THE HIGH COST
OF
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Do not be seduced
by the prospect of a —THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War. |
Chapter 1
Road to War
Following World War I France and Britain refused to listen to the statesmen who said that you can have peace or vengeance, not both. They broke their armistice pledge to Germany that peace would be made on the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points and "the principles of settlement enunciated" by the American President.* They continued the starvation blockade of Germany for six months after the Armistice, in order to force the German democrats who had taken over the government to sign a dictated peace. Having promised a peace without annexations or indemnities, they deprived Germany of territory and imposed a crushing reparations burden on the newly established Weimar Republic.
Having promised general disarmament they disarmed Germany without disarming themselves. The victors refused even to discuss the terms of peace with the vanquished who had surrendered on stated conditions which were not fulfilled, and in general discredited democracy in German eyes by associating it with broken pledges, national humiliation, and economic distress.
The Nazi movement, born from the dragon seeds planted at Versailles, and brought to monstrous growth by the world depression which raised the total number of unemployed in Germany to six million, took power at the moment of Europe's and America's greatest economic crisis. Inevitably, the second World War followed the first after an interval of only twenty years.
* Referring to the Armistice, Maynard Keynes in 1919 wrote in his prophetic book The Economic Consequences of the Peace : "The nature of the contract between Germany and the allies . . . is plain and unequivocal. The terms of the peace are to be in accordance with the addresses of the President, and the purpose of the peace conference is 'to discuss the details of their applications.' The circumstances of the contract were of an unusually solemn and binding character; for one of the conditions of it was that Germany should agree to Armistice Terms which were to be such as would leave her helpless. . . . The honor of the allies was (thus) peculiarly involved in fulfilling their part, and if there were ambiguities, in not using their position to take advantage of them."
1
Instead of learning that you cannot build confidence and security, democracy and prosperity, on a foundation of hatred and vengeance, the victorious allies this time have torn Germany apart, deprived her of all possibility of existence without exterior aid, and while unable to agree among themselves on a peace treaty, have jointly reduced the defeated enemy country to the status of an African colony.
History is repeating itself with results likely to be even more tragic for Europe than the events which led up to World War II. Once again the victorious allies are making it impossible for the Germans to place their faith in democracy and justice, since they find justice denied and democracy mocked by the occupying powers. Once again the German democrats are in danger of yielding right of way to the totalitarians because legal methods and appeals to justice are again failing to obtain a fair deal for the German people. Last time we produced Hitler; this time we may succeed in giving Stalin hegemony over all Europe.
If France, following World War I, had been prepared to treat Germany as generously and intelligently as England had treated France after Napoleon's defeat, Europe might have known another century of peace. The long conflict between Germany and France could have ended on terms as advantageous to both, and as conducive to European peace, as the Anglo-French collaboration which succeeded centuries of rivalry and war between England and France. Instead, France sought a fictitious security by disarming the Teutonic giant while giving him every reason to plot for revenge. The crushing burden of reparations the Germans were required to pay, and the denial to Germany of a secure and honorable status among the nations of Europe, so enfeebled German democracy that the Nazis won power and France was overwhelmed by the forces she herself had created.
It may be true that the lesson to be learned from history is that mankind learns nothing from it. But the explanation for the failure of the Western democracies to read the lesson of the immediate past seems mainly due to the effect of war propaganda and the ignorance or lack of integrity of the molders of public opinion.
The pen is still mightier than the sword and responsible for more human misery when unscrupulously employed in "psychological warfare." As Samuel Johnson wrote in the eighteenth century : "I know not whether more is to be feared from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie."
War propaganda, and the falsification of history indulged in by a multitude of journalists, authors, professors, and politicians has convinced the American public that the Germans have a peculiar aversion to democracy and are an innately aggressive people who will always attempt to rule the world unless kept down and taught to love democracy by a long period of instruction in a reformatory.
Only those who have studied the history of Europe know that Germany did not become a militarist nation until centuries of French aggression, from the days of Richelieu to Napoleon's conquests had caused a reaction which enabled Prussia to forge the modern German state out of the disunited and powerless congeries of kingdoms, principalities, and free cities, which constituted "the Germanies" before the French Revolution.
Americans who have had it dinned into their ears for years that Germany has attacked France three times within living memory will be astonished at reading what was said at the time in Britain and the United States about the Franco-Prussian War.
The London Times on July 16, 1870, wrote as follows :
The greatest national crime that we have had the pain of recording in these columns since the days of the First French Empire has been consummated. War is declared—an unjust but premeditated war. The dire calamity, which overwhelms Europe with dismay, is, it is now too clear, the act of France, of one man in France. It is the ultimate result of personal rule.
There can be no doubt as to the side on which the world's sympathies will be enlisted, and, whatever may on former occasions have been the offenses of Prussia, she will in this instance have on her side all that moral support which is seldom denied to those who take up arms in self-defense.*
George Bancroft, the U. S. Minister in Berlin, reported as follows :
The leading statesmen as well as public opinion America regard the present war essentially as an act of self-defense on Germany's part, and the outstanding task is to insure Germany permanently, by a better system of frontiers, against new wars of aggression on the part of her western neighbors, of which the past three centuries have brought so large a number.
* Cited in Gustav Stolper, German Realities (New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948), p. 218.
3
The tragedy of modern history is that the Germans have always been kicked around when they were pacifically minded, with the natural result that the apostles of violence have again and again won the leadership of the nation, following the failure of the democrats and antimilitarists to win a fair deal for the German people, or protect them from attack.
Having finally girded their loins to resist French aggression and forced France to abandon her centuries-old ambition to establish her hegemony over the Continent, the Germans proceeded, once Bismarck's influence was withdrawn, to follow in France's footsteps. Nevertheless the popular conception of the Germans as the cause of all recent wars is erroneous. In the half century which elapsed between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, Germany was at peace, whereas Britain and France conquered most of Africa and extended their Asiatic colonial empires; Russia fought Turkey and Japan; and the United States acquired new territory by wars with Spain and Mexico.
Having both studied and taught history at London university in the twenties, when war passions had cooled, and having had the privilege of knowing the eminent British historian, Dr. G. P. Gooch, who with other scholars was establishing the facts concerning the causes of World War I, I am also aware that Germany cannot be regarded as solely responsible for the first act in the Tragedy of Western Civilization. Diplomatic documents made public by the Bolsheviks, together with those from the Vienna archives, proved that Tsarist Russia and the Hapsburgs were more responsible for the outbreak of the war than Germany.
As Gustav Stolper has written :
Not one historian of international repute of any nationality during the twenties and early thirties maintained that Germany alone was responsible, while several outstanding historians, particularly British and American, went far in establishing Germany's comparative innocence.*
The facts of history were overlaid by propaganda during World War II and are today forgotten. But no one can deny that after their defeat in World War I, the Germans for a time swung back and embraced pacifism and democracy with the same fervor as they had formerly followed their militarists. The Constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed so many freedoms that it allowed license to both Communists and Nazis, first to undermine and finally to destroy the German Republic.
* Ibid., p. 221.
4
The Weimar Republic might have survived its own inner weaknesses if France had been willing to bury the hatchet and pursue as enlightened a policy toward Germany as the British, who soon after the war's end realized the stupidity of stifling the democratic forces in Germany by the full implementation of the Versailles Treaty.
In 1923 the French, against British advice, occupied the Ruhr in their efforts to squeeze blood out of a stone and obtain the huge reparations the German Republic could not possibly pay. The Germans countered this high-handed action by a general strike in the Ruhr which, although it eventually forced the French to retreat, toppled Germany over into bankruptcy. The runaway inflation which resulted ruined the middle classes and laid the basis for the Nazi movement. At the same time the misery of the working classes drove many to abandon Social-Democratic leadership and follow the Communists.
The intervention of America postponed the crisis for a decade. American loans and credits rescued the Weimar Republic and enabled Germany to pay a scaled-down annual indemnity, while also presenting an appearance of prosperity. There remained a hard core of unemployment amounting to about two million, but German industry was re-equipped and rationalized with the help of American loans.
Germany's hope of meeting her obligations depended on expanding world trade and continuing American credits. The world economic crisis drastically reduced German exports, brought an end to American credits, and destroyed any possibility of Germany's being able to pay either reparations or interest on her loans.
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States and the 1931 Ottawa Conference which raised a tariff wall around the British Empire, completed the ruin of German democracy. Germany's export trade was reduced by half, and unemployment, bank failures, and bankruptcies produced such desperation on all sides that the extremists on the right and the left were able to destroy the democratic parties which had strained so hard, and under such tremendous handicaps, to make the German people reject militarism and place their trust in a rational and peaceful world order.
President Hoover endeavored to prevent the crisis in Germany and all Europe by his moratorium on international debts. President Roosevelt, by torpedoing the London Economic Conference and devaluating the dollar, gave a further mighty impetus to the economic warfare which was the curtain-raiser to the tragedy of World War II.
In desperate economic distress, disarmed and denied equal rights with other nations, with half its industrial population unemployed, and possessing no such imperial revenues as Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium to support its workless millions, Germany succumbed to Hitler. The false Messiah who promised "work and bread," and a free strong Germany in place of the impotent Weimar Republic, extinguished German democracy.
The Nazis not only took advantage of economic distress. They played upon national resentments and fears. As H. A. L. Fisher, the eminent British historian, wrote in his History of Europe :
The disarmament imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles had never willingly been accepted by a nation of soldiers; and the Germans were entitled to claim, either that they should be allowed to rearm, or that a reduction of armaments should be seriously undertaken by their neighbours. With a rare unanimity of passionate emotion, the youth of Germany claimed equality of treatment, and protested against the continuance of a system which left them helpless before the airplanes, the tanks and the heavy artillery of Poles, Czechs, and Frenchmen. . . . The long delays of the League militated against the authority of the Social democrats who stood for fulfillment of the treaties, and had been prepared to make sacrifices for European peace. For seven years Germany had wooed Geneva, and wooed in vain.
To the Germans, for a few years, it seemed that Hitler was eminently right and the German democrats profoundly wrong. For everything that had been denied to the latter was given to Hitler without a struggle. From 1933 to 1939 the truth of the maxim that "might makes right" and that justice is always denied to the weak, was proved over and over again. The union with Austria, denied to the German democrats when it could have alleviated the economic crisis which was rendering their positions untenable, was permitted to Hitler. The right to self-defense, denied to the Weimar Republic, was not questioned till long after the Nazis had extended it to mean the right to attack others. After Hitler came to power the Germans found themselves able to win every right denied to them when they were democratic.
The German "common man" who had stood idle at street corners or looked vainly for work, and felt himself an outcast in a society which had no use for his labor, now had permanent employment, and a sense of security so long as he obeyed orders.
Whereas the world's markets had been shut to German exports under the Weimar Republic, Dr. Schacht opened the gates to German trade by his barter treaties concluded outside the international monetary system controlled by London and New York. The Germans, who had suffered great privations when they followed the lead of the Social Democrats, had good jobs and comfortable homes under the Nazis. The price was the loss of freedom but a starving man will always sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Hitler is dead and the Nazi bid for world empire has ended in overwhelming defeat and universal hatred of the German people who followed after their false star, and are still held responsible for their crimes. Equally disillusioned by the Nazis and by democracy, the German people today are adrift and hopeless. If democracy could inspire them with hope as strong as that once inspired by the false Nazi prophets, all Europe might be saved. But we, the victors, treat them as a pariah people, and by giving little or no support to the German democrats, demonstrate that the latter are as incapable today as two decades ago, of winning for the Germans the right to work for their own support and be accorded an equal status with other European nations.
Only a little knowledge of history is required to refute the popular belief that the Germans are naturally more aggressive than the French or the English or any other people. Each of these peoples has, in turn, been the aggressor, according to its power, its opportunities, and the ambitions of its rulers.
It serves no purpose to apportion blame, since almost all nations at one time or another, have been aggressors in Europe, Africa, or Asia, and even Americans have waged wars of conquest on their continent. The survival of Western civilization now depends on our ability to forget old injuries, rise above national prejudices, and heal the scars of war. Unless the internecine feuds of Europe are ended and we start acting according to the principles we profess to believe in, the Communists will conquer. The first bad peace produced Hitler; the second is giving us Stalin.
Only a revived faith in the principles we profess to believe in and our determination to put them into practice can preserve Western civilization.
The insidious influence of totalitarian doctrine, and the decay of democratic principles is reflected in the changing attitude of the United States between the two world wars.
