chaloner of the Hanover Information Council.
When its editorial got out of hand, it was offered to the Germans and
Springer. Springer was given his first licence by Major William Barnetson,
later chairman of Reuters. Despite the opposition of some British
administrators, Springer rapidly advanced to become Germany’s first post-
war press baron.31
Attitudes to 20 July
 The Allies introduced a term for the victims of National Socialism,
which should have secured privileges. In practice this did not happen much
at first. They were called ‘Opfer des Faschismus’ (victims of fascism) or
OdF. In theory at least Greta, the widow of the poet Adam Kuckhoff who
had been executed as a member of the communist-inspired ‘Red Orchestra’,
and Marion Gräfin Yorck, whose husband perished on a gibbet after 20
July, should have received higher rations. The OdFs had their own relief
organisation. It was not alone - there was a rival body in the VVN, or
Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes.
While he was attached to an American unit researching the nature of
Nazism, the poet W. H. Auden heard the story of the Scholls for the first
time and their touching but ultimately hopeless attempt to resist Hitler:
‘Those who condemn the Germans for their lack of opposition . . . should
have spent six months here during the war.’32 Hans and Sophie Scholl,
Alexander Schmorrell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf and Professor Kurt
Huber had brazenly printed leaflets attacking Hitler and the war and
scattered them throughout the lecture halls of the university in Munich. A
branch of this ‘Weisse Rose’ Movement had been formed in Hamburg too.
They had all been beheaded for their pains - and eight more in Hamburg.33
Auden and his friends went to see the family of ‘Schurik’ Schmorrell to
learn the story at first hand. It proved a harrowing and emotional moment as
the father, mother and sister of the young medical student rehearsed the
story of his arrest and execution. The sister, Natascha, had been tortured and
lost an eye in the process. This did not protect them from the American
army of occupation. James Stern later learned that the Schmorrells, father,
mother and sister of a hero of the resistance, had been kicked out of their
home to provide accommodation for servicemen and their families.34
However much Stern wished to deny the idea of ‘good Germans’, the
subject exerted a sort of fascination for him. Spurred on by what Auden had
discovered about the White Rose conspirators, he paid a visit to Prince
Fugger von Glött in his vast palace near Memmingen. The prince had been
designated governor of Bavaria in the event of Hitler’s death on 20 July
1944, as he was connected with the two Jesuit priests who had taken part in
the discussions of the opposition. He had been arrested after the failure of
the Plot and had been one of the few survivors. As he told his harrowing
tale the scales began to drop from Stern’s eyes.
 The BBC’s Hugh Carleton Greene made an early sympathetic
programme about the Plot broadcast on its first anniversary on 20 July
1945. Greene had been a journalist in Germany before the war and an
intelligence officer during the conflict. After the war he directed the
German-language service of the BBC and as control officer for the media
exerted an important influence in the intellectual reconstruction of
Germany. Ursula von Kardorff, who had been closely connected to many of
the plotters, described the programme as ‘very fair, no one could have done
it better’. From it she learned the sad news of Nikolaus von Halem’s
death.35
German attitudes were more complicated. Until May 1945 these men
had been traitors; now ordinary Germans had to get used to the idea that
they were actually heroes. For those who had been peripheral to the
plotters’ circle this was not a problem. Ursula von Kardorff was particularly
interested to know the fate of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. The BBC
or the Allied station in Calais had put it about that he was still alive. His
wife Charlotte had also held out hope. Immediately after the war she had
gone to the British CO in Plön to ask whether there was any truth in the
broadcasts. She was received by a Jewish liaison officer who promised to
look into things. Later he appeared at Testorf where she was living. ‘That
was just propaganda’ with no foundation in fact, he told her. Her husband
had been hanged in August 1944.36 Also in Lübeck was Fritz-Dietlof’s
sister Tisa. On the day of Greene’s broadcast she suffered a complete
nervous collapse: ‘The memory of the past year. All the tears that I had
failed to shed at Fritzi’s death came out unexpectedly in an unstaunchable
deluge, I was defenceless. All my brothers were dead. My home was lost.’37
One exile who had a fully open mind about the German opposition to
Hitler was Carl Zuckmayer. Zuckmayer had been a Heidelberg
contemporary of Carlo Mierendorff, one of the chief plotters who had been
killed in an Allied bombing raid on Leipzig in December 1943. He had also
been a friend of Helmuth James von Moltke, great-nephew of the Great
Moltke, Prussian chief of staff in Bismarck’s wars, and nephew of the
Lesser Moltke, who as chief of staff bungled the German advance in 1914.
Helmuth James’s manor at Kreisau (a gift to the older Moltke from his
grateful king) had been used for meetings and debates by members of the
opposition, who were later known as the Kreisauer Kreis, or Kreisau Circle.
 Zuckmayer had believed that the Kreisauer were the perfect breeding
stock for the new Germany, but he sadly realised all too quickly how
comprehensive had been the purge after 20 July. Not only Mierendorff and
Moltke were dead, but also his friends the trades-unionist Wilhelm
Leuschner and the socialist Theodor Haubach. Some, however, had
survived; and Zuckmayer felt they should be hailed, and receive a promise
of support.38 Many of their names had not even appeared in the newspapers
- ‘the footsloggers, the unknown warriors of the resistance’. Zuckmayer
cites one example of a widow whose husband had been arrested in June
1941. More than a year later a neighbour drew her attention to a notice in an
advertisement column. It informed her and the rest of the world that the
man had been executed for high treason. The widow had lived as a post-
office cleaner, but when Zuckmayer met her she had no work and no
savings. The only thing she had to live on was a modest sum from the OdF.
She was bitter, because the Nazis did more for their people; indeed the
judges who had sentenced her husband to death received pensions, and so
did their widows. She lived in great solitude, her only pleasure had been her
wireless set, but the Nazis had taken that away. She was resigned to her
fate: nothing could give her back her husband.39
One who survived the general purge was the poet and writer Günther
Weisenborn. He had been involved with Harro Schulze-Boysen and the Red
Orchestra. The Gestapo lacked evidence against him and his life was
spared. He was condemned to life imprisonment. His young wife had
endeavoured to maintain contact with him in prison in Luckau. She
discovered that he was part of a work detail that was sent out of the prison,
so she travelled on the trains that transported the prisoners in order to catch
a glimpse of him. She had written and performed music to accompany some
of his lyrics, and to attract his attention she whistled one of these tunes. One
day she heard the same tune whistled inside the prisoners’ carriage, and
knew that he was aware that she was near him. When the Russians came
they released the prisoners from their ordeal, but immediately they were
assigned roles within the zone. Meanwhile the Battle for Berlin reigned, and
she could not find a way to him. The Russians finally dismissed him from
his job and he rode on a bicycle to Berlin. Their former home had been
destroyed by bombs, and he had not a clue where she might be. Later he
was riding though an unfamiliar suburb when he saw another bicycle
coming towards him: it was her - ‘They had found one another in the
chaos.’40
Jews in Germany and Austria
One way or another, Germany and Austria had lost the Jews, who had
been such a noticeable part of their populations. There had been around
450,000 in Germany in 1933. Of these some two-thirds emigrated. The
other third perished in the camps and ghettos. In Austria the original figure
was around 180,000, with almost all of them living in Vienna. Again two-
thirds got away, but the other 65,000 died. Of those whose lives were saved
by timely emigration, only a tiny percentage returned. Most of them would
have been reluctant to find themselves face to face with the murderers of
their friends and relations. But there were Jews in Germany and Austria
after 1945 - soldiers and DPs.
Not all Germans had been pleased by the official antisemitism of the
Nazi years, by any means. Ursula von Kardorff, who saw a convoy of
vehicles emblazoned with Stars of David (they belonged to the Jewish
Infantry Brigade) leading off a posse of bedraggled POWs, called it ‘divine
justice’ and recalled the moment three years before when she had seen Jews
wearing the same stars cowering in the backstreets of Berlin while German
soldiers swaggered around in smart uniforms bedecked with decorations.41
By the summer of 1945, the Jews had their own fighting units in
Germany. Up to 35,000 Jewish Palestinians signed up for the Brigade - a
proper fighting force. For much of the war the British had allowed German
and Austrian Jews only to serve unarmed in the Pioneer Corps and many
felt profoundly insulted. When former German and Austrian Jews arrived in
Germany in 1945 they learned what had become of their relatives and co-
religionaries who had stayed behind. They had feared the worst, but few
could have imagined that the horror would be as bad as it was. They were
still in uniform and very few could do much to help in the circumstances.
One exception was Captain Horwell, who became assistant commander of
Bergen-Belsen after the liberation, and was able to aid the 10,000 who
survived.42
Many German or Austrian Jews had distinguished themselves in the
fighting and they were to go on to play important roles under the
occupation. One who played a significant political part in the British army
was Michael Alexander Thomas. At D-Day Thomas was a liaison officer
between the British and the Poles. He was much feared by his staff, who he
insisted should shower and brush their teeth daily. Such rigour earned him
the sobriquet ‘the Prussian Baron’.43 In Germany he was appointed political
officer and made firm contacts with leading socialist politicians such as
Karl Severing and Rudolf Petersen in Hamburg. He prevented General
Templer from banning Germans from wearing military uniforms, as he
pointed out they had no other clothes. Templer found this advice
unwelcome. Thomas left the army as a result of the insensitivity of his
immediate superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Pearson, who referred to him as a
‘Jew-boy’.
Thomas was not the only Jew holding high rank as a political officer. In
Schleswig-Holstein Major Lyndon was head of the Political Department.
Jews also performed important roles in Information Departments - that is,
propaganda and denazification. Two majors, Calmon and Kendal (born
Knobloch), served first in Austria before being assigned the task of finding
war criminals. Major Linford was second secretary to Allied Control
Commission in Austria, acting as liaison with the other Allies. His
counterpart in Berlin was a Captain Lederer. Kaye Sely was chief of
information control, first in Hamburg and then in Berlin. Many of these
Jews were academics in disguise. The distinguished historian of Germany F.
L. Carsten was the son of a Berlin doctor who had Anglicised his first name
(Franz) to Francis. He spent his war at the Political Warfare Executive
(PWE) and performed an important role during the occupation as the author
of a handbook explaining Germany to British forces.44
Many Jews spoke German - although they often refused to use it among
themselves, having decided that the language was somehow polluted. Even
the Poles used Jewish soldiers as interpreters with the Germans in the so-
called ‘Recovered Territories’.45 When George Clare went to work in
denazification in Berlin in 1946, he found that all his colleagues were
German or Austrian Jews or half-Jews with the exception of the Russian.
Sely was from Munich. The American, Ralph Brown, was a Berliner.46 The
role of the Jews in the British army occasionally caused concern. Kaye Sely
showed George Clare a letter from ‘Public Safety’ accusing the Jews of
excessive zeal in denazification, citing the fact that most of the leading
lights were former German and Austrian Jews who might be acting from
motives of revenge.47 There were many more Jews in the American army
than in the British. The Americans were much more willing to grant
commissions to refugees. The British had qualms about using them.
Most of the Jews employed during the occupation worked as
interpreters, and a special school was formed to train them in Brussels. An
Austrian, Major Reitlinger, who had been in SOE during the war, was the
eyes and ears of General McCreery in Vienna. A Viennese, Sergeant R.
Rawdon, was interpreter for the Military Police unit who were the first
British soldiers to enter Berlin. Not only Jews, however, were used to make
up for the linguistic inadequacies of the British forces. Until they realised
who they were dealing with, the British and Americans actually employed
members of the Nazi Concordia Bureau and British Free Corps the motley
gang commanded by John Amery, son of the colonial secretary Leo. Once
the penny dropped, the traitors were shipped back to Britain and tried.48
The Fate of Jewish DPs
The Jewish survivors who drifted towards Germany in the hope of
reaching the West or Palestine were put back behind barbed wire in DP
camps. Many children were born in captivity. For the Jewish survivors there
was a quandary: once they had achieved a sense of humanity once again
and could begin to think about the basics of food and clothing, they needed
to decide what their future would be, and where. Could they go back to
their old homes in Poland or Hungary? These countries had been more or
less cleared of Jews. There were no more friends and relations to welcome
them, and wherever they went they would be reminded of the scale of their
tragedy. And there was the nasty thought of the gentile neighbour, who
might look them up and down, surveying them with a mocking smile that
said ‘What? Still alive?’49
These Jews, who were known as the she’erit Hapletah or ‘rescued
remainder’, kept flooding into Germany. Partly this was a result of renewed
antisemitic violence in the new Poland, where between 1,500 and 2,000
Jews were killed in pogroms in Kielce and elsewhere in 1945. Occupied
Germany was considered the safest place to be. Some 270,000 Jews went to
Germany after the end of the war and sought refuge in DP camps. The
period before they were to find new homes in Palestine and elsewhere has
been called the ‘grim aftermath of the Holocaust’.50
The British were suspicious about the influx of Jews into Germany.
They thought, possibly correctly, that they were intending to use Germany
as a springboard to Palestine. The head of displaced-persons operations for
UNRRA in Germany, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, thought a
secret organisation was behind the arrival of so many ‘well-dressed, well-
fed, rosy-cheeked’ Jews who appeared to have ‘plenty of money’. The
British began to bar entrance to the DP camps to new arrivals and prevent
Jews from going south via Austria. They also introduced a compulsory
labour law for the inhabitants of the camps.51
At their height there were 184 Jewish camps scattered around Germany:
there were eleven in the French Zone, twenty-two in the British and 151 in
the American. One of the most famous camps was at Landsberg in Bavaria,
where the Landsberger Caytung was based. The Landsberger Caytung, the
most successful Jewish paper of the time, offered practical advice to Jews
and reported on the Nuremberg trials.52 Caytung (newspaper) was an
example of the Germanified Yiddish spoken in the camps. The Katzet was
the concentration camp, from the German ‘KZ’.
One unfortunate aspect of life in the DP camps was that Jews were often
driven in with their former tormentors - Hungarian, Ukrainian, Latvians and
Poles who had worked voluntarily in the camps and were now as good as
stateless. They formed a rough and often criminal core at the centre of the
camp. It was not uncommon for the Allies to assign ex-Nazis to the camps
as guards; to add insult to injury, they were armed. The presence of these
sentries and the barbed-wire fences around the barracks gave the Jews’ new
quarters an aspect of the concentration camps they had only recently quit.53
The preponderance of Jewish DP camps in the American Zone was no
accident: Jews wanted to reach America and found British policy on
Palestine unsympathetic. Britain was the principal enemy of the Jews before
1949.54 From January to April 1946 admissions to American camps ran at
around 3,000 a day, with some 2,000 entering camps in the American Zone
in Austria. By April there were 3,000 Jews in Berlin, 1,600 in the French
Zone, 15,600 in the British and 54,000 in the American. There were six
times as many Jews in American-occupied Austria as in the British Zone.
By the end of the year there were 204,000 Jews in the parts of Germany and
Austria controlled by the Western Allies, 90 per cent of them in the
American Zones. It was not always the case, however, that the Americans
were more considerate towards the Jews than the British. General Patton
expressed the view that they were ‘baser than animals’.55
 The Americans were spending $500,000,000 a year on the camps. There
was some question as to whom the Jews belonged. They were hardly likely
to want to be Germans, and most of the eastern states disowned them too.
They were effectively stateless. As numbers continued to swell, the
Americans let in a trickle to the US by slightly loosening their quota in
December 1945. The British Dominions, which had been excessively stingy
in extending hospitality in 1938, continued to sport the oak. Jews who tried
to run the blockade into Palestine were famously intercepted and interned in
DP camps on Cyprus. When the Jewish state was established in May 1948
they flooded across the water.56
The DP camps in Germany resembled Yiddish-speaking villages. The
language acquired immense importance before Hebrew developed under the
auspices of the new state of Israel. German was clearly out, unless there
was no alternative. After 1949 the state of Israel would ban both German
and German music. The pre-war drive to assimilation also ground to a halt.
Adolf Hitler had taught the Jews in no uncertain terms that they were not
wanted.57 The camps were as close to the Shtetlach as anyone was likely to
see after the Third Reich. Indeed, they have been described as the shtetl’s
last evocation.58 The Jews remained there until they could find a means of
getting to Palestine or the United States. The American quota remained
very strict until 1950.
Carl Zuckmayer believed that the Jewish DP camps were keeping
antisemitism alive. As the Jews were outsiders or foreigners, the word
Ausländer (foreigner) had become synonymous with Jew in some parts of
the country. A little girl near his house in the Salzkammergut told him,
‘Mummy went shopping because she wanted to bake something for you.
She needed flour, so she had to go to the foreigners.’ Often this meant going
to a DP camp where those still lucky enough to own cars often found
supplies of benzene.
The Jewish camps were comparatively well provided for, and the
surplus was sold off - for a price. Zuckmayer heard the Germans grumble
that the Jews were growing rich from their hunger. In a dark corner of the
main station in Munich he saw a Jew wearing a kaftan, with a long beard
and curls - ‘a figure never seen in this part of Germany, but perhaps
[visible] in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt, in Bratislava, Łódź or Warsaw’.cw He
had a table, chair and cash register, and scruffy individuals were showing
him things they had in their pockets. A woman told him it was a big
jewellery market. The last of the family heirlooms were being transformed
into meat, fat or coffee. Some of the gems were obviously stolen.59
There were still 29,000 Jews in American camps in Austria at the time,
who were given better rations than the other DPs, and unlike the others they
were exempted from work. That this caused resentment is something of an
understatement, especially as the Jews were prominent in the black market.
An Allied report produced a statistic that 71 per cent of Austrians felt no
guilt about the Second World War. On the other side the Jews complained
too. ‘Until you get your things back, you are treated like a beggar. Once you
have them back, nobody remembers that you were ever a beggar.’60
Resentment of the Jews and their higher rations led to a small riot in
Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut in the summer of 1947. The issue was the
milk quota. Angry protesters surrounded the hotel that served as the Jewish
DP camp and pelted it with stones: ‘Down with the dirty Jews! Hang the
Jews!’ they shouted. The American authorities acted firmly and one rioter
was sentenced to fifteen years. The sentence was later reduced by General
Keyes.61
There were also 15,000 Jews in Germany who had survived the
genocide. One of these was Victor Klemperer, who went back to his
damaged but inhabitable house in Dresden dreaming of good wines, food,
drives in his car, visits to the seaside and the cinema. Mostly he cherished
the fact of raw life, of ‘simple survival’.62 He was one of the 3 per cent of
German Jews who owed his survival to an Aryan spouse. Jews tended to be
given the pick of the jobs in the Russian Zone. A former ‘submarine’, the
machinist Walter Besser, was put in charge of a hospital in 1945. Jewish
leaders emerged from captivity in the concentration camps to found
newspapers. Josef Rosensaft had been in Bergen-Belsen, where he married
the camp doctor Hadassah Bimko after the war. He founded the first
Yiddish newspaper in the British Zone at Belsen, Undzer Sztyme (Our
Voice). Another was Zalman Grinberg, a doctor from Kovno. He founded
the Yiddish newspaper Undzer Weg (Our Way), first published in October
1945. In the British Zone Hans Frey started the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt
für die Nord-Rhein Provinz in Westfalen. Between 1945 and 1948 there
were over 200 publications - books and newspapers - published in Yiddish
in Germany.63
The camps were mostly old barracks buildings, together with some
pukka structures that had been cleared of their German occupants. Quite a
few of them were near or actually located in old concentration camps like
Bergen-Belsen and Landsberg. Two training camps for Jews were housed in
property that had previously belonged to Julius Streicher and Hermann
Göring. Jewish DPs in the American Sector of Berlin were actually lodged
in the Villa Minou, where the infamous Wannsee Conference had been held
in the first weeks of 1942, and where reports had been delivered on the
progress of the Final Solution.64
In the main, the camps were not as daunting as they might have seemed
from the outside. They had their own schools and courses in Jewish history,
Hebrew, Zionism and Palestinian geography - once more attesting to the
abandonment of assimilation and the embracing of Zionism in most cases.
Political parties were formed, theatres put on Yiddish classics, and concerts
were given. Groups of singers such as the Happy Boys sang Yiddish songs.
American rabbis were assigned to the camps to look after the spiritual well-
being of the inmates.65
One of the most notorious DP camps was Bergen-Belsen. Once the
British had managed to bring down the death rate it was possible to
introduce some degree of comfort into the camp, especially when the
inmates were moved out of the old buildings and into the well-appointed SS
barracks. That took a while. At first witnesses were horrified to see how
dehumanised the former prisoners had become. Many of the Jews were
women, and General Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army,
recalled seeing one ‘standing stark naked washing herself with some issue
soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated’.66
In theory, at least, the French, Dutch, Russians and Poles in Belsen had
homes to go to. The Jews did not want to go back, they wanted to go
forward. Once the enormity of their suffering was known, they received
special treatment. The British rabbi, Rev. Leslie Hardman, arrived at Belsen
soon after its liberation. On Friday 20 April he conducted the first Jewish
service there, observing Kiddush in the open air. With foreboding he
remained behind to eat some gefilte fisch with the prisoners. The next
morning he woke with excruciating pains and was forced to take to his bed
for forty-eight hours.67 Hardman witnessed some old-fashioned
antisemitism among the British officer corps. One officer exclaimed,
‘Bloody Jews! Serves them right!’ In general, however, it was more the
dehumanising effect of the war that he observed in the British - they had
seen too much horror to be able to respond any more.68
 Part of the process of recovering was for women to begin to take an
interest in their physical appearance again. One of the doctors working at
Belsen was repeatedly asked by the women whether their beauty would
return.69 For some it would take a long time: the humiliation that had been
part of the policy of their Nazi torturers had gone too deep. One Red Cross
man recalled asking a woman what her name was and where she came
from. ‘Me . . .’ she replied, ‘no name - only number - no country, just a
Jewess, do you understand? I am only a dog.’70 Baths were treated with
suspicion. Some of the women had been in the extermination camps, and
had learned to fear trips to the shower block. The situation was considerably
improved when some old women’s clothes were found to replace the prison
gear and someone discovered a cache of lipstick. In the words of one of the
senior medical officers, ‘It was the action of genius, of sheer unadulterated
brilliance.’ The women were overjoyed. The same officer reported seeing a
woman dead on a slab still clutching her lipstick.71
By June the atmosphere was wholly changed at Belsen. When the
cameramen rolled up it reminded a Red Cross woman of ‘a Butlin holiday
camp’.72 The inmates wanted to know about Zionism and Palestine.
Ironically Hitler had made them better Jews: assimilation was a dead letter.
Even hardened atheists were keen to learn about a religion that had not been
practised for a generation.73 To inject a little morale, concerts were given
and the likes of Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten visited. The women
of Belsen rediscovered men. Dancing became popular, although the women
were still little more than skeletons. The camps were not just culturally
fertile. They were productive in human life. After the genetic experiments
of the concentration camps, many Jews feared they were barren. This
proved not to be the case. In 1946 UNRRA reported between eight and ten
thousand pregnancies in the camps, giving the Jewish camps the highest
birth rate in the world.74
Incidences of antisemitism were comparatively rare, although a Jewish
shopkeeper was threatened in Staubing and locals accused the Jews who
inhabited the old concentration camp in Deggendorf of carrying out armed
robberies. In Munich the Möhlstrasse had its complement of Jewish shops
and there was even a kosher restaurant.75 The camps had flourishing black
markets that led to one police raid on a camp near Stuttgart. In the course of
the police action a Jew was killed during a dispute about boot-leg eggs.
After that the police were banned from entering the camps.76
There were occasional incidences of fury directed at the Germans, but
they were rare. The greatest act of lawlessness committed by the Jews in
post-war Germany was the attempt to kill a large number of POWs in
Nuremberg. Abba Kovner, who had led an armed revolt in the Vilna Ghetto,
founded the Nakom (‘Revenge’) Group and conceived the idea of poisoning
the drinking water in the city. One member of the group found a job in the
waterworks, but David Ben-Gurion refused to allow him to go ahead with
the scheme. They turned instead to the camp, where 12,000 POWs were
kept, many of them ex-SS or Nazis, and succeeded in poisoning the bread.
The prisoners suffered terrible pains, but none died. The perpetrators fled to
Palestine and resisted all attempts to make them face justice in Germany.77
The afterlife of the German Jews was a long time fading. Behind barbed
wire they continued their shadowy existence for over a decade. The last
Jewish DP camps closed in 1957.

OceanofPDF.com
 PART III
Crime and Punishment
OceanofPDF.com
 12
Guilt
We experienced the false indignation of other
lemurs who came to the place of lies to dig up the dead
and expose the decomposed bodies; to measure them,
count them and photograph them, as it was their aim.
They played the role of prosecutor only to gain for
themselves the right to base revenge and then to satisfy
themselves with similar orgies . . . The hand that wants
to help man in all this, and to lead him forth in his
blindness, must be free from sin and acts of violence.
Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 21

How Could We Have Known?

‘The Allies have ceased to threaten us with bombs, now they speak to
us like a nanny, one who gets on our nerves with her bony index finger and
her shrill old maid’s voice. You get the feeling of sitting in a classroom
where you are constantly being told off in such a way that even the best-
behaved pupil will after a short while become obstinate.’1 Many Germans
reacted to the Allies’ revelations with disbelief. Ursula von Kardorff met a
typical old Nazi woman who dismissed their broadcasts as so many lies.
She simply didn’t want to believe in the atrocity stories. When they were
shown pictures of piles of corpses in Dachau they said these were pictures
of the dead after the Allied bombing raid on Dresden. Such was the effect
of Goebbels’s propaganda.2 When a Polish Jew told Käthe von Normann he
had escaped the fate of twenty-three members of his family only by being
incarcerated in a Siberian POW camp, the truth dawned on her. She noted in
her diary, ‘What a mess was caused by this fallacious doctrine!’ and cursed
Hitler for not making peace.3
James Stern found in the course of his interviews in Munich that the
responses to the questions about concentration camps varied. One working-
class man asked him how German Americans were being treated. Stern
replied, ‘With extraordinary fairness’ - something we now know to be
untrue. When faced with the atrocities of the German camps, the man’s
response was measured: if it were true it was ‘die grösste Schweinerei die
es gibt!’ (the most disgusting thing he had ever heard!). A young doctor he
talked to, who came from a rich family, referred to the treatment of the Jews
as a Kulturschande (a national disgrace), but he thought the German
occupation of Russia had been carried out with no more brutality than the
American occupation of Munich.4
Carl Zuckmayer thought there were relatively few of these Ewig-
gestrige (yesterday’s men) who believed their current situation was all
down to the Allies and that the Germans had done nothing to deserve it.
Rare were the Germans, even in the safety of their broken homes or in the
corners of a dim-lit, ill-heated Kneipe, who rued the hanging of the
defendants at Nuremberg. Most Germans would have rejected the extreme
charge of ‘collective guilt’, however, on the ground that there was very little
an individual could have done to stop Hitler’s warmongering and killing
even if he had been fully aware that it was happening. ‘Collective guilt’ was
also changing its meaning with the opening of the concentration camps.
Originally the Germans were all guilty of starting an aggressive war, as
their fathers had been in 1914. Now they had all committed, aided or
abetted mass murder. Ernst Jünger thought he recognised an Allied agenda:
‘The thesis of collective guilt has two interwoven skeins. For the conquered
it means “I must atone for my brother’s guilt”, for the victors it affords
practical support for their indiscriminate looting.’5 Some, like the
philosopher Karl Jaspers, however, were prepared to assent to the lesser
accusation of ‘general responsibility’.6
Jaspers in Heidelberg was now the respected voice of post-war German
philosophy. He tackled the subject of German complicity in his post-war
lecture-cum-essay delivered to the medical faculty: ‘The Question of
German Guilt’. Doctors had been especially prominent in acts of atrocity
against the Jews. He defended the necessary evil of the Allied presence:
‘They stop us from becoming bumptious and teach us modesty.’7 The whole
world was wagging its finger at Germany. Not just the victors, but also
Germans who had opted for exile. Germans might feel they had other things
to think about. ‘The horizon has become narrow. People don’t want to hear
about guilt or the past. They don’t care about the judgement of history, all
they want is for the suffering to cease . . .’8 Jaspers warned, however, that ‘it
is the duty of all us Germans to look clearly at the question of guilt and
understand the consequences’.9
He had lived in Germany during the war. ‘Germany under the Nazi
regime was a prison. The guilt of falling into this prison is political guilt.
Once the gates were shut, however, a prison break from within was no
longer possible. Any responsibility, any guilt, attributed to the imprisoned -
whenever it arose - must prompt the question whether there was anything
they could do.’ In a lecture delivered on 15 August, he returned to the
theme, but he was kind to Germany and the Germans: ‘Thousands of
Germans either sought death or were killed anyway because of their
opposition to the regime. The majority of them remain anonymous. We
survivors did not seek death. We did not go out on to the streets when our
Jewish friends were led away, nor did we cry out until they destroyed us as
well. We preferred to stay alive on the weak if justified grounds that our
death would not have helped anyway. That we live is our guilt. We know
before God what deeply humbles us.’10
‘The Question of German Guilt’ helped to define a form of orthodoxy in
the early years of the Federal Republic, even if the author himself thought it
the most ‘misconstrued piece of his collected works’. One of Jaspers’s
favourite students had been Hannah Arendt, who had spent the war years in
safety in America. She too tackled the question of guilt in her book
Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility. Like Jaspers she felt it did
not help to tar all Germans with the same brush. ‘Where all are guilty,
nobody in the last analysis can be judged.’ It was an echo of Jaspers’s own
line that ‘It runs contrary to sensible argument to make a whole nation
guilty of a crime. The criminal is always an individual.’ ‘The collective
guilt of a nation or a group within a nation cannot therefore exist and with
the exception of political responsibility, there is neither criminal, moral nor
metaphysical guilt.’11 Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne, adopted a
similar line. As far as the war was concerned, ‘The Führer took such
decisions on his own and at most consulted his closest advisers.’ As regards
the atrocities, he maintained that most people had learned about them after
the war, from the BBC: ‘The German people are much more the victims
than the perpetrator of these atrocities.’12
Jaspers’s wife Gertrud was a Jew, and, although she was to some extent
protected through her marriage to the prominent intellectual, by the end of
the war she was in hiding. Jaspers nonetheless felt that most of his fellow
countrymen were not evil: ‘Generalisations about the mentalities and
behaviour of millions of Germans in the Nazi era are bound to be of limited
application - apart, perhaps, from the generalisation that, for the great mass
of the population, the figurative colours to look for are less likely to be stark
black and white than varying and chequered shades of grey.’13
Zuckmayer was also fairly indulgent. He believed that the tally of Nazis
left in German society lay at around 20 per cent - the ‘blacks’. The ‘whites’
were equally represented, with 60 per cent of Germans being ‘grey’ or
fellow travellers. Around 40 per cent of the ‘greys’ were an acceptable
shade, while another 20 per cent were dark grey, verging on black.
Zuckmayer thought the percentages given would apply to most countries,
and Germany was no worse than them. Thinking back to that time, the
literary critic Karl-Heinz Bohrer estimates that 70 per cent of Germans were
‘nationalists’ in 1945, which meant that they made common cause with the
Nazis, even if they said they disapproved of them.14
For everyone who had heard stories ‘from the east’ - transmitted by
relatives in the army who had witnessed atrocities - there were equal
numbers of ordinary Germans who genuinely knew nothing. One who
merely suspected that terrible things were being done was Gertrud Jaspers -
who might have experienced the horrors at first hand had the authorities
been able to prise her away from her husband. The Allied revelations came
as a profound shock to her; they painted a picture she had never imagined.15
Re-education through Propaganda
James Stern ran into the American propaganda campaign soon after
arriving in Bad Nauheim. He observed the groups of Germans huddled in
front of a billboard. At first they were silent, then they began to shake their
heads and walk away, but it was no good - the poster was everywhere.
‘Who is guilty?’ it read. Beneath those words were a number of
photographs showing human skeletons, charred bones, prisoners in uniform
hanging from gibbets and children dead from starvation. This poster was to
be seen throughout the zone.
According to Stern, no German commented. Some moaned, one or two
stifled a cry, but generally they looked on in silence before moving away.
Another poster in the series answered the question posed by the first: ‘This
town is guilty! You are guilty!’16 Others report that, despite the propaganda
posters, the Final Solution was very little discussed in the 1940s or 1950s,
possibly because images of slaughtered children aroused memories of the
Allied bombing campaign which was still fresh in German minds. The
Western Allies failed to pursue their quarry after the first campaign. That
would fit with the diminishing enthusiasm for trial and denazification. By
1948 it had fizzled out.17
The most famous propaganda film of all was the Movietone footage
shot at Belsen by the British cameraman Paul Wyand. Even today it remains
the most powerful account of the abuse of human life and dignity in the
Nazi camps. Wyand turned up at Belsen on 23 April 1945. It is not clear
whether the film was intended as propaganda from the outset, or whether
Wyand and his crew were there to record what the British were doing to
save lives. Wyand interviewed a number of inmates and guards. The latter
were humiliated and made to pose in front of heaps of bodies. Dr Fritz
Klein, who had been involved in selection at Auschwitz, had been burying
bodies for a week. Wyand worked with a Polish interpreter. Klein, who was
already half insane from the work he had been forced to do, gave an
incorrect answer to a question. When the interpreter relayed this to Wyand,
the British beat him with rifle butts. Klein was then filmed in a pit filled
with corpses. Sometimes the film had the wrong effect. People found it hard
to cope. Alfred Karzin saw it in a cinema in London’s Piccadilly: ‘many
laughed’.18
Doubts were expressed about the use of such grotesque images, but one
writer has raised the valid point that where we have no pictures we find the
slaughter intangible, and easier to forgive. There are, for example, few
revealing pictures of the Soviet camps, or of the fate of their victims.19
There were mixed reactions in America. One obvious target was the large
German American population of the Mid-West. Joseph Pulitzer from St
Louis was one of them. He insisted that the city’s Kiel (sic) Auditorium be
festooned with photo-murals taken from the camps. Others, such as James
Agee in the Nation of 19 May 1945, were unconvinced. Agee refused to
look at the pictures and questioned their propaganda role, which was to
prepare the American people for an ‘extremely hard peace against
Germany’. The pictures elicited another protest from Milton Mayer in the
Progressive who spoke of a Carthaginian peace and said ‘vengeance won’t
raise the tortured dead’.20
Meanwhile the camps had become the object of a ghoulish voyeurism.
The former prisoners continued to die in droves (200 a day in Mauthausen),
while journalists, congressmen, senators and soldiers paraded around the
huts. At Buchenwald tours began with the iron hook and the crematorium
before visitors saw the macabre collection of tattooed-skin lampshades,
shrunken heads and pickled organs apparently put together by Ilse Koch.
Dead bodies were left around for days for the visitors to see. A tour of a
concentration camp became part of the ‘ritual of exorcism and revelation in
the occupied Germany of late April and early May 1945’. Typical was the
reaction of Representative John Vorys who visited the Little Camp at
Buchenwald and saw what appeared to be ‘absent-minded apes. Many were
professors, doctors, writers or generals . . . They had preserved their spirits
and had not sunk mentally to the bestial level of their living.’21
The Ministry of Information, as the British called their propaganda
ministry, were anxious to make as much as they could from the
opportunities offered by Belsen. They brought in the local mayors from
Celle and elsewhere and showed them the pit full of bodies. SS men and
women stood on the other side of the trench and a German-speaking officer
read out an indictment. Wyand’s cameramen recorded the moment. One of
the mayors wept, another was sick.22
The Fragebogen and Denazification
The Fragebogen
The Americans were hell-bent on purging the Nazi evil from the
German body politic. Their policy for Germany was constructed on the
adamantine plinth of JCS 1067, Clause 6 of which deemed the foremost
requirement to be denazification as a punitive measure. The Joint Chiefs of
Staff had drawn up the document in wartime, but it had received the support
of Roosevelt, who was wallowing in Teutonophobia. As ever, the British
limped after the Americans. The French and the Russians went their own
ways.23 With its desire to impose a ‘peace of punishment’, JCS 1067 was
Morgenthau’s last legitimate child and survived long after Truman formally
relinquished the Plan. It proposed to tear down, rather than rebuild, and to
help Germans only when it was necessary to avoid disease or disorder. JCS
1067 was responsible for the inhumane approach of the Americans and to
some extent had a knock-on effect on the British in the first months of
occupation. There were modifications, however, in that JCS 1067 allowed
for some industrial activity in the conquered nation. To surrender to the
Americans - as most Germans actively strove to do - was ‘a lottery ticket’.
At best you might be released before all the other POWs, at worst you
might die in the Rhine Meadow mud. JCS 1067 policy was largely
overturned by Clay, who was ‘very nearly an independent sovereign’ in his
German house. Clay rapidly came round to the idea that the best way to
succeed was to allow the Germans to govern themselves.24
The chief instruments of denazification were the Fragebogen or
questionnaires. They were also the first attempts on the part of the
Americans to quantify National Socialism and exclude former Nazis from
public life. One American writer questioned the legal foundation of
denazification, calling it a ‘Nazi or communist concept of jurisprudence’.25
As many as thirteen million forms were printed and handed out either to
those with dubious pasts or to Germans who were looking for employment.
The number corresponded roughly to the number of Pgs. Ursula von
Kardorff was subjected to a prototype of the Fragebogen as early as 7 May
1945, the day the Germans capitulated. Captain Herrell, the commandant in
Günzburg, brought out something that looked like a book: he wanted to
know if the women had been in the Party or the Frauenschaft (Nazi
women’s league). She hadn’t known there were so many organisations, and
the officer reminded her of the Gestapo.26
Margret Boveri got her first glimpse of the form on 5 June 1945, and
thought the vetting system of her new lords and masters much more
complicated that the Nazi one. The questionnaire consisted of twelve pages
and 133 questions. It had been handed out to a crowd of doctors to
determine if they had belonged to Nazi organisations. If they had, they were
banned from practice. Ruth Friedrich saw the form at the same time. It
asked a number of questions she could no longer answer with any certainty:
how she voted in 1932, the numbers of her bank and post office accounts as
well as those of close relations: ‘Is one supposed to commit perjury because
one has a bad memory?’27
Some of their Allied tormenters had sympathy for the Germans’
wounded pride. Stern read through the Fragebogen and was struck by its
‘peculiar German’. He ‘wondered how on earth . . . [he] would answer
some of these vague, some unintentionally humorous queries’. The Allies
wanted to know, for example, whether the bombing had affected the
interviewee’s health, work or sleep. Information was demanded about
insurance and indemnity claims, and more questions about sewage,
electricity and drainage. At a house in Munich’s Planetta Strasse, Stern
interviewed a thirteen-year-old girl and an eighty-eight-year-old man who
was ‘quite gaga’. One blind man came to the interview accompanied by his
wife, who was almost completely deaf, an affliction she shared with her
husband. Stern discovered that many Germans had been temporarily
deafened by the bombing. The names had been drawn at random, ‘à la
Gallup’.28 The idea that all Germans were to be questioned in this way, even
those who had been in concentration camps, provoked another outburst of
fury from Kurt Schumacher: ‘we want a just and objective examination of
the facts’, he said in Kiel in the autumn of 1945.29
Ursula von Kardorff had to wait until the end of July. She was outraged
by the 148 (sic) questions asked: how much you weighed, scars,
distinguishing features, religion (and whether you had quit the Church),
titles of nobility, earnings, whether you had worked in an occupied territory.
The question about scars was to determine whether you had been a member
of one of the wicked duelling fraternities, but they had been banned by
Hitler. She found the question about how she had voted particularly absurd:
firstly because it was so easy to lie and secondly because Germans were
being told that the secret ballot was one of the foundation stones of
democracy. In the end they found the form so comic that it put them all in a
good mood: ‘in the old days it was having a Jewish grandmother that
caused problems, now it is having a noble one. And what has the colour of
my eyes got do with my political opinions?’30
No one escaped. Jünger came home in early September 1945 to find one
on his desk. It was marked with the warning ‘False information will result
in prosecution by the courts of the military government.’31 Had he known
that Bishop Graf Galen, whose sermons had been dropped from British
aircraft as propaganda, was also required to fill in the form, he might have
felt relieved.32 In Jünger’s literary world, anyone who did not leave and take
up residence abroad like the famous Thomas Mann was treated with the
utmost suspicion by the Western Allies. One case was Erich Kästner, author
of Emil and the Detectives. He had been banned from writing under the
Third Reich, but that cut no ice with the interrogators. 33 One of the most
bizarre examples of the American insistence on the Fragebogen was when
Emmy Göring was required to fill one in. She, her daughter and her sister
were all in Straubing Prison at the time. Her husband was awaiting trial at
Nuremberg.
One of the questions was: ‘Did you have a relative or a close friend in
the Party with a high position in the Third Reich?’
‘Yes, my husband, Hermann Göring,’ I wrote.
‘What post did he have?’
 ‘He was not in the SS. But the SA. He was Reichsmarschall, master
huntsman, Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe . . .’
I tried to remember his other titles and ended up by sighing.
‘Why are you sighing like that?’ asked an American.
‘I can’t remember my husband’s titles any more.’
‘Don’t worry. Just write: Hermann Göring. We’ve got enough
information on him already.’34
The nature of the questions on the form gave a fair indication of the sort
of things (besides Nazism) that were offensive to the Allied Military
Government. One thing they wanted to know was whether the interviewee
had ever hoped for a German victory. Margret Boveri was not slow to point
out that in other countries to hope for defeat would be classically construed
as treason. After May 1945 it was quite wrong to believe in German victory,
but was it so bad in 1939, or 1940? It recalled the line of Talleyrand, who
said treason was a question of dates.35
The question that had incensed Ursula von Kardorff was nobility, as
enshrined in Question 18. The captain in Jettingen showed her a
memorandum in which American soldiers were told how to sniff out a
wicked Junker: find out if he had a potato schnapps distillery on his estate.
The form required you to state whether you or your wife, your father,
mother, wife’s father and mother, or either of your grandparents had
belonged to an ennobled family. Antiquity of lineage was clearly
synonymous with political unreliability and the Junkers in particular were
accused of having helped in Hitler’s rise to power; and yet, of the people
who had taken active steps to dispose of Hitler and his regime - particularly
on 20 July 1944 - a very high proportion had been nobles, Junkers in
particular. In the winter of 1945-6 the supposition that nobility and Nazi
were in some way at one contributed to the lack of fuel. As an American
interrogator told John Dos Passos, all the foresters had been sacked because
of Question 18: ‘von This and von That, big time Nazis, every one’. The
Fragebogen was the absolute authority, the litmus test. Another officer told
Dos Passos ‘It’s the Fragebogen. The Fragebogen is the best thing in
Germany . . . If they get past this, they can hold any job they want.’36
Question 25 was concerned with membership of a student corps. The
author of the Fragebogen was possibly unaware that the famous student
Burschenschaften had been suspended at the end of 1935 and not revived
until after 1945. The first nail in their coffin had been a drunken student at
Heidelberg who had rung Hitler’s adjutant to ask him to ask the Führer the
correct way to eat asparagus. Hitler was not amused. Not only did pranks of
this sort thenceforth go under the name of ‘Spargelessen’ or asparagus
eating, all secret meetings of old members of the fraternities became de
facto acts of opposition. Later on they proved recruiting grounds for the
July Plotters.37
The Allies were obsessed with the need to stamp out ‘militarism’, and
any connection with the armed forces was held against the supplicant. A
joke ran round that one of the questions on the form was ‘Did you play with
toy soldiers as a child? If so, what regiment?’38 The real Question 32 also
went wide of the mark. It demanded to know if the applicant had been a
member of the General Staff. The German staff officer, with carmine stripes
on his trousers, was the intellectual of the army. In 1939 there were 824 of
them, of whom 600 served in staff positions. Of these 359 were dead by
1945: 149 had been killed in action, 10 had died of natural causes and 143
were missing. There had been sixteen suicides, mostly in the aftermath of
the July Plot, while another twenty-four had been executed for their part in
the conspiracy. All in all some sixty staff officers were arrested as a result
of the attempt on Hitler’s life - that is, 10 per cent. The names included
Stauffenberg and Colonel Merz von Quirnheim who both died on the night,
together with Colonel General Beck. Others who were executed were Field
Marshal von Witzleben and Generals von Stülpnagel, Olbricht and Hoepner.
General Staff officers such as the former army chiefs Hammerstein and
Fritsch had also been opponents of Hitler and his war plans.39 The General
Staff officer was liable to immediate arrest. He was seen as the symbol of
German militarism, and the Western Allies did not want his expertise put at
the disposal of the Soviets. On 22 June Radio Hamburg broadcast a speech
by Bernard Montgomery saying that all General Staff officers would be
imprisoned for life in special camps outside Germany.40
The problem remained that it was only once the properly completed
questionnaire had been returned and vetted that a German could return to
normal life. Until then he was in a sort of purgatory that left him outside the
law. If you wanted to get on, you faced the ‘inquisition’ and filled in the
form with its ‘sometimes stupid questions’, otherwise you were out of work
and deprived of ration tickets. If you were not careful, you were declared a
war criminal to boot.41
Denazification
 The American policy was to locate the least objectionable German and
give him the work, but insufficient zeal in denazification could still result in
important heads falling. Membership of any Nazi Party-affiliated institution
was enough to have you banned from office. The American-appointed
minister president of Bavaria, Fritz Schäffer, was a known anti-Nazi, but
the Americans sacked him because he did not hate all Nazis, and allowed
some of them to figure in his administration. Another who fell from grace
was General Patton, who had the temerity - indeed folly - to say that the
‘Nazi thing is just like a Democrat-Republican election fight’. He was
relieved of his command. Elsewhere Patton’s approach had been
attractively pragmatic: ‘we shall need these Germans’ was his line, and it
turned out to be prophetic.42 The future German president Theodor Heuss
urged restraint. He thought that only 10 to 15 per cent of Nazis were in any
way dangerous, and that the Americans were too strict: ‘only he who has
lived twelve years under the Nazi terror can judge how enormous this
pressure was and how much heroism and political insight were required to
resist it’.43 All hints of what Germany had been over the previous twelve
years were to be expunged. In one town hall Dos Passos noted the gaps
where the pictures of past mayors had been hung. When he asked why, he
was told they wore the Geflügel (the fowl): the Nazi Party badge.44
The right way to denazify Germany was not generally agreed between
East and West, and even the Western Allies had their fall-outs. The British
were lukewarm, but in their sector of Berlin there was a little show of
strength. One of George Clare’s first experiences in the city was interpreting
for a British officer who was determined to keep a fire chief in office
despite his Nazi past. He wanted efficient firemen, and he couldn’t give a
damn about the man’s past. The only problem was that the other firemen
were social democrats who had been persecuted by the Nazis and for that
reason would not tolerate having one in their midst.45 In the Ruhr all the
mining engineers were dismissed as Nazis. Then there were explosions that
claimed hundreds of lives - including British - and General Templer decided
that Military Government had been foolish.46
Clare’s office might have been feared by Berlin Nazis, but in general no
one worried too much about the British, and visitors to their zone reported
pro-Nazi graffiti they did not see elsewhere. The British attitude was
allegedly not to disturb the status quo and to use re-education where
possible. The results were not deemed successful in retrospect.47 The
figures, however, do not always bear this out. By September 1946 there
were 66,500 Nazis interned in the American Zone, and 70,000 in the
British.48 In Nordrhein-Westfalen alone two and a half million cases were
examined. The mill ground very fine and many of these men, and some
women, were kept under lock and key and in terrible conditions for years.
In general, however, they were either released at the end, or given a trifling
punishment. The British had their own problems at home to worry about.
Denazification was hardly their top priority. Around 80 per cent of Nazis
were exonerated. By that time even the Americans had lost their enthusiasm
and there were only 200 of them working in Public Safety, assisted by
around thirty-five foreigners. They could not hope to be able to sift the
evidence and they had no co-operation from the Russians whatsoever.49
The Russians were firm believers in collective guilt and any German
was liable for punishment, even death. They set the Germans to work and
gave them as little as they could to sustain life. They investigated half a
million cases in their zone, around 3 per cent of the population, and, as in
Austria, the Pgs were not allowed to vote in the various elections held in
1946. By 1948 they too had lost interest and ended the purge.50 The French
attitude lay somewhere between the British and the Russians: it was less a
question of guilt than ‘should this man play a role in public life or should he
not?’51
One of the problems facing the Allies was the scale of the work before
them. With twelve million Pgs in their midst it became clear after a while
that their original ferocity would be tempered with time and that a lot of
small fry would swim free. The Germans, for their part, were more used to
the methods used by the Gestapo or the NKVD and assumed that, once
caught, they were for the high jump. Allied Military Courts, on the other
hand, were snowed under with Nazis waiting to know their fates.52
Denazification was a fact of life for all Germans, even dead ones who
had been hanged for their part in the plot to kill Hitler. In 1949 Charlotte
von der Schulenburg had yet to receive her widow’s pension and was
having difficulty providing for her children by Fritz-Dietlof. The problem
was that her husband had been an early member of the Party, having joined
in 1932, a fact that ‘was clearly more important than anything that he did
afterwards’.53 Four years after the end of the war Charlotte had to go before
a tribunal in Hanover to fight her late husband’s corner.
 She sat on a bench outside the court waiting for her case to be called.
Next to her were Jews and gypsies seeking recognition as victims of the
Nazi state. She defended her husband’s memory bravely, clutching
telegrams from Annedore Leber and Gustav Dahrendorf, but the problem
was that a Prussian bureaucrat who had been condemned to death, in the
same way as a common murderer, could not expect a pension for his wife.
The law had to be changed before Charlotte could have her pension. She
did not receive any money until 1952, and that was due to her as the widow
of a Third Reich Regierungspräsident - the president of an administrative
district.54

There was a joke doing the rounds (a variant of it is still told in Vienna):
a man comes into a police station and tells the officer that he wishes to
register as a Nazi. The policeman replies that he should have done that a
year and a half ago. The man tells the policeman, ‘Eighteen months ago I
wasn’t a Nazi!’
Dos Passos cites an interview with an American lieutenant whose
business it was to interrogate Nazis. ‘My people are Jewish . . . so don’t
think I’m not bitter against the Krauts. I’m for shooting the war criminals
where we can prove they are guilty and getting it over with. But for God’s
sake, tell me what we are trying to do?’ The lieutenant continued, ‘Hatred is
like a fire. You’ve got to put it out. I’ve been interrogating German officers
for the War Crimes Commission and when I find them half-starved to death
right in our own PW cages and being treated like you wouldn’t treat a dog, I
ask myself some questions . . . Brutality is more contagious than typhus and
a hell of a lot more difficult to stamp out . . .’ He mentioned Patton and his
habit of putting his foot in it, but he clearly approved. ‘All those directives
about don’t coddle the German have thrown open the gates for every
criminal tendency we’ve got in us.’55 The American hatred for the Germans
continued to astound many people. Dos Passos met an eastern European in
Berlin who spoke to him in French. The man asked him, ‘why do you
Americans feel this desire for vengeance? I can understand it in the
Russians, who suffered fearful injuries, but your cities were not laid waste,
your wives and children were not starved and murdered.’ Dos Passos did
not have an answer.56
 For Zuckmayer there was a fundamental error behind the denazification
policy: it failed to create a belief in a state of law because it failed to
differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. The ideal liberation
should have come about through a revolution within Germany. It was not
going to be possible to clean up Germany by pushing a large number of its
citizens before the courts. There were too many cases, and the witnesses
were in many instances unreliable, as they knew they would come under the
microscope themselves and the most important thing was to deny
everything. The accused were protected - there was evidence of nepotism
and intimidation. Denunciations were frequently made out of sheer bloody-
mindedness and there were too few judges and lawyers around who were
free from guilt.
The courts themselves had a hopeless task. In one Bavarian district
Zuckmayer was told there were 11,850 former Nazis who were due to be
examined by the Spruchkammer. The president of the chamber estimated
that it was going to take between eleven and twelve years to acquit the
work. In Stuttgart there were around 80,000 cases. Zuckmayer saw a danger
of renazification as the suspects were forced to mark time before their cases
came up for review. He was for a wide-ranging amnesty for the small fry,
who were implicated in no particular crime other than opportunism or
ideological commitment.
Zuckmayer gives an example of a minor case - a midwife who had her
husband sent to Dachau for two years because he had had an affair with a
young girl in the factory where he worked. He later threw a bust of her
beloved Adolf out of the window, enabling her to denounce him. When her
case came up the husband made a plea in mitigation. She had helped non-
Aryans and delivered their children without question and had even waived
payment in certain cases. She was a good midwife and performed a service
to society. If she had committed a crime it was out of passion. She had also
been sufficiently punished: she had lost the man she loved because of the
Hitler bust. The judge accepted the plea, and let her off with a fine, and
allowed her to continue working as a midwife.57
Franz von Papen, a former chancellor who had become a Nazi minister
and ambassador, had never been a member of the Party. He had been
acquitted at Nuremberg. A new trial was arranged for January 1947. He was
to face a panel of seven judges: two Social Democrat lawyers and five
members of democratic parties. The seven included two Jews. Bavaria’s
minister for denazification called on the court to sentence Papen to ten
years’ hard labour on the basis of his having profited from Nazism. Papen
was given eight. His property was confiscated and he was deprived of his
civic rights.58 Schacht, who was tried at Nuremberg alongside Papen, had an
ingenious way of wriggling out of responsibility for the crimes of the Third
Reich. A paper was produced that had been written at the time of the
takeover of the Austrian National Bank by the Reichsbank, of which he was
then president. It was a hymn of praise to the God-given Führer written by
none other than Schacht. The banker was asked to comment: how did he
find it? ‘I find it excellent!’ said Schacht. He told the tribunal what clever
‘deception’ (Tarnung) it was.59
The wives of the leading Nazis were put through a predictably
humiliating trial. After leaving Straubing Prison, Emmy Göring was living
in a hut near her husband’s castle at Veldenstein in Franconia. She was
suffering from sciatica and had a high fever. She was nonetheless
incarcerated in a rat-infested prison for two weeks along with the wives of
Hess, Funk and Baldur von Schirach. The brides of Speer, Dönitz, Neurath
and Raeder, on the other hand, were spared this indignity, although Speer’s
wife Margarete was closer to Hitler than any of them, with the exception of
Henriette von Schirach who was the daughter of his hard-drinking court
photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. As it was, Frau Göring was able to
muster a good deal of testimony from Jews that she had helped them over
the years, even if she clearly disappointed the president of the tribunal by
failing to denounce her dead husband. She was classified ‘Group 2’ and
allowed to return to her hovel.60
Another high-profile case was the English-born daughter-in-law of
Richard Wagner, Winifred. There was no doubt that ‘Winnie’ was besotted
with her ‘Wolf’ - as she and her four children called Hitler - but after 1940
the Führer had avoided her. One of her grandchildren has even gone so far
as to say that she had wanted to marry Hitler, and that with her at his side
there would have been no war.61 Hitler kept away from Bayreuth, although
he continued to see three of the four Wagner children (the eldest girl,
Friedelind, emigrated to Switzerland and the United States, where she
fanned the flames against her mother) and exempted the first son, Wieland,
from military service as the heir to Bayreuth.
The Wagners all had questions to answer. Verena’s husband Bodo
Lafferenz had been in charge of the Kraft durch Freude Nazi leisure
organisation, and as such had held high rank in the SS. He was shipped off
to an internment camp in Freiburg. Wolfgang had not been a Party member
and could take refuge behind that fact, even if he had been entertained by
Hitler and had been as close to him as the others. Party member Wieland
had made himself scarce at the Americans’ approach, hiding in the French
Zone until the coast was clear. He had been administering the town’s
‘concentration camp’ - an outside station of the more notorious Flossenbürg
housing a few score inmates who were involved in technical research for
the SS. He never mentioned his closeness to the regime in his remaining
years, and set himself up as a hero of a debunking, cultural revolution in
Bayreuth. His designs were meant to clear his grandfather’s operas of all
their nationalist trappings, and as such they represent a major instance of
the cultural and artistic purge of the arts that followed the Second World
War. The Spruchkammer branded Wieland a ‘fellow traveller’. His mother
took the rap.
The Americans entered Bayreuth after reducing a third of the town to
rubble - including much of Wagner’s home, Wahnfried, though not the
house of the master’s son, Siegfried, which had been called the Führerbau
because it was made over to Hitler for his use during his visits to the
festival. The Americans moved into the opera house on the Green Hill and
created havoc playing jazz on Wagner’s and Liszt’s pianos. Winifred
insisted that most of the damage was done by ‘coloured’ American GIs,
who looted the theatre and shot up the sets with their revolvers. They also
amused themselves by dressing up in the operatic costumes. Another story
has it that German refugees stole the costumes, and for miles around you
could see people fleeing Bayreuth dressed as characters from Wagner
operas. The American authorities promptly banned the playing of Wagner’s
music.62
Winifred took on the role of the unrepentant Nazi, although she had
performed numerous acts of intercession with the Party to save the lives of
Jews and others who had fallen foul of the regime. Almost the first
‘Americans’ she received were Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, and Curt Riess,
reporting for the army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. The two Germans
in American uniform were getting used to hearing that no one had been
aware of the atrocities carried out by the regime, and that everyone had
been against Hitler and was proud to possess a ‘“non-Aryan” granny’.
Winifred therefore came as a surprise. First of all she insisted on speaking
English to the freshly baked Americans - and was rather more proficient
than they were. She made no bones about her friendship with Hitler. She
praised his charm, his sense of humour and his good looks. This came from
the heart, although she later admitted that she could not resist the temptation
to rile the Germans in their borrowed clothes. Mann retired bruised.
The interview brought Winifred Wagner new fame. More reporters
pitched up at her house in the Fichtelgebirge. Some wanted to know if she
had slept with Hitler. She said no. She told them that Hitler had been misled
by Bormann. She clearly possessed a ‘stuff and nonsense’ charm, and had
seen enough of the Third Reich and its puffed-up officials to know how to
deal with a few army interrogators. With time she won the conquerors
round. One reason was her command of English, which made her an
important source of information for the occupying forces.63
Meanwhile Thomas Mann had weighed in from his exile in America,
publishing his reasons for not returning to Germany. He attacked those who
had continued to pursue an artistic life under Hitler. One who felt that he
was being indicted was Emil Preetorius, who had designed some of the
most famous sets for Bayreuth, and whose anti-Nazi views and friendship
with Jews had not only been well known but had put him in danger. Mann
gave no credence to the idea of ‘inner emigration’ as expounded by
Preetorius and others. Preetorius’s message to Mann was ‘My dear friend,
you have no idea of the sorcery of terror.’ It was an argument forcefully put
forward by Furtwängler when he asked Mann why he felt that Germans
should have been deprived of the solace of Beethoven during the years of
the Third Reich.64
Furtwängler’s humiliation began on 11 December 1946 in the
Spruchkammer in the Schlüterstrasse in Berlin. This was run by the British
major Kaye Sely as head of the Information Services Control Intelligence
Section. His attitude to denazification was generally more indulgent than
that of most gentiles, but it was not going to help Furtwängler much. The
first session of the Spruchkammer lasted for five hours before it was
adjourned so that more witnesses could be called. Heinz Tietjen, who had
abandoned his lover Winifred Wagner to her fate, once again played a
questionable role. Now he attempted to cover up for his intrigues at the
Lindenoper. He had had enough of the vain Furtwängler and sought to
promote the equally vain but considerably more ambitious Karajan. He
became Goebbels’s stooge in his campaign to discredit the older conductor.
65
Furtwängler meanwhile expressed his astonishment at his treatment
considering that he was the only member of the musical establishment to
have actively opposed Hitler.cx
In words reminiscent of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Furtwängler said, ‘You
have to work with the regime in order to work against it . . . Emigration
would have been a more comfortable solution in any case.’ The Western
Allies had plenty of dirt to throw at the conductor. Much of it centred on the
critic Edwin von der Nüll, who had made unflattering comparisons between
Furtwängler and Karajan, and whom the former had contrived to have sent
to the front, where he perished. Nüll had been a pawn of Goebbels.
Furtwängler’s defence had been limp, and the conclusion of the day was to
direct the case to the Allied Kommandatura. Those who had hoped to be
able to hear the conductor perform the Eroica the next day were to be
disappointed.66
Behind the scenes there was the constant clamour of the émigrés who
were determined to see the conductor as a cultural figurehead for the Nazis.
Chief among them was Erika Mann. His old rival Toscanini also played a
prominent role. Furtwängler had sealed his fate with many Jewish
Americans when in 1936 he had been offered the position of principal
conductor of the New York Philharmonic but chose to direct the orchestra
of the Berlin State Opera instead. Once again he had been a victim of Nazi
intrigue. News had been leaked to the press in order to compromise him
with the New Yorkers.67

The Americans led the way with denazification, trying 169,282 cases.
The Russians and the French weighed in at around 10 per cent of that figure
at 18,328 and 17,353 respectively.68 The British seemed to show very little
interest in the matter within their zone, handling a little over 1 per cent of
the American cases, at 2,296. Clay had full belief in the process and thought
the Allies were doing well. On 5 July 1945 he reported that denazification
in the early ‘liberated’ cities of Aachen and Cologne was virtually
complete. In Bavaria and Württemberg, however, it was going very slowly.
In March 1948, the Russians made a point of releasing 35,000 minor Nazis
from their camps.69
Clay had bagged 75,000 Nazis to date. Certain organisations were
particularly thick with them. He estimated that the police administration
was 100 per cent Nazi; the ‘Kripos’ or criminal police 60 per cent; the
others 40 per cent.cy In the banking world of Frankfurt half those employed
were Nazis; that meant 326 people. On the other hand the docility of the
post-war Germans struck Clay as it did everyone else: the ‘German masses
seem totally apolitical, apathetic and primarily concerned with [the]
everyday problems of food, clothing and shelter’. They did not quite behave
as he expected them to: ‘no general feeling of war guilt or repugnance for
Nazi doctrine and regime has manifested itself. Germans blame Nazis for
losing war, protest ignorance of regime’s crimes and shrug off their own
support as incidental and unavoidable.’70
Clay continued bagging Nazis. In autumn 1945 he had 80,000 in the bag
plus the same number of Waffen-SS and ‘Schupos’ - members of the
Security Police who were interned with the POWs. On top of these he had
around 75,000 Germans sacked because of their Nazi past, and 9,500 from
financial institutions.71 On 8 December the number of imprisoned Nazis in
the American Zone had risen to 90,000, and was to reach 100,000 by the
end of the year. Another 25,000 members of paramilitary organisations
were lodged with the POWs.72 It is not clear whether or not most of the SS
men had been released. Certainly, most of the Nazis had been released by
the summer of 1948. Clay admitted to holding 5,000 prisoners at that time,
with some 25,000 more awaiting trial outside the camps. They were all
hard-core cases. In September 1947 he turned his mind to the German
scientists who had been taken to the US in Operation Paperclip, to work on
the atom bomb and the rocket programme. In his opinion they should not
have been exempt from trial.73
On 13 May 1946 Control Council Order Four was passed. All literature
of a Nazi or militarist nature was to be confiscated. Clay was not impressed.
He had, by his own admission, been banning and confiscating such books
since the arrival of the Americans in Germany. He was particularly keen to
replace school textbooks from the era of the Third Reich. It was an
understandable measure, but taken to extremes it could only lead to absurd
situations and scenes reminiscent of the Nazi book burnings when over-
zealous local councils decided to expurgate their library collections.cz It also
furthered the confusion - which reigned at the heart of the Control Council -
that Nazism and ‘Prussianism’ were intimately related.74
 Clay played the game while he was at the helm. In 1948 the Cold War
was coming and JCS 1067 was replaced by the less stringent JCS 1779,
which advocated economic unity and self-government. Clay was replaced
by his deputy, John McCloy. Times had changed and the former banker was
more interested in building a bridge to the Germans. His wife Ellen came in
useful in all this: she was German, and a distant cousin of Adenauer’s
second wife.75 McCloy himself went to Canossa: he paid a call on Frings
and promised the prelate that he would review the sentences passed on
German war criminals. The Americans began to release them in droves in
1949 in the interests of good relations with Adenauer’s government. 76
Seen as an exercise in punishing criminals, denazification was a farce.
A number of insignificant Pgs were treated with the utmost cruelty while
the big fish went free. Most of the minor cases were not ideologically
committed anyway. Some of the worst killers, those who sent thousands to
their deaths, who carried out the executions in the east as members of police
units, or who operated the trains which took Jews to the death camps in the
General Gouvernement, were not punished at all; they retired from the
police or the railways without anyone having called them to account, and
died in their beds.
Nazis in the Austrian Woodwork
In Berlin, the Viennese George Clare was keeping an eye on Herbert
von Karajan. He was well aware of the conductor’s Nazi past. The
impresario Walter Legge came to see them in the Schlüterstrasse to enquire
about his status, as he wanted to know if he was permitted to give concerts
in Britain. He had been denazified in Vienna, but as Sely told him, ‘we
always discount Austrian denazification’. Sely later sent Clare off to
investigate, giving him the address of the British theatre and music officer
Peter Joseph Schnabel - otherwise known as ‘MacSchnabel’ from his
dandified ways and the fact that he had once performed the role of teaching
the Cameron Highlanders to ski.
Clare found a room in the Park Hotel in Hietzing, a stone’s throw from
British Army HQ in Schönbrunn, where his murdered parents had spent
their honeymoon. He met Schnabel at Demel’s coffee house by the
Hofburg. The Austrian Jew was doing a tour of the tables, kissing the hands
of the local ladies. It soon dawned on Clare that Allied culture boffins were
even more firmly wedded to the local terrain in Vienna than were those in
Berlin: there was Schnabel and ‘George’ the Frenchman, whose Danubian
accent gave him away. Also ‘one of us’ was the US captain Ernst
Häussermann, who was deputising for another - Ernst Lothar. Finally the
Russian representative dashed into the meeting late, and bearing a parcel.
She had a ‘sweet’ excuse in her hand: it was a Sachertorte. Her name was
Lily Wichmann, another Viennese.
Denazification was not a big issue for any of them. For a start Austria
had had its own government from the beginning - a privilege granted to the
‘first victim’. The armies of occupation were there to enjoy themselves, and
that meant music. It would have been a shame, according to Clare, to lock
up decent musicians. He looked up a former corporal in the Pioneer Corps
who had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The colonel invited him to
the British Officers’ Club in the Palais Kinsky. Clare was shocked to see
how much the Austrians had buried the past. Pure German Hochdeutsch
was now out of fashion: everyone did their best to speak in a sing-song
Austrian dialect, and men donned Styrian hats and suits, and women
dirndls, to assert the cultural differences that occurred once you crossed the
little River Inn.77
Yet there was still the problem of what to do with the Nazis who so
openly contradicted Austria’s pose. The Figl government drew up a
National Socialist Law which was passed by the federal parliament on 24
July 1946 in the belief that it was in keeping with Allied demands for
denazification. It was not: the Russians in particular found it too lenient and
the Americans wanted automatic prosecution at the level of
Untersturmführer - that is, a second lieutenant in the SS. The Allies made
around 200 changes. The American minister, Erhardt, went so far as to
suggest the creation of ‘concentration camps’ for Nazis.78 These already
existed in the British Zone.da It was finally adopted on 7 February 1947.
Under this law Nazis were divided into two groups according to the power
they yielded during the Third Reich. For war criminals there was a special
jurisdiction. The categories were similar to those employed in the American
Zone in Germany: ‘incriminated’, ‘slightly incriminated’, ‘not
incriminated’. Of the more than half a million Austrian Nazis, a little under
10 per cent fell into the first class. It was assumed that the 470,000 in the
second class would be amnestied and returned to the suffrage for the next
elections.79
 Special ‘People’s Courts’db - nomen est omen - were established to try
Nazis. There was no appeal. The first case came up on 14 August 1945
when four SA men were accused of the massacre of 102 Jews in Engerau.
There were seven death sentences passed by the end of the year. It was a
modest tally. Where possible the blame was laid at the feet of the Germans.
On 30 August William Donovan, head of the OSS, received a report that
63,000 of Vienna’s 67,000 Nazis had been tagged. A large number of them
were claiming they had been forced to join the Party and wanted their
names dropped from the register. Some 5,800 of the city’s ‘dangerous
Nazis’ had been gaoled, but another 10,000 were still at large.80
When the tally was concluded there was a total of 536,000 names on the
register; and 100,000 of these had been so keen they had joined before
1938, when it was still an illegal organisation. Denazification went off at
half cock in Austria. From the beginning it was left in the hands of the
Austrian government to pursue Nazis, albeit under the gaze of the Allied
Bureau. The Americans prided themselves in being the ‘most drastic’,
although the evidence does not necessarily point to that. In October they
came under strong criticism when it was reported that the former Gauleiter
Scheel had been seen walking about the streets of Salzburg. They were also
keen to weed out the ‘Austro-fascist’ Dollfussites from the ÖVP. The
British they castigated as the ‘mildest’. Again this is misleading.81
On 26 February the trial of Chancellor Schuschnigg’s foreign minister
Guido Schmidt opened in Vienna. This was the moment to review the
behaviour of the Corporate State and to discover who was responsible for
the Anschluss. Schmidt had come home from Nuremberg, where he had
appeared as a prosecution witness in the case against Schuschnigg’s
successor Arthur Seyss-Inquart.82dc The trial lasted 107 days but failed to
prove that Schmidt had acted behind the back of his chancellor. There had
been much finger-waving on the part of the Dachauer because Schmidt had
been spared incarceration in a camp. Although he had been ousted from
politics by the Nazis, he was nonetheless made a director of the Hermann-
Göring-Werke. He was acquitted.
The efficacy of the courts altered from zone to zone. The OSS reported
on a trial in Vienna of four criminals and Jew-murderers: three were
convicted and sentenced to hang.83 As in Germany capital sentences were
often commuted. The courts awarded ten death sentences and thirty-four
terms of life imprisonment. The tribunals delivered another 13,600 guilty
verdicts. The punishments for major culprits were chiefly pecuniary: up to
40 per cent of their property and a 10 per cent fiscal surcharge over a
certain number of years. In all Austria 42,000 people were treated in this
way. Lighter measures were imposed against a further 481,000. The
punishments were fairly trifling, but 72,000 to 100,000 government
employees lost their jobs. This, it seems, was in no way consistent, and
40,000 Nazi civil servants continued in their functions in the Tyrol and the
Vorarlberg.84 Nazis were debarred from a certain number of professions as
well: journalists, university chairs, physicians; they could neither vote nor
stand as candidates in elections.
Some of the Allied commanders considered that harsh. The Frenchman
Béthouart, for example, felt that the law was cruel to small-time Pgs and
that it eliminated valuable experts from the workplace while ‘closing the
door to national reconciliation’.85 He does not allude to Austria’s Jews, who
had been robbed and murdered, and who were wary of a state that had not
actively sought their return. Few but the main activists even thought of
coming back.86 After the delusions current during the war years, it was now
clear that the majority of the Austrian people were party to their
expropriation. Nonetheless, Béthouart pushed for and succeeded in
attaining a moderation of the statute that amnestied the youngest Nazis.
Béthouart was not alone in forgetting the Jews. Of the 120,000 or so
who had managed to escape from Austria after the Anschluss, only 8,500
had returned by March 1947. With time the number was to go down, not up.
There were other Jews in Austria - around 42,000 DPs, living mostly in the
American Zone. The Americans made sure they received larger rations than
the others: around 2,000 calories as opposed to the standard 1,550. It was
said that Austrian antisemitism was the reason why so many Jews were
reluctant to come back. The charge was bitterly resented by the mayor of
Vienna, Theodor Körner, who said he had issued an invitation to Jewish
artists to return. In a dazzling non sequitur he said, ‘The Austrians are
cosmopolitan and therefore not antisemites.’ The notion of Austrian
antisemitism amounted to ‘deliberate lies or thoughtless babble’.87
The British approach to the Nazi problem in Austria was markedly
different to the approach in the British Zone in Germany, where
denazification was at best limp-wristed. The enforcement squad was the
Field Security Service or FSS, which had instructions to identify and arrest
all those on the pre-prepared Allied lists, and which depended on the
Intelligence Corps at home. One former member described the force as a
‘secret service in uniform’.88 Nazi lawyers were suspended - twenty-six in
Carinthia and seventy-six in Styria.89 The FSS also had to deal with
brigands, gangs of non-German SS men and Cetniks who terrorised isolated
farmhouses close to the Yugoslav border. It had a more strategic role on the
Carinthian border, controlling a twenty-kilometre-broad strip otherwise
accessible only to residents. This was used not only for the defence of the
region against Tito but also to keep the Yugoslavs out of Venezia-Giulia.
Those involved in the hunt for war criminals worked from lists drawn up by
the Atrocities Committee Austria.90
In the British Zone the courts examined the case histories of 31,517
Nazis. Of those only 2,623 were acquitted. The British maintained three
internment camps for Nazis at Wolfsberg, Weissenheim and Wetzelsdorf.
The first named became a synonym - along with Glasenbach in the
American Zone - for the rough treatment of political prisoners. The higher
courts dealt with around another hundred cases. These meted out fifty-three
death sentences, forty-two of which were carried out.91 The main atrocities
committed in Styria concerned the death marches to Mauthausen at the end
of the war. These gave rise to a number of high-profile cases in 1946. The
Eisenerz Trial dealt with the SS guards who killed off 162 Hungarian Jews
in the village of that name because they were in no condition to make it to
Mauthausen. Ten of the eighteen defendants were sentenced to death, and
were shot on 21 June.92
Shooting gave way to hanging when the gallows was set up in the
Provincial Court on 24 September 1946 and eight men were despatched by
the British master, Albert Pierrepoint. The British had brought in a Herr
Zaglauer and his two assistants to learn the ropes. Pierrepoint expressed his
confidence in these hangmen, who were deemed ‘now fully competent
officially to conduct executions themselves in the approved British
manner’.93 The People’s Courts then took over from the British. In Austria
as a whole they meted out forty-three capital sentences. Vienna naturally
took the lead with twenty-eight, but Graz came second with twelve; Linz, in
the American Zone, passed only three; French Innsbruck, none.94
The Soucek Case examined by the People’s Court dealt with an
important group of neo-Nazis. The court also handled the trial of the
Leoben Gestapo chief Johann Stelzl and those responsible for the
euthanasia programme in the lunatic asylum in Klagenfurt. Four men were
condemned to death. Sometimes the tariffs handed out seem light: the main
culprit in the Stremer Jewish Murder Case, in which the defendants were
proved to have killed fifty Jews, received twenty years.95 The following
year, on 27 February 1948, the Russian general Kurasov proposed a bigger
amnesty. The consequence two months later was the law of 21 April which
struck 487,000 names from 524,000 on the original lists. This added half a
million electors to the roll, most of them on the right.
Once the former Nazis had been included again within the pale of the
constitution, a new party came on the scene in the guise of the Union of
Independents. Anti-Nazi politicians sought to ban the Independents in the
Western zones. The Soviets, however, refused to follow suit, and the
Independents promptly took 12 per cent of the vote in the elections of 9
October 1949. The ÖVP once again topped the poll.
Punishment by Starvation
Once it had been decided that all Germans were guilty, the next job was
to punish them. Despite the propaganda rations meted out by the Russians
in Berlin, the Potsdam Conference decided that the Germans were not to be
over-fed. Requests by the Red Cross to bring in provisions were waved
aside, and in the winter of 1945 donations were returned with the
recommendation that they be used in other war-torn parts of Europe -
although the Irish and Swiss contributions had been specifically raised with
Germany in mind. The first donations to be permitted reached the American
Zone in March 1946, to some degree thanks to the intervention of British
intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz.
Gollancz had published a polemic with the title The Ethics of
Starvation96 in the middle of 1946. As a Jew whose family had settled in
Britain from Germany, Gollancz had no reason to love the Germans. What
he objected to was the inhumane and unethical treatment of German
civilians:
I am a Jew: and sometimes I am asked why, as a Jew, I bother
about people in whose name infamies have been committed against my
race, the memory of which, I fear - though I would wish it otherwise -
may never die. I am sometimes asked this, I regret to say, by fellow-
Jews who have forgotten, if they ever knew, the teaching of the
Prophets . . . It is indeed a fact that I feel called upon to help suffering
 Germans precisely because I am a Jew: but not at all for the reason
imagined . . . It is a question . . . of plain, straight common sense,
undeflected by that very sentimentality that deflects the judgement and
corrupts the spirit of so many. To me three propositions seem self-
evident. The first is that nothing can save the world but a general act of
repentance in place of the present self-righteous insistence on the
wickedness of others, for we have all sinned, and continue to sin most
horribly. The second is that good treatment and not bad treatment
makes them good. And the third is - to drop into the hideous collective
language which is now much the mode - that unless you treat a man
well when he has treated you ill you just get nowhere, or rather it will
give further impetus to evil and head straight for human annihilation.97
Despite the great wrong perpetrated against his people, Gollancz could
not sanction another crime: ‘The plain fact is . . . we are starving the
Germans. And we are starving them, not deliberately in the sense that we
definitely want them to die, but wilfully in the sense that we prefer their
death to our own inconvenience.’98 Over and over again in his letters to his
wife, he is struck by the fact that these suffering infants might have been his
own children.
From newspaper reports Gollancz prepared a chilling indictment: seven-
tenths of people in the now British city of Hamburg had no bread for two
weeks of every month. He quoted the UNRRA figure for daily subsistence -
2,650 calories. The minimum needed to sustain life was 2,000. In March
1946 the average for the British Zone had fluctuated between 1,050 and
1,591. This consisted of four and a half slices of dry bread, three middle-
sized potatoes, three tablespoons of oatmeal, half a cup of skimmed milk, a
scrap of meat and a tiny dollop of fat. At those levels you could survive in
bed, but could not work. Then at the end of February the rations had been
cut to 1,014 for those not doing heavy work, that is women. Infant mortality
was now at ten times the rate of 1944. In Dortmund in February 1946 forty-
six out of 257 children born that month perished.99
Politicians and soldiers - like Sir Bernard Montgomery - insisted that no
food be sent from Britain. Starvation was punishment. Montgomery said
that three-quarters of all Germans were still Nazis - although he did not
reveal the source of his information. The Germans had only themselves to
blame, and they should be last in the queue. The economist and chancellor
of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton argued that the cost of the occupation was
tantamount to paying reparations to the Germans.100 Britain itself was
recovering from the wartime dearth, however. The food minister John
Strachey had proudly announced that meat consumption was at 98 per cent
of pre-war levels, and that the British were eating 50 per cent more fish.101
As Gollancz presciently wrote, Germany had been stripped of its bread
basket cum milk-churn in the east, the pastures of Pomerania and East
Prussia.102 Meanwhile the British authorities in Germany were proposing to
cut the rations back to 1,000 calories. The French were already at 950,
while the Americans were not much more generous at 1,270. Gollancz
pointed out that the inmates at Belsen had 800, which was not that much
less.103 In Baden-Baden, Alfred Döblin was suspicious: if they really had so
little food they would be dead. He thought most of them were managing to
supplement their diet from the black market.104 That didn’t necessarily help
the old and infirm, however.
Gollancz followed The Ethics of Starvation with a further tract in
January 1947. In Darkest Germany was the result of a six-week tour of the
British Zone which the publisher made in October and November 1946, just
before the frost. It consists of eighteen letters and articles he had written to
belabour the government. He regretted he had been unable to make it to
Berlin. On the other hand he suggested that his performance was slightly
superior to that of Hynd, who in the past year by his own admission had
spent no more than twenty-eight days in Germany.105
Gollancz had gone to Germany with the ‘attitude of a sceptic’. He
nonetheless armed himself with a photographer, and to allay any scoffing at
the veracity of his reports, he backed up everything he said with a picture.
Most of the photographs include the figure of a benign elderly man in a
dark coat and hat: standing behind naked boys suffering from malnutrition;
holding up a particularly awful apology for a child’s shoe; or comforting a
crippled communist in his festering hovel. The point was to show that he
had seen these things with his own eyes and taken nothing on trust.106
Hunger oedema was not confined to the new Russian colony of East
Prussia. Gollancz thought it affected up to 100,000 people. He saw some
telling cases in the hospital, with the usual waterlogged legs. His
photographer took a picture of a dying man. The death-rattle had already
started. Another had a scrotum that stretched a third of the way down to the
ground. On second thoughts Gollancz had this picture omitted from the
finished text.107 Tuberculosis was at four to five times its 1939 level. There
was no penicillin available for the hospitals, because the Germans did not
have the money to pay for it.108 The Third Man said it all.
Gollancz was also interested in clothes. In Darkest Germany he
reproduces a shocking collection of footwear (‘shoes’ is hardly the word).
One child told him that he would not be able to come to school the next day
because his father needed to use the shoes. When it rained there were
appalling levels of absenteeism. In three schools he visited he inspected the
feet of all the children. In one, the shoes of thirty-four out of fifty-eight
children were kaput, in the next fifteen out of thirty-seven, and in the last
thirty-four out of fifty-three. The problem was that even if there were
Reichsmarks available these could not be used for clothing: you needed
coupons or Bezugmarke. If you had the precious Bezugmarke the chances
were that there were no shoes to buy. In Düsseldorf there were no nappies.
Gelsenkirchen had 260,000 inhabitants. In June the following were
available for Bezugmarke: fifty-six cardigans, forty-nine frocks, twenty-one
pairs of knickers, four nappies, three babies’ knickers, three rubber sheets,
seven kilos of knitting wool and twenty-one small towels. There were 182
births that month.109 There were other significant shortages: in Hamburg
there were virtually no contraceptives, despite the dreadful levels of infant
mortality.
The bombing of Hamburg had left the city with a hopeless lack of
accommodation, forcing 77,000 people to inhabit bunkers and cellars. Of
these Gollancz estimated that a quarter lived in conditions which resembled
some of the more heart-wrenching pictures of Honoré Daumier. He went to
Belsen to concentrate his mind, and wrote to his wife: ‘I don’t for a single
second forget the other side of the picture.’110 The bombing of the western
Prussian town of Jülich had been the worst in Germany: 93 per cent of it
had been flattened. Given the desolation around him, Gollancz was amazed
to hear that 7,000 of the original 11,000 inhabitants were still living there.
Their presence was indicated by the stove pipes peeping out of the ground
and the tunnels that disappeared into the bases of the ruins. Still, ‘in spite of
everything’, the town’s mayor, an SPD man, continued to speak of
‘liberation’.111
Leaving aside the humanitarian issue, the failure to feed the Germans,
especially during the cruel winter of 1946-7, may have given rise to a deal
of negative propaganda. Carl Zuckmayer reported conversations overheard
in bread queues in the American Zone: ‘Yes, Hitler was bad, our war was
wrong, but now they are doing the same wrong to us, they are all the same,
there is no difference, they want to enslave Germany in exactly the same
way as Hitler wanted to enslave the Poles, now we are the Jews, the
“inferior race”, they are letting us starve intentionally, can’t you see that is
their plan, they take away all our sources of income and let us die slowly,
the gas chambers worked quicker . . .’112
Gollancz had noticed this even before the frost set in. ‘Youth is being
poisoned and re-nazified: we have all but lost the peace . . .’ he wrote to the
editor of the liberal News Chronicle.113 The problem had even broader
implications: ‘I should have liked to write about the general decline of
public morality under the impact of growing despair and of the financial
crisis in which the black and the grey sectors constantly encroach upon the
legitimate one . . .’ Gollancz thought German youth had no morality
whatsoever, and the situation was not helped by the lackadaisical approach
of the British authorities. There was just one monthly youth magazine
published by the British, as opposed to nine in the US Zone; and most of
those were fortnightly.114
Clay was profoundly concerned about the lack of subsistence. He noted
that the people were receiving just 1,000 calories in the British Zone in
February 1946, which would ‘hardly maintain life’. Ernst Jünger, who
seemed to receive regular gifts of food from his admirers, reported in March
that the rations had sunk to half what they were. ‘This is a death sentence
for many who up to now have only been able to keep their heads above
water with the greatest effort, above all children, old people and
refugees.’115 The US Zone had been up to 1,550, but by 18 March the figure
had dropped to 1,313. Germans were better fed in the Soviet Zone. Even
when spring returned, the American provision had only risen to 1,275.
Without access to black-market supplies no one could live and work. Once
again Clay reserved some of his bitterest comments for the French, who
applied to him for wheat in January 1946. Without wheat the calorie count
in their zone would drop from 1,380 to 1,145. Clay thought they had none
because they had taken it all to France. Absence of wheat and the need to
make bread had also obliged the French to close the breweries. In February
that year Clay gave orders to reopen them in the American Zone.116 On 26
May 1946 he spoke of a ‘nutritional disaster’. Ever the propagandist, he
thought it ‘may seriously retard the recovery of Western Europe and
probably disturb its political development’. German children under six were
suffering from a high incidence of rickets, and children between six and
eighteen were often stunted.117
Many Germans were prepared to see the Allies as liberating angels at
first, but they were soon disappointed when they saw the all-too-human
soldiers arrive filled with propaganda and hatred for the civilian population.
The high-flown rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter now appeared to be every
bit as pharisaic as the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson had been.118 The
danger of hunger and famine was slow to abate. Gollancz had had faith in
the idea of Anglo-American co-operation, but even with the creation of
Bizonia the rations were pitifully low. As the cold weather began to set in,
on 14 October 1946 the daily intake was only 1,550 calories.119
Stories abounded like those retailed in Paris during the Commune: dogs
and cats were not safe from hungry Germans. Rats and frogs were eaten,
together with snails - which made a filling soup. Horse was a relatively
common dish, as the beasts often expired by the roadside and were then
carved up by the locals with sharp knives. The Germans discovered the
nutritious character of certain plants. Nettles were an obvious resource.
Flour was made from shoots, rosehips and reed mace (cat’s tail). Acorns,
dandelion and lupine roots were ground to make coffee. In Austria to this
day they will tell you that their fondness for elderflowers and elderberries
dates from that time.120 Wild mushrooms were a great boon in season: they
stopped the stomach from rumbling but later tortured the consumer with
their indigestibility. Even by the winter of 1948 the situation had not been
remedied - the Germans had still to reckon with scanty rations. That winter
the Americans brought in supplies of maize. As we have seen, the Germans
were not impressed: Hühnerfutter (chicken feed) one man called it; no jolly
green giants for them.
The countryside should have had other uses. Germany was struck by a
plague of wild boars after the war, which were in their way as frightening as
the marauding gangs of eastern European DPs. The boars gobbled up
potatoes and other crops. Farmers armed themselves with bows and arrows
because they had been obliged to yield up their guns. Most of them had no
way of killing the creatures, which then fell victim to Allied troops, who
hunted them for sport, not out of hunger.121
The situation was made all the more acute by the failures of supply. The
potatoes sent from Bavaria in the winter of 1946-7 arrived frozen. Those
who had nothing to trade and no power to go out and scavenge fared the
worst: of the 700 inmates of the lunatic asylum at Grafenberg bei
Düsseldorf, 160 died. At the lowest point of that winter, the daily intake in
British Nordrhein-Westfalen was 865 calories. Rumours spread: in
Oldenburg the locals thought the Allies were hoarding food in preparation
for a new war; or it was said that they were hoping that all the Germans
would die, and save them the expense of feeding them. Special ‘hamster’
trains were organised to see if anything could be found out in the country -
either by trading with the farmers or simply by scrumping. When rickets
appeared in the British Zone, the authorities responded by issuing vigantol
and vitimin D2. In Berlin, TB now accounted for one death in ten.122
Some relief was to be had from the Hoover Diet introduced in the
summer of 1947: a 350-calorie meal for children. Former president Herbert
Hoover had toured Germany and pronounced that its food situation was the
worst in Europe and that its diet was providing the lowest number of
calories for a century. He proposed sending over America’s surplus potato
production. Suddenly the school meal became the equivalent of a banquet.
Germans learned to like peanuts and soya. At the beginning of 1948 there
was a twenty-four-hour general strike in Bizonia in protest against the lack
of food. 123
On 17 June 1948 Carl Zuckmayer, now joined by his wife Alice,
witnessed a full-scale demonstration from their Munich hotel room. The
protesters were several thousand students in their twenties. From
loudspeakers they chanted, ‘We want no tyranny from hunger!’ and ‘We
have not been colonised!’ The demonstrators wore death’s heads or white
clothes painted with skeletons, and dragged coffins and gravestones along
behind them. One had a bread-basket containing just a piece of crust; others
carried symbols of misery, hunger and death. Other university cities
witnessed similar protests that day: three years after the end of the war the
people were still starving, and their intellectual hunger was also as yet
unassuaged.
The Zuckmayers found it horribly reminiscent of other demonstrations
they had witnessed in the city that had seen the birth of Nazism. In 1933
they had found themselves enmeshed in a pack of brutal Nazi students.
They had been lucky to extricate themselves with their lives; and yet these
students in 1948 were well brought up and highly intelligent. One of the
organisers was a close relative of a member of the Scholl circle - the Weisse
Rose. The Zuckmayers watched as armed MPs advanced at them from the
Nazi Haus der Kunst, which was now an American officers’ mess. Carl
realised that the only way to make the Germans into decent people again
was to treat them with kindness.124
Fringsen
It wasn’t just the lack of food that killed, it was the extreme cold. In the
winter of 1945-6 the coal ran out. Joseph Frings, archbishop of Cologne,
addressed the ‘people of the Rhineland’ in his New Year’s Eve homily: ‘We
live in times when we have to help ourselves to little things that are
necessary to keep ourselves alive and to maintain our health, if we may not
obtain them through our work or by requesting them . . . But I believe that
in many cases it has gone much further than this, and when this happens
there is only one solution: to immediately return any property you have no
right to own, otherwise God will not forgive you.’125 The people were only
too ready to interpret the sermon: if you are going lose your lives by
freezing to death, then help yourself to what you need! No one paid much
heed to the second part of the paragraph, or indeed to the gist of the sermon.
The story of the primate’s condoning of theft spread like wildfire - the
Church approved the stealing of coal. In February 1947 a train was stormed
in Nuremberg, forcing the police to fire warning shots. On the 26th of that
month it was reported that there had been 305 deaths from hypothermia in
the Western zones, 1,155 cases had been admitted to hospital and 49,300
people treated for the effects of the cold.126 By March 17,000 people had
been arrested for stealing coal since the New Year.127 Frings had come into
his own once the war ended. He was the one post-war churchman to
originate a verb in German: fringsen - helping yourself (principally to
Allied coal) when the troops weren’t looking. It was similar to zapp-zarapp
- helping yourself the Russian way. Frings was more a man of the people
than the other high churchmen who had won their laurels objecting to
Hitler’s policies. He had suffered knocks with the best of them. In June
1943 a bomb had blown up the air-raid shelter he was in, killing two nuns
and injuring five others. Frings rolled up his sleeves and helped to rescue
the wounded. His own family house was destroyed, killing one of his
sisters; a brother was killed during an air attack on Magdeburg; another died
in a Russian camp.128
 He had been appointed in May 1942 after his predecessor, Schulte, died
in the course of another air-raid. The Nazis had already expressed their
view of Frings when they attacked him in his parish, and Peter
Winckelnkemper, the ‘brown’ mayor of Cologne, had thrown an ashtray at
the priest, scarring his face. Perhaps because he had seen the suffering
caused by both sides in the conflict, he was able to speak up for the victims.
He stood up first to the Nazis, then to the Allies by rejecting ‘collective
guilt’. From his pulpit he called for justice and Christian love from the
conquerors; he demanded the liberation of POWs, spoke out against famine
and against the expulsions from the east and called for just proceedings in
denazification. He also pleaded for the lives of those who had been
condemned to death by the Allied courts.129
At Christmas 1945 he made this clear to his flock. The war was over,
but the current situation was one of general suffering: ‘I see it as my duty to
relieve your pain as best I might . . . by speaking and writing. I have always
made it plain that the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand
children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who
now bear the brunt of the suffering in this general misery.’130
Frat
As already noted, there was to be no talking to the conquered Germans.
‘Fraternising’ was prohibited before the Western Allies arrived in Germany.
The ban was first imposed after the First World War, but then the
occupation of Germany had been limited to certain western districts. After
the Second World War in some places it remained in force until October
1945, although it was perfectly ineffective.131
Soldiers were told not to be moved by the hunger of a ‘yellow-haired
German child . . . there lurked the Nazi’. In the American army paper Stars
and Stripes servicemen were rehearsed in useful slogans: ‘Soldiers wise
don’t fraternise.’ A picture showed a comely German girl: ‘Don’t play
Samson to her Delilah - She’d like to cut your hair off - at the neck.’ Or
quite simply: ‘In heart, body and spirit every German is a Hitler!’132 The
British were almost as heartless. The order banning frat was introduced to
British forces in March 1945. In his proclamation to the Germans Bernard
Montgomery asked them to tell their children ‘why it is the British soldier
does not smile’. Very soon, however, Montgomery saw that the ban was
unworkable with the children and exempted those under eight. On 12 June
soldiers could address any child. The British scrapped the ban altogether in
September, but until the following month Germans had to get out of the
way of British soldiers on the pavement.133
In some quarters, the ban on frat was the source of acute frustration
among Germans. Ursula von Kardorff heard about the prohibition on 11
June. Soldiers began to shout at the women: ‘We would like to talk to you,
but we are not allowed. Eisenhower said so.’ Arthur Radley, a British
officer serving in Austria, thought the whole thing ludicrous, but the ban
had one unexpected advantage. His regiment had an RSM whom everyone
disliked, but they could find no way of getting rid of him. Then, as they
were marching into Styria, a girl asked him the time, and he replied. He was
put before a court martial and broken to private. He was then transferred to
another regiment. ‘A lot of people could breathe again.’134
On 29 June Clay reported that the ban was ‘extremely unpopular’. It
was chiefly a ‘boy-girl problem’. ‘The only fraternisation that really
interests the soldiers is going with the pretty German girl, who is very much
in evidence.’ He thought the whole thing made for bad propaganda: it
should be the American soldier, not the German girl, who wins hearts and
minds.135 It was also wholly ineffectual: within a month of the Western
Allies’ arrival a German lover became the rule. What the soldiers did when
they were alone was fratting. For George Clare, coining a mixed metaphor
rather a long time after the event, British soldiers were ‘cementing Anglo-
German relations at the grass-roots’. His mess, a large, requisitioned Berlin
flat, was ‘liberty hall’: you never went into any bedroom without knocking
first. There was a chance there would be a ‘Veronika’ in there. Others went
home to the family. One of Clare’s friends shared a bedroom with a woman
and her mother. The latter just turned over and went to sleep.136
Neither Allied soldiers nor German women were ready to co-operate
with the ban. Part of the problem was a shortage of the opposite sex. Most
German men aged between sixteen and sixty were absent; those who
remained were often invalids or cripples. Women aged between twenty and
forty outnumbered their men by 160 to 100. Margret Boveri reported four
women mobbing a twenty-year-old German youth in Neukölln in Berlin,
and recalled the problems that had been caused for her generation by the
loss of two million young men in the Great War. The conquerors, by
contrast to the old men around, looked healthy and proud, which acted as an
aphrodisiac of sorts. For the women themselves, their virtue had been
compromised by two things - the experience of rape, often aggravated by
violence, disease or pregnancy, and starvation. Clare’s frat, ‘Anita’, was
lucky to have been raped just once: she had tried to wriggle out of it by
pointing to her groin and saying ‘I sick!’ The Russian was wise to that. ‘I
rubber!’ he replied.137 Very soon Clare learned that most if not all of his
comrades in arms had adopted ‘Fräuleins’ and that certain nights when the
men did not return to their billets were called ‘Fräulein nights’.138
The way to the Berlin women’s hearts appears to have been through
their stomachs. From the Winston Club, British Other Ranks filled their
haversacks with spam and cheese rolls, buns and cakes. A haversack filled
with NAAFI food had the purchasing power of two cigarettes. You could
feed a Fräulein and her family for four Gold Flakes or Players. British
soldiers were rationed to 200 cigarettes a week, which made them the lords
of the land with full seigniorial rights.139 Morality was loose and
prostitution rife. Both the Allies and the German authorities turned a blind
eye to it. In Nuremberg one of James Stern’s colleagues interviewed a
prostitute. She said most of her customers were sad German soldiers
looking for companionship, but there were American soldiers too, ‘both
white and coloured’. The AMG had not sought to interfere, but the
prostitutes had to register and see a doctor once a week.140
It was generally not a formal business arrangement in that way. German
women were prepared to have sex with Americans for reasons that stretched
from companionship to the need for protection, cigarettes, food or
stockings. There was a wood in Nuremberg that Stern called ‘Conception
Copse’. Between 6 p.m. and the curfew it was littered with GIs and German
girls. As frat was still officially banned, they had to beware of MPs. There
were, however, plenty of DPs acting as auxiliaries to the American forces
who had no fear of the police - Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Italians,
Letts or Poles - and they too availed themselves of the German girls.141