During World War I, President Wilson endeavored to make America's allies listen to the voice of reason and humanity, and appealed for a peace without "annexations and indemnities" to "make the world safe for democracy." But during and after World War II, the President of the United States became the foremost exponent of the policy of "all spoils to the victors," and took no account of the Atlantic Charter he had himself drawn up. It was President Roosevelt who sold out Poland and China at Yalta and delivered Eastern Europe to the Communist terror. It was President Roosevelt who agreed with Stalin that "reparations in kind" should be exacted by the use of Germans as slave laborers.
It was also the Democratic President of the United States who sponsored the Morgenthau Plan for the death by starvation of millions of Germans, and agreed to the expropriation and expulsion of millions of Germans from Silesia, East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and the Balkans for the sole crime of belonging to the German "race."
It was Churchill, the Tory imperialist, not Roosevelt, the American democrat, who stood up to Stalin at Yalta when the dictator of all the Russias proposed the massacre of thousands of German officers after victory.* It was Churchill, not Roosevelt or his "liberal" aides, who tried to save Europe from Communist domination and terror by advocating a strategy which would have kept the Russians out of Eastern Europe, and could have prevented the sacrifices of the war from resulting in nothing but the substitution of one totalitarian tyranny for another.†
President Wilson was broken, and died, after his failure either to persuade America's allies to agree to a just peace, or to get the support of Congress for The League of Nations, which he thought would compensate for the concessions he had been forced to make at Versailles to the greed, fears, and ambitions of the victors.
* This is not intended as a defense of Winston Churchill who was too short-sighted, or too exhilarated by his own eloquence, to realize the disastrous consequences of all-out aid to Stalin's Russia. As compared with Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, Churchill can claim to have been a statesman.
† According to the account given by Elliott Roosevelt in As He Saw It (New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946).
8
President Roosevelt died before the consequences of his repudiation of moral values in the treatment of the defeated enemy peoples and his readiness to sacrifice principles and interests in furtherance of his "Great Design" had become fully apparent. But before his death he must have known that Stalin would not honor the commitments won from him at the cost of betraying Poland and China, delivering Eastern Europe to Communist rule, and putting the Soviet dictator in a position to menace all Europe while taking over China.
Both Democratic Presidents failed; but Wilson had fought for justice, whereas Roosevelt had sacrificed it to expediency and staked the future of the world on what he himself admitted was a "gamble" and on his faith in his ability to charm the Soviet dictator.
The consequences of Roosevelt's "successes" were more disastrous than Wilson's failures. The United Nations proved from its inception to be a greater failure than Wilson's League of Nations and has already in effect been discarded in favor of the Atlantic Pact with the enemies of Soviet Russia.
The contrast between the attitude and aims of Wilson and Roosevelt was a reflection of the changed philosophy of the liberals. During and after World War I the liberals had pleaded for a just peace, eschewed national and racial prejudices, and endeavored to combat the influence of nationalism and war-fostered hatred among peoples. But during and after World War II, so-called liberals and progressives took the lead in demanding the crucifixion of the whole German people.
If the forces of Western democracy have been weakened by the influence of totalitarians masquerading as liberals, or corrupted by Communist influence, the Communists have lost part of their strength by having divested communism of its original humanitarian content and international appeal.
None but the ignorant, the blind, and a few self-seeking men of large ambition and little talent now believe, that communism offers mankind a more just social order or greater equality between men, nations and races.
The difference in the attitude and policies of the Communists today and twenty years ago is best illustrated by their behavior toward Germany. Here the contrast between past and present attitudes, and professed ideals and present practices, is most clearly displayed.
In 1917 Lenin proclaimed the unity of the "workers of the world," denounced the war as an imperialist struggle, and offered the hand of friendship to the German people while repudiating the nationalist war aims of both the Tsarist and Kerensky governments. Under his leadership the Communists were internationalists in both theory and practice. They had no more enmity toward the German people than toward any other because they regarded "the masses" in every country as the victims of "capitalist tyranny" and "imperialist ambition."
A quarter of a century later, Stalin, having built on the foundations laid by Lenin, but with a totally different conception of the structure which was to be erected, had transformed Russia into a national-socialist state, and was wreaking a terrible vengeance on the whole German people for having followed its own National Socialist leaders instead of Russia's. And whereas Lenin had renounced all the territorial ambitions of the Tsars, Stalin was demanding all and more than they had ever dreamed of acquiring in Europe and Asia.
The degeneration of Communism and of democracy having proceeded on parallel lines, it was natural that the Western Powers and Soviet Russia could agree only upon one thing : vengeance upon their defeated enemies. Communism having become a synonym for the interests of the rulers of Russia and democracy having succumbed to the insidious poison of national hatred, the victors of World War II combined to despoil and enslave the Germans.
Whereas hatred is a powerful weapon in the hands of the Communists, it debilitates the enemies of tyranny. Our hands have been tied by our intimate association with the tyrants whose only quarrel with Hitler was his refusal to make common cause with Russia's national socialists.
Communism has lost the liberal savor which once gave it moral force. But its appeal has not yet been nullified by its inhuman acts and its prostitution in the interests of Stalin's dictatorship. Stalin was wiser than Hitler, who ignored Machiavelli's precept that to succeed a tyrant must either kill off all opposition or conciliate his enemies. Whereas the number of victims consigned to Soviet concentration camps who have escaped is infinitesimal, many Jews and democrats who had either suffered in Hitler's prisons or had friends or relatives in them, were allowed to go abroad and tell the world about Nazi atrocities. Hence the widespread knowledge of Nazi crimes and the little information in democratic countries concerning the torture and death of the millions of victims of Communist tyranny.
Because Hitler was a little less ruthless, or efficient, than Stalin in exterminating his enemies, the atrocities committed by the Soviet Government are far less widely known than the record of Nazi crime. This is the one reason why the echo of communism's original humanitarian and international appeal still evokes a response among idealists who know nothing, and refuse to learn anything, about Stalin's Russia. But the main appeal of communism today is to the most irrational and destructive impulses to which human nature is heir. By playing upon our hatreds and passions the Communists foster and inflame class, racial and national antagonisms, and cause us to act against our own interests and the cause of freedom. Since the war's end they have been successful in propagating the idea that mercy, justice, charity, and goodwill are signs of "fascist" sympathies.
Years ago, when I went to live in the Soviet Union, the Communist attitude toward Menschlichkeit (humane behavior) was first revealed to me by the notice I read in Sevastopol under the portrait of a certain Russian general who commanded the Tsar's troops in the Crimean War : "General X was a most dangerous enemy of the working class; by treating his soldiers kindly he sought to dull their class consciousness."
Since the Communist aim is to perpetuate or create the conditions of chaos and misery which alone can give them the opportunity to seize power, it is natural that they should not only oppose the Marshall Plan but also exert their influence to exacerbate the old hatreds and resentments which keep their enemies divided.
The best and wisest of the Jewish people cannot be seduced by the Communist appeal to the natural but irrational desire to exact retribution from all Germans for the murder and torture of their race by the Nazis. Intelligent and liberal Jews have been among the leading opponents of the Communists and have rejected the Communist conception of collective guilt and punishment of innocent and guilty alike. But, being human, many Jews are as putty in the hands of the Communists, who appeal to their desire for revenge in order to soften up Europe for Soviet conquestThe Communists have likewise successfully appealed to the hatred of the Poles, the Czechs, and others who suffered at German hands, using this passion as a means to deliver the "liberated" peoples into Stalin's hands. Thus the Czechs, who expropriated and expelled the three million people of the Sudetenland, are today themselves being converted into Stalin's serfs in their own country.
If the influence of the Communists today were confined to those who still believe that the Soviet Union is a "peace loving democracy," it would be negligible. It is the cleverness of the Communists and their sympathizers and dupes in appealing to our irrational and destructive impulses which is weakening the democratic world.
Stalin is in the enviable position of having two hands to use for the destruction of the free world. As head of the Russian State he is offering the German people the opportunity to revenge themselves on the West by allying themselves with Soviet Russia. Hoping to harness German nationalism to his chariot, he gives former Nazis honorable and well-paid positions in the German Communist "police" forces which are in fact an army, and in the Communist universities and administrative offices of the Soviet zone. Soviet Russia's appeal today in Germany is mainly addressed to former Nazis who are welcomed into the ranks of their ideological brothers in the Communist party.
At the same time, as "pope" of the Communist "church," which is supposed to transcend national barriers, Stalin instructs the faithful in other lands to demand the implementation of policies calculated to drive the Germans to side with Soviet Russia because they despair of ever being allowed to earn a living under Western military occupation.
This double game would be too obvious to be successful, were it not for the influential writers, radio commentators, professors, and other molders of public opinion who have allowed themselves to be influenced by the Communists, either because they are ignorant, or because they are ambitious, or because of the skill of the Communists in playing upon national and racial hatreds and keeping alive the passions engendered by the recent war. The American people would by now have learned the self-defeating nature of United States policy toward Germany, were it not for the influence of Communist sympathizers, spread in manifold and subtle ways in newspapers, periodicals, and books; by popular lectures and the teachings of university professors; among Senators, Congressmen, and businessmen fearful of the stigma of red-baiting attached to those who question the Communist definition of "liberalism" and "progress."
The Communists and their hangers-on have succeeded in convincing a large number of Americans that justice and mercy are "reactionary," and sympathy for the underdog a sign of "fascist sympathies." They almost succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that vengeance on the defeated, even at the cost of imposing a crushing burden on the American taxpayer, is the way to secure peace.
Communist influence, so strong in the Roosevelt era, has been largely responsible for our treatment of Germany, and our repetition in exaggerated form of the mistakes made by France and England after World War I. Nor is this influence now dead, in spite of the growing awareness of the American people of the danger it constitutes.
French influence has reinforced that of the Communists to convince the American people that Germany should be kept disarmed and deprived of liberty and sufficient industrial capacity to exist without American subsidies—a policy which must eventually succeed in forcing the Germans to side with Soviet Russia.
We have not only, once again, imposed a crushing reparations burden on the German people. This time we have also deprived an already overpopulated Germany of the territory without which her people cannot be fed, and of the industries which could produce the exports with which to buy the food otherwise unobtainable. Not satisfied with having put Russia in direct control of Eastern Germany which formerly supplied Western Germany with food, we agreed to the expulsion of more than twelve million Germans from Silesia, which we gave to Poland; from the Sudetenland inhabited by Germans for centuries past; and from Yugoslavia and other East European countries with minorities of German "racial" origin.
If ever the history of our times comes to be written by scholars free of national prejudices, the "crimes against humanity" committed by the victors of the second World War of the twentieth century A.D., will appear as equal to those committed by the Nazis. For an objective observer of the "crimes, follies, and cruelties of mankind" cannot deny that the expropriations and expulsion from their homes of millions of people for the sole crime of belonging to the German "race" was an atrocity comparable with the extermination of the Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis. The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful.
Nor will that mythical person, the historian of the future, when he comes to draw up the balance sheet between Nazi crimes and those of their conquerors, fail to register against the democracies our decision to halt our armies on the Elbe in order to allow the Red Army to sack and ravish Berlin.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery no one ever paid a higher compliment to the Nazis than their conquerors.
Instead of acting according to the democratic principles we had gone to war to preserve, we tore up the Atlantic Charter and copied the Nazis in our repudiation of international law.
Instead of demonstrating our belief in the Christian and liberal principles which had made America the strongest power in the world, we reaffirmed the Nazi doctrine that "might makes right." Instead of showing the Germans that Hitler's racial theories were both wrong and ridiculous, we ourselves assumed the role of a master race. Instead of establishing a rule of law according to which individuals are punished only for the crimes they themselves have committed, and only after proof of their guilt has been established, we have indicted the whole German nation for Hitler's crimes.
We told the cold and hungry Germans in the cities shattered by our "obliteration" bombing that they could expect neither justice nor mercy, but that although we had disenfranchised them as punishment for Nazi crimes, we would teach them to love democracy.
Instead of recognizing that their "unconditional surrender" put us under a moral and legal obligation to ensure a fair deal for the German people, we did exactly the opposite. We proclaimed at Nuremberg that we no longer considered ourselves bound by the Hague or Geneva conventions because Germany had surrendered unconditionally, but that we would punish all Germans for having similarly disregarded international law when they were the victors.
The original directives, given to the United States occupation forces ordered them to do nothing to revive the German economy, and disclaimed all responsibility for the feeding of the conquered, although we had ourselves insisted during the war that Germany must provide enough food for the people of the countries she had occupied, however impossible this was, owing to our blockade. And it was agreed at Potsdam that the victors were entitled to exact reparations in kind in the form of forced labor—a provision taken full advantage of by the Russians who have held millions of prisoners of war as slave laborers and conscripted men and women in their zone to work in chain gangs or concentration camps.
The soldiers of the United States were told that they were entering Germany not as liberators but as conquerors. The task of the occupation forces was conceived of as entirely negative. It was to demilitarize, denazify, decentralize, and deindustrialize the defeated enemy country. Nothing was to be done to make the Germans believe that the victory of the democracies offered freedom, hope, or justice. Instead, we proceeded to teach the Germans that their dead Führer had been right in saying that if Germany failed to conquer she would be destroyed. "Woe to the vanquished" was our motto as it had been Hitler's.
For three years after their unconditional surrender we kept the Germans on rations little or no larger than those in Nazi concentration camps. All Germans, even those who emerged from Hitler's prisons, were starved and humiliated.
Germans were forbidden on pain of imprisonment to criticize the Soviet Union or complain of its inhuman treatment of those we had delivered over to the Communist terror. American and German Communists and fellow travelers were installed in influential positions in the Military Government, in the German state and town administrations, on denazification boards, and as newspaper editors and managers of radio stations. We did our best to convince the Germans that we had no objection to totalitarian doctrines and practices so long as they served the interests of Soviet Russia instead of those of German nationalism.
We not only made a mockery of our democratic professions by the power and influence we accorded to both American and German Communists, we also taught American youth to abjure the principles the American people had been told they were fighting to preserve.
American soldiers on entering Germany were given indoctrination courses in hatred, and taught to have no mercy or pity in dealing with the wicked German "race," just as young Nazis had been taught to hate and abhor the Jews. "The Morgenthau Plan," approved of by President Roosevelt at Quebec, was the basis of the Army's notorious order JCS 1067 which laid down the pattern of our original occupation policy. The Morgenthau Plan for the pastoralization of Germany, had it been carried out, would have constituted the greatest act of genocide perpetrated in modern times. The Germans would have been deprived of almost all their industries, and, since their soil is incapable of supporting more than the present agricultural population, at least thirty million people would have died of starvation.
The humanitarian scruples of the American people prevented the execution of this infamous plan. Unfortunately, however, JSC 1067 remained as the textbook of our occupation forces until 1947. According to this Army order issued to General Eisenhower in April 1945, "no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany or designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy" were to be taken. Military Government was explicitly instructed to "prohibit and prevent" production in a long and comprehensive list of industries.
The food consumption of the German people was to be held down to a minimum, with "surpluses" made available to the occupying forces and displaced persons. With a total disregard of the fact that a Germany deprived of her eastern bread basket by the Russian occupation and by the Polish seizure of Silesia had no possibility of feeding herself even at a near-starvation level, it was decreed that ration scales should be set low enough to permit the use of "net surpluses" for the sustenance of the occupation forces and displaced persons and for export.
Army order JCS 1067 explicitly states that "Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy nation." It went on to say that reparations and restitutions were to be exacted, and no political activity permitted. "Fraternization" with the enemy was strictly forbidden. We were determined to out-Nazi the Nazis in our own treatment of the conquered.
American soldiers were threatened with punishment should they behave like Americans and aid the destitute and helpless. Kindness, even to German children, was held to be a misdemeanor. GI's were forbidden to take a morsel of food off their plates to give to the starving, and mess sergeants were instructed to throw away food left over, not to let any Germans have it. Even the gift of coffee grounds to the Germans was forbidden.
Not only was charity forbidden and pity regarded as un-American, GI's and officers, if not positively encouraged to loot, were in no way discouraged from committing the same excesses as the Russians and French. Today the verb "liberate" has become an army colloquialism for stealing.
Since every army contains a percentage of gangsters and criminal elements, there is always some looting in an occupied enemy country and a certain amount of brutal mishandling of the civilian population. The instructions given by Washington to the United States Army positively encouraged the licentious and brutal minority and penalized the decent, law abiding, and humane majority.
It is to the credit of the American people that in spite of the Roosevelt-Morgenthau directives, put into operation by General Eisenhower without protest, large numbers of American soldiers insisted on behaving like Christian gentlemen. Many succored the hungry and defenseless Germans in spite of the regulations against it. Others were impelled by the impulse which in all ages has broken the barriers between conquerors and conquered.
Americans in the occupation forces might enjoy the status of "sons of heaven," but like the angels they looked upon the daughters of earth and saw that they were fair. It was impossible to prevent GI's who were far from home and sick of war to carry the demands of vengeance to the extent of rejecting association with ill-fed but neat German women or refusing candy to starving German children. Neither army regulations nor the propaganda of hatred in the American press could prevent American soldiers from liking and associating with German women, who although they were driven by hunger to become prostitutes, preserved a certain innate decency, and by responding to kindness with affection and loyalty, often won the love of American boys who had started out only to enjoy the pleasures which war affords to the victors.
Because of the natural kindness of the Americans, the call of human nature, and the qualities of German women, the inhuman and unrealistic directives given by Washington to the United States occupation forces were from the beginning more honored in the breach than in observance.
The futility of telling Americans to act like Nazis, Communists, or robots led at an early stage to the cancellation of the nonfraternization decrees.
Meanwhile, the utter absurdity of the Morgenthau Plan and the high cost of vengeance was becoming obvious in America. Far from realizing "surpluses," Western Germany had to be supplied with American food to prevent "disease and unrest" dangerous to the occupation forces.
Americans had not been sufficiently indoctrinated with totalitarian concepts of collective punishment to be inflicted on innocent and guilty alike to enable them to condemn millions of people to death by starvation, even if this policy had not involved risks to the occupation forces. Humanitarian sentiment was reinforced by the dangers to which American soldiers were exposed. Germs disregard racial barriers or those dividing "good" and "bad" nations, and it was also realized that starving people might prefer a quick death by attacking their conquerors to a slow lingering one. So the American taxpayer was called upon to provide just enough food to keep the Germans alive and submissive and to prevent epidemics. Gradually also, the influence of so-called liberals and "New Deal" advocates of the theory that we should love Communists and hate all Germans, declined.
The original pattern of the United States occupation had been set at a time when propaganda had convinced a large number of Americans that Soviet Russia is a "peace-loving" power and an example of a "new and better" democratic way of life, and had induced the majority of Americans to believe that Stalin could be trusted to honor his commitments.
After the Soviet Government made it increasingly obvious that it was irrevocably hostile to the Western democracies and had no more intention of observing its treaties with us than those it had formerly signed with its European neighbors, the most loving "friends of the Soviet Union" were compelled to think again. Those who were not Communists were forced to admit that the assumptions on which United States policy had been based since 1941 might conceivably be false. As the menace of Soviet aggression grew, the assumption that the Germans were the root of all evil crumbled. As it became more and more apparent that the Soviet Union menaced the whole world, it became clear that what was left of Europe must be defended against Russia even at the cost of forgiving the German people for their error in following Nazi leadership, and admitting them into the community of free Western nations.
Understanding of the terrible present danger which Communism constitutes to freedom everywhere in the world, combined with the American taxpayers' realization of the cost of vengeance, combined to modify our German policy. The Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, which included Germany as the recipient of American ECA assistance, took the place of the Morgenthau Plan for "keeping Germany in chains and Europe in rags."
The need for a complete repudiation of the totalitarian concepts which originally inspired our occupation policy is not, however, recognized even today.
As soon as I arrived in Germany in August 1948 I realized that the assumption at home that the Marshall Plan has completely superseded the Morgenthau Plan is a delusion. United States policy had changed, and compared to the first years of the occupation it had become humane and intelligent. But the basic pattern remained the same.
The adherents of the Morgenthau Plan, although they no longer directed United States occupation policies, still influenced it and could be found occupying important positions in Military Government. The Communists and their sympathizers were no longer permitted to hold leading positions in Germany; but they were still able to work through so-called liberals who have been persuaded that advocacy of a humane and constructive policy in Germany is a sign of reactionary sympathies.
Waning Communist influence has been reinforced by French intransigeance and the British desire to eliminate German competition in the markets of the world. Thus dismantlement and other measures which debilitate Germany, weaken Europe, place ever increasing burdens on America, and pave the way for a Communist conquest of the world, are still being implemented.
This book does not attempt to deal with all aspects of the German problem. It aims only to show the American people the cost of vengeance, now and in the future. That cost cannot be appraised only in economic terms. The moral, political, and military consequences of denying to the Germans, not only liberty, but also the right to earn a living and the right of self-defense, may lead to the destruction of Western civilization, unless America is made aware in time of the need to implement in Europe the principles which have made her great.
19
Chapter 2
The Spirit of Berlin
Berlin in the summer and fall of 1948 reminded me of Shanghai ten years ago. In China then, as in Germany now, the Americans, British, and French were living safely and comfortably while "the natives" risked their lives against the enemy who was preparing to attack us in the fullness of time. A decade ago the United States and Britain had endeavored to maintain "good relations" with the Japanese aggressors in spite of their Nanking Massacre and other "crimes against humanity"; and in spite of Japan's disregard of Western interests in China, her insults, and such hostile acts as the blockade of the British concession at Tientsin, and the bombing of the United States gunboat Panay. In Germany we were trying to reach an understanding with the Soviet Government in spite of the blockade of Berlin and Moscow's open proclamation of bitter enmity toward the Western "capitalist-imperialist" Powers.
In the first years of the Sino-Japanese War, when I was a correspondent in China, America and England, while seeking to preserve their own interests by appeasing Japan and sacrificing China, treated the Japanese with far greater respect than the Chinese who were fighting our battles as well as their own. In the Cold War in Europe, we were trying not to "provoke" the Russians, and were begging Stalin in Moscow to meet our envoys to discuss the Berlin Crisis with the same disregard of the interests of the German people as we had shown with regard to the Chinese. Just as we had formerly proffered the hand of friendship to militarist Japan if only she would refrain from attacking our interests in China, so now we were assuring the Soviet dictator that we would be delighted to cooperate with him once again if only he would keep his demands within reasonable limits. We still held the whole German people responsible for Hitler's crimes, while prepared to condone and abet Stalin's if only he would not attack us and our friends. We blamed the Germans for having submitted to Nazi dictatorship, but we ourselves continued to demonstrate our willingness to renew our wartime collaboration with Russia's national socialists.
While treating the representatives of the Soviet dictator with deference, and pleading with Stalin to come to terms permitting us to embrace him, we continued to regard the democratic leaders of the Berlin population as inferiors unworthy to sit down with us to discuss our mutual defense on terms of equality. General Clay and his staff who had formerly had no scruples in entertaining and being entertained by the military representatives of Stalin's bloodstained tyranny, never met the elected representatives of the Berliners except as masters giving orders to their subordinates. True a little more courtesy has been shown to the Mayor and members of the Berlin City Council, but there has been no disposition to treat them as friends.
In Shanghai there had been the International and French concessions where the white people lived in safety with all the conveniences, services, and material advantages of a master race, protected by their own soldiers and the power of their governments, while the great mass of the Chinese population fought and labored and starved in the Chinese city. The Japanese had had their own concession to use as the base for their attack on China, just as the Russians now had their sector of Berlin from which to operate.
In Berlin there was no native city; the whole town was divided up among the four "master races," all enjoying special privileges comparable to those which the Western Powers and Japan had enjoyed in China as a result of the "unequal treaties" which gave them "extraterritorial" rights on Chinese soil. We, the Western Powers, had won our privileged position in China by aggressive war and threats; the Germans whom we now treat like the "inferior" peoples of Asia had got themselves into their present situation by their failure to aggress successfully.
The whole setup in Berlin was so similar to the one I had known in Shanghai in the twenties and thirties that I found myself unconsciously referring to the British, American, French, and Russian "concessions." The Germans, commonly referred to by the American Military Government as "the indigenous population," were as wretchedly housed and fed and as rightless and defenseless as the mass of the Chinese population; and the "conquerors" seemed as callous in their attitude toward German sufferings as the whites had been toward "the natives" in India and China in the bad old days of Western imperialism at the height of its power. Susceptibilities had been hardened by the constant sight of poverty and hunger and our belief in our own moral superiority.
In China during the war, the Westerners had shown rather more sympathy for the poorly armed Chinese attempting to resist Japan than the majority of Americans and British in Berlin showed toward the Germans, part of whose country was already under Soviet Russia's Iron Heel by our consent. Then as now we wanted to "do business" with the aggressors, but we had at least sympathized with the Chinese and cheered them on to fight. The Chinese were not "enemy nationals," so it was correct to be sorry for them and to collect money for their relief. On the other hand the Chinese are not white, so Washington and London never considered Japanese aggression against China as nearly so wicked as German aggression in Europe.