OceanofPDF.com
 13
Black Market
Old Reichsmark coins, which weren’t valid any
more because of their silver content - we weren’t
supposed to have them any more - and Party badges -
all badges from Hitler’s time, Hitler Youth badges -
with those we went to the [American] barracks and in
the barracks we got cigarettes. And the cigarettes we
exchanged for food at the farmers.
Quoted in Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans, New Haven and London 2003, 90

Cigarettes and CARE Packets

With a cigarette worth more than a hundred-mark note even the old
nobles were happy to make a little money smuggling cigarettes across the
green frontier. An American cigarette was worth a suburban railway ticket,
and a packet counted as a major bribe. In October 1945, one cigarette was
worth four ounces of bread. In a POW camp they could cost as much as 120
marks a piece.1 The Germans who were best off were those who could still
lay their hands on jewellery, watches or cameras. Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein
remembered selling a badly damaged piece of Meissen porcelain to a black-
marketeer for a considerable number of cigarettes. The piece was restored
and sold to an American general’s wife who kept it too close to the fire and
the restored part promptly fell off.2
The importance of the cigarette trade is revealed in contemporary
literature. Heinrich Böll’s ‘Kumpel mit den langen Haar’ (My Long-Haired
Mate) describes a raid on a black market. The central character sees jeeps
drive up to a station filled with redcaps who then cordon off the area and
begin their search. ‘It went incredibly quickly. I stood just outside the
cordon and lit a cigarette. Everything happened so quietly. Lots of cigarettes
landed on the ground. Pity . . . I thought and I made an involuntary
calculation as to how much money was now lying in the dirt. The Black
Maria quickly filled up with its quarry . . .’ The man wisely avoids going to
his digs. He goes into the station and walks to the buffet where he hands
over 200 cigarettes to Fritz the waiter and sticks the money into his back
pocket. ‘Now I was completely without wares, just a packet for myself.’ He
orders a bowl of meat stock and a piece of bread. He is joined by little
Mausbach, quite out of breath. “You,” he stammered. “You need to beat it . .
. they have searched your room and found the coke . . . Christ!” He was
almost choking. I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and gave him
twenty marks . . . Pity, I thought again . . . eight thousand marks gone up in
smoke . . . You are safe nowhere.’3
One way of surviving was smuggling from the Russian Zone to the
West. Libussa von Krockow traded American cigarettes in the Russian
Zone and procured nylons in Chemnitz that she then bartered with a
shoemaker in Holstein for a pair of shoes. She suspended the smuggling in
1946, with the onset of the killing winter.4 In the spring of 1947 Clay made
a move to stop the use of cigarettes as currency by banning their
importation. He considered bringing in tobacco instead, thereby leading to a
fall in prices as supply increased. Clay had to admit it was unlikely to
remove the value of Lucky Strikes, as there had been a black market for
American cigarettes before the war.5 Rumours of currency reform were rife
six months before the Allies made their move. Until that happened barter
was still the means by which people normally lived. A woman wanting to
have her hair washed, for example, had to bring with her the soap, a towel
and five pieces of wood. Wood was an important commodity, especially in
winter, and Ruth Friedrich was appalled to see that her lover’s grave had
been plundered of the pine fronds she had laid on it - an ancient and
probably heathen Prussian tradition.6
For the Allies working in Germany shopping was done in ‘Occupation
Marks’ - ‘a currency with an appearance even more spurious than that of
the million- and milliard-mark bills of the inflation period after the First
War’.7 Cigarettes were one means the Allies had of getting their way in
Germany; another was chewing gum. A generation of Germans became
addicted to gum as a result of GIs handing it out to children, so much so
that even now chewing gum is nowhere in Europe so respectable as it is in
Germany. Even the Old Etonian Stern was not averse to using gum as a way
to the hearts of children.8 Another important commodity was soap.
Prisoners released from American camps hoarded soap, which they could
sell for food or cigarettes. Former POWs from British camps had no such
currency. A bar of soap had a monetary value of between fifty and eighty
marks. The most highly prized was Palmolive.
In the winter of 1946-7, as many as 60,000 chiefly elderly Germans
died of cold and hunger. CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to
Operate in Germany) was a manifestation of the Allies’ change of attitude
to the Germans. By the beginning of 1947 it had distributed 30,000 tons of
food. In April 1946 CARE (Co-operative of American Remittances to
Europe) joined in. This was the beginning of the famous CARE packets: 1.9
million of them were handed out in 1946 alone. After the winter Clay called
for relief from Washington. He expressed the view that there was no hope
of introducing democracy to a starving population.9

In a Germany where there were ‘calories but no food’10 something

always needed to be found to supplement the scanty commons provided by
the Allies - and that meant the black market. ‘Whoever wanted to live
needed to find connections to the black market as a seller or a buyer.’11
There was nothing new about black markets, which will emerge wherever
there is rationing. The black market flourished during the Third Reich
despite some draconian punishments, from the Junker who was made an
example of and given four months for failing to deliver his milk to the co-
operative, to the 5,142 black-marketeers who were executed for illicit
trading.12
The black market was often based in the main railway station. In a
remarkable number of instances, it was the only largely undamaged
structure in the city centre. The atmosphere in these stations appears in
Böll’s early stories. Another man with an eye for detail was Zuckmayer -
although with an important proviso. Zuckmayer points out that recording
the man in the street often gives a false idea of how a country thinks
because the stupidest have the loudest mouths, and more intelligent people
either reflect more before they speak or hold their tongues.13 The station
was the point of arrival and departure and a transit point: ‘In Germany there
is . . . a ceaseless creeping, crawling and groping; an enraged ant-heap, the
constant buzzing of swarms of wild bees; an eternal coming and going,
tramping, running and criss-crossing; a scraping and creaking of millions of
unquiet soles. This is the spirit of the “Black Market” or the “Green
Border” [the unpatrolled frontier]; the world and the march of the homeless,
the expellees, the masses torn asunder, the furtive traveller, the marauding
youth.’
Railway stations were the centres of their universe, open all day and all
night. ‘Stations are not just miserable waiting rooms for overtired,
exhausted travellers; they are homes for the homeless.’14 On the north side
of Frankfurt Station there was a hut operated by the Red Cross that served
as a room for travelling mothers, where they could change their infants and
receive a little nourishment in the form of porridge, gruel, skimmed milk or
hot soup. There was no need of coupons. Despairing mothers often left their
children in the hut, knowing that the Red Cross could hardly toss them out
into the cold. On the far side of the Rhine, in the French Zone, there was
rumoured to be a market for babies.15
Zuckmayer clearly enjoyed the curious parade of figures in every
conceivable costume: a man wearing Tyrolean dress, his knees exposed to
the freezing air and frozen blue scratching his wiry beard with the side of
his zither case; another wrapped in a Yugoslavian sheepskin; men dressed in
every form of military uniform and a lot of black jackets emblazoned with
the fading legend ‘PW’ for prisoner of war. Women were also dressed in
this motley fashion, from a worn-out silk cape to a pair of ski trousers that
had seen better days.
To buy food or drink required prolonged queuing. If you were lucky you
might obtain a glass of watery beer or a cup of beef broth on presentation of
a ration coupon. Even then a cup or glass was only issued on payment of a
ten-mark deposit. Most were there to trade, however. Zuckmayer compared
it to Times Square on a Saturday night. If you moved among the mass you
could hear the offers of butter, dripping, flour, cigarettes - Chesterfields or
Luckies were the best - or gems, coffee, chocolate or soap. Papers were also
traded, often on particular specialised platforms within the station. New
names could be issued with the passport. Most people went for quite banal
things they felt they needed, like tobacco. For a box brownie you might
have received a carton of washing powder crammed with desiccated
tobacco or crumbled cigarettes made up from fag ends called Besen or
brooms. An opera glass yielded a kilo of dried peas and a bacon rind. On
another occasion a camera was hocked for a goose.16
There were periodic Razzien or raids, when the traders scattered before
the police - these were either ‘minor’ or ‘major’ raids. The former were
carried out by the German police, who took their work seriously. They
concentrated on rounding up prostitutes and taking them off to a clinic for
examination. They were released with a ‘hunting certificate’ - or a clean bill
of health - and went directly back to the station. The major Razzia was
performed by foreign MPs. Those who were arrested spent a night in the
cells. In Berlin that meant the police station on the ‘Alex’ or
Alexanderplatz. It was not considered a disgrace to be caught and punished
in this way, when so many Germans were in prison for innocent reasons.17
Among those arrested was Ernst Jünger, who was in Tübingen to address
students. One of his companions in the car was found to possess a
suspicious number of cigarettes. He was put against a wall, and when the
local Landrat intervened, the politician was made to join him.18
Some of the traders had already begun to cast themselves as
‘businessmen’ by the winter of 1946-7. One young man called Dieter took
Zuckmayer off for a drink at his favourite bar, which turned out to be close
to Frankfurt Station. They had to walk though a gloomy and ruinous
backyard. The bar had been decorated with fake flowers and a three-man
ensemble played pseudo-swing music. An evil schnapps was available for
monstrous prices, as were American cigarettes. There was a sign on the
counter announcing that the under-aged were not allowed in, but
Zuckmayer saw plenty of much younger boys and girls. Zuckmayer heard a
boy pleading with a girl to sleep with him. He could not have been older
than fifteen and still had a child’s voice. The object of his attention was a
powerful girl in a Manchester jacket and man’s trousers: ‘Will you not
come with me tonight? You promised.’
‘Leave me alone. I have already done it five times today.’
‘But you promised!’ the boy begged.
‘Leave me alone. Do you think I do this for pleasure?’
‘I’ve got a Hershey Bar.’ The boy was almost in tears.
‘Get on with you. I still need a carton of cigarettes. I need a new dress.’
Zuckmayer’s ‘businessman’ did not relish the idea of this freebooting
being brought to an end, but a money-based economy was bound to come.
The other boys ‘in business’ looked well on it: they were strong and fit,
although the girls, living mostly from their bodies, looked less so. There
was chicanery there too. Some of the men who went into the ruins with the
girls were promptly beaten up and relieved of their wallets.19 Dieter lived
with a girl who worked as a prostitute for the officers and men of the
garrison. He was keen that Zuckmayer should not think ill of her for
making her money that way. She was all right for all that, and Dieter
thought that they could make it together, pull themselves out of the gutter.
‘Who can navigate these times and remain wholly clean?’20
 In Berlin the most famous black market was held around the ruined
Reichstag building, stretching as far as the Brandenburg Gate - though this
may have been a separate division. The main business was in cigarettes, and
there were the usual police raids. One effect of the new currency was to
increase the price of metal, and Paul Wallot’s building was stripped of all its
metallic features for cash. This rang the knell for a number of statues that
were torn down and sold for scrap.21 The legendary Munich black market
was in the Möhlstrasse in Bogenhausen. Here you could obtain anything,
provided you had money, cigarettes or something to swap: ‘flour and
carpets, French cognac [sic], Spanish oranges, silver pots and cigarettes,
English cloth and German cameras’. The traders were eastern Jews, Greeks,
Hungarians, Czechs and Poles. There were also deals in the main
Viktualienmarkt in the centre of the city, where business centred on the
Stadt Kempten pub. Even the Hofbräuhaus was a black market in its day.
Traders used ingenious devices to run cigarettes. There were James-Bond-
style cars with false floors which could be lined with cartons.22
The situation in French-controlled south Baden gives an indication of
values at the end of 1946: 1,200 litres of fermenting wine must plus 200
litres sweet must plus old wine barrels were exchanged for seven rubber
tyres; 6,000 kilos of potatoes for twelve pairs of working trousers and four
aprons; three flints for five eggs; six bottles of schnapps for three men’s
shirts; a watch for two kilos of butter; thirty litres of wine for eighty
horseradish roots; two pairs of ladies’ trousers for two calf pelts; a cuckoo
clock with a ceramic plate for a thousand cigarettes; a 500-kilo pig for 200
litres of wine; two pairs of ladies’ socks for a pound and half of butter.23
There were plenty of rhymes:
Der Schmuck hat man als Butter aufgegessen,
die Meissner Tassen trägt man jetzt als Schuh.
So wächst dem Eigner, was er einst besessen
Von Grund auf umgewandelt wieder zu . . .dd
Here at last was ‘zero hour’; the tabula rasa. Those family treasures
that had not been destroyed by bombs, stolen or broken by Russians were
now eaten up. That the black market had its positive side was pointed out
by the Frankfurt city physician Dr Strüder: it offered an opportunity to
supplement rations. Another - also illegal - solution was hamstern. Special
trains took town and city folk out to country areas to trade with farmers and
smallholders. If no one was to hand, the ‘hamsters’ helped themselves. The
farmers did not trust money, so exchanges were in useful goods or objects.
Another country activity of note was illegal distillation. A bottle of
schnapps was a tradable commodity and a good way of turning a few apple
trees into a money-making enterprise. Growers in Lower Austria fought shy
of bringing their wine into Vienna, as they were often robbed by Russian
soldiers. They preferred potential clients to come to them, at their own
risk.24
Of course the black market bred crime as well. The buyer needed to
beware of counterfeit foods. Tins were filled with filth, and the unwary
could return to find everything they had acquired was rotten. Many of the
Germans working at the black market were KZler - ‘greens’ or habitual
criminals - and these were prone to show off their wealth in one or two
prominent bars, such as the Queen in Cologne, by drinking real coffee and
eating coupon-free menus. The fortunes of several West German
businessmen were founded in the post-war black market.
The black market was also a stomping ground for DPs. While they
waited to be repatriated many turned to crime. Western European DPs
received a good press on the whole, but others were feared by the Germans.
James Stern witnessed an ugly scene in Darmstadt, when the car he was in
collided with a German cyclist with a wooden leg. A crowd of Polish DPs
gathered around the injured man, evidently hoping that the Americans
would beat him up - or worse. They were disappointed when they drove the
man home instead. Wild bands of lawless DPs had become the new
brigands of post-war Germany. Another man Stern interviewed, a lawyer,
was obsessed with the risk of robbery by bands of Polish DPs. So far they
had stolen three bicycles from him in a Munich suburb and a Pole had shot
at him in the city centre. Russian DPs had attacked his neighbours and
killed the wife, before stealing the couple’s bicycles.
As Jünger had observed in his village near Celle, the DPs were at their
worst around Hanover. The writer and journalist Leonard Mosely admitted
that most of the cars had been stolen by the Allies themselves, but it was
DPs who first led a reign of terror in Herford ‘loaded with loot and drinks’.
In Hanover they were out of control for several days.25 Touring Hessen in
the winter of 1945, John Dos Passos was told of a German killed and
stripped by DPs the night before. The DPs formed robber bands that were
responsible for a number of atrocious acts in both Germany and Austria.
Near Stuttgart there were nightly attacks on isolated farmhouses. On 10
November 1945 at Spitalmühle near Margröningen a miller and his family
fled to the cellar for safety, but all six were shot in the head by the
intruders.26 The American army was called in to deal with a gang of Polish
DPs, and eventually had to use tanks in the course of a twelve-hour Razzia
at Wildflecken near Fulda.27
For the time being no one seemed to have a policy for what to do with
the foreign workers. They were to be found on the roads leading from the
main cities, trying to find a way home. The exceptions were the Russians,
most of whom would have done anything to remain in Germany, or travel
on to America or Australia. Elena Skrjabina was appointed to visit some of
the Russian camps. She reported that all the Russian inmates were ‘driven
by one feeling - to get as far away as possible from the Soviet Union’.28
Russian soldiers sold off some of their surplus watches and traded
German marks for dollars, while the Americans bought Meissen porcelain
with their PX rations.29 A Russian soldier remembered encountering a black
American who tried to sell him first a Colt pistol, then a jeep. Elsewhere
blacks sold cigarettes, chocolates and soap.30 Smuggling cars back to the
Soviet Union ended when the Russian authorities imposed huge tariffs in
1946. The Americans used the Interzone train that ran from Osnabrück to
Berlin and was called the ‘the silk-stocking express’ for that reason.31 The
British received fifty cigarettes free per week and could buy another 200 at
duty-free prices. These were sold for marks and then changed back into
sterling at RM40 to the pound. Anything could be obtained on the black
market to improve the quality of life. There were drugs such as cocaine,
morphine and opium; for VD sufferers there was penicillin, and quinine to
provoke abortions. There were also contraceptives. 32
One striking case of criminality that had its origins in the black market
was that of Werner Gladow, the ‘Al Capone of the Alexanderplatz’. Gladow
was born in May 1931, the son of a butcher. He was too young to have
experienced the war as a soldier, merely the chaos and depravity occasioned
by the Allied bombing. At sixteen he made a modest start as a criminal on
the Berlin black market. He was rounded up and imprisoned twice. In April
1948 he graduated from petty marketeering to proper crime when he
smashed the window of a camera shop in the Rankestrasse and stole what
he thought was a camera. The proprietor gave chase, but Gladow shot him
in the leg. He and his gang stole a car and headed for the Soviet Sector.
When East Berlin Volkspolizei or ‘Vopos’ surrounded the car, Gladow fired
at them and the gang escaped.
Gladow formed his friends into a proper gang expanding to twenty-
seven at its apogee. All the members had nicknames. Gladow was
‘Doktorchen’, or ‘Little Doc’. He acted on tip-offs from Gustav Völpel, an
executioner on both sides of Berlin between 1946 and 1948. The gang’s
first proper haul occurred when they held up the cashier of a funfair on the
Prenzlauer Berg. Gladow was convinced that the way to succeed was
superior firepower. To this end he held up a detachment of seven Vopos and
stole their guns. These came in useful for the robbery of a number of
jewellers’ shops and a hold-up at a Tauschzentralde in the Frankfurter Allee.
As the director of the Tauschzentral would not reveal where he had hidden
the day’s takings Gladow tortured him until he handed over RM6,000.
Meanwhile the gang had run out of ammunition. The solution was to hold
up another eight Vopos in January 1949 and rob them of their guns. The
Gladow gang’s attacks became ever more violent. During a robbery of a
jeweller’s they shot a man several times. A shocked general public pelted
them with stones. They still managed to escape and the police found no
trace of them. One reason why they were so difficult to track down was the
position of Berlin and its sectors. As in The Third Man in Vienna, there was
no co-operation between the police in the East and West. Berlin was a
paradise for gangsters like Gladow.
In May 1949 the gang shot and killed the driver of a BMW and stole his
car. Now the police finally uncovered the tracks of the gang and went to
arrest Gladow in Friedrichshain in the Soviet Sector. After a gun battle in
which Gladow was wounded twice, he was taken into custody and charged
with 352 offences, including two murders and fifteen attempted murders. In
the dock he was undiminished in his cockiness. Attempts to reduce the
sentence on the grounds of age were rejected, and Gladow was beheaded in
Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on 5 December 1950.33

OceanofPDF.com
 14
Light Fingers
Naturally I nicked things sometimes, coal and that
sort of thing. Wood too. Just recently I even stole a loaf
of bread from a baker’s shop. It was really quick and
simple. I just snatched the bread and walked out. I went
out calmly, only when I got to the corner did I start to
run. You just don’t have the nerves any more.
Heinrich Böll, ‘Geschäft ist Geschäft’, in Wanderer kommst du nach Spal - Erzählungen, Munich 1997, 171

Theft was not confined to petty larceny among the soldateska, DPs or
starving Germans. Whole governments were involved in robbing Germany
of anything that took their fancy. It could have been just about anything,
such as Göring’s yacht, the Karin II, which ended up in the hands of the
British royal family. One Soviet priority was the seizure of any important
works of art found in the capital. This was a fully planned operation, and no
particular novelty. The greatest art thief of all time was probably Napoleon
Bonaparte, and French provincial museums are still filled with paintings
acquired on his campaigns. The Nazis too plundered art wherever they
went, but they proved themselves amateurs beside the Red Army. The art
works stolen by Soviet troops were originally planned to be exhibited in a
huge museum of war trophies - the equivalent of Hitler’s museum in Linz.
As the tide of opinion changed, however, the Russians chose to conceal the
art works in special closed galleries throughout the Soviet Union. Many of
them remain hidden to this day.df
In true Soviet style many of these works of art were destroyed in the
fighting and more were to be eradicated by negligence during the first days
of the occupation. The pillage was by no means limited to Berlin, and
within their zone and in the former German areas that were ceded to Russia
and Poland the Soviets were able to make off with some two and a half
million objets d’art including 800,000 paintings. Some of these had been
stolen by the Nazis.
Art boffins travelled with the Red Army as they conquered Germany,
grabbing anything of value. This was not always so easy, as the squaddies
were often more likely to destroy works of art than to preserve them.
Fyodor Chotinsky, for example, chanced upon his first haul when he
entered one of the houses of a Graf Pourtalès on 10 March 1945. His
excitement was mitigated, however, when over the next few days troops
shattered the larger part of the porcelain, knocked over statuary, and poked
out the eyes of portraits in the style of Rembrandt and Greuze. Even when
troops were posted to watch over a collection, the boffins returned to find
that the guards had slept in the tapestries and used the porcelain to cook in.1
The nemesis of this Russian pursuit of trophies was the MFAA
(Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives) department of the US army. They too
took art works into ‘custody’, including some 200 canvases found in Berlin.
The Americans originally planned to ship a large percentage of Germany’s
art treasures home with them. This was a policy warmly supported by Clay,
who wanted to ‘hold them in trust for the German people’. There was a
little more to it than that, however. Clay’s concern for the art works
encompassed an element of ‘trophying’: the ‘American public is entitled to
see these art objects’. He opposed the return of works from the Kaiser
Friedrich Museumdg in Berlin before a place could be found to exhibit them.
Eventually President Truman stepped in and promised to send them back.2
This was in part due to Captain Walter Farmer, the author of the
‘Wiesbaden Manifesto’, who encouraged ministers, senators and museum
curators to protest against official policy. Those works of art that had
already been removed to America were brought back to Germany after their
return had been officially sanctioned by Clay in March 1948. The Prussian
Collections were given to Hessen, as the state of Prussia would shortly be
abolished by the notorious Control Council Law No. 46 of February 1947.
The former Prussian Collection from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum had
found a temporary home in Wiesbaden. They included the famous bust of
Queen Nefertiti. Much of Berlin’s treasure was housed in the castellated
flak towers that were National Socialism’s most striking gift to the capital.
In one of them, the Zoo Tower, Soviet art historians in uniform discovered
Heinrich Schliemann’s gold: the treasures of Troy protected day and night
by the director of the Museum for Antiquities, Dr Wilhelm Unverzagt.
Unverzagt had managed to prevent the soldiers from finding the gold until 1
May, when a superior officer appeared. Then he revealed the contents of the
cases. The officer posted sentries. A few days later General Bersarin made a
visit to the tower and assured Unverzagt that the treasures would be taken to
a safe place. At the end of the month Schliemann’s gold was carried off on
an army lorry. Its ultimate destination was Leningrad.
Unverzagt had one last job to perform: he had to supervise the inventory
as the boxes were filled with other treasures as they were removed from the
tower. The first convoy set out on 13 May. By the 19th the work was all but
finished. On the 21st he learned that the lorries were heading for the Soviet
army HQ at Karlshorst. Speed was vital: the Western Allies were due in
Berlin at any moment and the Soviet authorities did not want the British or
the Americans calling them to order. The Zoo Tower was going to be in the
British Sector after all. The art historians had to convince the generals of
the importance of what they were doing. Many of these senior officers were
demontageniki - keener on using their lorries and railway trucks to ship out
whole factories together with any heavy machines to rebuild the Soviet
economy.3 And there was still a problem: the flak tower was under Smersh -
Military Intelligence - control, and the culture boffins had no right to
remove the objects from it. They had to win over Marshal Zhukov. This was
done by sending Andrei Belokopitov, in civilian life the director of the
Artists’ Theatre in Moscow, to see the marshal. Zhukov thought the visit
was to do with the theatre and received Belokopitov cordially. When he
learned that it was to do with the treasure in the flak tower, he became
angry. Belokopitov told the marshal, however, ‘If this collection falls into
the hands of the Americans, you will regret this mistake.’
Zhukov summoned his adjutant, Antipenko. They would override
Smersh: the culture boffins had twenty-four hours to empty the Zoo Tower.
Belokopitov broke into the conversation: twenty-four hours were too few,
because the objects were very large. Zhukov awarded the boffins forty-eight
and dismissed them. They enlisted a detachment of some 300 experienced
pioneers who set about dismantling the Pergamon Altar. They also loaded
7,000 Greek vases, 1,800 statues, 9,000 antique gems, 6,500 terracotta
figures and thousands of objects of lesser value. The bigger job was
finished by the beginning of June. When the Americans arrived they were
told that the altar had been removed undamaged, but that some Egyptian
reliefs and Roman statuary had been smashed, and that a Chinese bronze
gong had rolled away down the stone steps.4 The largest piece of booty
transported to Russia were the friezes from the Pergamon Altarpiece, which
had been a present to Kaiser William II from the Ottoman emperor to thank
Germany for its help in excavating the site. The Pergamon Museum had
been built up around it.
The greatest tragedy of the sack of Berlin was the fire that took place in
the Control Tower in the Park at Friedrichshain. The huge concrete tower
was abandoned by its defenders on 2 May. Over the next three days it was
picked over by various foreign workers who were chiefly looking for food.
The tower was, however, the temporary repository of the classical
antiquities from the Berlin museums together with the paintings from the
picture gallery. There were 8,500 objects from the classical collections, as
well as 1,500 in glass. Of the 411 canvases, 160 were Italian masters, a
quarter of the total collection, and including works by Fra Angelico and
Luca Signorelli. Italian sculpture was represented by Donatello’s Madonna
and Child. There were large works by Rubens, as well as pictures by
Chardin, Zurbarán, Murillo and Reynolds. Of the German works one of the
most famous was Menzel’s Tafelrunde.
In the night of the 5-6 May the Control Tower burst into flames,
destroying at least some of the art works housed on the first floor. It was
thought that the fire had been started by Germans looking for food.
Someone had the wilder theory that Werewolves had set the tower alight.
Still it was impossible to convince the Russians to guard the tower, and
some time between the 7th and the 15th another fire broke out that
destroyed all that remained. The second fire may have been started by
thieves trying to find valuable works of art, as some artefacts and at least
one picture later materialised on the market. As there was no light in the
tower it was supposed they had lit newspapers in order to see better. When
art historians visited the site a few days later they found that the forced
labourers had already scoured the remains, taking with them fragments of
antique glass and pots. On contact with the air the marble disintegrated in
the hands of the despairing experts.5
At the beginning of July the Russians took another look at the Control
Tower in Friedrichshain. It was decided to sift through the ruins to see if
there was anything worth retrieving. They filled fifteen chests with broken
antiquities. One of the archaeologists was excited about a strangely shaped
vase he found buried in the ashes. When he had dusted it down he found
that he was holding a Russian bazooka shell that had failed to explode. The
Russian experts knew that it was important to remove anything salvageable
from the Control Tower before the autumn as the damp air would destroy
the remaining artefacts. The military governor of Berlin, Colonel General
Gorbatov, wrote to Zhukov to this effect, but work did not begin until
December. By March 1946 around 10,000 objects had been dug out. Even
the Americans from the MFAA were able to retrieve a few objects. There
seems to have been little or no security at the tower.6 More antiquities were
taken from the cellars of the New Mint where they had lain around in pools
of water, in many cases badly damaged. From the Museum Island the
Russians selected fifty-four canvases from the cellars. Among others there
was Goya’s May Pole, and Ghirlandaio’s Christ on the Cross. All the looted
treasure was taken to Schloss Tresckow in Friedrichsfelde or the former
abattoir for shipment back to Russia.
The fate of Hitler continued to trouble the Russians for many months:
was he actually dead? The British too had launched an investigation, with
the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper piecing his last days together. The
Russians had the advantage of possessing the Chancellery, the bunker and -
although they were confused at first - his bones. Trevor-Roper did not have
those, although the picture he drew was substantially correct.7
Meanwhile the Soviet authorities were falling out over the bones. Stalin
had been informed by Zhukov that Hitler had committed suicide on 30
April. His body and that of his new wife Eva Braun had been dug up in the
garden, in the spot designated by Admiral Voss. As the Smersh soldiers
were not certain that they had the right bodies, they reburied them, only
finally exhuming them on 5 May, when together with the bodies of the
Goebbels children, the chief of staff General Krebs and a couple of dogs,
they were sent to their HQ at Berlin-Buch as important trophies. The
autopsies were performed the next day. Contradictory evidence made the
officers concerned reluctant to send in a final report on the cause of Hitler’s
death. The Soviet authorities preferred the version that had him taking
poison - a cowardly way out. Shooting oneself was a braver, more soldierly
death.
When the Soviets’ Operation Myth was launched in 1946 to establish
the real sequence of events leading to Hitler’s death, some of Hitler’s
personal staff were brought back to Berlin and the bunker, in order to point
out the precise details of the suicide and subsequent burning in the garden.
The bones, for the time being, were stored in Magdeburg.8 Of particular
importance were the objects in Hitler’s personal collection. For them an
aircraft was laid on as Stalin wanted his bones examined by his foremost
experts. The Führer’s skull was eventually put into a paper bag and
deposited in the State Archives. The paintings in his private collection were
taken to the abattoir.9 The area around the Chancellery remained out of
bounds to Berliners. When Ruth Friedrich poked her nose into the cour
d’honneur of the Chancellery in May she saw a Soviet squaddie
comfortably ensconced in an armchair with a machine gun across his
knees.10
At Schloss Sophienhof near Berlin, Russian soldiers destroyed the
complete archive of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Part of the medieval-weapon
collection housed in the Berlin Arsenal was destroyed on orders issued by
the Soviet military authorities. At Karinhall, the house Göring had built for
himself on the site of the the Kaiser’s hunting lodge on the Schorfheide, the
Russians indulged in an orgy of destruction, demolishing statues by Pigalle,
Houdon and Boizo by using them for target practice. The hidden pictures by
Emil Nolde (the Nazis had forbidden Nolde to paint) in Teupitz Hospital
were burned.11
Not everything was rubbished. In Silesia delighted Russian officials
seized immense numbers of wireless sets. In the villas of prosperous
Silesians well-stocked libraries were found, and 40,000 art books were
collected and despatched back to the Pushkin Museum. In Gleiwitz there
was excitement when a horde of Stradivari and Amati violins was seized,
until it turned out that they were fakes. Silesia, however, was not as rich in
artefacts as its soil was fertile. A Kolbe figure was located and
appropriated. As they searched for booty on one estate Soviet art experts
found a group of soldiers about to hang a monkey. The creature was
accused of having lifted its paw in salute when they had shouted ‘Heil
Hitler!’ as a joke. The irony of the monkey’s response had been lost on
them. The art historians rescued the beast and made it their companion.12
Soviet officers - particularly Lieutenant Yevgeny Ludshuveit - were
credited with saving the Schlosser of Sanssouci (the town palace was
destroyed by British bombs in April). Frederick the Great’s art collection,
however, went east, and a Russian officer is thought to have slashed Philip
de László’s portrait of William II with a sabre.13 Most of the Russian energy
went into removing the best parts of the collections they found. In the old
Cistercian monastery at Lehnin they found some stored works of art and
organised their shipment. Frederick the Great’s first palace, Schloss
Rheinsberg, was stripped of its last contents, right down to the painted over-
doors. Viktor Lazarev, however, a professor of art history at Moscow
University, was one who respected the architectural ensemble where
possible. In Potsdam he advocated leaving paintings, sculpture, chandeliers
and tapestries in situ, when they were conceived as part of the
Gesamtkunstwerk. As many as 60,000 POWs were used in the evacuation
of these works of art, loading them on to 90,000 railway trucks.14
Berlin was not the only place rich in art treasure. The Russians had the
run of Saxony and much of Thuringia, not to mention Pomerania and the
prosperous port of Danzig. The electors and kings of Saxony had been great
collectors, and the Dresden Gallery was one of the world’s foremost art
museums. Part of the collection had been stored in a quarry at Grosscotta
near Pirna. Among the paintings there was the Sistine Madonna by Raphael.
The art historian Natalia Sokolova was the first to see the pictures when a
German unlocked the door to the store room.
A simple goods wagon stood in the tunnel. The German handed me the
candle. [Leonid] Rabinovitch turned on an electric lamp. In this twilight
were glimpsed the gold frames of the pictures, that were tightly packed
together. We turned our lights towards them and I felt I had gone deathly
pale. Before me I could see the broad span of the eagle that bore off
Rembrandt’s Ganymede in its claws. Rabinovitch carefully moved the
painting to the right, and another appeared.
‘Do you see?’ he whispered. ‘Wonderful,’ said the German . . . what lay
before me was the Sleeping Venus of Giorgione . . . After that came the Self-
Portrait with Saskia by Rembrandt and a small, silvery landscape by
Watteau, a view of Dresden by Canaletto, Titian’s Portrait of a Woman in
White . . .
The conditions in the quarry were terrible: it was cold and damp: ‘The
Germans had lost any moral claim to [the pictures]. Now they belonged to
the Red Army.’ There was a fear that they might have to fight the
Americans for them if they did not get them to their collection point at
Schloss Pillnitz as quickly as possible. Marshal Koniev came to inspect the
haul. He was also impressed and telegraphed Stalin to tell him that the
treasure had been found.15
There was more booty in Schloss Weesenstein. Here the Russians found
the Koenig Collection that had been bought by Prince John George of
Saxony, and forty-five Rembrandt etchings that had belonged to the
industrialist and banker Rudolf Gutmann of Vienna and had since been
earmarked for the Führer’s Museum in Linz. Only one of the etchings had
been detached from the collection: The Jewish Bride was thought to portray
too sensitive a subject.16
More paintings from the Dresden Gallery were found at Pockau-
Lengefeld by the Czech border in the fortress at Königstein and some
modern masters in a house in Barnitz. In Meissen orders were given to
restart production of the famous porcelain. This was not possible, however,
as the demontagniki had made off with the equipment. The contents of the
Porcelain Museum as well as some valuable paintings were stored in the old
castle at the top of the hill. Also in Saxony, Leipzig’s most valuable
collections had been placed in the strongrooms of banks. Nearly a hundred
were found in a vault on the Friedrich-Tröndlin-Ring in October. Thirty
more were found in a bank in the Otto-Schill-Strasse. The Russians took
only 10 per cent of their find home, but that still amounted to over a
hundred paintings. Another fifty-two came from the Coburgs’ Jagdschloss
Reinhardsbrunn and the palace in Dessau. Added to the pictures were whole
libraries from Friedenstein, Gotha and Leipzig. These were taken to the
Academy of Sciences in Moscow, together with the university libraries
from Leipzig and Halle.17
At the beginning of May a search had been made for the vanished
treasures of Danzig after the Russian shelling of the old city. The hunt
began in the Arsenal, where the Trophy Brigade had to brave the stench of
decomposing corpses to locate their quarry. After two days they found the
hiding place and unearthed treasures from the town hall and the museum.
The best bits went to Russia. A few odds and ends were given to the new
Polish director of the museum. In the ruins of the famous Artushof, they
looked in vain for the fifteenth-century wooden relief of St George. It had
been destroyed in the fire following the shelling. In the wreckage of a bank,
however, they unearthed the coin collection from Marienburg, the fortress
of the Teutonic Knights.18
The Soviet forces perpetrated all sorts of theft. The most common was
the pillaging which accompanied their arrival and which has never been
accurately assessed. When it is considered that virtually every sewing
machine, every gramophone and every wireless set went east, it can only be
described as looting on a staggering scale. The trophy battalions followed
on the heels of the soldiers who pinched anything that took their fancy. By 2
August 1945 these had seized 1,280,000 tons of material and 3,600,000 tons
of equipment. This way they hoped to make good the losses they had
incurred in the war. Officially they claimed the Germans had destroyed
$168 milliard’s worth of equipment, but that figure must also have included
items they destroyed themselves in their retreat.19
It was not always the Russians who arrived first. The art historian Paul
Ortwin Rave guided the MFAA to Ransbach where the Berlin State Theatre
and the Opera House had stored their costumes. They found the remains of
an orgy that had been enjoyed by Russian and Polish workers and prisoners
together. Once their German guards had run off they had broken into the
cases and dressed themselves up in costumes from Aïda and Lohengrin.
They had also found a hidden fund of champagne and cognac. In their
drunken state they had broken into cases containing Dürers and Holbeins,
but at the sight of the saints they had fled in holy terror. The Americans
took the prize to Frankfurt in their zone. It was they who located the
treasure in Altaussee, as well as parts of Göring’s collection, including the
sixteen cases which the Reichsmarshall had grabbed from among the
pictures stored in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and which
the Germans had taken into safe keeping before the British destroyed the
building.20
Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein recalled examples of the Americans’ cupidity
in their zone. He was staying in his wife’s family mansion, Budingen, when
the US governor of Hessen, Newman, sent word to requisition silver and
furniture for his palace. They fobbed him off with tableware, which was
later returned. In June 1946 Clay rebutted a charge of looting made against
some of his soldiers who were accused of stealing six paintings. 21 Easier to
verify was the theft of the Quedlinburg Bibles by American soldiers in
Thuringia.22 The American commander in Budingen was a Captain
Robinson, who swiped five pictures from the Städel Gallery in Frankfurt.
‘Robinson revealed himself as nothing more than a common thief.’ They
were traced as far as Holland, whence they were in all probability shipped
to the United States. They were put up for sale many years later, and the
Städel was able to buy them back.23 Most American cases were restricted to
petty larceny out of a desire for souvenirs, though occasionally a shop was
looted for objects like cameras. GIs had a passion for Nazi artefacts only
equalled by the Soviet soldateska - as they advanced through Germany they
trashed each SS barracks in the pursuit of flags and swastikas. There was
also a celebrated case when two officers of the Women’s Army Corps were
tried for stealing $1,500,000 worth of jewellery from Princess Mary of
Hesse, a fantastic sum then.24
Captain Frank M. Dunbaugh took the 50,000 tin and lead soldiers that
were the pride of the Hirtenmuseum in Hersbruck in Franconia. They
represented the armies that went to war in 1914. In an effort to relocate the
soldiers the town contacted President Eisenhower, who promised his
support. Some 500 of the figures were tracked down in Texas. When
Dunbaugh was asked his excuse for ‘liberating’ them he replied that it was
to ‘deglamorize the Hitler war machine in every way possible’. Theft was
therefore justified by JCS 1067. In 1958 another 20,000 of the soldiers were
located and eventually shipped back to Hersbruck. An attempt to force the
Americans to compensate the museum for the rest fell on deaf ears.25
The Americans were not all thieves. In Wiesbaden they organised a
Central Collecting Point for Jewish paintings and books stolen by the Nazis.
It was run by Theodor ‘Ted’ Heinrich, later professor of art history at the
University of Toronto. Surviving Jews could apply to retrieve their
belongings there. The Americans also located a favourite grey that had
belonged to Queen Wilhelmina of Holland and which had been seized by
the Germans during the occupation of her country. In the confusion at the
end of the war, the horse had been given to a circus. The Americans
returned the animal to its mistress who had it saddled in order to form part
of a parade. When the music struck up, the horse got up on its hind legs and
began to dance, a trick it had learned in the circus. Her majesty was not
amused and the horse was put out to grass.26 Queen Wilhelmina might have
been more grateful that the horse had not been eaten by hungry Germans or
DPs. In Munich Carl Zuckmayer reported that Poles had stolen the world’s
sole porcine tightrope walker, once the pride of Althof’s travelling circus -
they had then slaughtered it and had it for dinner. When the owner tried to
prevent the Poles from killing his beloved pig he nearly lost his own life as
well. Althof had had the hog insured abroad and apparently received no
compensation for his loss.27
There were acts of common theft perpetrated by the British too. At the
Krupp residence, Villa Hügel in Essen, an inquiry carried out in 1952
revealed that property valued at two million marks had been purloined
during the occupation. Much of it was later found in Holland, where it was
waiting to cross the Channel. The greatest scandal surrounding the British
Zone was the use of Schloss Bückeburg, home of the Schaumburg-Lippe
family, by the RAF. The process was begun by Air Marshal Sir Arthur
Coningham, whom the art historian Ellis Waterhouse compared to Göring
in his acquisitiveness. Coningham removed and distributed enormous
quantities of valuable silver, furnishings and objets d’art from the Schloss,
and much of it later remained unaccounted for. The affair led to the
resignation of the military governor, Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto
Douglas.28
The British lagged behind the Russians and the Americans in purloining
art works, but they had their own brand of organised theft in T-Force, which
sought to glean any industrial wizardry hatched under the Nazis and bring it
home to Britain. The Russians and the Americans were equally guilty on
this score, but, as George Clare puts it, they ‘preferred the inventors to the
inventions’, while the British were too hard up to feed their boffins. In
Cuxhaven, however, they learned what they could about the workings of the
V2, and they made off with all the German naval equipment they could
find. One of the things that Clare saw at the Askanier Works when he was
interpreting there was a prototype tape recorder.29 In January 1947 the
British launched Operation Matchbox designed to lure German scientists to
their zone, but they were even less efficient than the French; and the
Americans had the pick of them.30 As one American put it, ‘The British and
the Russians have got hold of a few German scientists . . . but there can be
no doubt that we have captured the best.’31
The Allies stole men and women who for one reason or another were
useful for their projects. Under the pretext of accusing them of seeking to
develop an atomic bomb, bacterial warfare, space travel and guided
missiles, the British and Americans arrested a number of nuclear physicists
and had them brought to England in what was meant to be a species of joint
enterprise. 32 These included Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Hahn,
Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue. With the exception of Heisenberg,
the men were found in Hechingen in Württemberg, where they had been
working on their uranium piles, drawn from the mines of Joachimsthal in
the Sudetenland. Heisenberg was discovered in his family skiing chalet in
Upper Bavaria. Others, such as Richard Kuhn and Wolfgang Gertner, were
apprehended in Heidelberg. Some of the smaller fry were taken by the
British in Hamburg.
Once the team had been assembled they were brought first to France,
initially to Rheims and Versailles, before being lodged in a villa in the Paris
suburb of Le Vésinet. They were eventually delivered to Farm Hall near
Cambridge, where they were perceived to have nothing in common bar the
title Herr Doktor ‘by which they punctiliously addressed one another’.33
Once the Anglo-Americans had learned everything they could about the
Nazi atom-bomb programme they were released in Hamburg and Göttingen,
but told not to stray into the Soviet Zone. That was also for their own safety.
The Russians were keen to abduct or simply tempt away scientists and
technicians who might have been useful to them. The Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Gustav Hertz was taken to Russia to help them develop nuclear
weapons. On 21 October 1945 a large number of skilled workers,
technicians and scientists were freighted out by train. The Western powers
made a weak protest, which the Russians simply ignored.34

OceanofPDF.com
 15
Where are our Men?
The only thing I know for certain is that the
prisoners-of-war are dying of hunger and that the field
in which they have to sleep is hellish damp.
Ernst von Salomon, The Answers, London 1954, 423