When I came from China to the United States in 1938, I found there was infinitely greater indignation over the rape of Czechoslovakia than over Japan's partial conquest of China with the aid of the American and British war materials she was permitted to buy in huge quantities.
Sun Yat-sen described the China of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a "subcolony," meaning that his country was in an even worse situation than a colony, since all the Western Powers together with Russia and Japan had exploited and oppressed China, while no one of them was responsible for her defense. Today it seemed to me that Germany was in much the same situation. Her conquerors, while quarreling among themselves, jointly hold Germany down. Her people, deprived of all means of self-defense, have no guarantee that the West will defend them from Soviet aggression; and they fear that at any moment Russia and the Western Powers may resurrect the Yalta and Potsdam agreements for their mutual benefit. The Germans had ample proof in the first years of the occupation that democratic principles were of little or no importance to any of their conquerors, and that it is only Stalin's greed and openly declared hostility toward America which has caused the rift between the Eastern and Western victors.
The Germans in Berlin and in the Western zones were being permitted to raise their heads again only because their masters were at odds. They knew only too well that should Stalin choose to make concessions to the Western Powers they, the conquered, would once again be crushed, and might once again be forced by the Western occupying Powers to pretend that Communists are democrats and to admit Stalin's German stooges into a "coalition government."
In their defenseless situation the Berliners might have been expected to resign themselves fatalistically to whatever blows fate still held in store for them. Instead, they were drawing upon spiritual forces, the very existence of which had been denied during the thirteen years of Nazi domination. They were displaying greater courage and fortitude in adversity than in the days of Hitler's power and glory. Alone among the peoples of Europe close to the terrifying power of Soviet Russia, the Berliners were defying it.
Perhaps it is true on earth as in heaven that the last shall be first and the first last. France, who had once been in the forefront of the struggle for liberty, now seemed to be lagging behind Germany in the will and courage to resist tyranny. The French, who ten years ago had asked, "Why die for Danzig?" were now saying, "What, die for Berlin!" Yet the Berliners, ex-enemy nationals as they are, were surely right in believing that if the Western Powers failed this time to recognize the indivisibility of Europe, the need to defend principles as well as self-interest, and the call of the unarmed millions in Germany and Eastern Europe endeavoring to resist the Communist terror, not all the arms and atom bombs manufactured in America would later on be able to save our civilization.
Without weapons, hungry, and in rags, living in squalor in the bomb-shattered buildings of their once proud city, and well aware that the Western Powers would not risk a clash with the Soviets to protect them from "arrest" or kidnapping by the Communists even in the Western sectors of the city, the people of Berlin refused to be cowed.
They were being encouraged in their resolution by General Clay, who, although his attitude towards the Germans was still that of a conqueror, had shown a bold front toward Stalin and was credited with having prevented the State Department from giving way to the Soviets when they started the blockade. It was said that Clay wanted to run an armored convoy through at the outset but had been held back by Washington as well as by the British and French. While the Berlin Mayor and the city councilors resented the cavalier treatment they too often received at the hands of the Military Government, they realized that General Clay was mainly responsible for the air lift and the preservation of a free Berlin.
It was my impression that on the whole, American military men behaved better toward the Germans and had more sympathy and respect for them than the civilians. There was still a good sprinkling of "Morgenthau Boys" among the civilian officials in the economic, financial, and information sections of the Military Government; and it is in any case a truism that those who fight wars do less hating than the civilians who have never learned to respect a brave enemy.
Many United States officers, air-force pilots, and GI's openly proclaimed their admiration for the courage of the Berliners. Colonel Babcock, Deputy Commandant in Berlin, said to me in August : "The courage of these people is really something to wonder at. The City Council members risk their lives and liberty, each time they go to a meeting, since the Stadthaus ("City hall") is in the Russian sector and we can give them no protection there."
I realized how true this had become, for, the day before, I had met Jeanette Wolff, a woman Social-Democratic leader who had been manhandled by the Communists on her way home from a meeting of the Council, and been called a "dirty Jew" by Stalin's bullies. She had escaped serious injury only because a Soviet sector policeman, who had known her when they were together in one of Hitler's concentration camps, protected her and led her to safety.
As against the encouragement they were receiving from Military Government, the Berliners had to reckon not only with the anti-German sentiment still spread in America by most of the press, but also with the influence of such advocates of appeasement as Walter Lippmann and Sumner Welles. The extent of this influence was exaggerated in Germany because the New York Herald Tribune was the only stateside daily newspaper with a European edition, and because the German Communist press seized upon Lippmann's and Sumner Welles's columns as evidence of the lack of support in the United States for General Clay's bold stand in Berlin.
At a meeting I attended in Berlin at America House, a German newspaper editor told a joke then current in the city : A telegram had been dispatched to Washington by a mass meeting of Berlin citizens saying : "Take courage, don't be afraid and give way to Russian threats. We are a hundred per cent behind you!"
This witticism contained a substantial truth. It was in fact the courage of the Berlin population and their unwavering support of the stand against Russia at the cost of acute hardship, which had given the United States the backing it required to hold on in Berlin.
It was interesting in Berlin to witness the "conversion" of many visitors. However great their resistance to the idea on their arrival, many of them left at least partially convinced that the capital of Hitler's infamous Third Reich has been transformed into the focus of resistance to total tyranny. This seeming paradox is not only the result of the rapid tempo of history in our times. It also must be remembered that in the tragic record of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Berlin was conspicuous for its anti-Nazi vote, and succumbed only after the Communists had made common cause with the Nazis to destroy German democracy.
It seemed to me, in August and September 1948, and even more forcibly at the end of November when darkness and cold were adding to the misery of the inhabitants, that a phoenix had arisen from the ashes of the ruined city. A new resolute, hardened, and purified democratic movement was inspiring the unarmed people of Berlin to resist Soviet Russia's armed might with a courage unequaled anywhere else in Europe. German bravery, discipline, and singleness of purpose were at last, to judge from Berlin, being directed toward the defense, instead of the destruction, of Western civilization.
The unanimity of the Berlin population, in contrast to the divisions which weaken the democratic forces in France and even in Britain, is the more remarkable because the Germans are receiving less encouragement and help from America than any other European country. Although it is true that the United States has saved the German people from mass starvation, they have been at the end of the line in the allocation of food and raw-material subsidies from America. Even more important is the fact that the Germans still lack the moral support they would derive from being accepted as fighting allies in the American-led opposition to Communist aggression. Although they are in the front line of the world-wide struggle against Communist tyranny, the Germans are still suspect for their former acceptance of Nazi leadership. While struggling to be free, they drag the chains with which the democracies have shackled them as punishment for Hitler's crimes. Nevertheless the Germans in Berlin were providing a lesson for all Europe, and in particular for divided and frightened France. They were risking their lives for liberty, while others only talked about their devotion to democracy.
The Germans, it seemed, have learned through bitter experience that the battle today is not one between different economic systems, or between classes or even nations, but one for or against the basic values of Western civilization. A nation whose best spirits recognize that it has sinned mightily was demonstrating in Berlin that it now has greater courage in resisting evil than others who have never been tempted, and have never learned what are the consequences of succumbing to a dictatorship which repudiates all moral values.
"We know, now," a young German said to me, "that in the long run power depends upon the extent to which it is based on spiritual and moral values. Everything which Germans ever won by the sword is lost; our only permanent gains have been those won by moral force. Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler gave us nothing which has not passed away, but the influence of Luther and the Reformation have been permanent."
The man who said this to me, Rainer Hildebrandt, is not a pacifist. Nor did he think that his own country was alone guilty of "crimes against humanity." To him it seemed that Western civilization as a whole was on trial, and had failed so far to meet the test of the machine age and of a world in which the misery of one people affects all others.
"The crisis in Berlin," he said, "is an explosion of all the evils which evoked the previous totalitarianism and now threatens us with the endless night of Communist domination."
Hildebrandt was one of several Germans I met whose ancestry was partly Jewish. They were treated as second- or third-class citizens by the Nazis and never shared, nor, wished to share, in the fruits of Hitler's victories, but they have identified themselves with the German nation in the hour of its defeat and humiliation. He combined an abiding love for the country of his birth with the international and humanitarian outlook of the most idealistic Jews. Thin to the point of emaciation, with classically perfect features and eyes which are both brilliantly intelligent and kind, Rainer Hildebrandt has a vision which transcends nationality and race, burning energy and a zeal for "righteousness" in the Biblical sense of that almost forgotten word.
Hildebrandt had been a friend of the younger Haushofer who was executed for his part in the July Twentieth plot against Hitler and he has written a book for a Swiss publisher on the German resistance movement. He told me that prior to the Soviet occupation he had been among those Germans who had imagined that the Russians would liberate them. Today, having met the Communists face to face, having witnessed the horrible atrocities they committed when they took Berlin, and knowing all about the concentration camps in the Eastern zone and in Russia, he is one of the most fearless and active anti-Communists in Germany. He is in constant touch with the resistance movement in Russian-occupied Germany and has organized help for the neglected victims of Communism who escape to Berlin from the lands under Soviet domination. When I first met him Hildebrandt was trying to get permission from the Military Government to organize an international league to help the victims of Communism on the same lines as the associations formed to help the victims of Nazi terror in prewar days. Failing to obtain American or British support, withheld presumably in the interests of lingering hopes of an accord with Stalin, Hildebrandt has on his own initiative started an organization called "Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit" ("Action Group against Inhumanity").
The following is an extract from a speech he delivered in Berlin :
Decency requires that we take up this fight. We have a responsibility toward ourselves and toward the millions of people in Soviet concentration camps. We want peace, but we do not speak the word peace if it means a continuation of the Cold War. We want a peace which presupposes freedom and respect for human values; a peace which will eliminate the internal as well as external causes of war. The two great motive forces of history are, on the one hand, fear, a bad conscience, and lust for power; on the other hand, responsibility, confidence, brotherhood. These two motors cannot run side by side. The road grows ever narrower, the course which humanity takes will be determined by whichever car takes the lead. If the first car draws ahead, the other will never be able to pass it; a curtain will descend upon us heavier than the Iron Curtain, and the darkest word in the history of the world will have been spoken : "Too late."
27
The reaffirmation of spiritual values, faith in the spirit of man, and readiness to die for liberty; in a word, recognition of the importance of the intangibles which decide the fate of civilizations was, it seemed, the explanation for the spirit of hope which pervaded the besieged city of Berlin.
Reading the stateside press was as depressing as the bombed and fire-gutted buildings of Berlin which stretch mile after mile in every sector of the city. One had an unhappy feeling that the role of the Germans and that of the victorious and powerful democracies had been reversed. For, to judge by most of the American and British newspaper reports and commentaries, the conflict in Berlin was regarded in terms of pure power politics; as if the city where West meets East was just a point on the map, worth so much or so little as a bargaining counter in an American-Russian conflict.
It was more than a little ironic to read the comments of Walter Lippmann, Sumner Welles, and others whose writings were quoted almost daily in the Russian-licensed German press. The same writers who were advocating a deal with Russia which would involve extinction of the lamp of freedom lighted in Berlin, were reproving General Clay for standing up to Russia instead of "concentrating upon the conversion of the German spirit to individual freedom and democracy"!
How was it possible, one thought in Berlin, that anyone could still imagine that the punishment of opinion by denazification courts and penalties, "decartelization," land reform, or the preaching of democracy would decide the issue in Germany? How was it that these and many other writers failed to see that it was example, deeds, our own attitude in the face of totalitarian aggression, and our support and protection of the fighting democrats in Berlin which were all-important? That if we should decide to retire from the battle for the sake of a temporary truce in the Cold War, and leave the Berliners to be overwhelmed by the Soviet Union, it might never again be possible to enlist the German people on our side; and that the resistance movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Soviet satellite countries would be dealt a mortal blow.
If we should once again appease Russia and betray those who trusted in our promise not to abandon Berlin, the unholy alliance of Communists and Nazis—so evident in Berlin where even the Chief of the Russian Sector Police, the notorious Markgraf, is a former prominent Nazi—would be able to destroy the democratic movement of infinite promise born in this ruined city. Germany might then once again be driven to repudiate Western civilization instead of becoming a bulwark for its defense.
As one woman Social Democrat said to me during the Moscow negotiations, "You can't treat people like pawns in a chess game to be moved forward, encouraged to fight for freedom against tyranny while America is at odds with Russia, and then sacrificed in another move to appease Russia. If you once again come to terms with Stalin over our heads and at our expense, you will never again be able to evoke the spirit which is now keeping us on your side in spite of Russia's greater strength and the hunger and terror Communism uses to break men's spirits."
As in a performance of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, the role of the chief protagonists in the drama was omitted in much of the American comment on Berlin. Occasional tributes were paid to the courage and endurance of the Berliners who were daily risking their liberty or their lives by defying the Soviets in the Eastern sectors of the city. But the effect on them and all the Germans of the decisions being arrived at over their heads in Moscow, Washington, London, or Paris, was barely mentioned. The elected representatives of the Berliners in their City Council were not even allowed to participate as advisors in the abortive currency negotiations which began in Berlin in September. We were still the conquerors and the Germans the conquered. While still vainly proffering the hand of friendship to the Russian dictator, we still refused to treat as allies even those Germans who were daily proving the reality of their democratic professions.
The German people have suffered too much not to be realists. Ready as many of them were at the beginning of the occupation to atone for the sins of the Nazis, they naturally refuse to accept the thesis that other nations should be allowed to commit crimes against humanity with impunity. They have begun to ask questions about our deals with the dictators, and our failures to take action against the Communists.
The Berlin weekly, Sie, stated on August 22 :
We do not understand why the Communists are allowed to act according to the old maxim, Might is Right, which they have reformulated as, Arrogance Wins. We do not understand why Lübeck (in the British zone) continues to supply the Communist zone with electricity while tormenting darkness reigns in the Western sectors of Berlin. We do not understand why the gangster Markgraf who is wanted by the prosecutor (for war crimes) can arrest people while his employees are not arrested when they come into the Western sectors. We do not understand why what was regarded yesterday as the collective guilt of the German people, namely tolerance of SA-like gangsterism, today passes as "conciliation."
When I returned to Berlin at the end of November, more questions were being asked. Why were the British exporting planes and machinery to Soviet Russia and even repairing the Red Army's transport in the British sector of Berlin? Why were the French surreptitiously exporting machinery from Berlin to Russia? Why was the United Nations in Paris failing to condemn the Soviet blockade of Berlin—surely an obvious "crime against humanity"? Why was machinery still being dismantled and sent to Czechoslovakia and other Soviet satellite countries from the Western zones?
I had never thought of the Olympic games as of great importance, but Germans of all classes in Berlin in August 1948 asked me how we justified the exclusion of German athletes from the games being held that summer in England, although the very same people, Lord Vansittart among them, who today held all Germans responsible for Nazi atrocities had themselves come to Berlin in 1936 to participate as Hitler's guests in the Olympiad of that year.
To the Berliners our former readiness to "fraternize" with the Nazis was on a par with our more recent willingness to accept the Soviet Union as a "democratic" state and join hands with Stalin in depriving all people of German race of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Why should only Germans be punished and others go scot free?
In spite of all the questions and doubts about our good faith, the Berliners were still holding on. Indeed the most remarkable and significant fact, it seemed to me, was that neither our long-continued appeasement policy toward Russia, nor our treatment of the Germans as a conquered people without rights, nor our original identification of Communism with democracy, had failed to destroy all faith in Western professions and principles.
Here among the ruins and the rubble, among a great people brought down to an Asiatic level of subsistence by war and defeat and the universal abhorrence of Nazi crimes which has led us to treat all Germans as deserving of punishment; here where the children went ragged and barefoot and left cold schoolrooms to wait in dark homes for their mothers to return from work—work like that of Chinese coolies—stacking bricks, pulling heavy loads along the streets, and doing a man's heavy labor on the airfields; here, in spite of hunger and humiliation and back-breaking labor, one found, not despair, hatred of the East and West alike, and a futile lust for revenge, not nihilism or a cynical defeatism and self-seeking, but a stubborn faith in the values of Western civilization which the Nazis had denied and Western occupation policies have done little to revive.
In the city where the anti-Nazis had fought hardest, but not hard enough, to prevent Hitler's coming to power, one sensed in every word and deed, not only of the Mayor and the City Council, but of the mass of people, a determination never to let it happen again.
A student from the port of Rostock in the Russian zone, who came to see me in Berlin in September, said that the German workers there would prefer war, even if it meant death, to the misery of their life under the Communists. He also told me how depressing it was to hear every night on the radio that the Western Powers were still negotiating in Moscow, although they had said originally that they wouldn't negotiate until the Berlin blockade was lifted. "We are allowed no other papers but the Russian-licensed ones," he said, "and it is not encouraging to see the headlines about 'The great defeat of America' and to read how you are begging Stalin to talk to you and come to terms."
I talked to many other visitors and refugees from the Soviet zone, to returned prisoners of war from Russia, and to several people who had escaped, or been released, from the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen in the Soviet zone, where hundreds of thousands of Germans are today even worse treated than Hitler's victims in the same camps. I met others who were ostensibly free, but to whom life in Russian-occupied Germany seemed little better than prison. One and all they echoed the saying I heard everywhere in Berlin : "Better a horrible end, than horror without end."
In America, "Give me liberty or give me death," is only an echo from the past, without urgent appeal for people who take freedom for granted. But the liberties men fought and died for a century and a half ago are felt to be worth more than life by those who live in or near the Russian zone, and have experienced a servitude far more terrible than any which formerly existed in Europe under its Kings.
The word democracy has been too debased by identification with communism for it to be heard often in Berlin. An older, cleaner word is used by the people and their leaders : freedom. At the great demonstration I witnessed on August 26, held outside the gaunt, fire-gutted Reichstag building after the Communist storm troopers and police had driven the City Council out of the Stadthaus in the Russian sector, the keynote of all the speeches was "freedom." This was the word which roused tumultuous applause among the hungry, shabby multitude.
The faces of all the people around me showed signs of privation and sorrow. Everyone, from the skinny children to the women old before their time, might have been expected to care more for promises of bread and peace. But it was not until a speaker said, "The fight is not only for Berlin but for freedom everywhere," that the tired sad faces lit up and the applause rang out.
"We are unarmed but our spirit is stronger than theirs," said Ernst Reuter, the elected Mayor of Berlin who was prevented from taking office by the Russians. And the eyes of the crowd turned toward the Russian soldiers standing guard close by at the Soviet War Memorial.
The cynic may say that the Berliners are not democrats, that they are merely fearful of the Russian terror which every one of them has experienced in one form or another. True, that tragedy has touched every German one speaks to in Berlin, whether it is the women raped by the Soviet soldiers; the mothers whose husbands or sons were massacred in the Russian sack of the city or are still held as slave laborers in Soviet mines or factories; the families whose homes were burnt over their heads by the Russians; or those who have recently had someone arrested by the Communists and sent to the dread concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Yet Reuter that day had the crowd with him when he said : "If the Russian people were free to speak, they would be fighting together with us for liberty."
Another popular speaker, the lovely and gracious Frau Annadora Leber, whose Alsatian husband was killed by the Nazis, declared at an open-air meeting I attended in Spandau : "Not every Russian is responsible for the crimes of those who rule over him. We all know that some Russians have shown us kindnesses. They are victims of the same system which oppresses us in the Eastern zone and now threatens all Berlin. Germany must become part of the Western world again. To win freedom, we must endure starvation and face death."
And she continued with these words of warning : "In the depression years many of you said : 'it couldn't be worse,' but you found out later that under the Nazis it eventually became far worse. Now in spite of our terrible difficulties with food—no Berlin woman knows from day to day how she will be able to feed her family—we know that it would be even worse than now if the Russians ruled over us. We know that we would be taken away to slave labor camps and be ruled over by the same methods the Nazis used. The new PG's* (Communists) are the same as the old PG's (Nazis)."
Every speech I heard and every talk I had with Germans of all kinds in Berlin, convinced me that it is not only the close and ever present fear of Russia which inspires the German resistance to communism. It is as much their experience under the Nazis, and their realization that communism means a repetition of it, which holds the Germans on our side of the Iron Curtain.
Those who have experienced life under a totalitarian dictatorship are better aware of the supreme value of liberty than others who have never known servitude. This perhaps explains why the Germans, in spite of their aptitude for a century past in submitting to authority, are less susceptible today to Communist propaganda than Americans who have accepted liberty as their birthright and cannot even imagine what it means to be without it.
The Berliners are regaining their self-respect and that of the whole German nation by their courage in resisting the Communist threat to themselves and all Europe. The former enemies of democracy have become its foremost defenders.
"Berlin is not Prague" is more than a patriotic slogan. It expresses the German determination to show the West that those whom we fought yesterday are more to be relied upon in today's world-wide struggle against the totalitarians than some former allies in whom we put our trust, but whose leaders succumbed without a struggle to Communist pressure.
In a long talk I had with Ernst Reuter in his house in Berlin, he said that the feeling in the city was that by a certain kind of behavior the Germans could redeem themselves and "make it impossible for the West to treat us any longer as 'natives.'"
When I asked how it was that, after all they had experienced, not only under the Nazis, but also under Western occupation, the Germans had not all become nihilists, Reuter replied : "Today we have a chance to do something to help ourselves; to struggle in our own defense even though we are unarmed. The most effective remedy for despair is action. Our life has been given meaning again by our struggle against Communism. Berlin today is proud of itself. We have won back our self-respect, and we are confident that eventually we shall also win your respect."
* Short for Partei Genossen ("Party Comrades")
33
The war was, however, still too recent for the United States and Britain to accept the Germans as allies. If the courage of the Berliners had convinced American military men, from generals to GI's, that the Germans could become our best allies on the Continent, sentiment at home, French fears and blindness, and the original pattern of behavior set by our occupation policies, precluded a radical change in our attitude toward the Germans. We had made a half turn since we began to understand that "you can't do business with Stalin"; we had begun to revive Western Germany and to set our faces against further dismantling; and friendly relations with the German people were now encouraged rather than discouraged. But we still failed to treat the Germans as equals. We were still obsessed by the totalitarian concept that some nations are "good" and "peace-loving" and others wicked and aggressive. We still refused to recognize the fact that people are people everywhere, and that our primary purpose should be to encourage and support the truly liberal forces to be found among all peoples.
In besieged Berlin American and British buses, reserved for Allied personnel, still drove around town almost empty, while the Germans trudged on foot or waited in long queues for the few and overcrowded streetcars and buses allowed by the Russian blockade. We "the conquerors" still occupied the best houses, reserving ample space for ourselves, while the majority of Berliners lived in squalor in cellars and bomb-wrecked apartments. We still ate to repletion, drank well, and even had fresh milk imported by air from Denmark, while Berlin babies had none, and no Germans except black-marketeers had enough to eat. The demarcation line between the occupation forces and the "natives" was still applied even to the lavatories in Military Government offices—some were labeled only for use by Americans, and others were permitted to German personnel. We had electric lights eight hours out of twenty-four, while the Germans had only two hours' use of current and only enough gas to boil a kettle of water a day. In some parts of the Western sectors of the city electric light and gas were available only at 1 A.M. and tired women who had worked all day had to rise to cook and wash in the middle of the night; but we could still dance by electric light till 11 P.M. When winter came our houses or apartments were warm night and day, but the Germans had no coal. German hospitals overflowing with patients were in darkness and lacked medicines and even bandages, but almost empty American and British hospitals had their lights burning all night.
The automobile and jeep drivers, and all other Germans, from clerks to experts, employed by the Military Government were not only receiving their wages six weeks in arrears, thanks to the control over the Berlin banks which we had originally given to the Russians in 1945. They were also receiving only a quarter of their wages in the new Western marks introduced after currency reform. The other three-quarters were paid in the Russian marks which were worth only a fourth of the Western marks we had half-heartedly brought into Berlin. Appeasement, or what was more politely called the desire "not to provoke" the Russians, had led us to penalize all the Berliners, including those working for us, by using the Russian marks as legal tender.
The June currency reform will be discussed in a later chapter. It is, however, necessary to comment here on the curious policy of the Finance Office of the Military Government. Having first given the Russians an excuse for their siege of the city by introducing the new Western mark, it then refused to bring in a sufficient quantity to permit the city administration and the Military Government to pay wages and salaries in Deutsche (D) marks. While flying food into Berlin at tremendous cost, we accepted Russian marks in payment for it, thus effectively supporting the value of the Russian sponsored currency.
The Communists had the whip hand over the city administration, since the banks are in the Russian sector, and the Communists could withhold the funds necessary to pay wages. They were also in a position to block the accounts of every factory owner and business enterprise in the city.