The Status of German POWs

The history of the German POWs is murky, largely because the West,
by acting in an inhumane manner, lost the moral high ground they had
achieved by fighting a moral crusade against the Nazis, but also because the
German Federal Republic has allowed it to remain shrouded in darkness.
Around eight million German soldiers were captured at the end of the
war - making a total, if you add those taken before May 1945, of around
eleven million. This meant that every household in Germany was affected
in some way; and the women were asking, ‘Where are our men?’1 The
Western Allies captured some 7.6 million, while the rest fell into the hands
of the Red Army. About five of the eleven million were released within a
year. A million and a half, however, never came home, giving rise to a
number of stories of how they met their end. Some writers have averred that
they were all killed in captivity, and that it was a deliberate policy on the
part of the Allies. The only figures that exist refer to the ‘missing’. The Red
Cross gives their number as 1,086,000. A more reliable tally would be 1.3
million in the east (including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland) and
around 100,000 in the west.2
Until 8 May 1945, the Swiss had been responsible for German prisoners
of war. On that day they packed their bags - the Allies had decided that the
German Empire had ceased to exist. The German army had
‘unconditionally surrendered’ and the new prisoners were now at the mercy
of their captors, without recourse to protection by a neutral state. Two new
terms - strange to the Geneva Convention - were created to describe the
newly captured soldiers: they were ‘Surrendered Enemy Persons’ and
‘Disarmed Enemy Persons’. POW status, as regulated by the Geneva and
Hague Conventions, accounted for 4.2 million men who had been caught in
the net earlier. The other 3.4 million in the West were SEPs or DEPs and
were not entitled to the same levels of shelter and subsistence.3 The Soviet
Union had never signed the Geneva Convention, so the Red Cross never
had any jurisdiction there; they were not POWs, or anything else for that
matter. Their fate was often a matter of complete indifference to the Soviet
authorities. The change in terminology is significant. The men had been
robbed of their status as combatants, which left them open to prosecution,
an outcome excluded by the Geneva and Hague Conventions. It presaged
new uses for the men, who were to be put to work. With the exception of
the Americans, the Allies all envisaged a prolonged use of German slave
labour. While the International Red Cross had a right to inspect POW
camps, the barbed wire surrounding SEPs or DEPs was impenetrable.4
The idea of using the POWs as slaves was aired at Moscow in 1943.
The originators of the proposal were the British. At Yalta it was decided
that the men could be made to repair the damage Germany had caused to
the Allies. They were to be a ‘work force’ and were to be retained for an
indefinite period. It was at that moment that it became clear that their status
would have to be changed to get round the Geneva Convention. Once again
it was the British who were most keen - the proposal was put forward
before the full horror of the concentration camps was known. It was to have
another advantage - the British could evade another of the Convention’s
stipulations, the requirement that they provide 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day.
From the first day of peace the British would have had immense problems
supplying that amount, and for most of the time levels fell below 1,500
calories. The more prosperous Americans were for rapid demobilisation and
for adherence to the Convention.5 There was no precedent either for the
rough treatment of high-ranking officers. In the view of the Allies, German
generals were complicit in war crimes and thereby lost their usual
privileges. This was decided before any crime had been proven. There were
generals’ camps in South Wales and Russia, and there was rumoured to be a
third near Nuremberg,dh in close proximity to the courthouse. 6 They were
not treated as badly as the hoi polloi, however. In dh Wales the German
general officers had a small number of privileges, and in Soviet Russia they
were exempted from work.
That the Allies should conspire to rob prisoners of their status was
outrageous; to treat them with so little care that a million and a half died
was scandalous. The Russian attitude is understandable, though not
forgivable: the Germans had systematically killed three million of their
Russian prisoners. di But this could not be claimed for Western POWs.
Indeed the Malmédy trial of those accused of massacring American soldiers
during the Battle of the Bulge and the quest for the killers of the fifty
British airmen who had taken part in the Great Escape from a Silesian POW
camp show quite clearly how rare it was that the Germans ill-treated
American and British POWs. That the Americans should have pursued the
perpetrators of the killing of a hundred or so soldiers with such ruthlessness
while at the same time allowing anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to
die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine was an act of
mind-boggling hypocrisy.
In parts of Europe the sight of a German POW became an everyday
occurrence. In Britain these dishevelled figures often prompted acts of
generosity, despite the fact that only a few months before British towns and
cities were being wrecked by German bombs. In France and elsewhere
German slave-labourers sometimes had a quite different effect. It was not
money the local people threw at them but bricks, stones and - in at least one
instance - grenades. The horrors of the war were fresh in the minds of the
people. Many had been wounded themselves, physically or emotionally.
‘What did the hunger, misery, sickness or death of a German POW matter?’
In Russia that feeling would have been particularly widespread.7
Another novelty was the leasing of prisoners to other powers. The
Anglo-Americans handed over around a million German soldiers to the
French to help rebuild their country. The Belgians were given 30,000 by the
Americans and another 34,000 by the British, the Dutch had 10,000 and the
Luxembourgeois 5,000.8 The Soviet Union gave about 80,000 Germans to
the Poles, who hung on to some of them until as late as 1953. Germans
worked Europe’s mines and sawmills and factories; they laid roads and did
menial chores in France, Poland and Yugoslavia. In Britain they harvested
potatoes and turnips. German soldiers were imprisoned in some twenty
countries around the world.
Those left on German soil after the summer of 1945 were only a small
fraction of the total number of POWs. The Americans, for example, used
their German camps for political prisoners and those awaiting trial or
denazification. Like the British and the Russians, they tended to use the old
concentration camps to house prisoners. Usually there was decent
accommodation for the GIs in the neighbouring SS barracks. Any attempt
to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by
death. It is not clear how many German soldiers died of starvation. Very
soon people were comparing the conditions in American and French camps
with those in the Nazi concentration camps. The psychoanalyst Alexander
Mitscherlich, who examined former POWs, learned that they were prone to
compare themselves to Hitler’s victims, and to accuse the Allies of
hypocrisy in their stories of German atrocities.9
On 10 December 1946, the industrious Cardinal Frings (he had received
his red hat earlier that year) delivered a petition to the Control Council in
Berlin. Ten million people had demanded the release of the POWs or
Kriegsgefangener. At the Moscow Conference in 1947 it was decided that
the Allies would send all prisoners home by the end of 1948. At that point
the Soviets admitted to holding 890,532 (although the real figure might
have been nearer to three million), the French 631,483; there were 435,295
in British hands, 300,000 in the Balkans, 54,000 in Belgium, 30,976 in
American custody and 10,000 in Holland.10 In the middle of 1948 the
number of POWs yet to come home stood at one million. The return was
agreed by the Western Allies, the Czechs and the Yugoslavs (who
subsequently reneged on the deal), but not by the Russians and the Poles.
That Christmas 1948 date decided the category of prisoner in the minds of
the German public: a Spätheimkehrer (late homecomer) was released
between 1949 and 1950. A Spätestheimkehrer (latest homecomer) returned
between 1950 and 1956.11 In 1979 there were believed to be 72,000
prisoners still alive in - chiefly Russian - custody.12
It was Adenauer who was the first German politician openly to raise the
problem in 1950. Addressing the Bundestag, he called for an end to
France’s cruel treatment of its German POWs - who had, in fact, all gone
home. The Yugoslavs were also singled out, and the German chancellor
added that it was horrifying that several hundred thousand German men,
women and children were still in Russia and Poland five and a half years
after the end of the fighting. He could think of no parallel in history for
such ‘cold heartlessness’. Even such strong words failed to deliver all the
goods. It was Adenauer’s visit to Moscow that finally brought home almost
all the last survivors, at the end of 1956.13
Adenauer’s successors were more faint-hearted. In 1957 a wide-ranging
academic study of the treatment of the German POWs was commissioned
by the Federal Republic. The project allowed for fifteen separate studies in
twenty-two volumes. The work was ready by the mid-1970s. In the
meantime, however, Bonn had had a change of heart. It was the time of
Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik - an attempt to link hands through the Iron
Curtain; the Oder-Neisse Line was recognised in the West for the first time.
The publication of a work of this sort would, they feared, upset relations
with Russia and Poland. No names were mentioned in the texts, and much
of the material was returned to the archives. The book was quietly issued,
but only for ‘official use’. Just 431 copies were printed: 391 for the Federal
Republic, and 40 for abroad. The FRG made it clear to all the recipients that
access was to be made difficult.14dj
This coyness on the part of the Bonn government added fuel to the fire.
In 1989 the Canadian journalist James Bacque published Other Losses in
which he claimed the French and the Americans had killed a million POWs.
It was called a work of ‘monstrous speculation’15 and was dismissed by an
American historian as an ‘absurd thesis’.16 Bacque’s book printed some
evocative drawings made of the Rheinwiesenlager, and asserted, as was
probably true, that thirty to forty Germans died every day in Rheinberg.17dk
Part of the problem was the little care taken by the Western Allies in
registering the prisoners and the destruction of Wehrmacht records. The
transfer of POWs from one nation to another often meant they were counted
twice. The final number of deaths will never be known, but it has since
been proved that Bacque misinterpreted the words ‘other losses’ on Allied
charts to mean ‘deaths’, when it was in fact an oblique reference to
prisoners who, for one reason or another, were no longer of interest to the
statisticians: deaths, yes, but also deserters, Volksturm and other categories
who were released without receiving a formal discharge.18
Bacque’s red herring had a positive result, however, in that it pointed
out that it was not just the Russians who killed prisoners of war. The
Russians were still the worst, but who was the second worst? The
Yugoslavs killed as many as 80,000 prisoners of war, which, given the
numbers they started with, must put them in second place. About 2.5 per
cent of all the Germans in French custody died, a figure that is
proportionally far higher than the American tally.
The American Camps
The Americans honoured their promise to release prisoners early. The
idea of slave labour was not popular with their trade unions. Men and
women over fifty were let go in June and they made a great flourish by
releasing two million prisoners at the end of July 1945. Some came home in
triumph like the 12,000 prisoners returned to Austria.19 The reality for a
further 1.5 million men was anything but liberty, however: they were
promptly ‘loaned’ to other powers - France and the United Kingdom.20 The
Americans even offered some men to the Russians. They refused, as they
had enough already.21 Also many SS men were retained to help with further
inquiries. Later the ‘grey’ or Waffen-SS were allowed to go home, while the
‘black’ or Totenkopf units were put on trial. Deaths on the American
continent were low: 491, with seventy-two suicides, seven murders,
fourteen men executed and seventy fatal accidents.22
The first Kriegsgefangener had been shipped back to America during
the war. One of these was Kurt Glaser, who was in a large camp in Texas.
The inmates worked in nearby factories, where their status was similar to
that of the local blacks. The food was decent, and, it being America, there
were frequent film shows. Not long after the end of the war a man speaking
German with a Frankfurt accent came to interrogate Glaser. He asked him
how it had been for him under National Socialism. Glaser replied, ‘Nicht
schlecht’ (Not bad). He then saw his interrogator circle the word ‘Nazi’ on
his questionnaire. For inveterate Nazis like Glaser there was a new diet of
propaganda. He had to watch a film entitled Deutschland erwache!
(Germany awake! - the title of an early Nazi song). It was about Belsen and
Buchenwald. In July 1946 he was shipped to Britain.23
Another account tells a similar tale of a more literary prisoner in an
American camp. The news that reached him on 6 May 1945 led him to
quote some lines from Thomas Mann: ‘The fate of the most repulsive
monster of our time, National Socialism, has been fulfilled. Had its death
struggle been confined to its person, and not at the same time to a great and
unfortunate nation, which now does penance for its bewitchment, we might
be able to observe the catastrophe with cold satisfaction, for the sake of law
and necessity.’24
When he was not working alongside southern blacks, the prisoner lived
on a diet of films. On 9 May he could watch the celebrations marking the
end of the war while his stomach rumbled. The inmates had just 2,000
calories a day, although the work details had 3,500 to 4,000. In a few
months he would have learned to appreciate what he had. Instead of the
usual cinematographic diet of Hollywood oaters, the prisoner now had to
watch more and more propaganda. He learned new names besides Dachau -
Buchenwald was unknown to him. He concluded that it was ‘a
Kulturschande of the first water, but what can I do about it? I am a German
and I share in the guilt.’ He was obliged to go and look at the pictures of
‘his’ victims. A guard with a truncheon stood over him. He felt he needed
to wear a ‘consciousness of guilt’ expression as he leafed through the
evidence of German crime. Then he signed a list stating that he had been
aware of Buchenwald after all25dl - anything to get them off his back.
The most notorious American POW camps were the so-called
Rheinwiesenlager. When these were closed some of the prisoners were
transferred to the camp at Mons in Belgium and were able to tell their
fellow countrymen about the conditions they had experienced. They had
been pushed into large, open areas by the banks of the Rhine, described as
‘concentration areas’ or PWTE - ‘Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures’.26
The Americans had burned their kit, so they had nothing to protect them
from the elements. April and May 1945 were particularly cold and wet, and
there was plenty of snow. The soldiers were forced to endure this in open
fields without tents; ‘many dug holes in the earth with a spoon or a tin can
or whatever was to hand, but with the constant rain the ground was soft and
every night the holes collapsed and the people who had sought protection
from them were buried. There was no night that passed that did not see the
deaths of several men on the meadows.’27
The prisoners in Mons learned of the two most infamous camps,
Rheinberg and Büderich. At its height the first contained 90,000 men.
Büderich was slightly smaller with 77,000. If all twelve camps established
by the Rhine and Nahe between May and July 1945 are taken together, the
number of inmates was around a million men. They stretched from
Düsseldorf in the north to Mannheim in the south, with the main
concentration between Koblenz and Mainz. At Bad Kreuznach on the Nahe,
the site of the camp was occasionally given as the ‘Galgenberg’ or ‘Gallows
Hill’, although it is more likely that it was laid out between the railway line
and the river. The camp at Remagen was arranged along a five-by-two-
kilometre stretch of the river. Between the two camps at Remagen and
Sinzig there were 400,000 prisoners. The Americans abandoned the camps
in July. Britain was given Rheinberg, Büderich and Wickramberg, and the
French Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Sinzig, Andernach and Koblenz. The
others were in the American Zone anyhow.28
In order to receive their rations the men had to walk along a slippery,
muddy passage. Two tins were then tossed to them. Those who fell while
trying to catch them were beaten with truncheons. Anyone caught stealing
food had to eat himself sick. In another instance the thief was forced to eat
all he had stolen covered with sugar. The prisoners discussed the merits of
the different Allies: ‘In general it was best to be with the English.’ That
guaranteed ‘decent treatment’.29
The Rhine Meadow camps operated from February to July, with the
worst outrages ending with the war, in May. Those hard-won tins were not
enough - for the prisoners they were ‘hunger camps’. The writer John Dos
Passos, who was shown round the camps, came to the conclusion that the
Germans were being deliberately starved. They were also systematically
robbed of their wristwatches, cameras and any Nazi souvenirs the guards
fancied. The men were deprived of anything they had on them when they
arrived. In the circumstances prisoners showed they could be resourceful.
Writing letters was prohibited to DEPs - as they were called here - but a
postal service grew up for all that. A prisoner cut through the wire and
escaped with the post. He would pick up supplies and slip back through the
wires.30
It has been difficult to come to a reliable estimate of the number of
Germans who died in the Rhine mud. The American figures do not even
tally with the graves in the local cemeteries. The Americans admit to 2,310
by the end of May and 5,912 to July. The German tally is 32,000. Graves
indicate nearly 2,000 prisoners died in the shadow of the vineyards in Bad
Kreuznach; the Americans admit to just over half that number. In
Rheinberg, where 140,000 Germans were crammed into 1,000 hectares of
mud during the months it was open, the official figures account for 438
deaths. The real number might be between two and three thousand now that
mass graves have been found within the camp. The total number of deaths
in the Rhine Meadows is now thought to be as high as 40,000.31
The picture is complicated by the fact that the Americans may well have
released all their Wehrmacht prisoners early - or lent them to others - but
that rule did not apply to SS men and political prisoners. They came under
the category of ‘Automatic Arrests’ or AAs. A POW or DEP could be
released from custody and automatically rearrested on suspicion of being a
Nazi or a member of the SS. The Americans maintained camps for up to 1.5
million of these.32 As well as the AAs there were STs (Security Threats)
from the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, BLs (Black-Listed men) and
WCs (war criminals).33 At Ebensee in Austria there were 44,000 SS men
behind barbed wire, watched over by Polish KZler in one of Mauthausen’s
most gruesome former dependencies.34
The Americans believed they had a case against the writer Ernst von
Salomon, and he tells us what it was like to be at the receiving end. They
came for him at 6.00 a.m. at his home in Siegsdorf near Salzburg where he
lived with his mistress, Ille Gotthelft. Two men called Murphy and Sullivan
told him that he was to be interrogated across the border in Kitzbühel. They
told Salomon it was because he was ‘a big Nazi’. When Ille protested that
she was Jewish, they took her as well. Even if the two men had no
knowledge of who Salomon was on their arrival, they could have gleaned it
as they went through the books in his workroom. It was clear that they
assumed that only a Nazi would have been involved in the killing of the
Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. His mistress’s protests
must have been seen as at best irrelevant, at worst a lie. She suffered for her
temerity, and was only released when she came close to death though
sickness.
When they arrived in Kitzbühel they were put in the town lock-up.
Salomon was philosophical. In his salad days he had seen the inside of
several prisons, but he worried about his mistress, who had managed to live
through the Third Reich without incarceration, and was now being
subjected to that indignity by the Americans. Kitzbühel prison was filled
with Party officials who were routinely beaten black and blue during
interrogation. If Salomon was right it was policy to give them all a ‘work-
over’ before returning them to their cells. Salomon was not interrogated in
the prison, but taken to the US army HQ in the town, ‘which I now
discovered to be an American Gestapo-type operation’.35 He was questioned
by a German-speaker who revealed that his parents were artists in Dresden,
and Party members. He did not want to believe that Salomon had not been a
member. He knew all about the Rathenau murder: ‘lucky for you you did
not try to conceal it!’ ‘My dear sir, I’ve written books about it this thick.’36
Salomon’s answers were not good enough. He and Ille were put in a
lorry and driven to an internment camp he calls ‘Natternberg’ in Lower
Bavaria. On the way they picked up other ‘big Nazis’ like a Herr Allin who
had been arrested because he had averred in a private conversation with a
friend in a café in Kufstein that Poland had started the war.37 When they
reached the camp they were driven through the gates with cries of ‘Mak
snell!’ (sic) and made to line up. When their names were called out they
were chased one by one into a hut, beaten with rifle butts, stripped, kicked
and punched in the groin while American soldiers fought for space at the
windows outside. The internationally acclaimed author was treated no
better. Lieutenant ‘Baybee’, the officer sitting at the desk, shouted at him:
‘You are a Nazi!’ Once again Salomon denied it. He was beaten up, losing
several teeth.38
His mistress was called to the hut. From where he stood he could see
soldiers jostling for places at the window. She had been forced to strip and
subjected to an intimate examination to make sure she was concealing
nothing about her person. The ‘work-over’ was the prelude to an ordeal that
lasted for months, and in some cases years. There were no exceptions - not
even generals were immune, although one SS-Standartenführer who had
‘solved the Jewish question’ in Hungary with singular efficiency was
treated with awe and absolved from the usual beating. As it transpired, once
a prisoner was officially marked down as a ‘war criminal’, the physical
abuse ceased. The higher judicial authority would certainly have learned of
any beatings. This sort of rough handling was reserved for those the
Americans deemed obscure or defenceless, not for Göring or Ribbentrop.
There were too many journalists buzzing around the courthouse in
Nuremberg.
For the mere soldiers the treatment was less brutal, but could be just as
deadly. Hans Johnert was taken prisoner by a GI on 9 April 1945. The
soldier snatched his watch and threw away his mess tin: ‘Kriegst du alles
neu!’ (You’ll get new ones!). He was taken to the Bavarian spa town of Bad
Kissingen and given a tin of beans with bits of meat in it. Then he was
transferred to the Pioneers’ Barracks in Worms, where the gloves came off.
There were 30,000-40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard, jostling for
space. With no protection against the rain they froze. They went from
Worms to France. As their convoy arrived on French soil, French civilians
threw stones and lumps of coal at them. A black guard had to fire his
weapon to keep them at bay.39
Behind bars back at Natternberg the violence slackened off, but did not
die out. One memorable day the prisoners had to run the gauntlet - a
punishment that had made the Prussians infamous in their time. The
prisoners were called out in alphabetical order. The Americans formed two
lines and the men ran between them while they rained down blows with
rubber truncheons. Salomon noted that the elderly were the hardest hit,
because they moved most slowly. Once again it was a Polish sergeant who
was most feared for his brutality. He was in the middle of one of the rows.
When L was called out it was the turn of Hanns Ludin, Hitler’s ambassador
to Slovakia. Ludin was determined to drink his cup down to the dregs. He
walked slowly through the ranks. ‘When he reached the Polish sergeant he
lost one of his wooden shoes. He turned about and with his bare foot fished
for the shoe he had lost. The sergeant ran after him, striking him, and
dropped his rubber truncheon. Ludin leaned down, picked it up and handed
it back to him.40 The physical maltreatment of the inmates came to an end
only when General Patton sent up a colonel to inspect the camp. After that
the prisoners received proper rations and medical treatment. The earlier
violence was attributable to JCS 1067, and ultimately to Morgenthau.41
The writer records plenty of cases of theft, the Americans being
especially keen to steal porcelain. ‘Baybee’ had the women brought to his
hut at night and bribed them with food, drink and cigarettes to sleep with
him. There was a lighter side of camp-life that developed with time -
cabarets, concerts, operatic performances, abstruse lectures, even theatre. It
was Salomon who directed the plays. The most senior prisoner was Graf
Lutz von Schwerin von Krosigk. He had been transferred from Hersbruck.
Schwerin von Krosigk had had a deal of incarceration since he left
Flensburg, and it was not going to stop for a while yet.
From Mondorf les Bains he had been transferred to Oberursel, which
the prisoners called ‘Alaska’ because it was so cold and uninviting. He had
met the pilot Hanna Reitsch there, and Percy Schramm, the military
historian. The inmates were known as ‘Gandhis’ because they were so
emaciated. During his first stay in Langwasser in Nuremberg, he was
friends with the Austrian general Glaise von Horstenau, until he committed
suicide. Then he reached Plattling, where Salomon now was, and he was
able to fill Salomon in on the treatment he had received from the British at
Flensburg.42 Salomon obviously admired Schwerin von Krosigk, as many
others did. The ex-minister became the apologist for the regime in a series
of lectures delivered to the other prisoners: ‘He spoke like a professor of
history, in a calm, agreeable, careful, highly educated voice, each sentence
well-rounded and deliberate. He covered the whole wretched story, from the
day he entered Brüning’s cabinetdm as a minister to the atrocious end.’43
From Plattling, Schwerin von Krosigk was transferred to Ludwigsburg,
where he was reacquainted with his cousin, Bodo von Alvensleben, the
former president of the Herrenklub in Berlin. The Herrenklub was the city’s
most aristocratic club, and Franz von Papen was a member. It was at the
Herrenklub that it was decided to allow Hitler to become chancellor - the
distinguished gentlemen thought they could control him. Alvensleben joked
that the reason he was in Ludwigsburg was that he was Hitler’s
grandmother: he had admitted Papen, who had admitted Hitler. The next
stop for Schwerin von Krosigk was Dachau, before he was returned to
Alaska. While he was in Dachau he learned that the Poles were demanding
his extradition, because as minister of finance he had introduced Reich
taxes into Poland.44 After that the Americans transferred him to Nuremberg
for his trial.
Another distinguished German who languished in a POW camp was
Carl Schmitt (not to be confused with the post-war conservative politician
Carlo Schmid), who was at one time known as the ‘crown jurist of the Third
Reich’, although he fell foul of the regime before the war, and before the
Final Solution was put into effect. The Americans had him locked up, and
were anxious to have him put on trial at Nuremberg. Schmitt was
interrogated, and not let go until 1947.45
The end of Salomon’s ordeal was Langwasser, which was set up in the
incomplete buildings of the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg. The
prisoners were beaten and harried from Plattling to the train. Salomon
protected himself with a bundle of blankets, but another was not so lucky:
In front of me an old man fell, his cap was snatched from his
head, and I recognized the elderly, white-haired conductor of the
Bayreuth orchestra, Professor Reinhardt. The Americans were beating
him, but two other American soldiers sprang forward and helped him
to his feet. ‘So there are decent individuals among them,’ I thought to
myself. Then I saw the two warm-hearted GIs cut the string with
which the professor had tied his violin to the top of his pack. The road
was several miles long.46
Another Langwasser inmate was Franz von Papen. After being
sentenced to eight years’ hard labour he had gone straight from the court to
a hospital in Fürth. When that closed he was packed off to Garmisch-
Partenkirchen and then Regensburg. While he was in Regensburg he was
set upon by an SS man in the washhouse who beat him bloody, fracturing
his nose and cheekbone and splitting his lips and eyelids. He was sewn up
by another prisoner, a surgeon. Papen says he was singled out for special
treatment. Meanwhile he was convinced that the right way to get out was to
appeal for a shorter sentence rather than a retrial, which might have taken
years to bring about.47
Once in Langwasser the prisoners were starved once more. There was
an army kitchen near by, and when the wind blew in the right direction
there was a delicate aroma of dried fruit. Every now and then they were
slipped something by the cooks, ‘negro soldiers, good-natured boys with
whom the SS got on very well. “You second-class, me second-class,” they
would say, and they would give us food whenever they dared.’ Albert Speer
attested to the particular kindness of black American guards at
Nuremberg.48 Langwasser had gathered up all the senior Nazis and generals
who were awaiting trail at Nuremberg. They signed a ‘golden book’ from
the Langwasser Theatre. Salomon noticed some of the other names:
Schwerin von Krosigk, who had written something in Latin or Greek, Field
Marshals von Manstein (‘For us the Reich must endure . . .’) and von
Brauchitsch (‘Keep the sunshine in your heart, whether it snow or hail . . .’).
It was the signal for Salomon’s release. The order sheet was headed
‘Subject: Release of erroneous arrestees’.49
The camps described by Salomon were not a figment of his
imagination. In the spring of 1946 the former concentration camp
dependency of Plattling contained 2,786 inmates and 1,464 foreigners of
eleven nationalities; Langwasser was much bigger with 11,761 Germans
and 1,389 foreigners from the same number of countries. For some reason
Salomon chose to disguise the name of his first camp. This was almost
certainly Auerbach on the far side of Deggendorf, which had 10,488
prisoners and 238 foreigners, as well as a women’s section.50 Another
notorious camp was Zuffenhausen near Ludwigsburg in Württemberg. Otto
Kumm, the last commander of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, recalled the
conditions: no food to speak of, wooden planks for beds, ‘some of us were
so undernourished that we could hardly get up’. For months lunch was
turnip soup, with half a potato for dinner. ‘Deliberately they collected heaps
of food outside the fence, which was burnt once a month in front of our
eyes.’51
The long arm of American retribution spared no one; not even the
princes. One of those whose spirit was broken in an American compound
was the Kaiser’s Nazi son Augustus William, or ‘Auwi’. He was taken
prisoner at the retirement home of his grandmother Empress ‘Vicky’ of
Great Britain - Kronberg near Frankfurt-am-Main. He was in a pitiful state,
but there were no medicaments to treat him. The Americans dragged him
through thirty-three camps and prisons, where he slept on the ground, and
denied him even the Bible to read. His sister Princess Victoria visited him
in a camp near Stuttgart. She found him sitting outside a hut looking very
thin. She was able to visit him again as a result of a theft at Kronberg, when
some of the booty had been traced to America. Auwi was required to make
a statement about the missing objects. He spent a short time after his release
in Langenburg, in one of the castles of the Hohenlohes, and, for want of
anywhere else to bury a Prussian prince, he was interred in the Hohenlohe
family mausoleum there.52
Another prominent American prisoner was Prince Philip of Hesse.
Philip had already suffered a good deal. He had been arrested on Hitler’s
orders following Mussolini’s fall in 1943 and incarcerated in Flossenbürg in
the Upper Palatinate. His wife Mafalda, daughter of the Italian king, was
sent to Buchenwald, where she died from injuries sustained in an Allied air-
raid. He was liberated in the South Tyrol with other prominent prisoners in
April 1945, but the Americans had not finished with him. Philip had been
an early member of the Nazi Party and the SA and the Nazi president of
Hesse-Nassau. They hauled him through twenty more camps and prisons
before he was released on New Year’s Day 1948. He died in Rome in
1980.53
The art historian Prince Franz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein took refuge at the
Schloss of his brother-in-law Prince Ysenburg at Budingen in Hesse. He
had been a simple soldier, possibly because his mother had remarried the
Jewish banker Richard Merton. He had deserted at the end and discarded
his uniform. Prince Ysenburg had been a Pg, and was imprisoned in the
schoolhouse from where he was initially sent out to sweep the streets. The
Americans began to look for a tougher approach and locked him up in the
prison in Butzbach, then in a camp at Schwarzenborn near Kassel. Sayn-
Wittgenstein was also incarcerated in a former Polish camp near
Hirzenhain. There were men and women there. The men were obliged to
camp outside, while the women inhabited the cells. He was allowed to visit
his wife, who was there with him. There was no question of sleep, and the
place was crawling with insects. From there he was transferred to a POW
camp near Giessen. The 2,000 soldiers there were discharged only to work
as slave labour in France, while their numbers grew to around 8,000. Sayn-
Wittgenstein had Prince Hubert of Prussia for companionship, but mainly
remembered the boredom of his prison time. He was set free on the orders
of an American officer who had fallen in love with his sister-in-law and
who was broad-minded enough to arrange for Prince Ysenburg’s release as
well. 54
Dachau was generally used for members of the SS, but not exclusively.
It was also the main depot and transit camp for American prisoners. One of
the oddest inmates was Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter. He had originally
been taken to Augsburg, but he was such a valuable witness to events
between 1933 and 1945 that he was constantly being released to appear in
trials. He was taken to Paris for Philippe Pétain’s hearings, and was able to
enjoy the cafés on the Champs Elysées and a meal at Fouquets, before
being returned to a cell in Mannheim. He was naturally a key witness at the
Nuremberg trials, and interpreted for the American psychoanalysts who
were trying to assess the personalities of the war criminals. He was close
enough to the gallows to hear the ‘dull blows’ of the men setting it up.
Schmidt was released in 1948 at a time of a general amnesty for lesser
internees who had served two years. 55
Some tough nuts suspected of major war crimes were kept in the old
penitentiary in the pretty town of Schwäbisch Hall near Stuttgart. Here
prisoners were subjected to some particularly nasty forms of interrogation.
Old boys included SS commanders Sepp Dietrich, Fritz Kraemer and
Hermann Priess, all of whom denied issuing orders to shoot prisoners of
war. Seventy-four SS men were finally arraigned for the massacre of
American servicemen at Malmédy, but many of their confessions were
subsequently withdrawn because they said they had been extracted under
torture.56 One of the last to break was the cigar-chewing SS officer Jochen
Peiper, who was suspected of being chiefly responsible for the massacre.
The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in
Dachau. One of these was keeping the prisoner for long periods in solitary
confinement. At Oberursel Peiper had been alone for seven weeks while his
guards had subjected him to extremes of heat and cold. At Zuffenhausen he
had been kept in a dark cellar for another five weeks. The prisoners were
subjected to mock trials that resembled sessions of the Klu Klux Klan.
Worse still were the mock executions, where the men were led off in hoods,
while their guards told them they were approaching the gallows. Prisoners
were actually lifted bodily off the ground to convince them they were about
to swing.
More conventional methods of torture included kicks to the groin,
deprivation of sleep and food, and savage beatings. When the Americans set
up a commission of inquiry into the methods used by their investigators,
they found that, of the 139 cases they examined, 137 had ‘had their testicles
permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes
Investigation team’. It was an indication of what happened if you failed to
say what the investigators wanted.57 The screams of the prisoners in
Schwäbisch Hall could be heard throughout the little country town. The
torturers were not all American: they included vengeful Polish guards like
those mentioned by Salomon. The archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph
Frings, kept a tally of reports of American brutality.58
The viciousness of the interrogators at Schwäbisch Hall was eventually
brought to Clay’s attention. The men charged were Harry Thon, Bruno
Jacobs, Frank Steiner and Joseph Kirschbaum - all German or German
Jewish names. Most probably they all spoke fluent German - they would
have needed it to be efficient interrogators. The man in charge was William
Perl, a Czech psychologist trained in Vienna. It was Perl who organised the
mock trials. Thon was a German refugee, ‘excitable and untrained’.59 Clay
pronounced a muted apology that was tantamount to an admission:
‘Unfortunately, in the heat of the aftermath of war, we did use measures to
obtain evidence that we would not have employed later when initial heat
was expended.’ On the other hand he thought that the accusation of
‘unbelievable cruelty’ from Sergeant Bersin, one of the SS men, gave a
distorted picture. He dismissed the appeals of the Malmédy prisoners,
finding no evidence of maltreatment.60
British Camps
In May 1945 the British admitted to having 2.5 million prisoners as well
as half a million wounded and a growing number of refugees from the east.
Captivity was an easygoing thing in those days. An officer in the Welsh
Guards, Andrew Gibson-Watt, recounts scenes of bacchic camaraderie in
the South Tyrol at the end of the war, when guardsmen and German
paratroopers had an all-night party with wine, exchanging cigarettes and
family snapshots.61 Fleeing from Mecklenburg, Charlotte von der
Schulenburg and her children found themselves in the middle of a huge
POW camp in eastern Holstein. The prisoners were living in barns and
stables and receiving very short commons from their captors. She recalled
the monotonous noise of soldiers crushing grain with stones to make gruel
which was at least some sort of nourishment. The camp was known as the
‘Kraal’. She recalled the extraordinary cultural activity of the place. Among
the thousands of prisoners were actors, musicians, poets and theatre
directors. Chamber music was performed, plays produced in barns. A poet
read his works to hundreds of captured soldiers, sometimes under a wide-
spreading tree, sometimes standing on the dung heap in the middle of the
courtyard.62
The prisoners mixed freely with the refugees and helped one another.
They organised their lives together, finding oats and shoes for the horses,
chopping wood for heating and making schnapps on the sly. One night
Charlotte von der Schulenburg recalled their slaughtering a cow. The
animal was cut up and distributed and then all trace of the act was cleared
away, so that when the gendarmes came looking for the culprits the next
day they found nothing. For Charlotte the worry about feeding her six
children was salutary: it prevented her from being overwhelmed by grief
after the death of her husband.63
Some soldiers with homes to go to were gradually released. There
remained the East Prussians, Pomeranians and Mecklenburger who had no
way of knowing what had happened to their nearest and dearest. There were
rumours that the senior officers were to be shipped to a camp in Belgium.dn
As the countess had learned to read cards, generals would bring her
provisions from their scanty stores in order to learn a little more of their
fate.64 Not all the East Elbians were content to wait for news. One day
Charlotte concealed herself in some straw in the back of a lorry travelling
towards the Schulenburg mansion at Tressow in Mecklenburg. She wanted
to fetch some provisions for the children, and the British were still in
control of the western sector of the old Grand Duchy, as far as Lake
Schwerin. After a while she realised she was not alone. She heard a rustling
in the straw and turned round to see a man emerge looking like a cattle
dealer. He was a von Wedel - like the Schulenburgs, of ancient Prussian
lineage. He was escaping from the camp because he wanted to locate his
family in the east.65
The Allies’ attitude hardened, however, partly because they had
witnessed or had been made to witness the barbarities committed by the
Germans, and partly because they saw a use for the men as slave-labourers.
At Bergen-Belsen they fed the SS men on starvation rations and made them
carry the dead without gloves. The idea was to ‘work them to death’. They
achieved this in twenty out of fifty cases, but then a higher authority
intervened. The SS were taken away and ordinary German POWs were
made to do the work.66 The British disposed of a great many camps in
Britain itself. In 1944 there were already 250,000 German POWs in Britain
and Northern Ireland. There were also camps filled with Russians who had
been fighting alongside the Germans - at Malton in Yorkshire, for example,
where they sought solace in drinking methylated spirits. The peak figure
was achieved in the third quarter of 1946, when there were 391,880
working prisoners in Britain.67 In 1948, a year before they were disbanded,
there were 600 camps. The regime was not so hard, and in terms of
percentages the number of men who died in British custody is strikingly
low compared to the other Allies: 1,254.68 Prisoners were taken first to the
‘cages’ that were set up on racetracks or football grounds to be interrogated
by the PWIS or Prisoner of War Interrogation Section. These had the job of
questioning the prisoners in the camp and awarding them grades A, B or C.
A was ‘white’, or free from Nazism; B was grey, or mildly tainted; C was
black, Nazi. Then they were allocated to camps that might have been just a
collection of tents or Nissen huts, or, if they were lucky, a ramshackle
stately home.
Country houses such as Crewe Hall in Cheshire, Grizedale Hall in
Lancashire, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire and the Duke of Roxburghe’s
Sunlaws in the Borders were filled with prisoners. Colonel Wedgwood
complained in the House of Commons about the use of this sort of luxury
accommodation and asked facetiously why they had not considered the Ritz
Hotel. Not all German POWs had been treated so well, and Wormwood
Scrubs Prison in London was also used to house them. Jewish Pioneer
Corps soldiers were given the job of guarding them at Bourton-on-the-Hill,
Watton in Caithness, Moreton-in-Marsh, Cattistock, Tiveton, Cheltenham
and Kempton Park.
The leading fliers were housed in a camp outside London. In order to
prepare the cases for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials, microphones
were concealed to listen to the conversations between Milch, Bodenschatz,
Koller and Galland. The British wanted to know about Göring, and to do so
they planted listening devices like the Reichsmarschall’s Forschungsamt
(Research Office) or Stalin’s NKVD. That way the British learned that
Göring’s generals did not hold their master in high regard. He was
‘ungrateful’ and he painted his fingernails mauve. Galland, however,
corrected his comrades: it was transparent varnish, not paint. An American
Major Emery was sent in as an agent provocateur on 5 June 1945 and told
the generals that Göring had been blackening their names in his prison in
Luxembourg. The men fell for it, and began retailing stories about how
corrupt Göring had been.69
In Scotland Camp 21 at Comrie was used to house 4,000 hard-bitten
Nazis - U-boat crews and Waffen-SS men who gruesomely lynched
Sergeant Wolfgang Rosterg. He had expressed doubt at Germany’s final
victory and threatened to uncover a plot to rise up against the guards. He
was hung up in the latrines. They also chased and beat Gerhard Rettig to
death. Five of the murderers were hanged in Pentonville Prison in London
on 6 October 1946, and another two were executed the following month. It
took a tough former Prussian officer, and holder of the Iron Cross, Herbert
Sulzbach to show them the error of their ways. He had written a respected
book on trench warfare, but when the Nazis came to power they put him in
a concentration camp as a Jew. Once more England’s gain was Germany’s
loss. After leaving Comrie, Sulzbach went to Haltwhistle. This was a
progressive camp with its own newspaper, orchestra, theatre and university
which laid on exhibitions of prisoners’ art. Sulzbach struck up friendly
relations with many prisoners that continued after their release. He was
considered the apostle of democratic ideas and a political confessor.70 The
youth camp at Cambridge possessed a similar figure in the pioneer Captain
Starbroke who looked like a ‘caricature from [the antisemitic paper] Der
Stürmer’, but was so respected by the prisoners that he was treated as if he
had been made of porcelain.71
The former army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch was
housed in No. 11 (Special) POW Camp, Island Farm, Bridgend - the so-
called German Generals’ Camp in South Wales. In his various court
appearances he had been economical with the truth and denied having
received a cash payment from Hitler at the time of his divorce and
remarriage to a Nazi woman. He also claimed to have had no knowledge of
the planning of aggressive war and to have been ignorant of the murderous
‘Commissar Order’ that required the shooting of Soviet political officers.
From Bridgend he was transferred to the grim Münsterlager to attend trial
before a British court, but died before his case came up.72 At one time there
were no fewer than 186 German generals or equivalent in the camp. One of
them was Lieutenant-General Hans von Ravenstein, who had been taken
prisoner at Tobruk. In the spring of 1946 he was transferred to Bridgend
from a prison camp in Canada. He was to spend over two years in the camp
before he was set free. No one had anything bad to say about him. He
disliked Bridgend: the holder of the Pour le Mérite from the Great War
looked down on a number of Hitler appointees who were not as well
mannered as he might have hoped.73
The generals at Bridgend were housed in bed-sitting rooms big enough
to accommodate a six-foot bed. Only field marshals were allowed separate
sitting rooms. Ravenstein was befriended by a family of Plymouth Brethren
who took him out for picnics, but he was not allowed to carry money. Field
Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was one of those at Bridgend with a set of
rooms. Ravenstein admired him, but he was wont to hide behind superior
orders when called upon to justify his errors and omissions.74 The tank
general Hans-Jürgen von Arnim had also been in British captivity since
May 1943. At the time he was the second most important prisoner in
England after Rudolf Hess. He was kept at a ‘beautiful’ mansion in
Hampshire and allowed certain privileges concomitant with his seniority.
He was not released until 1947. By then his estates had been mopped up by
land reform in the Soviet east. He died in genteel penury in 1962.75
Some of the German POWs in Britain had been transferred from camps
in the United States, and were officially ‘on loan’. These were called
Amerikafahrer (American travellers). There were 123,000 of them in all.76
They made up work details, and one of their first jobs was to build a camp
for the victory parade on VE Day.77 One Amerikafahrer was Kurt Glaser,
whose transport arrived in Liverpool in July 1946. He went first to Wollaton
Park near Nottingham, where he lived in a hut with fifty other men in the
shadow of the ‘Schloss’. An officer came to see him and asked him six
questions about National Socialism, similar to those asked in Texas which
had branded him a Nazi. He worked for a farmer in Nottinghamshire, and
harvested turnips and potatoes. He was later transferred to Revesby in
Lincolnshire where once again he worked on the land. A British
intelligence officer informed him that he was working to feed his fellow
Germans, as there was not enough food in the zone to nourish them. In
September he heard James Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech. When he learned that
America had released all its POWs, Glaser could not believe his ears. There
were still 355,000 German prisoners in Britain. In the main they were
treated with much kindness, however, and when Glaser went for a walk in
the manicured grounds of Nottingham Castle an old man came up to him
and gave him a florin. Shortly after that, like all the Amerikafahrer, he was
sent back to Dachau in Germany to be released.78
The literary prisoner who had found himself hungry on the 2,000
calories he had received in America began to understand the real meaning
of the word when he arrived in Sudbury Camp near Derby. As usual he was
shunted through a number of different camps - Pendleford Hall,
Wolverhampton; Halfpenny Green, Staffordshire - presumably according to
the demands of local agriculture. Meanwhile his stomach rumbled.79
Intellectual nourishment was provided by a Dr R, a ‘naturalised emigrant’
who talked to the prisoners about the Nuremberg trials. On 1 October they
learned of the executions after the International Military Tribunal (IMT)
verdicts.80 Meanwhile they were being graded for their levels of political
reliability. The uncertainty about their future had consequences: 219 of
them committed suicide.81
The prisoners began to receive a little money for their work - two
shillings a day. The British people were strikingly generous towards their
former enemies. A woman gave the man two oranges and an apple,
although fruit cannot have been that easy to obtain. Soon the prisoners were
allowed to walk out of their camps if they remained within five miles. The
prisoner admired English Gothic architecture and enjoyed visiting the
village churches. Pubs were out of bounds, but he chanced it. ‘From all
sides’ he was ‘cheerfully and amicably greeted’. He came out richer than
when he went in. The men had bought him drinks and there had been a
whip-round. He had been given five shillings.82
The prisoner was back in Germany in the cruel winter of 1947. He saw
some prisoners who had been released from the Soviet Union dressed in
rags: ‘We are ashamed that we have warm winter clothes.’ The treatment of
German prisoners of war was still nagging Frings, who used a trip to Rome
in February 1946 to pick up his cardinal’s hat as a pretext to rally German
soldiers incarcerated in Italy, together with Cardinals Innitzer of Vienna and
Faulhaber of Munich. He visited Britain in September that year and went to
no fewer than twelve camps containing a total of 20,000 men. Later he
addressed a congregation of 3,000 British Catholics in Westminster
Cathedral calling for the men’s release. In 1947 he performed a similar
mission to Canada to try to secure the liberation of Germans in Canadian
camps.83
The big fry might visit London from time to time to be interrogated in
the London District Prisoner of War Cage of the Combined Services
Detailed Interrogation Centre (or CSDIC) in the plush surroundings of
Kensington Palace Gardens.do It was here that Lieutenant-Colonel
Alexander Paterson Scotland led a team of German-speaking officers and
NCOs whose job was to compile the dossiers to be handed over to the war
crimes tribunals. Their principal concern was the crimes committed against
British nationals and above all POWs. The Great Escape loomed large,
specifically the killing of fifty of the airmen who had escaped from the
Stalag Luft III in Sagan in Silesia. Thirteen Gestapo men were eventually
brought to justice and hanged in Hamelin Gaol in 1948. The case was not
actually closed until 1964.84
The investigators based in Kensington Palace Gardens were also
exercised by the several atrocious massacres that had been carried out by
SS units in France. One was the killing of ninety-seven soldiers from the
2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment at the strikingly
inappropriately named village of Le Paradis on 27 May 1940.
Responsibility for the crime was pinned on a company commander in the
SS-Totenkopf Division, Fritz Knoechlein, who had learned to hate all non-
Nazi forms of humanity in the hard school of Dachau: to be a guard at
Dachau or any of the other camps required proof of a man’s contempt for
his fellows. Knoechlein had absorbed his lessons well. He was hanged.85
Germans complained of their treatment at the hands of Scotland and his
team, but the work-over seems to have been gentle compared to those
carried out by the Americans. The SS officer Otto Baum said he had been
slapped and threatened with extradition to the Soviet Union. Scotland
vigorously denied the charges, which could have been brought before the
courts in an attempt to prove that a confession had been extracted by force.
The prisoners naturally had a number of ruses up their sleeves, accusations
of torture being just one of them. Another was to blame everything on a
man who was dead, or in Soviet captivity - where there was no chance of
corroborating the story, and a fair chance that he would eventually perish
anyhow if he hadn’t done so already. That Scotland beat and abused
prisoners, however, seems beyond doubt. He even admitted as much in his
autobiography, although the relevant passages were cut at the request of
MI5.86
Scotland’s men were investigating a full-scale massacre of British
soldiers that took place at the time of the evacuation of the British
Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The command to kill a hundred or so men
mostly from the Royal Warwicks was probably issued by the later SS-
Brigadef ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, after his men had taken a pasting from the
British during the rearguard action. In connection with the inquiry the
Scotland team were able to bring in Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, who was in American custody. Scotland was
surprised to find that the former coachman who had become Hitler’s darling
was a broken man. He was squat and balding, ‘rough in manners and crude
in speech’.87 Scotland had evidently believed what he had heard about the
SS superman. He failed to get a confession from Dietrich, or from any other
SS man, and concluded that they took their oath of loyalty very seriously.
The British also had their prisons in Germany and Belgium. The
Belgian camp was meant to be particularly gruelling, and conditions for the
130,000 prisoners were reported to be “not much better than Belsen’.88
Those awaiting trial for war crimes were housed in the former Prussian
town of Minden or in Münsterlager. Conditions here were scandalously bad.
When the camp was inspected in April 1947 there were found to be just
four functioning lightbulbs in the whole place. There was no fuel, no straw
mattresses and no food apart from ‘water soup’. The camp was chiefly
guarded by ex-Nazi POWs. The inmates saw no British officers, and even
the sighting of an NCO was a rarity. Hygiene was equally nightmarish:
there were two washhouses for every 500 men, no soap and no towels.89
British civil servants showed scant concern for the idea that Germans
were dying in British camps. Con O’Neill at the Foreign Office minuted a
paper written by Hynd in July 1946 to say that a few more deaths might be
a good thing, as no one needed more Germans. A suggestion was mooted
that the prisoners should be made over to the Russians, as they would know
how to deal with them. The Russians would have no foolish sentimentality
and would kill them off.90
The British also ran their Civilian Internment Camps or CICs for
political prisoners, who had not all been screened or charged, and which
contained prisoners as young as sixteen. When questions were asked about
the camps in the House of Commons Wing Commander Norman Hulbert
called them ‘concentration camps’, the ‘only right and proper description’.
This was where the British haphazard denazification took place. Anyone
could have ended up there: Junkertum, being a member of the east Elbian or
Prussian nobility, called for ‘discretionary arrest’. Anyone with ‘von’ before
their names had to watch out. The British decided that it might be better to
place the civil prisoners offshore; perhaps that way fewer people would see
them. The proposal was to create an ‘Alcatraz’ for up to 10,000 prisoners,
but this never happened as the RAF was using the available islands for
bombing practice. When the new camp Adelheide was opened there were
only 473 prisoners, but thirteen of them were over sixty and another 136
over fifty.91
Once convicted of war crimes the Germans might have ended up at
Werl near Dortmund. Death row was in the Pied Piper town of Hamelin.
Execution exerted severe demands on the British hangman, Albert
Pierrepoint, who could not be in all places at once. It took him seven hours
to hang six prisoners in pairs. At one point the British were handing out
between thirty and fifty death sentences a month, although a third of them
were quashed on appeal.92 There was a suggestion that the British might
turn to the guillotine, as it was quicker. Soldiers had made it clear that they
did not like carrying out firing squads.93 At Bad Nenndorf near Hanover,
CSDIC 74 also possessed an interrogation centre where men were tortured.
The centre of the town was sealed off with barbed wire. The torture-
chamber was the old pumproom. Here they were beaten, deprived of sleep,
threatened with execution or unnecessary surgery. As many as 372 men and
44 women passed through Bad Nenndorf before it closed in July 1947.
Initially they were SS men and Pgs, as well as industrialists and
‘plutocrats’ who had done well in the Third Reich. The British were also
frightened of Werewolves, and brought in several Hitler Youth leaders for
interrogation. Later many of them were Germans who had been ‘turned’ by
the Soviets, and were spying on the British Zone. The camp commander
was Colonel Robin Stephens, an MI5 officer. His staff consisted of twelve
British - including civilian linguists - a Pole, a Dutchman and six German
Jews. They were helped by young soldiers. Some of these had been present
at the liberation of Belsen and felt no goodwill towards the Germans.
Others had committed minor offences of discipline, assault or desertion and
were being punished.
 The activities in Bad Nenndorf eventually reached the ears of the prime
minister, and Sir Sholto Douglas launched an investigation into the abuse of
POWs. A court martial opened in Hamburg on 8 June 1948 at which
Stephens was tried together with a German-born Jew, Lieutenant Richard
Langham. It was transferred to London and heard in camera. The officers
were acquitted. There was alarm in government circles that the public
should learn that the British were running a number of branches of CSDIC
in Germany, and that ‘Bad Nenndorf ’ should become a rallying cry. Lord
Pakenham expressed his concern about the accusation that the British were
treating prisoners in a manner ‘reminiscent of the German concentration
camps’. Following the court martial Bad Nenndorf was closed down, but
interrogations went on in the British base in Gütersloh. When Pakenham
heard of this he complained to Robertson. The military commander
apparently took no notice.94
Almost all the men who were not suspected of any great crimes,
however, were sent home for Christmas 1948 - that is, if they still had a
home to go to, or knew how to locate their families.
The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian
Civilians in Germany
Marshal Zhukov raised the question of the return of Russian POWs as
early as 5 June 1945 when the Allied commanders met in Berlin. It had
been agreed that these soldiers would be handed over to the Russians. Most
of the men were Cossacks and Ukrainians who had fought in German units,
chiefly SS. Some of them were also labour conscripts and white Russians
who had been caught up in the war zone.95 They did not have to be Russian,
as the Russians acted for their clients too. The character of Anna Schmidt in
The Third Man is one of these. She is from Czechoslovakia. Her lover
Harry Lime has had papers made for her. The Soviet authorities allow Lime
to carry on hiding in their sector as long as he continues to inform them of
cases like hers.
In the film Major Calloway is reluctant to hand Anna over to Brodsky,
considering her an insignificant case. In Austria the British co-operated
with the NKVD over Russians who had fought in SS units, although they
had no doubts that they were leading the prisoners to certain death.dp The
Anglo-Americans had 150,000 Russian prisoners. Over of a fifth of these
were returned to the Soviets and presumably slaughtered. The Russians
were furious not to receive the full tally. One of the most tragic incidents
was the handing over of part of Vlasov’s Russian Legion to the Soviets
across the border on 24 February 1946. The Russians were housed at
Plattling. Guessing their fate, they mutinied one night and the men at
nearby ‘Natternberg’ could hear the sound of shooting. They were rounded
up and taken to the Czech border. After the Russians were liquidated,
Salomon and the other men from Natternberg were transferred to Plattling,
along with the Hersbruck camp and the Nuremberg witness camp and the
SS men who had been held in Dachau.96
Salomon later learned the whole story. One day a Soviet official had
arrived at Plattling and demanded the files on the prisoners. When the
Russian POWs got wind of what was going to happen, they mutinied. A
senior American officer had placated them by telling them that they would
not be handed over, and that they would be resettleddq in southern Europe -
the same lie the Welsh Guards used in Carinthia. Then the tanks rolled in.
The American guards had been issued with rubber truncheons and went to
the Russian huts in the middle of the night, beating them out of their bunks
- ‘Mak snell, mak snell’ - and into waiting lorries. They were taken to
Zwiesel near the border. American guards reported that corpses could be
seen hanging from trees behind the Russian lines. The precise number of
Russian soldiers killed is not known. Estimates range from 300 to 3,000.97
The French Camps
A total of 1,065,000 German POWs were attributed to the French. Of
these about a quarter - 237,000 - had been captured in France. The rest were
an American ‘loan’. Their treatment was particularly brutal,98 probably
because the memory of internment in Germany was still fresh in the minds
of many French civilians, who had not recovered from the humiliation of
occupation either. At the beginning of November 1944, there had been
920,000 poilus in German POW camps.99 Here was the chance for revenge.
Very soon after the end of the war the Red Cross reported that there were
200,000 prisoners on the brink of famine in France. The United States
treated this report with some scepticism, but it stopped the transports and
brought 130,000 of the worst cases back to the US in 1946 because they
were in such poor condition that they could no longer work. The Americans
compensated the French with another 100,000 Amerikafahrer but were
careful to deliver food so that the same thing did not happen again. The
French received the prisoners only once they had agreed to abide by the
Geneva Convention. The good behaviour did not last long.100 When the
Americans put pressure on the French to release their prisoners, the latter
complained that neither the Americans nor the British had lost as many
labourers in the war and that the German slaves were ‘indispensable for the
rebuilding of their country’. France hung on to the men until the end of
1948, when the last 23,609 went home. An attempt to make the work
voluntary was unsuccessful.101 Neglect and brutality took their toll:
officially 21,886 German POWs died in France, or 24,178 men from the
Axis powers.102
Salomon cites one case of an elderly Alsatian German historian who
starved to death in a French ‘dungeon’.103 In another camp in the Sarthe,
prisoners had to survive on 900 calories a day. In the prison hospital an
average of twelve POWs died daily. Camp 404 at Septèmes near Marseilles
was originally set up by the Americans and was partly run by vicious
‘Jabos’ or Yugoslav guards. It was a gigantic place with twenty-five
separate ‘cages’ filled with tents. Solid structures came later. In February
1946, however, Septèmes was handed over to the French as part of the
Western Allied loan policy. The Germans felt they had been betrayed. There
were ‘indescribable scenes’ of panic and several suicides and self-inflicted
injuries. More, there was the nightmaredr - as far as the Germans were
concerned - of finding that their new captors were colonial troops.104
The march of German captives through France provided the French
public with the chance to tell the Landser (privates and NCOs) what they
thought of them. One woman who disregarded an order to stop pelting the
prisoners with stones was shot by a black American soldier. ‘She lay there
in the street. No one took any notice of her . . .105 Another prisoner who was
taken to a camp near Annecy to work in the quarries was told that the
French were receiving one mark for every prisoner they took off the
Americans. As they were marched through France a French soldier showed
off to little girls at the roadside by kicking him in the backside. Watch-
stealing was almost as common in the west as it was with the Red Army.106
One German describes a sergeant-major who showed him his watch, only to
lose it soon afterwards. The prisoner was not so badly treated for all that.
After the quarries he was able to work on the land and the local farmers fed
him well - all but one, that is, who cooked ‘roast cat’ in a cream sauce that
Christmas. He ate some of the sauce, but spurned the cat.107
On 22 July 1946 Hans Johnert learned that America no longer possessed
prisoners of war. They had all been put out on loan. Soon after his
‘repatriation’ he was moved to Pont d’Ain, near Bourg-en-Bresse. The
Germans were used to provide labour for the local community. They
worked on the farms and in the quarries. They served different masters,
some of whom were kind, some not. On 9 December Frenchmen dressed as
Germans threw grenades at the POWs, killing two of them and injuring
many more. Johnert was sent home in the spring of 1947.108 Another,
anonymous prisoner also found himself handed over to the French by the
Americans. He was originally taken to a tent camp outside the Breton city
of Rennes where the prisoners slept on the wet earth. The Americans were
particularly trigger-happy and one man was killed simply for running to
pick up a cigarette butt thrown down by a guard. Any prisoner found guilty
of theft was buried up to his neck in a hole in the ground. Those who tried
to run were confined for thirty days. ‘Vae victis,’ concludes the prisoner -
‘woe to the vanquished’.109
On 24 June 1945 the prisoner in Rennes learned that the French were
due to take over the camp. Despite the rough way they had been handled by
the Americans it was not a pleasant thought - ‘the modern slave-trade’ he
called it. If anything, the French were even quicker on the draw than the
Americans. Soon after they took control of the camp they shot three
Germans, two in the head: ‘Buy combs, you lot, there are lousy times
ahead!’ Shooting continued to be a frequent occurrence at night. Poor
provision meant that people died of hunger too. Two men starved to death
in the huts, but the prisoner added that about twenty died daily in the camp
sickbay. ‘Die. Who would ever learn about it - who would believe it? The
dead tell no tales.’ This death rate would tally with the known figures for
France in 1945.110
One evening a drunken guard fired into a group of prisoners. He missed
the Germans but hit a black American guard outside the perimeter, killing
him outright. Red wine was responsible for the guards hurling salvoes of
stones at the prisoners to shouts of ‘Vive la France!’, ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ and
‘boches!’ At least one of the guards was from Alsace. The Germans
inflicted revenge on him by using the insulting word Wackes behind his
back.ds On 8 August another eight men died of hunger in the sickbay. On the
other hand most of the starving men were in the huts, not in the sickbay.
When the Red Cross parcels arrived that August the men were as happy as
children. The arrival of food, however, failed to prevent ten more men
dying on the 22nd. One of the prisoner’s friends cut his wrists when the
guard discovered the tell-tale blood-group tattoo in his armpit. Meanwhile,
the scandal of the camps had reached the French press: reporters were
comparing them to Buchenwald. In the Figaro a writer acknowledged that
the Germans had committed terrible crimes but ‘these horrors should not
become the theme of a sports competition in which we endeavour to outdo
the Nazis . . . We have to judge the enemy, but we have a duty not to
resemble him.’111
The prisoner volunteered for a work detail that took him off to defuse
mines around the Breton coast - in blatant violation of the Geneva
Convention - but he was happy to do anything to escape from the misery of
the camp, and possibly get something better to eat. As he was signed up
there was a new spate of robbery, this time by both guards and civilians.
The men were beaten and kicked and they lost their watches, rings, shoes,
even their trousers.112
Belgium
Britain and America donated over 60,000 of their POWs to the
Belgians. One German soldier who ended up in a camp near Mons in the
south of the country had been captured in the South Tyrol. At the airport he
was robbed by an American soldier. Travelling through Germany he was
able to toss out a letter on Günzburg Station. A nod from the station master
told him that he would deal with it. In Mannheim they came across some
soldiers who had been shipped up from Lake Constance. ‘They reported
that the Franzmann [army slang for a Frenchman] was taking everything
away.’113
The Americans left them in Erbisoeuil camp with 30,000 others. Before
they quit their charges, the GIs robbed them of their wristwatches. What
they failed to take, the Belgians grabbed, adding that they would have it
back on their release: ‘These people were the worst we had met up to now.’
The prisoners were registered. When they produced their pay-books, the
Belgians were astonished to learn that they were not SS men, but that did
not prevent them from stealing the prisoner’s pen, money and clothes. Once
the Germans were admitted to the camp it became clear that the guards
wanted to see them as the perpetrators of brutal acts in concentration
camps: ‘You did this too in concentration camps . . .’ they said. When the
men tried to leave their huts to urinate or defecate, the guards shouted at
them, ‘You German pigs, do it inside, that’s how it was in the KZ!’ When
one of them chanced it, he was shot at. They got round the problem by
urinating through the window.114 The prisoner could not understand why
they had been sent to the camp: ‘The Belgian people don’t want us at all,
and they are frightened of unemployment and are threatening to go on
strike.’115
The prisoner was put to work in the mines. The work was only for the
Landser - the officers were exempted. The Belgian prime minister, Achille
van Acher, had given him some hope by affirming that the men would be
sent home in the spring of 1947. It was not just the work which was
gruelling, it was the occasional letters from home which painted a
disturbing picture of the life of their dear ones. They heard about the rapes
in the Russian Zone, the theft of all their belongings and the penury of their
families, and the desperation to get home meant there were frequent
attempts to escape. There were, however, advantages to living in the British
or Soviet Zones. It is not hard to see that the experience with the Americans
had made the prisoner bitter: ‘In the English [sic] or Russian Zones the
women receive a little support at least, but with the Yanks and their
complete democracy, everyone has to get on with their life as best they
can.’116
The official statistics for deaths in custody in the Benelux lands are 450
in Belgium, 210 in Holland and 15 in Luxembourg.117
The Russian Camps.
The Russians seemingly made no distinction between a POW and a
civilian, and both were liable to arrest and to be shipped to the Soviet Union
to work, or to rot in camps. On 29 June 1945 the Soviet Union was said to
have between four and five million Germans within its borders, helping
rebuild its cities.118 The imprisonment of German and other Axis POWs in
Russia was marked by an element of callous chaos. Huge numbers of
Germans went east - not just soldiers, but non-military men aged between
sixteen and sixty, including scientists and technicians. Records attesting to
their identity were inadequate, and whether they lived or died was clearly a
matter of supreme indifference to the Soviet authorities. As it happened,
1,094,250 soldiers perished, half of them before April 1945.119 Sometimes it
was the vast majority: of the 90,000 soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad,
only 5,000 returned home. By 1950 numbers had considerably decreased.
At the beginning of that year there were still 46,841 POWs in Russia; by its
end the number had sunk to 28,711.120 It was roughly the same figure as
those who had been put on trial for war crimes. They had all received
twenty-five years.
On 31 May 1945, Margret Boveri made a list of her journalist
colleagues whom she knew to have been arrested by the Russians:
Molkenthin, who was not a Party member but had joined the SS to protect
his back, and was a harmless reporter; Scharp, who had been forced to join
the Party in Prague in 1939; Sprang, a real Nazi; Wirths, a known anti-Nazi,
but the Russians refused to believe him because he was assistant editor of
Das Reich; John Brech, economics editor of the same paper, an anti-Nazi,
but who had been forced to join the Party in 1938; a lot of people from the
DNB (Deutsche Nachrichten Büro, the official press agency), including
anti-Nazis; Seibert from the Völkische Beobachter. All the others fled in
good time. The ones who were really important had naturally vanished
without trace, but the Russians were too foolish to know that. The treatment
of the smaller fry was not too bad. The food was decent, and the
interrogations polite; only the living conditions were bad. The bankers she
knew came out after two or three weeks. Three girls from the Foreign
Office were locked up for three days, during which they were beaten and
had their hair pulled. They could not tell the Russians where the bigwigs
were. Then they were dismissed. Even men and women who had been
involved in the July Plot were arrested and interrogated in this way.
Things got worse when the prisoners were marched off into captivity.
Some managed to escape. The Russians reacted by arresting the same
number in the next village so that they delivered the correct number of
internees as listed on the paperwork. Their flats and furniture were
requisitioned. Unimportant prisoners taken in Poland might eventually turn
up in the Russian Zone. Libussa von Krockow’s stepfather Jesko von
Puttkamer, who had done no more than lead the local Volksturm in the
Second World War, had last been heard of in prison in Danzig. In the spring
of 1947 his family received a message that he was in a POW camp in
Leipzig. Libussa knew the way over the green border and made her way to
Leipzig. She found the camp in a suburb of the city, and spoke to a prisoner
through the barbed wire. She went back later that evening with a crowbar.
By dawn he was free.121
The Soviet authorities were as wont to arrest monarchists as Nazis.
Hermine of Reuss, the Kaiser’s second wife, might have been described as
both. She had flirted with the Nazis before the Second World War and
damaged the reputation of her husband’s family in the process. After the
Kaiser’s death in 1941 she had withdrawn to her Schloss Saabor in
Thuringia. At the end of the war she had sought refuge near by with her
sister, Princess Ida zu Stolberg-Rossla. The Duke of Brunswick, who was
married to the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise, went to Thuringia to warn
her about the Russians. She replied that Thuringia was under American
occupation and that she had no reason to move. She remained obstinate
when the duke told her, ‘Just think who you are; you must not fall into
Russian hands.’ She replied, ‘I have no reason to reproach myself. I shall
stay here.’ She was not warned of the American withdrawal in July, and
soon the Russians arrived to take her into custody. After a long period in
which there was no news, she re-emerged in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where
she remained under house arrest in a building on the edge of the town. She
died in August 1947 of a heart attack brought on by ‘uncertainty and
profound mental suffering’.122
The Russians were keen to get their hands on all the leading army
commanders who had operated in their territory, whether they had been
party to the atrocities or not. One who is credited with having been a
humane general was Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist. He had been
dismissed from his command by Hitler at the same time as Erich von
Manstein. They were clever officers, but not National Socialists.123 Kleist
retired to his Silesian estate, moving to Bavaria at the approach of the Red
Army. There he was arrested by the Americans, who handed him over to the
Yugoslavs in 1946 - Kleist had performed an important role in the invasion
of Yugoslavia in 1941.The former army commander was incarcerated in no
fewer than twenty seven prisons in nine years. The Yugoslavs tried him and
sentenced him to fifteen years as a war criminal. After two years he was
extradited to Russia, where he was charged - with heavy irony - with having
‘alienated through mildness and kindness the population of the Soviet
Union’. In March 1954 he reached the end of his Calvary at Vladimir camp,
where he was finally allowed to make contact with his family. He died in
October that year of ‘general arteriosclerosis and hypertension’. 124
 Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, defeated at Stalingrad, had the doubtful
honour of being among the 5,000 or so of his troops to return to Germany,
but that did not occur until November 1954, when he had already served
eleven years. His treatment was not bad. He was kept under house arrest in
Moscow, and once he began to co-operate with the Soviet authorities after
20 July 1944 he was accorded some privileges. He gave evidence for the
prosecution at Nuremberg, but even on his release he was not allowed to
join his family in the West and died of motor-neuron disease in Dresden in
1957.
If life was tough for German POWs in Russian camps, one or two of
them could claim that the Soviet authorities preserved their lives. SS-
BRIGADEF ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, who led the defence of the
government quarter in Berlin in April 1945 and was taken prisoner on 2
May, was wanted by the Western Allies for ordering the execution of
unarmed POWs. Had he fallen into British or American hands he would
almost certainly have been hanged. As it was he was released from Soviet
custody in 1955, when the Anglo-Americans were no longer interested in
pursuing German war criminals, and died in his bed forty-six years later.125
Mohnke’s ten years in captivity were a curate’s egg. They began with a
remarkable meal in the Belle Alliance Strasse of Berlin. After they
surrendered, he and twelve other SS officers were taken to a four-storey
building and invited to a proper Russian feast complete with caviar and
vodka. The Germans failed to tuck in with a gusto equal to the Russians. At
10.30 p.m. the dinner came to an end and the Germans were locked up. The
next day Mohnke and Rattenhuber of the SD, Hitler’s pilot Baur and his
chief bodyguard Günsche were taken to a transit camp for high-ranking
German officers in Strausberg. On 9 May they were moved again - this time
to Russia.126
The Soviet authorities refused to extradite Mohnke or to give any
information on his whereabouts. With time any pretence at co-operation in
these matters broke down. One of the reasons the British tried Manstein, it
is said, is because they did not wish to hand him over to the Soviets.
Mohnke was taken to the Budirka Prison and finally to the Lubyanka,
where he walked the gangways with Admiral Erich Raeder and Field
Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. In the meantime he was beaten and tortured
by Soviet secret agents. Interrogations by the NKVD were no gentler than
those carried out by the Americans. Baur, for example, was deprived of
sleep for twenty-one nights in succession.
These were important Nazis, but there were plenty of men in Russian
camps who had no particular affiliation to the regime. Heinz Pust was a
typical German POW in Soviet captivity. He was taken prisoner in
Czechoslovakia, as a soldier in Schörner’s vast army. On 9 May 1945 he
had heard the Soviet soldiers shooting into the air. It was the first he was
even aware that the Germans were losing the war, let alone surrendering.
He was given papers that released him home, but he was caught hiding in
the woods by partisans and locked up in a school house. He was decently
treated after a local policeman decided to give the partisans a lecture on the
laws of war. On 16 May he was handed over to the Red Army.
He was taken to Georgievsk in Russia with a number of Hungarian
soldiers. Discipline tended to be relaxed in the camp. Sometimes you could
come and go as you pleased. The food was poor and the men were always
hungry. Two or three times a day there was kasha: gruel. They had
seventeen grams of sugar and five grams of tobacco which they made up
into cigarettes with old newspapers. To supplement this there was a daily
ration of 300-600 grams of soggy bread and seventeen grams of fat or meat.
Sometimes there was a soup made from rotten vegetables. The prisoners
would strew the sugar on the bread to give themselves the illusion of eating
cake. Pust’s first packet from home came in 1950 or 1951.127
Molotov stated at the Moscow Conference in March 1947 that there
were 890,532 German prisoners in Russian captivity. It was a moment of
terrible disappointment: only a third of Germany’s missing men were
alive.128 The news broke through to Pust that all POWs would be released
by the end of 1948, ‘but the year 1948 came and went without anyone in
our camp noticing any acceleration’.129 Clay can’t have believed the
Russians, but he could see a stick to beat the enemy with when he called for
a tough stance: ‘tell the truth about Moscow’ - they have two million
POWs. As he told Senator Kenneth Keating, ‘Don’t let’s be the first to get
nervous in this war of nerves.’130
There were no Russian trials until 1949. Most of the important prisoners
received the same tariff of twenty-five years’ hard labour. On 6 December
1949 Pust was indicted for war crimes. In Moscow he was placed in
‘investigative custody’. The men were tried in batches. It took all of fifteen
to twenty minutes. They each received twenty-five years, even - it seemed -
a Berlin bus driver whose main crime was to have been found wearing his
uniform. Now Pust’s imprisonment took on an official status for the first
time. At Rostov on the Don his head was shaved, and his picture taken
along with his fingerprints.131
The generals and staff officers were exempted from work, but that did
not always mean that their lives were any more pleasant and many
volunteered simply in order to have something to do. They were sent to the
generals’ camp at Voikova, which contained 186 senior German
commanders, where they peeled potatoes, tended the garden, fed rabbits and
brought in the harvest. Although officers could lead a lazy life, there was
little chance of getting out. The higher the rank the less the possibility of
reprieve: in 1947 officers represented 7 per cent of prisoners held; by 1949
the percentage had risen to 36.132 There was no hope of reprieve before
Stalin’s death in 1953. After Chancellor Adenauer’s visit in 1955 three
Russian generals appeared in the camp to break the news that the men were
free. Mohnke and his comrades then had a second feast from their Soviet
captors.
Pust was one of the 27,000 POWs who learned that he would not be
released until 1974, but despite that cruel verdict prisoners began to be
freed in more regular batches. The first to leave were the Hungarians and
the Romanians, probably because their countries had now become Soviet
satellites. Books became vital. A comrade in arms had given Pust a copy of
Faust Part One, much of which he now knew by heart. Some books
published by the Aufbau Verlagdt appeared in the camp: German
translations of Gorki and Tolstoy as well as suitable German literature:
Plivier, Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig. The regime lasted as long as
Stalin, then Pust went home.
Otto Engelbert had a different experience to Pust. He volunteered to
attend the ‘Antifa’ school in Talizy - freedom at the price of ideological
indoctrination. He went in November 1945. Talizy had been built as a penal
colony during the First World War. The area was rich in peat, which was
used to fuel the local power stations. The prisoners were assessed on their
arrival, by being questioned on their positions regarding East Prussia and
Silesia and what they thought about the Oder-Neisse Line. Then they went
on to the next stage: history according to the Marxist dialectic. They were
given courses on the reasons for Hitler’s defeat; the sources of the USSR’s
victorious power; the main stages of Germany’s development to industrial
capitalism (1500-1815); the foundations of capitalism; the Revolution of
1848; the creation of Prussia-Germany; reactionary Prussia and Prussian
militarism; imperialism; the growth of the workers’ movement; the
November Revolution etc, etc.133 When Engelbert finished his course he
swore an oath to fight Hitlerism. The reward was a proper feast. A pig was
slain; there was hot food, cake and tea, wine and schnapps. The
intellectuals, however, were not released. Engelbert was sent back to
Germany to spread the word.134
Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia
Poland was well and truly a Soviet client and retained tens of thousands
of German soldiers. In the summer of 1948 Clay was concerned about this:
‘I always pushed for the return of German prisoners of war.’ His reports
told him there were still 40,000 of them, more than three years after the
cessation of hostilities. A paltry twenty-one had reached the American Zone
that year. The German agencies involved in tracking them had informed the
American commander that ‘they also believe the POWS to be receiving
very bad treatment’.135 In the Neuhammer mines in Silesia, the mortality
rate was 15 per cent: 5,400 dead. The Jaworzno camp claimed 1,817
military and civilian lives. The total number of deaths in the camps is given
at 4,500, but the figure seems suspiciously low.136 In Warsaw the Germans
rebuilt the historic centre, putting back the buildings destroyed in the
Blitzkrieg of 1939 and the wide-ranging destruction of the historic heart of
the city which was effected after the Warsaw Uprising. There were still
4,240 German POWs left in Poland in 1950.137 One who never returned was
Gauleiter Koch, who lived to a remarkably ripe old age in a Polish prison.
There were still 600 Germans toiling in the uranium mines of the
Joachimstal of Czechoslovakia in 1950 to feed the Russian A-bomb
programme. 138 The Czechs claimed that 1,250 POWs were killed of the
25,000 prisoners they had.139 The Yugoslavs were among the most
draconian. The official figure for deaths of POWs in their custody stands at
6,215, but that number is considered ‘too low by far’. Around 80,000 would
be closer to the truth.140 One of the lighter duties these prisoners had to
perform was the construction and decoration of Tito’s new summer palace
and later guest house on Lake Bled. A painter was called in to decorate a
double-cube room on the first floor with blood-curdling scenes depicting
the battles between Tito and Hitler’s forces. The German POWs played all
the roles, from the slain who littered the field of battle to the Yugoslav
warriors who pierced them with their bayonets.141 The final batch of 1,300
Germans was sent home in 1949.142
The Return of the Warrior
Once the POW was released, the homecoming could be bitter-sweet.
Ruth Friedrich was horrified by the sight of returning German warriors in
the American Sector of Berlin. ‘Oh, great God! How bad misery can be!’
The rags of the Germans contrasted with the smart uniforms of the
Americans as they walked through Steglitz on 30 July 1945. Some lacked
arms, others legs, they showed signs of illness and plague, they were
abandoned and lost.143 The experience of returning soldiers forms the
background to some of the early stories of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Heinrich Böll, and provided the theme for the play Draussen vor der Tür
(Outside the Door) by the writer Wolfgang Borchert.
Borchert and Böll both lived through those times and spoke from
experience. Borchert, an aspiring actor who had been on the Eastern Front,
had been wounded and shipped home but was then obliged to return to the
colours before he was truly mended. The illness he incurred from poor
hospital treatment was to kill him at the age of twenty-six. Draussen vor
der Tür was first performed on 21 November 1947, the day after his death.
It was later filmed as Liebe 1947.
In the play, the NCO Beckmann returns from Siberia to find his wife in
bed with another man. He tries to drown himself in the Elbe but the river
rejects him. He becomes part of the mass of alienated German men, whose
defeat and complicity in crime had rendered them rebarbative even to their
own women: ‘your Germany is outside, in the rainy night, on the street’.144
Beckmann carries the responsibility for a minor massacre of his own men.
He wants to rid himself of it. He goes to see his colonel, in the hope of
passing the responsibility on to him. The colonel is prosperous and doesn’t
want to know. Beckmann looks for his parents. They are dead. They had
been Nazis and had been thrown out on the streets at the end of the war -
they also are ‘outside the door’. They had preferred death to denazification.
Early on he meets a lugubrious God, but he fails to find him again: ‘Where
is he then, the old man who calls himself God?’ Doors are slammed in his
face as he looks for work, women and humanity: ‘That is life! There is a
man, and the man comes to Germany and the man freezes. He starves and
he limps! He comes to Germany! He comes home, and there is his bed,
occupied. A door slams, and he is left outside.’145
It is a theme Böll returns to time and again. In Die Botschaft (Breaking
the News) a soldier takes the effects of a dead warrior back to his widow.
When he arrives she is laughing with another man. He puts down the
soldier’s wedding ring, watch and pay-book, and a few well-thumbed
photographs. The woman has to sit down, ‘and I realised that the war would
never be over so long as there was still someone bleeding from an injury it
had caused’. She wants to know whether her husband died in the east. No,
says the man who brings the news. “No . . . in the west, in a POW camp,
there were more than a hundred thousand . . .”
“And when . . .”
“In July 1945,” I said softly.’
One difference between prisoners in British camps and those in
American captivity was that the British allowed the Germans to sport
insignia of rank and the Americans did not. In Böll’s story, ‘When the War
Was Over’, the little literary type is busy sewing his braid back on his
uniform as the soldiers head for Bonn and discharge in October 1945. The
narrator recounts his treatment at the hands of the British and the
Americans. He has been captured by the latter in April. The corporal asks
him, ‘Hitler Youth, SA or Party?’, to which he answers, ‘No.’ The
American then bawls at him and accuses his grandmother of various sexual
practices that he can’t properly work out as his English isn’t good enough.
When later an English corporal asks him for papers he says he has none.
He has sold his pay-book for a couple of cigarettes. The Englishman
searches him and finds a diary he has kept in captivity: a hundred closely
written pages made out of paper bags stapled together. In fury the corporal
tosses it into the latrine. No one is supposed to know what has been going
on.

OceanofPDF.com
 16
The Trials
We had gambled, all of us, and lost: lost Germany,
our country’s good repute, and a considerable measure
of our own personal integrity. Here was a chance to
demonstrate a little dignity, a little manliness or
courage, and to make plain that after all we were
charged with, we at least were not also cowards.
Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976, 14

The Allies’ decision to indict the Nazi leaders had a precedent. Article
227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles called for a trial of major German ‘war
criminals’, with the Kaiser at the top of the list - who, Lloyd George
proclaimed, should be hanged. It demanded the extradition of up to a
thousand Germans but proved a soggy squib: neither Holland - where
William II had been granted asylum - nor a largely unoccupied Germany
would agree to hand over the defendants. To show willing, the Germans
themselves put on a trial in Leipzig. Thirteen men were convicted, but as
they were perceived as heroes in Germany they all managed to escape.1
At their various meetings, the Second World War Allies agreed on the
need to liquidate the top Nazis. The question was how? Should they suffer
summary execution, a drumhead court martial, or should the victors risk a
trial?2 When the fate of the ‘war criminals’ was discussed in Moscow in
October 1943, the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was in favour
of a drumhead court martial. The Soviet delegation could not have
approved more strongly. As their Nuremberg judge, General Iona
Nikitchenko, put it: the accused were ‘war criminals . . . who have already
been convicted’. It was the British and Anthony Eden who reminded the
conference of ‘legal forms’. Legal form was clearly important, but they all
knew whom they wanted to eliminate. The British prosecutor, attorney-
general Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, put it in a nutshell: ‘Our work . . . is to see
the top-notch Nazis tried, condemned, and many of them executed.’ Hull’s
master, Roosevelt, was in favour of shooting them, and appointed a judge to
look into the possibility. His advisers, however, told the president that it
would be illegal. America switched course and called for a trial, and Soviet
Russia joined in. By this time the British had changed their minds and
favoured summary execution!3
If there were to be trials, there had to be a law to try them by - the old
maxim runs nulla poena sine lege (there is no crime without laws,
sometimes rendered as nullum crimen sine lege). The Allies had to invent a
body of law that would criminalise Nazi offences and backdate it to cover
the period in question. It would be a code based on merging two
conventions: the Hague Convention on Land Warfare of 1907 and the
Geneva Convention of 1928, to which Germany (and not Soviet Russia)
had been a party. It had been argued that the Hague Convention had merely
framed laws and usages that had existed for centuries, but it had been
assembled at a time when, for example, aerial warfare was unknown and
when guerrilla armies were not taken into consideration. Some things
emerged with crystal clarity: Article 23 of the Geneva Convention stated
that it was an illegal act to kill or wound a soldier who had laid down his
arms. It was also illegal to deny quarter. German soldiers had the Ten
Commandments printed in their pay-books. It was correctly assumed that
those who slaughtered POWs knew they had done wrong, and there were
instances when their comrades in arms shunned them as pariahs as a result.
The result of the fusion was ‘Nuremberg Law’. Nuremberg Law was the
basis of the Royal Warrant of 18 June 1945 used in the military courts in the
British Zone. The British defined the ‘war crime’ as a violation of the laws
and usages of war. Stalin threw everything he could at the invading German
armies; and he did not play by the book. German soldiers were rightly
terrified of falling into enemy hands alive. Savage reprisals were directed
towards the civilian populations of the Soviet Union when German troops
were slaughtered behind the lines. It was a policy that had been losing
German armies friends since the time of the Franco-Prussian War, but it was
an accepted ‘usage’ allowed by Article 453 of the British Manual of
Military Law. As the Labour MP and KC Reginald Paget put it, ‘It was
really unreasonable to expect the Germans to fight these all-in wrestlers in
accordance with the Queensberry rules.’4 The Americans were even more
ruthless: ‘one shot merited the destruction of a village. You will see the
result in some heaps of rubble in Bavaria and Franconia. As they advanced,
if a shot was fired from a village, they either stopped, or evacuated, and
whistled up the air force. The isolated heaps of rubble in this relatively
undamaged countryside are very striking. The result was that the Americans
had very few casualties.’5
The Germans were to be judged for their behaviour in foreign territory.
This was inserted at the behest of the Russians and the French. It involved
the treatment of civilians: murder, abuse, deportation, slave labour; the
murder of prisoners of war, killing hostages, plunder of public or private
property, ‘the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation
not justified by military necessity’.6 ‘Genocide’ was a new word for a
relatively new crime. The destruction of the European Jews figured as only
a small part of the case against the Germans in the early trials. The killing
of German and Austrian Jews on the territory of the Greater German Reich
was not automatically covered as it was theoretically the legal right of a
sovereign state to dispose of its citizens as it pleased. On the other hand
there was agreement that Julius Streicher should be done to death, so legal
nicety had to be bent a little as he was not really guilty of any other crime
that had been brought to the Allies’ attention.7 The persecution of German
and Austrian Jews at home was therefore vaguely included under the aegis
of ‘aggression and the preparation for unjust war’.
For the Russians the massacre of Jews was hardly of interest, although
half a million of their Jewish citizens were slaughtered by the Nazis. The
reason for this was the rampant antisemitism they themselves experienced
after the war in reaction against the upsurge in Zionism. On the other hand
the prosecution found the Final Solution increasingly useful when it came
to breaking down the defendants. Films of the concentration camps had a
sobering effect even on such seasoned performers as Göring and Hess. By
the time the trials were under way no German was an antisemite any more.
As one later commentator glibly put it, ‘there was hardly a defendant who
could not produce evidence that he had helped some half-Jewish physics
professor, or that he had used his influence to permit a Jewish symphony
conductor to conduct a little longer, or that he had intervened on behalf of
some couple in a mixed marriage in connection with an apartment’. 8
There was very little call for retribution from Jewish groups at first.
Henry Morgenthau remained a voice in the wilderness, and Truman for one
wanted to keep him there. He later resigned in a huff. Zalman Grinberg,
president of the liberated Jews in the American Zone, accused the Allies of
a lack of concern, and wondered whether this would have been the case if
another race had been the victim of a similar purge. Morgenthau continued
to thunder, as did the presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the columnist
Walter Winchell, but they were not greatly heeded. On the other hand the
enormity of the crimes committed by Germans did provoke Americans to
calls for the severest punishments in the spring of 1945. Joseph Pulitzer of
the St Louis Post-Despatch thought 150,000 Nazis should be shot.
Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri advocated mass executions of SS
and OKW men.9
The hypocrisy of Nuremberg Law alarmed many people. One was the
Indian jurist Rahabinode Pal, a judge in the Tokyo trials, who dissented
from the judgments, seeing the sentences meted out as retrogressive, ‘a
sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for
revenge’. Field Marshal Lord Montgomery also disapproved of the tenor of
the trials that ‘have made the waging of unsuccessful war a crime, for
which the generals of the defeated side would be tried and then hanged’. He
understood that if the Germans had won the war, he might have been put on
trial himself.du Shortly after a British Military Court in Hamburg sitting in
the aptly named Curio-Haus had condemned Field Marshal Erich von
Manstein to eighteen years in prison, the Korean War broke out, and the
German press was happy to report that the American army was accused of
precisely the same atrocities as the field marshal.10
Many contemporary observers agreed with Pal and believed the scores
of trials that took place after the end of the war were simply a case of
victors’ justice. These dissenters included soldiers, jurists and judges. The
Soviets, who provided a general as their prosecutor in the main trials in
Nuremberg (he had been involved in fake trials in the 1930s and later
became the director of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in its first years
under Soviet management) and a more junior officer as a judge, constantly
reminded the Western Allies that the purpose of the tribunals was to punish
the defeated enemy. Yet the Soviet attitude was in some senses the most
lenient, because they of all the nations that had defeated Nazi Germany
were the most likely to have committed atrocities on a similar scale.
Reginald Paget KC was one of the most stentorian voices raised against
the trials. He agreed to lead Field Marshal von Manstein’s defence team
gratis, describing the Royal Warrant as ‘simply an exercise of the power of
the victor over the vanquished’. As far as he was concerned, none of the
convictions would have been secure in an English court, and they would all
have been quashed by the Court of Appeal. For Paget the conqueror had no
right to impose a form of trial which he ‘would consider inadequate for his
own citizens’.11
And yet something needed to be done. The Germans had performed
terrible acts. To claim that what they had done was in no way illegal
because they were obeying higher commands or putting through the secret
policies of the state was simply not good enough: not all Germans had sat
around waiting for homicidal orders; many had acted on their own
initiatives. Trials would also have the further advantage of recording the
acts of the Nazi regime, providing a huge quantity of sworn evidence about
the workings of the state. They would also have the effect of laying the
blame. The American prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson made it clear:
they were not trying the German people, just the men in the dock. Although
many condemned the trials at the time, a precedent was set for war crimes
and crimes against humanity and there is little protest against global
jurisdictions today. Clay realised that the courts were establishing
something. Writing to Jackson’s successor Colonel Telford Taylor on 17
October 1947, he said, ‘At Nuremberg we are establishing procedure for
[the] future and not aiming at any specific individuals. History will make no
distinction between a von Rundstedt and a von Leeb.’12
Under Nuremberg Law, the implication was that any officer who
received what was later liable to be interpreted as a criminal command
must refuse to carry it out, although - as Paget pointed out - both the British
and American Manuals allowed superior orders to be used as a defence for
‘criminal’ actions.13 In reality that meant an officer had to resign his
commission. In Nazi Germany the response would have been a court
martial and a firing squad. Colonel General Beck did resign his command in
1938, and encouraged other generals to follow his example (none did), but
that was not in wartime. He was one of the movers and shakers behind the
various military and civil plots to remove or kill Hitler between 1938 and
20 July 1944, when finally he did indeed pay with his life.
Suggesting that generals had absolute authority within their areas of
command was also to misunderstand the nature of Hitler’s regime. Like
Stalin, the Führer was a great believer in impera et divida. He alone had
enjoyed unrestricted power; the underlings had to jostle for position beneath
him. On the battlefield this became a struggle for control between the SS
and the Wehrmacht. The SS reported to Himmler, who answered to Hitler.
The Waffen-SS had the advantage of better equipment, while the traditional
army tended to lead the campaign under experienced generals, the majority
of whom hailed from the traditional, Prussian officer corps. The SD was
responsible for the dirty work behind the lines. It, too, answered to
Himmler, but its actions within the Wehrmacht domains were agreed by the
general commanding, which - as so often in Hitler’s state - involved making
the traditional general complicit in the actions of the SD either by co-
operating with it or by agreeing to take over its functions by rounding up
commissars, partisans or Jews. It was not Hitler’s or Himmler’s intention
that anyone should emerge from the conflict with clean hands. Even
diplomats were obliged to sign memos that said they agreed with the policy
of deporting the Jews.
Paget pointed out that ‘usages’ were not considered binding in the
British Manuel of Military Law and ‘could be disregarded by belligerents’.
There were other fishy aspects to the Royal Warrant that had been taken
from Nuremberg Law: the accused was not allowed to know the charges nor
what evidence was adduced against him; he could not challenge the
authority or jurisdiction of the court; he could not insist on being tried by
his peers - and was generally subjected to the judgments of those holding
inferior rank and therefore diminished responsibility. The Royal Warrant
disregarded the long-established rules of evidence and admitted hearsay.
The statements of hearsay witnesses were not only given credence, the
witnesses were not summoned and could not be cross-examined. There was
no right of appeal.14
Paget also made it clear that the defendants remained prisoners of war,
because Britain had not brought hostilities to an end. As POWs they could
demand particular treatment. POWs had rights in international law: the
captor had to treat them as well as he did his own troops and subject them
to the same law as he would apply towards his own men.15
Interrogations
Before the German war criminals could be put on trial they needed to be
apprehended and interrogated. The British, for example, possessed a
remarkable collection of Nazi-hunters. They included men who later
achieved fame in other spheres, such as Robert Maxwell16 and the historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper. The interrogations and the accumulated details of Nazi
crimes had another role - they could be used against the German population.
Trevor-Roper was compiling his report for British intelligence at the time. It
was published as The Last Days of Hitler and was considered to be
excellent propaganda for the Allied cause. Trevor-Roper hardly needed to
be encouraged to belittle the Nazi leadership and show the Germans how
foolish they had been to follow them.dv
Maxwell was a Czech Jew and many of those employed to find the
Nazis were Jews from Germany and Austria. They had the ability to
interrogate Germans in their own language, and in many instances they felt
a real sense of motivation in their work. These included Peter A. Alexander,
a former bank clerk from Vienna. Major Frederick Warner (formerly
Manfred Werner from Hamburg) and Lieutenant-Colonel Bryant (Breuer)
formed part of an eighty-man team that arrested, among many others, the
chief of Bremen’s Gestapo Dr Schweder. They left him in the hands of a
group of RAF officers, who he thought would treat him relatively kindly.
They did not, and staged a mock trial in the best Gestapo tradition, so that
Schweder thought his last hour had come. When Warner returned Schweder
was overjoyed to see him.17
Peter Jackson (formerly Jacobus) was responsible for arresting the
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, having tracked him down to a
farmhouse kitchen where he was hiding. His superior officers were aware
that Jackson’s mother had been killed in Auschwitz, but they still believed
he was the only man for the job of interrogating the prisoner. The revulsion
Jackson felt towards Höss could be overcome only by drinking large
quantities of whisky. He was allegedly drunk for a week. 18
Former Pioneer Anton Freud was the man who captured Dr Tesch, who
had produced the gas for the ‘showers’ at Auschwitz. Freud’s team also
apprehended Himmler’s deputy, Oswald Pohl, who was delivered to
Nuremberg and condemned to death. Fred Pelican (born Friedrich Pelikan
in Poland) was the man who caught Hans Esser, the Nazi leader in Neuss in
Silesia. Flight Sergeant Wieselmann was involved in the search for the
killers of the fifty British airmen who were shot after the Great Escape. A
Sergeant Portman worked on the dossier concerning the deaths of 7,000
Jews who had died while being transferred from one concentration camp to
another.
One Nazi who particularly interested the British was William Joyce, the
American-born, half-Irish fascist who was known to all and sundry as Lord
Haw Haw. He had fled from Hamburg and was living in an inn near the
Danish border with his wife. On 28 May 1945 two British officers were
searching for kindling in the local wood. Joyce, who was doing much the
same, couldn’t resist giving them a hand, and shouted to them in French,
telling them where they might find some pieces of wood. He then repeated
himself in English: ‘There are a few more pieces here.’ His voice was
instantly recognised. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce, would
you?’ Joyce put his hand in his pocket. The officer thought he was going to
draw a gun and shot him in the leg. Joyce groaned that his name was Fritz
Hansen (his forged German papers said his name was Wilhelm Hansen), but
he was still carrying his military passport, which had him down as William
Joyce. He was taken back to Britain, where with doubtful legality he was
tried for treason and hanged in Wandsworth Prison.19
Despite the huge dragnet and the large forces at the Allies’ disposal,
very few of the top Nazis were executed. Many of the most important ones
like Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves before capture. Others managed
to commit suicide in captivity. A surprisingly large number of leading Nazis
were able to take poison behind bars, posing the question whether the Allies
turned a blind eye to such things. In his memoirs, Franz von Papen claims
that he was offered means to take his own life on two occasions, both times
by American guards.20
Himmler, the most important war criminal after Adolf Hitler, never
reached the courts. He had been spurned by Dönitz and issued instructions
to the leading SS men around him to disappear while he lay low in
Flensburg with his mistress and their children. The leading lights of the SS
were provided with false papers and cyanide capsules. Himmler himself
assumed the identity of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger of the Field Service
Police, a man whom he had had executed for defeatism. He shaved off his
moustache and, putting a patch over one eye, set out to join the Werewolves
in Bavaria. Unfortunately for Himmler the Allies had outlawed the Field
Service Police, and on 21 May the British picked him up halfway between
Hamburg and Bremen.
The British failed to recognise him. Eventually Himmler revealed his
identity himself. He still thought he had something to offer the Western
Allies, and asked for a meeting with Montgomery or Churchill. At Second
Army HQ at Barfeld he was strip-searched. A Captain Selvester found two
brass tubes on him. It is not altogether clear why they did not search his
mouth. Selvester alerted Montgomery’s intelligence chief Colonel Michael
Murphy. Murphy decreed that the formal interrogation should not begin
before he arrived. Selvester ordered some thick cheese sandwiches for the
prisoner and watched him as he ate. An intelligence officer could not resist
taunting Himmler with some photographs of corpses taken at Buchenwald.
Himmler shrugged him off: ‘Am I responsible for the excesses committed
by my subordinates?’21 It was an extraordinary response: of course he was.
Himmler was brought a change of clothes, but he refused to don a
British army uniform, preferring to wrap himself in a blanket. He was still
insisting he wanted to see Montgomery or Churchill. Colonel Murphy
arrived at eight and had Himmler bundled into his car. Murphy handled him
roughly and called him a ‘bastard’. He was driven to a villa outside
Lüneburg and ordered to strip again by a Sergeant-Major Austin. Himmler
responded by saying, ‘He does not know who I am.’ Austin replied, ‘Oh yes
I do: you’re Himmler. Ausziehen!’ Himmler was then examined by Dr C. J.
L. Wells, who noticed the phial in his mouth. Himmler was too quick for
them, however, and was able to flick the phial out with his tongue and crack
it. There were attempts to save him, but the effect of the poison was
immediate. Himmler died just after 11.00 p.m. on 23 May. He was buried in
an unmarked grave on the Heath two days later.22
Göring took a long time to realise that the Allies were not going to treat
him, or anyone else for that matter, according to the rules that had governed
VIP prisoners in previous wars. On 7 May 1945 US forces commanded by
Brigadier Robert Stack were searching for him around Mauterndorf dw in
Austria, where he possessed one of many mansions. The Görings were still
half convinced that they were going to be shot after Hermann had tried to
wrest authority from the Führer in the bunker. There was a large SS guard
with them. The Americans and Göring were converging on Fischhorn
Castle near Zell-am-See, which had been requisitioned for the latter’s use.dx
Here Göring was hoping to negotiate with Eisenhower. When the
Americans arrived, Göring was still bogged down in traffic in a car laden
with his monogrammed pigskin suitcases.
He had been out of touch with reality of late. He had badly overplayed
his hand with Hitler, and persisted in believing that Eisenhower would deal
with him directly. The Americans were generally courteous for the time
being, and Göring posed for photographers in Kitzbühl the next day. Some
said he had been seen talking to American officers on the balcony of the
Grand Hotel with a champagne glass in his hand.23 He was encouraged to
blab about other Nazi leaders at informal gatherings. This was part of the
process of softening up the prisoner. He was still cross with Hitler for
ordering his arrest and described him as narrow-minded and ignorant.
Ribbentrop - never his favourite - was a scoundrel, and Hess an eccentric. It
was not until the 10th that he came face to face with General Spaatz, the
commander of the US air force. Then the Americans took him into the
kitchen and stripped him of his medals and insignia, leaving him only his
epaulettes. He was housed in a prison compound for high-ranking Nazis,
with a tall black soldier posted outside his door.
He discovered Robert Kempner among the American officers. Kempner
had been in Police Department 1a, the political police that had sired the
Gestapo. He had been sacked by Rudolf Diels in January 1933, and as a
Jew he then thought it prudent to leave. Göring must have realised that
Kempner would be a powerful adversary. The Americans asked him about
the concentration camps. The man who had nominally hosted the Wannsee
Conference denied all knowledge. He pointed out that Hitler had been
deranged at the end of his life. He later denied that he had ever signed a
death warrant or sent anyone to a concentration camp.dy Shown pictures of
Dachau he blamed Himmler.24
The robber-in-chief now had the disagreeable experience of being
robbed himself. US army engineers discovered his picture collection in
Berchtesgaden: works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Boucher and
Botticelli were all hauled out. One Rembrandt bought in Paris in 1940
turned out to be a fake. French Moroccan soldiers had already pilfered some
of his jewellery; a GI stole his field marshal’s baton, which was intercepted
at customs and eventually found its way into the collection at West Point;
his 1935 wedding sword was stolen by a platoon sergeant who placed it in a
bank vault in Indiana. Later his wife Emmy was defrauded of an emerald
ring by a sergeant who came to tell her that Göring was about to be
released.25
Prison Walls
On 20 May 1945 Göring was flown to Mondorf-les-Bains in
Luxembourg to join fifty-two other Nazi big fish in ‘Ashcan’, Allied
Supreme Headquarters Centre for Axis Nationals. The gloves were off:
Göring was treated with scant respect when the aircraft landed. He was
struck by the monotonous movements of the GIs’ jaws churning up their
chewing gum.26 The prisoners were strip-searched for poison and weapons,
and anything of value to them was taken away. The first to arrive had been
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had succeeded Kurt von Schuschnigg as
chancellor at the Anschluss, and had later been Reich commissioner of
Holland. He had been responsible for throwing all the leading Austrian non-
Nazis - including a sizeable number of government ministers - into Dachau
and beginning the persecution of the Jews.dz In Holland he bore
responsibility for the deportation of most of the Jews. Hans Frank was next,
much the worse for wear after slashing his wrists. He had been the governor
general of Poland who proclaimed his mission to be ridding ‘Poland of lice
and Jews’.27 Göring was reunited with Frank, Bohle, Brandt, Daluege,
Darré, Frick, Funk, Jodl, Keitel, Ley, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Streicher.
The Americans dubbed him ‘fat stuff’. Three days later there was a fresh
delivery: Admiral Dönitz arrived together with Speer. Speer did not stay
long. He was flown to Eisenhower’s HQ at Versailles and then to the
British-run interrogation centre named ‘Dustbin’ in the medieval castle of
Burg Kransberg in the Taunus. Here he received a visit from Hugh Trevor-
Roper, who was then researching his Last Days of Hitler. They seem to
have got on: in the summer of 1947 Trevor-Roper sent a copy of the book to
Speer for his comments.28
Franz von Papen was delivered to Mondorf in May 1945, but he was not
considered important enough for the Grand Hotel, where the leading Nazis
were lodged, and went to a smaller establishment next door instead. He had
been pushed further and further out of the nest, as ambassador to Austria
before the Anschluss and then as ambassador to Turkey. He was still
claiming to be surprised that he had been arrested at all. He had been
housed in some comfort in a château near Spa in Belgium where he had the
Hungarian regent Admiral Horthy for a cellmate.ea Horthy also
accompanied him to Mondorf.29 Papen and Horthy’s regime was Spartan,
and the elderly regent’s health began to suffer. Papen claims in his
autobiography that he tore the notorious American gaoler Colonel Andrus
off a strip for maltreating a head of state. Papen’s prison was beginning to
establish itself as the place for the B-stream Nazis. Soon they were joined
by Schwerin von Krosigk and the Freiherr von Steengracht from the
German Foreign Office. There were now six to a room. Papen tried to pin
Andrus down on the subject of the Hague Convention governing prisoners
of war. Andrus shook him off, but permission was swiftly granted to write
letters. On 15 June Joachim von Ribbentrop was brought in. He had been
tracked down in a bed and breakfast in Hamburg, having spent six weeks on
the run, during which he had composed a letter to the British government.
He was arrested after a tip-off on the 14th. A British lieutenant found him in
bed, dressed in pink and white pyjamas.
The old rivalries and hatreds persisted. There was a ridiculous
adherence to correct forms of address. Even after the sentences were
pronounced, Speer would ask the former deputy Party leader, ‘What did you
get, Herr Hess?’30 Göring could not abide Ribbentrop, Speer or Dönitz.
With Dönitz the feeling was clearly mutual. Once when Göring was
complaining that his lot was the worst, because he had more to lose, Dönitz
acidly remarked, ‘Yes, and all of it stolen!’ Göring was interrogated by
Major Hiram Gans and Lieutenant Herbert Dubois. Dubois asked him if he
were ashamed of the milliard-mark fine imposed on the Jews in 1938.
Göring expressed his muted regrets: ‘You have to take the times into
account.’ He soon got the hang of how to deal with the interrogations.
When a Russian team arrived to prepare their case he had them roaring with
laughter.31
The Trials
The Allies were now finalising the procedure for the war-crimes trials
that were to be held in Nuremberg. On 8 August the ‘London Statute’ was
drawn up and signed by Justice Jackson from the United States, the future
Lord Chancellor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe from Britain, Professor Gros from
France and General Nikitchenko from the Soviet Union. (Nikitchenko
started out as prosecutor and later served as a hanging judge.) It was hardly
difficult to tear holes in the text: there were four different powers with four
different ideas of law. One of the nations prosecuting was as totalitarian as
Nazi Germany had been. There was little hope for the defendants: the
prosecution had all the advantages, the defence all the disadvantages; and
there was to be no questioning of the competence of the tribunal. Article 6
contained the meat - the court had the right to condemn persons, either as
individuals or as members of organisations, for crimes against peace and
conspiracy to wage war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. These
had not, of course, been crimes when they were committed, nor were any of
the prosecuting powers immune from accusations of this sort - particularly
Soviet Russia. When the defendants brought this up the response of the
court’s president Lord Justice Lawrence was to say, ‘We are not interested
in what the Allies may have done.’32 Article 9 ruled that carrying out orders
was not an excuse; evidence of atrocity by a member of an organisation
would be taken as evidence of the criminal nature of the organisation. The
defendants at Nuremberg were mostly intelligent men, and there was a fair
smattering of jurists among them. Naturally they protested, but it was
cogently impressed upon them that they might just as easily have been put
up against a wall.
Although the Allies had plenty of time to prepare their cases, a lot of
their accusations proved groundless, or they were obliged to let a major
criminal go free for want of evidence. Papen was still falsely accused of
being a member of the Party even when the Americans were in possession
of the full Nazi Party membership archive. The case against him was that he
had conspired to wage aggressive war, which was a difficult one to prove
given that he was nowhere near the inner circle of the regime, and came
within inches of losing his life during the 1934 Röhm Putsch, the so-called
Night of the Long Knives. His real crime was folly - believing that Hitler
could be contained. He was by no means alone in this.
Papen and his friend Horthy had not yet understood the new post-war
world. Horthy composed a letter to Churchill pleading for the maintenance
of a ‘big’ Hungary with access to the sea as a bulwark against Bolshevism.
There was no reply. In August the inhabitants of the annexe were
transferred to a wing of the Grand Hotel. Horthy was sent away. Papen now
found himself together with the major Nazis, and reflected on how different
they looked in their shabby beltless uniforms and worn-out laceless shoes to
the last time he had seen them all strutting about at a rally in Nuremberg in
1937. Nuremberg was also where they were now heading. The party was
taken to Luxembourg aerodrome.
Göring was housed in a proper prison cell in the courthouse now, as
opposed to a maid’s room in Mondorf. He was watched at all hours of the
day. Humiliations were arranged for him, such as a formal discharge from
the German armed forces (arranged by the Americans), which had the effect
of bringing on a minor heart attack. The Allies turned up the heat during the
interrogations, but Göring was given a defence lawyer in Otto Stahmer
from a short list of jurists who had managed to keep their noses relatively
clean during the Third Reich. It should be added that few of them were
entirely clean: the list contained 206 names, of whom 136 had been Pgs and
10 were former members of the SS. One, Rudolf Dix, had been president of
the Nazi bar association; another, Ernst Aschenbach, had been an expert in
deportation attached to the Paris embassy.33 Stahmer was a patent lawyer.
Papen chose a Breslau lawyer called Kubuschok, with Papen’s own son
acting as his junior. Speer made a wise choice in Hans Flächsner, a
diminutive Berliner who gave him useful advice, telling him not to over-
dramatise his role in the Third Reich and pointing out that the Allies had
already decided he was only a minor criminal and that he was not to put on
the airs of a major one. Speer was probably right in believing he owed a
deal of his salvation to Flächsner. Being contrite, or undergoing religious
conversion, availed the prisoners little. Both Frank and Seyss-Inquart
showed contrition. Both were hanged.34
To Papen’s horror he chanced upon Horthy again on one of his weekly
trips to the showers. Papen was beginning to learn something of the charges
against him: he had instituted the terrible People’s Courts, which had been
set up after the acquittal of the Bulgarian communist Dimitrov. It was not a
charge that was likely to stick. The Americans were understandably baffled
that Papen had continued to serve the Nazis after the Röhm Putsch, when
his speechwriters were murdered for writing an anti-Nazi speech for him.35
Another who claimed that he had no idea why he was there was Dönitz.
Hitler’s successor stressed that it was not for generals to take decisions to
go to war, and had he refused to carry out his orders ‘he would have
received the heaviest punishment’. He was also charged with using
concentration-camp inmates as workers in his dockyards.36 The charge was
pretty pharisaic, given that the Allies had millions of POWs working as
slaves for them at the time of the trial.
John Dos Passos arrived in Nuremberg on 19 November 1945 to cover
the trials. The arrangements in the courthouse were compact. For the
spectators and journalists the facilities were good, and they had their own
post office and a smart snack bar.37 The chief defendants were housed in the
basement and brought up in a lift. Then it was just a few steps down the
corridor to the courtroom.38 There was a consolation for Göring, at last: at
Nuremberg he regained his supremacy. He was number one on the list,
meaning that he was the first into the dock with a seat on the front bench at
the extreme right facing the judges. The hated Bormann - tried in absentia -
was down at number nineteen and Speer at twenty-two. Dönitz had been
positioned at a measly fourteen.
 His neighbour in the dock was Rudolf Hess, who was flown from
England to Nuremberg on 8 October. After his mysterious flight in May
1941, Hess had been incarcerated in Britain. He was now brought home for
the gathering of the clans. The frugality of prison life in Nuremberg came as
a shock to him after the relative comfort of his confinement in Britain. He
was pretending to have lost his memory and stared stonily at everyone who
tried to remind him of details of his distinguished past. He later announced
that he had been acting all along: ‘Good wasn’t I? I really surprised
everyone, don’t you think?’ he asked his fellow inmates. Despite being
officially compos mentis Hess still paid no attention to the court. He would
not wear the headphones, but read books and chatted throughout the
proceedings.39
As Hess could not be indicted for most of the juicier atrocities
committed by the regime (which had taken place while he was in British
captivity), he was given the Streicher treatment and tried for conspiracy
against peace and humanity - a charge concocted for Nazi leaders who were
earmarked for long detention or execution, and who had been essentially
condemned before they entered the dock. His crimes were not great by
comparison to some: he was tangentially involved in the drafting of the
antisemitic Nuremberg Laws and with the invasion of Poland. Göring
laughed off many of the Allied accusations. He swiftly dealt with an
attempt to foist responsibility for the Reichstag Fire on him, and the
interrogator, Kempner, did not raise the matter again. Göring might well
have begun to waver when he learned that the Americans had arrested his
wife Emmy in October and put his daughter Edda in an orphanage
(although she was later allowed to join her mother in Straubing Prison).
Emmy was not a political figure. She and Edda were eventually released
when the Americans realised that this sort of Sippenhaft - a method
favoured by the Nazis - would not make it easier to justify their cases
before the courts.
Göring stood his ground, however. He had a positive attitude towards
life and for the time being was not tempted to follow the examples of some
others: Ley managed to strangle himself with the hem of a wet towel
attached to a lavatory cistern, and the mass-murderer Dr Leonardo Conti
also killed himself, leaving a note saying he had lied under oath to cover up
his knowledge of medical experiments.40 Field Marshal Werner von
Blomberg died of a heart attack in March 1946.eb In 1948, General Johannes
Blaskowitz committed suicide by jumping from the third storey of the
prison block.ec
In all this gloom Göring might have taken heart at the news that his IQ
was placed third among the remaining Nazi prisoners, exceeded only by
Schacht and Seyss-Inquart.41ed The time of surveys ceased, however, when
on 19 October 1945 Göring and the others were served their indictments by
none other than Major Airey Neave, a British intelligence officer who had
successfully escaped from Colditz and who would later become a member
of Mrs Thatcher’s shadow cabinet.ee German civilians took a muted interest
in the show trials. Göring may have impressed the court, but little of this
seeped out to the German population. Such reports as there were of the
trials were heavily censored. The radio broadcasts delivered by a Gaston
Oulman every night were confined to the more sensational aspects of the
prosecution’s case.42 In Berlin, Ruth Friedrich thought the indictments had
little relevance to ‘good Germans’ but she approved, as it gave heart to the
Allies. ‘Not so much for us, but for the farmer in Oklahoma, who wants to
make sense of his son’s missing leg.’43
Papen had finally learned that he was charged with conspiracy to wage
war. Dos Passos, who arrived on the day before the trials were to start,
heard an address from Colonel Andrus, in which he regretted to inform the
press that the former SD chief Kaltenbrunner was ill and would miss the
first day. He seemed disappointed that he had not managed to keep all of
them fighting fit for the première. Frick was paralysed in his left wrist after
a suicide attempt, but Göring was in better health than he’d been in twenty
years, having lost weight and been weaned off drug addiction.44 The trial of
the major war criminals began at 10 a.m. on 20 November. The president of
the court Lord Justice Lawrence was assisted by Francis Biddle from the
US, and his deputy John J. Parker. From France came Professor Henri
Donnedieu de Vabres, who scribbled away silently throughout the trial
without ever uttering a word. The Germans had a particular contempt for
General Nikitchenko, the one judge who disdained the use of the gown, and
wore his military uniform throughout: ‘We knew what his verdict would be,
with or without a trial.’45
Dos Passos sized up the prisoners in the dock: Göring looked like a
‘leaky balloon’, ‘a fat man who has lost a good deal of weight’. Ribbentrop
was a ‘defaulting bank cashier’, Schacht, ‘an angry walrus’. The former
head of the Luftwaffe was still ‘the master of ceremonies . . . Nero must
have had a face like that’; while Hess paid ‘no attention to anything’.46
The charges were read out and Jackson made a speech in which he
offered the estimate that 5.7 million Jews had lost their lives as a result of
Nazi orders. Most of the defendants claimed they knew nothing of this.
Schacht advanced the ingenious argument that he had been helping the Jews
to emigrate by framing legislation that would rob them; Streicher claimed to
be a Zionist, which, in a way, he was.47 During the recess Göring was asked
who had issued those orders. Göring replied, ‘Himmler, I suppose.’48 The
camps came back to haunt them: films were shown of their victims. The
psychiatrists Kelly and Gilbert took notes as the defendants watched scenes
of civilians being burned in a barn. Hess was captivated, others tried to look
away; Frank choked back tears; Funk actually shed some at the sight of the
crematorium ovens. When Hess muttered disbelief, Göring told him to shut
up.49
Göring indulged in a few jokes. There was a strong Jewish presence at
Nuremberg in the form of jurists attached to the army, translators and
interpreters. At one stage he spotted a group of Jews in the public gallery
and whispered: ‘Look at them, nobody can say we have exterminated them
all!’50 He was outraged by the testimony of Lahousen, the Austrian Abwehr
chief, who spoke on 30 November, giving details of the plans to kill Hitler.
Göring blurted out, ‘That’s one we have forgotten to knock off after 20 July
1944.’51 The leading Nazis could not shake off the accusations levelled
against them for the very reason that they had been slack about destroying
the evidence - too many papers had lain around at the end of the Thousand-
Year Reich. The other problem was the officials and SS men who were
prepared to give evidence against them. Turning ‘king’s evidence’ for the
prosecution was a way of saving your life for the time being. Some of the
worst criminals even stayed out of prison while they made themselves
available to the courts.52
The apparently honest statements of the state secretaries Bühler and
Steengracht were particularly damning, as well as those of the SS men
Ohlendorf, Wisliceny, Höttl, Höss and Pohl. One man who outraged all the
main defendants was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, possibly the most
brutal of the police generals, and one who was perfectly aware of the crimes
he was committing.53 He may have just been buying a sort of freedom (he
died in a prison hospital in Munich in 1972). Before 1949 he appeared as a
prosecution witness no fewer than twenty times, earning Göring’s loud
condemnation as a ‘Schweinehund!’
That opening day was also notable for the surprise announcement from
Hess that he wished to take responsibility for his actions, and that he had
never lost his memory, he had been pretending all along. Hess was a puzzle
even to his own colleagues. Papen confessed that he didn’t know if he were
sane or not. He thought he had been compos mentis at the time of the flight
to Britain. During the trial he read novels by the Bavarian writer Ganghofer.
Göring, with support from his old enemy Ribbentrop and from Rosenberg,
persisted in his claim that the court had no authority and that the British and
Americans were equally guilty of infringing international law. He was
occasionally seen plotting with Hess. Like the other prisoners, he gave
Streicher a wide berth. He was contemptuous of Hans Frank, who had been
smitten with religion since his incarceration and was much given to tears -
he had been behind the brutal treatment of the Poles. Göring claimed to be
shocked by what he now learned of the camps, and declared that the story
was incredible. But we also know that he tried to save people from the
camps, so it was pretty clear he knew that something nasty went on there.54
Göring could not claim so easily that he had had no knowledge of the
killings that took place on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. It had
been chiefly his party. He dismissed Röhm, however, as a ‘dirty
homosexual swine’ and justified himself by saying it was them or him. As
Speer and others sought to atone for their roles in the mass murders, or
claimed a dubious role in opposition, or - like Paulus - chose to implicate
Hitler and his gang in monstrous crimes, Göring started to talk about
honour. He didn’t care whether he lived or died, but he was not going to
grovel before the court. He urged the generals to be equally resolute. He
said they were all going to be treated as martyrs before too long, and their
bodies set up in mausolea like Napoleon’s.
When the defendants were shown a Soviet film of German atrocities,
Göring yawned and scoffed. With a little justification he pointed out that the
Russians did not necessarily occupy the moral high ground. As it turns out,
he was right to be scornful: the Soviet film showed images of Katyn, and
the mortal remains of a large element of the Polish officer corps, murdered
not by the Germans but by the NKVD. (The massacre was part of the Soviet
indictment.) He was, nonetheless, appalled by the images he had seen.55
 The defendants all took the trial very differently. Jodl was calm and
soldierly, and awaited his fate. Seyss-Inquart thought he would be acquitted,
and told Viennese stories. The one thing that disturbed him was the
knowledge that Hitler had appointed him in his will to replace Ribbentrop.
Frank admitted his guilt and spent his time in meditation. He, Papen, Seyss-
Inquart and Kaltenbrunner were regular in their attendance at Mass.
Ribbentrop continued to write long letters in self-justification; Rosenberg
made pencil-sketches of the witnesses; Streicher let out cries and screams
during the night. To the end he maintained that the trial was the triumph of
world Jewry.56 Of the service chiefs Keitel remained his pompous self,
pleading not guilty to the indictment, but Dönitz and Raeder - who had been
turned over by the Soviet authorities in a rare gesture of cooperation -
conducted themselves with dignity, as did Neurath.57
The prosecution opened its case against Hess on 7 February 1946.
Göring took the stand at last on 13 March, and remained in the dock until
the 22nd. He had waited five months for his moment. He put on a fine
performance and refused either to grovel before the court or to deny his role
in the ‘movement’. He gaily quoted Winston Churchill’s line, ‘In the
struggle for life and death there is, in the end, no legality.’58 He took
responsibility for everything he could, thereby removing much of the case
against Papen, for example, when he claimed that the Anschluss had been
his show.59 Asked about some aspect of mobilisation, Göring answered that
the Americans had so far kept quiet about their own strategic plans. The
Americans now began to doubt the wisdom of this sort of public trial.
Göring was in danger of becoming a hero again. Even the American press
reported. ‘Göring wins first round.’60
There was a reluctance among the Allies to produce witnesses for the
defence, and it took them a while to locate Göring’s chief of staff, Koller,
even though he was in British captivity.61 The British proved more
successful at badgering Göring than the Americans had been. Under Sir
David Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination he began to sweat. The British
case hinged on the shooting of the fifty airmen after the so-called Great
Escape - a terrible crime and a contravention of the Geneva Convention, but
one that looks peripheral now compared to others perpetrated by the Nazis.
They had been shot on Emmy’s birthday. Göring may well have known
nothing about it, but that hardly absolved the Luftwaffe chief of the ultimate
responsibility for the crime.62
One of the Nazis who dramatically turned his coat at Nuremberg was
Frank, the governor of the Polish General Gouvernement. Many of the most
repulsive acts of grisly murder and cruelty had occurred on his beat, even if
it was not necessarily true that the murderers were in any way responsible
to him. When asked if he had participated, however, he replied with a clear
‘Yes’. It had been the testimony of Höss, he said, that had made him want to
take the responsibility on to himself: ‘My conscience does not allow me to
throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never
installed a concentration camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such
camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally laid that dreadful responsibility on his
people, then it is mine too, for we have fought Jewry for years; and we have
indulged the most terrible utterances - my own diary bears witness against
me . . . A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not
have been erased.’63
The atrocities in the concentration camps nettled even the most
obstinate Nazis. After the camp commandant Rudolf Höss had given his
testimony Göring turned to Raeder and Jodl and said, ‘If only there weren’t
this damned Auschwitz! Himmler got us into that mess. If it weren’t for
Auschwitz we could put up a proper defence. The way it is our chances are
blocked. Whenever our names are mentioned, everybody thinks of nothing
but Auschwitz or Treblinka. It’s like a reflex.’64
Some of Göring’s greatest crimes were not even mentioned in the
indictment. Nowhere did the Allies make mention of the bombing of
Warsaw, Rotterdam, London or Coventry. The Soviets, who had not
possessed the capacity to bomb Germany with the same ferocity as the
Anglo-Americans, had wanted to bring the matter up, but it was vetoed by
the West. For good reason, thought Speer: ‘The ruins around the courthouse
demonstrate all too plainly how cruelly and effectively the Western Allies
on their part extended the war to non-combatants.’65
Göring addressed the court for the last time on 31 August 1946. He
reiterated the precept of nulla poena sine lege and declared that the German
people were ignorant of crime and ‘free from blame’. He would expiate
their guilt with his martyrdom.66 Less dramatically perhaps, he reminded the
court of his efforts to negotiate a peace in 1939 - behind Hitler’s back. More
and more was leaking out from the courts. It was not just the Germans who
were shocked. In Bendorf in the Rhineland, Elena Skrjabina thought the
whole process hypocritical, and the bench’s impartiality compromised by
the judges from her own land. On 1 September she wrote:
Recently the Nuremberg trials have been creating great interest.
Now they are over. The accused have been most severely punished and
rightly so. However, who were the judges? When I think that the most
savage measures of punishment were being demanded by the
representatives of the Soviet Union, I cannot help but feel oppressed
by the injustice of it all. Indeed, the Soviet Authorities have destroyed
and are right now destroying millions of their own people for nothing
whatsoever. No other country in the world has so many jails and
camps.67
The French academic Robert d’Harcourt had no reason to love the
Germans, having had two sons pass through Buchenwald. He was even
harder hitting in his accusation of hypocrisy: the Germans ‘are not angry
with the fliers who destroyed their towns today, it is the judges. By their
attempts to forcibly convert them the Allies have lost most of the moral
high ground that they had obtained through victory. To take on the role of
Solomon presupposes a moral qualification. It is this moral authority that
the vanquished no longer recognise in the victors.’68
The summing up began on 30 September. The judges rehearsed the
entire history of the Third Reich, giving the impression that the trial was
entirely political. It was Lord Justice Lawrence who read out the sentences:
his speech lasted a day and a half. The defendants slept ill that night.
Lawrence began with Göring, who was found guilty on all four counts and
sentenced to death on 1 October. Apart from Hess - who was given life -
similar sentences were meted out to those seated on the front bench until the
judge reached Schacht. Göring flinched when Schacht was acquitted, then
slammed down the earphones in disgust. Hess was not wearing his
earphones and later told Speer that he had assumed he had been awarded
the death penalty, but he had not bothered to listen.69 In the back row there
were custodial sentences for Dönitz and Raeder, then came Papen, who was
also acquitted. In Berlin 25,000 workers downed tools in protest when they
heard the news about Papen.70 The Russians still insisted he was an
important Nazi.
Göring’s counsel entered a plea in mitigation, again mentioning his
efforts to maintain peace in 1939 - moves that must have been known to the
British government at least. The British had no desire to modify the
sentence, and the government issued an instruction to Sir Sholto Douglas in
Berlin that such a thing would not be politically expedient. As it was, the
Soviet judge, Nikitchenko, had called for the three acquitted men, Schacht,
Papen and Goebbel’s deputy propaganda chief Hans Fritzsche, to be
convicted, and wanted the death sentence for Hess.71 Schacht had been
liberated because his role in the expropriation of the Jews was a pre-war
internal matter, but Streicher had been sacked as Gauleiter of Franconia in
1940 and banned from public speaking two years before. Fritzsche believed
he had been tried because Goebbels was not around to take the rap.
After the sentences those on ‘death row’ were creamed off - Göring,
Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Streicher, Sauckel, Frick, Rosenberg, Seyss-
Inquart, Frank and Kaltenbrunner. The cellar of the courthouse emptied,
leaving the condemned men to themselves. The seven men who were
eventually to be transferred to Spandau Prison in the British Sector of
Berlin were provided with new cells upstairs: Hess, the economics minister
and Reichsbank chief Walter Funk, the Grand Admirals Dönitz and Raeder,
the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, the former foreign minister
and ‘protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia Constantin von Neurath and Speer.
They had been given sentences ranging from ten years to life.
Göring cheated the executioners by taking cyanide from a phial he had
managed to conceal from his guards. One of the reasons he gave for his
choice of end in the note he left in his cell was the Allied decision to film
the deaths of their prisoners. The gallows equipment arrived at Nuremberg
on the night of 13 October. The next day hammering could be heard from
the gymnasium, and the slave-driver Fritz Sauckel had begun to scream. In
the absence of Göring, the other Nazis went to their deaths at the appointed
hour on the 16th. Ribbentrop was now the leader. The hangman botched the
execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty
minutes before he expired. The others died as planned.ef Speer could hear
them being collected from their cells: ‘scraps of phrases, scraping of boots,
and reverberating footsteps slowly fading away’. When Streicher’s name
was called, someone cried, ‘Bravo, Streicher!’ Speer thought it was Hess.
As they went to their deaths, the others shouted words of defiance. Keitel’s
last utterance was ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland über alles’ (All for
Germany, Germany above all else). Ribbentrop, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart said
something similar. Streicher chanted, ‘Heil Hitler! This is the Purim
Festivaleg of 1946!’72 The bodies were photographed. On 16 October they
were taken to a house at 25 Heimannstrasse in Munich-Solln which the
Americans had been using as a mortuary. They were inspected by Allied
teams before they were cremated. The ashes were scattered into the
Conwentzbach seventy-five metres downhill from the house - a muddy,
Bavarian ditch. The cremated were entered in the books under false names:
Hermann Göring was Georg Munger, and the scourge of the Jews, Julius
Streicher, received the name of Abraham Goldberg.73
The next morning the seven men they left behind to serve out their
sentences were called to clean out the cells. Speer observed the remains of
the last meal in their mess tins. Papers and blankets were strewn about.
Only in Jodl’s cell was everything in apple-pie order, the blankets neatly
folded. On Seyss’s wall he noted that the former Austrian chancellor had
put a cross on the calendar for the 16th, the day of his death. In the
afternoon Speer, Schirach and Hess were handed brooms and mops and sent
into the gym where the men had been hanged. The scaffold had already
been taken down, but - spotting a mark on the floor he took to be a
bloodstain - Hess stood to attention and raised his arm in a Nazi salute.74

OceanofPDF.com
 17
The Little Fish
A Prosecutor cannot also be a judge . . . Justice is
by its nature light, which also renders the shadows
starker. The less passion is reflected in its source, the
clearer the crime emerges in its hideousness.
Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 50, 51

Lesser Nuremberg Trials

The Allies put a brave face on it, but the International Military Tribunal
had not been deemed a success and it was put in mothballs. Robert Jackson
was ‘thoroughly disenchanted’ with the trials. He had particularly disliked
the methods of the Soviets. The Allies had in fact taken stock of the
criticisms levelled at the trials. The presence of a Russian judge on the
bench (and a general rather than a jurist) had been an embarrassment. It was
decided that the Allies should try their own Nazis in their own zones. That
way the ideological differences between the Allies would be less
immediately obvious. Jackson had recommended to Truman that any more
international trials of this nature would have to be held in Berlin. This never
happened, of course.1 Nuremberg would go on, but as a solely American
jurisdiction. After the first eleven victims had been despatched, the cells
filled up with new inmates who were to pass before the tribunal.
On 8 September 1947, while the Krupp and ‘Stormtrooper’ trials were
in full swing, Clay tried to whittle down the number of cases before the
Nuremberg court. He planned just six more: the big six banks; the Press and
Propaganda Office; the Foreign Office; those members of the military
leadership who had violated the rules of international warfare; the military
leaders responsible for the POWs; and the directors of the Hermann-
Göring-Werke. He could see no possibility of having them all and thought
about running some of them together. He was inclined to drop the
Hermann-Göring-Werke case, possibly the Press and Propaganda trial as
well.2
When the final decisions were made, 185 men were arraigned before a
dozen tribunals. First was the trial of the medical doctors, which resulted in
seven death sentences; next that of Field Marshal Milch, who was tried in
solitary splendour for directing slave labour and sent down for fifteen years.
The third trial judged the Nazi judiciary; the fourth Oswald Pohl and the
concentration-camp hierarchy. Pohl swung, but two other death sentences
were commuted. Next in line were the industrialists from the Flick Group,
followed by trial six: the senior administration of IG Farben. The next in the
dock were the generals who had fought the battles in the south-east. Field
Marshal List received a life tariff. The RuSHA (Race and Resettlement
Office) were trial eight. No death sentences were handed out, but RuSHA
chief Richard Hildebrandt was shipped over to the Poles. Ohlendorf and the
other Einsatzgruppen (death squad) leaders were trial nine. Five men were
executed, one by the Belgians. Nine death sentences were commuted. The
tenth arraigned the twenty-three directors of Krupps. Alfried Krupp
received twelve years. The eleventh judged members of the German
Foreign Office and other officials - the Wilhelmstrasse case. The sentences
were quite haywire, with Ernst von Weizsäcker receiving a seven-year tariff
(later reduced to five) and a man who condemned thousands to death in
Auschwitz, like Edmund Veesenmayer, receiving twenty years (reduced to
ten). The last trial was for the generals who had invaded Russia. There were
no spectacular sentences, nor were they handed over to the Russians.3
Speer and the rest of the seven were still carrying out their menial duties
in Nuremberg. The architect was able to offer a smile to Alfried Krupp one
day, and on another occasion he saw the Alsatian surgeon Karl Brandt. He
had interceded on Brandt’s behalf when Hitler had had him condemned to
death for sending his wife and child out of Berlin. Brandt gave Speer a sad
wave. Speer claimed that he had not known that Brandt had been in charge
of the Euthanasia Programme and had initiated the experiments on human
beings in the concentration camps.4 When the SS leadership arrived, Speer
observed, ‘These are all candidates for death row.’5
Like many other prisoners, Speer was called upon to give evidence at
the trials of his former colleagues. Field Marshal Milch had been in charge
of armaments for the Luftwaffe, and had been closely allied to Speer. He
had requested labour from Speer, including concentration-camp inmates.
Speer’s use of slaves had been an important part of the indictment against
him. He permitted himself a philosophic reflection in the secret journals he
was penning at the time: ‘Of course all these trials are judgements by the
victors on the defeated. In various ways I keep hearing that German
prisoners of war, contrary to law, are also being put to forced labour in
armaments and supply bases. Who here is the judge?’6
 The Americans were insistent on the trial of the industrialists. The old
paterfamilias, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, had bequeathed his firm to
his son Alfried in November 1943 and gone into retirement. Before he did
so, he had Hitler enact a ‘Lex Krupp’ imposing primogeniture in violation
of the laws of Weimar, which were still in force in Hitler’s Germany.7 As it
was eventually decided that Gustav was too ill too stand trial, the major
charges were heaped on Alfried, who had been taken prisoner when the
Americans went into Essen on 10 April 1945. Alfried suffered the usual
series of camps before being taken to the Nuremberg courthouse. After his
arrest American soldiers helped themselves to souvenirs at the Villa Hügel -
typewriters, a portrait of Hitler, and a model cannon.8 When the British
replaced the Americans in Essen they set about arresting the other directors:
they wanted to make an example of Krupps along with Flick and IG Farben
as ‘Samson’s hair’ - the symbol of Germany’s industrial might.9 The idea of
making Alfried responsible for his father’s crimes came from the French.
The Americans got cold feet about this and Gustav received a seat in the
dock at the main trial, which he was never to occupy. He died in 1951.
The trial of the generals who had led the campaign in the Balkans was
considered a watershed. For the first time the second tier, the generals who
had acted on Hitler’s orders, became responsible for massacres. The
German advocates made a brave effort to prove that the taking and shooting
of hostages as reprisals for acts committed by partisans or guerrillas was
permitted in the British, American and French military manuals; and they
pointed out that a similar charge had been controversial in the Kesselring
trial, which the British held in Venice, and that the Manchester Guardian
had thundered, ‘This is not justice as we know it.’eh They accused the
British military of sentencing a man to death for being a figurehead.10
Cross-examined, List pleaded a hard fight against non-regular forces. It was
a Balkan war, ‘harsh measures’ needed to be taken against partisans who
obeyed no laws, who fought ‘Balkan-style, treacherous and atrocious . . .’ It
did List no good.11 Tito had been on the Allies’ side.
The US Supreme Court had refused to grant leave of absence to its
members to serve in Germany, and the three judges in the Krupp case were
a member of the Tennessee Appeal Court, a member of the Supreme Court
of Connecticut, and another from the Supreme Court in Seattle. This was a
reasonable showing. There was resistance to using elected judges,
particularly from Clay. Non-professional jurists would lead to further
criticism of the trials. Clay also resisted the idea of sending out a number of
black attorneys to work at Nuremberg - not because he objected to them per
se, but because Germany did not have a black population. 12
Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach had already suffered eighteen
months of detention before the trial began, and he maintained a dignified
silence throughout. An empty chair had represented his senile father at the
international trial. Now it was his turn to be judged - in loco parentis. Thirty
German lawyers had been engaged to defend the directors during the eleven
months of the trial. More than 200 witnesses were called. The minutes run
to 13,454 pages.13 The directors were indicted for crimes against humanity,
pillage, appropriation, spoliation and exploitation. They were also accused
of participating in atrocities and being complicit in deportation,
imprisonment, and racial and religious persecution. A further charge laid
against them was planning aggressive war, despite the fact that only two of
them - Alfried and Ewald Loeser - had been on their boards at the time.
Evidence that would have been inadmissible in an American court was
accepted at Nuremberg. Some of it had as little value as common gossip.
The directors answered for any act performed by any one of a quarter of a
million employees.
Of course Krupps was up to its neck in the activities of the state. It
profited from German expansion in all directions and took over the running
of sequestered firms in France and Holland. It used armies of slave-
labourers who were treated with sickening cruelty. For this reason the
sentences were severe: Alfried was sent down for twelve years, to be spent
in Landsberg Prison. The other directors received similar tariffs. In addition
to this Alfried was relieved of all his personal property. He was the only
man tried at Nuremberg to receive this punishment. The president of the
court thought the decision ran counter to the law and dissented.14 The Krupp
case showed up many of the weaknesses of the Allied jurisdiction: Alfried
had wanted to use an American lawyer, but that was not permitted. He had
then decided not to defend himself, but that was also not allowed. The
German lawyers demanded a conference room, but this was not granted
either. When they left the court in protest, they were brought back by force
and six of them were arrested for contempt.15
The jurists’ trial opened in March 1947. Some of the worst Nazi lawyers
had been spared by premature death. Among them was the president of the
People’s Court, Roland Freisler, who had been crushed under a wooden
beam during an Allied raid on Berlin in February 1945. Hans Frank had
been executed by the Poles. A large number of jurists had killed themselves
as they saw the regime fall. One of these was the minister of justice, Otto-
Georg Thierack. In all, sixteen defendants stood trial; including the three
state secretaries Franz Schlegelberger, Curt Rothenberger and Herbert
Klemm. The others were officials from the People’s Court. The judges
examined 2,093 exhibits and questioned 138 witnesses. They reached their
verdict in December 1947. They have been praised for their impartial and
balanced approach: ‘If anything, the judgment erred on the side of
caution.’16 Some of the German jurists were exonerated. Four life sentences
were handed down.
The Wilhelmstrasse trial arraigned twenty-one senior civil servants.
There was a slight modification of the London Statute and of Control
Council Law 10 of 20 December 1945, in that the court finally recognised
the principal of nullum crimen sine lege, if only in international law, which
was a fairly nebulous jurisdiction.17 The names included Ernst von
Weizsäcker, Wilhelm Keppler, Ernst Bohle, Ernst Woermann, Karl Ritter,
Otto von Erdmannsdorff, Edmund Veesenmayer, Hans Lammers, Wilhelm
Stuckart, Walter Darré, Otto Meissner, Otto Dietrich, Gottlob Berger,
Walther Schellenberg, Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland, Schwerin
von Krosigk, Paul Körner and Paul Pleiger. It was a hotchpotch of Nazi and
non-Nazi diplomats and civil servants which included some who had acted
counter to the interests of the regime, some who had simply toed the line -
like Schwerin von Krosigk - and murderers like Veesenmayer. Veesenmayer
had been allowed to continue at liberty while he gave evidence against his
former colleagues. He had freely surrendered to the Allies, but he continued
to see them as his enemies: ‘I am a criminal who must be exterminated.’
But he was not executed, despite his role in the deportation of Hungary’s
Jews. He was released from Landsberg Prison in 1951.
In the case against the diplomats, four old-school examples
(Weizsäcker, Woermann, Erdmannsdorff and Ritter) were flanked by the
same number of Nazi outsiders (Steengracht, Keppler, Bohle and
Veesenmayer). As Margret Boveri knew, it was not always possible to see
them as wholly black or wholly white. Weizsäcker stuck his neck out for a
few Jews here and there; Steengracht, his pure Nazi successor, managed (by
adding a zero to the figure of 400 Hungarian Jews who had been given
permission to travel to Sweden) to save a further 3,600.18
 The case for the prosecution ran to 39,000 pages of which the British
evidence alone amounted to 28,000 pages. The bundle was made up of
3,400 documents. The main arguments against the defendants dealt with
crimes against humanity, the deportation of the Jews and their murder in
concentration and annihilation camps.19 Ernst von Weizsäcker is now
acknowledged to have been one of the first and most important opponents
to the regime operating in the German Foreign Office, but as state secretary
he had been singularly powerless to prevent or alleviate the tragedy of those
years. His own son Richard is clear on this: ‘from documents and spoken
report he knew more than enough to reach his own decisions’.20 The state
secretary saw it as his role, to the extent of his powers, to prevent the
outbreak of the war, and, once he had failed there, to limit its effect by
averting the war against the Soviet Union. We now know much more about
this than we knew then. We know, for example, that Weizsäcker was a party
to the despatch of Adam von Trott first to Britain and later to the United
States, to explain the position of the German opposition. Indeed Ribbentrop
himself had said that the only reason that Weizsäcker was not arraigned
before Roland Freisler and the People’s Court was that on 20 July 1944 he
was already safe behind Allied lines, as ambassador to the Vatican.
Once in the Vatican, Weizsäcker had been free to protect Jews from the
maniacal purge that was put into action after Italy went over to the Allies.
The prioress of the nunnery of Our Lady in Sion attested to the fact that he
had directed 185 Jews to her door and issued her with a letter that forbade
the SS from searching the premises.21 The question arose whether
Weizsäcker was actually a traitor, in that he had warned the British
ambassador, Nevile Henderson, that Germany was about to sign a pact with
Russia in August 1939. Was he thereby willing defeat on his own country
and the death of his country’s own soldiers? Weizsäcker was categorical: ‘I
wanted peace without Hitler, but not a defeat that would lead to Hitler’s
ejection.’22
The indictment, however, accused Weizsäcker of supporting Hitler’s
war policy and making it possible, which his son describes as the ‘absolute
and grotesque opposite of the truth’. On the other hand the defence case
was not easy, as the witnesses were foreign statesmen, who were not always
easy to subpoena. The British did much to sabotage his case by putting
pressure on diplomats and former ministers to stay clear and reveal nothing
of Weizsäcker’s role in the various plots of 1938 and 1939. One exception,
however, was Lord Halifax, who gave a ‘helpful and honest testimony’ for
the state secretary.23 Among the more damning accusations brought to bear
in the case was the contention that Weizsäcker had allowed himself to utter
the Nazi slogan ‘Deutschland erwache!’ (Germany awake!) at the funeral in
Paris of Ernst vom Rath, the German diplomat murdered in 1938 by the Jew
Herschel Grynspann. Vom Rath’s death was used as a pretext to launch the
Reichskristallnacht on 9 November that year. Eyewitnesses maintained he
had done no such thing. As the coffin was despatched to Germany
Weizsäcker had actually said ‘Deutschland erwartet Dich!’ (Germany is
waiting for you!), which was nothing less than the truth.24
Richard von Weizsäcker managed to have himself attached to the
defence team, despite the fact that he had yet to be called to the bar. The
greatest difficulty he had with the Allied jurists in Nuremberg was that they
were still infected with ‘Vansittartism’ and had yet to learn the real nature
of the Third Reich. Americans also had a particular problem with
diplomatic language, and the double meanings with which men such as
Weizsäcker sought to conceal the real sense from the Party authorities, as
their internal memoranda show.25
The American prosecutor was the former Prussian civil servant Robert
Kempner. He had worked closely with Carl Schmitt, who was also held as a
prisoner in Nuremberg. On Kempner’s authority Schmitt was released in
May 1947. Others were also released from their more severe punishments
once they had come to an understanding with Kempner.26 Such methods did
not work with Weizsäcker. He shunned the quid pro quo and relapsed into
an injured silence. The case lasted eight months. On 13 April 1949
Weizsäcker was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, which was later
commuted to five as already noted. One of the three judges dissented and
said he should be freed. John McCloy thought so too. In the autumn of the
following year he released the former state secretary as his first response to
the Nuremberg judgments
Even after three of the Einsatzgruppe commanders had been condemned
to death at Nuremberg in 1947, they managed to stave off execution by
giving evidence at the trials of their peers. Writing after his unsuccessful
attempt to defend Field Marshal von Manstein, Reginald Paget wondered
whether Otto Ohlendorf had actually been telling the truth to Himmler.
How had he managed to kill so many Jews with such limited resources?
Ohlendorf was credited (in a Nazi sense) with having wiped out up to
90,000 Jews during his four-and-a-half-month tenure of Einsatzgruppe D.
The strength of his unit lay at around 500 men divided into five companies;
of these, 200 men served as clerks. Each company had just ten vehicles.
Otto Ohlendorf is a puzzling case. He was a Nazi humanist who, while
he was murdering Jews in huge numbers, was rebuilding schools and
hospitals for the Volga Germans. Ohlendorf described his methods at his
trial. Jews were required to register before ‘resettlement’. This was the
pretext for taking them to their deaths. Then they were ferried to a ditch
some ten kilometres outside the town and shot where as few people as
possible would witness the killings. During this time the SD were also
fighting partisans, who were active in their sectors. Paget found it incredible
that single companies of SD were able to claim that they were killing
between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews in two or three days. The maximum
number of Jews that could have been accommodated in a lorry was twenty
to thirty and each ten-kilometre journey would have taken near on two
hours to load, unload, assemble, kill and return to the town or village to fill
up again. It was claimed that the SD had killed 10,000 Jews in Simferopol,
but by Paget’s calculations the number could not have exceeded 300.
Ohlendorf claimed that he had rid the whole Crimea of its Jewish
population: ‘He was clearly a man who was prepared to say anything that
would please his employers. The Americans had found him a perfect
witness.’27 Paget thought he was lying to save his skin, telling Himmler
what he wanted to hear. In which case why did he not try to save himself at
Nuremberg? If mass slaughter was not a big element in Ohlendorf ’s
curriculum vitae after all, if - as Paget suggests - the figure of 90,000 needs
to be shortened by a nought or two, it hardly exonerates him from the
charge of mass murder, nor did he ever try to deny it himself. Indeed, he
was chillingly factual about the killing of children. Once again he took
pains to point out that the Allies had not been particularly scrupulous about
it either.28
The final trial of the Nuremberg twelve took place in 1948. This show
was reserved for the General Staff and the OKW. One of those indicted was
General Walther Warlimont, a mere pen-pusher who had been responsible
for operations and whose sin was an unquestioning loyalty to the regime.
He was accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sent down
for life. The case hinged on the two orders that infringed the laws of war:
the Commando and the Commissar Orders. Warlimont was punished
harshly because he was perceived as one of the planners, whereas Gerd von
Rundstedt (‘My Führer, whatever you order, I shall do to my last breath’)29
was able to settle in West Germany after four years in a POW camp. In
1951 Warlimont’s sentence was reduced to eighteen years. He was released
six years later.
Elsewhere
The British made a first stab at administering justice by dealing with the
culprits at Belsen. They were put on trial in the nearby town of Lüneburg.
Josef Kramer, the camp commandant, stood in the dock with forty-four
others on 17 September 1945 in a converted gymnasium at 30
Lindenstrasse. This was the first of the trials, a dress rehearsal for those that
came later where international, rather than German law would be invoked.
The defendants were accused of war crimes. It was hard to prove that they
had done more than callously neglect their charges, as there were no gas
chambers at Belsen and the prisoners had been given food, though not
nearly enough. The cases against Kramer and Dr Fritz Klein were easier to
prove, in that both had worked at Auschwitz, where they had been cogs in
the killing machine. It is interesting to record now that the indictment said
nothing about Nazi genocide nor about its specifically antisemitic character.
In the dock along with Kramer, Klein and the ‘Blonde Beastess’ Irma
Grese were a number of Polish kapos, former prisoners whose improved
status had allowed them to wallow in acts of brutality. Various lawyers in
khaki were roped in to defend the SS men and women, and did it as
diligently as they could, even describing Kramer as a scapegoat. The legal
formula of nulla poena sine lege was of course ignored, prompting
comparisons with the Nazis themselves: those indicted had not broken any
German laws as they went about their business at Belsen. Reading an
account of the trial now, it is striking how many inaccuracies were allowed
to pass and how little the British knew about the workings of the camps.
As far as Irma Grese was concerned, there was an indecent amount of
prurience expressed in the British press about her fate. She was blonde and
good looking. She had also been involved in the selections at Auschwitz,
where she had a reputation for brutality without parallel among the female
guards. The court adjourned on 16 November and delivered its verdicts
after six hours and eight minutes: eleven people, including Kramer, Klein
and Irma Grese, were condemned to death. Kramer submitted an appeal to
Montgomery, but it fell on deaf ears. Klein refused to appeal, saying that his
part in the Final Solution ‘was such that he was not fit to live’. Britain flew
in Albert Pierrepoint to carry out the executions. They died on 12
December.30
The concentration-camp trials were to continue for twenty years. The
Belsen trial was a warm-up for Nuremberg. The staff at Stutthof camp near
Danzig were also arraigned. Seventeen SS guards and five block
supervisors were executed and fifty-eight others given sentences of up to
fifteen years. The British hanged Sturmbannf ührer Max Pauly, second in
command, but after the Allies ceased to be responsible for the nemesis the
West German courts were often disgracefully lenient. Pauly’s successor,
Paul Werner Hoppe, was given a nine-year sentence. One sadistic guard
received two years from a Hamburg court, and Otto Knott, who fed the gas
chamber, was set free by a court in Tübingen.31
One of the more controversial sentences was that meted out to Field
Marshal Erich von Manstein, who had always received a good press,
particularly in Britain. Manstein, however, was in his way every bit as
blinkered as Warlimont, and would not have been described as a general
with a ‘heart’. In one of his more ridiculous moments he had stood up
before Hitler and exclaimed ‘Führer befehl! Wir folgen!’ (Führer command!
We shall obey!). Hitler had thought he was mocking him, and Manstein
later received a hefty reprimand behind closed doors, leaving Hitler’s
bunker like an admonished schoolboy. The source for the story was the SS
man Otto Günsche, who would not have been sympathetic to the stock-
Prussian general, but Manstein’s unappetising coldness and stiffness is well
attested, and his response to an overture to co-operate with the military
opposition (‘Prussian generals do not mutiny’) was as telling as it was
untrue.32
It was the British who subsequently tried Manstein. They awarded him
a heavy sentence, but he was released after only four years and at the end of
his life was an adviser to Adenauer’s government on military matters - an
indication of how seriously the war crimes tribunals were taken by West
German conservatives. The probable reason for the harshness of his
punishment was the clamour from the Soviet Union. Manstein’s charm
worked little on the Soviets, who would almost certainly have killed him.
Reginald Paget, on the other hand, thought Manstein a perfect gentle
knight, the ‘Hector’ of the Wehrmacht, and the longer he represented him, it
seems, the more he grew to like him. Paget formed a team with Sam Silkin
(who being Jewish was making a statement by taking on the case) and two
German lawyers, Drs Laternser and Leverkühn. The former had already
defended Field Marshal von Leeb before an American court and Kesselring
before a British one; the latter had worked in Canaris’s Abwehr, and had
come under suspicion himself when Canaris and his team were arrested by
the Nazis.
Once again Paget learned that you would get nowhere by citing cases of
similar atrocities carried out by Allied armies: the Allies were above
reproach. But there was a great deal more readiness on the part of the
British to socialise with the German defence team. The Americans had
treated them as pariahs.33 Once the trial began Paget was to note more
features that contributed to the miscarriage of justice. One of these was the
right to bring in photographers to snap the defendant over an extended
period at the beginning of the trial, which made it resemble Nazi justice,
and the journalists present filed stories that would have been sub judice in
an English court. As it was not a ‘real’ trial they were immune from
accusations of contempt. Another rub was the simultaneous translation. The
defendant could listen to a translation of the case as it proceeded, but the
interpreters were often not up to the task.34
Manstein was not the only important general to be omitted from the
line-up at Nuremberg. As we have seen, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring
was tried by the British in Venice for atrocities carried out under his
command there. These included the massacre of 335 Italians in the
Ardeatine Caves and another 1,087 people killed in reprisals after attacks
by partisans. Kesselring mounted an impressive defence, showing that the
SD and not he had responsibility for security. He was nonetheless sentenced
to death. The verdict was controversial enough for Churchill to intervene
with his successor, and Kesselring’s sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment. In 1952 he was released after a serious head injury.35
The IMT dry-run for the Americans was the Dachau trial in November
1945. In the dock were the commandant Martin Weiss, four SS doctors and
the seventy-four-year-old Professor Klaus Schilling, the malaria expert who
had been trying out his theories on the prisoners. There were forty people
indicted in all and the court handed down thirty-six death sentences.
General Lucien Truscott, presiding, later commuted four of these, but not
Schilling’s.36 Sepp Dietrich was the most distinguished SS general of the
war. Troops under his command were responsible for a vast number of
atrocities, particularly in the Soviet Union. At the end of the war he
surrendered his army to Patton at Krems, and was kept in a number of
camps ending up with his trial at Dachau. It was one of sixty-seven trials
held in the former flagship concentration camp which were to mete out
death sentences. The main case against him was the slaughter of between
300 and 600 American troops and 111 Belgian civilians at Malmédy, which
was carried out under orders from Jochen Peiper. The court dismissed
claims that the SS men’s confessions were extracted under torture. Peiper
behaved with dignity in the dock, and recounted some of the ways in which
the interrogators had behaved - pretending that they already had signed
confessions from the others, that his death sentence was assured, that he
would be better off saving his comrades, and so on. Peiper’s plea that
international law allowed a certain leeway with POWs in the heat of battle
if that meant that victory could be ensured was not entertained by the
court.37
On 16 July 1946 the defendants in the Malmédy trial learned of their
fates. Forty-three men were sentenced to death by hanging, including
Peiper; twenty-two more received life sentences, including Sepp Dietrich.
The prisoners were then transferred to Landsberg Prison, the very place
where their former master Adolf Hitler had penned Mein Kampf. Dietrich’s
sentence was commuted to twenty-five years in 1951, and he was released
four years later. Many of the men on death row survived. There was a
discomfort felt by many of the Americans who had been involved in the
case. The presence of so many Jews in the court, the way that the
confessions had been extracted and the fact that many of the Americans
could recall their troops carrying out similar illegal acts contrived to raise
doubts about the security of the convictions. A year later the sentences were
reviewed, with a number of the death sentences being commuted. In the
middle of 1948 there were still 150 men in Dachau on death row. Clay still
wanted to execute them. Most of them wriggled off the hook in the end. A
few months later there were ten cases on his desk from the condemned men
of Dachau: six writs of habeas corpus and four who had been granted leave
to appeal. Another ninety-five were still supposed to be hanged. On 4
March 1949 Clay was anxious to dispose of ten of the Malmédy murderers;
twelve more were still on appeal.
He did not think much of their claims to have been tortured. On 12
March he examined the appeal of Sergeant Tank Commander Bersin of the
1st SS-Panzer Regiment: ‘He was forced to spend two months on a prison
floor, beaten and kicked by the guards to the extent of losing several teeth,
carried to the dental clinic and to interrogations with a hood over his head
and grossly mistreated in an interrogation of March 20 1946 by Mr
Kirschbaum in the presence of Mr Ellowitz.’ Clay had no doubts about
Bersin’s guilt. The supposed torturers denied the charges against them.38
Whatever Clay felt, the methods used to extract confessions had discredited
the trial.39
On top of these he had nineteen death sentences from the Buchenwald
trial to ratify, including Ilse Koch - the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ - who had
managed to get herself pregnant.40 She was the wife of Karl Koch, the camp
commandant, and was renowned not only for her collection of lampshades
but also for her fondness for riding through the camp on a horse and lashing
out at the prisoners. Her case presented particular difficulties. She had left
Buchenwald in August 1943 and no one seemed to know what she had done
after that. Clay commuted her sentence, but by doing so he aroused a storm
of protest. He found a way out of ‘double jeopardy’: she could be
transferred to the German courts because there were German nationals in
Buchenwald. This stratagem worked, and she was sentenced to life
imprisonment. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.41
Dietrich’s life sentence was severely criticised, as no link could be
found between him and the murderous command. Unfortunately for him,
Clay was not prepared to revise the decision. On the other hand now only
twelve men remained on death row. Clay later halved that number again.
The last six were let off in 1951, at the same time as the revision of
Dietrich’s life ticket.42
Germans accused of atrocities conjured up some ingenious arguments in
their defence, but as the courts had been able to impose their own rules they
stood little chance of success. So it was that the SS man Fritz Knoechlein,
accused of killing ninety-seven British POWs in cold blood, claimed that
there had been a Standgericht - or drumhead court - before the massacre,
something that was permitted by the rule book. On the other hand the court
was told that such a tribunal could not be set up once soldiers had laid down
their arms. POWs are entitled to protection by the opposing army.43
The SS regimental commander Kurt Meyer was tried by a Canadian
court for ordering the killing of forty Canadian POWs. Meyer was
effectively being tried for atrocities committed by his regiment, as no
evidence could be produced to show that he had issued the fatal orders.
Allied commanders were mercifully spared this ‘chain of command’
principal. In general Meyer impressed the court by his dignity at the trial.
He was convicted, however, of responsibility for the deaths of eighteen
soldiers and sentenced to death by firing squad. This was later commuted to
life imprisonment by the general commanding Canadian forces in Germany
whose conscience, it is alleged, was not entirely clean when it came to the
actions of his own men in dealing with German and Italian POWs. Meyer
was imprisoned in New Brunswick before being transferred to the British
high-security prison at Werl near Dortmund, where he had Kesselring for a
cellmate. He was released in 1954.44
The Canadians lost heart after that, and allowed the British to look into
atrocities perpetrated against their men after D-Day when widely circulated
rumours that Canadian and British troops were not taking prisoners led to
some scenes of savagery on the part of the SS.ei Once again the orders to
refuse quarter appear to have come from Wilhelm Mohnke. The killings at a
first-aid post were carried out by an SS man called Wilhelm Schnabel. His
superior officer, Bernhard Siebken, actively resisted implementing the
orders and was not present when the shootings took place. The trial began
in Hamburg on 28 August 1948. When Siebken was sentenced to death, a
plea was entered in mitigation, but the deputy judge advocate, Lord Russell
of Liverpool, decided that the court had pronounced the correct verdict.
Both men were hanged in Hameln by Pierrepoint on 20 January 1949. It
was a classic case of vis victis, or victor’s justice.45
Another Nazi who was imprisoned in Dachau was the former Gauleiter
of Mecklenburg. Tisa von der Schulenburg travelled to Dachau to see
Friedrich Hildebrandt, who was implicated in the shooting of two American
airmen. She was told that she could not save him, even though he had
protected her and her sister-in-law after 20 July 1944. She tried to
understand why Hildebrandt, a ‘harmless’ man, would have ordered the
shooting of the fliers, and she remembered that it was in response to the
strafing of a train, in which a hundred people, chiefly women and children,
had been killed. Hildebrandt had decided that the next ‘terror-bombers’ that
fell to earth alive would suffer accordingly.
The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis
 Those who were liquidated first tended to be those who had committed
atrocities against Allied citizens. Hence the Russians wanted the heads of
the generals responsible for invading the Soviet Union; the Yugoslavs and
the Poles those who had performed that role in their lands; the Czechs those
who had administered their country. The Russians killed the SS chief
Friedrich Jecklen in 1946; the Yugoslavs the minister Siegfried Lasche and
the general Alexander Löhr; the Poles executed Josef Bühler, Jürgen Stroop
and Rudolf Höss, and the more prominent Nazis in Danzig were also passed
though the Polish courts: the Gauleiter, Albert Forster, was caught by the
British and handed over to the authorities in Warsaw. He and Richard
Hildebrandt, head of the RuSHA, were executed. Before his despatch,
Greisser, the head of the Danzig Senate and Gauleiter of Posen, was
paraded in an iron cage through the streets of the city that had reverted to its
Polish name of Poznań.46 The Czechs killed Karl-Hermann Frank, Hanns
Ludin and Dieter Wisliceny.
Officers who had ordered the killing of Allied POWs could expect death
sentences. Many who had ordered the killing of thousands of their own
citizens escaped scot free: Mengele, Gestapo Müller, Alois ‘Jupo’ Brunner
and others managed to elude the Allies, and some say that the Allies
connived at their disappearance. The Allies’ fury was quickly spent. In the
main Nuremberg trials sentences became lighter with the passage of time;
and even those given capital sentences or life often had the tariff commuted
or reduced. As the trials edged towards the end of the 1940s, the fear
developed among the judges that the Soviets were about to invade western
Germany and wind the proceedings up.
There was a large element of hypocrisy. Since that time many Allied
atrocities have come to light, particularly the killing of POWs at Biscari, on
orders from General Patton. The sinking of the French fleet at Oran by the
British, with the loss of some 1,500 French lives was no secret. It was a
continuation of a British naval tradition that originated at Copenhagen in
1801. The last German Kaiser had feared that it would happen to his
fledgling fleet. It was possibly a ‘usage’, but it can hardly be called any
more legal than the German Blitzkrieg.
The British made the decision to stop the trials in April, and in
September they handed the business over to the Germans. They passed Nazi
Party members before the Spruchkammer according to the American Law
for Liberation issued on 5 March 1946. Nazis were now being judged by
Germans, essentially their former political enemies in the SPD or the KPD.
The biggest calls for retribution came from the American Zone, as a
response to pressure from OMGUS, the American military government.
One of those arraigned before the courts was Winifred Wagner, who was
reduced to penury, cycling up to seventy kilometres a day to forage for
kindling. In between foraging for wood, she put together a sixty-four-page
document on her relations with Adolf Hitler, appending copies of
documents showing how she had gone out of her way to help the oppressed
of the Third Reich. She also quite rightly pointed out that she had not
broken the law by joining the NSDAP at the time.47
In her deposition, Winifred claimed to have only the vaguest knowledge
of the concentration camps, though other documents showed that she had
been involved with trying to get someone out of Auschwitz. She had
probably been given poor advice, but by that time she had seen how savage
the courts had been with some of her friends, who had been guilty of little
more than Party membership. Particularly galling had been the treatment
accorded to her doctor Helmut Treuter, who was dispossessed and
imprisoned, largely as a result of denunciation by a rival. It was not until
November 1949 that he was able to practise again. Winifred feared the
worst.48
She had no problem understanding the methods of her interrogators.
They were similar to those employed by the Gestapo, ranging from threats
to normal chit-chat. She learned that she had been indicted because she had
made Hitler ‘socially acceptable’. Meanwhile her daughter Friedelind - an
American citizen - was telling the world that Winifred’s former lover, Heinz
Tietjen, had been used to interrogate British spies. It transpired that she
meant Hermann Göring (or ‘Teddie’, as he was known in the Wagner
household). Indeed, the case against Winifred relied substantially on the
account of the family’s history provided by her daughter’s book.49
Winifred Wagner’s trial took place in Bayreuth. The principle was sauve
qui peut. Heinz Tietjen, who had directed the festival after Siegfried
Wagner’s death, cried off. His own denazification trial was coming up, and
he preferred not to venture out. Winifred was again scrupulously honest
about her belief in Hitler, which had seized her as early as 1923. Hitler’s
love of Wagner and Wagner’s hatred of the Jews were also aired at the trial,
though neither could have been said to have had any bearing on the case
against Winifred. The Spruchkammer showed an unfortunate bias towards
conviction that must have reminded many Germans of the proceedings of
the infamous People’s Court it had to some extent replaced. When one
witness said that she saw things ‘from a different point of view’, the
prosecutor rejoined, ‘Your different point of view is of no interest to us
here.’ It might have been Roland Freisler himself. 50
The prosecution called for Winifred to be classed grade one. If she had
provided help to victims of the regime, it had not been from sentiments of
opposition. They called for a sentence of six years in a labour camp and the
confiscation of her assets. As it was, Winifred was condemned grade two.
She had to do 350 days’ community service and yield up 60 per cent of her
assets. She was later reclassified as a ‘lesser offender’ on appeal. The initial
sentence proved controversial. Some Germans howled about the leniency of
the court. Foreigners sent her food parcels. As one Jewish friend conceded,
her chief crime was succumbing to the widespread delusion that Hitler had
not been responsible for the crimes committed in his name. It was a view
she was later to express to a like-minded person, the historian David Irving.
To the end of her days Hitler was ‘USA’ - ‘Unser selige Adolf’ (Our blessed
Adolf ).
The Western Allies started out well. In the summer of 1945, for
example, they sacked 90 per cent of legal officials in their zones, but they
soon realised that by doing so they were greatly adding to their own
workload, and that they would have problems rebuilding the German legal
system. Many of the German lawyers were able to receive testimonials
from colleagues attesting to their ‘inner’ rejection of the system. Once these
had been approved, a Persilschein was issued: named after the soap powder,
it ‘washed white’ the former Nazi. Similarly, prison officials who had been
responsible for myriad murders and who had carried out a policy of
unrivalled brutality were absolved for the simple reason that the prison
service was short staffed. In the new state of Baden-Württemberg the
proportion retained was an astonishing 96 per cent.51
Once washed clean, the jurists returned to the bench or ministry. About
80 per cent of Nazi jurists went back to work in the Federal Republic,
including seventy-two former judges and prosecutors from the notorious
People’s Court. Some of these continued to serve as late as the 1970s. The
German courts proved incapable of sentencing any former Nazi judge or
prosecutor. Their excuse was that they were applying the law as it existed at
the time.52 In the East the situation was different. After the initial teething
problems, when a lot of very dodgy men were elevated to the bench, of
1,000 GDR judges in 1950, only one had been a member of the NSDAP. To
deal with the shortage of skilled jurists, judges were given crash-courses.
These judges however, would not have been impartial. The prison service
was similarly purged, but again this hardly made the prisons of the GDR
preferable to those administered by ex-Nazis in the West.53
The Americans pulled the plug on denazification on 8 May 1948. By
then US, British and French courts had tried over 8,000 cases and sentenced
a tenth of the accused - 806 - to death. Fewer than half of those were
commuted, and 486 went to the gallows. The Americans tried 1,672 people
for war crimes. Of the 255 they executed at Landsberg-am-Lech, 102 were
skilled workers, thirty-seven civil servants, with a few academic titles here
and there, twenty-three were academics, twenty-two workers, eleven
soldiers, and the rest were made up of the professions, Nazi functionaries
and schoolboys. The oldest was Dr Schilling at seventy-four. (Twenty more
died from naural causes.) All the lifers were eventually released, with one
exception - Hess.54 German courts reopened in the summer of 1945, and
they too passed judgment on former Nazis. Between 1945 and 1950 the
courts sentenced only 5,228 defendants for Nazi crimes. Sentences were
either short or the criminals were swiftly pardoned. In the years from 1951
to 1955 there were only 638 convictions. It is now clear that many of the
worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not
punished at all.55

OceanofPDF.com
 PART IV
The Road to Freedom
OceanofPDF.com
 18
Peacemaking in Potsdam
18 July 1945 Now it will be decided whether we
can carry on living in Europe or if we must try to live
our lives as a refugee God knows where. A year has
elapsed since the [assassination] attempt of 20 July. A
year filled with blood and misery which might perhaps
have been avoided. But our people had to drink the cup
down to the dregs, and in the end, it was all for the
good.
Ursula von Kardoff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 1942-1945, Munich 1994, 337

The wartime conferences had calmly discussed the Germans’ fate, but
at the Potsdam Conference the Allies finally realised that ‘Uncle Joe’ had
stolen a march on them. He would call the shots. The Allies met from 17
July to 2 August 1945 at the palace of Crown Prince ‘Little Willi’, the
Cecilienhof in Potsdam. The Western Allies were able to see their
handiwork for the first time. In a fifteen-minute raid on 14 April they had
flattened the centre of Frederick the Great’s Residenz.1 The town centre had
lost ‘everything that was historic, a memorial or artistically important’,
according to Hanna Grisebach.2 There were consolations: ‘The voices that
we have had to listen to for over twelve years have been silenced.’3
Hanna Grisebach was a Jewish convert to Protestantism married to a
Heidelberg colleague of Karl Jaspers. For many of the same reasons as the
philosopher, her husband was forced into retirement in 1937. The couple
moved to the so-called ‘von-Viertel’, the aristocratic quarter, of Potsdam.
Frau Grisebach was taken into the circle of the largely royalist nobles like
the Wedels, Schulenburgs, Buddenbrocks and an old Princess Trubetzkoy
who lived in Potsdam, many of whom subscribed to the ‘confessing
Church’ and were wholly opposed to Hitler’s regime. Like Gertrud Jaspers,
Hanna Grisebach spent the last few days of the Third Reich in hiding.4
On 24 April Hanna noted ‘the first Russian in our house’. Their Polish
maid Marja was able to interpret and shoo the Russian away, saving the life
of her young son. Her teenage daughter she now dressed as a boy, cutting
off her long plaits to save her from being raped. By now the Germans had
retreated, leaving a sorry spectacle of destruction: ‘battered vehicles,
shattered cars, discarded pieces of uniform and weapons of every kind lie
scattered around . . .’5
The Russians showed more respect for Potsdam’s cultural monuments
than the Anglo-Americans. During the battle for Potsdam the business of
safeguarding the palaces in the park of Sanssouci was given to Yevgeny
Ludshuveit, an art historian. He sent a radio message to German High
Command to ask them to cease shelling the park: ‘I was very worried about
the treasures, and wanted them to be preserved.’6 The Glienecke Bridge,
which connected Potsdam with Greater Berlin to the north, was another
victim of the bombardment. You might still cross to the Wannsee side, but
only by means of a ‘hair-raising climb’ over the pylons that had previously
held up the suspension bridge. In their destructive rage the SS had set fire to
all the fine boats belonging to the Imperial Yacht Club moored on the
Havel.7
The care taken over the remaining monuments was not extended to the
private property of Potsdam’s townsfolk. There was the usual hunt for
watches and bicycles. The Grisebachs lost eight watches, as well as all their
bicycles. Hanna’s son managed to buy another of the latter with a gold
watch, but that was also later stolen. Surviving meant helping yourself to
what you could. Hanna Grisebach brought back part of a horse and
marinated it in vinegar and spices. The dish brought forth whoops of joy.
She also received her share of a cow that had trodden on a mine. Possibly
the greatest discovery of all was the contents of the cellar of a villa which
the owner had thrown into the waters of the Hasengraben, in order to
prevent the Russians from drinking it. Hanna’s daughter, together with a
friend, had located the booty and they were prepared to wade out to their
hips to bring up the precious bottles: ‘top wines from famous sites’. The
Grisebachs drank them with relish, while the one who had donated them lay
in bed with a cold. The wine put the food to shame. Anything they didn’t
want, such as a bottle of Malaga, could be traded with the Russians for
bread and bacon.8
On 5 May Hanna heard a rumour that the Americans were coming to
Potsdam. Stories of this sort were rife at the time - there was no connection
with the Potsdam Conference in July. The first Russian wave was moving
on. A baggage train set off, creating a ‘picturesque scene’ reminiscent of
Tolstoy’s The Cossacks or similar episodes from War and Peace. Boys
spent their time shooting ducks and riding horses around, while abandoned
boats bobbed on the water. The Americans didn’t come, however, and from
mid-May there was very little food. Supplies of meat and fat dried up and
the Grisebachs lived on potato flakes and whatever fruit and vegetables they
could scrump from abandoned gardens. Added to this they caught fish in
the Havel or the lake, sometimes picking up a few after the Russians had
tossed a grenade into the water - their usual form of angling.
In their hunger they were pleased to hear that professors were equated
with manual workers in the handing out of ration cards: they were eligible
for the card I. When a field full of potatoes was located twenty kilometres
away in Buckow, Hanna and others set off on replacement bicycles they had
unearthed. They had to dodge Russian fire to get at the tubers, as the
soldiers wanted to distil them. Still, despite several setbacks, Hanna was
able to get away with thirty-five kilos.9
First Contacts between East and West
One pretext for the Allied conference was to enforce the zones decreed
at Yalta. The Allies had all ended up in the wrong places: the French had
been in Stuttgart; the Americans were in Thuringia and had advanced to
Halle in Saxony; the British had occupied the western half of Mecklenburg,
while other American units had crossed the Harz Mountains to reach
Magdeburg on the Elbe. This so-called Magdeburg Pocket was due to the
Soviets. The Allied zones remained fluid until just before Potsdam, and
there was a good deal of idle speculation about who would fall to whom.
Even at the beginning of September it was still not clear to Berliners who
was where. It was said that the Russians were to evacuate Eisenach and
Jena and that the British had control of the airport in Erfurt (all three were
in the Russian Zone). The British were to receive Thuringia, they heard, and
the Russians would be compensated in East Asia. The Western Allies were
forced to retreat to positions previously agreed by the politicians at Yalta
behind the Elbe and the Harz. The generals grumbled. In their enthusiasm
to take back their rightful territory, the Russians also attempted to grab
Coburg in Franconia, probably because they thought the town was in
Thuringia. This led to a stand-off with the Americans.
On 11 July 1945, Margret Boveri reported a fresh wave of arrests
connected with the conference. The neighbouring communes were being
cleared of Germans to make room for the delegates. Babelsberg was already
purged, now it was the turn of Wannsee. Intellectuals were the main targets,
Pgs or non-Pgs. Pace Hanna Grisebach, there were disadvantages to their
academic status.
The conference proved a chance to survey the behaviour in the Allied
camps. There was bad blood on both sides. The Soviets still believed that
they had done the lion’s share of the fighting and borne the brunt of the
losses. The East did not trust the West, and vice versa. The Russians
believed that the Western Allies were merely taking a breather before they
attacked the Soviet Union and that they had kept their options open
throughout the war by conducting secret negotiations with the Germans.
That channels were open is undoubtedly true, and the Soviet authorities had
been informed of the fact by the British intelligence officer Kim Philby and
others. The Russians said they were not allowed to interview all the
prisoners held by the West. But they were allowed to talk to a number of
them and ‘the records of the interrogations confirmed that there had been
some backstage negotiations between the Nazis and the US and British
Intelligence about the possibility of a separate peace.’10 The Russians had
also held talks with the Germans.11
There were advocates for war against the Soviet Union in both the
British and American camps, but how far up they went was concealed
during the Cold War. The Hitler Book, prepared for Stalin from
interrogations with high-ranking German POWs in 1948, abounds with
accusations of Western Allied perfidy.12 Some British generals, notably
Montgomery, were anxious to push on against the Russians. This had been
supported by Churchill, but the plans would have been leaked to the
Russians by Donald Maclean of the British Foreign Office, adding to the
feeling of distrust that existed among the Big Three. In 1945 the Russians
believed the British were holding back a substantial German army for use in
the next campaign and for that reason had omitted to disarm German forces
in their zone. At Potsdam Zhukov made a formal protest, claiming the
British were keeping the 200,000-man Army Group North in readiness and
that a million men in Schleswig-Holsteinej had not been given POW status.13
The Americans were rounding up scientists and taking them back to the
United States to use in - among other things - their atom-bomb
programme.14 That the Russians were hardly averse to this themselves does
not figure in Zhukov’s memoirs. The Russians believed that the Anglo-
Americans had intentionally failed to bomb targets that would be of use to
them later. One example of this was the headquarters of IG Farben in
Frankfurt, which was virtually intact - so much so, in fact, that the
Americans took it over as their own HQ.15
Truman had no desire to continue the war against the Soviet Union and
agreed to fall back to the lines agreed by the Big Three at Yalta. Churchill
now expressed ‘profound misgivings’ in a cable to the president.16 These
pieces of territory might have been used for bargaining, for example, on the
Oder and Neisse rivers. There was a little warm-up for Potsdam in Berlin
on 5 June when Montgomery and William Strang from Britain, Eisenhower,
Clay and Robert Murphy from the United States, and the French
commander de Lattre de Tassigny were invited to settle the government of
the city at Zhukov’s HQ in Karlshorst. The Anglo-American generals were
then invested with the Order of Victory, while de Lattre de Tassigny had to
make do with the Order of Suvorov First Class.17 Clay gave Zhukov the
Legion of Merit.18
The inferior decoration handed out to de Lattre was emblematic of the
status of the fourth ally: France was not invited to Potsdam.ek It was ‘a bitter
blow to French pride’.19 Truman had given the French assurances that their
wishes would be noted and their arguments put forward, but they had not
endeared themselves to the Americans through their behaviour: they had
occupied Stuttgart and the Italian Val d’Aosta and they had indulged in
colonial rivalry with the British in the Levant. The French had forgotten
nothing, and learned nothing. In 1919 they had taken 50 per cent of
Germany’s reparations; now they demanded machines, coal and labour, as
well as the restitution of all that the Germans had taken from them. The
French were desperately angling for the Ruhr with its natural resources and
heavy industry, but the incoming foreign secretary Bevin and the British in
general did not want to give an inch, fearing that the Russians would also
claim their pound of flesh.20
At the Berlin meeting Germany formally ceased to exist as an
independent nation. The Allies signed the Declaration of Defeat and
Assumption of Sovereignty. The four powers also agreed the form of the
Allied Control Council that was to rule Germany, but the Russians made it
clear that the Western Allies would not be allowed to take up their sectors in
the capital until they had complied with Yalta: they had to fall back behind
the River Elbe and the Harz Mountains. Western politicians wanted this
decision to be taken by the Control Council, but Eisenhower (who was
impressed by Zhukov) was in favour of giving in to the Russians, and
Truman’s emissary Harry Hopkins had discussed this quid pro quo in
Moscow.21 Zhukov believed that the Western Allies were prepared to accept
this loss of territory because they were still anxious for the Russians to play
a military role in the war in the Far East.22 Ursula von Kardorff already had
a fair idea of the future Russian Zone on 11 June - Weimar, Leipzig,
Dresden - and doubted Stalin’s credentials as a ‘benefactor of mankind’.
The zones were ratified on 26 July. 23
Zhukov also had a meeting with Hopkins the next day, 12 June.
Hopkins had flown in from two weeks in Moscow, where he had had six
meetings with Stalin to discuss the UN Charter among other things and the
chance of fitting in a few non-communists in the government of the Lublin
Poles. Otherwise his task had been to reassure the Russian leader that the
United States had no foreign political ambitions in Europe, thereby leaving
him a free hand in Poland and Austria. Hopkins had not consulted
Churchill, whom Truman was holding at arm’s length, while he refused to
speed up the scheduled talks. Members of Truman’s entourage, however,
took a completely different view, arguing for a showdown with Russia.
These included Harriman, Forrestal and Leahy.24
Stalin and Molotov backed four or five of Hopkins’s Poles, who later
had to flee for their lives. On the way out Hopkins’s aircraft had flown over
Berlin. Seeing the ruins he remarked, ‘It’s another Carthage.’25 He was
sympathetic towards the Russians, and regretted the former president’s
sudden death. He had no close relationship with Truman: ‘It is a pity
President Roosevelt didn’t live to see these days. It was easier with him.’26
Hopkins told Zhukov that the Americans would not be ready for 15 June
and that they would need to postpone the leaders’ conference for another
month, until 15 July. Zhukov proposed Potsdam because there was no
suitable building in Berlin in a good enough state of repair. The only place
in Potsdam was the crown prince’s palace, but there was the advantage of
Babelsberg, a largely undamaged area of villas that had been inhabited by
film-folk and politicians in Weimar times.27
The themes on the agenda were the political and economic future of
Germany, denazification, demilitarisation and decentralisation, Germany’s
eastern border, the status of Königsberg and East Prussia. Austria was also
on the agenda, as well as all the other former belligerent powers. Zhukov
took Hopkins and his assistant Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen on a tour of the
ruined city and afterwards there was a buffet lunch that was ‘light on food,
heavy on vodka’.28
Hopkins had been present at Yalta, and knew his old master’s mind. He
had been sent to deal with de Gaulle, which he clearly found an onerous
duty. When Roosevelt’s interpreter at the conference, Chip Bohlen, had
said, ‘We can all admit that de Gaulle is one of the biggest sons of bitches
who ever straddled a pot,’29 the late president had laughed. Roosevelt was
insistent that de Gaulle should not receive a place at the top table. Churchill
had to present the French case and obtain an occupation zone in Germany.
Stalin only agreed as long as it took nothing away from his portion. What is
striking is how little fight the Western Allies put up against the Russian
leader even at Yalta. Hopkins had advised Roosevelt to accept Stalin’s huge
reparations demands,30 and when America and Britain gave way on
Poland’s western borders, it is not clear they knew exactly what was
involved.
Churchill had tried to settle the Polish issue before the Red Army
arrived, but Russia’s might had won the day. He had had a change of heart.
On 15 December 1944 he had been quite open about the complete
expulsion of Germans from the eastern territories, but he was worried about
numbers. It appeared that he thought six million was the upper limit, and
now he learned that the figure would be eight or nine, which was
completely impossible to effect.31 Churchill clung to his Wismar pocket as a
bargaining counter, and on 9 June 1945 he cabled Truman to advise him to
do the same and hold on to American positions in Thuringia and Saxony.
He might have hoped for a better rapport with Truman, as his relations with
Roosevelt had been strained at the end of the late president’s life. He told
Truman not to consider withdrawing until the Austrian question had been
properly settled. On 14 June Truman cabled Stalin, however, and agreed to
move his troops back to the Elbe. Churchill had no alternative now but to
comply with his ally’s decision. He now informed Stalin that the British
would be gone by the 15th. Stalin then played for more time. He requested
that the Allies wait until 1 July before taking up their lines in Berlin. There
were mines to be cleared, and other chores to be effected first.32
They should have known what they were in for by now - Stalin had
already shown his hand in eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was a case in
point. The government in exile had taken leave of King George VI on 15
February and left England on 12 March. On 19 March Beneš and Masaryk
were in Moscow. On 6 April they arrived in Prague to be welcomed with
bread and salt. On 9 April an interim government was set up under Zdenek
Fierlinger with representatives of the four parties and four non-party
members. The highest goal was co-operation with Moscow.
The Poles had been obliged to accept the Curzon Line in the east, but on
21 July 1944 Stalin was able to placate the Lublin government by dangling
compensation in front of their eyes, in the form of German territory in the
west. Churchill and Roosevelt had raised no objection to the Oder-Neisse
Line at Yalta, although there had been misgivings about giving the Poles
such a large amount of German territory and it was left that land would be
found for them in the west and north. The Poles were well aware of what
they wanted from the Potsdam conference. The Lublin regime had formally
stated that they wanted the Oder-Neisse on 5 February 1945. As Władisław
Gomułka put it, ‘we must expel all the Germans because countries are built
on national lines and not on multinational ones’.33
The issue was scheduled for review at Potsdam. The reason why the
Russians had stood by and watched the Warsaw Uprising from the other
side of the Vistula was that they wanted those elements out of the way that
were not in favour of a communist or pro-Moscow Poland. The Western
Allies continued to support the regime in exile in London. The sixteen
London government emissaries who went to Moscow to enquire about
possible collaboration were arrested. Meanwhile the Lublin men trotted
along behind the Red Army. In March 1945 they created five new Polish
woiwode: Masuria, Pomerania, Upper Silesia, Lower Silesia and Danzig.
They were already referring to the areas as the ‘Recovered Territories’. The
move resulted in protests from Washington: there had to be peace talks
first!34
In their policy of demontage and cultural pillage, the Russians showed
no desire to co-operate with the West. Some of the Soviet generals, such as
Bulganin, thought like Montgomery - they had won a battle, not the war.
Fascism had to be defeated, particularly in America. ‘America is now the
arch-enemy!’ said Bulganin on the eve of the storming of Berlin. ‘We have
destroyed the foundations of fascism, now we must destroy the foundations
of capitalism - America.’ In cultural terms this was expressed by the
Russian officer Vladimir Yurasov prior to the Western Allies’ arrival in
Berlin: ‘Take everything out of the Western Sector of Berlin. Do you
understand? All of it! What you can’t take, destroy. Only leave nothing for
the [Western] Allies: no machine, not even a single bed; not even a chamber
pot!’35 Berlin and its industrial satellites were being stripped bare: the
hardware of companies such as Osram and Siemens, of the telephone
exchanges, of the S-Bahn and so on, right down to their typewriters, was
being loaded up and shipped back to Russia.
The Russian leader was also wary of American and British attempts to
promote capitalism. The American minister responsible for Germany was
John McCloy, who was a banker in normal life. He had some sympathy for
the defeated Germans in that his wife had been born in Germany. In
opposition to the Morgenthau view (which was essentially behind
demontage) McCloy encouraged the rebuilding of Germany. Morgenthau
had not abandoned his famous plan. In 1945 he published Germany is our
Problem. Truman had been opposed to the plan even as a senator, so he was
happy to listen to McCloy. Another opponent of Morgenthau was the
secretary of war Henry Stimson, who thought the secretary for the Treasury
‘biased in his semitic grievances’. The day before his departure for
Potsdam, Truman accepted Morgenthau’s resignation, commenting, ‘That
was the end of the conversation and the end of the Morgenthau Plan.’ On
the other hand the plan was still present in the minds of many of the
soldiers, and their desire to lay waste to Germany had been sharpened by
what they had seen in the concentration camps.36
In their recorded statements the Russians showed themselves more
sympathetic to the conquered Germans. Anastas Mikoyan, then vice-
president of the Council of People’s Commissars, expressed the view in an
interview with Pravda, which found its way into The Times: ‘We have
crushed Hitler’s armies in fierce combat and taken Berlin, but our moral
sense and our traditions do not allow us to ignore the suffering and
privations of the German civilian population.’ It was a far cry from the
realities of life under Soviet dominion. Germans also clung to the
comforting line of Stalin’s - ‘Hitlers come and go, but the German people
remain.’37
It was also becoming clear how little the Anglo-Americans could trust
Stalin. The Russians had occupied the Danish island of Bornholm, which,
they said, lay to the east of the line of their own sphere of influence. The
truce in Hungary was signed without any participation of the Western
Allies, and at the time of Potsdam the west had yet to be allowed into
Vienna. Just how much Stalin was lying at Potsdam is clear from an
exchange between Clay and Zhukov on 7 July, just ten days before the
meeting of the Big Three. Zhukov informed the American general that
Silesia had already been turned over to the Poles; ‘the Germans had moved
out of the area in such huge numbers that there is little agriculture
remaining for this area’. The Russians did not even have access to the coal,
said Zhukov. They had to pay for it like everyone else. The British and the
Americans were having to supply the Germans with 20,000 tons of food
every month. The loss of Silesia was therefore highly significant. The
United States had already protested about the handing over of Silesia to the
Poles.38
At the Cecilienhof - the palace of the Prussian crown prince and the
venue for the Potsdam Conference - the Russians planted a great red star of
geraniums, pink roses and hortensias in the flower bed at the entrance.39
Inside the house there were frantic preparations for the arrival of the Big
Three.40 The different quarters were to be colour-coded: blue for the
Americans, white for the Russians and pink for the British. The conference
table had been specially made in the Lux Factory in Moscow.41 The
Russians and the Americans were already observing one another from
either side of the Glienecke Bridge, as they were to do until the end of the
Cold War.
In Potsdam itself Hanna Grisebach and her family were made aware of
the coming of the Big Three by increased security around the Neue Garten
and the Cecilienhof. They were lucky enough to be on the far side of the
Heiligensee. All the streets leading directly to the palace had to be
evacuated. GPU carried out a wave of arrests and a sentry was posted in
their garden. There were one or two advantages: the Russians quickly laid
out a new street and a bridge was thrown across the Havel to Babelsberg
where the leaders were staying. A pontoon bridge was also put up to allow
access to Sacrow and the airport at Gatow. Russian soldiers rode bareback
and naked into the waters of the lakes, reminding Hanna of centaurs, but
she was less pleased to find herself under house arrest from 16 July, living
in a state of impotent rage while she observed the Red Army guard
knocking twenty-five kilos of unripe apricots off their tree in the garden.
Any attempt to go out was greeted by cries of ‘Dvai-Dvai! Zuhrick nah
Haus!’ (Quick, quick! Back in the house!). When an aircraft flew low over
their street she hoped it was the British and American leaders going home.42
Stalin arrived by train on 16 July. He wanted no special arrangements,
no regimental bands. He told Zhukov to meet him, and to bring along
anyone he thought necessary. Zhukov sat beside him in the car and they
drove to a luxurious villa. Stalin wanted to know who had lived there. He
was told it had belonged to General Ludendorff.43 The British and
Americans arrived the same day. Truman and Churchill were in frequent
contact in the run-up to the conference. Churchill had wanted King George
VI to attend, and also to review the British forces in Berlin, but that idea
was dropped in June.44 The British had had a general election on 5 July, but
because British servicemen were scattered throughout the world, the results
would not be in for three weeks. Churchill informed Truman that, whatever
the results of the election, the conference should not be hurried. 45
Truman came via Amsterdam. He was very much an innocent abroad
and relied on his secretary of state, James Byrnes. He had no strong feelings
of his own. He had inherited from Roosevelt the idea that America and the
Soviet Union could happily coexist. Kennan, for one, thought this an
illusion.46 Truman and Byrnes flew in separate aircraft, Byrnes himself
piloting the plane between Cassel and Magdeburg. Truman looked at both
cities from the window. He could see not one single undamaged building.
He landed on the ‘British’ airfield at Gatow, which was conveniently close
to Potsdam. They drove to their quarters in Neubabelsberg. British and
American soldiers lined the route until they reached the Soviet Zone.
The Americans had already decided they wanted to undermine
communism in Germany. To that end they desired to see the creation of
some centralised agencies that might squeeze out Soviet influence. It was
one of the first rumbles that presaged the Cold War. Neither Truman nor
Byrnes thought Germany was a danger any more: it had been destroyed,
and the atom bomb was there should it ever seek to menace world security
again. Byrnes was also firmly in agreement with the British in wanting to
keep the Ruhr free from the Russians. Besides, the cession of the Ruhr
would upset the struggling German economy and make the occupation even
more expensive for the Anglo-Americans.
Truman was lodged in a three-storey villa at 2 Kaiserstrasse on the
Gribnitzsee, which had been the home of ‘the head of the movie colony’
who had been sent ‘back’ to Russia - ‘for what purpose I do not know’,
Truman wrote to his mother and sister. It was evidence of a certain naivety
as far as Russia was concerned, and did not augur well. The house had been
newly painted, and received the ironic title of the ‘Little White House’,
‘although it was painted yellow’.47 Churchill had a house of the same size,
two blocks away at 23 Ringstrasse. Truman went to bed early to prepare
himself for what was likely to be a tough day on the 17th. He met Churchill
in person for the first time the next morning, but felt he was no stranger.48
Churchill was accompanied by his daughter Mary, Sir Anthony Eden,
the head of the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan and his naval
adjutant, Commodore C. R. Thompson. Truman told Churchill he wanted to
suggest an agenda, and asked him if he had brought one himself. ‘No,’ he
said. ‘I don’t need one.’49 In fact both the British and the Americans had
decided to toughen their stance over the Oder-Neisse, to the degree that
they were prepared to go back on what they had indicated they would
accept at Yalta. Stalin had made it clear at Yalta that he meant the Western,
not the Eastern Neisse.el Now the diplomats arriving in Potsdam were to
play innocent and carried instructions not to permit an extension of Poland
to the Western Neisse. The Americans also wanted to prevent the
subtraction of most of Pomerania. Poland was to receive the southern half
of East Prussia, Danzig, Upper Silesia and part of Pomerania, but that part
would be far east of Stettin.50
The Americans were ready to dig their heels in, though the British were
more concessionary, as they had been at Yalta. The sticking point was the
Eastern Neisse. The British wanted the border drawn there, which would
leave a substantial part of Lower Silesia in German hands, together with
three million Germans. The negotiations would hinge on reparations: the
Russians would not receive a brass farthing from the Western zones of
Germany if they insisted on advancing the Polish border to the Western
Neisse. What the Western Allies had not reckoned with was the obduracy of
Stalin. He was not prepared to budge on this issue, and their opposition
simply caved in.51
Truman allowed himself a little excursion to the capital. He saw the
remains of the Reich Chancellery, ‘where Hitler had conducted his rule of
terror’. He looked at the mess and was thankful that his own country had
been spared such ‘unimaginable destruction’. ‘That’s what happens . . .
when one overreaches oneself,’ he added sententiously.52 The news of the
statesman’s Berlin walkabout reached the ears of Ruth Friedrich: ‘They are
having a very discreet meeting in Potsdam, no noise penetrates the
kilometre-thick cordon. As a result it is exciting to learn that the foreign
heads of government have visited the inner city and the Tiergarten district
and seen over the ruined buildings of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery and the
air-raid cellar.’53 She would not have been so impressed had she known how
profoundly Truman had understood the plight of the German people. On the
second day of the conference the American leader characterised the Soviets
as the sort of people who stole rare old grandfather clocks and damaged
them in the process.54
Stalin visited Truman in the Little White House shortly after his arrival
in Potsdam. He came with Molotov and Pavlov the interpreter and insisted
on being called ‘generalissimo’ and not ‘marshal’, in tribute to his great
victories in the field.55 Truman wanted him to stay for lunch. Stalin tried to
fight him off, but he stayed in the end. Truman congratulated himself, and
felt that he could do some good for the world as a result of this small
domestic triumph.
The conference began at 5.10 p.m. on the 17th. Stalin proposed that
Truman should preside, and Churchill seconded him. Truman’s first move
was to propose a quarterly conference of foreign ministers as a means of
avoiding the pitfalls that had followed the First World War. This had been
foreseen at Yalta in February. The Allied Control Council was to start work
at once. Truman made his demands: he wanted complete disarmament for
Germany, and Allied control of all industry that might be used to produce
arms. ‘The German people should be made to feel that they had suffered a
total military defeat and that they could not escape responsibility for what
they had brought upon themselves.’ The Nazi Party was to be destroyed, its
officials removed from office. The country was to be reconstructed on
democratic lines prior to its eventual peaceful participation in international
life. Nazi laws were to be rescinded and there were to be trials for war
crimes. On the other hand the seeds were to be sown for reconstruction:
Germany was to be seen as one economic unit.56
Now it was Stalin’s turn. As far as Germany was concerned he wanted
his share of the German merchant fleet and navy, and reparations and
trusteeships due to him under the UN Charter. He made demands relating to
other countries before finishing with Poland’s western borders and the
liquidation of the London-based government in exile. Churchill was not
happy about giving Stalin the German fleet. He told the dictator that
‘weapons of war are terrible things and that the captured vessels should be
sunk’. The wily Georgian had an answer to that: ‘Let us divide it . . . If Mr
Churchill wishes he can sink his share.’57 That concluded the first day.
There was music playing all over Potsdam that July, or so it seemed.
Hanna Grisebach was a violinist and played Mozart with a local doctor and
a Frau von Kameke. The Russians came to the house of the latter and loudly
applauded. This led to one of her strangest engagements: to play before the
NKVD. She was very pleased to oblige, as it meant a hot meal. Her elderly
husband, however, remained at home in profound anxiety. It was only when
he heard the valedictory word ‘Dosvidania’ on the doorstep that he calmed
down.58 On 18 July Ursula von Kardorff noted that the Big Three were
sitting in Potsdam ‘like the Norns’ in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung who spin
the golden rope of world knowledge that binds past, present and future. In
the opera the rope snaps.59
The second day continued the discussions about the Conference of
Foreign Ministers before the Big Three came to the subject of defining
Germany. Churchill was vague. He said Germany was what it had been
before the war. Stalin countered by asking whether Austria and the
Sudetenland were part of Germany. For him Germany was ‘what she has
become after the war. Austria is not part of Germany.’ Truman proposed the
1937 frontiers, before Germany began to expand. Stalin would accept that,
‘minus what she lost in 1945’. Truman was evidently perplexed: ‘Germany
lost all in 1945.’60
Stalin was impatient to broach the Polish issue. He had obviously made
promises to the Lublin Poles. The Western Allies were content to leave this
issue for the proposed peace conference. Truman did not think they had
adequately defined Germany. Stalin’s answer was evasive. Germany had no
government, no definable borders, no frontier guards and no troops. The
country was divided up into four zones of occupation. Truman insisted on
the 1937 borders and Churchill agreed.61
Stalin returned to the ownership of the German fleet on the 19th. He
made it crystal clear that he saw war material as plain, old-fashioned booty.
Indeed, his view throughout - and indeed that of the Red Army - was the
traditional one - the victor has the right to live off the conquered, take his
chattels, eat his food and help himself to his women; and it is for the
conqueror to decide whether he should preserve the life of the vanquished.
Stalin had his grievances. On this day it was Franco and the Blue Division
which had fought in the USSR; on another it was the Italians who had done
the same. When there was mention of the Yugoslavs, who were
embarrassing the West by demanding large-scale repatriations of their
citizens from Austria, Stalin said he would not discuss the matter, as the
Yugoslavs were not present. Eden reminded him that they had discussed the
matter at Yalta, and the Yugoslavs had not been there either.62
Truman assured the Soviet leader that he would carry out the Yalta
Agreement to the letter. He was getting bored, and perhaps just a little
worried about what he had let himself in for.em He threatened to leave.
Stalin laughed and rejoined that he would like to go home too. Truman gave
a state banquet in the Little White House. The young American pianist
Eugene List, a sergeant in the US army, played Chopin’s Opus 42.
Appropriately for a man who had belatedly set himself up as the patron of
the Poles, Stalin was a Chopin fan. He was impressed and drank a toast to
the pianist. Stalin liked the wine and asked where it came from. It was
Californian. Truman also played the ‘Missouri Waltz’ for his guests. Only
Churchill failed to see the charm of it all: ‘he did not care much for that
kind of music.’63
The following day Truman inspected American troops in Berlin. The
session that afternoon raised the question of Vienna. Churchill complained
that his soldiers had not been allowed to take possession of their sector.
Stalin said the zones were now settled, and he could bring his army in now.
The Polish issue had been handed over to the foreign ministers to solve.
They reported back on the next day, the 21st. The Lublin Polish leader
Bolesław Bierut had told Byrnes that the Poles would still be at a
disadvantage despite the huge amounts of German territory they were to
swallow. Poland would still be smaller than it was before the war, because it
had lost 180,000 square kilometres to the Russians. On the other hand he
conceded darkly that it would be a more homogeneous state.en Yalta had
decided that it was for the peace conference to give Poland its shape, but
that the Allies would consider the Poles favourably. Truman continued to
insist on the 1937 German borders, but he was beginning to realise that
Stalin had presented him with a fait accompli. ‘It now appeared . . . as if
another occupying government was being assigned a zone in Germany. This
was being done without consultation . . .’64
 Stalin reiterated the position as seen at Yalta - the eastern borders would
follow the Curzon Line. That meant he would hang on to what he had
gained from his deal with Ribbentrop in 1939. ‘It had been decided at Yalta
that Poland should receive cession of territory in the north and west.’
Truman agreed, ‘but insisted that it was not correct to assign a zone of
occupation to the Poles’. Stalin then uttered two monstrous lies: ‘What had
happened . . . was that the German population in these areas had followed
the German Army to the west, and the Poles had remained.’ The Germans
were not only still there, but, with the exception of some parts of Upper
Silesia, there were no native Poles.eo Stalin went on to say that ‘he was
unable to see what harm had been done by the establishment of a Polish
administration where only Poles remained’.65 He then added, ‘The western
frontier question was open, and the Soviet Union was not bound [by Yalta].’
‘You are not?’ Truman asked. ‘No,’ said Stalin. According to Truman
Churchill had a good deal to say but gathered that it was not the time to say
it. Truman reiterated that it was a matter for the peace conference. 66 In the
meantime the brutal torture and expulsion of the civilian populations of the
region continued unabated. Even if the peace conference had been held in
Paris in the summer of 1946, by then there would have been only a small
minority of them left.
Stalin mentioned East Prussia, adding that ‘it would be very difficult to
restore a German administration’ there. In his view, ‘an army fights in war
and cares only for its efforts to win the war. To enable an army to win and
advance, it must have a quiet rear. It fights well if the rear is quiet and better
if the rear is friendly . . .’ This was the prologue to the revelation that the
East Prussian Germans had all packed their bags and left as well - an act of
great consideration towards the advancing Russians, as they had realised
that the Red Army would want to know they had a quiet rear. ‘Even if the
Germans had not fled . . . it would have been very difficult to set up a
German administration in this area because the majority of the population
was Polish . . .’ Truman and Churchill were fobbed off with more lies.
Stalin ‘insisted there was no other way out’.67
The matter was then placed in hock for the peace conference. Churchill
continued to worry about British interests. He didn’t want to have to foot
the bill for feeding the Germans. The regions the Russians had de facto
ceded to Poland represented a quarter of Germany’s arable land. Truman
expressed either terrible weakness or the hopelessness of the Western Allies
when he said he ‘did not think there was great disagreement on Polish
frontiers’. This was probably yet another attempt to delay the decision, but
until a time when Stalin’s contention that there were no Germans had
become reality. When he repeated that ‘there was no German population’
because they had ‘all fled westward’ and so ‘there the [area] falls to
Poland’, Truman countered that ‘nine million Germans seemed like a lot to
me’. Churchill enquired, ‘who is to feed them?’ He was reluctant to take on
this role without having the means at his disposal. It was a repeat of his
concerns over provisions for the British Sector in Vienna.68 The needle had
stuck in Stalin’s gramophone: the population had disappeared before the
Red Army arrived - ‘he emphasized that no single German remained in the
territory to be given to Poland’.69ep
It was at that moment that the president’s aide Admiral Leahy
whispered his famous interjection: ‘Of course not . . . The Bolshies have
killed all of them.’ In his memoirs Truman took a tough stance: ‘Of course I
knew that Stalin was misinterpreting the facts. The Soviets had taken the
Polish territory east of the Curzon Line, and they were trying to compensate
Poland at the expense of the other three occupying powers. I would not
stand for it, nor would Churchill. I was of the opinion that the Russians had
killed the German population or had chased them into our zones.’70
Churchill later claimed that had he returned to Potsdam he would have
prevented the Soviets from making off with so much of Silesia, but his
contention was never put to the test.71 It was a pity he did nothing at the
time, beyond repeating that it was a matter for the peace conference. No
monitors were despatched east, no enquiries were made among the
incoming treks or among the miserable trainloads of refugees that
discharged their cargoes in the Western zones. They did not want to know.
Churchill was concerned for the beleaguered British economy. Silesia’s
coalmines had been awarded to Poland, so that coal was not available for
Germans. The West would have to foot the bill again. He was concerned
that Germany needed to be built up again to avoid becoming a burden on
the West. Reparations therefore had to take second place.72 Stalin came up
with his most ingenious argument to date at this point: ‘the less industry
there was in Germany, the greater would be the market for American and
British goods’. Churchill reiterated, ‘We do not wish to be confronted by a
mass of starving people.’ Stalin replied, ‘There will be none,’ and added,
‘Are we through?’73 That night Stalin gave his banquet. For occasions of
this sort there was no shortage of provisions. On the contrary, it was quite a
thing, with vodka and caviar at the beginning and melon and champagne at
the end. There were at least twenty-five toasts. Truman took care to eat little
and drink less. Stalin was not to be outdone by Eugene List, and had two
great pianists and violinists perform. Truman was interested in what Stalin
was drinking in his tiny glass. He presumed it was vodka, but the Russian
leader was employing the same ruse as his marshal Koniev. Stalin finally
told him with a smile that it was French wine - since a recent heart attack he
could not drink as much.74
The next day, 22 July, was a Sunday. Truman studied the Yalta
Declaration to see what it said about Poland’s western borders. The Big
Three had accepted the Curzon Line then, but had left the western border
open. They had not expected problems on this issue. Truman concluded that
there was no case for the Poles receiving a zone. He did not really object,
but he didn’t like the manner in which it had been done. Stalin thought that
the Western Allies should listen to the Poles on this subject. Meanwhile the
Soviet leader was romping home. He pointed out that the leaders at Yalta
(Churchill was still at the conference at this point) had not meant the
Eastern Neisse, but the Western Neisse. There were indeed two rivers of
that name in Silesia, as we have seen - one which ran into the Oder below
Breslau and one that joined it below Guben. This meant that the line
demarcating Poland’s western borders would run to the left of the town of
Stettin, and more than a hundred kilometres to the left of Breslau, and
would encompass all that part of German Lower Silesia that ran between
the two rivers. To make it clear to the Western leaders, Stalin rose and
showed them the area on a map.75
This cunning confusion over the two Neisse rivers added greatly to the
Polish cull. Not only were the Poles to be richly rewarded with their half of
East Prussia, Danzig, all of Hinter Pomerania and a large chunk of
Brandenburg east of the Oder and the so-called ‘border area’, they were
now to receive such stock German towns as Brieg, Bunzlau, Frankenstein,
Glatz, Glogau, Goldberg, Grünberg, Hirschberg, Landeshut, Liegnitz,
Ohlau, Sagan, Waldenburg and Warmbrunn, containing altogether some 2.8
million Germans.76 In all they would be awarded 21 per cent of Germany’s
pre-1937 territory, while the Russians made off with 3,500 square miles of
East Prussia. All in all Germany would lose a quarter of its extent, and a
large part of the arable land that had fed it in the past. In return the Poles
were meant to shut up about Poland east of the Bug, and accept their place
in Stalin’s world.
Truman and Churchill were giving way at every point. Stalin talked of
Königsberg as a conquest next. This was booty - not in keeping with
Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s high-minded utterances in Newfoundland in
1941 - but Byrnes thought Churchill understood Stalin’s desire to grab a
colony or two. The status of the city had been discussed at Teheran. The
Soviet Union ‘should have an ice-free port at the expense of Germany’.
Stalin added that the Russians had suffered so much at the hands of
Germany that they were anxious to have some piece of German territory as
some small satisfaction to tens of millions of Soviet citizens. Besides,
Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed. Churchill made a weak attempt
to backtrack. He said it would be difficult to admit that East Prussia did not
exist and that Königsberg would not come under the authority of the Allied
Control Council. Once more, the region’s ultimate status would be left for
the peace conference that was never to be.77
The conference then heard a report from Field Marshal Alexander about
the British Sector of Vienna. The area contained 500,000 people, but the
British had no means of feeding them, their zone being hundreds of miles to
the south and west of the city. Stalin promised to look into the matter with
Renner. On the 24 July he generously agreed to feed the British charges for
the time being.
The conference returned to the thorny matter of the Polish border on the
25th. Churchill and Eden had met the Polish delegates, headed by Bierut,
the previous day. Bierut was a Soviet pawn who simply lied to and
stonewalled the British leader, but all the same he provided a rather more
generous estimate of the number of Germans remaining beyond the Oder.
He believed there were a million and half of them. At the next session
Churchill said that the question of the transfer of populations from
Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland should be discussed: ‘This area was
part of the Russian Zone and the Poles are driving the Germans out. He felt
this ought not to be done without consideration being given to the question
of food supply, reparation and other matters which had not yet been
decided’. In his reply, Stalin came close to being frank. The Poles, he said,
‘were taking their revenge upon the Germans . . . for the injuries the
Germans had caused them in the course of the centuries’. Churchill
expressed a material consideration once more - that revenge took the form
of throwing the Germans into the American and British Zones to be fed.78
Truman reminded Stalin that the Poles were his responsibility too, and
that he was also at the mercy of the Senate; and that they might easily
refuse to ratify any proposed treaty. Stalin brought up another bargaining
counter, one that was not in his hands: the Ruhr. This was in the British
Zone, and the British were having a hard time keeping the French out.
Churchill announced that he was leaving for Britain. ‘What a pity!’ said
Stalin. ‘I hope to be back,’ replied the British premier. Stalin suggested that,
judging from his rival’s face, ‘he did not think Mr Attlee was looking
forward to taking over Churchill’s authority’, apparently adding, ‘He does
not look like a greedy man.’ The British left Alexander Cadogan to mind
the fort.79
There was no meeting on 26 July, as the British were absent. Truman
flew to Frankfurt-am-Main to visit Eisenhower. On the way to Schloss
Berckheim, General Bolling’s palatial headquarters in Weinheim, he drove
through unscathed villages, and saw healthy-looking Germans. Eisenhower
was based in the big IG Farben building in Frankfurt, which reminded
Truman of the Pentagon. The British delegation had still not returned on 27
July and Truman relaxed with Eugene List’s piano-playing. He wrote to his
mother and sister of this ‘Godforsaken country’. ‘To think that millions of
Russians, Poles, English and Americans were slaughtered all for the folly of
one crazy egotist by the name of Hitler. I hope it won’t happen again.’80 The
day before he had met a Lieutenant Hitler, who came from the solidly
German town of St Louis.
Churchill had very much expected to be back, but Attlee won by a
landslide and became prime minister on the 26th. On the 27th he
unexpectedly named the former docker Ernest Bevin as foreign secretary.
Bevin himself thought he was destined for the Treasury, and that Hugh
Dalton would get the Foreign Office. Attlee had even told Dalton as much
when he saw him that morning. The Foreign Office, however, was not
happy with Dalton, possibly fearing that the Old Etonian economist would
be ‘too soft’ on the Russians. The permanent under-secretary, Cadogan,
thought Bevin ‘the heavyweight of the cabinet’. A further deciding factor
was the king’s antipathy towards Dalton. He too preferred Bevin.81
Bevin had no problem thinking himself into the role of chief diplomat.
As he told his private secretary Nicholas Henderson, he knew all about
‘foreigners’. He had had plenty of experience of ships’ captains. ‘Oh yes, I
can handle them,’ he said. As it was, he was devoted to the old guard at the
Foreign Office and the Foreign Office liked him too, because he did not
prevent them from shaping government policy. Bevin was strongly anti-
Soviet and had become fed up with Churchill’s softness towards them. He
thought the Conservatives had thrown too many ‘baubles at the Soviets’.
On 28 July, badly overweight and heavily dependent on drink and
cigarettes, Bevin went to Brize Norton to take his first flight.82
Truman was introduced to Ernest Bevin. Both he and Byrnes were
rather shocked by his aggressiveness towards the Soviets. When he got to
his digs, Bevin told General Sir Hastings Ismay that he was ‘not going to
have Britain barged about’.83 His passion for the British Empire would not
have been popular with the Americans or the Russians. Britain, however,
had far less might than the other two. Economically it was on its back: six
years of war had cost a quarter of the country’s pre-war wealth; its income
was reduced by half; exports were just a third of what they had been, and its
merchant fleet was down by 30 per cent. It had also lost 40 per cent of its
markets - chiefly to the Americans. Together with these problems, the
colonies were crawling with nationalists who were looked on with
sympathy by the other two powers round the Russian table in Potsdam.84
Despite the limited affections of the Americans, Britain had only one way
to turn. The Americans were avowed enemies of colonialism and the
sterling bloc, which they saw as a threat to the open world economy.85
Naturally Stalin knew Attlee well. The later arrival of the British meant
that the conference did not kick off until 10.15 p.m. on the 28th. Bevin was
seeing the Russian leader for the first time. He decided he was like a
‘renaissance despot’ - it was always yes or no, ‘though you could only
count on him if it was no’. Bevin immediately protested about the Oder-
Neisse Line.86 For the time being, however, the conference continued to
discuss booty. Stalin agreed that he would not seek reparations from Austria
(he was insisting on payments from Italy). He would find another way of
making off with the booty he desired - by sequestering ‘German’ assets.
Truman was growing impatient with the reparations issue. He realised all
too well that when these countries were bankrupted by reparations they
would need bailing out by the United States. It was after midnight when the
meeting broke up.87
 The 29th was the second Sunday of the conference. Truman attended a
church service in Babelsberg. Stalin had caught a cold and had stayed in
bed, thereby postponing the end. Truman thought he was faking the illness,
and that he was merely disappointed that Churchill had been replaced by
Attlee. Molotov took his place at the table. Zhukov remarked that Attlee
was rather more reserved than Churchill, but that he continued Churchill’s
line of argument.88 Truman’s original suppositions about Stalin had been
revised - he had never met such stubborn characters before and hoped he
would never do so again.89
The American secretary of state James Byrnes read out a statement
offering a definition of Poland’s western borders that would prevail until the
matter could be decided by the peace conference. The area was to be
administered by the Poles ‘until Poland’s final western border was fixed’ by
the peace conference.90 Byrnes drew a line starting at Swinemünde, west of
Stettin, and proceeding down the Oder to the Neisse before following the
Eastern Neisse to the Czech frontier. The Poles would also administer
Danzig and the lower half of East Prussia. It would not be considered a part
of the Soviet Zone.91
Molotov immediately objected: he wanted the border fixed at the
Görlitzer or Western Neisse. Truman thought he ‘requested a very large
concession on our part’. That was a considerable understatement. Truman
was already annoyed by the Russian-Polish fait accompli. The Russians had
warned their clients in Poland and Czechoslovakia to put a temporary stop
to their expulsions, at least until such time as the Allies could find places
for them within the shrunken Germany. The miserable German population
in Silesia were hoping vainly for justice from Potsdam. The Polish
authorities had now declared them to be ‘outside the law, without
possessions or honour’.92 The final decision was pure whitewash.eq Molotov
returned to the Ruhr. It was the bit of western Germany the Russians
wanted and had failed to occupy. Now he demanded two milliard dollars or
its equivalent - five to six million tons of machinery. Russian reparations
had already been fixed at Yalta. They were to receive a quarter of the
equipment in the Ruhr. There were other little points of that nature to clear
up. The naval issue was settled by a three-part division.93
Stalin continued indisposed. Truman wrote to his mother and sister. He
was not convinced that Stalin was ill. Perhaps the generalissimo genuinely
missed Churchill, for it was certain that Attlee would make just as many
concessions, if not more. Stalin did not please the American leader: ‘You
never saw a more pig-headed people as the Russians. I hope I never have to
hold another conference with them.’94
The end drew near. The eleventh and penultimate meeting took place on
the 31st. The Ruhr was British, and Bevin fixed the Russian share at 10 to
15 per cent. That meant 15 per cent in commodities or 10 in reparations.
Bevin also held out for the Eastern Neisse, but Byrnes was ready to concede
and grant the Russians the plum they longed for. Truman added forlornly
that it was only a temporary measure. Bevin was still insisting on the 1937
borders and hoping for a deal of some sort before he would concede. The
Americans pulled the carpet out from under his feet. He wanted to know if
the British could also give away parts of their zone to other countries.er
Truman added in what was no doubt a resigned tone: ‘we all agreed on the
Polish question’. Stalin said, ‘Stettin is in Polish territory.’ Bevin added,
‘Yes, we should inform the French.’ And they decided to tell the French.
The French had wanted it thus all along.95
The Anglo-Americans had lain prostrate while the Russians had walked
all over them. Truman thought the Polish compromise was ‘the best we
were able to get’.96 It begs a number of questions: had Stalin placed the
border at Berlin and the Spree, would the Allies have consented? Berlin had
a Slavic history too, as indeed did Magdeburg. Why not fix Poland’s border
at the Elbe? For the Germans on the right bank of the Oder, however,
Potsdam gave an ambiguous verdict, leaving the Oder-Neisse issue open
until 1974 and later. The final decision was to be left until a peace treaty
was agreed. This never happened. The Oder-Neisse Line therefore became a
temporary frontier until a permanent one was fixed at a later conference. In
the meantime the Poles resumed their expulsions from the areas allotted to
them by the Soviets. The cities of Breslau and Stettin felt this decision
acutely. The Anglo-Americans had not intended to leave them in Poland,
either permanently or temporarily. They had planned to divide Breslau,
leaving the bulk of the city in German hands, and the right-bank suburbs
were to go to Poland. At Yalta Churchill had said, ‘It would be a great pity
to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.’97
Zhukov claimed that the Oder-Neisse Line had been settled at Yalta, and
that Churchill was backtracking.98 Without Churchill’s at best limp
resistance, Truman agreed to the Oder-Neisse Line including the Eastern
Neisse and Breslau.99
At the next meeting Stalin was after booty again. He wanted a line
drawn from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and the opportunity to appropriate
any German property to the east of that marker. They discussed war
criminals: the Russians wanted the Krupps indicted. Krupps had made
possibly the greatest demands on the Nazi government for Russian slave
labour and raw materials. The Russians complained that Rudolf Hess was
living comfortably in England. Bevin replied that the British would send the
Allies a bill for his upkeep.100 Attlee thought the Russians had Goebbels.
Stalin was evasive. He wanted to have a list of war criminals who might be
in the Soviet Union, but the Americans opposed this. Stalin asked for just
three names, at which Attlee suggested Hitler: ‘Stalin replied that we do not
have Hitler at our disposition but that he had no objection to naming
him.’101
Stalin reverted to the western Polish border at the last meeting, which
began at 10.40 p.m. on 1 August. Molotov had amended the line on the
map. Stalin said that he wanted it fixed immediately west of Swinemünde,
but that the precise location would be decided by the Poles and Russians.
Bevin objected. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the British could not cut themselves out of
this . . . The line must be recognised by the United Nations.’ The delegates
continued to bicker about Swinemünde and how many other German
villages to the west of the coastal town would fall to Poland. The session
broke up at 3 a.m.102
The Potsdam Conference laid down the guidelines for the transfer of
populations. An estimated 3.5 million Germans were to be brought out of
the new Poland and settled in the British and Soviet Zones in an orderly and
humane manner as enshrined in Article 13. A schedule was drawn up which
foresaw the entire number crossing the frontier before August 1946.103
The Big Three agreed to create a number of ‘central agencies’ that
would be law in all four zones. The French smelled a rat: central agencies
smacked of the ‘Reich’. ‘There is thus a German state,’ complained de
Gaulle; that was ‘inadmissible’.104 It was not only the French who were
unhappy. Potsdam ended in recrimination. The path to the Cold War was
open. From now on decisions would be taken at the regular meetings of the
Allied foreign ministers. The Russians had the dropping of the US atom
bombs on Japan to concentrate their minds. On 22 August Truman put an
end to Lease-Lend while de Gaulle was on a visit to America. Franco-
American relations were marked by mutual incomprehension. France,
which had signed a treaty with Soviet Russia in December, was playing the
communist card. It was easily done with the Communist Party the largest in
the French Assembly.105
The Western Allies were shocked that they had made so many
concessions to the Soviets. They had managed the conference badly. Soviet
power was at its height, while the British were at the nadir of their fortunes.
The death of Roosevelt in April had meant that the only delegation to have
maintained the same dramatis personae at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam had
been the Soviets, and they had known how to invoke past agreements.106
Although Truman had accepted Morgenthau’s resignation, it was only at
Potsdam that the politician’s thinking really became a dead letter.107 One of
the most influential critics of Potsdam was the diplomat George Kennan,
who was stationed in Moscow and knew the Soviet leaders well. He viewed
the whole conference with ‘unmitigated scepticism and despair’. ‘I cannot
recall any political document the reading of which filled me with a greater
sense of depression than the communiqué to which President Truman set
his name at the conclusion of these confused and unreal discussions.’
Quadripartite control was, thought Kennan, ‘Unreal and unworkable’.108
He believed that the agreement was wrong, point by point. War crimes
needed to be settled by immediate execution, and there was no common
ground to be found with the Soviets. ‘In all fairness’ the granting of
Königsberg to the Soviet Union had been agreed by Churchill and
Roosevelt, ‘but the casualness and frivolity with which these decisions were
made . . . the apparent indifference on the American side’ appalled Kennan.
He also showed how Truman and Byrnes had been hoodwinked. The
Russians required an ice-free port, and felt they deserved one after the
sacrifices made by the Soviet people. Kennan pointed out that they already
had three - Ventspils, Libau (Liepaja) and Baltisky - and Königsberg was
forty-nine kilometres from the sea. The result was a disaster ‘without
parallel’ in modern times.
Not only were the East Prussian population subjected to the most
ghastly fate imaginable (and in many cases it was unimaginable), but - as
Kennan pointed out - it resulted in the most terrible squandering of the
resources of a rich agricultural province. Gone were 1.4 million head of
cattle, 1.85 million pigs, four million tons of wheat, fifteen million tons of
rye and 40 million tons of potatoes in a yearly average.109
Some Germans, however, were relieved to hear the outcome of the
Potsdam Conference. For Ruth Friedrich it was as if a ‘stone had fallen
from our hearts: so there is not to be a fresh war but they were going to
rebuild and rule together’. The order was enshrined in Control Council
Proclamation No. 1 of 5 June, which informed the German people that the
four powers would jointly govern Germany.110
For the Potsdamer life returned to what they now called normality.
Hanna Grisebach was free to scrump again, stealing potatoes from the
crown prince’s garden. She was caught red handed by a Russian:
‘Zappzarapp kartoscha!’ Her daughter pacified the soldier with a little
school-book Russian. He dismissed them: ‘Na Haus!’111 The shadows
lengthened and the cold set in. By February it was fifteen degrees below,
and there was no glass in their windows. They slept in their coats and
animal skins. The shortage of potatoes had been joined by a dearth of coal
and wood. It was Karl Jaspers who finally helped them out by recalling
August Grisebach to his chair in the newly reopened university. His wife
and children had to remain behind in Potsdam until repeated visits to
OMGUS, the American HQ in Berlin-Dahlem, yielded the necessary
papers.