On the other hand, if more D marks had been flown in, more of them would have fallen into the hands of the Russians to use for the purchase of the goods they needed from the Western zones. For, whereas we accepted the Russian mark in payment for the supplies we flew into the city, the free, or black, market was controlled by the Russians, and D marks were demanded for most unrationed supplies, such as the meager quantities of fresh fruit and vegetables and coal which entered the Russian sector of the city. D marks were also required for the purchase of the clothing and household goods which had appeared in the shops following currency reform. The trouble was, of course, that there was little of anything to be bought in the Russian zone, which the Soviets were stripping for their own use. Such few goods, or raw materials to make them, as could be brought into Berlin through the blockade had to be paid for with D marks. Naturally the Russians would not sell anything they controlled for their own paper marks.
In these circumstances it would have been more sensible to give the food ration free to all workers in the Western sectors than to take Russian marks in payment for it.
The day I left Berlin on the air lift I was provided with a small, but symbolic, example of how our attitude toward the Germans hampers us in the Cold War for Berlin.
While I stood watching the German workers unloading the plane on which I was to fly to Frankfurt, the United States Air Force pilot waiting beside me said : "We'll be delayed at least half an hour longer beyond our scheduled time, because our cargo, as you see, is airstrips, and the Germans can't handle the stuff fast, not only because it's so heavy, but because they haven't got gloves."
The United States was spending millions of dollars each week to supply Berlin. "Operation Vittles" is a miracle of American organization, as I realized to the full while I listened in on the radio operator's headphones to the instructions being given even few seconds to each of the Big or Little "Willies," which take off and land at two- to three-minute intervals. A second's mistake or miscalculation of time, altitude, or position could be disastrous. Yet operations can be slowed down, and tired American pilots compelled to work a fifteen, instead of a normal twelve-hour shift, because a hundred or so dollars have not been spent to provide the Germans who load and unload the planes with gloves!
Obviously this omission was not due to the practice of petty economies, although in effect cents were being saved and dollars wasted. It was the hardening of our sensibilities through the accustomed sight of hungry, cold, and ragged people, through three years of occupation of a conquered country, which had, no doubt, induced this costly disregard for the human needs of the Germans working with us in Berlin. Not that the GI's and pilots and American mechanics I talked to on the airfield and during this and subsequent flights had a "master race" attitude toward the Germans. On the contrary, they called my attention to the barefooted women strewing sand on the runway and exclaimed : "Did you ever see anything like it! Aren't those German women wonderful?" And my pilot said : "I used to think that it was only in China you could see women working like that; I never imagined white people could do it. I admire their guts."
I admired them too, but I also wondered how it must feel to go home at night to cook and wash and care for children after doing a man laborer's heavy work all day. I also wondered how these ragged women would be able to work in the cold of winter.
The women are the silent chorus, the unsung and weary heroines of the struggle dramatized by the spectacular air lift. The women outnumber the men by more than two to one in Berlin, and it is upon them that the chief burden of the struggle rests. Many of them have lost their husbands, or wait in vain for them to return from Russian prisons. They are the sole support of their children and often also of a grandmother or some relative crippled or blinded in the air raids. Day after day they must not only earn their living but also tend to and comfort their cold and hungry children, while never getting enough to eat themselves.
The ration in Berlin is now 1,800 calories; before the blockade when the Allies could have provided enough food, it was even lower. One wondered in Berlin how human flesh and spirit could stand the long ordeal of the women whose life is one continuous round of drudgery and want without any pleasures ever, or any future hope of a happy married life. Yet the Berlin women knew that there was one thing left they had not yet lost : and they would endure to the end to preserve it for their children : freedom. A greater proportion of women than men had voted in the October 1946 elections which defeated the Communists in Berlin; and in December 1948, 86 per cent of the population was to register its vote for the democratic parties. In the happy West such a large proportion of voters has never gone to the polls, although we have streetcars and subways and automobiles and plenty of leisure.
I visited the "homes" of several German workers and their families, and marveled that the women, somehow or other, managed to keep a cellar, or one or two patched-up rooms in a bombed tenement house, clean and neat in spite of overcrowding and the lack of hot water and sufficient soap. Their children, who in most other countries would be dirty and unkempt in such circumstances, are still kept looking respectable by their mothers' continual darning and patching of clothes.
Instead of the extraordinary industry of German women evoking sympathy and respect, it too often only results in Americans' thinking that the Germans are quite well off. Mrs. Roosevelt, for instance, after spending a day or so in Berlin reported that she saw no destitute and hungry children, and that the Germans did not seem to be as poor as the French and other former victims of Nazi aggression. She cannot have had time to see more of Berlin than Dahlem and Zehlendorf where the United States occupation forces live—suburbs inhabited by the former well-to-do which we never bombed with the same intensity as the working-class districts of Berlin. But even if she had taken the time to visit the poorer parts of the city, Mrs. Roosevelt might not have revised her opinion. To win the pity of some people it is necessary to imitate those beggars, who although they may be "earning" a good living by appealing to the charitable for alms, appear in rags and dirt to evoke sympathy.
I wished that all the complacent visitors and residents from the victor countries could see what I had seen, and that they had the imagination to put themselves in the situation of the majority of Berlin's women and children.
There were some Military Government officials who felt as I did. Elizabeth Holt, for instance, wife of a State Department official and herself assistant to the head of the Educational and Religious Affairs branch of the Military Government, was in constant contact with German women and was wearing herself out, not only because of the help and encouragement she gave them, but also because she could not rest or enjoy life thinking of the suffering all around her. Thanks to Mrs. Holt, I made my first contacts with German women active in the social work conducted by all three parties : Socialists (SPD), Christian Democrats (CDU), and Liberals (LDP).
Ursula Kirchert, a Socialist, took me to spend a morning at a medical clinic, where I watched a procession of the sick, the crippled, the undernourished, and the old receiving what help could be given them by the doctor, in the absence of many medicines and the even greater need of nourishing food. One patient had a huge abscess on his neck, which after being lanced had to be bound up with paper, since the Germans had no cotton bandages, no absorbent cotton or lint. The doctor told me that his great difficulty was that medical supplies could be bought only with D marks, since the Russian zone could not supply them. Consequently social-security funds, which are under Russian control, are useless in obtaining them, and his patients whose wages or pensions consisted mainly of Russian marks could not buy them.
The saddest and hardest-working people in Berlin are the women with children whose husbands fell in the war, or are still prisoners. The expellees from Silesia thrown out of their homes and driven westwards with nothing but what they could carry on their backs are in an even more destitute condition.
I visited one woman from Silesia, Frau Scheibner, whose husband was, she hoped, a prisoner of war in Russia and not already dead. She had three young children and they had all walked to Berlin, the mother carrying the youngest child. Her mother and father were Berliners and until a week before my first visit they had all lived with her parents in two tiny rooms. Now she was "happy" because by great "good fortune" she had obtained possession of a not-too-damp cellar in the same building. She had of course no linen and her furniture consisted of two mattresses and a packing case used as a table. Her eldest child, a girl of twelve, looked after the two youngest while the mother worked as a "trimmer"—the German word used in Berlin to describe the thousands of women who collect, stack, and cart the bricks from bombed-out houses.
The youngest child, a pretty girl of five, was playing on the stone cellar floor with a little friend from next door, while her brother, a boy of eight, did his school homework, sitting on one of the mattresses. When I gave her a can of dried milk, Frau Scheibner told me what upset her most was the little girl begging for more milk every day. Of course these children, like the rest of those in Berlin, never received any fresh milk, but there was a small ration of dried milk. Their mother felt that if she could only get enough food for her children, she would be content in their new "home."
Upstairs in the same house, I found a couple who considered themselves among the luckiest people in the world because the husband, missing for five years, had returned from Russia a few days before. Frau Woltherz had had no news of her husband since 1943 and had given him up for dead. Her joy was indescribable when he suddenly appeared, having been freed because he was too ill to work any more. I wondered how he would ever be able to get well on the inadequate ration on which the Berliners somehow exist, but his wife was so happy to have him back that she thought nothing of their hardship. Woltherz said to me : "If the Russians had behaved differently, they would have won us. It is too late now. After the treatment we have received we will never go along with them. I shall probably be an invalid for the rest of my life, but if I could fight again I would join up with America against the Soviets."
Another day I visited a widow with two children whose husband had been killed on the Russian front. She had just been joined by two younger sisters who had spent three years as Russian slave laborers in the Urals. One had been a seamstress and the other a worker on a farm, and both looked to be typical "proletarians." But in March 1945, they had been arrested, put in a cellar and beaten until they "confessed" to having been members of Hitler's Jung Mädel. Apparently the Red Army soldiers who had arrested them had been ordered to round up a certain number of Nazis, and the simplest way to do this was to take anybody they could lay their hands on and torture them until they would say they had been Nazis.
After signing a paper written in Russian which they could not understand, the two girls, whose name was Graubusch, had been placed in cattle trucks and transported to the Urals. There had been forty-three people in the car and several had died of suffocation and thirst. They had been given only one cup of water each two days. On arrival at the prison camp they had been set to work making bricks. They had been forced to take the hot bricks out of the ovens with bare hands, and to push loads of them in wheelbarrows for fourteen hours a day.
Many of the German women in the camp had died—in one year, more than half of the original number. Typhus had carried off many in spite of a German doctor prisoner who had tried to help them. The manager of the camp had been a Volksdeutsche and very brutal. Presumably he had saved his own life, which would have otherwise been forfeit on account of his race, by taking the position.
The prisoners had to sleep on wooden benches without blankets. They were fed on cabbage soup and a small bread ration, but had been told to say how good it was in Russia and that only Germans behaved like devils. They were never allowed any contact with the Russian population, being led out to work under armed guards and returned to their prison after their day's labor. A few of the guards had been kind but most of them were brutes. One "bitch of a woman" had forced the prisoners returning from work to stand at the prison gates for an hour or more in the cold with their clothing damp from perspiration and their dresses "burning on their bodies."
Atrocities are now "old stuff." No one cares what innocent Germans suffer, although still ready to make them pay for Nazi atrocities. But I think that if Americans at home could see and hear what the Germans have gone, and are going, through we might begin to help the people of Berlin and the released or escaped victims of Communist cruelty and oppression. It was with a sense of impotent pity that I learned that only one of these two German sisters was permitted to remain in the United States sector of Berlin. The other was forced to live in the Russian sector, where she might at any moment be arrested again, because she had not formerly lived in Berlin, and the regulation is that only those may register and receive ration cards who were residents before 1945. The elder sister was in bad enough circumstances herself, but she would somehow or other have found room for both sisters, if only the United States authorities had permitted her to shelter them.
It was not only the poor and the victims of Communism who aroused one's pity in Berlin. The most overworked widows and wives of prisoners of war, if they had children, were perhaps less unhappy than such lonely girls as Elsa, the housekeeper of my billet in the Press Camp. She looked after an empty house reserved for visiting American women journalists, who were so few and far between that it was usually empty. No longer a girl, but still not old and quite good looking, she spent day after day alone. Her fiancé had been killed in the war and her only surviving relative was her mother who was not allowed to live with her in the house reserved for the conquerors and their servants. As one of the latter she had more to eat than most Berliners, but the hunger of the heart is perhaps worse than physical starvation. She was not the type for light love affairs and had no "boy friend" among the Americans; nor was it likely she would ever have the opportunity of social intercourse to meet a German who might marry her. The future offered her nothing but loneliness.
In contrast to the timid and gentle Elsa for whom there was no place in the harsh world of today, Annalena von Caprivi, editor of the Women's Page of the British licensed Telegraph, had the spirit, intelligence, and adaptability to overcome the handicap of an aristocratic origin and an unhappy marriage. Her maiden name was Lindquist, and her family, originally of Swedish origin, had owned the island of Ruetgen in the Baltic for centuries past. Her grandfather had been one of Bismarck's ministers, and her father, Ambassador to South Africa before World War I. Annalena was therefore of real Junker origin, but many Prussian aristocrats, like her parents, had never been pro-Nazi, or taken office under Hitler. Her parents, who had for long been living retired lives on their island, had committed suicide when the Russians came. Annalena had found them dead when, after the war's end, she had made her way on foot from Western Germany to the Russian zone, carrying a bundle on her back and dressed like a peasant.
The Russians had, of course, confiscated the family property and Annalena now worked for the support of her two little girls as well as herself. She had divorced her husband, heir also to an ancient name and as incapable of adapting himself to conditions in defeated Germany as his wife was capable.
I came to know Annalena von Caprivi well and to have a great liking and respect for her character and keen and objective mind. She was not in the least sorry for herself and somehow managed always to look well groomed, and even elegant, although her clothes were made out of such relics as her grandfather's military uniform.