OceanofPDF.com
 19
The Great Freeze
Whenever I think of the winter of 1946 to 1947 in
Germany, I always recall the glitter on the walls and in
the interiors of houses, that I must have seen a hundred
times in German homes and which resembled the
sparkly sheen on the unpolished side of a granite block.
It was the glitter of a wafer-thin layer of white frost, an
icy blast of damp; the frozen moisture in the
atmosphere created by men, sweat, coughing and
breathing; men whose clothing was sometimes soaked
though with snow, and who dried out slowly when they
got home.
Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 82

After Potsdam the stage was set for the Cold War, but it did not come
for a while. One reason for this was that Stalin did not want a war, hot or
cold; and it was the Western Allies, first Britain, and then America, who
pushed him into it. He had no desire to reach the North Sea, the Rhine or
the Atlantic. The Soviet Union was exhausted by war. If Stalin had
considered resuming the march west, he knew that his country needed a
good twenty years to recover first. When goaded to invade western Europe
by one of his generals, he answered, ‘But who would feed all its people?’1
Similarly, he tried to restrain Tito’s wilder ambitions - although this did not
come out at the time - when he appeared to back his territorial claims.
Stalin’s system was about security, and his almost paranoiac sense that the
Soviet Union was in danger. Poland was the lynchpin: he wanted a good,
deep buffer. In Germany he saw something more akin to an ally. He sought
to avoid division, although he allowed certain policies - such as agrarian
reform - which could only have been intolerable to the West. The Cold War
was the result of what Vojtech Mastny has called the ‘Western perception of
a Soviet threat’.2 Stalin kept his options open.
There was friction at Potsdam, but the Allies went home in the belief
that they were policing the globe together. They had instituted a regular
conference of foreign ministers (CFM) to keep the world in check. The
merry-go-round had taken the foreign ministers to London in September
1945. It was their first meeting since Postsdam. There was a predictable
scrimmage over who was to receive what in the way of German resources.
The French were still clamouring loudly for the Rhine and the Ruhr and
‘justice’, by which they meant coal, machinery, locomotives, consumer
goods and men. They were pre-empted by the Soviets, who had awarded
themselves 50 per cent of reparations, with 20 per cent each to Britain and
America. France and the other claimants had to make do with 10. Bevin
was still firm on the Ruhr. He was generally sympathetic to the French, but
in this instance he realised that any internationalisation of the area would be
tantamount to opening the door to the Russians.3
French behaviour upset Molotov and led to a chilling of relations
between the two countries. On 7 October 1945 Pravda ran an article saying
that the French had less right to discuss eastern Europe than the Yugoslavs,
Czechs or Poles. Moscow complained that the French were not prepared to
deport Russian POWs, by which it almost certainly meant those Russian
citizens who were hiding under French skirts because France had not been
party to Yalta. The Russians responded by saying they would not return
French POWs, which meant Alsatians who had been recruited into the
German army after 1940.4 They would have to spend another winter in the
Gulag.
The winter of 1945-6 was not abnormally cold, but the terrible lack of
coal and food was felt acutely by the very large numbers of Germans
without proper roofs over their heads. The ground was rock hard and the
lakes froze. The Kommandatura authorised a Holzaktion in the Grunewald
woods, allowing Berliners to cut down the venerable trees of the former
royal hunting reserve. That winter 167 people committed suicide from
despair, and the British authorities in Berlin decided to evacuate children
aged between four and fourteen to their zone. This involved 50,000 children
and 10,000 accompanying adults. Despite this precaution, 60,000 Berliners
are believed to have died before March 1946. The following winter killed
off an estimated 12,000 more when temperatures hovered around thirty
degrees below.5
As noted in the previous chapter, the meetings between the Big Three
had foreseen a peace conference, similar to that which met in Versailles in
1919, putting the final coat of varnish on the post-war settlement. There
were endless discussions about this, and about just who was to be allowed a
seat at the table. Byrnes was still courting Stalin. He sat next to him at
dinner in Moscow at the CFM in December 1945 and raised a toast: ‘Whom
we hath [sic] joined together, let no peace put asunder.’ By his own
admission it went down like a lead brick. The brief American-Soviet
rapprochement struck fear into Bevin, but on 9 February 1946 Stalin
appeared to open the batting in the Cold War with his speech hailing the
victory of the Soviet people. The war, he said, had been the result of
monopoly capitalism. 6 It was very probably true, however, that the Soviet
leader had not meant to frighten the Western Allies. Both he and Molotov
were still keen on East-West co-operation. So, to some extent, was Byrnes;
but his attempts to maintain the peace between East and West were
undermined by Truman, who pronounced himself ‘tired of babying the
Soviets’. He would go so far, and no further.7
Churchill made his speech in Fulton, Missouri on 5 March in which he
was supposed to have coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’. The words had, in
fact, been first used by Joseph Goebbels.8 Churchill’s views were loudly
cheered by the Foreign Office, though they were very cautiously received in
America at first, which was moving only slowly in that direction.9 The idea
persisted in some quarters that Soviet Russia and America could carve up
the world. The notion had found favour with Roosevelt. It often had to do
with a profound Anglophobia on the part of senior American army
officers.10 Now voices of dissent began to ring out.
The Soviets had no desire to see Germany break up - they had their eyes
on the Ruhr with its industries, and on their 10 per cent share of German
production. After the Berlin election of May 1946 that went by the board.
The Russians were proceeding with their idea of setting up ‘democratic’
government in their zone. The political resolve of the Western Allies in
Berlin had first been put to the test in March that year when the Soviets
called for the merging of the SPD and the KPD. In April the socialists and
communists of the SBZ held a conference in the Admiralspalast Theatre
where the call for the new ‘Socialist Unity Party’ or SED was unanimous.
Elections by secret ballot were held in the West but were banned in the
Russian Sector. The Soviet ban was challenged in both Prenzlauerberg and
Friedrichshain, but Russian troops broke up the polling station and carried
off the ballot boxes. In the Western sectors the vote was a disaster for the
Russian plans to introduce a one-party state: 29,610 Social Democrats voted
against, with just 2,937 agreeing to the merger. It had been ‘the first free
and secret election on German soil since 1932’.11 Russia’s policy had blown
up in its face, especially when free elections were allowed.
The New Ideologists
The East-West co-operation that had won the war was going out of
intellectual fashion. A different set of men were wielding influence in the
Western corridors of power. George F. Kennan had served in the Moscow
embassy during the war. For him the Soviet Union posed a threat to the
American way of life.12 He believed the Americans were deceiving
themselves if they thought they could change events in the areas already
under Soviet hegemony; on the other hand he could see no reason for
making things easier for them. Germany was not going to work - a shared
Germany was a ‘chimera’. In the summer of 1945 Kennan wrote his famous
‘long telegram’: ‘We have no choice but to lead our section of Germany -
the section of which we and the British have accepted responsibility - to a
form of independence so prosperous, so secure, that the East cannot
threaten it.’ Better a dismembered Germany than totalitarianism at the
North Sea.13 Kennan’s memorandum was echoed by three similar telegrams
from the British diplomat Frank Roberts, although he expressed himself
with more caution.
In retrospect Kennan probably went too far. It is highly unlikely that
Stalin wanted to cross the Elbe. It did not make a lot of sense to strive for a
communist Europe while the Americans and the British retained large
forces on the mainland. If that had been what he desired, it was better to
wait: the fruit might fall from the tree without any need to struggle. Besides,
America had the atomic bomb, and was to possess a monopoly in nuclear
weapons until 1949.14 The Soviets were still keen to reform their zone. The
Soviet diplomat A. A. Sobelev told Murphy that the pan-German central
government laid down by Potsdam would need years of preparation, as the
spirit of Prussia had to be excised from the administration first.15 The
changes of attitude were in the West, where the Americans feared an attack
on the open economy and the British an attack on their interests in the
Middle East and the Mediterranean.16 Kennan was not deceived by the
Czechs. By 1945 the country was already under the sway of Moscow.
‘Personal acquaintance with the Czech ambassador in Moscow, Zdenek
Fierlinger, had given me the impression that we had to do in his person not
with the representative of a free and independent Czechoslovakia but with
one who was to all intents and purposes a Soviet agent.’17
Views like Kennan’s were becoming common currency in America.
General George Patton was a case in point: with time he preferred Nazis to
communists. A more analytical indictment of the policy that led to the
Anglo-American rout at Potsdam appeared in Ralph Keeling’s Gruesome
Harvest of 1947. Keeling called it ‘one of the most brutal and terrifying
peace programmes ever inflicted on a defeated nation’. Germany was not a
pawn in the battle between East and West, thought Keeling, ‘she is the
major prize’. Germany needed to be attracted over to the American side and
kept there.18 This was to become American policy before the year was out.
Keeling echoed many of Victor Gollancz’s views on the treatment of the
Germans, but he was rare at the time in being prepared to bring up Allied
wartime atrocities, such as the bombing of civilian targets and the
firestorms where men, women and children were fried at temperatures of
1,000 degrees. The Oder-Neisse Line contradicted the Atlantic Charter, and
- Keeling pointed out - even the draconian Morgenthau had limited his
territorial demands for the Poles to the southern half of East Prussia and the
mixed Germano-Polish area of Upper Silesia.19
In Britain, Roberts’s views prevailed in the Foreign Office, which was
calling for an all-out offensive against Russia’s mission of ‘dynamic and
proselytising communism’. What Roberts feared was ‘communism on the
Rhine’. The British attitude was so aggressively anti-Soviet in Bevin’s
Foreign Office that some observers have suggested that the British were the
prime movers in the Cold War.20 There were still delusions of grandeur in
Whitehall and Bevin was certainly all in favour of the hard line. He thought
it might be necessary to abandon the idea of a united Germany but insisted
that responsibility for the breakdown in relations between the wartime
Allies should rest fairly and squarely with the Soviets. Though the Russians
appeared peaceful in Europe, they were already moving troops into Iran, the
move that was to prompt Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech.21 The Americans
were the last to abandon their faith in a united Germany, but Byrnes was
defeated in Paris, the location both of the farcical peace conference and of
the Quai d’Orsay, which was most famously opposed to German unity.
Byrnes could not believe a peace conference had any value now that so
many countries had been absorbed into the Soviet bloc.22
 Bevin was also worried about money, especially as Britain did not have
much. Reputations die hard, but Britain’s subaltern position was recognised
by the permanent under-secretary, Cadogan, who referred to the leaders of
the Allied coalition as ‘the great two and a half’. In 1945 the economist
Maynard Keynes was talking of a ‘financial Dunkirk’, and as the fuel crisis
set in during the cruel winter of 1946-7 Britain’s economic handicap was
patently obvious.23 In 1945-6 alone, Germany cost the British taxpayer £74
million, while the British people had to put up with a continuation of
wartime rationing.
Although Truman had recognised the Oder-Neisse Line on 9 August
1945, the Americans were ready to backtrack almost immediately. For the
time being, however, the Control Council defined Germany as the land
between the Line and the ‘present western borders’. The French had made it
clear as well that, although not party to Potsdam, they approved the
cessions in the east. It was Byrnes who reopened the can of worms by
raising the question of border revision and threatening Poland with a peace
conference. 24
That other Russo-sceptic, Clay, drew his inspiration from Byrnes. On 19
August he wrote to the secretary of state, ‘You are carrying so much of the
hope of the world on your shoulders against almost insurmountable odds
that you should be free of all other worries. If you cannot win the fight for
peace, no one can.’25 The Berlin elections were coming up. Clay thought the
Americans should support the democratic parties in the west - the CDU and
the SPD represented the ‘substantial majority of the population’. ‘I am not
unduly apprehensive of the election results in Berlin,’ he wrote, as he did
not trust them anyway. Berlin depended on Russia, which fed its people,
and was subject therefore to Soviet economic pressure.26 Indeed, there was
a feeling that the Germans in the SBZ could not be trusted and that they
would turn to communism under the blandishments of the occupiers. Even
when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary - as in the Austrian
elections - the Anglo-Americans still persisted in their view. The feeling
that Germans in the east had been seduced by the Soviets strengthened their
resolve to create a separate state in the west of the country. As early as May
1946 Bevin explained to the cabinet why he felt a divided Germany was
desirable. The Russians presented a danger as great as, if not greater than, a
revived Germany. The idea was to create a Germany ‘that would be more
amenable to our influence’, whereas a united Germany would be more
under Soviet hegemony.27
Byrnes was also the architect of Bizonia - the idea of merging the
Western zones rapidly replaced Bevin’s notion of a ‘loose federation’. In
April 1946 the four powers met to discuss the situation in Germany, and
Russia was accused of reneging on the agreements made at Potsdam. The
result was an economic amalgamation of the British and American zones.
The conference affirmed the fact that the enemy had changed since the
onset of the Cold War: the Germans had become allies in the new order.
The British cabinet agreed in principle to Bizonia on 25 July 1946.
Germany should become self-sufficient again by 1949.28
Byrnes made his statement of intent in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946.
He had been attending the impotent Paris Peace Conference and had left for
Berlin before flying on to the Württemberg capital. He met the German
minister presidents and addressed an audience in the Opera House. The
German politicians told him a new Hitler was an impossibility: were such a
man to emerge, he would have to be a communist. Byrnes said it had been a
mistake for America to lose interest in Europe after the First World War.
‘The American people want to help the German people to win their way
back to an honourable peace among the free and peace-loving nations of the
world . . . What we want is lasting peace. We will oppose harsh and
vengeful measures which obstruct our attempts at peace. We will oppose
soft measures which invite the breaking of the peace . . . We do not want
Germany to become the satellite of any power or powers or to live under a
dictatorship, foreign or domestic.’ There were sideways swipes at the Poles
for seizing land before they had been granted leave. Poland’s borders, he
warned, were not final; there had been no agreement. The French were also
put in their place: America could not deny their right to the Saar, but it
would not support any encroachment on the Ruhr or the Rhineland. The
criticism of the French in Stuttgart, of all places, must have been especially
piquant.29
Byrnes’s hard stand was heartily approved by Clay. The British were
also enthusiastic. Churchill cabled his congratulations. After some initial
reticence, Bevin appeared pleased and made similar noises before the
House of Commons in October.30 Attlee was all for withdrawing from
Germany, but Bevin, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff ganged up on
him, claiming that it would be tantamount to another Munich. They wanted
confrontation, not retreat. Above all Byrnes’s speech went down well with
the Germans. The Wiesbaden Kurier called it ‘a ray of light at last’. Then
again, in Wiesbaden, it was wise to praise anything the Americans did.31
When Byrnes went, Clay continued the hard line. Washington interfered
very little with American military commanders in Germany.32 Not so
enthralled by Byrnes’s words were the Poles, who staged a protest outside
the American embassy in Warsaw.33
John Dos Passos had the chance to interview Clay in Berlin at the end
of 1945. Clay exerted his charm on the journalists, telling them ‘with a
smile that we weren’t necessarily trying to produce an efficient Germany,
we were trying to produce a democratic Germany’. He did not know if he
would succeed in this. Nor could he say whether the Germany they
produced would be separate or unified: ‘That decision couldn’t seem to get
past the [Control] Council.’ Clay was referring to the French, who
obstructed anything that exuded a whiff of unity.34
The French were up to their usual tricks and not playing ball with the
Anglo-Americans. From the very beginning they sought to disable the
Control Council and resist the implementation of the Potsdam Agreements
as far as creating ‘central agencies’ was concerned. There was to be no
recreation of the ‘Reich’. Pierre Koenig wielded his veto like a bacon slicer.
On 20 October 1945 he put paid to the idea of a unified trades union
structure. The Americans were incensed. First Eisenhower threatened to
scrap the Control Council, then the matter came within Clay’s domain, and
Clay was permanently furious with the French for their obstructions. The
latter still had their hearts set on the dismemberment of Germany and
looked approvingly to what had happened on the other side of the Oder-
Neisse Line. As Bidault put it: if you can do it with Breslau, why not
Mainz?35
The South Tyrol
One issue that was festering in the autumn of 1946 was what to do with
the German-speaking South Tyrol. Hitler had been surprisingly pragmatic
about ethnic Germans. Where ‘Heim ins Reich’ (home in the Reich)
provided a pretext for annexation in most cases, for the German-speaking
majority in the South Tyrol and Gottschee it meant ‘come home to the
Reich’: Mussolini was to be allowed to continue Italianising this former
Austrian territory north of the River Adige or Etsch.es
 In 1919 the region had been 95 per cent German, but self-determination
was nonetheless denied to its people. The Allies had promised the Italians
the Brenner to lure them over to their side in 1915. Some vague noises had
been made about autonomy, but once the Italian fascists came to power they
were keen to consolidate the region by evicting the natives and replacing
them with poor peasants from the south. Mussolini encouraged new
industries in Bolzano (Bozen) and Merano (Meran), and brought in
Sicilians to man them. The fanatical Ettore Tolomei from Trentino pursued
a policy of promoting Italian institutions and banning the German language
and place names. Many changed their family names to something more
Italianate in order to retain their farms. The experience of persecution had
been a bitter one for the South Tyroleans; and they had been only partly
mollified in 1943 when the Germans had taken over from the Italians and
Mussolini’s drive had abated. The Soviet Union might well have consented
to hand over the territory had it not been for Marshal Badoglio’s coup
against Mussolini that year. Now Italy was on the winning side again, and
would not be penalised in a post-war peace settlement. Similar sentiments
were expressed by Churchill’s foreign secretary Anthony Eden: there was
more to be gained by sparing Italy further humiliation.36
From May 1945, the South Tyroleans naturally hoped that they would
be allowed the chance to join their cousins in the north, and become part of
an independent Austria. This was the aim of the SVP (South Tyrolean
People’s Party), founded on 8 May. Karl Gruber had been active in
reclaiming the South Tyrol from the very moment the Allies arrived in
Austria. He felt that Austria had proved its victim status, and could now
reap the reward. In September 1945 there had been a demonstration on the
streets of Innsbruck, and Figl expressed the view that ‘The return of the
South Tyrol to Austria is every Austrian’s dream.’37
The Italian foreign minister Alcide De Gasperi was from Trent and was
more prepared to see Trieste fall to the Yugoslavs, however, than the South
Tyrol return to Austria. He tried to frighten the Anglo-Americans by
conjuring up a vision of a communist Austrian state on the Brenner. This
was calculated to have an effect on Truman. In general the Allies were split,
with the American Austrian expert James Riddleberger siding with Austria,
and the Italian authority Samuel Reber resisting. In Britain Lord Hood and
Arnold Toynbee were in favour of Austria, while A. D. M Ross and the
historian of the Habsburg Monarchy, A. J. P. Taylor, were against.38
 Renner sent notes to the Allies on 6 and 16 September 1945 canvassing
their views on a return of the region to Austria.39 In January 1946 the
Austrian government issued a note to the Allied Council with a request that
it be forwarded to the member governments. The note requested the return
of the province of Bolzano-Bozen - its agricultural production was vital to
the Austrian economy. The request had support from some unusual circles.
In the House of Lords Robert Vansittart spoke in favour of the cession of
the South Tyrol to Austria, and the foreign secretary Bevin lent it a
sympathetic ear.40 The South Tyrol, however, was not what it had been in
1919. As a result of Mussolini’s transfer of poor Italians from the south and
Hitler’s encouragement of the ‘Heim ins Reich’ programme to bring
German-speakers to Germany, the Italian minority amounted to nearly 40
per cent of the population, and their presence was particularly strong in the
bigger towns.
Gruber had assumed office as foreign minister with a desire to pursue a
‘dynamic foreign policy’ that was mostly thrust at the idea of getting the
South Tyrol back.41 A petition was signed by 158,628 South Tyroleans and
handed to Figl in Innsbruck. On 1 May 1946 the Allies refused a South
Tyrolean request for a plebiscite. The question was deferred to a putative
Paris peace conference.
On 5 May 20,000 South Tyroleans gathered in the bailey of Schloss
Sigmundskron wearing placards that read, ‘Wir bitten die Siegermächte:
schenkt uns unsere Heimat!’ (We ask the victorious powers, give us our
home!). Gruber now suggested that the South Tyrol be administered by the
United Nations. When Austrian demands were rejected by the Italians, a
general strike was organised in Innsbruck, Salzburg and Vienna. Gruber
was invited to ‘air his views’ in Paris in August. By the end of the month
his demands had been modified: South Tyroleans were to enjoy political
liberty; the province of Bolzano was to have economic autonomy; there was
to be a special customs policy between Austria and the South Tyrol.42 The
Italians agreed to a different statute for the region within the province of
Trentino-Alto Adige. Trentino had also been a part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, but its population was almost entirely Italian-speaking. As it was,
the Allies made the decision to evacuate Italy at the Paris CFM on 24 June
1946. On the question of the South Tyrol, the foreign ministers were content
to ask Italy for certain guarantees for the German-speaking population.
They had eventually resolved to maintain frontiers, where possible, as they
had been before the war. The French were more in favour: they had to put
away a dream of extending their Austrian zone to the Adige. The decision
to maintain the status quo was bitterly disappointing to the Austrians.
Renner scrapped a banquet that was to be offered in 1946 to commemorate
the victory over Germany.43
The injustice of the South Tyrolean position finally led to a meeting
between the Austrian foreign minister and his Italian counterpart De
Gasperi in Paris on 5 September 1946. They met to consider a South
Tyrolean ‘Magna Charta’.44 The accord guaranteed the rights of the
German-speakers. Once again they were to be entitled to German schools,
and Germans might occupy a number of local-government positions. Place
names could be written in German again. Exchanges between the north and
the south of the Tyrol were encouraged with an automatic right for qualified
students to study at Innsbruck University. In 1948, however, hopes of
autonomy were dashed when the southern region was bound into the new
area of Trentino, where Italians had a two-thirds majority.
The Paris Conference proved a humiliating experience for De Gasperi,
but good news was on the horizon in the form of Trieste. The British had
managed to keep the Yugoslavs out, and the following year the port, with its
80 per cent Italian population, reverted to Italy. ‘Co-belligerency’ with the
Allies had once again saved the Italians from the worst punishment. Italy
lost its African colonies, and had to cede Fiume and Istria to Yugoslavia and
the Dodecanese to Greece. A few Alpine villages were transferred to
France.45
The Russians Come into the Cold
Russian attempts to show the Germans they were soft and cuddly did
not help when it came to Berlin’s first free elections for fourteen years. The
poll, which was held in October 1946, gave very different results to the
local elections which the Russians had been able to run by themselves. The
SED received a paltry 19.8 per cent, trailing behind the right-wing CDU,
with 22.2 per cent, and with less than half the votes of the SDP, based in the
Western sectors. For the SPD it was the best score they had achieved since
1925; Berliners perceived the SED as the ‘Russian party’.46 Some saw the
behaviour of the Red Army as being partly to blame. A majority of female
voters in Austria had certainly refused to support political parties that
appeared to emanate from the same place as their rapists. The bourgeois
parties in the SBZ had also been able to exploit the women’s plight. The
Russian journalist K. Gofman took the matter up with the Bulgarian
ideologist Georgy Dimitrov in Moscow, condemning ‘this evil which
carries such a huge cost for our local prestige in Germany’.47
The news that the hated wartime coalition might be on the verge of
collapse was rapturously greeted in the courthouse prison in Nuremberg.
When Churchill began to criticise the Soviet Union, even Hess forgot that
he had lost his memory and told the other major Nazis that he had always
known it would be thus, that the trial would end, and that they would be
restored to their high-sounding titles and dignities. Göring too slapped his
thighs in glee and exclaimed, ‘History will not be deceived! The Führer and
I always prophesied it! The coalition will break up sooner or later.’48
The first calls from the Soviet Zone to create pan-German committees
in keeping with the Potsdam Agreement came as early as 1945. They were
issued by the LPD or Liberal Democrats. They suggested the creation of a
‘general plenipotentiary’ to act as a liaison man between the different
centres of power, or the formation of a ‘party control commission’. In 1946
the Liberal Democrats called for a German Zone Council, and the following
year a committee made up of all German parties. That same year the CDU
in the Soviet Zone demanded ‘national representation’.49
The Russians were also changing their minds about their wartime
partners. A New York Times reporter who interviewed a Soviet general in
Dresden, heard him say that the destruction was ‘your work and now it is
our work to clear it up’.50 A new froideur had set in with the Allies since the
attempt by the Soviets to manipulate the elections. This was the beginning
of the squeeze on West Berlin that was to culminate in the airlift and the
failed attempt by the Russians to overrun the Western sectors. Berlin was to
be ‘a Danzig without a corridor’. What was more, the Western Allies were
pathetically understaffed, particularly in Berlin, where the US had no more
than two battalions of troops to face the Red Army.51 The day after the poll
the NKVD began rounding up over 400 scientists and technicians in the
Russian Sector and shipping them back to the USSR. Three days later the
British protested against a violation of human rights. In a rare moment of
candour Colonel Frank Howley admitted that the Americans too had taken
away German scientists. They were ‘hardly in a strong position’ if they
chose to protest.52
 The Great Freeze
The winter of 1946-7 was possibly the coldest in living memory. In
Cologne there were sixty four days in the 121 from December to March
when the temperature was below zero at 8.00 a.m. Near Frankfurt further to
the south, deep snow lay on the ground until March.53 The puny ‘cannon
oven’ was the only source of warmth for most. It was capable of warming
one side of the room, but its effect rarely extended to the other. The cannon
oven gave off an intense heat, but only for a short period, as the rations of
fuel were soon burned up. In the American Zone households were limited to
six briquettes, and sometimes there were none at all.
The cannon oven was a way of locating life in the ruins. A makeshift
chimney indicated a room under the rubble. The stench was appalling,
reminding Zuckmayer of a working coalmine. The inhabitants of these
smoky dens were happy for all that - at least they had some sort of roof over
their heads. They were lucky, too, if they were not obliged to share a room
with another family. Only in the relatively rubble-free western districts of
Berlin where the Allies had requisitioned many of the houses could one find
fresh air and the scent of pine trees, but even that was spiked with benzene.
Fuel was short here, however, and living in an elegant villa meant little if it
could not be heated. The privileged inhabitants of Zehlendorf or Dahlem
froze with the rest.54
Everything was burned that winter. Germans might have regretted that
they had been so quick to put their Nazi literature into the stove. A rumour
went round that there were to be public burnings of Nazi books, but the
truth was only that the Berlin public libraries threw out the now
ideologically suspect material in September 1945, and the others naturally
followed suit. Using Nazi paraphernalia as fuel had begun even before the
Führer’s death. The anonymous Woman in Berlin was cooking on National
Socialist literature on 27 April 1945. Later she burned the Movement’s
sacred text to keep warm. ‘I suspect . . . Adolf ’s Mein Kampf will one day
become a collector’s item.’55 Christabel Bielenberg, taking refuge in the
Black Forest, wondered where the big portrait of the Führer had gone that
had previously adorned the walls of the Burgomaster’s office: ‘In the
stove,’ she was told.56
By 20 November 1946 the icy wind was causing alarm among
Berliners, who were turning up their threadbare collars against the cold. On
6 December Ruth Andreas Friedrich and her friends were wondering if they
could hold out. Ten days later it was minus twenty. The pipes were frozen.
The women returned to fetching water from the pumps. On 21 December
the ice had to be broken in the buckets to make morning coffee. In the
American Sector the electricity was turned off for eight to ten hours a day,
and the situation was worse in the British. As the lavatories were frozen
over, the Berliners packed up their excrement and dumped it in the nearest
ruin. Prices rocketed at Christmas. The Andreas Friedrichs were able to
steal a tree in Teltow, but a goose at RM1,400 was more than a pair of shoes
and much more than they had to spend. A pound of chocolate was RM500,
a bar of soap RM40. The maximum monthly earnings were in the region of
RM1,000.57
One of the sufferers that winter was the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, who
was seriously ill as a result of his confinement in Ravensbrück. His wife
was trying her best to treat an inflammation of his lungs by giving him
access to fresh air, yet that meant freezing air. Suhrkamp literally risked life
and limb every time he ventured to the lavatory. The cold had been so
intense that it not only froze the water pipes, but also caused the pipe from
the lavatory to explode, leaving the bathroom floor covered in frozen
excrement. A hot-water pipe had been fed through the bathroom to afford
some feeble warmth. This turned the sewage into a semi-liquid mass the
colour of coffee ice-cream. The only way to rid the bathroom of this
stinking mass was to scrub it with boiling water, but with the lack of
combustible material and the terrible cold, it was not possible to get water
that hot. It was weeks before a plumber could effect the necessary repairs;
meanwhile the bathroom remained a serious health hazard.58
In the courthouse in Nuremberg the Seven survivors from the first IMT
trial felt the cold like everyone else. Speer, who had been ruminating on
how Air Marshal Harris had expressed himself when he spoke about the
Germans - had he used words like ‘extinction’ or ‘annihilation’? - suddenly
began to shiver. On 22 December he sat in his cell wrapped in a blanket,
watching his breath. He was wearing his spare underwear around his feet.
On Christmas Eve the men buried the hatchet, or at least declared a truce:
Funk gave Dönitz a sausage and Schirach handed Speer a piece of bacon as
neither had received any provisions from home. Neurath also shared his
Christmas biscuits with Speer, while the American chaplain gave them all
cigars, cigarettes and chocolate.59
 That Christmas the grim news leaked out that a second frozen train had
arrived from Poland. Of the refugees, thirty-five had died, stripped of their
clothes at the border, 182 were seriously affected by frostbite, and twenty-
five more required amputations. Among the victims were thirty children.
The Berliners’ stomachs rumbled and they grumbled: under Hitler there had
been potatoes. The political risk of letting them go hungry was becoming
apparent.60 This might have prompted the reforms in the SBZ. Ration Card
VI was scrapped and demontage halted. Seventy-four Berlin industries were
returned to the people. On 7 January 1947 the barometer had plunged once
again in Nuremberg, this time to minus eighteen Fahrenheit. Speer learned
that in Berlin people were burning their last sticks of furniture. The
prisoners’ shower had frozen.61 The thermometer sank again on 31 January.
The power in Berlin was cut for eight to ten hours a day again. The
Berliners went out with their rucksacks to scour the Grunewald for
kindling.62
The winter bit everywhere in Europe. Britain had to cut back on its
commitment to the fight against communism, so Greece became an
American sphere of influence. The Soviets made more mischief at the
London Conference of Foreign Ministers of 16 January 1947. Stalin’s
advice appears so contradictory it is small wonder that the Western Allies
could not get the measure of him. He told his delegation that if reparations
obstructed German renewal they should drop their demands,63 yet the
Soviets backed the Yugoslav leader Joze Vilfan, who was demanding $150
million, 2,470 square miles of Carinthia (including the provincial capital
Klagenfurt and part of the city of Villach), and 130 square kilometres of
Styria (although to the Russians the Yugoslavs said they would be happy
with sixty-three square kilometres on the Drau, and an important power
station). These areas possessed large Slovenian populations. The Soviets
added that they wanted a special statute to protect the Croats in Burgenland.
Lord Pakenham dismissed the Yugoslav request, adding that it was not
worth the paper it was written on.64 The game came to an end the following
year when Stalin and Tito fell out at the Villa Bled.
Business took Ruth Friedrich to Hamburg that winter. She noted a rise
in the popularity of the Nazis. People had been scrawling ‘88’ on walls.
Someone explained that H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, and 88
stood for ‘HH’ or ‘Heil Hitler’. The British were to blame. They were not
sufficiently tough on the Nazis.65 They had lodged many of the bombed-out
citizens in Nissen huts, where they froze. The police were turning a blind
eye to thefts of coal. They believed that protecting coal supplies was down
to the conquerors. Ruth Friedrich was keen to compare prices with Berlin.
A half-packet of soap powder cost five marks, a quarter pound of tea a
hundred.66 On her return she missed her connection to the military train in
Hanover, and had to spend twenty-four hours there before she could catch
the next. At first she found a sort of buffet in a bunker where the people
smelled of fish and onions. She had to pay a ten-mark deposit for a beaker
to drink some coffee. Later she ran across the black market where American
soap was changing hands for fifty marks a bar. The hand of the woman who
offered it to her was so dirty that she wanted to tell her to use it herself. She
made her way to an official doss-house where she was put into the women’s
dormitory. There she met a woman who had been raped eight times trying
to cross the ‘green border’. She was bleeding badly and stank.67
Another smell permeated Berlin that winter: the carbide lamp that
reeked like garlic. Filth, and washing, was a huge problem. Like Hitler’s
victims who languished in concentration camps, it became imperative to
retain human dignity that winter. Zuckmayer spoke of the necessity of
keeping fingernails clean and brushing teeth. Germans went to
extraordinary lengths to polish their shoes, even though there was no
bootblack. Despite the outside temperatures, some Germans - particularly
refugees from the east - were virtually naked and concealed their shame
behind ragged blankets. On their feet they wore bits of planking tied on
with lengths of cloth.68
Vienna was no warmer. General Béthouart recalled the miserable
figures stumbling past his Hütteldorf villa returning from the Vienna woods
with faggots. The Viennese spoke of the ‘blue hour’ when gas was issued to
the pipes to allow the citizens to cook their dinners on a low flame.69 Food
was scarce and money no longer had any value. As in Germany, American
cigarettes had the greatest worth. Josefine and Leopold Hawelka had
managed to reopen their café in the Dorotheergasse. Leopold went off each
day to the Vienna woods to find kindling to keep the stove alight and boil
the kettle for the coffee. Once Josefine forgot she had hidden some cartons
of cigarettes in the stove, and lit it. A great deal of money went up in
flames.70
Bizonia
 Clay was in favour of inter-zonal co-operation from the first. Once more
it was the French who stood in the way. He had put his hope in the
provision for central agencies that had been decreed at Potsdam, but the
French didn’t like the idea of resurrecting the ‘Reich’. ‘If these agencies
cannot be obtained and/or the boundaries of occupied Germany are to be
changed, the present concept of Potsdam becomes meaningless,’ he wrote
in the spring of 1946. There was no exchange of commodities between the
zones. Clay thought it essential to have a common financial policy and
freedom to travel from one to the other. He was so angry with the French by
16 June that he sued for permission to retire.71
In Paris on 11 July 1946, Byrnes offered to merge the American Zone
with anyone who was interested. The British took up the offer at the end of
the month and all the problems were ironed out by 9 August. The joined
zones would have a common standard of living, pooled resources and a
common export policy, and would fix imports necessary to supplement
indigenous resources.72 Heralded by General George Marshall’s Harvard
speech that laid the keel of the famous ‘plan’ to relieve impoverished, war-
torn Europe, Bizonia kicked off with an Economic Council in Frankfurt in
June 1947. For the first time in fourteen years the national tricolour was
raised. When the Americans noticed, they objected, and it had to be hauled
down. In the course of the Council the Transitional Law was passed that
legalised federal authority over the provincial Länder. It was a move
towards the creation of a sovereign, federal state.
A Thaw in the Weather
In March 1947 milder weather set in, bringing fresh dangers. The
hospitals had filled up with cases of broken bones: people who had slipped
on the ice; and there was now a great stink to replace the great freeze.73 It
was time for the Moscow Conference, which came hard on the heels of the
announcement of the Truman Doctrine, which was designed to lure Europe
away from communism by stick and carrot. Marshall, who had replaced
Byrnes as secretary of state, would develop the policy into the Marshall
Plan in his prize-giving speech at Harvard in June. General Mark Clark
considered Moscow the most important planning meeting between the
Allies since Potsdam. The idea of a peace treaty for Austria was brought up,
and returned to the files. There were attempts to conclude peace with
Germany as well, which had faltered at Paris and New York in December,
and which made no progress in Moscow either.74 Already the London
Conference discussions just prior to Moscow had been bogged down by
Yugoslav demands. Moscow was a trying time for Clark, who had already
made up his mind to go home. During the night he was woken by calls from
females asking if he needed anything, so that he had to wrap his telephone
in a towel and put it in a drawer. The rooms at the hotel were bugged, and
for privacy the American delegates spoke to each other as they walked
around the Kremlin walls.75
Stalin was comparatively unmoved by the Truman Doctrine and still
hoped to effect German unity. The French predictably blackballed it. In
April that year French policy changed a little, as the French communists left
the government which they had haunted since the liberation. It was the
Marshall Plan that seemed to threaten Soviet security, in that it extended
offers of assistance to countries within Stalinist eastern Europe. Molotov
was instructed to break off talks with the West in Paris on 30 June when it
became clear that the Anglo-American plans were directly aimed at the
Soviet Union. The Soviet satellites were ordered to ignore the siren offers
of aid.76 The Soviet response was Cominform. It was intended to keep the
Eastern bloc on the straight and narrow.
Bevin was more fearsome than Marshall in his belligerence towards the
Soviet Union. There is a story about the London CFM in November 1947,
when Bevin confronted the Russian foreign minister. ‘What do you want?’
he demanded to know. Molotov replied, ‘I want a unified Germany.’
Molotov came to the conclusion that it had been easier to work with the
patrician Eden than with this man of the people. After the London meeting
Soviet policy changed - the Russians were seeking confrontation. The Cold
War had begun.77
The Carthaginian peace was aired for the last time in October 1947
when the British and Americans announced an unpopular scheme to
dismantle all industries that had originally been constructed for the war
effort. Adenauer protested, pointing out that industrial production was a
third of pre-war levels. Lord Pakenham also had his doubts about the
fairness of a policy which was reminiscent of the savage demontage in the
Soviet east that had stripped industry down and bled the zone white.
Nacht und Nebel
 By 1947 Austria was liberated, but still not free. At the ‘peace
conference’ in Paris the previous autumn that settled matters with the
‘satellite’ states which had been allied to Hitler’s Reich, Austria was not
considered. Austria was a ‘victim’ when it suited the Allies but most of the
time it did not, and the Russians had never really believed in Austrian
innocence.78 For the Austrians the situation was highly frustrating,
especially as 71 per cent of them thought they bore no guilt for the war, and
only 4 per cent were prepared to concede that Nazism had something to do
with them; although at least 8 per cent had been members of the Party and a
million or so had served in the Wehrmacht - and half of those in the savage
war in the east where no one wore kid gloves.
Austria had also been properly turned over to war work. The Danube
had been pressed into service, forty-two airfields and landing strips had
been created and 50,000 Austrians had been involved in building war-
planes. The Russians in particular were keen to show how many concealed
weapons they had found in their zone - evidence that the Austrians were not
trustworthy.79 The Austrians countered that there had been 35,000 Austrian
victims of National Socialism, and 65,000 Jews had lost their lives (the
Jews were generally mentioned when it was deemed convenient). They
talked of their resistance and published their Rot-Weiss-Rot Buch in which
Austria’s anti-Nazi stance was fully documented. Moscow poured cold
water on it, and dubbed it a ‘Viennese Masquerade’ - an allusion to the
farce at the heart of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier.80
The Cold War was now revving up and the Soviets were anxious to
hang on to what they had. Attempts to control the police were finally
checked by the Western Allies, but the West was not able to put a stop to
Nazi-style Nacht und Nebel disappearances which claimed around 400
people over three years. An American report on Soviet kidnappings was
submitted on 18 July 1947. The problem became acute that winter when the
Russians were turning up the heat in Berlin. On 12 April 1948 Martin Herz
wrote, ‘Hardly a week passes in Austria without some person disappearing
without trace . . . last seen being invited by uniformed Soviet personnel to
enter a waiting vehicle’.81
The wave began with some Balkan subjects the Russians wanted to talk
to. In May 1947 a woman was removed rolled up in a rug. In December Dr
Paul Katscher, who worked in the Ministry of Transport, was kidnapped as
he passed the statue of Goethe near the Hofburg. The next day he had been
due to speak in Geneva about the number of Austrian railway carriages that
had disappeared in the east. The Russian commander, Kurasov, refused to
allow Figl to comment on Katscher’s disappearance - he was suspected of
being a British agent. Katscher is believed to have perished in a Soviet
prison. Similar charges were levelled against Dr Rafael Spann and Gertaude
Flögl, who were also kidnapped. Another woman, Ernestine Sunisch, was
arrested on the busy Kärtnerring in broad daylight.
By the time the Russians kidnapped Anton Marek, a chief inspector of
police and former Dachau inmate, on 11 June 1948, the Berlin blockade
was in full swing. Marek had annoyed the Soviets by purging the police of
its communist stooges. He was grabbed outside the Ministry of the Interior.
In Russia he was sentenced to the standard twenty-five years, but was
released after seven, at the conclusion of the State Treaty. The gendarmerie
official Johann Kiridus suffered a similar fate. Another civil servant
kidnapped in this way and also released in 1955 was Frau Ottillinger, head
of economic planning. She was taken from the car of her minister, Peter
Krauland. She was not in the Soviet Zone. In 1948 alone it is thought that
around 300 Austrians were the victims of Nacht und Nebel kidnappings.82
A Solution in the East
The GDR was still not a foregone conclusion. There was limited room
for manoeuvre at the beginning, and Stalin hung on for longer than the West
before creating his puppet regime. The French sat in their corner and
clamoured for the Ruhr. The Anglo-Americans had made the first moves
when it came to dividing Germany.83 That the Russians were still making
concessions is clear from Stalin’s meetings with the German Muscovites. At
the end of January 1947 a delegation from the Soviet Zone had visited
Moscow to report to Stalin and Molotov. It contained Pieck, Grotewohl,
Ulbricht, Max Fechner and the interpreter Fred Oelssner. Stalin toyed with
the idea of allowing the SPD back into the Soviet Zone. He was not
impressed by Grotewohl’s opposition to this, which he saw as a sign of
weakness.84
Stalin wanted to know what the SED thought of a referendum on the
future structure of Germany. Was it to become a united state, or a federal
state? Grotewohl estimated a 60 per cent majority for a united state. Stalin
did not think that was enough. He wanted to know if there were not more
people to win over in the west who were prepared to accept a state that
looked east. This idea was at the heart of the pan-German people’s congress
at the beginning of 1948 and led to the creation of the NDPD (the National
Democratic Party of Germany) in the Soviet Zone. Stalin was still keen to
see a structure for all Germany. The KPD was renamed the SED in the
Western Zones, but the West refused to accept the change.
The falling out between the Allies was now plain to see. In Berlin the
Western Allies felt particularly vulnerable, and they were surrounded by
Soviet troops.85 The Soviet plan to erect national German legal jurisdictions
foundered at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference. The abject failure
of the conference fanned rumours of war. On 6 and 7 December 1947 the
People’s Congress for Unity and Just Peace met in East Berlin. Of the 2,215
delegates, 664 came from the Western zones. Their mandates were dodgy,
in that they had been selected by parties rather than by a popular vote. The
idea was to elect a delegation to go to London to put pressure on the foreign
ministers’ meeting there and call for national unity. A delegation was
elected, but it did not receive permission to enter the United Kingdom.86
Before it broke up, the Congress had issued a manifesto calling for a
central German administration, the nationalisation of industry in the
Western zones and the formation of a united German government once a
formal peace treaty had been signed. A standing committee was also chosen
to prepare for a second congress in March 1948. Such moves were not
rejected out of hand by the Liberal and Christian Democrat parties in the
Western zones. The CDU already possessed a ‘working community’ with
its Eastern sister and was equally keen to see the establishment of national
representation. Even the SPD leadership was prepared to co-operate in
principle. On the other hand they would not work with the SED as long as
the SPD was banned in the Soviet Zone. It was therefore Grotewohl who
stood in the way of progress in this matter, together with the Allied Control
Council. The French once more smelled the unity-rat and were particularly
adamantine in their refusal to allow cross-zonal political activities. Another
negative voice was that of Jakob Kaiser, which prompted the Soviet
authorities to banish him from their zone. The SED were left as the sole
voice behind the 1948 Congress, which effectively destroyed its credibility.
As it was the Congress met on 17-18 March 1948 in East Berlin. There
were 2,000 delegates, 500 of them from the West. The SED presence was
naturally that much stronger, and the percentage of CDU delegates declined
from a quarter to a fifth. The Congress created a German People’s Council
composed of 300 East German members and a hundred from the West. This
was divided into committees, and discussions began on the form of a
constitution for a united German Democratic Republic. There was a repeat
too of Stalin’s call for a plebiscite. There was an immediate negative
response from both the Americans and the French, who refused to recognise
the gathering in Berlin. The British tolerated the Congress but nonetheless
described the suggestion as ‘useless, unnecessary and uncalled for’. With
the Western powers turning their backs on the call for unity, the take-up was
almost completely limited to the Soviet Zone.
The West had already made its decision. A six-power conference
meeting in London in February and March 1948 backed the Marshall Plan:
American finance would help rebuild Western Europe. Germany had to play
its role in this, and could not be plundered for ever. It became clear at the
time that the West already had plans to create a separate German state in its
zones.87 The Russians were naturally angry that discussions were being held
about Germany to which they were not party and called the entire Control
Council into question. They saw the Marshall Plan as the embodiment of
American imperialism. In February 1948 the bourgeois parties were
eliminated from the Czech government, giving a clear signal that the Soviet
Union was consolidating its power within its bloc. All over the east the
Russians began to show their hand - in Romania, Poland, Hungary and
Bulgaria. When a separate German state was mooted at the Second London
Conference that took place between April and June 1948 and a new
currency agreed on 18 June, Germany’s split had been effectively achieved.

OceanofPDF.com
 20
The Berlin Airlift and the Beginnings of Economic
Recovery
24 June 1948 With a rattling din yesterday night an
iron curtain fell between Helmstadt and Marienborn.
Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 236

Three years after the end of the war, Germany was limbering up for
economic recovery. Nineteen-forty-eight was to be the year of German
rehabilitation, but there were political problems to face first. Heinrich Böll’s
early short stories describe the beginnings of business after the war. In
‘Geschäft ist Geschäft’ (Business is Business), a man spots an
acquaintance, a former soldier like himself. After the war they had both
been depressed: ‘We had our old army caps pulled down over our brows,
and when I had a little cash I’d go to him, and we’d have a chat; sometimes
about hunger, sometimes war; and sometimes he gave me a fag, when I was
broke; and I occasionally brought him bread coupons as I was clearing
rubble for a baker at the time.’ Now there he was in a brand-new, white-
painted wooden shop with a corrugated-iron roof at a busy intersection. He
was licensed to sell cigarettes and gobstoppers. He looked well fed. The
man watched as he sent a little girl packing who didn’t have enough
pfennigs for a gobstopper.
The narrator had not done so well. He thought back to the various digs
he had occupied since the end of the war, above all the cellar, which was
not too bad when heated with stolen briquettes. Then the newspapers
learned about it and took photographs and wrote an article on the tragedy of
the returned soldier living in squalor. He had to move. He did occasional
jobs, humping and carrying, or cleaning bricks. At other times he stole:
coal, wood, a loaf of bread. During the war they stole constantly -
somebody stole and the others reaped the reward. Now the same was true
again. He alone was left waiting at the tram-stop, while the others were
already on board heading for their destinations.
He stood watching the man in the booth. The other gave him no sign of
recognition. He watched another man picking up fag-ends. In his POW
camp he had seen colonels doing just that, ‘but this one wasn’t a colonel’.
He was one of the unlucky ones like the narrator. For some people coming
back from the war was like getting off the tram at their stop. The house was
still there, if a bit dusty, there was jam in the cupboard and potatoes in the
cellar. Life went back to normal; the old firm took them back. ‘There was
still medical insurance; you went through the paces of denazification - just
like a man going to the barber to have an annoying beard shaved off’. On
holidays and holy days they could chat about their medals and about acts of
gallantry and come to the conclusion ‘that we were really splendid fellows,
in the end just doing what was required of us’.
In another story, ‘Mein Onkel Fred’ (My Uncle Fred), Böll’s
eponymous hero comes back from the war, possessing nothing but a tin can
containing a few cigarette butts. He demands bread, sleep and tobacco; then
he lies down on the sofa and, complaining it is too small for him, remains
there, scarcely stirring, for months.
The fourteen-year-old narrator is the family breadwinner. His father has
been killed in the war, and his mother has a small pension. The boy’s job
was to take unwanted possessions to the black market, swapping a Dresden
cup for some semolina, three volumes of Gustav Freytag for two ounces of
coffee or a pillow for some bread. Freytag’s brand of German nationalism
must have seemed highly dispensable just after the war. At other times he
stole coal. His mother wept at the thought of this, but did nothing to stop
him.
Meanwhile Uncle Fred snoozed on the sofa. One day his sister - the
boy’s mother - suggested gently that he might enquire whether there was a
position going in his old firm, where he had kept the books. The boy was
sent to find out. He discovered a pile of rubble about twenty feet high.
Uncle Fred was clearly elated when the news was brought to him. He asked
the boy to break open a crate containing his few effects. In it was his
savings book, containing 1,200 marks and a few other objects of trifling
worth and his diploma from the Chamber of Commerce. The boy was told
to collect the cash and sell the rest. He managed to dispose of all but the
diploma, as Uncle Fred’s name had been inscribed with India ink. This
provided enough food for weeks, a considerable relief as the schools had
opened their doors again and the narrator was compelled to finish his
studies.
 Uncle Fred rose Lazarus-like from the sofa, shaved and called for clean
underwear. He borrowed the boy’s bicycle and set off for the city. He
returned smelling strongly of wine and armed with a dozen buckets. He had
decided to revive the flower trade in the town. He set up beside the tram
stop and with a shout of ‘Flowers, fresh flowers - no coupons required!’ he
began his new life. Within three weeks he had three dozen buckets and two
branches, and a month later he was paying taxes. It was impossible for the
boy to keep up with his uncle’s progress: there were ever more buckets and
branches, and soon he had colonised the entire town. The boy retired from
his branch of the family business and concentrated on school. A few years
later his uncle was a man of substance in a red car, and the boy was
designated his heir - only he had to go to business school first.
In the spring of 1947 Alfred Döblin paid the first of two visits to the
German capital. It was here he had achieved fame for Berlin-
Alexanderplatz, the most famous novel of the Weimar Republic, and also
the best-known fictionalised account of Berlin life. By his own account,
Döblin entered though the back door. Like Renée Bédarida he landed in
Frohnau in the French Sector. It was a soft introduction, but he had few
illusions: ‘Reality exceeds fantasy.’ He went into the centre, arriving at the
same Stettin Station that had received him and his family when they came
from the Pomeranian port in 1888. He was immediately struck by the vision
of an elegant restaurant with chandeliers and brightly painted shutters.
Outside the signs were in Cyrillic. It was for Russians.1
He went west, arriving in an incongruously elegant flat in the
Kurfürstendamm, in the British Sector. There was a publisher there
(possibly Suhrkamp). ‘I asked what do the people get up to here? I was told
that many sold their possessions, if they still had any, and lived off the
proceeds. One piece after another disappeared in this way. Many dealt on
the black market, very many.’2
The terrible weather was over - it was a sunny day, and they went out to
the Café Wien. There was no coffee to be had, and the ‘cup’ turned out to
be no more than coloured mineral water. Döblin looked for the cinema that
had given the première of the film of his novel Berlin-Alexanderplatz. It
was no more. The fashionable literary café of the Weimar days, the
Romanischen, was open - to the skies. The sheer enormity of the
destruction at last dawned on Döblin. Here was the city he had so ably
chronicled in his novels, and almost all of it was gone: the Wintergarten
with its variety shows, the Viktoria Café. There were no buildings either
side of the Brandenburg Gate. He watched with astonishment as a Russian
soldier walked past the Kranzler Eck with his lover on his arm. A paper
seller gave him what for: ‘As things are going in Europe and the world,
anything is possible, and who knows if, after ten or twenty years, a Russian
soldier and his wife will be walking along the wrecked boulevards of some
western city.’3
Döblin continued his voyage of discovery. On the Schlossbrücke (called
the ‘Dolls’ Bridge’ because of the statues of Prussian worthies) he had
recollections of the various Kaisers. There was little more than the river. On
Alexanderplatz he looked at the great department store Tietz: ‘It looks like a
man who has had his neck broken by a blow, and whose skull has been
pushed down into his ribcage.’ Döblin was bitter. He had converted to
Catholicism, but he could not quite bring himself to bestow mercy on his
former tormentors: “What am I actually doing here . . . They allowed
themselves to be defiled . . . I feel like a man who has been betrayed.’4 In
the Königstrasse he noticed women pushing prams past the wreck of
another Jewish department store, Wertheim - they were filled with wood.
His goal was the Frankfurter Allee, where he had lived and practised: a
popular quarter that provided him with models for his books. ‘The sight was
shocking. A terrible martial violence must have descended to knock these
houses flat . . . Every now and then a façade reported for duty. There the
house must have stood . . . It is no longer what I knew and where I lived.’5
Döblin returned to give a lecture the following year. Berlin made him
uneasy: ‘This was the principal theatre of the horror. This is where the
crime took wings. The nation allowed itself to be deafened by singing youth
and applauding bystanders.’ He was hard on Berlin, a city that was no more
enthusiastic about Hitler than many others. ‘The judgment of history speaks
in a terrible voice.’ But Döblin’s message is one of hope: ‘A man finds it
easier than a city to change. A man may transform himself where a city
crumbles away.’6
Currency Reform
The currency had been chaotic since the end of the war. The Soviets had
simply printed money when they needed it, and this had caused rampant
inflation.7 Nobody trusted cash. Farmers and shopkeepers were placed in a
difficult position. The former avoided the market. The latter ruled over
empty shops in the basements of ruined buildings. Germany’s post-war
planners therefore conceived of a system that would inject confidence into
the currency and wind up the black market and the cigarette economy. They
wanted to create a marketplace where shopkeepers and manufacturers were
kept permanently short of working capital to create a powerful incentive for
rapid turnover and all cash received would promptly be spent on new
goods. The scheme was an instant success. The Germans were often
literally ‘drunk’ with the opportunities it gave them, and the black market
disappeared overnight.8
The first proposals for monetary reform were made in the autumn of
1946. The Reichsmark was pegged at ten to a dollar. Barter markets were
created in order to undermine the illegal black markets where most
Germans did their shopping. In January 1947 Clay believed the new money
to replace the Reichsmark should be centrally printed in Berlin, but there
were doubts about the Russians. As it was, the cigarette economy had its
own ways of regulating itself. The price of a twenty-cent packet of
cigarettes was RM120, which remained the same for six months even in
Berlin. French cigarettes were a third of that sum. A month’s shopping
amounted to only RM50. A dollar was worth 600 marks, so six marks
bought you a cigarette. In the Rhineland Elena Skrjabina was able to buy a
lorry with a suitcase filled with cigarettes.9 With rumours that the old
money was shortly to go, there was frenzied buying to get rid of potentially
worthless currency. In May 1948 the price of a pound of strawberries had
gone down to RM25 and cherries were now at 12. The pubs were filled with
Berliners drinking away their reserves. Elena Skrjabina’s Bendorf shop was
doing a roaring trade.10
The problem was that the new money did not come, and the prices
began to rise again. On 16 June a pound of coffee cost 2,400 marks. Two
days later the word was out that the new currency was to be called the
‘Deutsche Mark’. On 25 June 1948 currency reform was introduced in the
Western zones. The old money would be exchanged at a rate of one-tenth of
the new, though for a while the two currencies ran side by side. The SBZ
had been excluded from monetary reform because the Russians could not
have been trusted to print the right amounts.11 By June 1948 Ludwig Erhard
had made arrangements to print 500 tons of banknotes in the US and have
them airlifted to Frankfurt. Virtually all rationing and price controls were
abolished. Clay told him that his advisers had said that the move was a
terrible mistake. Erhard replied: ‘Herr General, pay no attention to them.
My own advisers tell me the same thing.’12
The Soviet answer was immediate. That same day the Russian
commander Sokolovsky required the SBZ to introduce ‘immediate and
necessary measures to protect the interests of the German population and
the economy of the Soviet Zone’.13 The Russians acted that night: passenger
trains were halted, and at the beginning of July they cut the city off
completely from the West.et
In the meantime shops in the Western zones filled with goods; black
markets disappeared; people ceased to ‘hamster’; and production increased.
The atmosphere changed too. Every man, woman and child received DM60
in two instalments, and they all set out on shopping sprees. Ruth Friedrich’s
friend Frank reported from Munich that the shops were crammed with food
and that no one spoke of calories any more, because they all had enough to
eat.14 Clay wrote to his guru Byrnes to complain about the British and the
French, who had dragged their feet over the currency reform. Clay could
report the immediate benefits: ‘Overnight hoarded goods appeared on the
shelves as the stores had to sell to meet pay-rolls . . . even fruits and
vegetables from the farm once more went on sale in the market place.’ In
one month productivity had risen by 10 per cent.
In Hehlen the Schulenburgs were now the proud possessers of DM280,
but Charlotte still didn’t know where the next tranche of money would
come from. There was a knock at the door and her faithful cook and maid
Klara came in wearing a white apron. Charlotte handed her DM40, and
Klara said, ‘I want to tell her ladyship something, I don’t want any more
money.’ When Charlotte replied that she had none to give her for the time
being, the maid said, ‘I am doing this for his lordship’s sake.’ She meant:
you don’t have to thank me.15
Crisis in Berlin
Döblin’s second visit marked the moment of change in Berlin. From
June 1947 the city had a new mayor in Ernst Reuter, a former communist
and intimate of Lenin’s who had gone over to the socialists in the 1920s and
had emigrated to Turkey on the arrival of the Nazis. He had returned to
Germany in November 1946 and taken a British train from Hanover to
Berlin at the end of the month. On 5 December he was elected to the
council. It was a bad moment to start, just before the killer winter. The
council worked just half the day, as the offices could not be heated.16 The
Russians vetoed his election as mayor, because, they said, Turkey was a
fascist country. Louise Schroeder had to take his place meanwhile. Stalin
was looking to find a way of preventing the Western Allies from creating
their own Germany. It was the policy that Bob Murphy called ‘irritate and
tire’ - wear down the West.17 Come what may, the Russians would force the
Western Allies out. Molotov made it sound like ‘them or us’: ‘If we are to
lose in Germany we would have lost the war.’18 Everything short of military
force was to be used. The Russians were constantly probing and pushing,
spreading rumours that the Western Allies were about to pack their bags.
They invaded the railway offices in the US Zone, but the Americans
resisted and they backed off. They made applications to the Americans for
any of their citizens hiding in their sector.19
Currency reform was the pretext, but it wasn’t really about that. The
Soviets saw the chance of making the Western Allies abandon Berlin,
thereby losing their attraction to the Germans, or forcing them to drop the
London programme for a separate state, or obliging them to return to the
grand alliance as embodied in the CFM mechanism.20 There was fear in
some quarters that the Russians would succeed.21 Clay for one was looking
for a showdown:
I doubt very much if this action would imperil the quadripartite
machinery. If it should, we still force the Russians to slam the door and
even if they did slam the door, we should still continue in Berlin.
However, we cannot continue successfully unless we establish a
governmental machinery for western Germany. The resentment of the
Germans against colonial administration is increasing daily and those
democratic Germans who hate communism and would prefer to
establish the types and kind of government which we desire will soon
lose their positions of leadership with their own people.
He told the under-secretary of the army, William Draper, that ‘two and a
half years without government is much too long’. On 5 November 1947 he
said that a provisional government would be established no later than 31
January 1948.22
The others were not so sure. General Robertson was for appeasement.
The French even considered allowing the Russians the stake in the Ruhr
they coveted so much.23 Clay was right that the Russians were not actually
looking for a fight. They wanted to humiliate the West by offering to
provision all the Berliners. That way they would win their love. The
Berliners certainly did march on their stomachs, and their stomachs were
empty. The Russians were going to keep the air corridors open and avoid
military confrontations. They made no preparations for a military
emergency. Nor was the Western bluff that convincing: the bombers the
Americans sent to Britain were not configured for atom bombs.24
From 23 February 1948 the London Conference was debating just this
question. The Russians had jumped off the CFM carousel at the end of the
previous year. They were not invited to London. In their absence and in the
imposing setting of India House the foreign ministers of Britain, Belgium,
France, Holland, Luxembourg and the United States were giving form to
the state of West Germany. On 17 March the Brussels Pact was signed as
the first step towards NATO. The terms were leaked to the Soviets by
Donald Maclean on the same day the Prague coup took place. Most of the
Western ministers were convinced that the time had come to split Germany
in two, but the French held aloof for the time being. They thought the
Russians would prevent it. They only reluctantly agreed to the idea of West
Germany because of Prague and because Sokolovsky walked out of the
Control Council on the 20th. Couve de Murville, the French foreign
minister, began to panic and decided there would be a fresh war within
three years.25
Howley had been made American commandant at the Kommandatura
on 1 December 1947. He was looking forward to a scrap too. He called his
British counterpart, General Herbert, ‘shockingly defeatist’. When the
Russians cut off the city in June, Herbert predicted that that would drive the
Westerners out by October.26 He might have been conscious of just how
weak the West was. In a reply to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge dated 5 March
1948, Clay detailed the strength of the American forces in Berlin - there
were fewer than 2,000 soldiers. ‘It is obviously our desire to retain as small
as garrison as possible.’ The Americans also had some German police
auxiliaries, as the Russian-backed Markgraf Police (run by Paul Markgraf )
were not meant to function in the American Zone.27
On 18 March there was cause for a little celebration in Berlin. It was the
centenary of the March Revolution of 1848 which had brought a brief
triumph to the cause of the German middle classes, before they joined the
more reactionary nobility and rallied behind Bismarck and the Empire. A
crowd of 30,000 gathered at the ruined Reichstag. There were speeches
from Franz Neumann of the SPD, Jakob Kaiser of the CDU and the mayor-
elect, Ernst Reuter. Reuter alluded to the events in Prague. ‘Who will be
next?’ he asked. Berlin would be next. ‘If the world knows this we will not
be abandoned by the world.’28
The situation was worsening with each month. There were no barriers
between the sectors, and those fleeing the Russians could try to disappear in
the west of the city in the hope of finding a way out to the West. On 25
March the journalist Dieter Friede disappeared in a Nacht und Nebel
kidnapping. The Soviet authorities later justified their actions by claiming
that he was a spy. The ‘Mini Blockade’ was next. It began on 31 March and
lasted until 2 April. The SBZ’s policy was improvised.29 This time it was
provoked by an Anglo-American refusal to allow the Russians to board
their military trains.30 One of these crossed the Soviet Zone daily. There
were also several freight trains every week, thirty-two daily ‘paths’ - or
crossings - to supply the garrison and the Germans and a daily passenger
aircraft. It was a warning shot, a trial run. Three days later, on 2 April, the
Allied Kommandatura was dissolved. More disappearances followed. Some
200,000 people were reported to have been forcibly taken to the USSR
since the end of the war. The Berliners felt particularly vulnerable once
again. The Russian-backed SED launched a propaganda campaign in the
Western sectors.31
The Soviets had shown their hand in the communist takeover in Prague
in February and Jan Masaryk’s suspicious death the following month. They
were now openly demonstrating what was in store for their bloc. Truman
understood that Berlin needed to be held for propaganda purposes; it was
also necessary to stop the flow of communism west. ‘If we failed to
maintain our position there, communism would gain great strength among
the Germans.’32 Like Clay he gave the Germans no credit for being able to
make up their own minds.
Prague brought the French down to earth. It was timely that Robert
Schuman was president of the council, and possessed the sort of wise head
France needed at the time. In March Koenig met Clay and Robertson in
Berlin for talks on the German constitution and the French merging with
Bizonia to form Trizonia. Koenig became predictably uppity at the idea of a
‘Reichstag’. On 6 April Couve de Murville flew to Germany to see Clay.
He was concerned that Berlin might fall to the Russians. They also
discussed currency reform. When the Russians did move to cut Berlin off
from the west, the French foreign minister Bidault stressed that for the sake
of Allied prestige there could be no backing down. Schuman, who had
begun his political career in Germany, insisted that Berlin was a symbol that
could not be abandoned. It was not thought politic that any French soldiers
should die for Berlin, however, and the French air force was kept out of the
operation, the excuse being that it was too weak - which was probably
true.33
Airlift
Russian ‘milk snatchers’ formed the pretext for the airlift. The Russians
were supposed to provide food for the entire population of Berlin, although
the Western Allies donated the flour. To this end the Russians had 7,000
cows in suburban farms. In the early summer of 1948 they cut off the milk.
Berliners were obliged to go to the east in lorries to collect it. The American
medical officer reported to Howley: ‘Unless we get fresh milk, six thousand
babies in our sector will be dead by Monday.’ Three years before, the
Anglo-Americans had had fewer scruples about infant mortality. Howley
saw Russian uncooperativeness as an attempt to intimidate the Americans
and ordered in 200 tons of condensed milk and another 150 tons of
powdered milk. Howley proudly reported that not one baby died in his
sector.34
Clay thought he might keep his meagre garrison alive, but not the
Germans. The Soviet attempt to prevent the Western Allies from reaching
their sectors of the city provoked a discussion between Clay and Robertson
on the legitimate response. The British decided they would not shoot if the
Americans did not. ‘I believe this [the Russian move] is bluff,’ wrote Clay,
‘but do not wish to bluff back as British may be doing unless we mean it
[sic].’35 The American secretary of the army, General Kenneth Royall,
thought the president should send Stalin a note. He was not certain how
serious the situation had become. Clay replied, ‘I do not believe this means
war but any failure to meet this squarely will cause great trouble.’ He added
that he would rather go to Siberia than abandon Berlin. The Soviets were
now challenging the Western Allies’ right to be in Berlin in the first place.
Clay cited the EAC agreement made during the war, by which the German
capital would be administered by the three powers. Added to this there was
the oral agreement with Zhukov of 5 June 1945 and ‘three years of
application’. The right to provision the city and its Western garrisons was
governed by mostly tacit or oral agreements.36
Clay was not prepared to put up with hair-splitting: ‘Legalistic argument
no longer has meaning . . . our reply will not be misunderstood by 42
million Germans and perhaps 200 million West Europeans. We must say,
we think, as our letter does, “this far you may go and no further.” There is
no middle ground which is not appeasement.’37 Clay continued to see the
idea of the Russians inspecting trains as the thin end of the wedge: the
‘integrity of our trains is a part of our sovereignty’. It was a ‘symbol of our
position in Germany and in Europe’. When the Anglo-Americans put the
Russian ‘bluff’ to the test the Soviet authorities would not let them cross the
SBZ without prior inspection. The managers of the trains all refused bar one
American, who panicked and let the Russians on board. The decision was
made to switch to aircraft.38
That was also not without difficulties at first. On 5 April a Soviet Yak
fighter dived under a scheduled British BEA Vickers Viking aircraft as it
came into land at Gatow. As it rose it took off the starboard wing of the
Viking. Both planes crashed, killing the fifteen British and American
passengers and crew together with the pilot of the Yak. Robertson called for
fighter protection for the transports and immediately went to see
Sokolovsky in protest. The Russian commander was adamant that the pilot
had had no orders from him to buzz the British plane. He would not direct
the Soviet air force to molest flights in the corridor. Robertson was satisfied
with his answer and called off the escort. Later the Russians showed a
similar docility when there were complaints about the positioning of a
barrage balloon. No one wanted to take responsibility for war.39
Clay was not going to budge. There was little or no freight for the time
being, as it required permission from the Russians, ‘which I will not
request’. The British had their own aircraft, but the French had ‘no air
transport worthy of the name’ even if, for the time being, they were happy
to keep their small force in Berlin. Clay was still stubbornly determined:
‘We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige
in Germany and Europe. Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol
of American intent.’40
The balloon went up again when the Russians walked out of the
Kommandatura on 17 June, Howley was relieved. They claimed that there
was an urgent need to repair the roads near Magdeburg and the bridges over
the Elbe, which therefore had to be closed. On 22 June the price of coffee
had risen to RM3,000, bread was at 200 and a single Chesterfield was 65.41
On the 24th the motorway was blocked between Berlin and Helmstedt.42
Only military convoys were allowed to pass. They also cut off supplies of
gas and electricity to the Western sectors of the city. Ruth Friedrich noted in
her diary that an ‘iron curtain’ had abruptly fallen between Helmstadt and
Marienborn.43 ‘We poor little Berlin mice!’ They had spent all their money,
and the Russians were doing their best to prevent the new currency from
crossing their zone. ‘In the end the entirety of Berlin had harmed their
stomachs in the prospect of currency reform.’44 The new currency was
issued in the Western zones on 25 June at 7.00 a.m. That same day the
Russians stopped the supply of brown coal to the city. From 7 July coal
would also have to be brought in by air. ‘I do not expect armed conflict,’
wrote Clay; the ‘principal danger is from Russian-planned communist
groups out looking for trouble’. For such a propagandist, he was
surprisingly worried about the behaviour of the Berliners: ‘Perhaps the
greatest danger comes from the amazing resistance of the Berlin population.
This is driving the Soviet administration and the SED to further extreme
measures.’45
‘June 24 1948’, wrote Howley grandiloquently, ‘is one of the most
infamous dates in the history of civilisation. The Russians tried to murder
an entire city to gain a political advantage.’46 There were 2,250,000
Germans in the Western sectors, and just 6,500 soldiers to protect them. The
Russians had 18,000 men in their sector and another 300,000 stationed in
their zone.47 In order to stress the weakness of the Western powers the
Russians began military manoeuvres. Bevin, who (as opposed to Attlee)
was running the show in London, chipped in by inviting the Americans to
station B-29 bombers in Britain. It was hoped that this gesture would
concentrate the Russians’ minds, even if there was no provision for their
carrying nuclear weapons. Britain was rapidly becoming a client nation of
the United States.48
The Berlin airlift began on 26 June. The idea came from the British. Air
Commodore Reginald Waite proposed a scheme to supply the civilians as
well as the garrisons. He and Robertson took the scheme to Clay, who up
until then had preferred the idea of a convoy.49 General John Cannon was
responsible for the name ‘Operation Vittles’. Ruth Friedrich noted the
change: ‘The skies are buzzing as they did during the Blitz. For the time
being the American military authorities have increased air traffic to Berlin
to a maximum.’50 The density was to increase. At first the excuse was the
need to provision the American and other Allied garrisons, then Clay made
it clear that the Soviets would not be allowed to starve the Berliners in the
Western sectors. For eleven months American C-47s (‘Gooney Birds’,
which the Berliners called ‘Rosinenbomber’ or raisin bombers) and C-54s,
as well as British cargo planes, under the command of the American Major-
General Tunner and the Briton Air Marshal Williams flew in 4,000 tons of
food daily. British Sunderland flying boats landed on the Havel, bringing
much needed salt from Hamburg. At the height of Operation Vittles, 13,000
tons of food was delivered in twenty-four hours.
British planes left Frassberg for Gatow, while the Americans flew from
Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. The Americans operated two-thirds of the flights,
the British the rest. West Berlin was the prize won for the new, Allied-
backed West German state.51 Clay wanted to know if American service
families should be flown to safety. Truman advised against it, saying that it
would have a bad ‘psychological effect’. Clay agreed to make ‘emergency
arrangements for essential supplies’.52 The political nature of the blockade
was swiftly understood by Truman. It was fully in keeping with his
doctrine: this far but no further. He told Clay to make the blockade-busting
formal. The humanitarian aspect was important, but so was access to the
former capital. On 26 June Truman directed that the airlift be put on a full-
scale organised basis. Every available aircraft was to be used.53 The same
day the Russians introduced Order 111 which created their own currency.
This took the form of coupons attached to existing banknotes. The coupons
were stuck on with glue made from the ubiquitous potato. On the fourth
exchange it fell off. The Berliners were quick to dub them Tapetenmark or
wallpaper money. The new notes were ready on 26 July.
The SBZ authorities were credited with saying they were going to ‘Dry
out the Western Sector as we would tie a tourniquet around a wart.’54 On 26
June it was reported that the Americans could provision the city for another
thirty days. News was transmitted by the RIAS (Radio in American Sector)
van. Ruth Friedrich remarked on the ‘frustration of being at the centre of
the world stage and yet only [having] the chance to be informed of this
between twelve midnight and two o’clock in the morning’. Meanwhile an
aircraft flew over her head every eight minutes. 55
 On 28 June American soldiers arrested Sokolovsky - allegedly by
mistake - for speeding in their sector. He identified himself, but they still
held him for an hour. Sokolovsky told Robertson that the blockade was
about the currency, and he could draw his own conclusions. The Russian
was unconvinced by the game his countrymen were playing in Berlin.
Rumours flew this way and that. Clay was later told that the Russians
intended to put up barrage balloons to impede landing.56 When the first
proper banknotes were issued in the east, the SBZ further exacerbated the
plight of the westerners by making them go deep into their sector to convert
their old coupons. The dollar was now worth DM28, and a flight to the
West cost $28. No one had DM784. Anyone who might be able to scrape
together such a princely sum had left. Even Ruth Friedrich, who had
endured the worst of it, now thought it was time to go.
Clay’s airlift was as much a propaganda success as the Soviet blockade
was an own goal. In West Berlin and Western Germany the wholly negative
picture of Soviet aims never disappeared. The crisis also accelerated the
polarisation of the two sides. Otto Grotewohl addressed the SED Central
Committee on 30 June to affirm his clear commitment to an ‘Eastern
orientation’, even if this did not change the Party’s policy on unity.57
Currency anarchy continued. The Eastern ‘coupon mark’ was now worth
ten Reichsmarks. It could also be used in the Western sectors, but not for
everything. A money market grew up around the Zoo Station. Certain
currencies were used for different goods: matches were paid for with
Western money; onions half and half; raisins Western; sugar Eastern. You
bought a newspaper with Eastern money, but the printing had to be paid for
with Western currency.58
The Western authorities prevented the new currency from reaching
Berlin, but the SBZ did not call off the blockade. ‘Technical problems’ had
required the closing of land routes and waterways to Berlin. As Lucius Clay
put it, ‘the technical difficulties would last until the Western Powers buried
their plans for a West German government’.59 On 2 July the Russians cut off
the water to the Western sectors, claiming the need to repair the locks.
Howley pointed out that water was needed to make bread, although once
again he was unclear about how much.60
A great disappointment to the Berliners was the craven behaviour of
Wilhelm Furtwängler, who cancelled his appearance with the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra on 7 July 1948. The conductor was due to direct the
orchestra in Potsdam with American soloists. He evidently thought it would
be too risky, even though the Americans had agreed to lay on the transport.
The Berliners had to be satisfied with Leopold Ludwig.61 As a result of the
airlift, the Russian-occupied Radio Station could no longer be used.
Eventually the Soviet authorities gave up their island in the British Sector
and built themselves a new station in Adlershorst in their own fief. The next
day the blockade claimed its first life when an American Dakota crashed.
The second crash occurred two weeks later on the 25th when a C-47
ploughed into a house in Friedenau killing the crew.62
On 14 July the Russians dropped all pretence about ‘technical
difficulties’. 63 A week later a plane was landing every three minutes, but
the situation was dire, and in November and December the operation was
often hampered by fog, even if the weather miraculously improved when
the food situation was at its worst. Radar allowed some planes to land. The
lack of landing space had meant that the French airstrip at Tegel was being
rapidly made ready for aircraft. As many as 17,000 men were working on
the runway, on the promise of a hot meal every day. Berliners received at
best a couple of hours’ electricity at day, and often had to wait until the
middle of the night to cook. The short-lived burst of electric light brought
the same sort of euphoria as a glass of wine. The lucky ones lived in an
Allied-occupied building. They had power and light.64
On 23 July Clay reported to Truman in the White House. It was not
going to be a repeat of Potsdam. Truman was not to be bamboozled. He
returned to the idea of supplying the city by armed convoys. Clay was not
so keen, but he did not think the Russians were prepared to go to war.65 In
America voices were raised calling for a break with the Russians. ‘These
people did not understand that our choice was only between negotiations
and war,’ Truman said. ‘There was no third way.’66 The real reason for the
blockade must have become obvious to all and sundry on 27 July when the
Conference of Foreign Ministers in London decided that they had agreed on
the creation of a West German state. All that was needed now was a ‘basic
law’ to serve as a constitution. The basic law (Grundgesetz) would be
ratified by the provincial assemblies or Landtage. There would be no vote
in the east, as the ministers had decided the people were not free to express
their opinions and might vote against. Clay concluded once again that the
Germans needed the responsibility of self-government. Germany was to
have its own administration before the peace treaty. This little bombshell
made the Western Allies reconsider evacuating some Berliners who might
otherwise have been abducted.67
The West had finally had enough of the Soviet-controlled Markgraf
Police and on 26 July organised their own force under Johannes Stumm,
Markgraf’s former deputy. Three-quarters of the Markgraf Police promptly
deserted to the Stumm. When on 29 July the Magistrat or town council tried
to meet at the Red Rathaus they were met by SED members chanting, ‘We
want just one currency!’ Members of the council were intimidated and
beaten up, and Western policemen were carried off by SED thugs. One who
was manhandled was Jeanette Wolff, a Jewess who had survived two
concentration camps. She was called a ‘Judensau’ ( Jewish pig) in the
Rathaus carpark. ‘I have only one life to lose, and this life belongs to
freedom,’ she exclaimed. The communist stooges stormed the council
chamber. The future author of Berlin’s constitution, Otto Suhr, refused to
begin the session until they left. Louise Schröder, standing in for Reuter,
told the communists to be reasonable, and to go home and listen to the
session on the radio. The SED men withdrew. ‘The storming of the Bastille’
was over.68
Berlin was sealed off by road, rail and water. Contingency plans were
made to withdraw the Allied armies to the Rhine. On 2 August Stalin said
he would lift the blockade if both Eastern and Western marks were allowed
to circulate freely throughout Berlin. It was also the ‘insistent wish’ of the
Soviet government that the Allies ‘postpone the next stages planned in the
integration of the Western Zones’. The Russians admitted that the West was
in Berlin ‘on sufferance’, but would not concede that it was ‘there by
right’.69 The next day Clay said he was prepared to compromise on the
currency issue. Molotov wanted more: on 10 August he demanded control
of exports from the Western sectors. Clay told Washington to reject this
request.70 In the meantime the Markgraf police were being increasingly
tough on people seeking Western currency. On the 12th they arrested 320
on the Potsdamer Platz. On the 24th Stalin changed his mind, and once
again requested the withdrawal of the currency, but the West said no: it had
been a success. That same day there was a mid-air collision between two C-
47s. Both crews perished.71
The four military governors met on 1 September. Sokolovsky was
concerned that the air transports might be used to flood Berlin with new
Deutsche Marks. Three days later the Russian commander came clean: the
restrictions were the result of the London Conference and were aimed at the
splitting of eastern and west Germany’.72 Berliners were getting by with
dried potatoes and other vegetables and tinned meat. The suicide rate rose
again. There were now around seven a day. Sokolovsky also announced that
the Soviet Union would start air-force manoeuvres over Berlin on the 6th.
This was, he said, normal practice for this time of the year. Clay noted in
his report to Washington, ‘This is amusing since in the four summers we
have been in Berlin we have never heard of these manoeuvres previously.’
Robertson expressed the hope that the Soviet manoeuvres would not
interfere with the air corridor. Sokolovsky replied, ‘Certainly.’ Clay was not
certain whether that meant ‘Certainly yes’ or ‘Certainly no’.73
On 6 September there was an attempted coup d’état at the Stadthaus.
Clay naturally had a report of the new outrage:
Meanwhile their [that is, the Soviets’] tactics in Berlin are getting
rough. Yesterday a communist mob prevented City Assembly from
meeting. It manhandled three American reporters at the scene. Today a
well-organised mob was on hand again. The deputy mayor foolishly
took forty-odd plain clothes men from western sectors to keep order.
Uniformed police of the Soviet sector under direct orders of Soviet
officer started to arrest them. They rushed into offices of three western
liaison representatives where some are still at siege. However, Soviet
sector police broke into our office and led about twenty of the poor
devils off to death or worse.
Pride is a cheap commodity, thank God, or I could never hold my
head up. We are being pushed around here like we were a fourth class
nation. My impulse was to send our military police in to restore order
as Americans were being pushed around by Germans.
Clay thought there would be more ‘inspired rioting in western sectors’.
Robertson was optimistic. Clay was not.74
The meeting was the last one held in the Red Rathaus. As the Western
delegates were unable to make it through the Soviet Sector they met in the
Taberna Academica on the Steinplatz in the British Sector instead. The
Russians responded by kidnapping some of Stumm’s men, and the
intimidation did not stop there: even Howley suffered from anonymous
nocturnal telephone calls.
In Washington General Draper expressed concern. Clay thought there
would be more of these Goebbels-style ‘spontaneous demonstrations’. ‘I
think mob-violence is prelude to Soviet-picked city government taking over
the city; then spreading mob-violence into western sectors.’ When Clay
protested to Sokolovsky’s deputy Kotikov on 8 September the Russian said
the ‘mob’ were workers proceeding legitimately to the town hall. The
Western police had attempted to stop them. He accused the American MPs
of being drunk and disorderly.75 In fact Sokolovsky was innocent of the
outrage, which had been organised by Tulpanov and Ulbricht off their own
bats.76
The Westerners responded with a massive demonstration of support for
democracy before the Reichstag on 9 September. ‘On Thursday hundreds of
thousands of Berliners demonstrated on the Platz der Republik for
democratic freedom and against the shocking events at the Stadthaus . . .
women deserted their cookers, hairdressers left their clients in the lurch
under their wave machines and the newspaper-sellers closed up shop. All of
them ran thinking I must demonstrate; we belong to the West. We must
prove it.’77
The response had been impressive: 300,000 Germans staged an anti-
communist rally. The Berliners were rallied by their mayor, Reuter. Before
the ruined Reichstag he told them, ‘Look at this city and admit that you
cannot abandon it!’ The city under siege became the symbol of moral
renaissance and contributed greatly to German rehabilitation.78 The red flag
was torn down. Fifteen-year-old Wolfgang Scheunemann was killed and
222 people injured when the Russians fired into the crowd. The volleys
ceased, however, when the British deputy provost calmly walked over to the
Russians and pushed them away with his swagger-stick.79 The Russians
took it out on five men they had arrested at the scene. On 9 September these
unfortunates were sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour.80
Clay was slow to see the significance of the Reichstag demonstration.
He noted that a communist counter-demonstration was planned for the
Soviet sector. He seemed doubtful of the wisdom of the British in issuing a
permit for the rally. ‘The huge attendance was I am sure a great surprise
even to the Germans and led the German political leaders to inflammatory
speeches.’ Clay thought they were ‘playing with dynamite’. He saw a risk
of the whole business blowing up in their faces - such demonstrations
‘could turn into mass-meetings against the occupying powers and could
develop into the type of mob government which Hitler played so well to get
into power’. He concluded that it had set ‘a dangerous, habit-forming
precedent’.81
Accidents continued to occur. The British crashed an Avro York on 20
September killing five, and a month later a C-54 went down in Frankfurt.
But the situation had now become static. The Allies needed to bring in a
minimum of 4,500 tons a day, though 5,500 were ideal. As it was there
were days when the tonnage reached 8,000. It was now a question of who
would back down first. ‘The airlift has been a magnificent success and can
keep us in Berlin through the winter. As long as we pursue diplomatic
means to gain a settlement the airlift adds to our prestige.’ Clay still had
acute reservations about the French and apparently had problems with the
Labour government in Britain: ‘Our difficulties with the French continue.
Neither is being in partnership with the British a bed of roses.’82
While the blockade was in force neither Bevin nor Marshall would
communicate with the Soviets. The Soviet foreign minister had stayed away
from the meeting of the Brussels Treaty Organisation in September. The
Western powers decided that the case would be referred to the United
Nations.83 Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky in New York
denied the existence of a blockade or any threat to peace. Meanwhile the
Soviets were also trying their hand at propaganda by broadcasting their own
peace plans from Moscow. They offered an all-German government, a
formal peace treaty, a united Germany west of the Oder-Neisse Line, four-
power control of the Ruhr, higher industrial output and, most important of
all, higher rations.84 The Americans, however, had a new trick up their
sleeves. They were going to win over the children: Harry King, the
president of the confectioners Huylers, had obtained ten tons of sweets and
some parachutes, and on 26 October Clay saw the chance for some
excellent propaganda. The ‘morale value would be real if candy could be
flown out’.85 This was the cue for Operation Little Vittles when airman
Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen’s ‘Candy Bombers’ dropped packets of sweets
for the children by parachute into Berlin. Some even fell in the Eastern
Sector.
The new airfield at Tegel opened on 5 November when the top brass
flew in. The French commander General Jean Ganeval thanked his workers
for their ‘almost Egyptian labour’.86 The city was suffering from TB, with
84,000 recorded cases. By November the Magistrat was divided in two with
the Soviet Sector meeting in the Red Rathaus and the Western sectors
meeting in the town hall in Schönefeld. The situation was formalised on 1
December. Clay predicted that the Berlin elections that were due to take
place on 5 December ‘will almost certainly result in a split city’. It was a
chance to take back the promise of abiding by the Soviet-inspired Eastern
mark. This would ‘necessitate immediate issue of western currency’. Clay’s
prediction came true that time.87 As Germany polarised, so did Berlin. In
the East they elected a mayor to be the counterpart of Reuter in the West. It
was Friedrich Ebert, ‘a fat, repulsive man’ according to Howley,88 who was
to remain in the post for twenty years.
The process of making two Berlins was accelerated by the
establishment of a ‘Free University’ in the buildings of the old Kaiser
Wilhelms Gesellschaft in Dahlem, with General Clay’s blessing. The
pretext was provided when the Soviet-backed authorities at the Humboldt
University in the Linden had expelled three students, Otto Hess, Joachim
Schwarz and Otto Stolz, although all three were wholly above board, and
Hess had the added advantage of Jewish blood. Clay wanted the new
university to open its doors by the autumn.89 The Allies distributed coal that
December. Each household received 18 kilos, and those with children were
allocated four times that amount. In the woods 120,000 cubic metres of
trees were felled to provide fuel. Even this largesse was hardly able to stave
off the cold of Yuletide in Berlin, and as many as 2,000 Berliners died of
cold and hunger that winter. It was second only to the winter of 1946-7.
General Ganeval brought the French glory in the long run. The antennas
of the Soviet-controlled Radio Berlin posed a danger on landing and take-
off at Tegel. Ganeval decided to seize the initiative. He requested that the
directors of the radio remove the masts as being a danger to planes. When
they did nothing, Ganeval coolly blew them up at 10.45 on the morning of
16 December. The Russian General Kotikov was furious, and demanded to
know how he could have done such a thing. The Frenchman replied, ‘With
the help of dynamite and French sappers.’90 The Russians exacted their
revenge by making off with the outlying village of Stolpe, which up to then
had lain in the French Sector.91
At Christmas the SED leadership was summoned to Moscow. On his
return Pieck announced that the East was not ready to embrace popular
democracy. There were no immediate plans to create an East German state.
Stalin made it clear that it was not just the Western orientation that needed
to be fought in Germany, he wanted the Americans out.92 In West Berlin
they had a treat in the form of a visit by Bob Hope and the aptly named
Irving Berlin. The stars performed at the Titania Palast in Steglitz. At the
end of the year electricity was pumped out between 11 p.m. and 0.30 a.m.
to allow the Berliners to welcome the New Year.93
It was in January 1949 that the diarist Speer alluded to the airlift for the
first time. He noted that the Alliance had broken down and that had led to
the blockading of the roads to Berlin: ‘day and night transport planes roar
over our building’. They were on their way to the British airfield at Gatow
near by. As they toiled in the garden, the Spandau Seven wondered what the
events meant for them. They came to the conclusion that they would be
handed back to the countries that captured them. Speer was comforted by
the idea he would be returned to the British.94 It meant no such thing: the
only real effect it had on the men was that their wives were unable to pay
them visits because they could not reach Berlin.95
The battle for Berlin had descended into mud-slinging. The Russians
condemned the Anglo-Americans for the barbaric bombing of Dresden.
Clay again saw the possibility of propaganda: he seemed to recall that the
bombing had been carried out ‘at the specific request of Red Army’. He
wanted to know if there were any written communications along those lines
that might be leaked.96 On 30 March, Moscow decided that Sokolovsky had
failed and had him replaced by Vassily Chuikov. The Western Allies had no
more problems dealing with the emergency:97 the Russians might as well let
the trains run unmolested.
George Kennan visited Berlin on 12 March that year. He went to stay at
Harnack House in Dahlem, once part of the Kaiser Wilhelms Gesellschaft;
the Americans had taken it over as a social club that mirrored Marlborough
House in the British Sector. The city was not a pretty sight. Not only was it
still ruinous, but it was dead - ‘a ghost of its former self’. Harnack House
was one of the few places that was still alive. It was ‘like a garish honkey-
tonkey that has stayed open too late in a sleepy provincial town. It was
Saturday night . . . A German band was faithfully whacking out American
dance tunes which they knew by heart. The faces of the musicians were
drawn and worn . . .’ Kennan observed a major studying the bill of fare:
‘Look what’s on de menu. Tuna fish. Tuna fish, for God’s sake. We been
feedin’ it to our dog. He don’t even like it any more. He jes’ looks at me
and says: jeez, tuna fish again.’98
 He went to see the mayor. Reuter told him, ‘this is the hardest time of
the year. Fresh food is at its lowest. The grippe season was upon them. But
morale could be maintained as long as we Americans evidenced
determination to remain.’ Kennan learned that, contrary to all appearances,
the housing situation in Berlin was far from being the worst in Germany.
Berlin had lost 40 per cent of its accommodation, but it had also seen a 25
per cent drop in its population. When the airlift reached a consistent 8,000
tons a day the Russians would have to concede. That night there was a
colonial-style dinner party. The conversation addressed ‘the price of
antiques, the inadequacies of servants, and the availability of cosmetics at
the PX’.99
During the eleven months of the airlift, Berlin had returned to wartime
conditions. There was an evening curfew, and lack of gas and electricity
obliged its inhabitants to live by candlelight and eat the dehydrated food
provided by the Western Allies. The city was deserted in the evenings and
there was no street lighting. There was no work. The Russians decided to
drop their demands for the scrapping of the new Deutsche Mark, but they
still insisted that the West cease its attempts to create a West German state.
The Russian blockade failed. The Soviet operation had been both a waste of
time and a loss of face. One recent historian has called it ‘a harvest of
blunders’.100 On the night of 11-12 May 1949 road traffic was resumed.
‘Hurrah, we’re still alive!’ shouted the grateful Berliners, who were driven
into the arms of the West in gratitude. One of the main streets of Berlin-
Zehlendorf was renamed in Clay’s honour. The Anglo-Americans could
now congratulate themselves that they were winning the propaganda battle
for Berlin. The citizens of the former capital were turning against
communism. Even the slowest Germans now began to understand that they
were best off with the Western Allies. Not all West Berliners, however,
supported the American and British action, and 120,000 of them registered
for food rations in the East. Howley dismissed them as ‘spineless
backsliders’.
The Americans celebrated in Hollywood too, where three films had
been made by December 1948. The most popular of these was The Big Lift
with Montgomery Clift. In the Berlin streets the urchins played a new
game: Airlift.
Austria
 The airlift had its echoes in Austria.101 Methods were used that were
once again reminiscent of the Berlin blockade. In April 1946, the Soviet
acting commander, L. V. Kurasov, demanded the removal of the radio-
control tower at Tulln. The main road to the airport was often closed. The
Russians caused difficulties for the British in Semmering and at the airport
in Schwechat that they shared with the French. They tried to board the
Mozart Express which linked the American Zone with the US sector in
Vienna, and which was run for the exclusive use of American personnel.
This led to an incident in the winter of 1946 when two Russian officers
boarded the train and pulled a gun on Specialist Sergeant Shirley Dixon;
Dixon replied by drawing his own gun, shooting one of the men dead and
injuring the other. The Russians were naturally furious, and demanded that
the Americans hand Dixon over for trial. The Americans refused. They tried
Dixon themselves and acquitted him. The Russians demanded a fresh trial,
but by that time Dixon was out of harm’s way. The Russians then began to
cut up the air traffic arriving and leaving Tulln, going so far as to fire on the
aircraft. General Mark Clark responded by arming the planes coming into
Tulln and informing the outgoing Soviet commander Koniev that he had
done so. Clark says there were no more incidents.102
Contingency plans were drawn up to withdraw the Western Allied
forces to a line along the River Enns,103 and the Western Allies considered
transferring their administrations to Salzburg. As the Cold War dawned,
Béthouart was conscious of his inferior strength when it came to resisting
the Russians. From the autumn of 1945 he possessed no more than a weak
division of mountain troops.104 The situation was similar for the other
Western powers: for Soviet divisions you read Western battalions.
Washington and London were sceptical of the need to reinforce the armies
in Austria. London refused to countenance the idea of a Russian attack and
Washington believed the likelihood to be remote.105 That changed once the
Soviet Union began to topple the post-war regimes in Budapest and Prague
and flex its muscles in Berlin. Béthouart was summoned to a meeting at the
Hôtel Matignon in Paris, attended by General Revers, chief of the general
staff, and Koenig, Béthouart’s opposite number in Berlin. The government
wanted to know how the French Zone could protect itself. As a result mines
were provided to blow up the roads in the event of a Russian advance; there
were parachute exercises in the mountains and stocks of weapons and food
were built up for use by Austrian resisters.
 The Americans were also ready to fight any Soviet aggression, but the
British, who were defending the port of Trieste, were much more reluctant.
On 5 August 1948 General de Lattre de Tassigy organised a conference of
the Western powers in Strasbourg, where the possibility of rearming the
Germans was voiced for the first time.106 It was the first step towards
bringing West Germany into NATO.
There was much bandying about of accusations. Like Zhukov north of
the Inn, Koniev indicted the British for keeping the Germans under arms.
The political commissar, Colonel-General A. S. Zheltov, half in jest,
focused on factories capable of making buttons for military uniforms. The
Soviet Union could not be satisfied until Austria’s ability to make such
buttons was eliminated. The Western Allies were also dragging their feet
over denazification. In the circumstances Austria would have to wait for
freedom.107
The Russians pointed to cases of rape and theft by American
servicemen in Vienna in October. Over a number of days the Soviet-backed
Österreichische Zeitung reported beatings of black American troops by
their white comrades, robberies, hold-ups and sex crimes. On 16 September
Americans were alleged to have raided a nightclub shouting ‘Niggers out!’
The US minister, John Erhardt, neither accepted nor denied the stories. The
British were not well regarded in the East either - they were accused of
collusion with anti-Tito partisans who had been engaged in armed activity
and shoot-outs on the border with Carinthia.108 There was some fear that
Vienna would become the victim of a full-scale blockade, but the
Americans comforted themselves with the reflection that the operation in
Germany had not been a shining success. Feeding the Viennese was also the
responsibility of the Austrian government even if there were no airfields
suitable for the use of the Western Allies within Vienna. The ructions were
many and annoying, but the situation never came close to war as it did in
Germany, and the co-operation between the four powers continued.109
Chaos reigned too when it came to currency, with German Reichsmarks,
Occupation Schillings and Austrian National Schillings all in circulation.
None had any real purchasing power - for that you needed cigarettes. The
Schilling had been re-established in 1945, but its value plummeted and in
December 1947 a ‘new Schilling’ replaced it, at a value of three old ones.
Meanwhile the Allies continued to bleed the stricken state. In 1945 the
Allied armies of occupation absorbed 35 per cent of the Austrian budget.
With difficulty this was reduced to 15 in 1947. That year the Americans
dispensed with their share, but it was not until 1953 that the other powers
decided they could pay their own way.110
The Federal Republic
On 7 April 1948 General Robertson told the members of the Nordrein-
Westfalen Landtag that they were to make the best of the western part of
Germany for the time being; ‘the rest will come in time. We offer you our
good will and co-operation.’ The effect of the speech was to hearten the
Germans.111 Adenauer was in on the European movement from the start. In
May 1948 he was one of 800 delegates at the United Europe Congress in
The Hague. His adviser Herbert Blankenhorn would have carried with him
some of the ideas current at meetings of the Kreisau Circle during the war,
when the notion of removing borders was seen as a means of preventing
future wars. Sovereignty was also to be played down - as Adenauer himself
put it, ‘to secure common political and economic action’.112 Churchill
delivered a speech at the conference and received Adenauer personally.
Adenauer had sent a message to Churchill via Frank Pakenham: ‘We were
Hitler’s prisoners and but for Mr Churchill we would not be alive today.’
He was playing the victim card again.113
The London Conference of the Western Allies published the London
Agreements on 7 June. It proposed the setting up of a constituent assembly,
the defining of an Occupation Statute for the Allied armies and the creation
of a Ruhr authority to allocate coal and steel production. It was typical of
Adenauer that he was unconcerned about events in Berlin. The man of the
moment was Reuter. Adenauer was chiefly concerned with the Ruhr
authority, which he interpreted as an affront to German dignity. The
Versailles Treaty was ‘a bed of roses by comparison’.114 As a recent
biographer has written, given the situation in Berlin, Adenauer’s
protestations sounded like ‘complaints about the functioning of the parish
pump’.115 More important were the meetings to decide the form of the
future constitution. Documents were issued to the minister presidents of the
three Western zones. The Länder called a conference in Koblenz on 8 July
which was followed by another at Frankfurt that began on 20 July. On 10
August they met again on the Herreninsel in Lake Chiemsee. There was
little agreement between the CDU and the Bavarian CSU, and Adenauer
disliked the Bavarian party chairman, Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ Müller.
 On 26 July the minister presidents agreed to summon a constituent
assembly to be called the Parliamentary Council in Bonn on 1 September. It
was to be a conference of party officials, arranged proportionate to seats in
the three Landtags. Bonn was not Adenauer’s idea. He would have
preferred Koblenz, which was in the French Zone.116 It was in Bonn that
one of the architects of the Grundgesetz or basic law came to the fore - Dr
Carlo Schmid. Schmid was the SPD’s constitutional expert and it was the
job of his committee to produce the legal foundations for post-war
Germany. The SPD scored a small victory over Adenauer, who was anxious
to prevent them from constituting a majority in the new Bundesrat, or upper
house (the lower house was to be the Bundestag). He was trying to exclude
Berlin from the body, both because of his animus against the city and
because its inclusion would mean that the SPD carried the day. The SPD,
however, succeeded in establishing that the size of the Land’s population
would decide how many delegates would go to the Bundesrat.
It was at this time that Blankenhorn entered the stage. He had been a
colleague and friend of Adam von Trott’s in the German Foreign Office,
and was well aware of the aims and ideologies of the Kreisauer. He was an
Anglophile, and fell out with Adenauer only when the latter opposed British
membership of the Common Market. Blankenhorn could do what Adenauer
could not: he could charm Allied generals and talk to journalists. Adenauer
was too much of a stuffed shirt to appeal to them.
The French were distressed to see the progress being made towards a
German government under the lead of Adenauer. Work was proceeding at
such a lick that the minister presidents of the Länder were worried about
taking the responsibility of splitting Germany in two. Not so Adenauer. He
thought Germany’s future lay in the west in the defence of Romano-
Christian culture. He knew that his bread was buttered in Paris. The French
nonetheless wanted him to slow down, and confine his attentions to the
basic law. When Clay and Robertson issued Bizonia Law 75 giving the
Germans the cue to decide the future of the Ruhr, the French uttered a last
gasp of fury embodied in a formal complaint from Schuman.117
Despite this, Adenauer was still flirting with the French. One of the
contacts he made at the time was with Schuman. They met first in October
1948 at Bassenheim in the French-administered Pfalz, in the residence of
the governor, Hettier de Boislambert. Adenauer had no desire to let the
Anglo-Americans know of his talks and travelled to the meeting wrapped in
a blanket with his Homburg pulled down over his eyes. The Ruhr was still a
sticking point. Schuman had to go carefully. Even after 1949 the Saar was
the cause of frequent friction between the French and Adenauer.118
The parliamentary capital had yet to be decided. Berlin was out, not just
because of Adenauer’s loathing of Prussia, but because it was behind
Russian lines and increasingly prone to Soviet intimidation. The natural
capital was Frankfurt, in that it had been a semi-independent imperial,
coronation city before 1806, and it was also the scene of the abortive
German parliament of 1848. After 1848, German liberals believed the
country had taken the wrong path - the path that led to the First World War
and the Second. It was also famously the birthplace of Goethe. Frankfurt
was the choice of the SPD. The CDU was for Bonn, a small city associated
with the archbishop of Cologne, and with the Prussian university founded
there in 1815. Bonn was the birthplace of Beethoven. The British decided in
Bonn’s favour by offering to make it autonomous and free from their
control. Frankfurt was administratively too important for the Americans to
relinquish it. The Germans could finally be masters in their small house.

OceanofPDF.com
 Conclusion
The policy of constraint applied by the victors brings only fragile and misleading solutions . . . For
as long as there is reason for revenge, there will be a renewed risk of war. Germany was never as
dangerous as when she was isolated.
Robert Schuman, Pour l’Europe, 2nd edn, Paris 1964, 107, 110

That means the old borders must fall and be replaced by new alliances, and a new, bigger empire
must unite the nations . . . That is the only way to end the feud properly to everybody’s advantage.
Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 31

The Soviets had failed. They had failed twice: they had neither pushed
the Western Allies out of Berlin nor forestalled the creation of a Western
German state. The stage was now set for the division of Germany into two
camps, each with its own ideologically orientated government. On 8 April
1949 the Allies in Washington decided to transform their Military
Government into an Allied High Commission, and the French agreed to join
Bizonia, briefly to be called Trizonia. On 23 May 1949 the basic law or
Grundgesetz was signed in the presence of the three Western Allied
governors. The Federal Republic was waiting in the wings. Adenauer
claimed that the Grundgesetz constituted ‘a major contribution to the
reunification of the German people’.1 This was clearly untrue, and it is
interesting to speculate today how much Adenauer ever genuinely desired
to see the family reunited. Some maintain that Adenauer was biding his
time, waiting for the East to fall into his hands. For the time being,
however, Germany east of the Elbe was cast adrift and would not come
back into harbour until 1989, twenty-two years after Adenauer’s death.
Some would argue that Adenauer - indeed the West - was powerless to
alleviate the plight of those Germans caught behind the Iron Curtain, but
this is only true up to a point. There was another way: it was the solution
which, after 250 days of negotiation, resulted in the Austrian State Treaty in
1955. The Allies then packed their bags and went home. That solution was
presented to Germany too. On 10 March 1952 Stalin made Adenauer an
offer of an armed and unified Germany. The only condition he sought to
impose was that Germany - like Austria after 1955 - should not belong to
any military alliance. Stalin was still worried about security. Adenauer
pocketed the note. He said it contained nothing new. He thought it more
important to integrate his West German state with the West than to unite
with his brothers across the Elbe.2
The rest may be summarised. Elections in West Germany were set for
14 August 1949. Adenauer went into the lists claiming that the British were
funding the socialists, which made him more sour than ever, even if he
didn’t actually believe a word of it. The result was a hung parliament, with
the CDU/CSU winning 31 per cent of the vote and the SPD 29.2 per cent. A
coalition was inevitable. On 21 August Adenauer held a CDU coffee party
at his home in Rhöndorf. The leader of the FDP, or Free Democrats,
Theodor Heuss, was to be fobbed off with the ceremonial presidency.
Adenauer pushed the CSU aside to clasp the chancellor’s role for himself.
On 15 September it was put to a vote among the members of the Bundestag.
Adenauer secured the Chancellery by one vote - his own. Kurt Schumacher
dubbed him ‘the Allies’ Chancellor’.3 The new Germany could now start
work. The adoption of the basic law that month ended the military
occupation of Germany.
Adenauer’s election prompted an equal and opposite move in the East.
On 16 September a SED delegation arrived in Moscow to receive
instructions from the Politburo on how to cope with the creation of a ‘West
German imperialist state’ and to plan the creation of the German
Democratic Republic. It was much the same crew: Pieck, Grotewohl,
Ulbricht and Fred Oelssner on the German side, and Malenkov, Molotov,
Mikoyan and Kaganovitch on the Soviet. America was cast in the light of a
colonising power. The West German regime was to be unmasked as the
organ of the Western powers.4
The GDR was created on 7 October not only as a response to the FRG,
but also as a result of East Germany’s abandonment by West. At the end of
1949 the Soviet regime made promises that it did not keep, among which
was an agreement to release all German POWs, and to close the camps in
Germany. At the outset there had been eleven such establishments, but this
number was now reduced to just three. At their peak the camps had
contained 158,000 Germans. There were still 16,000 as 1949 turned into
1950, and the camps did not finally close until after Stalin’s death. As a
special treat the German delegation had asked for some translations of
Stalin’s speeches. The incentive was to be rid of the SBZ, which with time
the East Germans were, although no one can argue that Moscow failed to
keep them on a tight leash.

Adenauer’s courting of the French not only ensured their eventual

support, it had one lasting benefit: it laid the foundations for the Common
Market, or European Union as it has now become. The idea has its
precursors. Emperor William II of Germany made frequent references to the
subject and voiced a hope that it would come to fruition. It apparently
derived from his chancellor Caprivi.5 Aristide Briand had proposed a
European Federation in 1929-30 as a means of matching the might of the
United States after 1918, but the suggestion was put aside by the slump that
followed the Wall Street Crash. Robert Schuman became interested at that
time as a deputy for Lorraine in the French Assembly.6 During the war the
notion of European unity surfaced on both sides of the Rhine. In Germany it
tended to be the left who took it up, especially some of the intellectuals in
the Kreisau Circle. Adam von Trott, for example, was keen to revive a
‘Carolingian’ Europe and it was a conception that found echoes in the Quai
d’Orsay at the end of the war.7
In France a union of Europe was more popular with the right, often as
an unlikely benefit that had accrued with defeat. Ernst Jünger, who must
have encountered its champions on both sides of the Rhine, thought it a lost
opportunity that the French and Germans were not brought together on an
equal footing after the Fall of France. Writing in the middle of the war, he
saw the forging of a new ‘empire’ to be a task for the peace: ‘Can someone
like an Alsatian live as a German or a Frenchman without being forced to
turn from one to the other?’ Jünger was also swayed by the Carolingian idea
- to build a new empire that would be as strong as its rivals.8 His thoughts
were not far from those of Schuman.
De Gaulle too took up the banner in September 1943, when he spoke of
Europe’s ‘common identity’. The first task was to remove customs barriers.
The plans were more elaborately worked out by the French radical
politician René Mayer in a memorandum of 30 September 1943. He called
for an ‘economic federation’ centred on France and taking in Benelux and
‘Rhenania’ (the German territories bordering the Rhine), and possibly Italy
and Spain too.9 Jean Monnet, the head of the French General Planning
Committee, put forward a line of argument similar to that of Helmuth James
von Moltke: there would be ‘no peace in Europe if states re-establish
themselves on the basis of national sovereignty . . . To enjoy . . . prosperity
and social progress . . . the states of Europe must form . . . a “European
Entity”, which will make them a single European unit.’10 For Schuman, a
fragmentary Europe was anachronistic. The resources of individual states
were not enough, as France discovered after the war: they needed German
coal. The solidarity of nations should be greater than ‘outworn
nationalism’.11
The European idea even found a few champions in Britain. Victor
Gollancz warned of the dangers of an isolated, dismembered Germany: ‘A
federal Europe, a hundred times yes; an atomized Germany in an
unfederalised Europe, danger and folly.’12 Sir Robert Birley, headmaster of
Eton, and the man who had been chosen to shape education policy in the
British Zone, looked forward to European Union in his 1949 Reith
Lectures, and for much the same reason - sovereignty needed to be
sacrificed to collective security.13 And Britain was present as the first steps
were taken towards union. It was one of the signatories of the Western
European Union on 17 March 1948 and of the Atlantic Pact a year later,
even if it fell by the wayside before the Treaty of Rome established the
Common Market in March 1957.
De Gaulle found the notion of embracing the whole of German territory
in French plans too ambitious. He focused his attention on westward-
looking ‘Rhenania’, and Adenauer was cunning enough to sell him a
Germany that was just that.14 Indeed, Adenauer was also keen to play the
Carolingian card, based on France and Germany’s common Frankish
inheritance. The new Germany based in Bonn would defend Romano-
Christian culture from - guess who? The Slavs.15

Germany’s experience of post-war bloodletting was not an isolated one.

In the wake of the Second World War there was imprisonment, trial and
retribution - des rendements de comptes - all over the world. In 1956
Margret Boveri estimated that as many as half a million French people had
been arrested after the war, resulting in 160,000 trials. In Belgium the
number of investigations was as high was 600,000, in Holland 130,000.
Even in America, 570 federal officials were dismissed and 2,748 resigned
during Truman’s term; another 8,000 were sacked by Eisenhower. In
England they hanged Lord Haw Haw and John Amery, and branded up to
10,000 people with ‘legitimate doubt’.16
The question arises whether the Allies achieved what they desired. The
war horses on the American side had their doubts. The Cold War showed
them that they had not defeated the enemy - Germany was not the enemy
any more. That was the Soviet Union. For Patton or Mark Clark it had been
a botched job. Clark wrote: ‘We had not won the war. We had stopped too
soon. We had been too eager to go home. We welcomed the peace, but after
more years of effort and expenditure we found that we had won no peace.’17
America had succeeded elsewhere, however. It was able to shove the ailing
Great Britain aside and assume the leadership of the Western world. The
days of the Raj and the rest of the British Empire were numbered. British
India was over even before the signing of the Grundgesetz. Britain would
be encouraged to drop its pretensions to power and follow at the American
heel.
The Russians had been checked at the Elbe, but they had the security
Stalin craved, and it was thirty-five years after Stalin’s death before their
European empire finally tottered and fell. The most surprising victors of the
peace were the French, who started right at the back yet finished by
realising all their war aims. For the Poles and the Czechs it proved bitter-
sweet: they had their national states without the dangers presented by racial
minorities, but they had communism, and Soviet Russia squatting on their
national aspirations.
And what did the Germans gain from the peace? The Allies had helped
them ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ in what was an often
misguided desire to dig out the roots of the evil. They promoted an idea of
Germany’s past as ‘another country’ which became enshrined in Jurgen
Habermas’s dictum that ‘history begins at Auschwitz’. They were well rid
of Adolf Hitler and his cronies, who had led them to ruin and besmirched
their name for all time. They gained stability created by a monetary reform
which ushered in a new era of prosperity.
The Germans didn’t want to know their sullied history. Weary of the
past they began to take pleasure in the destruction of their towns. Those few
towns and villages in Germany and Austria that had emerged unscathed
were ripped down all the same in the 1950s and 1960s: the past had to go,
to be replaced by an anodyne notion of comfort and prosperity. The myth of
zero hour was taken to all their hearts. The perceptive writer Alfred Döblin
noticed this tendency as early as 1946. For the time being there was little
construction going on. Commerce thrived in the ruins. The people made no
bones about the state of Germany: ‘They are not depressed by the
destruction; they see it rather as an intense spur to work. I am convinced
that, if they had the means they lack, they would rejoice tomorrow that all
their outmoded, badly laid-out conurbations had been knocked flat giving
them the opportunity now to build something first class and wholly
contemporary.’18
The west was patched up quickly; buildings went up here there and
everywhere to replace those destroyed in the war. A vast ugliness replaced
the ruins. If they were allowed to, they could finally forget the blood they
had spilled, and concentrate on the birth of the new Germany, which they
had watered with their own.

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 Notes
PREFACE
1 A. J. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler, 3rd edn. London 1991,
136-7.
2 Quoted in Ernst Jünger, Jahre der Okkupation, Stuttgart 1958, 130.
INTRODUCTION
1 Gerhard Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus: Vertreibung und Eingliederung
von 15 Millionen Ostdeutsche, Stuttgart 1973, 94. Ziemer’s figures are
based on those published by the Statischen Bundesamt in Wiesbaden in
1958.
2 See also Manfred Rauchensteiner, ‘Das Jahrzehnt der Besatzung als
Epoche in der Österreichischer Geschichte’, in Alfred Ableitinger, Siegfried
Beer and Eduard G. Staudinger, eds, Österreich unter alliieter Besatzung -
1945-1955, Vienna, Cologne and Graz 1998, 18-19.
3 Alfred Döblin, Schicksalsreise, Bericht und Bekenntnisse,
Frankfurt/Main 1949, 420-2.
4 Heinrich Böll, Kreuz ohne Liebe, Cologne 2003, 285-6.
5 Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz, 1270 to the
Present, New Haven and London 1996, 10.
6 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, introduced by C. W. Ceram and
translated by James Stern, London 1965, 139.
7 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edn, London
and New Haven 2003, III, 1138.
8 David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature, London 2005, sees early
Nazi tendencies in the desire to control Germany’s waterways.
9 Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four Power Control in Germany and
Austria 1945-1946, Oxford 1956, 28.
10 Ibid., 15.
11 Eugene Davidson, The Death and Life of Germany - An Account of
the American Occupation, 2nd edn, Columbia, Miss. 1999, 6-7. Davidson
possibly means Adam von Trott, who arrived in America in September
1939 - see Giles MacDonogh, A Good German: Adam von Trott zu Solz,
revised edn, London 1994, 307-19. It was Roosevelt who told J. Edgar
Hoover to have him closely followed: the president considered Trott a
threat to national security.
 12 Curtis F. Morgan, Jnr, James F. Byrnes, Lucius Clay, and American
Policy in Germany, 1945-1947, Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter 2002,
2, 5.
13 Henric Wuermeling, Doppelspiel: Adam von Trott zu Solz im
Widerstand gegen Hitler, Munich 2004, 142-4.
14 Davidson, Death and Life, 5; Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control,
34.
15 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 30-1, 36.
16 Ibid., 34; Paul W. Gulgowski, ‘The American Military Government
of United States Occupied Zones of Post World War II Germany in Relation
to Policies Expressed by its Civilian Governmental Authorities at Home,
During the Course of 1944/1945 through 1949’ (doctoral dissertation,
Frankfurt University) Frankfurt/Main 1983, 22.
17 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 18.
18 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 8-9.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 Ibid., 15.
21 Hermann Graml, Die Alliierten und die Teilung Deutschlands.
Konflikte und Entscheidungen 1941-1948, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 27, 60.
22 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 41; Graml, Teilung Deutschlands, 53, 56.
23 Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany - A History of the
Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Cambridge, Mass. and London
1995, 9; Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 52-3.
24 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 76.
25 John W. Young, France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance,
1944-49: French Foreign Policy and Post-War Europe, Leicester and
London 1990, 9.
26 Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity, New York and
Oxford 1996, 17.
27 Ibid., 19.
28 Oliver Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente in die “unendliche
Geschichte” von den Sowjetische Absichte in Österreich’, in Ableitinger et
al., Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung, 139-42, passim.
29 Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘France 1945: L’Ambition allemande et ses
moyens’, in Klaus Manfrass and Jean-Pierre Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne
1944-1947, Les Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent,
December 1989-January 1990/Akten des deutsch-französisch
Historikerkolloquiums, Baden-Baden, 2-5 December 1986, 37.
30 Ibid., 15.
31 Ibid., 25.
32 Ibid., 40.
33 Ibid., 26.
34 Ibid., 28.
35 James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, London 1947, 25.
36 Rioux, ‘France 1945’, 40-1.
37 Ibid., 49.
38 Ibid., 50-1.
39 Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ‘Der Weg nach Potsdam - Die Alliierten und
die Vertreibung’, in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutschen
aus dem Osten. Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folgen, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 51-2,
55-6.
40 Andreas Lawaty, Das Ende Preussens in polnischer Sicht. Zur
kontinuität negativer Wirkungen der preussischen Geschichte auf die
deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen, Berlin and New York 1986, 56-7.
41 Ibid., 100.
42 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 29-30.
43 Detlef Brandes, ‘Die Exilpolitik von Edvard Beneš 1939-1945’, in
Arnold Suppan and Elisabeth Vyslonzil, eds, Edvard Beneš und die
tschechoslowakische Aussenpolitik 1918-1948, 2nd edn, Frankfurt/Main,
Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford and Vienna 2003, 159.
44 Ibid., 160.
45 Ibid., 161.
46 Manfred Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4: Österreich unter alliieter
Besatzung, Vienna 2005, 7-8.
47 Quoted in General Béthouart, La Bataille pour l’Autriche, Paris
1966, 15.
48 Quoted in ibid., 16.
49 Ibid., 10.
50 Otto von Habsburg, Ein Kampf um Österreich 1938-1945,
Aufgezeichnet von Gerhard Tötschinger, Vienna and Munich 2001, 26, 69.
51 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 14.
52 Ibid., 12.
 53 Charmian Brinson, ‘Ein “Sehr Ambitioniertes Projekt” - Die
Anfänge des Austrian Centre’, in Marietta Bearman et al., Wien-London,
hin und retour: Das Austrian Centre in London 1939 bis 1947, Vienna
2004, 15.
54 Marietta Bearman, ‘Das kommende Österreich. Die Planung für ein
Nachkriegs-Österreich’, in Bearman et al., Wien-London, 222.
55 Ibid., 207.
56 Ibid., 212
57 Ibid., 207-8.
58 See Helene Maimann, Politik im Wartesaal, Vienna, Cologne and
Graz 1975 and F. C. West, Zurück oder nicht zurück?, London 1942.
59 Brinson, ‘Ein “Sehr Ambitioniertes Projekt”, 22-3.
60 Anthony Grenville, ‘Zeit der Prüfung, Zeit der taten, Zeit des
Triumphes und der Illusionen - Die politische Tätigkeit des Austrian
Centre’, in Bearman et al., Wien-London, 29.
61 Ibid., 47.
62 Eden to Ralph Murray, 10 September 1942, kindly communicated by
Johannes Popper von Podhragy; see also Peter Gosztony, Endkampf an der
Donau 1944/1945, Vienna, Munich and Zurich 1969, 209.
63 FAM, untitled document of 15 March 1943, communicated by
Johannes Popper von Podhragy.
64 Grenville, ‘Zeit der Prüfung’, 37.
65 Ibid., 35, 37, 38.
66 Ibid., 40.
67 Ibid., 41.
68 Ibid., 42.
69 Ibid., 43-4, 48.
70 Ibid., 49.
71 Charmian Brinson, ‘Die “Robinson Crusoes” von Paddington und
die Briten. Die Beziehungen zwischen Austrian Centre, Free Austrian
Movement und den britischen Gastgebern’, in Bearman et al., Wien-
London, 180, 181.
72 Ibid., 184.
73 See Christiane Maasburg, ‘Nikolas Maasburgs Rolle im Widerstand
und bei der Wiederherstellung eines unabhängigen Österreich’
(Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des Magistergrades der Philosophie,
University of Vienna 1996); Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds, Das
Buch Hitler, Bergisch Gladbach 2004, 335 and n.
74 Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente’, 142-5, 156-7.
75 Grenville, ‘Zeit der Prüfung’, 48, 52.

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 CHAPTER 1: THE FALL OF VIENNA
1 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 77-8, 91.
2 Ibid., 73.
3 Ibid., 71; Klaus Dieter Mulley, ‘Aspekte Sowjetische Besatzung in
Nieder Österreich’, in Ableitinger et al., eds, Österreich unter alliierter
Besatzung, 387.
4 Giles MacDonogh, Prussia - The Perversion of an Idea, London
1994, 384; Naimark, Russians in Germany, 91.
5 Adolf Schärf, Österreichs Wiederaufrichtung im Jahr 1945, Vienna
1960, 29, 31.
6 Ibid., 7.
7 Ibid., 33.
8 Alois Brusatti, ed., Zeuge der Stunde Null, das Tagebuch Eugen
Margaréthas 1945-1947, revised by Hildegard Hemetsberger-Koller,
Vienna 1990, 24.
9 Ibid., 28, 39.
10 Mulley, ‘Aspekte Sowjetische Besatzung’, 376.
11 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 22-3; Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 18.
12 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 29.
13 Josef Schöner, Wiener Tagebuch, ed. Eva-Marie Csáky, Franz
Matscher and Gerald Stourzh, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar 1990, 136.
14 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 33.
15 Oliver Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik am Beginn der zweiten
Republik - vertrauliche Berichte der US-MILITÄRADMINISTRATION aus
Österreich 1945 in englischer Originalfassung, Vienna, Cologne and Graz
1985, 158; Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 24-5.
16 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 29.
17 Schöner, Tagebuch, 137-8.
18 Giles MacDonogh, The Wine and Food of Austria, London 1992, 19.
19 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 25.
20 Ibid., 19-20.
21 Carl Szokoll, Die Rettung Wiens, Vienna 2001, 291.
22 Schöner, Tagebuch, 138-9.
23 Schöner, Tagebuch, 140.
24 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 23.
25 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 52, 61.
26 Schöner, Tagebuch, 162.
 27 Willy Prinz von Thurn und Taxis, ‘Memoiren’, unpublished MS in
the possession of Princess Daria von Thurn und Taxis, Munich, 19-20, 24.
28 Ibid., 162-3.
29 Wolfgang Mueller, Die sowjetische Besatzung in Österreich 1945-
1955 und ihre politische Mission, Vienna 2005, 82-4; Christiane Maasburg,
‘Nikolaus Maasburg’, 72-3, 75, 77.
30 Schöner, Tagebuch, 141-2; Margarétha, Tagebuch, 32.
31 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 31.
32 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 25.
33 Schöner, Tagebuch, 144.
34 Ibid., 145.
35 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 33; Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 20.
36 Schöner, Tagebuch, 147, 172.
37 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 35; Schöner, Tagebuch, 148.
38 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 25; Schöner, Tagebuch, 148-9, 169.
39 Schöner, Tagebuch, 150-2.
40 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 32.
41 Ibid., 35, 39, 50.
42 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 37.
43 Ibid., 45-6.
44 Ibid., 58.
45 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 154-8; Rathkolb,
‘Historische Fragmente’, 147.
46 Schöner, Tagebuch, 165.
47 Ibid., 153-4.
48 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 42.
49 Schöner, Tagebuch, 158-60, 171.
50 Ibid., 164.
51 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 42-3, 48.
52 Ibid., 44-5.
53 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 52, 57.
54 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 46.
55 Schöner, Tagebuch, 165-6; Margarétha, Tagebuch, 42.
56 Schöner, Tagebuch, 167, 175.
57 Ibid., 181.
58 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 17.
 59 Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Austrians - A Thousand-Year Odyssey,
London 1996, 377-8.
60 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 20.
61 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 115-17.
62 Schöner, Tagebuch, 182-3.
63 Ibid., 184.
64 Grenville, ‘Zeit der Prüfung’, 60.
65 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 60.
66 Schöner, Tagebuch, 191-2.
67 Ibid., 201; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 27.
68 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 114.
69 Ibid., 201-2; Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 27, 89; Rauchensteiner,
Stalinplatz 4, 21.
70 Schöner, Tagebuch, 205; Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 87.
71 Siegfried Beer, ‘Niederösterreich unter der Roten Armee’, in Ernst
Bezemek and Willibald Rossner, eds, Niederösterreich 1945 - Südmähren
1945, Vienna 1996, 140.
72 Béthouart, Bataille, 19.
73 Schöner, Tagebuch, 217-18.
74 Ibid., 225.
75 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 67-8.
76 Ibid., 233.

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 CHAPTER 2: WILD TIMES: A PICTURE OF
LIBERATED CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1945
1 Ursula von Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942-1945, new,
unabridged edn, Munich 1994, 346.
2 Hans Graf von Lehndorff, Ostpreussisches Tagebuch: Aufzeichnungen
eines Arztes aus den Jahren 1945-1947, Munich 1961, 11.
3 Josef Henke, ‘Exodus aus Ostepreussen und Schlesien: Vier
Erlebnisberichte’, in Benz, Die Vertreibung, 93.
4 MacDonogh, Prussia, 380-1; Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler,
312-13.
5 Henke, ‘Exodus’, 95.
6 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 67-8.
7 Ibid., 68.
8 Ibid., 71, 75.
9 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 73. (The translation is by Robert
Conquest.)
10 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 70.
11 Ibid., 71, 77.
12 Ibid., 68, 72.
13 Ibid, 79-80.
14 Ibid., 85.
15 Fritz Gause, Die Geschichte der Stadt Königsberg in Preussen, 3
vols, Cologne and Vienna 1965-71, III, 172.
16 Marianne Peyinghaus, Stille Jahre in Gertlauken - Erinnerungen an
Ostpreussen, Berlin 1985, 90; Giles MacDonogh, review of The Amber
Room by Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy in Literary Review, June
2004.
17 Gause, Königsberg, III, 170n.
18 Ibid., 171.
19 Henke, ‘Exodus’, 97-9.
20 Ibid., 100-1.
21 Gause, Königsberg, III, 171.
22 Christian von Krockow, The Hour of the Women, translated by
Krishna Winton, London and Boston 1991, 67, 86.
23 Käthe von Normann, Ein Tagebuch aus Pommern, Munich 1987, 16.
24 Ibid., 16-17.
 25 Ibid., 18-19.
26 Ibid., 21, 252.
27 Ibid., 26.
28 Carl Tighe, Gdansk - National Identity in the Polish-German
Borderlands, London and Concord 1990, 194.
29 Ibid., 195; Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1053.
30 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1052.
31 Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi
Germany, New Haven and London 2004, 324-5.
32 Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, eds, The Liberation of
the Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberation,
with an introduction by Robert H. Abzug, Washinton DC 1987, 91.
33 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 327-8.
34 Tighe, Gdansk, 197-8.
35 Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1988,
485.
36 Giles MacDonogh, ‘Do Mention the War’, Financial Times
Magazine, 1 November 2002.
37 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1049-51.
38 Johannes Kaps, ed., Die Tragödie Schlesiens 1945/46 in Dokumente
- unter besonderer Berucksichtigung des Erzbishoftums Breslau, Munich
1952-3, 50-1.
39 Edward N. Petersen, Russian Commands and German Resistance:
The Soviet Occupation, 1945-1949, New York 1999, 224.
40 Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a
Central European City, London 2002, 408.
41 Herbert Hupka, ed., Letzte Tage in Schlesien: Tagebücher,
Erinnerungen und Dokumente der Vertreibung, Munich and Vienna 1982,
12.
42 Ibid., 50.
43 Ibid., 51.
44 Ibid., 53, 55.
45 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 332.
46 Michal Chilczuk in Chamberlain and Feldman, eds, Liberation, 27-8.
47 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1055.
48 Margret Boveri, Tage des Überlebens, Frankfurt/Main 1996, 163.
49 Ibid., 167.
 50 Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 60.
51 Saul K. Padover, Psychologist in Germany - The Story of an
American Intelligence Officer, London 1946, 134.
52 Ibid., 218.
53 Ibid., 280-1; Kurt Buchholz, ‘Die ersten Amis sagten freundlich
“Hello”, Wiesbadener Tagblatt, 25 April 2005, kindly communicated by
Frau Gertrud Loewe.
54 Missie Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries, London 1985, 290, 294.
55 Ibid., 294.
56 Elena Skrjabina, The Allies on the Rhine 1945-1950, translated by
Norman Luxenburg, with a foreword by Harrison Salisbury, Carbondale
and Edwardsville 1980, 9-13.
57 Ibid., 17.
58 Ibid., 17, 29-30, 39, 41.
59 Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, edited by Gunther Nickel, Johanna
Schrön and Hans Wagener, Göttingen 2004, 18, 70.
60 Ibid., 69.
61 Ernst Wiechert, Jahre und Zeiten - Erinnerungen, Munich and
Vienna 1989, 408.
62 Ibid., 410.
63 Quoted in Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society
from Hitler to Honecker, New Haven and London 2005, 26.
64 Abraham J. Peck, ‘Befreit und erneut in Lagern: jüdische DPs’, in
Walter H. Pehle, ed., Der Judenpogrom 1938 - Von der
‘Reichskristallnacht’ zum Völkermord, Frankfurt/ Main 1988, 204-5.
65 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 316 n. 4, which gives the uncorrected text
from the diary.
66 Ibid., 317.
67 Ibid., 329, 331.
68 Ibid., 318.
69 Ibid., 322 and n. 2.
70 Ibid., 319-20.
71 Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart - Americans and the
Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, New York and Oxford 1985, 80.
72 Paul Berber, Dachau 1933-1945 - The Official History, London
1975, 183.
 73 Ibid., 89-93; Michael Selzer, Deliverance Day: The Last Hours at
Dachau, London 1980, 188-9. The latter is an unsatisfying book in that it
conceals the identity of the interviewees and creates conglomerate
characters. There are also large chunks of dialogue.
74 Ibid., 198, 201, 204; Abzug, Vicious Heart, 94-5.
75 Chamberlain and Feldman, eds, Liberation, 32.
76 Berber, Dachau, 199.
77 Ibid.
78 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 330.
79 Brigitte Hamann, Winifred Wagner - A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s
Bayreuth, translated by Alan Bance, London 2005, 405.
80 Walter Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz. Die letzten Tage des
Dritten Reiches, Göttingen 1951, 86.
81 Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, Stuttgart 1977, 242-4.
82 Ibid., 245.
83 Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz, 95.
84 Ibid., 98.
85 Karl Dönitz, Mein Wechselvolles Leben, Zurich, Berlin and Frankfurt
1968, 210; Reimer Hanse, Das Ende des Dritten Reiches. Die deutsche
Kapitulation, 1945, Stuttgart 1966, 194.
86 Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich, London 2005, 138-40.
87 Hanse, Kapitulation, 196-8.
88 Boveri, Tage, 153.
89 Charles Whiting, Finale at Flensburg. The Race to the Baltic - The
British Army’s Last Campaign, London 1966, 152.
90 Hanse, Kapitulation, 186.
91 Ibid., 192.
92 Marlis Steinert, Capitulation 1945: The Story of the Dönitz Regime,
translated by Richard Barry, London 1969, 275, 277.
93 Leonard Mosely, Report from Germany, London 1945, 103.
94 Whiting, Finale at Flensburg, 150.
95 Ibid., 153.
96 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 251.
97 Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz, 113-14.
98 Whiting, Finale at Flensburg, 160.
99 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 252.
100 Boveri, Tage, 152.
 101 Whiting, Finale at Flensburg, 168.
102 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 252.
103 Steinert, Capitulation 1945, 280.
104 Whiting, Finale at Flensburg, 168.
105 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 253.
106 Steinert, Capitulation 1945, 281.
107 Lüdde-Neurath, Regierung Dönitz, 123.
108 Botting, Ruins,140-1.
109 Elisabeth Ruge, ed., Charlotte Gräfin von der Schulenburg zur
Erinnerungen, Hamburg 1992, 70-90 passim.
110 Jünger, Okkupation, 11, 17.
111 Ibid., 19.
112 Ibid., 28.
113 Ibid., 32-4.
114 Ibid., 48-9.
115 Herzogin Viktoria Luise, Ein Leben als Tochter des Kaisers,
Göttingen 1965, 320-4.
116 Friedrich Wilhelm Prinz von Preussen, Das Haus Hohenzollern
1918-1945, Munich and Vienna 1985, 247.
117 Ben Shepherd, After Daybreak - The Liberation of Belsen, 1945,
London 2005, 8.
118 Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, 348.
119 Shepherd, After Daybreak, 42.
120 Ibid., 41.
121 Susanne Kirkbright: Karl Jaspers - A Biography, Navigations in
Truth, New Haven and London 2004, 187-8.
122 Ibid., 190, 192.
123 Richard von Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten: Erinnerungen, Berlin 1997,
95-6.
124 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 410.
125 Jünger, Okkupation, 202.
126 F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany 1945-1949, Stanford 1962,
16-17.
127 François-George Dreyfus, ‘Les Dernières Operations militaires
françaises et l’avenir des relations Franco-Allemandes’, in Manfrass and
Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne, 13.
 128 Hans Rommel, Vor zehn Jahren. 16/17 April 1945: Wie es zur
Zerstörung von Freudenstadt gekommen ist, Freudenstadt 1955, 27.
129 Ibid., 26.
130 Hans Joachim Harder, ‘Militärische Operationen in der Endphase
des Krieges: die deutsche Sicht’, in Manfrass and Rioux, eds, France-
Allemagne, 31.
131 R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, Chicago 1947, 57.
132 Ibid., 56-7.
133 Harder, ‘Militärishe Operationen’, 32.
134 Willis, The French in Germany, 18.
135 Petra Weber, Carlo Schmid, 1896-1979. Eine Biographie, Munich
1996, 191-2.
136 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 397.
137 Ibid., 397-9.
138 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1050.
139 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 105.
140 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 39.
141 Ibid., 24-5.
142 Ibid., 41-3.
143 Béthouart, Bataille, 51-2.
144 The full list is reproduced in Josef Müller, Bis zur letzten
Konsequenz: Ein Leben für Frieden und Freiheit, Munich 1975, 364-7.
145 Ibid., 267; Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, translated by
Franz von Hildebrand, New York 1946, 286.
146 Ibid., 288.
147 Ibid., 270.
148 Ibid., 271.
149 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 3-5.
150 Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 201.
151 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 31-3.
152 Ibid., 203.
153 Ibid.
154 Lewis Weinstein witnessed his vomiting: see Chamberlain and
Feldman, eds, Liberation, 46.
155 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 26-30.
156 Padover, Psychologist, 284.
 157 Volker Mauersberger, Hitler in Weimar - Der Fall einer deutschen
Kulturstadt, Berlin 1999, 295-300; Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1051; Eberle
and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, 348; Berber, Dachau, 182.
158 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1055.
159 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 49, 52.
160 Schöner, Tagebuch, 178.
161 Quoted in Mauersberger, Hitler, 296.
162 Ibid., 300.
163 Padover, Psychologist, 293-6.
164 Ibid., 293-4.
165 Peterson, Russian Commands, 331.
166 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 72.
167 Ibid., 74, 78.
168 Ibid., 80; Marianne Günther: Peyinghaus, Stille Jahre in
Gertlauken, 206.
169 Peyinghaus, Stille Jahre in Gertlauken, 217.
170 Tisa Hess Schulenburg, The First Days and the Last, London 1948,
25.
171 Ibid., 26.
172 Ibid., 27.
173 Tisa von der Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt - Bildhauerin und
Ordensfrau - ein unkonventionelles Leben, Freiburg im Breisgau 1981, 177.
174 Abzug, Vicious Heart, 62, 68.
175 Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt, 181.
176 Jenny Williams, More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans
Fallada, London 1998, 245.
177 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 360-2.
178 Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher 1945 - Die letzten Aufzeichnungen,
Hamburg 1977, 442; Padover, Psychologist, 200.
179 Beer, ‘Niederösterreich’, 136.
180 Jean Edward Smith, ed., The Papers of Lucius D. Clay: Germany
1945-1949, Bloomington and London 1974, I, 47.
181 Carl Zuckmayer, ‘Jugend in Niemandsland’, in Deutschlandbericht,
228-34; Krockow, Hour of the Women, 75.
182 Wilhelm Turnwald, ed., Dokumente dur Austreibung der
Sudetendeutschen, Munich 1951, 152.
183 Fritz Löwenthal, Der neue Geist von Potsdam, Hamburg 1948, 118.
 184 Ernst von Salomon, The Answers - to the 131 Questions in the
Allied Military Government ‘Fragebogen’, preface by Goronwy Rees,
translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon, London 1954, 410.
185 James Stern, Hidden Damage, London 1990, 318.
186 Werner Schwipps, Die Königl. Hofund Garnisonkirche zu Potsdam,
Berlin 1991, 100-1.
187 Ibid., 104; Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1180.

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 CHAPTER 3: BERLIN
1 G. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections of the Marshal of the
Soviet Union, 2 vols, Moscow 1985, II, 383.
2 Ibid., 392, 394.
3 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 20.
4 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 396.
5 Quoted in Alexandra Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis - A History of Berlin,
London 1998, 606.
6 Boveri, Tage, 106-8.
7 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 86.
8 Ibid., 44.
9 Botting, Ruins, 87.
10 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 14.
11 Boveri, Tage, 123.
12 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 63.
13 Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music, London 1951, 211.
14 Boveri, Tage, 246.
15 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 42.
16 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 21.
17 Boveri, Tage, 128.
18 Ibid., 128-9.
19 Cyril Buffet, Berlin, Paris 1993, 359.
20 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 46.
21 Ibid., 53-4.
22 Boveri, Tage, 120.
23 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 46-7.
24 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 22.
25 Ibid., 24.
26 Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, 411.
27 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 50, 123, 134.
28 Boveri, Tage, 129.
29 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 70.
30 Boveri, Tage, 254.
31 Ibid.
32 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 82.
33 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 77.
34 Ibid., 145.
 35 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 35.
36 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 60-1.
37 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 14, 16.
38 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 144, 150, 186.
39 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 22.
40 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 80, 83, 150.
41 Boveri, Tage, 245.
42 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 124.
43 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 94.
44 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 617.
45 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 131.
46 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 616.
47 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 358.
48 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 26.
49 Kay Summersby, Eisenhowever was my Boss, Watford 1949, 230.
50 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 397-401.
51 Hedda Adlon, Hotel Adlon - Das Berliner Hotel in dem die grosse
Welt zu Gast war, Munich 1997, 315; Peter Auer, Adlon, Berlin, Berlin
1997, 217.
52 Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, translated by C. M.
Woodhouse, introduction by Günter Minnerup, London 1979, 287.
53 Ibid., 311-12.
54 Ibid., 299.
55 Ibid., 315.
56 Ibid.
57 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 253, 292.
58 Dietrich Staritz, Geschichte der DDR, Erweitete Ausgabe,
Frankfurt/Main 1996, 273; Buffet, Berlin, 366.
59 Leonhard, Revolution, 303.
60 Ibid., 315-16; George Clare, Berlin Days 1946-1947, London 1989,
30-2.
61 Peterson, Russian Commands, 44-5.
62 Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, Harmondsworth
1987, 817.
63 Leonhard, Revolution, 306.
64 Ibid., 326.
65 Ibid., 332, 337.
 66 Buffet, Berlin, 358.
67 Boveri, Tage, 133.
68 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 36.
69 Davidson, Death and Life, 74-6.
70 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 609-10.
71 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 135.
72 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 106.
73 Buffet, Berlin, 363-4.
74 Clare, Berlin Days, 47.
75 Ruth Gay, Safe among the Germans: Liberated Jews after World War
II, New Haven and London 2002, 111-12, 151.
76 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 12-13, 15.
77 Ibid., 27, 38, 84.
78 Boveri, Tage, 144-5.
79 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 168.
80 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 32.
81 Boveri, Tage, 214.
82 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 84, 102, 110.
83 Boveri, Tage, 207-8.
84 Ibid., 262, 286.
85 Ibid., 209-10.
86 Ibid., 209.
87 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 17.
88 Frank Howley, Berlin Command, New York 1950, 29, 34.
89 Ibid., 41.
90 Ibid., 46.
91 Ibid., 11.
92 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 627, 629; Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin,
74.
93 Buffet, Berlin, 358; Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 75.
94 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 436; Howley, Berlin Command, 57.
95 Howley, Berlin Command, 66-72.
96 Boveri, Tage, 234-5.
97 Howley, Berlin Command, 22-3.
98 Boveri, Tage, 237-8, 263, 267.
99 Howley, Berlin Command, 79, 87.
100 Ibid., 238-9.
 101 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 36.
102 Ibid., 82.
103 Buffet, Berlin, 362.
104 Boveri, Tage, 165.
105 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 45.
106 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 87.
107 Boveri, Tage, 269, 272.
108 Howley, Berlin Command, 12.
109 Ibid., 30, 41,
110 Ibid., 39.
111 Klaus Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache . . .’ - Wilhelm Furtwängler
und sein Statthalter - Ein philharmonischer Konflict in der Berliner
Nachkriegszeit, Zurich and St Gallen 1988, 11-12.
112 Ibid., 13, Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 97.
113 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 356.
114 Ibid., 359.
115 Ibid., 362-3.
116 Renée Bédarida, ‘Une Française à Berlin en 1945’, in Manfrass and
Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne, 149.
117 Ibid., 150.
118 Nabokov, Old Friends, 211; MacDonogh, A Good German, 73.
119 Bédarida, ‘Une Française’, 150-1.
120 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 160.
121 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 114.
122 Ibid., 139, 141.
123 Clare, Berlin Days, 59.
124 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 16.
125 Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, translated by Richard
and Clara Winton, London 1976, 66.

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 CHAPTER 4: EXPULSIONS FROM
CZECHOSLOVAKIA, HUNGARY AND
YUGOSLAVIA
1 Theodor Schieder, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutscher Bevölkerung
aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vol. IV/1: Tschechoslowakei, Berlin 1957, 4.
2 Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and
the Expulsion of the Germans - Background, Execution, Consequences,
with a foreword by Robert Murphy, London 1979, 27.
3 Rudolf Jaworski, ‘Die Sudetendeutscher als Minderheit, in der
Tschechoslowakei 1918-1938’, in Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung, 29; for the
treatment of German-speaking Jews after the war, see Melissa Müller and
Reinhard Piechocki, Alice Herz-Sommer: ‘Ein Garten Eden inmitten der
Hölle’, Munich 2006, 308-9.
4 Ibid., 30.
5 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, xi and n. 8, xiv.
6 Schieder, ed., Tschechoslowakei, 6.
7 Thurn und Taxis, ‘Memoiren’, 33.
8 E. Franzel, Die Vertreibung Sudetenland 1945/1946. Nach
Dokumenten des Bundesministeriums für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge and
Kriegsgeschädigte, Bonn; Nach Dokumenten aus dem Bundesarchiv in
Koblenz, Fragebogen Berichten des Bundesarchivs, Erlebnis und
Kreisberichten, Bad Nauheim 1967, 108-9.
9 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 56; Zbyněk Zeman with Antonin Klimek, The Life
of Edvard Beneš 1884-1948 - Czechoslovakia in Peace and War, Oxford
1997, 225-6, 237.
10 Franzel, Sudetenland, 20.
11 Ibid., 240.
12 Ibid., 242.
13 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 65.
14 Karl Peter Schwarz, ‘Mit der Vertreibung vollendet’, in Suppan and
Vyslonzil, eds, Beneš, 180.
15 Franzel, Sudetenland, 23-4, 218.
16 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 527-56 - the ‘Kaschauer’ Statutes and
Beneš Decrees are printed in full; Zeman and Klimek, Beneš, 245.
17 Schwarz, ‘Vertreibung’, 180.
18 Franzel, Sudetenland, 33, 104.
 19 Alois Harasko, ‘Die Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen. Sechs
Erlebnisberichte’, in Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung, 107.
20 Zeman and Klimek, Beneš, 246.
21 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 66.
22 Ibid.; Franzel, Sudetenland, 22.
23 Zeman and Klimek, Beneš, 248.
24 Alice Teichova, ‘Die Tschechen in der NS-Kriegswirtschaft’, in
Suppan and Vyslonzil, eds, Beneš, 172-3; Franzel, Sudetenland, 19.
25 Schieder, ed., Tschechosowakei, 17.
26 Theodor Schieder, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutschen Bevölkerung
aus der Tschechoslowakei, vol. IV/2, Berlin 1957, 789.
27 Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus, 73.
28 Ibid., 18.
29 Franzel, Sudetenland, 55-6.
30 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Kurt Schmidt, 366, 375, 402-3.
31 Franzel, Sudetenland, 22.
32 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 18-19, Dr Hans Wagner, 38, 226-7.
33 Margarete Schell, Ein Tagebuch aus Prag, Beiheft II, Dokumente der
Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, Kassel 1957, 9.
34 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Ludwig Breyer, 333-4; Schell, Tagebuch,
74.
35 Schell, Tagebuch, 24, 34.
36 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 15, Franz Rösch, 15-16, 28; Thurn und
Taxis, ‘Memoiren’, 34.
37 Zhukov, II, 410.
38 Schell, Tagebuch, 12 n. 1.
39 Ibid., 18.
40 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 10.
41 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Hildegard Hurtinger, 14, Hans Wagner,
39, 42; Schieder, ed., Tschechoslowakei, 63 n. 1; Thurn und Taxis,
‘Memoiren’, 35.
42 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Dr Hans Wagner, 39, Sebastian Herr, 50,
Kurt Schmidt, 404.
43 Schell, Tagebuch, 20.
44 Schieder, ed., Tschechoslowakei, 62; Thurn und Taxis, ‘Memoiren’,
33.
45 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 3-8, 21, 22, 23, 25-6.
 46 Ibid., 20, 29.
47 Ibid., 9-10, 13.
48 Ibid., 26-38.
49 Quoted in Ibid., 42.
50 Ibid., 20, 24-5, 40.
51 Schell, Tagebuch, 89-90.
52 Schöner, Tagebuch, 255, 258.
53 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 45.
54 Ibid., 16-17, 41.
55 Ibid., Franz Mauder, 338-9.
56 Franzel, Sudetenland, 97.
57 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 64.
58 Botting, Ruins, 229-30.
59 Harasko, ‘Sudetendeutschen’, 109-10.
60 Ibid.
61 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 63-75, 76, 77, 78.
62 Franzel, Sudetenland, 117.
63 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Else Köchel and Franz Kaupil, 279-81.
64 Ibid., Erika Griessmann, 313-15.
65 Franzel, Sudetenland, 21.
66 Jünger, Okkupation, 193.
67 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 128-35, Edouard Fritsch, 162, 350, 353-
4, Karl Oberdörfer, 389.
68 Ibid., Dr E. Siegel, 147, Hans Strobl, 161.
69 Ibid., Otto Patek and Rudolf Berthold, 290-1.
70 Ibid., Marie Weiss, 206.
71 Ibid., A.R., 200-2, Franz Wagner, 214.
72 Ibid., Gregor and Johann Partsch, 250-5.
73 Harasko, ‘Sudetendeutschen’, 110-11.
74 Franzel, Sudetenland, 72.
75 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Alfred Latzel, Karl Schneider and Karl
Froning, 229-50.
76 Ibid., Anton Watzke, 184, Adolf Aust, 203.
77 Ibid., Franz Limpächer, 317-19, 429, 432.
78 Ibid., Dr Karl Grimm, 85-101, Eduard Kaltofen, 182. Der Neue
Brockhaus encyclopaedia gives the 1939 population figure as 36,500, of
whom 16,000 were Germans.
 79 Ibid., 85-7.
80 Pre-war population from Brockhaus; Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, the
judge Dr Franz Freyer, 105; Harasko, ‘Sudetendeutschen’, 116.
81 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Dr E. Siegel, 148.
82 Ibid., 105-10, passim.
83 Ibid., 121-3, 124.
84 Harasko, ‘Sudetendeutschen’, 113-15. SS men were identified by the
blood group tattooed in their left armpit.
85 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Eduard Grimm, 217-18, 328.
86 Ibid., 124-5.
87 Ibid., 48-50, F. Fiedler, 190.
88 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1056.
89 Franzel, Sudetenland, 222-3.
90 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Marie Weiss, Josef Zillich and Emilie
Dotzauer, 206-7.
91 Ibid., Dr E. Siegel, 139-61 passim, Franz Richter, 397.
92 Ibid., Dr E. Siegel, 143.
93 Tom Lampert, Ein einziges Leben: Geschichten aus der NS-Zeit,
Munich 2003, 168-9. I am grateful to my friend Ursula Heinzelmann in
Berlin for sending me this book. See also Hans-Günther Adler,
Theresienstadt 1941-1945, Tübingen 1955.
94 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, 18, Dr E. Siegel, 153, 160, 216.
95 Ibid., 80-2, quoting Die Brücke, 10 June 1951.
96 Ibid., Dr E. Siegel, 146, Franz Richter, 397.
97 Ibid., Hans Freund, 17.
98 Schell, Tagebuch, 270-5, passim.
99 Turnwald, ed., Dokumente, Alfred Latzel, 235, Franz Richter, 399,
Max Griehsel, 470; Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 281-2.
100 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 148.
101 Ibid., 149.
102 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 619.
103 Ibid., I, 312.
104 Zeman and Klimek, Beneš, 247.
105 Harasko, ‘Sudetendeutschen’, 107.
106 Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der
Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Ungarn,
Düsseldorf 1956, 41E-45E, 50E, 60E.
 107 Ibid., 62E, 65E.
108 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 14.
109 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 313-14.
110 Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der
Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in
Rumänien, Berlin 1957, 6E, 41E, 63E.
111 Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der
Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in
Jugoslavien, Düsseldorf 1961, 76E, 82-83E, 108-9.
112 Eva Schmidt-Hartmann, ‘Menschen oder Nationen? Die
Vertreibung der Deutschen aus tschechischer Sicht’, in Benz, ed., Die
Vertreibung, 143-4.
113 Franzel, Sudetenland, 24.
114 Eva Schmidt-Hartmann, ‘Menschen oder Nationen?’, 148-9.

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 CHAPTER 5: HOME TO THE REICH!
RECOVERED TERRITORIES IN THE
PRUSSIAN EAST
1 Wolfgang Benz, introduction to Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung, 7.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus, 63.
4 See Egbert Jahn, ‘On the Phenomenology of Mass Extermination in
Europe: A Comparative Perspective on the Holodomor’, in Manfred Sapper
and Volker Weichsel, eds, Sketches of Europe: Old Lands, New Worlds,
Berlin 2005, a special edition of Osteuropa, 183-220.
5 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 86-7.
6 Ibid., 88-9.
7 Ibid., 92-3.
8 Ibid., 98.
9 Ibid., 109-11
10 Ibid., 112, 115, 117.
11 Ibid., 118.
12 Ibid., 119-22, 128.
13 Ibid., 131, 133-4.
14 Ibid., 163.
15 Ibid., 136-9.
16 Ibid., 139-40.
17 Ibid., 145.
18 Ibid., 152-3.
19 Ibid, 156-7.
20 Gause, Königsberg, III, 174; MacDonogh, Prussia, 386; ‘Stalin
ordino: deportateli tutti, la Prussia dev’essere Sovietica’, Corriere della
Sera, 25 May 1993; ‘Zum Schluss Schokolade’, Der Spiegel, 28 June 1993.
21 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 187.
22 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 164.
23 Ibid., 159-60.
24 Ibid., 168-70, 175.
25 Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, ‘Ein Brief aus Ostpreussen in her Weit ist
der Weg nach Osten - Berichte und Betrachtungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten,
Munich 1988, 18.
26 Ibid., 19.
 27 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 202.
28 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 187; Naimark, Russians in Germany, 74.
29 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 183-5.
30 Ibid., 192.
31 Ibid., 194-6.
32 Kaps, Tragödie, 152-4, 156; Tighe, Gdansk, 205.
33 Kaps, Tragödie, 164-5.
34 Hupka, Letze Tage, 39.
35 Michael Luke, Hansel Pless - Prisoner of History, London 2001,
215-16.
36 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 66-7.
37 Normann, Tagebuch, 132-5.
38 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, 409-10.
39 Ibid., 411.
40 Tighe, Gdansk, 206-7.
41 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 12.
42 Kaps, Tragödie, 73.
43 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 23.
44 Normann, Tagebuch, 201.
45 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 200.
46 Ibid., 34.
47 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 206.
48 Ibid., 202.
49 Ibid., 45, 124.
50 Ibid., 202, 204.
51 Ibid., 254.
52 Kaps, Tragödie, 138, 418; Hupka, Letzte Tage, 223.
53 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 75.
54 Kaps, Tragödie, 177.
55 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, 413.
56 Ibid., 414.
57 Kaps, Tragödie, 292.
58 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 148.
59 Kaps, Tragödie, 75.
60 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 135, 200.
61 Tighe, Gdansk, 215.
 62 Giles MacDonogh, Frederick the Great, London 1999, 269, 274;
Klaus Ullmann, Schlesien-Lexikon, Mannheim 1985, 118; Hupka, Letzte
Tage, 293.
63 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 47.
64 Kaps, Tragödie, 74, 139.
65 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 179-80.
66 Kaps, Tragödie, 358.
67 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 38.
68 Kaps, Tragödie, 417-20; Hupka, Letzte Tage, 136.
69 Kaps, Tragödie, 175.
70 Ibid., 252, 484.
71 Ibid., 180.
72 Ibid., 184.
73 Ibid., 178-85.
74 Ibid., 184.
75 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 46.
76 Kaps, Tragödie, 189.
77 Ibid., 157, 165.
78 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 23-5.
79 Ibid., 26-7.
80 Ibid., 67.
81 Ibid., 39.
82 Ibid., 63, 80.
83 Ibid., 68.
84 Ibid., 68, 78.
85 Kaps, Tragödie, 223-30.
86 Ibid., 497, 502.
87 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 85, 86.
88 Ibid., 80-1.
89 Ibid., 89-92.
90 Ibid., 92.
91 Ibid., 44-5, 105; van Pelt and Dwork, Auschwitz, 334.
92 Kaps, Tragödie, 148, 150.
93 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 96-7.
94 Josef Foschepoth, ‘Potsdam und danach: Die Westmächte, Adenauer
und die Vertriebenen’, in Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung, 82.
95 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 243.
 96 Kaps, Tragödie, 75.
97 Ibid., 359.
98 Ibid., 131-2.
99 Ibid., 132-3.
100 Ibid., 404-5.
101 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 149.
102 Gerhart Pohl, Bin ich noch in meinem Haus? Die letzte Tage
Gerhart Hauptmanns, Berlin 1953, 24-5.
103 Grigori Weiss, ‘Auf der Suche nach der versunkenen Glocke.
Johannes R. Becher bei Gerhart Hauptmann’, in Erinnerungen an Johannes
R. Becher, Frankfurt/Main 1974, 217.
104 Pohl, Bin ich noch, 44-5.
105 Ibid., 50.
106 Hupka, Letzte Tage, 302-3.
107 Pohl, Bin ich noch, 72-3.
108 Ibid., 54. Pohl’s petits nègres have a certain sameness that makes
them suspicious.
109 Ibid., 66.
110 Ibid., 69.
111 Weiss, ‘Auf der Suche’, 227.
112 Ibid., 233.
113 Kaps, Tragödie, 420-1; Ullmann, Lexikon, 20; Hupka, Letzte Tage,
313-14, 316-17.
114 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 302.
115 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 139-40; Giles MacDonogh, The Last
Kaiser: William the Impetuous, London 2000, 123.
116 Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung, 8.
117 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 236.
118 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 147.
119 Ibid., 152.
120 Ibid., 155.
121 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, 422.
122 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 15.
123 Ibid., 16.
124 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 173.
125 Ibid., 188.
126 Lehndorff, Tagebuch, 204.
127 Normann, Tagebuch, 268.
128 Henke, ‘Exodus’, 99.
129 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 189.
130 Kaps, Tragödie, 87.
131 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 197.
132 Normann, Tagebuch, 270.

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 PROLOGUE TO PART II
1 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 13.
2 Patricia Meehan, A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British
1945-1950, London and Chester Springs 2001, 13.
3 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 105.

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 CHAPTER 6: LIFE IN THE RUSSIAN ZONE
1 Peterson, Russian Commands, 7.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 13.
4 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 24-6.
5 Ibid., 16.
6 Gregory Klimov, The Terror Machine - The Inside Story of Soviet
Administered Germany, translated by H. C. Stevens with an introduction by
Edward Crankshaw and Ernst Reuter, London n.d., 103.
7 Ibid., 26-7, 30-1.
8 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 69; Peterson, Russian Commands, 14;
Hans Borgelt, Das war der Frühling in Berlin. Die goldene Hungerjahre.
Eine Berlin Chronik, Munich 1983, 38.
9 Leonhard, Revolution, 302.
10 Williams, More Lives than One, 247-8.
11 Boveri, Tage, 165.
12 Leonhard, Revolution, 341-2.
13 Boveri, Tage, 217-19.
14 Quoted in Naimark, Russians in Germany, 142-3.
15 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 108.
16 Franz Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge durch die Landschaften
meines Lebens, privately printed, Munich 2000, 161-4.
17 Ibid., 143.
18 Ibid., 163.
19 Harald von Koenigswald, ed., Besuche vor der Untergang - aus
Tagebuchaufzeichnungen von Udo von Alvensleben. Frankfurt/Main 1968,
147.
20 Ibid., 162.
21 Borgelt, Das war der Frühling in Berlin, 45.
22 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 116.
23 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 80-1.
24 Michael Cullen, Der Reichstag - Die Geschichte eines Monumentes,
Stuttgart 1990, 399.
25 Nikolaus Bernau, ‘Der Ort des Souveräns’, in Fördverein Berliner
Stadtschloss, Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins, Berlin
1993, 75.
 26 There have been moves to rebuild all three. The decision to put back
the Berlin Schloss was approved by the German parliament, but so far the
project has been stymied by lack of funds in a bankrupt city. In 2005 it was
ruled that the exterior of the city palace in Potsdam would be re-erected to
house the provincial parliament or Landtag. For the time being the plans to
rebuild the Garrison Church remain on the drawing board.
27 Alan Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737-1989, New York
1990, 187.
28 Buffet, Berlin, 363.
29 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 10-11.
30 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 16; Löwenthal, Potsdam, 16.
31 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 19.
32 Ibid., 20-3.
33 Ibid., 24-5.
34 Ibid., 34, 41, 44.
35 Klimov, Terror Machine, 118-20; Peterson, Russian Commands, 104.
36 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 72.
37 Ibid., 97.
38 Ibid., 113-18.
39 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 42, 44.
40 Ibid., 85.
41 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 53.
42 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 105.
43 Ibid., 92, 94-6, 116.
44 Klimov, Terror Machine, 117.
45 Ibid., 221.
46 Ibid., 208, 219.
47 Michel Bar-Zohar, The Hunt for German Scientists, translated by
Len Ortzen, London 1967, 9.
48 Ibid., 151-3, 161, 168.
49 Klimov, Terror Machine, 222-5.
50 Jana Urbancová and Claus Josef Riedel, Riedel od roku 1756,
exhibition catalogue, Jablonec (Gablonz), 19 August-27 October 1991, 14.
51 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 237-40, 248-9; Petersen, Russian
Commands, 123; Jünger, Okkupation, 293.
52 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 355-7, 360-2, 374.
53 Peterson, Russian Commands, 46.
 54 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 376; Peterson, Russian Commands,
25.
55 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 378.
56 Ibid., 381-2.
57 Löwenthal, Potsdam, 201-2.
58 Alexander Behrens, Johannes R. Becher, eine politische Biographie,
Cologne, Weimar and Vienna 2003, 223.
59 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater - Cultural and Intellectual
Life in Berlin 1945-1948, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1998, ix.
60 Behrens, Becher, 223.
61 Ibid., 225.
62 Clare, Berlin Days, 62.
63 Ibid., 81.
64 Schivelbusch, Cold Crater, 31, 36-7.
65 Zuckmayer, ‘Bericht über das Filmund Theaterleben’, in
Deutschlandbericht, 156-204.
66 Clare, Berlin Days, 64.
67 Behrens, Becher, 229.
68 Schivelbusch, Cold Crater, 40, 45.
69 Ibid., 231-3.
70 Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache’, 21.
71 Ibid., 28-9.
72 Clare, Berlin Days, 81; Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache’, 33.
73 Clare, Berlin Days, 105-7.
74 Speer, Diaries, 104.
75 Clare, Berlin Days, 182-4.
76 Speer, Diaries, 44.
77 Boveri, Tage, 159.
78 Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache’, 59.
79 Ibid., 71
80 Schivelbusch, Cold Crater, 56.
81 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 92; Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 364.
82 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 105.
83 David Pike, The Politics and Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany,
1945-1949, Stanford 1992, 189-92.
84 Clare, Berlin Days, 128.
85 Williams, More Lives than One, 252.
 86 Ibid., 256-7.
87 Erinnerung an Johannes R. Becher, 189.
88 Carsten Wurm, Jeden Tag ein Buch - 50 Jahre Aufbau-Verlag 1945-
1995, Berlin 1995, 11-12.
89 Ibid., 10, 119.
90 Behrens, Becher, 234.
91 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 624.
92 Behrens, Becher, 239-40.
93 Ibid., 241-2.
94 Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture, New Haven and London,
1997, 228.
95 Ibid., 244-66.