There are one hundred women to every 60 men in Germany and the tragedy of many of them is that they have no hope of marriage. But Annalena, who is both attractive and intelligent, wrote an article for her newspaper in which she said that many German women could not now "afford" a husband. German men, she said, still expected to be waited upon hand and foot by their wives, as if they were the breadwinners, even if their wives were earning the family's living. It was too much to expect, and unless German men would abandon their lordly ways they could not expect any capable women to marry them.
A young unmarried woman who had been a war correspondent, but had taken up a rifle and fought herself in the last desperate days of Berlin's defense against the Red Army, gave me another angle on the relation between the sexes in Germany. She said that German men not only cannot forget that they were once "brilliant and victorious" and are therefore incapable of adapting themselves to the lowly work and status which is all life now offers them. She also thought that they were too bitterly ashamed of their failure to defend their country and save its women from rape and rough treatment at Russian hands to be psychologically capable of loving.
42
They hate the girls who go around with Americans but are themselves unable to offer companionship or any possibility for happiness in marriage.
Of course not all German men have developed complexes which keep them in bitter isolation and drive German women either to have affairs with the "conquerors" or to live alone. But even in undefeated and prosperous countries men who have spent years soldiering find it difficult to settle down to civilian life. In Germany where many men have spent ten years of their life in the army, and the younger ones have known no other life since they left school; where most jobs offer a bare livelihood and where there are so many sick as well as crippled veterans, the problem is even more acute.
In these days of adversity it is the endurance of German women and their determination to keep their families alive that constitutes the strength of Germany even in defeat.
Having lived six years in Soviet Russia, I too had been a wife struggling for food and shelter for my family in a world not very different from theirs. Consequently, I felt a sense of identification with the people of Berlin. Today I was one of the privileged enjoying the same comforts, conveniences and luxuries as the rest of the American and British correspondents and occupying forces, but I did not feel that I belonged with them. The memory of my life in Moscow, when I lived as ordinary Russians do, was still too vivid.
Most Americans and even the British have no real conception of what hunger means, nor any repugnance to eating well and driving in automobiles or jeeps, while the "natives" starve and walk. It was not that I was better than the rest, or even that I had more imagination. It was simply my past experience and the close presence of the Soviet Power which so vividly recalled it to me.
When I saw German women carrying heavy loads in the streets, I remembered how I had once thought nothing of carrying home 44 pounds of potatoes, happy only to have obtained so much food. When I saw the thin, sad-eyed Berlin children, I remembered my own son, born in Moscow, who had never suffered actual hunger but would have become like these German children if I had not escaped with him from Russia after my husband's arrest. When I visited German homes consisting of one dilapidated room, I recalled similar crowded and damp places where I and my Russian friends and acquaintances had lived.
When I bought my cigarettes, chocolate, and soap ration at the PX store, I remembered how much in those distant days in Moscow a gift of coffee, soap, or toilet paper from some friend in England, had meant to me.
In Germany I felt ashamed to be like one of those foreign visitors to Moscow who had gorged themselves in the Intourist Hotels while the Russians starved. When I invited Germans to eat with me at the Press Club, I remembered what it had once meant to me to be invited to a good meal in a Moscow hotel by some visiting foreigner.
As I watched the German waiters at "our" clubs and hotels, I remembered those in the Moscow Intourist ones, who like these Germans served good food to others without ever partaking of it themselves. Tips had been forbidden in Communist Russia, where Russians still gave them but foreigners rarely did, because they had been told it was beneath the dignity of a waiter to accept them in the "Socialist fatherland." In Germany, one was not allowed to give tips either (since our occupation money could not legally be used by Germans) except in the form of a cigarette or two left on the table.
Worst of all, the attitude of the Military Government officials toward the Germans reminded me all too forcibly of the aloof disdain with which the Communist bureaucracy had treated the Russian "common man". Not, of course, that Americans had yet learned to behave with the same arrogance as Soviet Russia's ruling class. There was still a good bit left of the natural American tendency to be friendly and generous to everyone. But these Americans had been taught to treat the Germans as inferiors and many of them thought that to show sympathy or kindness, would be what the British call "bad form."
I could not feel superior to the Germans for I too had once been guilty. If the Germans deserved to suffer indefinitely for having followed the false and evil lead of the Nazis, so I also, and many other Britishers and Americans, should also be punished for once having been Communists or Communist fellow travelers and dupes. "There, but for the Grace of God, go I," was the thought which came to me continually in Berlin and the other bombed cities of Germany, where a people condemned by all the world, defenseless, hungry and without rights or liberties, continues to live only because of its indestructible vitality or the consolations offered by religion.
I knew that the impulses and illusions which led me to become a Communist in my youth were not fundamentally so different to those which led many young Germans to follow Hitler. Being English, having been brought up a socialist, and living in a rich country and in the capital of an Empire upon which, in those days, the sun never set, I had been concerned with the emancipation of the human race, not that of my own country. I had embraced communism because it promised equality of all men, irrespective of nation, race, or creed. The Communist ideal had seemed to me the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice.
The Nazis had not appealed to the same generous impulses and international ideals as the Communists had done. But to many a young German, Nazism must originally have seemed the only way to obtain freedom and equality for the German people, "shackled", as they saw it, by the Versailles Treaty. When Hitler promised them bread and work, an end to unemployment, and a proud and strong Germany in place of the weak and defenseless Weimar Republic, most of them could not have known that he would lead them to commit horrible atrocities and wage aggressive war; no more than I had known that communism meant the liquidation of millions of Russian peasants, starvation for the workers, and slave labor on a scale never seen before. In Russia I had seen how young men and women were induced by an appeal to "idealism" to carry out the operation of liquidating the so-called kulaks—a crime as great and horrible as the Nazi liquidation of the Jews. For to me it seems equally terrible to kill people or send them to concentration camps for their "class" as for their "race."
It is incomprehensible to me that the very same Americans who had glorified Stalin's bloody dictatorship during and after the war are now most insistent in demanding endless punishment for all Germans. If all the Germans are to be considered guilty of Hitler's crimes, and anyone who was ever a Nazi to be damned forever, then Communists in all countries, and also those who were their dupes and supported them, must be held accountable for the atrocities committed by Stalin.
I had escaped from Russia, and as a foreigner I had been able to get out of the Communist Party without being liquidated years before I left the Soviet Union. But I knew that if I had stayed, I might have been forced by the Soviet dictatorship to do horrible things myself, if the life of my husband or son were the penalty for disobedience. Having lived under the Communist dictatorship, and knowing what terror means, I cannot blame the Germans for not having "revolted against Hitler," as others do who are safe in America and have all their lives enjoyed inherited liberties.
Another reason, besides my Russian experiences, for my inability to regard the Germans as more wicked than other peoples, is no doubt the fact that I was born an Englishwoman. I recognize the fact that the Germans made the profound mistake of endeavoring to follow in the footsteps of Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium, in an age when empire building is no longer respectable except for Communists. But I cannot quite see why the Germans, who have no Asiatic and African colonies to exploit, should be considered as innately more aggressive than the Western European nations who derive revenues from their colonial empires.
My old anti-imperialist sentiments, and intense dislike for the sight of any one lot of people denying to another the rights and liberties it claims for itself, had made me both anti-Communist and anti-Nazi. But I could not, on account of my own past mistakes and lost illusions, consider the whole German people as guilty of Nazi crimes, any more than I considered myself responsible for the past evil doings of British imperialists, or past and present atrocities committed by Stalin and his followers. My punishment for my past foolishness, if nothing worse, had been the loss of my husband in Russia. But I had saved my son and escaped with him to the free Western world. The Germans, innocent and guilty alike, had suffered obliteration bombing attacks, starvation, the torture of husbands, sons and brothers in Russian prisons, and the opprobrium of the world. I could not but feel that their punishment was out of proportion to mine.
It was with a sense of shame that I heard the German driver of the automobile assigned to me in Berlin say : "I have worked for three years for the Americans and you are the first who has spoken to me as a human being."
I had asked him how much he earned, how many hours he worked, whether he had a wife and family, whether they got enough to eat, and how he got home at night after leaving me at my hotel. It was not, I think, the fact that I displayed some interest in his personal situation, or my gifts of chocolate, soap, and cigarettes, or my sharing with him the ample breakfast I received, which eventually broke down the barrier he had erected between us by his correct behavior as a servant, or as one of the conquered toward the new master race. It was after I remarked to him one day that we were treating the Germans like colonial subjects that he became communicative and friendly. My observation had been occasioned by my first sight of the half-naked, barefoot young German boys who pick up the balls on the Press Club tennis courts. It had seemed to me they should be playing games themselves instead of running around like little slaves.
It was from this chauffeur of mine that I got a view, from the other end of the telescope, so to speak, of how our original "treat the Germans rough" occupation policy affected the mass of the German people. "I suppose," he said, "that the rudeness and lack of consideration of the Americans is due to the great size of their country. Probably many Americans never go to school and learn good manners, and that is why they are so rough and tactless."
I told him that he was mistaken and tried to explain that Americans were not really either uneducated or heartless; that it was the hatred of Nazi brutality and the consequent belief that all Germans deserved punishment and rough treatment which had originally inspired our occupation policy. But he remained unconvinced. How, he asked me, could I explain the American attitude of friendliness and consideration toward the Russians if it was Nazi Germany's atrocities which had inspired the American lack of humanity toward the conquered Germans?
The word which he used, and which I have translated as "lack of humanity," was Unmenschlichkeit. Menschlichkeit, its opposite, was the word I heard most often on the lips of Germans. It is a word difficult to translate because it means so much : behavior worthy of a human being, decency, kindness, consideration for others, respect for the individual irrespective of nationality, class, religion, or power—everything which should distinguish a free man from a brute, a slave, or a robot.
It is the realization that the Rights of Man, in the good old-fashioned eighteenth-century sense which inspired the French and American revolutions, are primary, and that no economic and social system which denies them is bearable; it was this realization that had united the Socialist, Liberal, and Christian-Democratic parties of Berlin in face of the Communist threat to their liberty.
Here, in the front line of the conflict between Western democracy and Soviet totalitarian tyranny, there was a reborn faith in the ideals of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter Reformation.
There was a unity to be found nowhere else in Europe, between agnostics and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, socialists, liberals, and conservatives, because they one and all realized that the struggle for the world is primarily one between the individual and the machine, or state, which seeks to reduce everyone to slavery; between the totalitarians who would drag us all down to the level of beasts by denying individual responsibility, conscience, and Menschlichkeit, and those who insist that "security" is only to be won by submission to tyranny.
Perhaps, I thought, it is the new content of socialism, as demonstrated in Berlin, where the Social Democrats are the largest party and the leaders in the anti-Communist resistance, which holds out most hope for Western civilization.
"The change in the inner content of German socialism is the most important development in Europe today," was the comment made to me by Frau Doctor Ulrich-Biel, a woman leader of Berlin's Liberal Party. A white-haired elderly lady whose former husband is a professor of philosophy at Harvard, and whose son had been miraculously restored to her through his daring escape from a Russian prison camp, she is today mainly occupied in trying to secure relief for the homeless, ragged, and starved German refugees from the East, many of whom are in the Russian zone of occupation.
In her little room in an apartment house in what was once a sector of Berlin with a large Jewish population, she said to me :
I could not in the past join the Socialists because of my fear of regimentation and because of the Socialist opposition to religion. Not that I was a churchgoer, but because I always had respect for the secret of the world and could not reduce everything to materialistic terms. Now after all I have seen and experienced, all the sorrow and fear and misery of our life in Berlin these past fifteen years, I look to having the church on my side. The life of man is too short and he is too frail for him to dispense with a home for the great truths of Christianity. Men are too weak to preserve the truth alone; they must have a tradition to preserve it : a church. Many German Socialists realize this today. They are more concerned with preserving the values men live by than with economic theories. All those who do not believe that liberty and human rights are the primary concern have gone over to the SED [Socialist Unity party].
48
Otto Stolz, a young man who had been expelled from the University of Berlin for his anti-Communist activities and had already made a name for himself as a writer, told me that he and many other German Socialists no longer believed that "nationalization of the means of production and distribution" would solve the problems of human society. "We know now," he said, "that the end of capitalism may, as in Russia, lead only to tyranny."
Writing on the anniversary of the Revolution of 1848 which had failed, in Germany, to establish the liberal principles and democratic rights won in Western Europe, Otto Stolz, although he belongs to the Socialist party, reminded his countrymen that the struggle then and now is not for "an economic theory of production and distribution" but for the rights of man : equality before the law, individual responsibility and freedom, security of personal rights, government by consent, freedom of speech and opinion, freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial by due process of law.