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CHAPTER 7: LIFE IN THE AMERICAN ZONE
1 John Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, Boston 1946, 248-50; Summersby,
Eisenhower was my Boss, 235.
2 Kay Summersby Morgan, Past Forgetting - My Love Affair with
Dwight D. Eisenhower, London 1977, 198.
3 Klimov, Terror Machine, 136.
4 Stern, Hidden Damages, 350.
5 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 244, 247.
6 Ladislas Farago, The Last Days of Patton, New York, St Louis, San
Francisco and Toronto 1981, 59-64; Carlo d’Este, A Genius for War: A Life
of George S. Patton, London 1995, 738.
7 D’Este, Patton, 712.
8 Farago, Last Days, 68.
9 D’Este, Patton, 766.
10 Trevor Royle, Patton - Old Blood and Guts, London 2005, 194-6.
11 D’Este, Patton, 755.
12 Farrago, Last Days, 156.
13 D’Este, Patton, 755.
14 Davidson, Death and Life, 77.
15 Farago, Last Days, 1.
16 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 7.
17 Ibid., 351.
18 Ibid., 459, 463.
19 Salomon, The Answers, 422.
20 Padover, Psychologist, 314-16.
21 Salomon, The Answers, 422; Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans, New
Haven and London 2003, 67.
22 Marta Krauss, Heimkehr in eines fremdes Land - Geschichte der
Remigranten nach 1945, Munich 2001, 63-5.
23 Stern, Hidden Damage, 71
24 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 7.
25 Ibid., 71.
26 Ibid., 80.
27 Hanns Mayer, Im guten Ratskeller zu Bremen, 5th edn., Bremen
1985, 110-11; information from Dr Carl-Ferdinand von Schubert at
Maximin-Grünhaus.
28 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 263.
 29 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 41.
30 Ibid., 69.
31 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 92-3.
32 Ibid., 102-3.
33 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 4, 15, 46.
34 Ibid., 50-1, 57.
35 Ibid., 53-4; Salomon, The Answers, 415, 408.
36 Salomon, The Answers, 320, 321.
37 Stern, Hidden Damage, 216-17.
38 Boveri, Tage, 283-4.
39 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 72-6.
40 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 75.
41 Ibid., 115.
42 Ibid., 95-6. 248.
43 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 59-60.
44 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht 20-1.
45 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 94-6, 101.
46 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 32 See also Saul K. Padover,
Experiment in Germany. The Story of an American Intelligence Officer,
New York 1946; also John Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, Boston 1946.
47 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 36-8.
48 Ibid., 42.
49 Peterson, Russian Commands, 254.
50 Boveri, Tage, 320-1.
51 Stern, Hidden Damage, 198.
52 Ibid., 324-5.
53 Salomon, The Answers, 416-17; Goedde, GIs and Germans, 84;
Naimark, Russians in Germany, 106 n. 172.
54 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 73.
55 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 109, 111; Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin,
163.
56 Davidson, Death and Life, 55.
57 Skrjabina, Allies on the Rhine, 86-7.
58 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 59.
59 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 102.
60 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 86.
61 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 102.
 62 Stern, Hidden Damage, 313.
63 Müller, Bis zur letzten Konsequenz, 304-6.
64 Ibid., 307.
65 Ibid., 311.
66 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 82, 89-90.
67 Müller, Bis zur letzten Konsequenz, 323.
68 Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard. Ein Politikerleben, Munich and
Landsberg am Lech 1996, 40-2.
69 Ibid., 48.
70 Ibid., 51.
71 Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth - A History of the Wagner Festival, New
Haven and London 1994, 200.
72 Hamann, Winifred Wagner, 412-13.
73 Spotts, Bayreuth, 201.
74 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge, 185.
75 Ibid., 56, 90
76 See Zuckmayer, ‘Bericht über das Film- und Theaterleben’.
77 Zuckmayer, ‘Allgemeiner Bericht über die Filmsituation in
Deutschland’, in Deutschlandbericht, 185-204.
78 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 121-2.
79 Ibid., 57, 14.
80 Ibid., 84-5; see also Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya
1939-1945, edited and translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen, London 1991,
393.
81 Reinhard Lettau, ed., Die Gruppe 47. Bericht, Kritik, Polemik,
Neuwied 1967, 22, 35.
82 Stern, Hidden Damage, 280-1.

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 CHAPTER 8: LIFE IN THE BRITISH ZONE
1 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 99.
2 Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London 1947, 17.
3 Ibid., 29.
4 Lord Longford, Avowed Intent, London 1994, 103-5. Longford’s book
is particularly unsatisfying, especially given that he was minister during
currency reform and the Berlin crisis, yet mentions neither.
5 Ibid., 156.
6 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 53-4.
7 See Weeks’s biography in DNB 57. There is remarkably little written
about these significant British post-war administrators.
8 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 82.
9 See his biography in DNB 16. Douglas did write volumes of
autobiography: Years of Command, London 1966, covers the period.
10 Peter Merseburger, Der Schwieriger Deutsche - Kurt Schumacher.
Eine Biographie, Stuttgart 1995, 197-8.
11 His biography is in DNB 47.
12 Clare, Berlin Days, 146.
13 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 63.
14 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 53, 60, 62, 67.
15 Ibid., 140-2; Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, London 1981, 130.
16 Robert Birley, The German Problem and the Responsibility of
Britain, The Burge Memorial Lecture, London 1947, 5.
17 Ibid., 7-9.
18 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 163-5.
19 Ibid., 171.
20 Krauss, Heimkehr, 74-5.
21 Clare, Berlin Days, 162; See also Balfour and Mair, Four Power
Control.
22 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 173-5, ‘Secret Retreat Marks 60
Years of Diplomacy’, in BBC News Online, 12 January 2006. See Richard
Mayne, In Victory, Magnanimity, In Peace, Goodwill: A History of Wilton
Park, London 2003.
23 See A. G. Dickens, Lübeck Diary, London 1947.
24 Ibid., 164, 173.
25 Corine Defrance, La Politique culturelle de la France sur la rive
gauche du Rhin, 1945-1955, Strasbourg 1994, 52.
 26 Clare, Berlin Days, 15, 35; author’s own visits to the Marlborough
Club.
27 Ibid., 37, 40.
28 Ibid., 42.
29 Botting, Ruins, 293-5.
30 Speer, Diaries, 79.
31 MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser, 173-4.
32 George Drower, Heligoland - The True Story of the German Bight
and the Island that Britain Betrayed, Stroud 2002, 217.
33 Ibid., 219.
34 Ibid., 226-7.
35 Ibid., 235.
36 ‘Der besessene Besitzer’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16
December 2005 - kindly communicated by Angela Bohrer.
37 Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt, 183-4; Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 63.
38 Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt, 186-7.
39 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin - Foreign Secretary 1945-1951, London
1983, 265.
40 George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, London 1968, 437.
41 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 75.
42 Ibid., 79. Gollancz fails to recognise the Emperor Fritz.
43 Herzogin Viktoria Luise, Ein Leben, 333. See Frieda Utley, The High
Cost of Vengeance, Chicago 1949.
44 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 191-4.
45 Ibid., 214-15, 221, 236; see also Ralf Richter, Ivan Hirst, 2nd edn,
Wolfsburg 2004.
46 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 98.
47 Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 68-9.
48 Interview with Karl-Heinz Bohrer, November 2004.
49 Charles Williams, Adenauer - The Father of the New Germany,
London 2000, 289.
50 Ibid., 295.
51 Ibid., 296.
52 Merseburger, Schumacher, 202.
53 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 60.
54 Quoted in MacDonogh, Prussia, 6.
55 Ibid., 297.
 56 Ibid, 300-1.
57 Ibid., 302; confirmed in Heinrich Böll’s short story ‘Als der Krieg zu
Ende war’ (When the War was Over), 1962.
58 Williams, Adenauer, 305.
59 Merseburger, Schumacher, 200.
60 Gilbert Ziebura, Die deutsch-französischen Beziehungen seit 1945:
Mythen und Realitäten, Pfullingen 1970, 57.
61 Ibid., 59.
62 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 387; Ziebura, Die deutsch-
französische Beziehungen, 62.
63 Ibid., 325-6.
64 Merseburger, Schumacher, 7.
65 Ibid., 212.
66 Ibid., 299-300.
67 Ibid., 282.
68 Willi A. Boelcke, Der Schwarzmarkt 1945-1948 - Vom überleben
nach dem Kriege, Brunswick 1986, 78.
69 Merseburger, Schumacher, 238.
70 Ibid., Schumacher, 224.
71 Ibid., 318.
72 Ibid., 320; Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 49.
73 Clare, Berlin Days, 188.
74 Ibid., 169.
75 Ibid., 130.
76 Herzogin Viktoria Luise, Ein Leben, 330.

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 CHAPTER 9: LIFE IN THE FRENCH ZONE
1 Davidson, Death and Life, 82.
2 Defrance, La Politique culturelle, 29.
3 Stern, Hidden Damage, 161.
4 Frank Raberg, ‘Landesregierungen und französisch Besatzungsmacht:
Aus den Kabinettsprotokollen von Baden und Württemberg-Hohenzollern’,
in Kurt Hochstuhl, ed., Deutsche und Franzosen im zusammenwachsenden
Europa, 1945-2000, Stuttgart 2003, 14.
5 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 400; Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control,
106.
6 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 23.
7 Young, France, 52, 58.
8 Edgar Wolfram, ‘Die französische Politik in besetzten Deutschland:
neue Forschungen, alte Klischees, vernachlässige Fragen’, in Hochstuhl,
ed., Deutsche und Franzosen, 66.
9 Ibid., 60.
10 Weber, Schmid, 193-4, 220.
11 Ibid., 286.
12 Willi A. Boelcke, ‘Industrie und Technologie in der französische
Besatzungszone’, in Manfrass and Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne, 177-8.
13 Ibid., 178-9.
14 Ibid., 181-5.
15 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 81.
16 Bar-Zohar, Hunt for German Scientists, 133-5.
17 Skrjabina, Allies on the Rhine, 42, 55, 58, 60.
18 Interview with Karl-Heinz Bohrer, November 2004.
19 Paul Falkenburger, ‘Souvenir d’un ancient curateur adjoint de
l’université de Freibourg’, in Manfrass and Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne,
285.
20 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 35.
21 Young, France, 76.
22 Ibid., 88-9.
23 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 88-9.
24 Young, France, 102-4.
25 Ibid., 106-7.
26 Ibid., 117.
27 Raymond Poidevin, Robert Schuman, Paris 1988, 74.
28 Ibid., 74-6.
29 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 288.
30 Young, France, 145.
31 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 1004, 1056-7.
32 Defrance, La Politique culturelle, 30-1.
33 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 404.
34 Ibid., 429-30.
35 Ibid., 431-2.
36 Ibid., 413.

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 CHAPTER 10: AUSTRIA’S ZONES AND
SECTORS
1 Béthouart, Bataille, 73.
2 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 279.
3 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 76.
4 Ibid., 86, 87, 89.
5 Schöner, Tagebuch, 242.
6 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 68, 71.
7 Ibid., 72.
8 Ibid., 90.
9 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 31-2.
10 Schöner, Tagebuch, 249.
11 Ibid., 283.
12 Private information.
13 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 49-50.
14 Beer, ‘Niederösterreich’, 156.
15 Franzel, Sudetenland, 117.
16 Schöner, Tagebuch, 290-1; Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente’, 154;
Margarétha, Tagebuch, 84.
17 Magarétha, Tagebuch, 89-90.
18 Michael Gehler, ‘“Kein Anschluss aber auch kein chinesische
Mauer”. Österreichs aussenpolitische Emanzipation und die deutsche Frage
1945-1955’, in Ableitner et al., eds, Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung,
206.
19 Ibid., 207.
20 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 122.
21 Rauchensteiner, ‘Jahrzehnt’, 24; Rauchsteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 60.
22 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 61; Gehler, ‘“Kein Anschluss”’, 208.
23 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 113.
24 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 277.
25 Papers kindly communicated by Podhragy’s son, Johannes.
26 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 292.
27 Renner, World Review, May 1938. Document communicated by
Johannes Popper von Podhragy.
28 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 110.
29 Ibid., 40.
 30 General Mark Clark, Calculated Risk, London 1956, 411.
31 Ibid., 412; Béthouart, Bataille, 25-6; Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 293.
32 Beer, ‘Niederösterreich’, 139.
33 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 111.
34 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 106.
35 Reinhold Wagnleitner, ed., Understanding Austria: The Political
Reports and Analyses of Martin F. Herz, Political Officer of the US
Legation in Vienna 1945-1948, Salzburg 1984, 94.
36 Ibid., 427.
37 Hermann Riepl, ‘Die Neubilding der Niederösterreichisches
Landesregierung und der Wiederaufbau der Niederösterreichisches
Landesverwaltung im Jahre 1945’, in Bezemek and Rossner, eds,
Niederösterreich - Südmähren, 88.
38 Alfred Ableitinger, ‘Grossbritannien unter der zweite
Kontrollabkommen: Genese und Gehalt des britischen
Regierungsentwurfes’, in Ableitinger et al., eds, Österreich unter alliieter
Besatzung, 98.
39 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 122-3, 143-4.
40 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 160.
41 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 185-6; Rauchensteiner,
Stalinplatz 4, 58.
42 Siegfried Beer, ‘Die Besatzungsmacht Grossbritannien und
Österreich 1945-1949’, in Ableitinger et al., eds, Österreich unter alliierter
Besatzung, 59.
43 Quoted in The Patriot, 2 August 1945.
44 Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente’, 151.
45 Béthouart, Bataille, 28.
46 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 105.
47 Ibid., 105, 107, 109, 112.
48 Ibid., 117; the last epithet the author learned from his Viennese
godfather on a visit to Vienna in 1969.
49 Clark, Calculated Risk, 416-18.
50 Ibid., 434.
51 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 22.
52 Ibid., 420.
53 Ibid., 76.
54 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 55.
 55 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 23, 32-3, 34, 53.
56 Ibid., 418-19.
57 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 125, 128; Béthouart, Bataille, 83.
58 Béthouart, Bataille, 86.
59 Ibid., 75-6.
60 Ibid., 77.
61 Clark, Calculated Risk, 446.
62 Ibid., 421-2.
63 Communicated by Sebastian Cody.
64 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 140.
65 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 200; Byrnes, Speaking
Frankly, 160.
66 Margarétha, Tagebuch, 149.
67 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 75.
68 Ibid., 74; Béthouart, Bataille, 96.
69 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 80.
70 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 281, 292.
71 Clark, Calculated Risk, 431.
72 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 83.
73 Ibid., 94-6.
74 Peter Leighton-Langer, X Steht fur unbekannt - Deutsche und
Österreicher in den britischen Streitkräften im zweiten Weltkrieg, Berlin
1999, 237-8.
75 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 325.
76 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 282, 291, 293.
77 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 47; Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 130-1.
78 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 76-7.
79 Ibid., 116-17.
80 The author’s maternal grandfather’s family is a case in point. Before
1938 they owned a substantial corner of the Kärntnerstrasse and the
Weihburggasse in the centre of Vienna. On the site was the department store
Modehaus Zwieback, the restaurant Zu den drei Husaren and the Palais
Pereira. After the war the family managed to regain the department store,
which they resold in 1957. On the other hand they were not compensated
for their lost palace and the restaurant was later sold by Göring’s favourite
restaurateur, Gustav Horcher, to Egon Födermayr. In the immediate post-
war years it had been Renner’s canteen. See Tina Walzer and Stephan
Templ, Unser Wien - Ariesierung auf Österreichisch, Berlin 2001, 42-3, and
the Grundbücher (Land Register) for 2 and 4 Weihburggasse as well as 11,
13-15 Kärntnerstrasse.
81 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 97; Clark, Calculated Risk, 424.
82 Clark, Calculated Risk, 424 n. 1.
83 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 134, 154.
84 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 102.
85 Clark, Calculated Risk, 425.
86 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 9.
87 Zuckmayer, ‘Allgemeiner Bericht über die Filmsituation in
Deutschland’.
88 Quoted in Marietta Bearman and Charmian Brinson, ‘Keine einfache
Sache’, in Bearman et al., Wien-London, 238.
89 Charmian Brinson, ‘Ein Stück wahrer Kultur, ein Stück Wien, ein
Stück Leben’, in Bearman et al., Wien-London, 171.
90 Walter Binnebös, Galoppsport in Wien, Vienna 1980, 147-8.
91 Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente, 148; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz
4, 36.
92 Information from Georg Stiegelmar, the late Helmut Osberger and
Erich Salomon.
93 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 125; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 48.
94 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 134.
95 Beer, ‘Niederösterreich’, 146, 148, 155-6, 165-6.
96 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 38; Andrew Gibson-Watt, An
Undistinguished Life, Lewes 1990, 173.
97 Gibson-Watt, Life, 183.
98 Beer, ‘Grossbritannien’, 52-3.
99 Ibid., 63.
100 Helmut Eberhart, ‘Weideraufbau in Nachkriegszeit - Das Tagebuch
von Anton Pirchegger’, in Siegfried Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische Steiermark’
1945-1955, Graz 1995.
101 Stefan Karner, ‘“Ich bekam zehn Jahre Zwangsarbeit”: zu den
Verschleppungen aus der Steiermark durch sowjetische Organe in Jahre
1945’, in Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische Steiermark’, 249-50; Othmar Pickl, ‘Das
Kriegsende 1945 und die frühe Besatzungszeit im mittleren Mürztal’, in
Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische Steiermark’. 250.
102 Beer, ‘Grossbritannien’, 57.
 103 Alfred Ableitinger, Siegfried Beer and Eduard G. Staudinger,
Besatzungszeit in der Steiermark, Graz, Esztergom, Paris and New York
1994, 15.
104 Ibid., 17.
105 Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische Steiermark’, 25; Siegfried Beer, ‘Die
Briten und der Wiederaufbau des Justizwesens in der Steiermark 1945-
1950’, in ibid., 113-14.
106 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 40.
107 Gibson-Watt, Life, 172.
108 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 24-6.
109 Donald Cameron Watt, ‘Austria as a Special Case in Cold War
Europe - A Personal Note’, in Ableitinger et al., eds, Österreich unter
alliierter Besatzung, 282.
110 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 58.
111 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 314-15.
112 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 67.
113 Arthur Radley, ‘The British Military Government in Steiermark
[sic] 1945-1946, Personal Reminiscences’, in Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische
Steiermark’, 586-7.
114 John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar, Slovenia 1945: Memories of
Death and Survival after World War II, London and New York 2005, 8.
115 Gibson-Watt, Life, 178.
116 Corsellis and Ferrar, Slovenia, 19.
117 Ibid., 43.
118 Ibid., 45.
119 Gibson-Watt, Life, 179.
120 Corsellis and Ferrar, Slovenia, 47.
121 Gibson-Watt, Life, 173.
122 Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta, London 1977, 220-1.
123 Ibid., 225-6, 229; Thurn und Taxis, ‘Memoiren’, 28-9.
124 Corsellis and Ferrar, Slovenia, 49.
125 Ibid., 50; Gibson-Watt, Life, 179.
126 Corsellis and Ferrar, Slovenia, 52, 59, 186.
127 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 44; Ralph W. Brown III, ‘A Cold War
Army of Occupation’, in Ableitinger et al., eds, Österreich unter alliierter
Besatzung, 349-50; Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 246.
128 Quoted in Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 45.
 129 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 168-70.
130 Ibid., 303.
131 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 46.
132 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 7.
133 Brown, ‘Cold War Army’, 355-66.
134 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 55.
135 Clark, Calculated Risk, 414; for Hitler’s use of the building, and the
French furniture: Eberle and Uhl, Das Buch Hitler, 113.
136 Clark, Calculated Risk, 415.
137 Ibid., 415.
138 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 243.
139 Ibid., 255.
140 Clark, Calculated Risk, 420-1.
141 Ibid., 432.
142 Günter Bischof, ‘Der Nationale Sicherheitsrat und die
amerikanische Österreichspolitik im frühen Kalten Krieg’, in Ableitinger et
al., eds, Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung, 112, 116.
143 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 243.
144 Ibid., 49-55.
145 Ibid., 69-71.
146 Béthouart, Bataille, 42.
147 Ibid., 47.
148 Béthouart, Bataille, 54.
149 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 41-2.
150 Béthouart, Bataille, 55.
151 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 371.
152 Béthouart, Bataille, 59.
153 Ibid., 67.
154 Ibid., 67-8; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 64; Otto von Habsburg,
Kampf um Österreich, 72, 75; Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 334.
155 Habsburg, Kampf, 78.
156 Denys G. C. Salt, ‘Reminiscences of Styria’, in Beer, ed., Die
‘Britische Steiermark’, 592.

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 CHAPTER 11: LIFE IN ALL FOUR ZONES
1 Clare, Berlin Days, 17-18.
2 Stern, Hidden Damage, 284.
3 Ibid., 286.
4 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 97-9.
5 See Heinrich Böll, Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa, Munich 2004;
interview with Karl-Heinz Bohrer, November 2004. Norbert Mühlen,
L’Incroyable Famille Krupp, Paris 1961, 197.
6 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 132, 133-4; Zuckmayer,
Deutschlandbericht, 149.
7 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 137, 144, 161-3.
8 Quoted in Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 272.
9 Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 94.
10 Quoted in Williams, More Lives than One, xiii.
11 Borgelt, Das war der Frühling in Berlin, 69; Krauss, Heimkehr, 56-
7, 73.
12 Ernst Jünger, Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas. Ein Wort
an die Jugend der Welt, Vienna 1949, 83, 87.
13 Jünger, Okkupation, 147.
14 Jünger, Der Friede, 10.
15 Ibid., 21.
16 Ibid., 16.
17 Ibid., 76.
18 Karl O. Paetel, Ernst Jünger. Die Wandlung eines Deutschen
Dichters und Patrioten, New York 1946, 10.
19 Salomon, The Answers, 524.
20 Ibid., Goronwy Rees preface, viii.
21 Ibid., 545-6.
22 Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss, Oxford 1995, 107-12.
23 Leighton-Langer, X, 231.
24 Hans Habe, Im Jahre Null. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutscher
Presse, Munich 1966, 50, 53, 70, 79; Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 363, 364 n.
1.
25 Zuckmayer, ‘Bericht über das Filmund Theaterleben’.
26 Georg Stefan Troller, Das fidele Grab an der Donau - Mein Wien
1918-1938, Düsseldorf and Zurich 2004, 96.
27 Habe, Im Jahre Null, 119-20.
 28 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 1066.
29 Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt, 200.
30 Ibid., 206.
31 Clare, Berlin Days, 158-9.
32 Stern, Hidden Damage, 167.
33 See Inge Scholl, Die Weisse Rose, Frankfurt/Main 1988.
34 Stern, Hidden Damage, 175.
35 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 337.
36 Ibid., 363; Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 65.
37 Schulenburg, Ich hab’s gewagt, 185.
38 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 57.
39 Ibid., 104.
40 Ibid., 105-6.
41 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 339.
42 Chamberlain and Feldman, eds, Liberation, 71-2; Leighton-Langer,
X, 228.
43 Leighton-Langer, X, 229.
44 Ibid., 230.
45 Normann, Tagebuch, 207-8.
46 Stern, Hidden Damage, 343-4, 350.
47 Clare, Berlin Days, 152.
48 Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason, 2nd edn, London 1982, 129.
49 Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 205.
50 Ibid., 206.
51 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1228.
52 Ruth Gay, Safe among the Germans: Liberated Jews after World War
II, New Haven and London 2002, x-xi, 70, 72.
53 Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 206.
54 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1132.
55 Ibid., 1229; Peck, “Jüdische DPs’, 206.
56 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1234.
57 Ibid., 1134.
58 Ibid., 65.
59 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 111-12.
60 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 131.
61 Ibid., 257.
62 Gay, Safe, 104-5.
63 Ibid., 59-60, 63, 103.
64 Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 207.
65 Gay, Safe, 56; Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 208.
66 Shepherd, After Daybreak, 44.
67 Ibid., 71.
68 Ibid., 72.
69 Ibid., 92.
70 Ibid., 116.
71 Ibid., 118, 133.
72 Ibid., 134.
73 Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 206.
74 Gay, Safe, 68; Peck, ‘Jüdische DPs’, 209.
75 Gay, Safe, 81, 83.
76 Ibid., 86-7; 96-7.
77 Ibid., 89.

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 CHAPTER 12: GUILT
1 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 330.
2 Ibid., 332, 334.
3 Normann, Tagebuch, 61.
4 Stern, Hidden Damage, 307.
5 Jünger, Okkupation, 130.
6 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 72, 74.
7 Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage. Für Völkermord gibt es keine
Verjährung, Heidelberg 1946, 13
8 Ibid., 19.
9 Ibid.
10 Quoted in Kirkbright, Jaspers, 141, 193.
11 Ibid., 197, 195; quoted in Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 245;
Jaspers, Schuldfrage, 28-9.
12 Norbert Trippen, Josef Cardinal Frings (1887-1978). Sein Wirken für
das Erzbistum Köln und für die Kirche in Deutschland, Paderborn, Munich,
Vienna and Zurich 2003, 132.
13 Ibid., 142.
14 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 76; conversation with Karl-Heinz
Bohrer, 12 January 2005.
15 Kirkbright, Jaspers, 190.
16 Stern, Hidden Damage, 79-81.
17 Interview with Karl-Heinz Bohrer, November 2004.
18 Abzug, Vicious Heart, x.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 134-7.
21 Ibid., 128-32; Farago, Last Days, 58.
22 Shepherd, After Daybreak, 74-7.
23 James F. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and
Denazification in American Occupied Germany, Chicago and London 1982,
11, 14.
24 Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat
to Victory, Detroit 1977, 115, 59; Frank M. Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes
Trial Program in Germany, 1946-1955, New York, Westport and London
1989, 19.
25 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 35.
26 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 324.
 27 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 82.
28 Stern, Hidden Damage, 120.
29 Justus Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung. Ein Kapitel deutscher
Nachkriegspolitik, Neuwied and Berlin 1969, 25.
30 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 339.
31 Jünger, Okkupation, 153.
32 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 116.
33 Krauss, Heimkehr, 51.
34 Emmy Goering, My Life with Goering, London 1972, 142.
35 Margret Boveri, Der Verrat im XX. Jahrhundert - für und gegen die
Nation, Hamburg 1956, 14.
36 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 253-4.
37 MacDonogh, A Good German, 71; see also R. G. S. Weber, The
German Student Corps in the Third Reich, London 1986.
38 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 103.
39 MacDonogh, Prussia, 192-3; Hansgeorg Model, Der deutsche
Generalstabsoffizier. Seine Auswahl und Ausbildung in Reichswehr,
Wehrmacht und Bundeswehr, Frankfurt/Main 1968, 135-9.
40 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 326 n. 1, 333.
41 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge, 166.
42 Peterson, American Occupation, 174, 216; Tent, Mission on the
Rhine, 51.
43 Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 54-5.
44 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 273.
45 Clare, Berlin Days, 26-8.
46 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 104.
47 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 328-9; Timothy R. Vogt, Denazification
in Soviet-Occupied Germany 1945-1948, Cambridge, Mass. and London
2000, 7-8
48 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 174.
49 Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, 182-3, 221; Wolfgang Krüger,
Entnazifiziert!: Zur Praxis der politischen Säuberung in Nordrhein-
Westfalen, Wuppertal 1982, 14-15.
50 Vogt, Denazification, 2-3, 71.
51 Krüger, Entnazifiziert!, 11.
52 Clare, Berlin Days, 112-13.
53 Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 91.
 54 Ibid., 91-2.
55 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 251-2.
56 Ibid., 309.
57 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 140-1; Zuckmayer, ‘Jugend im
Niemandsland’.
58 Franz von Papen, Memoirs, translated by Brian Connell, London
1952, 577-8.
59 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 261-2.
60 Goering, My Life with Goering, 168.
61 Nike Wagner, The Wagners - The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty,
London 2000, 226.
62 Hamann, Winifred Wagner, 403; Spotts, Bayreuth, 199.
63 Hamann, Winifred Wagner, 406, 408.
64 Ibid., 410-11.
65 Franz Endler, Herbert von Karajan: My Autobiography, London
1989, 46.
66 Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache’, 48-50.
67 Ibid., 58.
68 Davidson, Death and Life, 127-8.
69 Peterson, Russian Commands, 84-5.
70 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 46-7.
71 Ibid., 102.
72 Ibid., 130, 141.
73 Ibid., 433; II, 624.
74 Ibid., 224-5.
75 Peterson, American Occupation, 93.
76 Buscher, War Crimes Trial Program, 49, 60.
77 Clare, Berlin Days, 206-10.
78 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 98-100.
79 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 110.
80 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 147-8.
81 Ibid., 209, 243.
82 Ibid., 109, 112.
83 Ibid. 153, 152 n. 1.
84 Ibid., 390.
85 Béthouart, Bataille, 120.
86 Richard Dove, Foreword to Bearman et al., Wien-London, 11.
 87 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 115-17.
88 Blake Baker, ‘Zur Arbeit der Field Security Service im Steirischen
Grenzland’, in Beer, ed., Die ‘Britische Steiermark’, 608.
89 Beer, ‘Die Briten’, 130-1.
90 Ibid., 122.
91 Beer, ‘Grossbritannien’, 65 n. 67.
92 Beer, ‘Die Briten’, 122-3.
93 Ibid., 125.
94 Wolfgang Muchitsch, ‘Das Volksgericht Graz’, in Beer, Die
‘Britische Steiermark’, 43.
95 Beer, ‘Die Briten’, 153.
96 Lorenz Jäger, Adorno - Eine politische Biographie, Munich 2003,
223.
97 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 18-19.
98 Victor Gollancz, Leaving them to their Fate: The Ethics of
Starvation, London 1946, 4.
99 Ibid., 5-6, 12, 18.
100 Bullock, Bevin, 265.
101 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 24.
102 Ibid., 18.
103 Ibid., 14-15, 17.
104 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 415.
105 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 11.
106 Ibid., 12.
107 Ibid., 23-4.
108 Ibid., 38-9.
109 Ibid., 53-7.
110 Ibid., 64.
111 Ibid., 66-7.
112 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 72.
113 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 29.
114 Ibid., 13-14.
115 Jünger, Okkupation, 240.
116 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 151-2, 161, 166, 179, 207.
117 Ibid., 212.
118 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 74.
119 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 264-5.
 120 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 35-6.
121 Ibid., 164; Davidson, Death and Life, 137.
122 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 48-9, 50-4, 59-60, 64.
123 Ibid., 60, 65-6, 70; Davidson, Death and Life, 159.
124 Zuckmayer, ‘Deutschland, Sommer 1948: Jüngstes Gericht oder
Stunde Null?’, in Deutschlandbericht.
125 Trippen, Frings, 251.
126 Ibid., 174-5.
127 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 240.
128 Paul Dahm, Joseph Kardinal Frings, Erzbischof von Köln, Munich
1957, 4-5.
129 Ibid., 21-2.
130 Quoted in ibid., 22.
131 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 43, 45.
132 Davidson, Death and Life, 21, 54.
133 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 41-2.
134 Radley, ‘British Military Government’, 583.
135 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 29.
136 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 332; Clare, Berlin Days, 34, 55.
137 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 44; Boveri, Tage, 286; Clare, Berlin
Days, 16, 55, 60.
138 Clare, Berlin Days, 54.
139 Ibid., 17-18.
140 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 82; Stern, Hidden Damage, 273.
141 Stern, Hidden Damage, 286.

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 CHAPTER 13: BLACK MARKET
1 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 167, 169; Heinrich Böll, When the War
was Over.
2 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüger, 171.
3 Heinrich Böll, ‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . .’, in his
Erzählungen, Munich 1997, 14-15.
4 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 192.
5 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 335-6.
6 Ibid., 211-13.
7 Stern, Hidden Damage, 130-5.
8 Ibid., 68.
9 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 122.
10 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 6.
11 Hans Habe, In American Uniform, quoted in ibid., 123.
12 Ibid., 12.
13 Zuckmayer, ‘Jugend in Niemandsland’.
14 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 142.
15 Ibid., 152.
16 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 76-8.
17 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 119.
18 Jünger, Okkupation, 235-6.
19 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 143-9.
20 Ibid., 155.
21 Cullen, Reichstag, 399-401.
22 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 92, 94-5.
23 Ibid., 102.
24 Ibid., 170.
25 Mosely, Report from Germany, 46-7, 55, 80-1.
26 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 260; Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 164.
27 Boelcke, Schwarzmarkt, 206-7.
28 Skrjabina, Allies on the Rhine, 81.
29 Davidson, Death and Life, 84-5.
30 Klimov, Terror Machine, 178.
31 Ibid., 128, 134, 160.
32 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 116, 130.
33 Gerhard Keiderling, ‘Der Al Capone vom Alexanderplatz’, in
www.luise-b erlin.de
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 CHAPTER 14: LIGHT FINGERS
1 Konstantin Akinscha and Grigori Koslow, Beutekunst - Auf
Schatzsuche in russischen Geheimdepots, Munich 1995, 61, 68.
2 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 68, 84, 268; Keeling, Gruesome Harvest,
40.
3 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 24, 97-100.
4 Ibid., 103-5.
5 Ibid., 94-5, 113-15.
6 Ibid., 112-13, 116.
7 See Giles MacDonogh, Translator’s Preface to Henrik Eberle and
Matthias Uhl, eds, The Hitler Book, London 2005.
8 Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, Afterword, 462-78 passim.
9 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 95, 122-3.
10 Friedrich, Shauplatz Berlin, 33.
11 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 126-7.
12 Ibid., 129-33; A. A. Löwenthal, ‘Der Hitler-Affe: Ein Zwischenfall
in Schlesien’, in Gesammelte Schriften, Tübingen 1965, VI, 636-43.
13 Giles MacDonogh, ‘Parlour Games’, Guardian, 20 December 2003.
Damon de Laszlo, the artist’s grandson, maintains that it is doubtful that
Red Army officers carried swords, and it may well be that the damage to
the painting was incurred in quite another way. On the other hand, we know
that the Russians carried all sorts of weapons as trophies.
14 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 106-9, and author’s visits to
Rheinsberg.
15 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 145-8.
16 Ibid., 151. Akinscha and Koslow have Rudolf ’s name as Robert. See
Sophie Lillie, Was einmal war: Handbuch der enteigneten
Kunstsammlungen Wiens, Vienna 2003, 439-42, 463-5.
17 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 136, 138-9, 172-5, 176.
18 Ibid., 160-1.
19 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 167-8.
20 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 167; Giles MacDonogh, ‘Vichy’s
last stand: a prince’s story’, Financial Times, 5 October 1996 - interview
with Friedrich Wilhelm Fürst von Hohenzollern; MacDonogh, Frederick
the Great, 8; see E. Grosetti and M. Matronola, Il bombardimento di Monte
Cassino, diario di Guerra, Montecassino 1997.
21 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 232.
 22 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 173.
23 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge, 156-7.
24 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 273; Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 40;
Botting, Ruins, 16.
25 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüger, 187-8.
26 Ibid., 182-4.
27 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 107.
28 Meehan, Strange Enemy, 119, 121, 125.
29 Clare, Berlin Days, 28-9.
30 Meehan, Strange Enemy, 210-11.
31 Bar-Zohar, Hunt for German Scientists, 132.
32 Franz Kurowski, Alliierte Jagd auf deutsche Wissenschaftler. Das
Unternehmen Paperclip, Munich 1982, 8.
33 Bar-Zohar, Hunt for German Scientists, 10.
34 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 149.

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 CHAPTER 15: WHERE ARE OUR MEN?
1 Arthur L. Smith,‘Die Vermisste Million’ - Zur Schicksal deutscher
Kriegsgefangener nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Munich 1992, 10.
2 Wolfgang Benz and Angelika Schardt, eds, Kriegsgefangenschaft:
Berichte über das Leben in Gefangenlagern der Alliierten von Otto
Engelbert, Kurt Glaser, Hans Johnitz und Heinz Pust, Munich 1991, 7.
3 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 20; Kurt W. Böhme and Helmut Wolf,
Aufzeichnungen über die Kriegsgefangenschaft im Westen, Munich 1973,
xiii.
4 Ibid., xiv.
5 Davidson, Death and Life, 5; Smith, Die vermisste Million, 18, 21.
6 Speer, Diaries, 41.
7 Benz and Schardt, eds, Kriegsgefangenschaft, 7.
8 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, xiv.
9 Jäger, Adorno, 224.
10 Smith, Die Vermisste Million, 57, 62, 63 n. 29.
11 Benz and Schardt, Kriegsgefangenschaft, 8.
12 De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, xxv.
13 Ibid., 8-9.
14 Ibid., 10; Erich Maschke, ed., Zur Geschichte des Deutschen
Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, vol. XV: Die deutschen
Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges - Eine Zusammenfassung,
Munich 1967, 35.
15 Ibid., 11.
16 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 9 n. 2.
17 James Bacque, Other Losses - An Investigation into the Mass Death
of German Prisoners of War after World War II, London 1991, 45.
18 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 11, 101.
19 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 252, 267.
20 Benz and Schardt, eds, Kriegsgefangenschaft, 7-8.
21 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 30.
22 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 225.
23 Kurt Glaser, ‘Kriegsgefangener auf drei Kontinenten’, in ibid., 202.
24 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 142.
25 Ibid., 143-4.
26 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 24.
27 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 225.
 28 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 25.
29 Ibid., 40 n. 13; Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 225-6.
30 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 37.
31 Ibid., 43-6, 86.
32 Ibid., 26.
33 Farago, Last Days, 153n.
34 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 47.
35 Salomon, The Answers, 440.
36 Ibid., 442.
37 Ibid., 447.
38 Ibid., 453.
39 Hans Johnitz, ‘In amerikanischer und franzözischer
Kriegsgefangenschaft’, in Benz and Schardt, eds, Kriegsgefangenschaft, 85-
6.
40 Salomon, The Answers, 498.
41 Ibid., 505-6.
42 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 258-9.
43 Salomon, The Answers, 536.
44 Schwerin von Krosigk, Memoiren, 259, 262.
45 Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War
European Thought, 3.
46 Salomon, The Answers, 541.
47 Papen, Memoirs, 578-9.
48 Salomon, The Answers, 542; Speer, Diaries, 25.
49 Salomon, The Answers, 543-4.
50 Webmaster Kriegsgefangener.de
51 Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, Hitler’s Last General - The Case
against Wilhelm Mohnke, London 1989, 265.
52 Preussen, Hohenzollern, 191-2; information from the late Prince
Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg.
53 Herzogin Viktoria Luise, Ein Leben, 318.
54 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüger, 158.
55 Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s Interpreter, edited by R. H. C. Steed, London
1951, 280-1; Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 578.
56 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 269.
57 R. T. Paget, Manstein - His Campaigns and his Trial, London 1951,
109.
 58 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 270-1, 282.
59 Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, 134.
60 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 1054-5.
61 Gibson-Watt, An Undistinguished Life, 170.
62 Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 62-5.
63 Ibid., 70.
64 Ibid., 66.
65 Ibid., 66-7.
66 Shepherd, After Daybreak, 55.
67 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 210.
68 Ibid., 225.
69 David Irving, Göring - A Biography, London 1989, 478.
70 WW2 Memories Project - Le Marchant POW Camp; Terence Prittie
in http://www.royalpioneercorps.co.uk/rpc/history germanguns.htm
71 Leighton-Langer, X, 239-42.
72 Brian Bond, ‘Brauchitsch’, in Correlli Barnett, ed., Hitler’s
Generals, London 1990, 95.
73 Rowland Ryder, Ravenstein - Portrait of a German General, New
York 1978, 170-1.
74 Ibid., 171.
75 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jnr, ‘Arnim’, in Barnett, ed., Hitler’s Generals,
353.
76 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, xiii.
77 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 24.
78 Glaser, ‘Kriegsgefangener’, 208-12, 215, 218, 225.
79 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 170.
80 Ibid., 174.
81 Ibid., 174, 178.
82 Ibid., 175, 180-1.
83 Dahm, Frings, 27-8, 34.
84 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 90-1.
85 Ibid., 91.
86 Ibid., 95, 190, 265; Document, BBC Radio 4, 9 January 2006,
dedicated a programme to British torturers, and mentioned Scotland in that
context.
87 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 97.
88 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 24.
 89 Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 27-8.
90 Ibid., 38.
91 Ibid., 70, 73, 76-7.
92 Ibid., 86.
93 Ibid., 68.
94 Ian Cobain, ‘The Interrogation Camp that Turned Prisoners into
Living Skeletons’, Guardian, Saturday 17 December 2005. I am grateful to
Nick Jacobs for drawing my attention to this article; Document, BBC Radio
4, 9 January 2006; see also Meehan, Strange Enemy People, 82-6, who saw
the papers long before the newspapers or the BBC.
95 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 30-1.
96 Salomon, The Answers, 530-1; the events are substantiated by a film
in the American archives that was seen by Jeremy Murray-Brown in July
1992 - untitled web document; see also Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret,
London 1974, and Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta; also Botting, Ruins; Keeling,
Gruesome Harvest.
97 Salomon, The Answers, 534; Murray-Brown, op. cit.
98 Johnitz, ‘Kriegsgefangenschaft’, 102.
99 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 285n.
100 Ibid., xiii; Smith, Die vermisste Million, 31.
101 Smith, Die vermisste Million, 32; Maschke, Zusammenfassung,
197.
102 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 226.
103 Salomon, The Answers, 362.
104 Johnitz, ‘Kriegsgefangenschaft’, 102.
105 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 427.
106 Ibid., 427, is another case.
107 Ibid., 391.
108 Ibid., 102, 114.
109 Ibid., 275, 279, 282.
110 Ibid., 284, 290.
111 Ibid., 290-2, 293-4; The Progressive, 14 January 1946, quoted in
Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 21.
112 Böhme and Wolf, Aufzeichnungen, 291.
113 Ibid., 217.
114 Ibid., 223-4.
115 Ibid., 219-22.
 116 Ibid., 251-5.
117 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 226.
118 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 18.
119 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 224.
120 Ibid., 196-7.
121 Krockow, Hour of the Women, 202.
122 Herzogin Viktoria Luise, Ein Leben, 324-5.
123 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jnr, ‘Kleist’, in Barnett, ed., Hitler’s
Generals, 259.
124 Ibid., 260.
125 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 236.
126 Ibid., 317.
127 Heinz Pust, ‘Als Kriegsgefangener in der Sowjetunion.
Errinerungen 1945-1953’, in Benz and Schardt, eds, Kriegsgefangenschaft,
22, 29.
128 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 180-1.
129 Pust, ‘Sowjetunion’, 32.
130 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 331.
131 Pust, ‘Sowjetunion’, 33-5.
132 Ibid., 43-4.
133 Ibid., 75-6.
134 Ibid., 81-2.
135 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 789-80.
136 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 225.
137 Ibid., 196-7.
138 Ibid.
139 Ibid., 225.
140 Ibid., 224.
141 Information from my friend Janez Fajfar, general manager of the
Villa Bled Hotel, who showed me the room and Tito’s desk. The former
POWs frequently returned to point out to their wives and children their
portraits among the figures in the battle scene.
142 Maschke, Zusammenfassung, 197.
143 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 88.
144 Wolfgang Borchert, Das Gesamtwerk, Hamburg 1970, 102.
145 Ibid., 172.
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 CHAPTER 16: THE TRIALS
1 Davidson, Death and Life, 100 n. 4; Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, 29-
30.
2 MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser, 422, 423, 424; Hilberg, Destruction,
III, 1142.
3 Davidson, Death and Life, 105; Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1142; papers
released by the National Archive at the end of 2005 show that Churchill had
always been in favour of executing the Nazi leaders. The fact that only the
second tier of Nazis were captured may have altered his thinking in favour
of a trial: Sunday Times, 1 January 2006.
4 Paget, Manstein, 139.
5 Ibid., 155; this was from Paget’s defence submission.
6 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1145.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 1099.
9 Ibid., 1130-1, 1152.
10 Quoted in Paget, Manstein, 67, also 154.
11 Ibid., 68.
12 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 441.
13 Paget, Manstein, 86-7.
14 Ibid., 69-70.
15 Ibid., 80.
16 Information from Ian Maxwell, who also informed the author that his
father had told him that Trevor-Roper was called in to interrogate major war
criminals.
17 Leighton-Langer, X, 235.
18 Ibid.
19 West, The Meaning of Treason, 132-3.
20 Papen, Memoirs, 551.
21 Peter Padfield, Himmler - Reichsführer SS, London, 1990, 610.
22 Ibid., 609-11; Anthony Read, The Devil’s Disciples - The Lives and
Times of Hitler’s Inner Circle, London 2003, 914-15.
23 Willi Frischauer, Goering, London 1950, 277.
24 Irving, Göring, 465-70; Frischauer, Goering, 274-6.
25 Irving, Göring, 470-1, 478; Goering, My Life with Goering, London
1972, 136.
26 Frischauer, Goering, 280.
 27 Read, The Devil’s Disciples, 3.
28 Speer, Diaries, 65.
29 Papen, Memoirs, 541.
30 Speer, Diaries, 3.
31 Irving, Göring, 477, 480.
32 Papen, Memoirs, 563.
33 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1157.
34 Speer, Diaries, 37.
35 Papen, Memoirs, 546.
36 Karl Dönitz, Mein Wechselvolles Leben, Zurich, Berlin and Frankfurt
1968, 212-14.
37 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 296-7.
38 Speer, Diaries, 3.
39 Peter Padfield, Hess - The Führer’s Disciple, London 1995, 303-4,
312.
40 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1156.
41 Irving, Göring, 484.
42 Ibid., 489; Papen, Memoirs, 574.
43 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 146.
44 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 298-9.
45 Papen, Memoirs, 559.
46 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 301, 305.
47 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1149.
48 Irving, Göring, 487.
49 Padfield, Hess, 310-11; G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, New York
1947, 45-6.
50 Frischauer, Goering, 291.
51 Ibid., 295; Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 50.
52 See Peter Maguire, Law and War, New York 2001. I am grateful to
Sebastian Cody for directing me to this work.
53 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1149; Tom Lampert, Ein einziges Leben -
Geschichten aus der NS-Zeit, Munich 2003, 204-29, portrays von dem Bach
as a man suffering from psychosomatic illness as a result of the demands
made upon him by Himmler.
54 Irving made this statement in The Reichsmarschall’s Table, BBC
Radio 4, 15 March 2005, written and presented by Giles MacDonogh, and
produced by Dennis Sewell.
 55 Irving, Göring, 492-3; Frischauer, Goering, 292; Walter Görlitz,
‘The Desk Generals - Keitel, Jodl and Warlimont’, in Barnett, ed., Hitler’s
Generals, 153-4.
56 Speer, Diaries, 13.
57 Papen, Memoirs, 551-3.
58 Frischauer, Goering, 296.
59 Papen, Memoirs, 565.
60 Irving, Göring, 495; Frischauer, Goering, 297.
61 Frischauer, Goering, 295; Read, The Devil’s Disciples, 9.
62 Frischauer, Goering, 297.
63 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1136.
64 Speer, Diaries, 52.
65 Ibid., 45.
66 Ibid., 499.
67 Skrjabina, Allies on the Rhine, 77.
68 Helmuth Auerbach, ‘Que faire de l’Allemagne’, in Manfrass and
Rioux, eds, France-Allemagne, 293.
69 Speer, Diaries, 4.
70 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 147.
71 Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1151.
72 Ibid., 11, 14.
73 Werner Maser, Nürnberg, Tribunal der Sieger, Munich and Zurich
1979, 7; Read, The Devil’s Disciples, 923.
74 Speer, Diaries, 11.

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 CHAPTER 17: THE LITTLE FISH
1 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 247 and n. 3; Buscher, War Crimes Trial
Program, 30.
2 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 420.
3 Maser, Nürnberg, 434-42.
4 Speer, Diaries, 26.
5 Ibid., 32.
6 Ibid., 35.
7 Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, 236.
8 Mühlen, Krupp, 195.
9 Ibid., 200.
10 Hans Laternser, Verteidigung deutsche Soldaten: Pläydoyers vor
Alliierten Gerichten, Bonn 1950, 111, 126, 146-7, 153.
11 Ibid., 339.
12 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 262, 310.
13 Mühlen, Krupp, 213.
14 Ibid., 220.
15 Ibid., 214.
16 Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 343.
17 Carl Haensel, Das Gericht vertagt sich. Tagebuch eines Verteidigers
bei den Nürnberger Prozessen, Wiesbaden and Munich 1980, 17.
18 Margret Boveri, Der Diplomat vor Gericht, Berlin and Hanover,
1948, 44.
19 Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten, 119; Boveri, Der Diplomat vor Gericht, 18.
20 Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten, 121.
21 Quoted in Boveri, Der Diplomat vor Gericht, 17-18.
22 Ibid., 29.
23 Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten, 122.
24 Boveri, Der Diplomat vor Gericht, 17.
25 Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten, 122; Boveri, Der Diplomat vor Gericht, 18.
26 Weizsäcker, Vier Zeiten, 125-6.
27 Paget, Manstein, 171.
28 Ibid., 169-72. It should be said that this sort of argument has always
been very pleasing to the revisionists, and that Paget is quoted and lauded
on David Irving’s website for saying that the figure of six million murdered
Jews was incorrect; Hilberg, Destruction, III, 1158.
29 Earl F. Ziemke, ‘Rundstedt’, in Barnett, ed., Hitler’s Generals, 201.
 30 See Shepherd, After Daybreak, 166-75.
31 Tighe, Gdansk, 201.
32 Eberle and Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, 238-9; MacDonogh, Prussia,
376.
33 Paget, Manstein, 77.
34 Ibid., 78, 79.
35 Shelford Bidwell, ‘Kesselring’, in Barnett, ed., Hitler’s Generals,
288.
36 Berber, Dachau, 200.
37 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 278.
38 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 1041-3.
39 Buscher, War Crimes Trial Program, 38.
40 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 880-1, 889.
41 Ibid., 1007; Robert Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany, London
1995, 142-3.
42 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 283; Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 671.
43 Sayer and Botting, Mohnke, 91-2.
44 Ibid., 183n.
45 Ibid., 226.
46 Ibid.
47 Hamann, Winifred Wagner, 420-1.
48 Ibid., 423-5.
49 Ibid., 428-9.
50 Ibid., 438.
51 Ibid., 352.
52 Ibid., 345.
53 Idem, 356-8.
54 Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung, 231.
55 Maser, Nürnberg, 433; Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons, 344.

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CHAPTER 18: PEACEMAKING IN POTSDAM
1 Hanna Grisebach quoted in Inge Hoeftmann and Waltraud Noack, eds,
Potsdam in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, Düsseldorf 1992, 226.
2 Hanna Grisebach, Potsdamer Tagebuch, with an Afterword by Hilde
Domin, Heidelberg 1974, 23.
3 Ibid., 22.
4 Ibid., 48.
5 Ibid., 29, 32.
6 Quoted in Hoeftmann and Noack, eds, Potsdam, 235.
7 Grisebach, Tagebuch, 35.
8 Ibid., 38-9.
9 Ibid., 44.
10 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 438.
11 See Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Chance des Sonderfriedens:
Deutsch-sowjetische Geheimgespräche 1941-1945, Berlin 1986; Hugh
Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 7th edn, London 1995, 29;
MacDonogh, Translator’s Preface to Eberle and Uhl, The Hitler Book, xx.
12 Eberle and Uhl, Das Buch Hitler. See in particular the editors’
Afterword, 495-6.
13 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 429, 453.
14 Ibid., 430.
15 Ibid., 435.
16 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 17.
17 Zhukov, Reminiscenses, II, 433.
18 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 19.
19 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 39.
20 Young, France, 61.
21 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 18, 21; Bullock, Bevin, 17.
22 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 434, 437.
23 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 331, 334.
24 Bullock, Bevin, 17.
25 Henry H. Adams, Harry Hopkins, New York 1977, 391.
26 Averall Harriman Foreword to ibid., 19.
27 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 440.
28 Adams, Hopkins, 392.
29 Ibid., 382.
30 Ibid., 377.
 31 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 57-9.
32 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 22-4.
33 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 52-3; Naimark, Russians in Germany, 146.
34 Henke, ‘Potsdam’, 54.
35 Akinscha and Koslow, Beutekunst, 99-100.
36 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 11-12.
37 Quoted in Boveri, Tage, 157, 170.
38 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 50-1.
39 Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 629, mentions the geraniums; Harry S.
Truman, Memoirs, 2 vols, vol. I: 1945, Year of Decisions, London 1955,
268, the other flora.
40 Zhukov in Hoeftmann and Noack, eds, Potsdam, 240.
41 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 441-3.
42 Grisebach, Tagebuch, 49-50.
43 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 441.
44 Truman, Memoirs, I, 258.
45 Ibid., 262.
46 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 94.
47 Truman, Memoirs, I, 266, 265.
48 Truman in Hoeftmann and Noack, eds, Potsdam, 245.
49 Truman, Memoirs, I, 265.
50 Foschepoth, ‘Potsdam’, 71-2.
51 Ibid., 72-4.
52 Truman in Hoeftmann and Noack, eds, Potsdam, 246; Truman, I,
267.
53 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 85.
54 Truman, Memoirs, I, 279.
55 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 68.
56 Truman, Memoirs, I, 270.
57 Ibid., 275.
58 Grisebach, Tagebuch, 47.
59 Kardorff, Aufzeichnungen, 337; Amanda Holden, The New Penguin
Opera Guide, London, 2001, 1037.
60 Truman, Memoirs, 278.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 281, 285.
 63 Ibid., 286; Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 68-9; Davidson, Death and
Life, 64.
64 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 79-80; Truman, Memoirs, I, 293.
65 Truman, Memoirs, I, 293.
66 Ibid., 294.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 295.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., 296.
71 Bullock, Bevin, 24.
72 Ibid., 22.
73 Truman, Memoirs, I, 297.
74 Ibid., 297-8.
75 Ibid., 300.
76 De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 50.
77 Truman, Memoirs, I, 303, 305; Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 76.
78 Truman, Memoirs, I, 315-16.
79 Ibid., 317; Bullock, Bevin, 25.
80 Truman, Memoirs, I, 322-3.
81 Peter Weiler, Ernest Bevin, Manchester and New York 1993, 144-5.
82 Ibid., 145-6.
83 Bullock, Bevin, 25.
84 Weiler, Bevin, 147-8.
85 Ibid., 148-9.
86 Bullock, Bevin, 25.
87 Truman, Memoirs, I, 327.
88 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 451.
89 Truman in Hoeftmann and Noack, eds, Potsdam, 251.
90 Grisebach, Tagebuch, 70.
91 Truman, Memoirs, I, 329-30.
92 Kaps, Tragödie, 69.
93 Truman, Memoirs, I, 329-30.
94 Ibid., 331.
95 Bullock, Bevin, 28; Truman, Memoirs, I, 335.
96 Truman, Memoirs, I, 341.
97 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, 414-15.
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98 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 448.
99 Ibid., 414-16.
100 Truman, Memoirs, I, 337.
101 Ibid., 338.
102 Ibid., 339-40.
103 Zhukov, Reminiscences, II, 416-17.
104 Young, France, 62.
105 Ibid., 62, 64.
106 Davidson, Death and Life, 60.
107 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 73.
108 Kennan, Memoirs, 258-9.
109 Ibid., 263-6.
110 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 92, 103.
111 Grisebach, Tagebuch, 54.

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 CHAPTER 19: THE GREAT FREEZE
1 Mastny, Cold War, 23.
2 Ibid., 4, 6.
3 Young, France, 70-1.
4 Ibid., 74.
5 Buffet, Berlin, 360; Ritchie, Faust’s Metropolis, 638.
6 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 207.
7 Weiler, Bevin, 153-4.
8 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 133.
9 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. II: 1946 - 1953, Years of Trial and
Hope, London 1955, 100.
10 Kennan, Memoirs, 257.
11 Clare, Berlin Days, 193.
12 Weiler, Bevin, 154.
13 Kennan, Memoirs, 258.
14 Bullock, Bevin, 9, 11.
15 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 48.
16 Weiler, Bevin, 154.
17 Kennan, Memoirs, 253-4.
18 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, vii-viii.
19 Ibid., 5, 8.
20 Siegfried Beer, ‘Die Besatzungsmacht Grossbritannien und
Österreich 1945-1949’, in Ableitner et al., Österreich unter alliierter
Besatzung, 47.
21 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 111-12, 118.
22 Graml, Teilung Deutschlands, 165, 182.
23 Ibid., 48-50; David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan
O.M., 1938-45, London 1971, 778.
24 Foschepoth, ‘Potsdam’, 76, 79.
25 Bullock, Bevin, 268; Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 255.
26 Ibid., 257.
27 Weiler, Bevin, 159-60.
28 Bullock, Bevin, 309.
29 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 319; Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 190-1.
30 Morgan, Byrnes, Clay, 319.
31 Ibid., 334-5, 338; Weiler, Bevin, 160-2.
 32 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 192; Gulgowski, ‘American Military
Government’, 10.
33 Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 10.
34 Dos Passos, Tour of Duty, 321-2.
35 Graml, Teilung Deutschlands, 105-7, 109.
36 Rathkolb, ‘Historische Fragmente’, 146.
37 Alfons Gruber, Geschichte Südtirols - Streifzüge durch das 20.
Jahrhundert, Bolzano 2002, 103.
38 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 90.
39 Rathkolb, ed., Gesellschaft und Politik, 192.
40 Ibid., 406.
41 Schärf, Wiederaufrichtung, 121.
42 Béthouart, Bataille, 109.
43 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 90.
44 Ibid., 107.
45 Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, New Haven
and London 1997, 421-2.
46 Buffet, Berlin, 366-7.
47 Naimark, Russians in Germany, 90.
48 Speer, Diaries, 62.
49 Staritz, DDR, 18.
50 Davidson, Death and Life, 129.
51 Brigadier-General Frank Howley, Berlin Command, New York 1950,
10.
52 Ibid., 136.
53 Sayn-Wittgenstein, Streifzüge, 174.
54 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 83-4.
55 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 50, 100.
56 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 105; Christabel Bielenberg, The Past is
Myself, London 1985, 285.
57 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 151-2.
58 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 86.
59 Speer, Diaries, 29-31.
60 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 158-9, 161.
61 Speer, Diaries, 34.
62 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 166.
 63 Mastny, Cold War, 25. On Soviet Russia’s long-term plans, see
Wolfgang Mueller, ‘Stalin and Austria: New Evidence on Soviet Policy in a
Secondary Theatre of the Cold War, 1938-1953 ⁄ 1955’, Cold War History,
vol. 6, no. 1, February 2006, 63-84.
64 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 113.
65 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 170-1.
66 Ibid., 172-3.
67 Ibid., 174-6.
68 Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 87.
69 Bethouart, Bataille, 87.
70 Obituary, Josefine Hawelka, The Times, Saturday 26 March 2005.
71 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 213, 226, 230.
72 Ibid., 248.
73 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 182.
74 Byrnes, Speaking Frankly, 198.
75 Clark, Calculated Risk, 439-42.
76 Mastny, Cold War, 26-9.
77 Ibid., 40-1.
78 Balfour and Mair, Four Power Control, 279.
79 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 111-12.
80 Ibid., 112.
81 Ibid., 361-2.
82 Wagnleitner, ed., Herz, 401-3, 606-7.
83 See Staritz, DDR, 15.
84 Ibid., 17.
85 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 186, 198.
86 Staritz, DDR, 18.
87 Ibid., 21.

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 CHAPTER 20: THE BERLIN AIRLIFT AND
THE BEGINNINGS OF ECONOMIC
RECOVERY
1 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 434, 439.
2 Ibid., 441.
3 Ibid., 444-5.
4 Ibid., 447.
5 Ibid., 452.
6 Ibid., 453-4.
7 Mastny, Cold War, 48.
8 Davidson, Death and Life, 224.
9 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 274, 276, 302; Skrjabina, Allies on the
Rhine, 82, 95.
10 Skrjabina, Allies on the Rhine, 114; Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin,
230.
11 Howley, Berlin Command, 186.
12 Ibid., 329.
13 Staritz, DDR, 23.
14 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 249.
15 Ruge, ed., Schulenburg, 92.
16 Willy Brandt and Richard Lowenthal, Ernst Reuter. Ein Leben für
die Freiheit, Munich 1957, 358-60.
17 Mastny, Cold War, 41.
18 Ibid., 48.
19 Howley, Berlin Command, 177.
20 Kennan, Memoirs, 420; Bullock, Bevin, 574.
21 Bullock, Bevin, 571.
22 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 478, 483.
23 Mastny, Cold War, 50.
24 Ibid., 49.
25 Bullock, Bevin, 566, 573; Graml, Teilung Deutschlands, 199.
26 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, I, 206, 201.
27 Ibid. 567; II, 612.
28 Quoted in Ann and John Tusa, The Berlin Blockade. Berlin in 1948.
The Year the Cold War Threatened to Become Hot, London 1989, 138.
29 Mastny, Cold War, 46-7.
 30 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 597, 599.
31 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 220-8.
32 Truman, Memoirs, II, 131.
33 Young, France, 198-9.
34 Howley, Berlin Command, 3-4.
35 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 600-2.
36 Ibid., 602-5.
37 Ibid., 605.
38 Ibid., 605, 607.
39 Ibid., 618, 621 n. 2; Davidson, Death and Life, 211.
40 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 649-50, 661, 677.
41 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 238.
42 Volker Koop, Tagebuch der Berliner Blockade. Von Schwarzmarkt
und Rollkommandos, Bergbau und Bienenzucht, Bonn 1998, 11.
43 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 236.
44 Ibid., 237, 238.
45 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 700.
46 Howley, Berlin Command, 196-7, 199-200.
47 Bullock, Bevin, 573 and n. 1.
48 Weiler, Bevin, 179.
49 Bullock, Bevin, 576.
50 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 238-9.
51 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 166-7.
52 Truman, Memoirs, II, 130.
53 Ibid.
54 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 248; Howley, Berlin Command, 239.
55 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 246.
56 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 709, 711, 714.
57 Staritz, DDR, 26
58 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 248.
59 Staritz, DDR, 23.
60 Howley, Berlin Command, 209.
61 Lang, ‘Lieber Herr Celibidache’, 110.
62 Koop, Tagebuch, 18, 24.
63 Truman, Memoirs, II, 130.
64 Howley, Berlin Command, 202.
65 Truman, Memoirs, II, 132.
 66 Ibid., 135.
67 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 746.
68 Davidson, Death and Life, 217; Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 242.
69 Truman, Memoirs, II, 132.
70 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 763-4.
71 Koop, Tagebuch, 41.
72 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 798, 820.
73 Ibid., 824.
74 Ibid., 831-2.
75 Ibid., 834, 844.
76 Mastny, Cold War, 52.
77 Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, 260.
78 Buffet, Berlin, 369.
79 Goedde, GIs and Germans, 185, 187; Howley, Berlin Command,
218.
80 Koop, Tagebuch, 55-6.
81 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 856-7.
82 Ibid., 858, 860.
83 Truman, Memoirs, II, 136.
84 Davidson, Death and Life, 209.
85 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 908.
86 Koop, Tagebuch, 124-5.
87 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 928.
88 Howley, Berlin Command, 226.
89 Tent, Mission, 288.
90 Koop, Tagebuch, 133, pours a little cold water on this ‘legend’.
91 Davidson, Life and Death, 216; Clare, Berlin Days, 185; Tusa and
Tusa, Berlin Blockade, 330, 389-90.
92 Staritz, DDR, 33.
93 Koop, Tagebuch, 139.
94 Speer, Diaries, 115.
95 Ibid,, 122.
96 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 1015.
97 Ibid., 1063.
98 Kennan, Memoirs, 429.
99 Ibid., 431-2.
100 Mastny, Cold War, 62.
 101 Tusa and Tusa, Berlin Blockade, 395.
102 Clark, Calculated Risk, 429-30.
103 Smith, ed., Clay Papers, II, 625; Brook-Shepherd, Austrians, 395.
104 Béthouart, Bataille, 153.
105 Ibid., 157.
106 Ibid., 162.
107 Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 130.
108 Wagnleitner, Herz, 240-2, 249-53.
109 Ibid., 523-4; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 152.
110 Béthouart, Bataille, 115; Rauchensteiner, Stalinplatz 4, 82.
111 Williams, Adenauer, 328.
112 Ibid., 332.
113 Ibid., 331.
114 Ibid., 332.
115 Ibid., 333.
116 Ibid., 334.
117 Young, France, 204-7.
118 Poidevin, Schuman, 77.
CONCLUSION
1 Williams, Adenauer, 341.
2 Dönhoff, Weit ist der Weg nach Osten, 305-6.
3 Staritz, DDR, 34.
4 Ibid., 34-5.
5 MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser, 196; the idea that the Kaiser was
interested in European unity has been severely mocked by Volker Ulrich in
Die Zeit: see ‘Der Kaiser lacht!’, 16 March 2000.
6 Poidevin, Schuman, 84.
7 Young, France, 41.
8 Jünger, Der Friede, 56, 60, 63.
9 Young, France, 9-10.
10 Ibid., 10-11.
11 Poidevin, Schuman, 84.
12 Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, 16.
13 Robert Birley, Britain in Europe: Reflections on the Development of
a European Society, Reith Lectures, London 1949, 1-2.
14 Young, France, 11, 13.
15 Ibid., 229.
 16 Margret Boveri, Der Verrat im XX. Jahrhundert - für und gegen die
Nation, Hamburg 1956, 8; Philippe Burrin, La France à l’heure allemande,
Paris 1995, 467.
17 Clark, Calculated Risk, 447-8.
18 Döblin, Schicksalsreise, 412, 408.

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 Further Reading
There is no book in English that covers the whole period, the four-
power military occupation of Germany and Austria between the years 1945
and 1949. Douglas Botting’s In the Ruins of the Reich dwells on the early
period, but omits Austria; while the dated but still useful Four Power
Control in Germany and Austria by Michael Balfour and John Mair
(Oxford 1956) finishes with the creation of Bizonia at the end of 1946. The
former is strongest on chaos, the latter is best on administration. There are,
however, some excellent monographs covering the individual German
zones: Norman M. Nairmark’s The Russians in Germany (Cambridge,
Mass. and London 1995), Edward N. Peterson’s Russian Commands and
German Resistance: The Soviet Occupation 1945-1949 (New York 1999)
and Gregory Klimov’s Terror Machine (London n.d.) all cover the east. On
the US Zone there is Edward N. Peterson’s American Occupation of
Germany (Detroit 1977). More recently Petra Goedde has looked at
occupation from a woman’s angle in GIs and Germans (New Haven and
London 2003).
The British Military Government is detailed in Patricia Meehan’s
excellent book A Strange Enemy People: Germans under the British 1945-
1950 (London and Chester Springs 2001). What is missing is a study of the
French ZOF: John Young’s France, the Cold War and the Western Alliance
(Leicester and London 1990) is not really that, because it is more concerned
with foreign policy than with administration. There is no book in French
either, where the literature is largely confined to the cultural achievements
of the French occupation.
Nor is there much on Austria. The standby is Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s
Austrocentric The Austrians - A Thousand Year Odyssey (London 1996),
which explains the political background to the State Treaty, but does not
offer much on the events of April 1945. The best source in English is
probably Reinhold Wagnleitner, ed., Understanding Austria (Salzburg
1984), a compilation of the reports filed by the American OSS man Martin
Herz. Mark Clark’s account, Calculated Risk (London 1956), was written at
the height of the Cold War, and it shows.
There is a similar lack of documentation in English on events in
Czechoslovakia. The best remains Alfred M. de Zayas’s Nemesis at
Potsdam (London 1979). All the rest is in German. For a few pages of
Czech perspective, see Zbynek Zeman and Antonin Klimek, The Life of
Edvard Beneš 1884-1948 (Oxford 1997).
De Zayas also provides material on the events in the Prussian east.
Count Hans Lehndorf ’s unbelievably moving East Prussian Diary was
published in English in 1963. It should be reissued. We also possess
Christian von Krockow’s Hour of the Women (London 1991), which charts
the fortunes of his sister Libussa in Pomerania.
Two books record the fates of individual cities: Danzig is covered by
Chris Tighe’s Gdansk - National Identity in the Polish-German Borderlands
(London and Concord 1990), and Breslau’s fate is recounted in Microcosm:
Portrait of a Central European City by Norman Davies and Roger
Moorhouse (London 2002).
The anonymous Woman in Berlin (London 1965) is a graphic account of
the Russian arrival in the city. There is also an abridged edition of Ursula
von Kardorff’s Diary of a Nightmare (London 1965). The most recent
German edition, however, has restored the full text. Wolfgang Leonhard’s
Child of the Revolution was translated by C. M. Woodhouse (London 1979)
and is the standard account of the arrival of the Moscow-based German
communists.
There are a few serious American studies of denazification: James F.
Tent’s Mission on the Rhine (Chicago and London 1982) and Timothy R.
Vogt’s Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany (Cambridge, Mass. and
London 2000). The most relaxed account of denazification is George
Clare’s Berlin Days (London 1989). On individual cases Brigitte Hamann’s
Winifred Wagner - At the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (London 2005) is
highly recommended.
For the pursuit and conviction of Nazi war criminals there is an
emotional account by Tom Bower (Blind Eye to Murder, London 1981). R.
T. Paget’s argument in Manstein - His Campaigns and his Trial (London
1951) is still cogent. G. M. Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary (New York 1947) is
another old book that has its uses. There are also the translated memoirs of
the Nazis who served custodial terms: Speer (1976) and Papen (1952), as
well as Peter Padfield’s life of Hess (1995) and lives of Göring by David
Irving (1989) and Willy Frischauer (1950). Frank M. Buscher’s US War
Crimes Trial Program in Germany (New York, Westport and London 1989)
presents an academic approach. On the treatment of POWs there is nothing
in English, and the leading American expert - Arthur L. Smith - publishes in
German. The best there is can be found in Ernst von Saloman’s highly
coloured account of his own imprisonment: The Answers (London 1954).
Robert H. Abzug gives details of the grisly discovery of the inner
workings of the camps in his Inside the Vicious Heart (New York and
Oxford 1985), as does Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman’s The
Liberation of the Concentration Camps (Washington DC 1987), to which he
provides an introduction. Ben Shepherd’s After Daybreak (London 2005) is
specifically about the freeing of Belsen. On the surviving Jews there is Ruth
Gay’s Safe among the Germans (New Haven and London 2002).
Victor Gollancz’s two polemics on the treatment of the Germans still
make for salutary reading: Leaving them to their Fate: The Ethics of
Starvation (London 1946) and In Darkest Germany (London 1947).
Marlis Steinert provides a scholarly account of the Flensburg regime in
Capitulation 1945: The Story of the Dönitz Government (London 1969).
Frank Howley’s account of the airlift, Berlin Command (New York 1950),
should be read with caution. Ann and John Tusa’s Berlin Blockade (London
1989) is a still fresh general survey.
On culture in the Soviet Zone the best sources are David Pike’s Politics
and Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany (Stanford 1992) and Wolfgang
Schivelbusch’s In a Cold Crater (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1998).
I have also found Jenny Williams’s More Lives than One: A Biography of
Hans Fallada (London 1998) useful. The rather muted cultural policy in the
British Zone is easily gleaned from George Clare. The best source for
America is Carl Zuckmayer’s report - Deutschlandbericht, für das
Kriegministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von America (Göttingen 2004).
The outstanding book on Soviet policy is Vojtech Mastny’s The Cold
War and Soviet Insecurity (New York and Oxford 1996), and more recently
I have found Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin Wars: From World War to Cold War,
1939-1953 (New Haven and London 2006) extremely useful. Something
can be gleaned from Georgi Zhukov’s Reminiscences (Moscow 1985). For
the roles of other Cold Warriors, see Curtis F. Morgan Jnr’s James F.
Byrnes, Lucius Clay and American Policy in Germany 1945-1947
(Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter 2002) or Byrnes’s own account in
Speaking Frankly (London 1947). For Clay’s role in Germany there is Jean
Edward Smith’s The Papers of Lucius D. Clay (Bloomington and London
1974). Truman covers his back in his two-volume Year of Decisions and
Years of Trial and Hope (London 1955). They are very useful for Potsdam.
George Kennan’s Memoirs (London 1968) provide the dissenting view.
Ernest Bevin’s time as foreign secretary is amply covered by Alan Bullock
(London 1983) and in less detail by Peter Weiler (Manchester and New
York 1993). Charles Williams provides a useful, recent account of the rise
of Adenauer (London 2000).
More detailed references and non-English sources will be found in the
notes.

OceanofPDF.com
 Index
Aachen
Abramski, Stanisław, Bishop of Katowice
Abzug, Robert H.: Inside the Vicious Heart
Acher, Achille von
Ackermann, Anton
Adelheide camp
Adenauer, Konrad: forced retirement; resumes mayoralty of Cologne;
dealings with British; and formation of German Federal Republic;
suppresses political rivals; antipathy to Schumacher; on return of German
POWs; visits Russia; protests at dismantling of German industries; attends
United Europe Congress (May 1948); relations with French; and Ruhr
authority; and German reunification; made Chancellor; favours European
union
Adler, Guido
Adler, Viktor
Agee, James
Ahrenshoop (seaside resort)
Albrecht, Professor (of Prague)
Alexander, Field Marshal Haroldt Earl
Alexander, Peter A.
Allied Control Council: established; and Potsdam Agreement; meets in
Berlin; constitution; French obstruct
Allied High Commission: formed from Military Government
Althof’s travelling circus
Altmann, Karl
Alvensleben, Bodo von
Alvensleben, Captain von
Amelunxen, Rudolf
American Forces Network
American Military Government (AMG)
American zone (Germany): material plenty in; refugees in; cooperation
with British and French zones; HQ at Frankfurt-am-Main; civil
administration; US separation from Germans in; extent; anti-frat order
relaxed; theft and plunder in; rapes in; German marriages to US
servicemen; ‘occupation children’ born in; political life in; denazification;
culture in; industrial dismantling prevented; Jewish DP camps in;
internment of Nazis in; food donations in; rations and shortages in; and war
crimes trials; see also United States of America
Amery, John
Andernach camp
Andersch, Alfred
Andrus, Colonel Burton C.
Annan, Noël, Baron
Antipenko (Zhukov’s adjutant)
Ardennes: US campaign in (1944-5)
Arendsee, Marthe
Arendt, Hannah: Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility
Arnim, General Hans-Jürgen von
Arnold, Karl art: plundered and destroyed
artists: colony at Ahrenshoop
Astafiev, Major
Atlantic Charter (1941)
Atlantic Pact (1949)
Atrocities Committee Austria
Attlee, Clement (later 1st Earl): plans occupation; dislikes Germans;
succeeds Churchill as Prime Minister; at Potsdam Conference; favours
withdrawing from Germany
Auden, W. H.
Auerbach camp
Aufbau (periodical)
Aufbau Verlag
Augsburg
Augstein, Rudolf
August William, Prince of Prussia (‘Auwi’)
Auschwitz: liberated; reused by Poles
Aussig (Ustí nad Labem), Czechoslovakia
Aust, Adolf
Austin, Sergeant-Major
Austria: Allies’ view and policy on post-war settlement; elite purged by
Nazis; German annexation (Anschluss, 1938); Jews in; attempts to form
fighting units with Allies; doubts on independence from Germany; denies
war guilt; Russians capture and occupy; political parties formed; declaration
of independence from Germany; forms interim government (1945); Nazis
and Nazism in; German-speaking refugees in; territorial demands; divided
into occupation zones; industrial plant and property removed and
confiscated; communists in; free elections (1945) and Figl government;
under Allied administration; food shortage and supply; receives foreign aid;
four-power Agreement on (1946); State Treaty (1955); Germans expelled;
property claims and restitution; Soviet zone; vineyards; British zone;
American zone; borders agreed; Russian DPs in; French zone; Habsburgs
banned; refugees and DPs in; denazification; capital punishment in;
elections (October 1949); German POWs in; and South Tyrol; peace treaty
proposed; Soviet kidnappings in; Soviet obstructionism in; currency; see
also Upper Austria; Vienna
Austrian Centre
Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP)
Austrian Socalist Party (SPÖ)
Avenarius, Johannes
Bach-Zelewski, Erich von dem
Bacque, James: Other Losses
Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim camp
Bad Nenndorf
Bad Oeynhausen
Baden
Baden-Baden
Bader, Untersturmführer
Badoglio, Marshal Pietro
Baeck, Leo
Bähr, Erna (‘Bärchen’)
Balfour, Michael
Baltic States: German-speaking population
Barkow
Barnetson, Major William
Barraclough, Brigadier John
Baruch, Bernard
BASF, Ludwigshafen
Bauer, Christoph
Bauer, Otto
Baum, Otto
Baur, Hans
 Bavaria
Baxa, Captain
Bayreuth
Bayrische Volkspartei (BVP)
Becher, Johannes R.; Manifest des Kulturbundes zur demokratischen
Erneuerung Deutschlands
Becher, Lily
Beck, Colonel-General Ludwig
Becker, Frau (of Brandenburg)
Becker, Hans von
Beckmann, Christel
Bédarida, Renée
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Beheim-Schwarzbach, Martin
Behr, Fritz
Bekessy, Imre
Belgium: POW camps in; post-war trials
Belokopitov, Andrei
Belsen see Bergen-Belsen
Ben-Gurion, David
Beneš, Edvard
Benn, Gottfried
Berchtesgaden
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: Jewish prisoners in; British enter;
as Jewish DP camp; newsreel photographs from; Germans forced to visit;
food rations; Gollancz visits; SS prisoners in; culprits tried and punished
Berger, Gottlob
Bergius, Friedrich
Berlin: French granted sector; Soviet conquest and occupation of;
ceasefire signed (2 May 1945); rape in; illegitimate children; Western Allies
arrive in; surrender document signed in; communist-nominated
administration; local elections (September 1945); rubble cleared and city
reorganised; food shortages and subsistence; isolation; disease; Allied
Control Council established in; US-RUSSIAN conflicts in; partition into
zones; burial of dead in; houses requisitioned by Allies; mortality rate under
occupation; music and concerts; conditions (1945-6); German refugees in;
Kommandatura in; Russian dominance in; deputy military governors
(DMGs); Soviet administrative structure; arts and culture in; homes
restored; monuments destroyed; industries removed by Russians to east;
British in; Soviet blockade and Allied airlift (1947-8); denazification in;
deaths from TB; black market in; crime in; art treasures plundered; Truman
visits; severe winters; elections (May 1946); (October 1946); and Allied
disagreements; Reuter’s mayoralty; Western zone prosperity; Allied
military strength in; police; Russians cut off milk supply; Soviet military
strength in; currency circulation; Soviet-inspired violence in; Western
demonstrations for democratic freedom; divided; tuberculosis; housing;
road traffic resumes
Berlin, Irving
Berlin Free University
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Berling, General Zygmunt
Bernadotte, Count Folke
Berry, Sir Vaughan
Bersarin, Colonel-General Nicholas E.
Bersin, Sergeant
Besser, Walter
Béthouart, Lieutenant-General Emile-Marie: on destruction in Vienna;
status in Vienna; meets Clark; Koniev meets; acquires Palais Lobkowitz in
Vienna; visits Mauthausen; on Archduke Otto; on punishment of Nazis; on
hardships in Vienna; and Koenig
Bevin, Ernest: declines to defend Austria; as Foreign Secretary; and
Pakenham; on French communists; and Ruhr; at Potsdam; hostility to
Soviet Russia; on maintenance of Hess; favours divided Germany; favours
remaining in Germany; and cession of South Tyrol to Austria; and
Molotov’s wish for unified Germany; invites US to station B-29 bombers in
Britain; refuses communication with Russians during Berlin blockade
Biberteich camp, Czechoslovakia
Bidault, Georges
Biddle, Francis
Biel, Heinz
Bielenberg, Christabel
Bierut, Bołesław
Big Lift, The (film)
Bildt, Paul
 Bimko, Dr Hadassah
Birley, Sir Robert
Biscari
Bismarck, Prince Otto von
Bizonia (US-British zones)
black market: transactions; development and operation; and crime
Blaha, General
Blanckenburg family
Blankenhorn, Herbert
Blaschtowitschka, Dr
Blaskowitz, General Johannes
Blomberg, Field Marshal Werner von
Bluméon
Blum, Moritz
Bogomolov, Alexander
Bohle, Ernst
Bohlen, Charles (‘Chip’)
Bohlen und Halbach, Gustav von
Böhler, Josef
Böhm, Johann
Böhm, Karl
Böhm-Baweerk family
Bohrer, Karl-Heinz
Boislambert, Hettier de
Böll, Heinrich: Die Botschaft; ‘Geschäft ist Geschäft’ in Wanderer
kommst du nach Spa, Erzählungen; Kreuz ohne Liebe; ‘Kumpel mit dem
langen Haar’; ‘Lohengrins Tod’; ‘Mein Onkel Fred’; ‘When the War Was
Over’
Bolling, General Alexander
Bolzano-Bozen
Bongers, Else
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
Bonin, Colonel Bogislaw von
Bonn: as West German capital
Borchard, Leo
Borchert, Wolfgang: Draussen vor der Tür (play; filmed as Liebe 1947)
Bormann, Martin
 Bornholm (island), Denmark
Borotra, Jean
Böttner, Professor Arthur
Boveri, Margret: reaches Teupitz; disparages Dönitz; in Charlottenburg;
on Red Army soldiers’ behaviour; on women working in Berlin; meets
surviving Jews; on food shortage; on Americans in Germany; crosses into
Franconia; attends Berlin concert; on Bamberg; on Western Allies’
plundering; on Fragebogen; on shortage of German men; on prisoners in
Soviet Union; on accused at Nuremberg; on arrests in Potsdam; on number
of French arrests; Tage des Überlebens
Bradley, General Omar
Brandenburg
Brandt, Karl
Brandt, Willy
Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther von
Braun, Eva
Braunschweig, Eberhard von
Brech, John
Brecht, Bertolt
Breker, Arno
Bremen: ceded by British to Americans
Brenner
Breslau (Wrocław)
Briand, Aristide
Bridgend, South Wales
Britain: policy on Germany; advance into Germany and central Europe;
wartime alliance with USSR; refuses to recognise Renner regime in
Austria; dispute with Yugoslavia over Trieste and Carinthia; and Dönitz
government; and Princess Victoria Louise; arrival in Berlin; popularity in
Berlin; and development of German constitution; complains of Russian
thefts; forms Rhineland-Westphalia, 255; reputation; dealings with
Adenauer; supports Schumacher; Austrian policy; presence in Austria;
administration in Vienna; and deportation of Cossacks to Russia; employs
German and Austrian Jews in army; suspicion of Jewish influx into
Germany; changes policy on fraternising with Germans; treatment of
German POWs; POW camps in; and Nazi war criminals; and war crimes
trials; ends war trials; general election (July 1945); policy at Potsdam;
economic and financial weakness; rejects People’s Congress; and Berlin
airlift; Adenauer opposes entry to Common Market; effects of war on; post-
war retribution; decline as power
British Austrian Legal Unit (BALU)
British Control Commission
British Free Corps
British zone (Germany): German refugees in; co-operation with
American and French zones; tolerance; denazification; military government
in; education in; industrial plant removed; culture in; food and clothing
shortages in; thefts in
Britten, Benjamin
Brno, Czechoslovakia: death march
Broch, Hermann
Brost, Erich
Brown, Ralph
Brüning, Heinrich
Brunner, Alois (‘Jupo’)
Brunswick
Brunswick, Ernest-Augustus, Duke of
Brussels Pact (1948)
Brüx (Most), Czechoslovakia
Bryant, Lieutenant-Colonel George (born Breuer)
Buchenwald concentration camp
Büderich camp
Bugner, Helene
Bühler (state secretary)
Bulganin, Marshal Nikolai Alexandrovich
Bulgarians: population transfer (1913)
Bumballa, Raoul
Burgenland
Bürklin, Wilhelm Burschenschaften (student corps)
Busch, Field Marshal Ernst
Bussche-Streithorst, Axel Freiherr von dem
Byrnes, James: on Roosevelt’s anger with Germans; and Polish borders;
policy on Germany; and Austrian settlement; accompanies Truman to
Potsdam Conference; on Churchill at Potsdam; and Bevin’s hostility to
Soviet Russia; at Moscow CFM (December 1945); offers to merge
American zone with British; and German curency reform
Čabrinovič, Nedeljko
Cadogan, Sir Alexander
Cailliau, Madame Alfred (née de Gaulle)
Calmon, Major
Canada: German POW camps in; tries German war criminals
Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm
cannibalism
Cannon, General John
Caprivi, Georg Leo, Graf von
CARE see Co-operative of American Remittances to Europe
Carinthia
Carpenter, Len
Carr, Edward Hallett
Carsten, F. L.
Casablanca Conference (1943)
Cassel
Celibidache, Sergiu censorship: in Soviet zone
Chaloner, Major (of Hanover Information Council)
Chapigneulles, Major
Charlemagne, Emperor: crown discovered
Cheetham, N. J. A.
Cherrière, General P. R. P.
chewing gum
children: conditions and life
Chotinsky, Fyodor
Christian Democratic Union (CDU): formed; leaders; and Berlin
elections (1946); demands national representation; in West German
elections (1949)
Christlich-Sozial Union (CSU)
Chuikov, Vassily
Churcher, Brigadier John Bryan
Churchill, Mary
Churchill, Rhona
Churchill, (Sir) Winston S.: on treatment of Germans; drafts Atlantic
Charter; as premier (1940); hostility to Prussians; apprehensions over
Soviet Russia; and Polish borders; promises to free Austria from Prussians;
and Dönitz government; sends ‘iron curtain’ telegram to Truman; protests at
British treatment of German leaders; approves expulsion of Germans in
central Europe; Fulton speech (1946); and British entry into Vienna; Horthy
writes to; Göring quotes; intercedes for Kesselring; hostility to Russians;
pleads for French zone in Germany; at Yalta; at Potsdam Conference;
concern for weakened British economy; loses premiership to Attlee; and
granting of Königsberg to Russia; supports Byrnes; addresses United
Europe Congress (May 1948) cigarettes: as currency cinema: in Soviet
zone; in American zone; in Austria
Civil Affairs Division (CAD; US War Department)
Clare, George: finds Jewish survivors; with British in Berlin; on
Neumann’s satire; attends theatre; meets Karl Arnold; shares rations with
children; and denazification; on German-speaking colleagues; on Karajan;
and Austrian Nazis; and Anglo-German fraternising; and German scientists
Clark, Clifford
Clark, General Mark: aggressiveness; on Soviet looting; on Figl;
administration in Vienna; relations with Koniev; anti-Soviet stance; on
Austrian food supply; popularity in Austria; and Austrian culture; on
Moscow Conference (1947); and Austrian airlift; doubts over Allied
achievements
Clarke, Eric
Clay, General Lucius: and arrest of Dönitz; and absence of Nazi
underground movement; heads US mission in Berlin; relations with
Russians; and expulsion of ethnic Germans from central Europe; authority;
in Frankfurt-am-Main; attitude to Russians; on anti-frat order; background;
policy on Germany; and retention of German industry; and appointment of
German political leaders; denies Ruhr benefits to Russians; Schumacher
negotiates with; on French depredations in Baden-Württemberg; differences
with Koenig; on French demands for coal; prevents dismantling of German
industrial sites; and French customs wall in Saar; praises RIAS; favours
German self-government; and denazification process; and food shortages;
attempts to stop use of cigarettes as currency; requests relief from USA; and
German art treasures; denies looting charges against soldiers; apologises for
US interrogation methods; on Russia’s German POWs; and German POWs
in Poland; and Nuremberg trials; calls for execution of Malmédy murderers;
and agreement on Berlin; meets Zhukov; supports Byrnes; antipathy to
French; favours inter-zonal co-operation; and currency reform; and Soviet
blockade in Berlin; on US military strength in Berlin; and Berlin airlift;
concedes Soviet request for currency circulation; and founding of West
German state; and Soviet-provoked rioting in Berlin; and Berliners’ anti-
communist demonstrations; on proposed Soviet air force manoeuvres over
Berlin; and founding of Free University in Berlin; counters Russian
condemnation of Dresden bombing; honoured in Berlin; on future of Ruhr
Clemenceau, Michel
Clift, Montgomery
Cold War: Stalin disfavours; beginnings; develops
collective guilt
Cologne: destruction; Adenauer in; slowness in recovery
Cominform: established
Communist Party of Germany (KPD): refounded; and Berlin elections
(1946); renamed SED
concentration camps: reused by Allies; Jews in; categories of inmates;
liberated; killing methods; inmates ordered to be killed; in Austria; Czech;
in Silesia; in Russian zone; German disbelief in; tours; trials of
administrators; see also individual camps
Concordia Bureau
Conference of Foreign Ministers (CFM): Moscow (December 1946);
decided at Potsdam; first meeting (London, 1945); London (January 1947);
Moscow (March 1947); London (November 1947); London (February
1948); London (July 1948)
Coningham, Air Marshal Sir Arthur
Conrad, Josef
Control Commission Germany (CCG)
Control Council see Allied Control Council
Co-operative of American Remittances to Europe (CARE)
Cossacks: fight against Red Army; repatriated to Russia under Yalta
Agreement
Council of Europe: formed
Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany
(CRALOG)
Couve de Murville, Maurice
Cranborne, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount (later 5th Marquess of
Salisbury)
 crime: and black market; theft
Croats
Croy, Princess Agathe
Cullis, M. F.
Cultural Alliance see Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung
Deutschlands
Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquess
Cuxhaven
Czechoslovakia: territorial claims; settlement and minorities problem;
formed (1919); Germans occupy (1939); Sudetenländers (German minority)
in; communists take over (1948); liberated (1945); purge (1945); revenge
and atrocities against Germans; rapes in; concentration camps; American
zone; suicides; torture in; expulsion of Germans and minorities; People’s
Courts; German POWs in; post-war government; under Soviet influence;
effects of peace settlement on; see also Prague
Dachau concentration camp
Dahrendorf, Gustav
Dahrendorf, Ralf, Baron
Dalade, Colonel
Daladier, Edouard
Dalton, Hugh
Danzig (Gdansk)
Darré, Walter
‘death marches’
De Gasperi, Alcide
de Lancie, John
Deleuze, Major
Dempsey, General Sir Miles
denazification
Devers, General Jacob
Dibelius, Otto
Dick, Professor Walter
Dickens, A. G.
Diels, Rudolf
Dietrich, Landrat (of Ruppin)
Dietrich, Otto
Dietrich, General Sepp
 Diewald (Austrian lawyer)
Dimitrov, Georgy displaced persons (DPs): in central Europe; looting
and killing by; rapes by; in black market
Ditzen, Rudolf (Hans Fallada)
Ditzen, Suse
Dix, Otto
Dix, Rudolf
Dixon, Specialist Sergeant Shirley
Djilas, Milovan
Dmowski, Roman
Dobbek, Dr
Döblin, Alfred; Berlin-Alexanderplatz
‘Doktora’ (of Königsberg)
Dollfuss, Engelbert
Dombrowski (Polish policeman)
domobranci (Slovenian home guard)
Dönhoff, Marion, Gräfin
Dönitz, Admiral Karl
Donnedieu de Vabres, Henri
Donovan, William
Dortmund
Dos Passos, John: on US Military Government HQ in Frankfurt; on co-
operation between Western zones; on Vienna; on Fragebogen and
denazification; and US hatred of Germans; on DPs’ lawlessness; on Rhine
Meadow camps; reports Nuremberg trials; interviews Clay
Douda (Czech police director)
Douglas, Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto
Draht, Andreas
Drambusch (forester)
Draper, General William
Dratvin, General M. I.
Dresden
Dresden Gallery
Drobner, Bolesław
drugs
Dubensky, William
Dubois, Lieutenant Herbert
 Duermayer, Heinz
Dunbaugh, Captain Frank M.
Dunn, Thomas
Duppau, Czechoslovakia
Düsseldorf
Dyck, Dr van
Dymshitz, Colonel Alexander
Dyszkant, Dr
East Germany see German Democratic Republic
East Prussia: Soviet offensive and destruction in; German population;
religious faith; refugees from; starvation in; Stalin’s view on at Potsdam;
Germans driven from; Russians appropriate part; see also Prussia
Ebensee, Austria
Eberle, Henrik and Matthias Uhl (eds): Das Buch Hitler (The Hitler
Book)
Ebert, Friedrich
Eclipse, Operation
Eden, Anthony (later 1st Earl of Avon): and transfer of Germans from
East Prussia; disdain for Austria; recognises Austrian claim to
independence; and Nuremberg trials; at Potsdam Conference; supports
Italian claim to South Tyrol
Edler, Franz
Ehrenburg, Ilya
Eichmann, Adolf
Eigruber, August Gauleiter
Einsiedel, Horst von
Eisenerz Trial (1946)
Eisenhower, General Dwight D.: declares war ended; orders Dönitz’s
arrest; visits concentration camp; in Frankfurt-am-Main; reputation; and
anti-frat order; and US pillaging; and Göring’s capture; and agreement on
Berlin; and territorial allocations at Potsdam; Truman visits in Frankfurt;
threatens to scrap Control Council; federal officials quit under
Eisler, Hans
Emery, Major
Engelbert, Otto
Epenstein, Hermann von
Erdmannsdorff, Otto von
Erhard, Ludwig
Erhardt, John
Erlach, Albert von
Ermland
Erzgebirge, the
Esser, Hans
Esser, Heinz
Eulenburg, Siegfried
European Advisory Commission (EAC)
European Union (earlier Common Market)
Falkenburger, Paul
Falkenhausen, General Alexander von
Fallada, Hans see Ditzen, Rudolf
Fandrich (judge)
Farmer, Captain Walter
Faulhaber, Cardinal Michael
Fechner, Max
Fediunsky, General I. I.
Fegelein, Hermann
Fegelein, Waldemar
Fehrer, Franz
Feitenhansl, Karl
Felix, Leo (‘Felix Field’)
Feuchtwanger, Lion
Février, Jacques
Fichte, Paul
Fiedler, Ludwig
Field Security Service (FSS; British)
Fierlinger, Zdenek
Figl, Leopold
Filippov, Captain films see cinema
Final Solution; see also Jews
Fischer, Ernst; The Rebirth of My Country
Fischhorn Castle, near Zell-am-See
Fitsch, Eduard
Fläschner, Hans
Flensburg
 Flick Group
Flieder, Paul
Flory, General L. D. (Les)
Flossenbürg concentration camp
Foord, Brigadier E. J.
Forrestal, James
Forst, Willy
Forster, Albert
Foster, Norman, Baron
Fragebogen
France: revenge acts against Germany; goals for defeated Germany;
seeks recognition as great power; claims to Rhine and Ruhr; demands for
zone of occupation in Germany; employs German forced labour; granted
sector in Berlin; and Austrian settlement; repossesses country after
liberation; advance to Austria; forces in occupation of Rhineland; advance
on Baden; undisciplined behaviour; arrival in Berlin; administration in
Berlin; sympathy towards Germans; creates Rhineland-Palatinate; plans for
Rhineland; favours united Europe; opposes German unity; atrocities against
Germans; policy on Germany; jurisdiction over German territory; acquires
Saar; demands coal from Germany; in Austria; removes Austrian industrial
plant; administration in Vienna; Austrian view of; cultural activities in
Vienna; on German guilt; and denazification; and German POWs; not
invited to Potsdam; and Polish settlement; treaty with Soviet France -
continued Russia (1945); friction with Soviet Russia; approves of German
territorial concessions in east; rights to Saar; opposes Truman Doctrine; and
Soviet claims to Ruhr; forms Trizonia with USA and Britain; non-
participation in Berlin airlift; attitude to and relations with Adenauer; post-
war arrests and trials; effect of peace settlement on
Frank, Benno
Frank, Hans
Frank, Karl-Hermann
Frankfurt-am-Main; Städel Gallery
Franz, Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein
Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia: body moved and reinterred
Frederick Leopold, Prince of Prussia
Frederick William I, King of Prussia: body moved and reinterred
Free Austrian (World) Movement (FAM; FAWM)
 Free Democratic Party (FDP)
Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ): formed
Freisler, Roland
Freiwaldau (Jeseník), Czechoslovakia
French zone (ZOF; Germany): refugees in; co-operation with British
and American zones; numbers of French in; exports to France; industrial
plant transferred to France; treatment of Germans in; German youth
admiration for French; culture in; food shortages in; supposed market for
babies; black market in; and Berlin airlift
Freud, Anton
Freudenstadt
Freudenthal, Czechoslovakia
Freund, Hans
Frey, Hans
Freyberg, General Sir Bernard
Freytag, Gustav Frick, Wilhelm
Friede, Dieter Friedeburg, Admiral Hans von
Friedrich, Ruth Andreas: in Brandenburg; welcomes end of Reich; on
life in occupied Berlin; sees Americans in Steglitz; and denazification and
Fragebogen; and disposal of dead; at killing of Borchard; on influx of
Königsberger; and death of Bersarin; and cultural events; on German GI
brides; on French influence on German youth; on theft of wood from grave;
and Russian occupation of Chancellery; on returning German POWs; on
Nuremberg trials; and Truman’s visit to Berlin; welcomes Potsdam
Agreement; in severe winter (1946-7); on resurgence of Nazism in
Hamburg; on Berlin blockade; and Berlin airlift; flees to West; Schauplatz
Berlin
Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Prince
Frings, Cardinal Joseph, Archbishop of Cologne
Fritsch, General Werner von
Fritzsche, Hans
Froning, Karl
Fuernberg, Friedl
Fugger von Glött, Prince
Funk, Walter
Fürstenstein, Silesia
Furtwängler, Wilhelm
 Fyfe, Sir David Maxwell
Galen, Clemens August, Graf von, Bishop of Münster
Gamelin, General Maurice Gustave
Ganeval, General Jean
Gangl, Major
gangs: in central Europe
Gans, Major Hiram
Garibaldi, Sante
Gasperi, Alcide De see De Gasperi, Alcide
Gaulle, Charles de: proposes indefinite occupation of Rhineland; and
changes to Germany; claims German labour for France; orders Lattre de
Tassigny to cross Rhine; and French independence; advocates co-operation
with Germany; Soviet hostility to; favours Germany as confederation;
Hopkins negotiates with; Roosevelt disdains; on Potsdam agreement to
create central agencies in zones; supports European union
GDR see German Democratic Republic
Gebauer, Alfred
Geneva Convention; and Nuremberg trials
George, Heinrich
German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany): lawyers in;
founded; Russians introduce new currency
German Federal Republic (FDR; West Germany): beginnings; created;
Russians oppose; administrative structure and constitution; adopts basic
law; elections (August 1949)
Germans: minorities in non-German states; ordered to visit
concentration camps; suicides after defeat; Czech atrocities against;
expelled from central and eastern Europe; resettlement; in Poland; abducted
to develop industry in Russia; work for Allies; expelled from Austria;
property assets and restitution; disbelieve atrocity stories about Nazis
Germany: wartime casualties; and Atlantic Charter; divided between
Allies; proposed division into small states; Allies demand unconditional
surrender; destruction of towns and cities; evacuates prisons; industrial
plant removed; forms interim government under Dönitz; surrenders (8 May
1945); communists in; Allied fraternising forbidden; policy in
Czechoslovakia; internal deportations; Soviet administrative structure in;
wine plundered; industrial survival; US policy on; currency reformed and
stabilised; French changing policy on; Allied disputes over industrial
activity; literary revival; Jews in; and collective guilt; starvation policy in;
food riots and demonstrations; plague of wild boars; prisoners of war;
military organisation and command; tries Nazi war criminals; lawyers
absolved of Nazi crimes; dissolved as independent nation; discussed at
Potsdam Conference; divided at Potsdam Conference; boundaries; severe
winter (1946-7); Transitional Law passed (1947); split into East and West;
economic recovery; proposed rearmament; effects of war and peace
settlement on
Gernrode, Saxony
Gerö, Dr Joseph
Gertner, Wolfgang
Gessner, Adrienne
Gibson-Watt, Andrew
Gilbert, Felix
Gimborski, Cesaro
Gladow, Werner
Glasenbach, Austria
Glaser, Kurt
Glatz, Silesia
Gleiwitz, Silesia
Glum, Friedrich
Goebbels, Joseph: hopes for Western Allies to attack Russians; predicts
rape by Red Army; on killing of Oppenhof; and behaviour of occupying
Russians; body found; suicide; propaganda films; Rhineland origins; and
Furtwängler; Attlee believes in Soviet hands; on ‘iron curtain’
Goebbels, Magda
Goedde, Petra: GIs and Germans
Gofman, K.
Gollancz, Sir Victor; The Ethics of Starvation; In Darkest Germany
Gomułka, Władisław
Gorbatov, Colonel-General Boris
Gordow, General
Göring, Edda
Göring, Emmy
Göring, Hermann: four-year economic plan; and satire; protects
Karajan; property houses Jewish DPs; art collection; capture and trial at
Nuremberg; attitude to colleagues; suicide; and Winifred Wagner; on
dissolution of Allied coalition
Görlitz
Gotthelft, Ille
Gottschee
Gouliga, Captain Alexander
Graf, Willi
Grass, Günter: xiii, 249; Im Krebsgang; The Tin Drum
Graz
Great Escape (Stalag Luft III, Silesia)
Greece: population transfer with Turks; communists in; in US sphere of
influence
Greene, Graham
Greene, Hugh Carleton
Gregor, Carl
Greifenberg
Greisser, Arthur
Grese, Irma
Griehsel, Max
Griessmann, Erika
Grillparzer, Franz
Grimm, Dr Carl
Grimm, Eduard
Grinberg, Zalman
Grisebach, August
Grisebach, Hanna
Gros, Professor (of France)
Grosz, George
Grotewohl, Otto
Group
Gruber, Karl
Gruenther, General Alfred
Grünberg, Lower Silesia
Gründgens, Gustaf
Grüssau monastery, Silesia
Grynspann, Herschel
Günsche, Otto
Günter, Prince von Schönburg-Waldenburg
Günther, Marianne
Gusen concentration camp
Gutmann, Rudolf
Guyot (French torturer)
Habe, Hans (Janos)
Habermas, Jürgen
Habsburg, Karl Ludwig von
Habsburg, Otto von
Habsburg, Robert von
Hackmüller (Baldur von Schirach’s secretary)
Haffner, Sebastian
Hague Conventions
Hahn, Otto
Halder, General Franz
Halem, Nikolaus von
Halifax, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood t Earl of
Hamburg: destruction; British in; accommodation shortage
Hamelin
Hammerstein-Equord, Baron
Hammerstein-Equord, Colonel-General Kurt von
Hanke, Gauleiter Karl
Hanover; liberated and occupied
Harcourt, Robert d’
Hardenberg, Graf Carl-Hans von
Hardman, Rev. Leslie
Harriman, Averell
Harris, Air Marshal Sir Arthur
Hartheim concentration camp
Harwood, Ronald: Taking Sides
Hassell, Ulrich von
Haubach, Theodor
Hauptmann, Gerhart
Hausenstern, Wilhelm
Häussermann, Ernst
Hautmann, Rudolf
‘Haw Haw, Lord’ see Joyce, William
Hawelka, Josefine and Leopold
Hedy, Sister
Heidelberg
Heiden, Konrad
Heilig, Bruno: Men Crucified
Heimpel, Professor
Heine, Heinrich
Heinrich, Theodore (‘Ted’)
Heisenberg, Werner
Heligoland
Henderson, Sir Nevile
Henderson, (Sir) Nicholas Hengher, Sofie
Henlein, Konrad
Henry V (film)
Hentig, Hartwig von
Hentschel, Volker: Ludwig Erhard
Herbert, General Sir Otway
Herbruck, Franconia
Hermann-Göring-Werke, Linz
Hermann-Neisse, Max
Hermes, Andreas
Hermine of Reuss, Princess (Kaiser’s second wife)
Hernnstadt, Rudolf
Herrell, Captain (Günzburg commandant)
Hertz, Gustav
Herz, John
Herz, Martin
Herzfeld, Wieland
Hess, Fritz
Hess, Otto
Hess, Rudolf
Heuss, Theodor
Heydrich, Reinhard
Heym, Stefan
Hildebrandt, Friedrich
Hildebrandt, Richard
Hildesheim
 Himmler, Heinrich: hopes for Western Allies attacking USSR; and
Eichmann’s anti-Jewish activities; and Höss’s attempted escape; Dönitz
spurns; swallows cyanide; bargains with Jews; and extermination of
inmates of camps; authority; capture and suicide; invoked at Nuremberg;
and Ohlendorf
Hindenburg, Oskar von
Hindenburg, Paul von; bones moved
Hindenburg (Zaborze)
Hirst, Major Ivan
Hitler, Adolf: votes for; hopes for Allies to attack Russia; suicide; and
July assassination plot (1944); dismisses Hohenzollern princes from army;
orders Himmler to kill inmates of camps; body not found; and ethnic
Germans from Romania; disparages Knappertsbusch; bones offered to
Austria; German opposition to; and Winifred Wagner; fate investigated;
remains removed by Russians; accepted as Chancellor; authority; deposes
Horthy; policy on ethnic Germans (‘Heim ins Reich’); Mein Kampf
Hlond, Cardinal Augustus
Hochberg family
Hoechst factory, Dortmund Hoegner, Wilhelm
Hoepner, General Erich
Hofer, Andreas
Hofer, Franz
Hofer, Karl
Hoffmann, Heinrich
Hohenschönhausen concentration camp
Hohenzollern family
Holborn, Hajo
Holland: POW deaths in; post-war trials in
Hollos, Julius
Holstein
Honecker, Erich
Honner, Franz
Hood, Samuelh Viscount
Hoover, Herbert: diet
Hope, Bob
Hopkins, Harry
Hoppe, Paul Werner
 Hörnle, Edwin
Horst-Glaisenau, Edmund (General Glaise von Horstenau )
Horthy, Admiral Miklós
Horwell, Captain
Höss, Obersturmbannf ührer Rudolf
Hotek, Damian
Howley, Colonel Frank
Huber, Kurt
Hubert, Prince of Prussia
Huch, Ricarda
Hulbert, Wing Commander Norman
Hull, Cordell
Humboldt, Wilhelm: archive destroyed
Hungary: Swabians (ethnic Germans) expelled; territories; truce signed
Hurdes, Felix
Hussels, Dr
Huylers (US confectioners)
Hyde, Lieutenant-Colonel Harford Montgomery
Hyde White, Wilfrid
Hynd, John
Ida zu Stolberg-Rossla, Princess
IG Farben (company)
Iglau (Jihlava), Czechoslovakia
Ilg, Ulrich
Innitzer, Cardinal Theodor
Innsbruck; University of
Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA)
International Military Tribunal see Nuremberg trials
International Red Cross see Red Cross
Iran: Soviet troops in
‘iron curtain’
Irving, David
Ismay, General Sir Hastings
Italy: and South Tyrol; evacuated by Allies (1946); cedes African
colonies; recovers Trieste
Itter, Schloss, near Kitzbühel
Ivanov, Makar
 Jackson, Peter ( formerly Jacobus)
Jackson, Robert H.
Jacobs, Bruno
Jakupov, Lieutenant-Colonel
Jaspers, Gertrud (‘Trudlein’)
Jaspers, Karl
Javorička, Czechoslovakia
JCS see Joint Chiefs of Staff
Jecklen, Friedrich
Jena
Jenkins, Newell
Jerz, John
Jesse, Willi
Jewish Brigade
Jews: Western Allies and; in Austria; in concentration camps; in Berlin
administration; survivors; houses requisitioned by Allies; as administrators
in Russian zone; stolen property and restitution; in British army; position in
Germany; emigrate to Palestine; refugees and DPs; newspapers; revenge
acts; Nazi persecution of; paintings safeguarded; and Nuremberg trials;
interrogate Nazis for trial; Ohlendorf on; see also Final Solution
Jodl, General Alfred
Joham, Josef
John George, Prince of Saxony
Johnert, Hans
Joint Chiefs of Staff documents: JCS JCS 1779
Joos, Joseph
Jouhauxéon
Jouvet, Louis
Joyce, William (‘Lord Haw Haw’)
Jugl, Josef
Jülich
Jung, Rudolf
Jünger, Ernst: author meets; American soldiers billeted on; on dead in
Pforzheim; letter from Sophie Podewils; reputation; on collective guilt; and
Fragebogen; on food rations; arrested; favours European union; Der
Friede; On the Marble Cliffs
Jünger, Ernst, Jr: killed
 Junkers
Jusek (executioner’s assistant)
Justi, Ludwig
‘K., H.’
K, Sonja
Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich
Kahane, Rabbi
Kaisen, Wilhelm
Kaiser, Jakob
Kálal, Major (commandant of Theresienstadt)
Kaliningrad see Königsberg
Kállay, Miklós
Kaltenbrunner, Ernst
Kaltofen, Eduard
Kameke, Frau von (of Potsdam) Kanaltal (Fella river)
Karajan, Herbert von
Kardorff family
Kardorff, Ina von
Kardorff, Konrad von
Kardorff, Ursula von: flees to Berlin; in Jettingen; traces mother; on
conditions in Berlin; crosses into Russian zone; visits theatre; praises BBC
programme on July Plot; on treatment of Jews; and German guilt; on
Fragebogen; and ban on fraternising; and allocation of zones; on Potsdam
Conference; Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 1942-1945
Kardorff-Oheimb, Siegfried and Kathinka
Karin II (Goering’s yacht)
Karzin, Alfred
Kästner, Erich
Katscher, Paul
Katyn massacre (1940)
Kaunitz College
Keating, Senator Kenneth
Keelhaul, Operation
Keeling, Ralph F.: Gruesome Harvest
Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm
Keller, Karl
Kempner, Robert
Kendal, Major (born Knobloch)
Kennan, George F.
Keppler, Wilhelm
Kerr, Alfred
Kertész, Imre
Kesselring, Field Marshal Albert
Keyes, General Geoffrey
Keynes, John Maynard, Baron
Kiep, Otto
King, Harry
Kinsky, Graf Heinrich
Kirchheimer, Otto
Kiridus, Johann
Kirschbaum, Joseph
Kisch, Egon Erwin
Kitzbühel
Kladno, Czechoslovakia
Klagenfurt
Klahr, Alfred
Klaus, Marianne
Kleber, Andreas
Kleiber, Erich
Klein, Dr Fritz
Kleist, Field Marshal Ewald von
Klemm, Herbert
Klemperer, Otto
Klemperer, Victor
Klering, Hans
Klimov, Gregory
Kling, Alfred
Knappertsbusch, Hans
Knoechlein, Fritz
Knott, Otto
Koblenz
Koch, Gauleiter Erich Koch, Ilse
Koch, Karl
Koeltz, General Louis Marie
Koenig, General Pierre
Koeppler, Heinz
Kogon, Eugen; Der SS-Staat
Kokorin (Stalin’s nephew)
Koller, Karl
Komotau, Czechoslovakia
Koniev, General Ivan
Königsberg (Kaliningrad)
Konrad, Father Joachim
Kopelev, Lev
Kopf, Maximilian
Koplenig, Johann
Korean War (1950-3)
Körner, Paul
Körner, General Theodor
Košice Statutes (Czechoslovakia, 1945)
Kotikov, Major-General A. G.
Kouril, Jan
Kovner, Abba
Kozeluhová, Helena
Kraemer, Fritz
Kraft, Walter
Kramer, Josef
Krauland, Peter
Krauss, Klemens
Krebs, General Hans
Krebs, Willi
Kreisau Circle
Kremen, Ottokar
Krenek, Ernst
Krockow family
Krockow, Libussa von
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Alfried
Krupps works, Essen
Kubuschok, Dr (Breslau lawyer)
Kuckhoff, Adam and Greta
Kuhn, Richard
Kühnemann, Eugen
Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands
Külz (of CDU)
Kumm, Otto
Kundt, Ernst
Kunschak, Leopold
Künstner, Willi
Kurasov, Vladimir
Lafferanz, Bodo
Laffon, Emile
Lahousen, General-Major Erwin von Lais, Dr
Lammers, Hans
Lamsdorf (Lambinowice) camp, Silesia
Landsberg, Bavaria
Langham, Lieutenant Richard
Langoth, Franz
Langwasser, Nuremberg
La Rocque, Colonel de
Lasch, General Otto
Lasche, Siegfried
Lasky, Lieutenant-Colonel Wolf
Laternser, Dr H.
Lattre de Tassigny, Marshal Jean de
Latzel, Alfred
Laue, Max von
Laval, Pierre
Lawrence, Sir Geoffrey (later Baron Trevethin and Oaksey)
Lazarev, Viktor
Leahy, Admiral William D.
Lease-Lend Agreement (US-British): ends (1945)
Leber, Annedore
Leclerc, General Jacques Philippe, vicomte de Hauteclocque
Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret)
Ledenfels (musician)
Lederer, Captain
Leeb, Field Marshal Wilhelm, Ritter von
Legge, Walter
Lehndorff, Graf Hans
Lehndorff, Graf Heinrich
Lehndorff, Mausi
Leipzig
Leonhard, Wolfgang
Lepman, Yella
Lerchenfeld concentration camp, Czechoslovakia
l’Estrange, Captain de
Lettau, Reinhold
Leudesdorff, René
Leuschner, Wilhelm
Leverkühn, Dr Paul
Levin, Mayer
Levin, Sub-lieutenant
Ley, Robert
Liberal Democratic Party (LPD)
libraries: in American zone
Lidice massacre
Limpächer, Franz
Lincke, Paul
Lindbergh, Charles
Linford, Major
Linz, Austria
Lippmann, Walter
List, Eugene
List, Field Marshal Wilhelm
literature: in American zone; revival in Germany
Litvinov, Maxim
Livonius, Herr von (of Grumbkow)
Lloyd, Colonel Glynn
Lloyd George, David
Lockwenz, Dr
Lodge, Henry Cabot
Lods, Marcel
Loeser, Ewald
Loewenstein, Dr Karl
Löhr, Colonel-General Alexander
London Agreements: 1944 June 1948
London Statute (1945)
Longfordh Earl of see Pakenhamt Baron
Lorbeer, Hans
Lothar, Ernst
Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia
Löwenstein, Prince Hubertus zu
Löwenthal, Fritz
Lower Saxony
Lübeck
Ludin, Hanns
Ludshuveit, Lieutenant Yevgeny
Ludwig, Leopold
Ludwigshafen
Ludwigslust
Lukács, Georg
Lundwall, Dr Erich
Lurçat, Jean
Lusset, Félix
Luxembourg: POW deaths in
Lynch, Pat
Lyndon, Major
Lyne, Major-General Lewis Owen
M., Christel
M., Doris von
Maasburg, Nikolaus von
McCloy, Ellen
McCloy, John
McClure, General Robert
McCreery, General Sir Richard
Machold, Reinhold
Mack, Sir Henry
Maclean, Donald
Macmillan, Harold (later 1st Earl of Stockton)
McNarney, General Joseph T.
McNeil, Hector
Mader, Helene
 Mafalda, Princess of Hesse
Mahr, Franz
Mainz; university
Mair, John
Maisky, Ivan
Makins, Roger
Malenkov, Georgy
Malmédy massacre and trial
Maltheuren concentration camp, Czechoslovakia
Malzacher, Hans
Mander, Sir Geoffrey
Mann, Erika
Mann, Golo
Mann, Heinrich
Mann, Klaus; Auf der Suche nach einem Weg
Mann, Thomas
Manstein, Field Marshal Fritz Erich von
Marcuse, Herbert
Marek, Police Captain Anton
Marek, Max
Margarétha, Eugen: on arrival of Russians in Vienna; on looting; on
American advance; dismissed from job; hears rumour of Schuschnigg’s
poisoning; on Vlasov’s approach; on judging Nazis; on Viennese self-
interest; accommodates English troops; on Austrian elections (1945); on
Soviet occupation of eastern Styria
Markgraf, Paul; police force
Maron, Karl
Maršálek, Hans
Marshall, General George S.
Marshall Plan (1947): Soviet reaction to; anti-communist aims;
initiated; supported by London conference
Marwitz, family von der
Mary, Princess of Hesse
Masaryk, Jan
Mastny, Vojtech
Matchbox, Operation
Matzkowski, Hermann
 Mautern bridge, Austria
Mauthausen concentration camp
Maxwell, Robert
Mayer, Milton
Mayer, René
Mecklenburg
Meissen
Meissner, Otto
Mendelssohn, Felix
Mendelssohn, Peter de
Mengele, Josef
Menne, Bernhard
Mensdorff, Graf Albert
Menuhin, Yehudi
Merton, Richard
Merz von Quirnheim, Colonel
Metternich, Prince Paul von
Metternich, Princess Tatiana von
Meyer, Kurt
Meyer, Oskar
Michel, Heinrich
Mielke, Erich
Mierendorff, Carlo
Mikesch, Stanislaus
Miklos, Béla
Mikoyan, Anastas
Milch, Field Marshal Erhardt
Minden
Mitscherlich, Alexander
Mohapl, Major
Mohnke, SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm
Molkenthin (reporter)
Molo, Walter von
Molotov, Vyacheslav M.: and Sudeten Germans; criticises Western
Allies’ policy on Germany; on number of German prisoners in Russia; and
Potsdam Agreement; at Potsdam Conference; and French demands; favours
East-West cooperation; Bevin challenges; breaks off talks with West (June
1947); and Soviet hostility to West; demands control of exports from
Western Berlin; and government of East Germany
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939)
Moltke, Helmuth James von
Mondorf
Mondwurf, Friedhelm
Monnet, Jean
Mons, Belgium
Monte Cassino abbey, Italy
Montgomery, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Lawt Viscount: accepts
German surrender; orders non-destruction of German weapons; Churchill
protests to over treatment of Germans; as first military governor; promises
to restore party politics; keeps Ruhr coal in Germany; broadcast speech on
imprisoning General Staff officers; and food rationing; and ban on
fraternising; disapproves of Nuremberg trials; Himmler requests meeting
with; Josef Kramer appeals to; favours attacking Russians; and settlement
of Berlin
Monticault, Alain de
Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA; American)
Morgan, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick
Morgenthau, Henry: ‘pastoralisation’ plan for Germany; de Gaulle
rejects plan; proposes separation of Austria from Germany; Clay rejects
proposals; and denazification; and violence against German prisoners;
resigns; and Polish territorial demands; Germany is our Problem
Moroccan troops
Moscow: Conference of Foreign Ministers: (December 1946); (March
1947)
Moscow Declaration (30 October 1943)
Mosely, Leonard
Müller (German clockmaker)
Müller, Heinrich ‘Gestapo’
Müller, Josef (‘Ochsensepp’)
Mumm, Brat von
Munich
Munich Agreement (1938)
Münsterlager
Mürau bei Hohenstadt, Czechoslovakia
 Murphy, Colonel Michael
Murphy, Robert
Muscovites (German communists)
music: in Soviet zone; in American zone; in British zone; in Austria;
denazification of composers
Mussolini, Benito
Nabokov, Nicolas
Nagel, Otto
Naimark, Norman M.: The Russians in Germany
Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor of the French
National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD)
Natzwiller concentration camp
Nazis: employed in Russian zone; opposition to; and Fragebogen; tried
and sentenced; see also denazification
Neave, Major Airey
Neisse, Silesia
Nemmersdorf
Nerwig, Klaus and Frau
Neudörfl, Rudolf
Neues Österreich (newspaper)
Neumann, Franz Leopold
Neumann, Günter
Neurath, Constantin von
Neuss, Silesia
Neustadt, Upper Silesia
Neveu, Ginette
Newman (US governor of Hessen)
newspaper press; Jewish
Nicholls, Jack
Nicols, Philip
Nicolson, Nigel
Niehoff, General Hermann
Niekisch, Ernst
Niemöller, Martin
Nieusela, Hans-Günther
Night of the Long Knives (1934)
Nikitchenko, General Iona
 Nikolsburg, Czechoslovakia
Noiret, General Roger
Nolde, Emil
Nordhausen-Dora
Normann, Käthe von
Normann, Philipp von
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)
Nüll, Edwin von der
Nuremberg Laws
Nuremberg trials: Paul Schmidt at; Göring and; and executions;
established and constituted; treatment of accused; conduct of; sentences;
lesser trials; and severe winter (1946-7)
O5 (Austrian resistance group)
Occupation Marks (currency)
Ochab, Edward
Ödenburg (Sopron)
Oelssner, Fred
Ohlendorf, Otto
Ohrdruf labour camp
Olbricht, General Friedrich
Oldenburg-Januschau, Elard von
O’Neill, Con
opera: in Soviet zone; in American zone
Opfer der Fascismus (OdF)
Oppenhoff, Franz
Oradour-sur-Glane, France
Oran: French fleet sunk by British
Oranienburg
Osberger family
Oscar, Prince of Prussia
Ostpolitik
Ottilinger, Frau
Oulman, Gaston
Padover, Saul
Paget, Reginald
Pakenham, Francis Aungier Pakenham t Baron (later 7th Earl of
Longford)
 Pal, Rahabinode
Palestine: Jewish refugees emigrate to
Palmer, Rex
Pałucki, Władysław
Pancrác (Pankratz), Czechoslovakia
Pannwitz, General Helmuth von
Papagos, Field Marshal Alexander
Papen, Franz von: arrested, tried and acquitted; and Schwerin von
Krosigk; retried and sentenced after Nuremberg acquittal; membership of
Berlin Herrenklub; claims US guards offer suicide means; attends mass
Paris peace conference (1946)
Parker, John J.
Patton, General George S.: visits concentration camp; army in
Czechoslovakia; attitude to Germans; character and manner; reputation; on
Jewish DPs; relieved of command for comment on Nazis; and treatment of
German POWs; orders killing of POWs at Biscari; hostility to Soviet
Russia; on results of war settlement
Patzak, Julius
Paulus, Field Marshal Friedrich
Pauly, Max
Pavlov (interpreter)
Pawlowsky, Dr
Payne Best, Captain Sigismund
Pearson, Lieutenant-Colonel
Pechtel, Ursula
Peenemünde
Peiper, Jochen
Pelican, Fred (born Friedrich Pelikan)
People’s Congress for Unity and Just Peace
Perl, William
Pétain, Marshal Philippe Peters, Dr Theofil
Petersen, Rudolf
Petznek, Frau (née Archduchess Elisabeth)
Pfitzner, Hans
Pfitzner, Josef
Pforzheim
Philby, Kim
 Philip, Prince of Hesse
Picht, Georg
Pieck, Wilhelm
Pierrepoint, Albert
Pillau, East Prussia
Pinson (French ex-Jesuit)
Piquet, Gabriel, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand
Pirchegger, Anton
Pirzio-Biroli, Fey
Plathe
Plattling camp
Plattner (anti-Nazi Tyrolean)
Pleiger, Paul
Pless family
Plettenberg, Graf
Pliever, Theodor; Stalingrad
Podewils, Sophie Dorothea
Podhragy, Baron Leopold Popper von
Pohl, Gerhart
Pohl, Oswald
Pohrlitz camp, Czechoslovakia
Poland: Nazi death camps; border disputes and agreements; Stalin’s
policy on; territorial claims; soldiers liberate Teschen; allocated former
Teutonic regions at Yalta; General Gouvernement; resettlement programme;
claims Breslau; Miliz (organisation); partition; treatment of Germans; racial
minorities in& n; religion in; German disdain for; and deportation of
Germans; anti-semitism in; German POWs in; trial and punishment of war
criminals; Lublin government; Churchill attempts to settle; occupies Silesia;
discussed at Potsdam Conference; as buffer for Soviet Union; effects of
peace settlement on
Pollack, James K.
Pollitzer (or Pollitt), E. H.
Pomerania: disease in; Soviet conquest and occupation of; Germans in;
religious faith
Poncet (French adjutant)
Popławski, Jan-Ludwig
Portman, Sergeant
 Postelberg (Postoloprty), Czechoslovakia
Potsdam: Garrison Church;
destruction and conditions;
Russians in
Potsdam Conference (1945): and policy on occupation; and situation in
eastern Europe; and expulsion of Germans; and territorial allocations;
Agreement; and German coal supply; and Austrian question; on feeding of
Germans; Stalin’s dominance at; inter-Allied differences; France excluded;
agenda; and Polish settlement; arrangements; on transfer of populations;
assessed
Potter, Captain Merle
Prague: uprising (1945); Germans occupy (1939); German population;
atrocities against Germans; Red Army in; torture in; coup (March 1948);
see also Czechoslovakia
Praxmarer, Konrad
Preetorius, Emil
Priess, Hermann
Princip, Gavrilo
prisoners of war (POWs): German; in American camps; in British
camps; in Belgium; tried and sentenced for war crimes; in French camps; in
Russian camps; in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia; released; rights
Privalov, General Pjotr
Probst, Christoph
prostitution
Pruša, Alois and daughters
Prussia: suicides in; Adenauer and; ends as state; see also East Prussia
Pryce-Jones, Alan
publishing: in Soviet zone
Pulitzer, Joseph
Pünder, Hermann
Pust, Heinz
Puttkamer family
Puttkamer, Jesko von
Puttkamer, Robert von
Quadt-Isny, Eugen, Graf
Quebec Conference (1943)
Rabinovich, Leonid
 radio
Radio in American Sector (RIAS)
Radio Liberty
Radley, Arthur
Raeder, Admiral Erich
Rahm, Karl
Ransbach
rape see women
Rath, Ernst vom
Rathenau, Walther
Rattenhuber, Johann
Rauschning, Hermann
Rave, Paul Ortwin
Ravensbrück concentration camp
Ravenstein, Lieutenant-General Hans von
Rawdon, Sergeant R.
Reber, Samuel
Reckzeh, Dr
Red Army: captures and occupies Vienna; rapes ; advance and
behaviour in Europe; compared to American negroes; in occupation of
Berlin; and liberation of Prague (1945); in Prague; behaviour in
Czechoslovakia; in Königsberg; depredations in Silesia; looting in Austria;
see also Soviet Russia
Red Cross
Red Orchestra
Rees, Goronwy
Regensburg
Rehrl, Josef
Reichskristallnacht (1938)
Reichskulturkammer (RKK)
Rein, Dr (prison doctor)
Reinhardt, Professor (conductor)
Reitlinger, Major
Reitsch, Hanna
Remagen
Rendulic, Colonel-General Lothar
 Renner, Karl: heads post-war Austrian government; favours admitting
German refugees to Austria; attacked by Podhragy; supports Anschluss;
mistrusted by Western powers; and Charlemagne’s crown; resists
confiscation of Zistersdorf oilfields; French attitude to; and South Tyrol
Rettig, Gerhard
Reuter, Ernst
Revers, General Georges
Reynaud, Paul
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (newspaper)
Rheinberg camp
Rhine Meadow camps (POWs)
Rhineland: French claims on; liberated by Western Allies; in British
zone; French development plans for
Rhineland-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen)
Ribbentrop, Joachim von
Richter, Hans Werner
Richter, Father Helmut
Richtrmoc (president of Society for Czech-German Friendship)
Riddleberger, James
Riedel, Claus
Riedel, Walter
Riess, Curt
Ripka, Hubert
Ritter, Karl
Roberts, Frank
Robertson, General Sir Brian
Robertson, Sir William
Robinson, Captain (USA)
Röhm, Ernst
Rohracher, Andreas, Archbishop of Salzburg
Rohrscheidt, Hans von
Rohwohlt, Ernst (publisher)
Roman Catholicism: in Poland
Romania: German community evicted
Rome, Treaty of (1957)
Rooks, Major-General Lowell
 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: anti-German views; drafts Atlantic Charter;
restrains French ambitions; death; concessions to Stalin; and Polish borders;
and transfer of German subjects; and denazification; favours shooting
leading Nazis; at Yalta; and control of Königsberg; and division of world
with Soviet Russia
Rosche, Dr
Rosenberg, Alfred
Rosensaft, Josef
Rosenzweig, Alfred
Rösner, Johann
Ross, A. D. M.
Rosterg, Sergeant Wolfgang
Rothenberger, Curt
Rothenstein camp, East Prussia
Rothschild family
Royall, General Kenneth
Rügen (island)
Rühmann, Heinz
Ruhr: Poles in; in British zone; Russian claims on; French claims on;
coal production; administrative authority proposed; Germans given cue to
decide future
Runciman, Waltert Viscount
Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von
Russell, Bertrand
Russell of Liverpool, Edward Frederick Langley RussellBaron
S., Leni
Saar
Saaz, Czechoslovakia
Sachsen-Anhalt
Sachshausen concentration camp
Salomon family
Salomon, Ernst von: and local civil administration under occupation;
Wehrpass destroyed by GI; on rapes by Americans; detained and mistreated
by Americans; on POW treatment in France; Der Fragebogen (The
Answers)
Salvator, Hubert
Salzburg; Festival
San Francisco Conference (1944)
Sargent, Sir Malcolm
satire: in Soviet zone
Sauckel, Fritz
Sauerbruch, Ferdinand
Sauken, General Dietrich von
Saxony
Sayn-Wittgenstein, Prinz zu see Franz, Prinz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein
Schacht, Hjalmar
Schäffer, Fritz
Schärf, Adolf
Scharoun, Hans
Scharp (prisoner in Russia)
Schaumburg-Lippe family
Schell, Margarete
Schell, Peter, Baron von
Schellenberg, Walther
Scherber, Professor and Mrs
Schernstein, Herbert
Scheunemann, Wolfgang
Schicketanz, Franz
Schiffer, Eugen
Schilling, Klaus
Schirach, Baldur von
Schirach, Henrietta von
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von
Schlegelberger, Franz
Schleswig-Holstein
Schliemann, Heinrich: treasures from Troy
Schlüter, Andreas
Schmid, Carlo
Schmidt, Guido
Schmidt, Paul
Schmitt, Carl
Schmitt, Heinrich
Schmittlein, Raymond
Schmitz, Bruno
 Schmitz, Richard
Schmorrell, Alexander
Schmorrell, Natascha
Schnabel, Peter Joseph
Schnabel, Wilhelm
Schnetzer, Max
Schnitzler, Arthur
Schnurre, Wolfdietrich
Schöbritz concentration camp, Czechoslovakia
Scholl, Hans and Sophie
Scholz, Willi
Schönburg-Waldenburg, Prince von see Günter, Prince von Schönburg-
Waldenburg
Schöner, Josef: in liberated Vienna; on Mensdorff; on arrest of von
Papen; on Austrian puppet government; and status of South Tyrol; attends
concert; on rapes in Austria; and partition of Vienna; on Austrian soldiers’
support for Hitler; told of treatment of Czech Germans; on German refugees
in Vienna; Wiener Tagebuch 1944/1945
Schönerer, Georg von
Schöninger, Johann
Schörner, Field Marshal Ferdinand
Schramm, Percy
Schröder (Balt bandit)
Schröder, Louise
Schröder, Paul
Schubert, Franz
Schubert, Hans
Schubert (Schöninger’s assistant)
Schuh, Karl
Schulberg, Stuart
Schulenburg, Charlotte von der
Schulenburg, Fritz-Dietlof von der
Schulenburg, Jonny von der
Schulenburg, Mathias von der
Schulenburg, Tisa von der
Schumacher, Kurt
Schuman, Robert; Pour l’Europe
 Schumy, Vinzenz
Schuschnigg, Kurt von
Schuster, Claud
Schuze-Boysen, Harro
Schwarz, Joachim
Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth
Schweder, Bernhard
Schwerin von Krosigk, Graf Lutz
scientists: abducted by Russians; abducted by Americans; French
remove; abducted by British
Scotland, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Paterson
Seegebarth, Hauptmann Wilfried
Seghers, Anna
Seibert (of Völkische Beobachter)
Seidel, Anna
Seidl, Pater Joseph
Seitz, Karl
Selvester, Captain
Sely, Major Kaye (born Karl Seltz)
Semionov, Vladimir
Semler, Johannes
Senfft, Baron von
Serebriensky, Colonel
Serov, General I. A.
Severing, Karl
Seyss-Inquart, Arthur
Shabalin, General
SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force)
Short, Dewey
Siebken, Bernhard
Siegel, Dr E.
Sigmaringen
Silesia: Soviet conquest and occupation of; German population;
religious repression in; concentration camps; Germans expelled from;
turned over to Poles
Silkin, Sam
Simonov, Konstantin
 Sinzig
Skrjabina, Elena
Slavs: Nazi disdain for
Slovenia
Smersh (Soviet Military Intelligence): and fall of Berlin; and protection
of Berlin flak-tower treasures
smuggling: between zones
Smuts, Field Marshal Jan
soap
Sobelev, A. A.
Sobottka, Gustav
Socialist Party (SPD)
Socialist Unity Party (SED): formed; Grotewohl leads; and Berlin
elections (1946); as ‘Russian party’; and future structure of Germany;
attends People’s Congress, East Berlin 1948, 516; propaganda campaign
against Westerners in Berlin; committed to Eastern orientation; violates
Berlin town council; leaders summoned to Moscow
Sokolova, Natalia
Sokolovsky, Colonel-General V. D.: Clay likes; as assistant to Zhukov;
attends Kommandatura; walks out of Control Council; and Berlin blockade
and airlift; and Berlin mob riot; replaced by Chuikov
Solf, Hanna and Wilhelm
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
Sombart, Nicolas
Sombart, Werner
Soswinski, Ludwig
Soucek Case (Austria, 1946) South Tyrol: status
Soviet Russia: ideology; allocated share of German territory and
resources; European claims; advance against Germany; Western Allies
refrain from attacking; post-war settlement of Austria; alliance with Britain;
favours independent Austria; occupation of Vienna; recognises Renner’s
regime in Austria; dismantles and confiscates German and Austrian
industrial plant; Churchill’s post-war anxieties over; in Mecklenburg;
administration amd dominance in Berlin; food supplies in Berlin; resists
Western Allies’ presence in Berlin; conflict with Americans in Berlin;
requisitions Berlin houses; Berliners’ dislike of; rumoured dispute with
Western Allies; administrative structure in Germany; promotes arts in
Berlin; Germans abducted to develop industry in; seizes German scientists;
develops atomic bomb; claims on Ruhr; nationals repatriated from west;
hostility to de Gaulle; occupation of Austria; plunders Austria; aims in
Austria; opposes foreign aid to Austria; Austrian zone; atrocities in Styria;
and return of Russian POWs; attempts to reclaim citizens in Austria;
believes in German collective guilt; smuggling from; refugees in Germany;
art plunder; destroys treaures in Berlin; looting; treatment of German
POWs; and Nuremberg trials; antisemitism; suspicion of Western
antagonism; at Potsdam Conference; treaty with France (1945); perceived
as threat by West; differences with French; and Berlin election (May 1946);
and spread of communism; US hostility to; Western suspicion of; and
dissolution of wartime Allied coalition; proposes pan-German committees;
and Austrian war guilt; kidnappings in Austria and Berlin; blockade in
Berlin; obstructs creation of Western Germany; quits Conference of Foreign
Ministers; cuts off Berlin milk supply; introduces new currency; violent
tactics in Berlin; offers all-German government; abuses Anglo-Americans;
maintains POW camps after creation of GDR; as post-war enemy; effects of
war and settlement on; see also Red Army; Soviet zone
Soviet zone (Germany): created; administration and appointments; land
reform in; money reintroduced; smuggling and corruption in; pillaging;
elections (October 1946); illicit crossing of border from West; police force
purged and reconstituted; rail travel in; concentration camps (Spetzlager);
culture in; releases minor Nazis
Spaatz, General Carl
Spann, Rafael
Speer, Albert: in Dönitz government; resigns; searched; transferred to
Spandau; and Berlin Chancellery; on drunken British guard; capture, trial
and interrogation; and Nuremberg executions; use of slave labour; in severe
winter 1946-7, on Berlin airlift; in detention; Spandau: The Secret Diaries
Speer, Margarete
Spiegel, Der (magazine)
Spiel, Hilde
Sprang (prisoner in Russia)
Spranger, Eduard
Springer, Axel
Stack, Brigadier Robert
Stahlberg, Werner
 Stahmer, Otto
Stalin, Josef V.: military successes; on Poland and Baltic states;
territorial claims in Europe; relations with Western Allies; Roosevelt makes
concessions to; policy on Austria; condones rape by Red Army; on
treatment of Austria; reinstates Renner as chancellor in Austria; opposes
Dönitz government; and domination of Berlin; rumoured anti-British
speech; and administration of Russian zone; and Red Army behaviour in
Austria; agrees to feed Viennese population; forms buffer zone to satellite
states; and Hitler’s suicide; and plundered art in Germany; conduct of war;
at Potsdam Conference; discusses UN Charter; and French; and Polish
settlement; Western Allies mistrust; demands part of German fleet at
Potsdam; on Attlee; on custody of war criminals; avoids further war;
Byrnes and; and beginnings of Cold War; and CFM in London 1947, 509;
breach with Tito; favours German unity; and founding of GDR; obstructs
creation of West Germany; and Berlin blockade; offers to lift Berlin
blockade for free circulation of currencies; offers armed and unified
Germany to Adenauer; achieves Soviet security
Stalingrad: battle of (1942-3); German prisoners
Stange, Wilhelm
Starbroke, Captain
Starke, Gerhard
Starlinger, Professor Wilhelm
Stasi (Ministry of State Security, East Germany)
Stauffenberg, Colonel Graf Claus Schenk von
Steel, Christopher
Steele, General Sir James
Steengracht von Moyland, Freiherr Gustav Adolf von
Stegerwald, Adam
Stein, Frau von (Lehnsdorff’s aunt)
Steiner, Frank
Steinhardt (assistant mayor of Vienna)
Stelzl, Johann
Stephens, Colonel Robin
Stern, James: on post-war fatalities; observes boys playing at bombing;
on Americans’ behaviour in Germany; sees German destruction; on black
market; hears Ledenfels play Beethoven at Auden’s house; on plunder by
Moroccans; on feral children; on Schmorrell family; visits Prince Fugger
von Glött; and German knowledge of atrocities; and Fragebogen; on
prostitutes; gives chewing gum to children; on Polish DPs; The Hidden
Damage
Sternheim, Carl: Der Snob
Stettin
Stevens, Major Richard H.
Steyr (motor manufacturer)
Stiegelmar family
Stiller, Obersturmführer
Stillfried, Major
Stimson, Henry L.
Stolp (Słupsk)
Stolz, Otto
Storm, Ruth
Strachey, John
Strang, Sir William (later Baron)
Stránský, Jaroslav
Strasbourg
Strauss, Emil Georg von
Strauss, Richard; Die Metamorphosen
Streicher, Julius
Stremer Jewish Murder Case (Austria)
Stroop, Jürgen
Strüder, Dr (of Frankfurt)
Stuckart, Wilhelm
Stülpnagel, General Carl-Heinrich and Frau von
Stumm, Johannes
Stumpff, General Hans-Jürgen
Sturgkh, Graf Alfred
Stuttgart
Stutthof concentration camp
Styria
Sudetenland
Suhr, Otto
Suhrkamp, Peter
Sulzbach, Herbert
Summersby, Kay
 Sunisch, Ernestine
Susmann, Herr (of Teupitz)
Svoboda, General Ludvik
Swabians (ethnic Germans in Hungary)
Sweet, Paul
Swinemünde
Switzerland: and Austrian territorial claims; responsible for German
POWs
Szokoll, Major Carl; Die Rettung Wiens
T-Force (British)
Talizy: ‘Antifa’ school
Taylor, A. J. P.
Taylor, Colonel Telford
Tedder, Marshal of the RAF Arthurt Baron
Tegel: airfield opened
Teheran Conference (1945)
Tempelhof (Berlin airfield): Howley visits
Templer, General Sir Gerald
Tetschen, Czechoslovakia
Thadden, Elisabeth von
Thadden-Trieglaff, Frau von
theatre: in Soviet zone; in American zone; in Vienna
Thekla, Leipzig
Theresienstadt concentration camp
Thibaut, Jacques
Thierack, Otto-Georg
Thiess, Franz
Third Man, The (film)
Thomas, General Georg
Thomas, Captain Michael Alexander ( formerly Ulrich Holländer )
Thomasdorf camp, Czechoslovakia
Thompson, Commodore C. R.
Thompson, Dorothy
Thon, Harry
Thorez, Maurice
Thuringia
Thurn und Taxis, Alexander, Prince
 Thurn und Taxis, ‘Hansi’, Prince
Thurn und Taxis, Willy, Prince
Thyssen, Fritz
Tichy, Lieutenant
Tiessen, Heinz
Tietjen, Heinz
Tito, Josip Broz: friction with Soviet Russia; Stalin restrains; partisans
in Carinthia; claims to Trieste; fights domobranci; summer palace; breach
with Stalin
Tolbukhin, Marshal Fyodor Ivanovich
Tolomei, Ettore
Tomeš (Theresienstadt assistant commandant)
Toscanini, Arturo
Toynbee, Arnold
transit camps: in Silesia
treks: by refugees
Treuter, Dr Helmut
Trevor-Roper, Hugh; The Last Days of Hitler
Trier
Trieste: British-Yugoslav dispute over; reverts to Italy
Trizonia (British-French-US zones)
Troller, Georg Stefan
Trotha, General Ivo Thilo von
Trott, Adam von
Truka (Czech Little Fortress guard)
Truman, Harry S.: accepts Russian occupation of Mecklenburg and
Saxony; Churchill sends ‘iron curtain’ telegram to; wariness of Soviet
Russia; Doctrine; and German art treasures; and Morgenthau’s isolation;
and trial of German war criminals; agrees to fall back to Yalta-agreed line;
and exclusion of French at Potsdam; at Potsdam Conference; relations with
Russians; relations with Churchill; accepts Morgenthau’s resignation;
demands complete disarmament of Germany; and Polish frontiers; meets
Bevin; ends Lease-Lend; and South Tyrol; supports holding Berlin; and
Berlin blockade and airlift; federal officials dismissed and resign
Truscott, General Lucien
Tsarskoe Selo: Amber Room
tuberculosis (TB)
 Tübingen
Tulln, Austria
Tulpanov, Sergey I. (‘the Colonel’ or ‘the Tulip’)
Tunner, Major General
Turks: population transfer (1913)
Turnwald, Wilhelm
typhus
Tyrol; see also South Tyrol
Udet, Colonel-General Ernst
Ukraine: kulaks in
Ulbricht, Walter: arrives in Berlin; and land reform; encourages culture;
denies Russian rapes; and founding of GDR; provokes riots in Berlin; in
East German government
Ulitzka, Carl
Ullstein publishing family
Ullstein, Heinz
Ullstein, Hermann
Union of Independents (Austrian party)
United Europe Congress, The Hague (May 1948)
United Nations: Declaration upholding Atlantic Charter; Charter
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)
United States of America: policy on occupation and treatment of
Germany; advance and occupation in western Europe; refuses to recognise
Renner regime in Austria; rapes by soldiers; rejects Dönitz government;
black soldiers in Germany and Austria; and discovery and liberation of
concentration camps; post-war deaths in Germany; conflict with Russians in
Berlin; administers zone in Berlin; food plenty in Berlin; attitude to
occupied Berlin; Berliners’ attitude to; liberation of western
Czechoslovakia; United States of America - continued and Czech
expulsions; sends food parcels to Europe; seizes German scientists; favours
Adenauer; desire to withdraw from Germany; advance on Vienna; in
Austria; administration in Vienna; radio stations; Jews serve in army;
propaganda campaign in Germany; denazification programme; ban on
fraternising with Germans; and German art treasures; art plunder and
pillaging; retrieves and preserves stolen treasures; treatment of German
POWs; prisoner-of-war camps; interrogation and torture methods; trial and
punishment of Nazi war criminals; conduct of war; and Dachau trial;
Bulganin declares enemy; policy on Germany at Potsdam Conference;
possesses atom bomb; drops atom bombs; hostility to Soviet Russia; and
Berlin airlift; post-war dismissals and resignations; see also American zone
Unverzagt, Wilhelm
Upper Austria
Upper Silesia
uranium: mined in Erzgebirge
Üxküll-Gyllenbrand, Gräfin Alexandrine von
Vaihingen
Valchař (Czech Little Fortress guard)
Vansittart, Robert, Baron
Vassiltchikov, Princess Marie (‘Missie’)
Veesenmayer, Edmund
Veltheim, Hans-Hasso von
Veltheim, Otti von
venereal diseases
Venlo Incident (1939)
Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN)
Vermehren, Isa
Versailles, Treaty of (1919)
Victoria, Princess
Victoria Louise, Princess (Duchess of Brunswick)
Vienna: partition and occupation; falls to Red Army; foreign workers in;
looting; under Soviet occupation; women raped; cultural life; May Day
parade (1945); destruction; housing; rationing and food supply; Western
Allies advance on; zoned between Allies; concern for return to normality;
administration under occupying powers; Soviet monument in; communist
failure in 1945 election; lawlessness and banditry in; discussed at Potsdam
Conference; food shortage in British sector; in severe winter (1946-7);
blockade threatened; see also Austria
Vietinghoff, General Heinrich von
Vilfan, Josef
Villach, Carinthia
Vlasak Karel
Vlasov, General Andrei
Vogel, Hans
Voikova (Russian camp)
 Voizard (governor of Tyrol-Vorarlberg)
Volga Germans
Volkspolizei (Vopos)
Volkswagen factory, Wolfsburg
Völpel, Gustav
Vom Ghetto zur Freiheit: Die Zukunft der Juden im befreiten Österreich
(pamphlet)
Vorarlberg
Voroshilov, Kliment Yefremovich
Vorys, John
Voss, Admiral Hans Erich
Vrša, Commandant
Vyshinsky, Andrei
Wabra, Dr Franz
Wagner, Franz
Wagner, Friedelind
Wagner, Hans
Wagner, Josef
Wagner, Richard
Wagner, Wieland
Wagner, Winifred; trial
Wagner, Wolfgang
Waite, Air Commodore Reginald Newnham
Wallenberg (village)
Wallenberg, Major Hans
Walser, Martin
Walter, Bruno
Wandel, Paul
Warlimont, General Walther
Warner, Major Frederick (born Manfred Werner)
Warsaw Uprising (1944)
Waterhouse, Ellis
Watt, Donald Cameron
Watzka, Maximilian
Watzke, Anton
Wechsberg, Joseph
Wedel, von (Prussian escapee)
Wedgwood, Colonel Josiah Clement (later 1st Baron)
Weeks, General Sir Ronald
Wegener, Paul
Wegner, Franz
Weidling, General Helmuth
Weimar
Weimar, Grand Duchess of
Weinberger, Lois
Weinhand, Franz
Weis, Franz
Weisenborn, Günther; Berliner Requiem
Weiss, Dany
Weiss, Grigori
Weiss, Martin
Weiss, ‘Uncle Toni’
‘Weisse Rose’ Movement
Weissenheim, Austria
Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich von
Weizsäcker, Ernst von
Weizsäcker, Richard von; Vier Zeiten: Erinnerungen
Wellesz, Egon
Wells, Dr C. J. I.
Wendt, Erich
Wensich, Franz
Werewolves
Werl, near Dortmund
Werner, Dr Arthur
Werth, Alexander
Wesen, Hans
West, F. C.
West Germany see German Federal Republic
Western European Union
Wetzelsdorf, Austria
Weygand, General Maxime
White, Harry Dexter
Wichmann, Lily
Wiechert, Ernst
 Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden Manifesto
Wieselmann, Flight Sergeant
Wiesenstein, Haus, Silesia
Wiesner (Czech camp commandant)
Wilhelm Gustloff (ship)
Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands
Wilkinson, Colonel Alexander
Wilkinson, Peter
Willenbucher, Dr
William II, Kaiser
Williams, Charles: Adenauer
Williams, Air Marshal Sir Thomas Melling
Wilson, Woodrow
Wilton Park, Buckinghamshire
Winchell, Walter
Winckelnkemper, Peter
Winterton, Major-General Sir John
Wirths (prisoner in Russia)
Wisliceny, Dieter
Witgenstein, Werner
Witzleben, Field Marshal Erwin von
Woermann, Ernst
Wolf, Markus
Wolff, Jeanette
Wolff, Karl
Wolfsberg, Austria
Wollin, Poland
Woman in Berlin, A (anon.)
women: raped ; attracted to conquerors& n; commit suicide; clear
Berlin rubble; and hairdressing; abused in Prague; work for Allies; as voters
in Austrian election; dehumanisation of Jewish; and ban on fraternising; in
Berlin elections
Worden, Blair
Württemberg
Würzburg
Wyand, Paul
 Xavier, Prince of Bourbon-Parma
Yalta Conference (1945): Roosevelt attends; defines Allied zones;
allocates former Teutonic regions to Poland; agrees deportation of Russian
citizens; and use of German POWs as forced labour; and Polish boundaries;
Truman promises to accept agreement; agreement on Ruhr reparations to
Russia
Yorck, Marion, Gräfin
Ysenburg, Prince
Yugoslavia: dispute with Britain over Trieste; ethnic Germans expelled;
claims part of Carinthia; vetoes Austria’s aid from UNRRA; nationals
deported; threat to Venezia-Giulia; German POWs in; Stalin refuses to
discuss at Potsdam; Soviet Russia backs demands for reparations
Yurasov, Vladimir
Zabern incident (1913)
Zaglauer (Austrian hangman)
Zahn, Werner
Zborowski, Helmut von
Zelder, Irene
Zelenka, Professor (of Prague)
Zerbst
Zetterberg, Frau
Zheltov, Colonel-General A. S.
Zhukov, Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich: in occupation of Berlin; at
signing of German surrender; authorises formation of German anti-fascist
parties; control in Berlin; protects Hauptmann; Patton disparages; and
Soviet art; tells Stalin of Hitler’s suicide; and return of Russian POWs;
protests at supposed British reserving of German army; and Allied
agreement on Berlin; at Potsdam Conference; given US Legion of Merit;
meets Clay; on Attlee at Potsdam Conference; on Polish border agreement;
and Western arming of Germans
Ziemer, Gerhard: Deutsche Exodus
Zimmermann (killer)
Zitzewitz, Elvira von
Zöberlein, Hans
Zuckmayer, Alice
Zuckmayer, Carl: and German awareness of moral bankruptcy;
emigrates and flees to USA; sees destruction in Germany; on Werewolves;
admires Russian contribution to arts; on German attitude to Americans; and
revival of professional life; and German women’s attitude to German men;
criticises US policy in Germany; reports on state of theatre and film; on
Austrian culture; and German children’s behaviour; and success of Neue
Zeitung; on German opponents of Hitler; on Jewish DPs; and German
collective guilt; and denazification; witnesses food demonstration in
Munich; advocates treating Germans with kindness; on black market; on
man-in-street; on Polish theft of circus pig; on German ovens; on severe
winter (1946-7); Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika; Der Hauptmann von Köpenick; Des
Teufels General
Zuffenhausen camp
Zühlsdorff, Volkmar von
Zweig, Arnold

OceanofPDF.com
 a
Gerhard Ziemer gives the figure of 2,280,000, Alfred de Zayas
2,211,000.
b
To some extent he based the book on his own family. As a teenager the
author was privileged to meet his two brothers. One had literally shot
himself in the foot to avoid fighting Hitler’s war.
c
At this stage the Soviet share included eastern Germany within its 1937
borders. Much of this was later hived off and awarded to Poland.
d
This is disputed. Michael Balfour says Morgenthau wrote the first draft:
Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four Power Control in Germany and
Austria 1945-1946, Oxford 1956, 20 n3.
e
This was an Anglo-American brassière: the French word applies to a
baby garment, and has no lumps.
f
Once again Bavaria was seen as the harmless part of Germany. The
monster was always Prussia.
g
The assistant Soviet commander in Germany, Sokolovsky, specifically
mentioned the Herrenvolk to justify the rapes. (See Norman M. Naimark,
The Russians in Germany - A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation,
1945-1949, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1995, 79.)
h
In February 1943 Hitler drove past a group of Russian slave-labourers
working on the road outside Zaporozhe. Filled with loathing he remarked,
‘It is quite right to make Slavs do this, these robots! Otherwise they would
have no right to their share of the sun!’ Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl,
eds, The Hitler Book, translated by Giles MacDonogh, London 2005, 102.
i
A variant on a Venetian dish, risibisi (rice and peas), and popular in
Vienna. The author came across it as a child, at a rare surviving Jewish
home in the 2nd Bezirk.
j
 Schärf had suffered at the hands of Dollfuss’s Corporate State when he
had been put in the concentration camp at Wöllersdorf, and again under the
Nazis when he had spent a few months in captivity after the Anschluss.
k
From Parteigenosse: Party comrade of member of the Nazi Party
(NSDAP).
l
G’schaftlhuber, a busybody; Adabei, from auch dabei, meaning also
present: someone who doesn’t want to miss the party.
m
O + the fifth letter of the alphabet = Oe, or Ö (Austria).
n
This was Willy Prinz von Thurn und Taxis’s view (‘Memoiren’,
unpublished MS, 25).
o
The socialist had supported the Anschluss with Germany. The
communists had not.
p
This now seems unlikely.
q
The equivalent of the Royal National Theatre performing in a music
hall.
r
The Tyrolean innkeeper Andreas Hofer had fought Napoleon, and was
shot by the French in 1810.
s
See below pp. 82-4.
t
The Josefstadt is where Anna Schmidt is engaged as a soubrette in The
Third Man.
u
Romanian-born Colonel General Alexander Löhr was handed over to
the Yugoslavs by the British, and later executed for ordering the
bombardment of Belgrade. Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, born in
Wiener Neustadt, was sentenced to twenty-five years for war crimes. He
was released in 1951.
v
 Brunswick’s palace was pulled down and replaced by a shopping centre.
w
Lasch was sentenced to death in absentia and his family arrested. Koch
escaped from Pillau after telling the population to stand firm.
x
The irony was that the room had been made for the Royal Schloss in
Berlin - another victim of the war - and Prussia’s first king, the spendthrift
Frederick I. His austere son, Frederick William, gave the room to Peter the
Great in exchange for a squad of tall soldiers, a commodity he valued more
highly than amber.
y
The sexual attraction of conquerors to the women of the defeated should
have appealed to the ‘psychologist’. The straitlaced Helmuth James von
Moltke had been shocked when he visited Paris in August 1940 to find the
women ‘positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed’ (Letters to
Freya, London 1991, 97).
z
Mainz was bombed early on in the war, and grass was already growing
on the ruins.
aa
Zuckmayer called his parents ‘the Badgers’.
ab
Jürgen von Kardorff had died in action in Russia in 1943; Graf Fritz-
Dietlof von der Schulenburg together with Nikolaus von Halem, Ulrich von
Hassell, Julius Leber, Werner von Haeften, and Claus von Stauffenberg had
all died as a result of their roles in 20 July 1944; Bernhard von Mutius,
Dietrich von Mandelsloh, Graf Wolf Werner von der Schulenburg, Martin
Raschke, Josias and Werner von Veltheim had all died as soldiers in the
war. The Lehndorffs and the Schweinitzes were noble Prussian families. For
Graf Heinrich von Lehndorff-Steinort see below p. 164; the others,
presumably, died in Hitler’s war.
ac
The inmates were recognisable by the coloured triangles they wore. The
original concentration camp prisoners were political: they wore red; anti-
social groups such as drunks, beggars and the ‘work-shy’ wore black; the
professional criminal, green; Jehovah’s Witnesses, lilac; returned emigrants,
blue; homosexuals, pink. It should be recalled that homosexuality was also
illegal in Britain until the 1960s. The Jews wore two triangles stitched
together to make a Star of David, one yellow and one with the colour of the
crime that had given the pretext to incarcerate them. See Bruno Heilig, Men
Crucified, London 1941, 73-4. The lion’s share at Dachau was made up of
44,401 ‘reds’. There were 22,100 Jews, 1,066 ‘blacks’, 759 ‘greens’, 126
Wehrmacht men, 110 ‘pinks’ including one who had been readmitted after
discharge, 85 ‘lilacs’ and 16 ‘blues’.
ad
See below pp. 82-4.
ae
There is a photograph of this.
af
An allusion to Schiller’s play of that name.
ag
R. F. Keeling (Gruesome Harvest, Chicago 1947, 56-7) gives the
official figure as 1,198, but the Germans thought it more like 5,000.
ah
In 1939 there were nearly 3,000 prisoners. Just under a thousand of
these were ‘greens’ or criminals, and 688 were political prisoners. There
were 930 ‘anti-socials’, 143 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 51 homosexuals.
(Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, New York and Oxford 1985,
106.)
ai
Literally ‘Oxen Joe’. As a boy, Müller had looked after the cows on his
parents’ Bavarian farm.
aj
An atomised sweet omelette filled with raisins and a favourite of the
Emperor Franz Joseph - hence the name.
ak
There can have been very little left of the town. The Allies had bombed
it relentlessly. Only a thin strip of old houses remained when the author
visited it in the early 1990s.
al
The monument had been built in 1927 to commemorate the German
victory over the Russians in 1914 - which had actually been achieved
elsewhere. The battle was deemed to have been won in Tannenberg to
compensate for the resounding defeat inflicted on the Teutonic Knights by
the Poles in 1410.
am
Hindenburg and his wife for good; Frederick William and his son
returned after much controversy in 1991. The remains of the Garrison
Church having been dynamited in the 1960s, Frederick William was
reburied in the Friedenskirche. Frederick the Great finally achieved his
original wish and was interred on the terrace at Sanssouci, next to his dogs.
an
The two kings were moved again in 1952, when they were sent to Burg
Hohenzollern near Hechingen in Württemberg. It was here that Frederick
the Great’s coffin collapsed, and a new one had to be made.
ao
Information from Prince Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern-
Sigmaringen, 14 May 1996. The prince told the author he had noticed the
theft when the coffin was changed in 1952.
ap
This had been going on for days, despite the draconian methods the
Party used to deter soldiers and civilians from leaving.
aq
When the British architect Lord Foster adapted the building for use by
the Bundestag, the more decorous graffiti were retained; the obscenities,
however, were scratched out. (Author’s visits to the Reichstag building, see
Financial Times, 9 August 2002 and 2 September 2004.) ‡ From the
German word Uhr, meaning watch.
ar
Almost certainly a reference to Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.
as
James Stern found an echo of this in bombed-out Nuremberg. He
observed two boys playing in the sand. They had built a castle. Suddenly
one of the boys began to make a wailing noise like a siren: ‘Ich bin ein
Amerikaner!’ The other jumped up with a tin can filled with sand: ‘Ich bin
ein Engländer!’ They flapped their arms and cried, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’
and launched their sand at the castle.
at
Procopius, The Secret History, trans. G. A. Williamson, London 1990,
41, has just three ways: ‘And though she brought three openings into
service, she often found fault with nature, grumbling because nature had not
made the openings in her nipples wider than is normal, so that she could
devise another variety of intercourse in that region.’
au
Eisenhower’s mistress, Kay Summersby, was there and took a dim view
of the Russian women soldiers in their knee-length skirts: ‘No British,
American or French girl would been caught dead in their uniforms’
(Eisenhower was my Boss, Watford 1949, 224).
av
See below Chapter 20.
aw
Howley must be confused: in our more prosperous times a kilo of rye
flour would require 700 ml of water for a 1.6 kg German rye Landbrot: it is
therefore more than a third water and may be happily kept for a week.
ax
At Advent a ramshackle Christmas market appeared by the ruins of the
Schloss. It was a refreshing symbol of the return of normality.
ay
In the Czech lands in the west, the Germans made up just over a third of
the population in the 1930 census, with roughly two-thirds of these in
Bohemia and the rest in Moravia. In Czechoslovakia as a whole, Germans
were 22.53 per cent of the population, with Czechs and Slovakians making
up 66.24 per cent together. There was a significant Magyar minority in
Slovakia. Of these 3,318,445 people, 3,231,688 had Czech nationality.
(Theodor Schieder, ed., Tschechoslowakei, Berlin 1957, 7.)
az
The German population was declining. In 1920 it had been 23.64 per
cent. In the German core, towns had seen the Czech communities grow: in
Aussig they had advanced from 10 per cent in 1910 to a third in 1930; in
Brüx from 20 per cent to a third; in Reichenberg the Germans had declined
by 10 per cent; in Troppau the Czechs had been 10 per cent, now they were
a third, and so on. (Schieder, ed., Tschechoslowakei, 10.)
ba
See above p. 44.
bb
Kaschauer in German, from the German name of the town, Kaschau.
bc
 From Part One of Goethe’s Faust. Gretchen asks Faust the question he
most dreads: whether he believes in God.
bd
Not to be confused with the town of Tábor.
be
‘Swabian’ is a Hungarian word for an ethnic German. In 1910 they had
been nearly 10 per cent of the population, but by the census of 1941 they
were down to 4.8 per cent (719,449 people). The principle denominations
were Bannater Schwaben, and Batschka-Deutsche from the Balkan areas, as
well as the Germans on the eastern side of the Neusiedlersee around
Ödenburg (Sopron) and the Schwäbische Türkei.
bf
They kept themselves aloof, generally in small communities such as
Villany on the southern border, and rarely dared to speak German. In the
author’s experience many of their children have only a rudimentary
knowledge of the language now.
bg
The list of those to be expelled runs to 16.5 million people: 9.3 million
within the 1937 Reich borders and 7.2 outside. There were 2,382,000 East
Prussians, 1,822,000 East Pomeranians, 614,000 in Brandenburg east of the
Oder, 4,469,000 Silesians, 240,000 in Memel and the Baltic States, 373,000
in Danzig, 1,293,000 in Poland, 3,493,000 in Czechoslovakia, 601,000 in
Hungary, 509,000 in Yugoslavia and 785,000 in Romania. The Russians
were not planning to export their 1.8 million Volga Germans, but they were
due to be resettled.
bh
After the Second World War the Poles demanded the return of their
countrymen in the Ruhr, many of whom had lived there for generations.
bi
Village near Preussisch Holland. The Schloss by Jean de Bodt survived,
and was even restored in the 1980s.
bj
Yet when the author visited the city in 1992 a tiny band of Germans had
somehow managed to re-establish themselves in Kaliningrad, and even had
their own church and pastor. They were naturally one of the first stops for
the many Heimatgruppen who wanted to visit the city where they had been
born and grew up.
 bk
See below p. 374.
bl
This was true only up to a point: half a million largely Catholic
Germans remained in Upper Silesia, because the Poles refused to recognise
their nationality, and there were the ‘autochthones’ in East Prussia. Most of
these left before the 1980s. As many as 30,000 remain around Olszstyn.
bm
There were unsuccessful attempts to bring Gimborski to trial in the
1960s.
bn
The ‘giant mountains’ (sic) rise to over 1,600 metres.
bo
(1887-1954). Avenarius was an expressionist painter famed for his
illustrations to Hauptmann’s works.
bp
Compare Eisenhower, below p. 227.
bq
The poet walked in the woods near by, as the town belonged to Weimar.
It was here he wrote ‘Über allen Gipfeln’.
br
Mendelssohn’s music had been taken out of mothballs by Leo Borchard.
See above p. 120.
bs
And future: it is now the popular Hotel Bogota.
bt
The process of humiliating the great conductor was admirably
dramatised in Ronald Harwood’s play Taking Sides.
bu
A modernistic cinema constructed in the 1920s. It is still there, although
it was severely altered in the 1960s.
bv
From which it was evicted when the building returned to its original
owners in 1995.
bw
Not to be confused with the Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried
Chicken fame. Colonel Sanders was a ‘Kentucky Colonel’, a purely
honorary rank he shares with the author.
bx
In her earlier and more respectful volume, Eisenhower was my Boss
(235), she says the office was ‘large enough for an auditorium’.
by
Or one of them: see below Chapter 19
bz
The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy.
ca
It is a moot point whether the CSU is really seen as anything other than
a Catholic Bavarian force.
cb
They were popular with the ‘lofty animals’ of the Party: Martin
Bormann had one in his house in Berchtesgaden and Goebbels one in his
Berlin home.
cc
In Zuckmayer’s case the question was whether he was still a German,
and whether he would consider coming back to Germany to live.
cd
See below p. 390.
ce
Under Salic Law a woman could not inherit the throne of Hanover.
cf
There may be a case for seeing a Carthusian ‘mafia’ at the heart of
British Military Government. Robert Birley (see below) had been
headmaster of Charterhouse since 1935.
cg
The former Ulrich Holländer, son of the Berlin writer Felix Holländer.
As a Jewish refugee he had served in the British Pioneer Corps.
ch
See below Chapter 20.
ci
The Americans were eventually allotted Tulln, the French Götzendorf
and the British the partial use of Schwechat - now the main airport for the
city. Eventually the British and the French shared Schwechat.
cj
They were all citizens of Austria-Hungary before 1918.
 ck
Schärf was also from Nikolsburg.
cl
The Kanaltal along the Fella river, around the now Italian town of
Tarvisio; for Gottschee see p. 503.
cm
A lot of this would have been formerly Jewish owned.
cn
Clark says this was Koniev, but Koniev had yet to be appointed.
co
There were an estimated 9,000 unburied bodies in the city (Adolf
Schärf, Österreichs Wiederaufrichtung im Jahr 1945, Vienna 1960, 24).
cp
See below p. 309.
cq
These establishments lived on to the 1960s, possibly later, providing the
Viennese with wholesome food at subsidised prices.
cr
The pun just about works in English: ‘Viennese old-timers and Viennese
without timers, vote ÖVP!’ The Russians had stolen their watches.
cs
When Holly Martins goes to the Russian 2nd Bezirk to flush out his
friend Harry Lime in The Third Man, men can be seen clearing rubble by
the Reichsbrücke. It is not said whether they were Nazis.
ct
A plebiscite carried out in the wake of the Treaty of Saint-Germain on
10 October 1920 had given the region to Austria.
cu
See below pp. 368-9.
cv
Douaumont was one of the bloodiest battles in the Verdun campaign;
Langemarck near Ypres witnessed the killing of the flower of German
youth in October and November 1914.
cw
Zuckmayer exaggerates. Such figures were certainly to be seen on
Berlin’s Sophienstrasse after 1918.
cx
 He had forgotten Erich Kleiber.
cy
Given that at a national level the police was gleichgeschaltet, or
incorporated in the SS, Clay’s figures seem conservative.
cz
See below p. 508.
da
See below p. 455.
db
The ‘Volksgerichthof’ in Nazi times had tried the enemies of the state.
There were no appeals and frequent death sentences.
dc
See below Chapter 16.
dd
The jewellery has been consumed as butter, The Meissen cups are worn
as shoes. Behold the new man step out the gutter, Ancient heirlooms put to
better use.
de
The Tauschzentral was a sort of pawn shop where goods were
exchanged for money or food, an official version of the black market,
established in all four zones. It was hoped that its presence would gradually
eliminate the latter. Unfortunately, however, the Tauschzentral would
neither sell food nor accept it in payment for goods.
df
In 1999 an assistant director of the Hermitage in St Petersburg told the
author that the pictures were still there, and that they had been in the
museum from the day they were removed from Germany. It was not
Russian policy to give them back.
dg
Now the Bode Museum. It was in the Soviet Sector.
dh
Almost certainly Langwasser. See below p. 403.
di
The Russians were quite capable of doing this too: at Katyn they
murdered a large percentage of the Polish officer corps.
dj
 In the British Library, for example, the books are stored under the ‘Cup’
shelfmark, normally reserved for pornography, and users of the books are
required to sit at a special table where they can be monitored more closely.
dk
For Rheinwiesenlager and Rheinberg, see below pp. 398-400.
dl
Incidentally a very National Socialist method of preventing anyone
from opting out of difficult decisions.
dm
Schwerin von Krosigk was a ministerial director - or under-secretary of
state - in Brüning’s government. He entered the cabinet under Papen.
dn
See below p. 413.
do
MI5 had another interrogation centre at Latchmere House in the London
suburbs - Camp 020. This was commanded by Colonel Robin Stephens
until his transfer to Bad Nenndorf.
dp
See above pp. 305-7.
dq
The verb to ‘resettle’ had a particularly lethal significance when the
Nazis applied it to the Jews.
dr
This went back to the First World War. There was generally a certain
empathy between Germans and black American troops. See above pp. 241-
2.
ds
The word Wackes, meaning an imbecile, was responsible for the so-
called Zabern Incident in 1913, when the German army’s treatment of the
Alsatian locals led to mass demonstrations, and there was a vote of no-
confidence in the German chancellor in the Reichstag.
dt
See above p. 224.
du
Sir Bernard Freyberg’s bombing of the Benedictine abbey of Monte
Cassino killed around 400 Italian civilians who had taken refuge there, and
not one German.
 dv
Information from Blair Worden, August 2004: Worden is Lord Dacre’s
literary executer. The Last Days of Hitler was not intended for publication
and Trevor-Roper was surprised when British intelligence consented. Any
interrogations he carried out were concerned with the report. They had
nothing to do with collecting evidence for Nuremberg or other trials.
dw
Göring had been left the medieval castle by Hermann von Epenstein,
the Jewish doctor who was his mother’s lover and Hermann’s godfather.
Hermann’s Christian name was most probably in homage to the doctor and
freshly minted nobleman. David Irving, Göring: A Biography, London
1989, 26-7.
dx
The castle was owned by Hermann Fegelein’s brother Waldemar.
Hitler’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein had been executed in the
Chancellery garden a few days before. The castle was teeming with further
SS men, something calculated to make Göring no more comfortable.
dy
In June 1940, Göring told Hitler he had had two Catholic priests sent to
a concentration camp because they had failed to rise when he entered a
Rhineland inn. He gave orders that they should have to give the Nazi salute
to one of his old caps every day. Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds, Das
Buch Hitler, Bergisch Gladbach 2004, 123.
dz
Those who had enforced the ban on the NSDAP were singled out for
particularly harsh treatment: politicians, judges and the guards at the
Corporate State’s own concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria.
The hangman who had executed the Nazi participants in the assassination of
chancellor Dolfuss in 1934 did not survive the first night in Dachau. See
Bruno Heilig, Men Crucified, London 1941.
ea
Horthy had been Hitler’s ally, but Hitler had had him deposed after he
started negotiating with the Allies. One reason why the two fell out was
Horthy’s refusal to ‘deport’ Hungary’s large Jewish population. Hitler had
him interned in 1944. He did not return to Hungary and died in Estoril,
Portugal in 1957.
eb
 Blomberg had been out of the picture since January 1938, and had not
even played a role in the Anschluss. Hitler managed to push him out of the
way when it was discovered that he had married a former prostitute. His
conscience cannot have been said to be clear, however, as it was he who
brought the army in behind Hitler, in recompense for the murder of Röhm
and the others who would have had the SA take over from the traditional
Wehrmacht. The Night of the Long Knives had seen the killing of army
officers as well, but Blomberg was happy to celebrate its success with a
slap-up meal with Göring at Horcher’s restaurant in Berlin.
ec
Blaskowitz’s suicide is odd for the fact that he was one of the few
generals to file a formal complaint about the activities of the SS, in this case
after the invasion of Poland. There was a rumour that he did not take his life
at all, but was murdered by SS men.
ed
Papen remembered things differently: he was third, after Schacht and
Speer. Streicher came last, ‘a position which could have been occupied by
almost any of the other Gauleiters’. (Franz von Papen, Memoirs, London
1952, 547.) Speer, on the other hand, recalled that it was Seyss who had
won the intelligence competition. He modestly concealed his own place in
the line-up. (Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976, 9.)
ee
He was murdered by the IRA in 1979.
ef
The Berliner Zeitung reported that it had taken Ribbentrop 14 minutes
45 seconds to die, and Jodl a little longer. Ruth Andreas Friedrich,
Schauplatz Berlin, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 148.
eg
A spring festival to commemorate a plot to massacre the Jews.
eh
Kesselring’s sentence was commuted to life. Both he and List were
released in 1952.
ei
There must have been some truth in these allegations. When the author
was living in France in the early 1980s he met two people who had
witnessed massacres carried out by Allied troops: a man who had been
eighteen at the time, and a woman who had been a child of six. She had run
out of the house to find British paratroops bayoneting German POWs in her
garden. A British friend of the author’s who had studied at Heidelberg
before the war and was intelligence officer to his regiment, told him that he
was unable to interrogate a single prisoner after the massacre at Oradour-
sur-Glane, because the British soldiers had killed the lot.
ej
See above p. 70.
ek
Eisenhower’s secretary - and mistress - Kay Summersby says the
medals were handed to the Western Allies in Frankfurt, when Zhukov
returned their visit.
el
In German they are called the Lausitzer or Görlitzer Neisse and the
Glatzer Neisse. The Glatzer Neisse joins the Oder at Schurgast in Upper
Silesia, the Polish Skorogoszcz. In Polish the river is called the Kłodzka.
em
The part of the Yalta Agreement would result in the deaths of thousands
of Russians and Yugoslavs.
en
The population east of the Bug was mixed, and the Poles were not
intending to permit any Germans to remain east of the Oder-Neisse. This
way the problem of racial minorities was solved.
eo
Any areas where there had been substantial minorities of Poles were
awarded to Poland at Versailles.
ep
At the beginning of June there were 800,000 Germans left in East
Prussia and 65 per cent of the Germans were still in Silesia. Half the
Germans in Pomerania had moved out, but only 30 per cent of those in
Brandenburg. In the Sudetenland only 3 per cent had left so far. (Gerhard
Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus: Vertreibung und Eingliederung von 15 Millionen
Ostdeutsche, Stuttgart 1973, 87-8).
eq
Polish-East German agreement was not made until 1951 when an
accord was signed in a villa in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. The place later
became the House of German-Soviet Friendship and a plaque was set up to
mark the spot. It was one of the few restaurants in Frankfurt when the
author ate there on 17 August 1991, the day of the Moscow Coup.
Bewildered Soviet soldiers wandered around the garrison. Soljankasuppe
seemed appropriate: it was the one culinary contribution made by the
Russians in the long years of occupation.
er
The Anglo-Americans had taken the decision to award part of their
zones to the French. The Soviets were indifferent.
es
Cf. the Deutschlandslied: ‘Von der Etsch bis an der Memel’ - Germany
ran from the Adige to the Memel, on the Lithuanian border.
et
See below pp. 527-8.

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