From these premises he developed the thesis that in the twentieth century, in countries where representative government and free speech have already been secured, no violent revolution is required to establish greater social justice and a better economic system. Revolutions today, far from being progressive, lead to the establishment of authoritarian governments under "popular" dictators. Thus revolutions in democratically governed countries are in fact counterrevolutions led by reactionaries calling themselves progressives, but wanting to lead the world back to the predemocratic era when liberty of the individual and human rights were denied by autocratic monarchies, as they are today denied by Nazis and Communists.
"The real revolution of our time," said Otto Stolz, "is a spiritual one, not economic or social. And here in Europe it must be directed toward the establishment of a European family of nations, with equal rights for all in a democratic federation."
The unity displayed by the Socialist, Christian-Democratic, and Liberal-Democratic parties in resisting the Communist onslaught was made possible by the recognition by members of all three parties that no one has a monopoly of truth, and that tolerance, integrity and Menschlichkeit are the primary needs of a free society.
Lothar Wille, Bürgermeister of the Berlin borough of Steglitz, who is a Catholic and a Christian Democrat, said to me :
"Our party, the Christian-Democratic Union, should have leaders who are not specifically Catholic or Protestant but Christian. To defend the Christian culture and values of Europe the primary need is good men. The best religion is a good moral life and a man who never goes to church, even an agnostic, may be in fact a good Christian. The important thing is to recognize one's duty to society and perform it." "The Catholic church," he added with a smile, "has also got to change with the times and become more catholic."
Most people in Berlin have nothing to lose but their freedom. Perhaps it is this and the terrible trials and privations they have endured that gives them their clear view of essentials and their inner strength. They have become so inured to material hardships and have experienced such great sorrows that those who have not been broken have acquired a rare spiritual fortitude.
Nora Melle, a City Council representative of the Liberal-Democratic party who had been thrown into the street with her little girl when the Russians came, had seen her husband carried off by them, her sister raped, her father killed, and her mother die of shock, said to me : "We are no longer influenced by fear of losing our possessions, since we have none, and because we have lost so much more than material comforts. Germans in the Western zones may think that there could be nothing worse than the Anglo-American occupation, and the loss of their savings through the recent currency reform. But in Berlin we know that all that is nothing compared to the ultimate horror of the Communist domination."
Jeanette Wolff told me : "The Berliners, unlike other people, do not wear blinkers. They know what they are up against and are facing it. It is vital to the survival of Western civilization that this political center of resistance to totalitarian tyranny be preserved."
Jeanette Wolff herself is one of the finest persons I ever met. An old Socialist of Weimar Republic days, she spent six long and terrible years in Hitler's concentration camps and lost her whole family except for one daughter who was crippled by the Nazis. But, instead of hating the German people, like so many others who have never even seen them; Jeanette has become one of the best-loved leaders of the Berlin population. An eloquent and moving speaker, elected member of the City Council in 1946, she is called the Trumpet of the Socialist party. A woman with a warm heart which has somehow failed to be corroded by the sufferings she has undergone, she is full of compassion for all the oppressed and miserable people of the world and also too good a socialist of the old international kind to consider any one nation or race as worse or better than another. Her understanding and human feeling are so great that she has been known to argue on denazification boards for the release of men who had belonged to the party which tortured her and killed her family, saying she knew that many young men had followed Hitler out of ignorance and should be forgiven if they would "go and sin no more."
I first met Jeanette Wolff, thanks to Hanna Bornovsky, a German girl engaged to George Silver, who worked in the manpower division of Military Government. George Silver was a former AFL trade unionist from Philadelphia. Although a young man, he had the same, prewar vintage, international socialist outlook as Jeanette. Hanna's Jewish mother had been killed in one of our air raids and her Aryan father was also dead. After having been treated as a second-class citizen by the Nazis because she was half-Jewish, Hanna had not been allowed to marry George because we considered her a German. But now that he was about to leave Germany after three years service there, they were getting married.
Many American visitors who might otherwise never have met any Germans socially got to know the leading democratic leaders of Berlin at the Silvers' house. Hanna had also managed to raise funds to reconstruct a part of Ribbentrop's bombed-out Berlin residence, which she had renamed Leuschner House and established as a meeting place for the Germans who were taking the lead in Berlin's anti-Communist struggle.
I owe a lot to the Silvers who put me in touch with many Germans, both prominent and unknown, and gave me the opportunity to meet men and women of all parties at their home.
Hanna and George were practicing socialists. She cooked a meal every other day, out of her husband's American rations and the vegetables she grew in the gardens of Leuschner House, for the students who came to her house, and who, like most German students today, are the poorest of the poor and always hungry. These Berlin students were extraordinarily mature in their thinking. I was impressed most of all by the fact that war, defeat, hunger, and the ever-present fear of ending up in a Soviet concentration camp had not broken their spirit or sapped their energies.
It seemed to me surprising that our original occupation policy had not succeeded in turning German youths into cynics, timeservers, or ruthless egotists. For in the first two years of our occupation we had made a mockery of our democratic professions and ideals, not only by treating all of the Germans, including the victims of Hitler's prisons, as pariahs, but also by condoning Soviet atrocities and treating Communists as democrats. We had even insisted upon the inclusion of Communists in the City and Länder administrations and put Communists on denazification boards.
In Berlin, for instance, although the October 1946 elections had given the Socialists, Liberals, and Christian Democrats 80 per cent of the votes, the allied Kommandatura had refused to allow majority rule, insisting instead on the inclusion of Communists in a "coalition," although their party (Socialist Unity party—SED) had polled only 19 per cent of the city's vote. And even today, I was told, the British and American Occupation authorities do not permit the Germans to oust the Communists who still hold some positions in the Food, Labor and Health offices of the Western sectors of Berlin unless they are proved to be incompetent, or sending "open" reports to the Russians!
"Yet you still place your trust in us?" I enquired.
"Yes," replied a pretty girl with red hair and an impudent smile, "we know we must have patience and wait until Americans stop being political babies."
"All the same," said a young man studying Slavonic languages, "it's funny to hear you Americans now saying the same things about the Soviet Union which you used to forbid us to say and regarded as a proof of our being pro-Nazi."
I am aware, of course, that not only is Berlin not Prague; it is also not all of Germany. The important fact, it seemed to me in Berlin, is that there is a movement there which could lead Germany to become a real democracy, and which might also reinvigorate and unite by its example the divided and confused anti-totalitarian forces of Europe and America.
There was a sinister reverse side of the hopeful Berlin picture. Some of the die-hard Nazis have made common cause with the Communists, and there was the threat of a recrudescence of aggressive German nationalism under a Red instead of a Black flag.
Former National Socialist theoreticians today hold leading positions in the University of Berlin and other universities under Russian control. The head of the disciplinary Court of the University of Berlin, Fritz Moglich, who now gives lectures on the social and political situation, which all Berlin students must attend, was formerly a leading Nazi anti-Semite and anti-Catholic writer. In a famous book on Ludendorff he had once urged a union of German and Russian National Bolshevism against the West.
Many other examples could be cited. Perhaps even more important is the fact that the Russians are using the full force of economic pressure to suppress the democratic opposition. Only "reliable" students can get grants to study, and special privileges in money and kind are given to those who support the Communist dictatorship. All Germans who can and will be useful to Russia are offered "Stalin parcels" of food and fuel. Those who join the Socialist Unity party for the material advantages this gives them can perhaps not be counted upon by the Russians. Their most reliable allies, and the most dangerous to us, are the former Nazis who hope that by submitting to the Soviets now, and working with them against the West, Hitler's "Thousand-Year Reich" will eventually be restored.
The political weakness of the Communists, evident in Berlin, proves that there are as yet too few Nazi or other collaborators of the Communists to bolster up their dictatorship.
Nevertheless, it is a mistake to assume that the Germans must inevitably remain on our side, even if we continue to refuse them the rights of free men.
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Chapter 3
The Material Cost of Vengeance
Leaving Berlin on the airlift early in September and arriving in the United States zone, I felt I had traveled farther in time than in space. In Berlin, in spite of the gross inequalities between the Germans and ourselves in sacrifice, privation, and danger, we were standing shoulder to shoulder in resisting Soviet aggression. But in Bizonia we still seemed to be fighting the last war. Here we were acting as if Germany, not Soviet Russia, now menaces the peace of the world and the freedom of Europe. We were still dismantling German industry, and in general carrying out the Yalta and Potsdam agreements as if Soviet Russia had never broken them, and with an almost total disregard of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine which Americans at home imagined were now the basis of United States policy.
Large shipments of "reparations and restitutions" were still going to Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and other countries behind the Iron Curtain, not only from the British and French zones but also from the American.
Following the start, in June, of Soviet Russia's blockade of Berlin, such shipments from Bizonia and the French zone to the countries behind the Iron Curtain, instead of being stopped, had been doubled in quantity. The bulk of the shipments to the Soviet Union in July 1948 and subsequent months went from the British zone, and deliveries from the United States zone direct to Russia had been stopped. But the United States had continued to give aid and comfort to the Communists by supplying the Czechs, Poles, and Yugoslavs with 5,790 tons of German machinery and other assets in that one month. At the end of October, when bad weather was endangering the lives of American pilots on the air lift and the Berlin population was already shivering in its unheated homes, the total reparations and restitutions shipments to the countries behind the Iron Curtain from Bizonia and the French zone combined, had been stepped up to nearly nine thousand tons, from the six and a half thousand sent before Stalin started the blockade of Berlin.
Factories were being dismantled in Western Germany to the detriment of the whole European economy, and with a cynical disregard of the needs of the German people and the danger of losing Western Germany to the Communists while attempting to save Berlin from them.
The cost to the United States taxpayer of subsidizing a pauperized Germany, and a Europe deprived of the products of German industry, was apparently also being disregarded not only by our Western allies, but by the American authorities responsible for our German policy.
In spite of the fact that it had been announced that Germany was to participate in the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan, the United States and Britain were implementing the 1947 "Revised Level of Industry Plan," which severely limits Germany's capacity to produce in most major industries and was drawn up with no provision for German exports of steel, machinery, and other goods most urgently required for European reconstruction.
From the British point of view dismantlement makes sense, since it helps to reduce Germany's competitive power on the world market. Originally the British authorities had held out for a higher level of industry than the United States was willing to allow. They understood that Western Germany could not be self-sustaining if the reparations program were carried through; and so long as they were themselves financially responsible for feeding the industrial population of their zone, they pursued a more enlightened policy than the United States. But since the merging of the British and American zones and the United States' commitment to meet the deficits of Bizonia, Britain's competitive motive has had free rein, and the British now oppose revision of the dismantlement program. In their frantic efforts to free themselves from dependence on dollar subsidies, they have abandoned the policy of wisdom and restraint toward defeated enemies which formerly made Britain great and strong.
Today the British are sacrificing their long-term interests by themselves exporting airplanes and capital goods to Soviet Russia, and by alienating the Germans and weakening Continental Europe by shipments of large quantities of dismantled German machines to Stalin's empire. According to figures given in a British Military Government communique, published in "Die Tat," on February 6, 1949, out of a total of 598,000 tons of machinery and other materials taken from German factories, 163,896 tons had been delivered to Russia, 18,618 tons to Czechoslovakia, 1,789 to Albania, and 45,135 to Yugoslavia. The British have had no scruples even in delivering armament factories to Russia. On December 20, 1948, the London Times reported that the Borbeck-Krupps Armaments Works was in process of being shipped to the Soviet Union.
In the French zone one could hardly have imagined that there is such a thing as a Communist danger, a Marshall Plan or any such question as the defense of Western Europe. The blindness of the French, their obsession with a past danger, and seeming unawareness of the lively present danger of Soviet aggression, their squeezing of their German zone to subsidize their own mismanaged economy, and their futile parade of the trappings of a nonexistent military might before the cowed but secretly mocking German population, require a separate chapter. Here I shall be concerned only with Bizonia, as the partially merged British and American zones are called.
Whereas both the British and French treatment of the Germans is easy to understand, if not to condone, American policy is incomprehensible. America has nothing to gain, and everything to lose economically, politically, and militarily by dismantlement. Yet the United States has exerted no strong pressure to bring it to an end in the British and French zones, and has continued to carry it out even in the American zone.
The comfortable assumption in America that the Marshall Plan has replaced the Morgenthau Plan is, I quickly perceived, a delusion. The spirit of Morgenthau, although it no longer dominates our German policy, still inspires it. The fact that there is now a Marshall Plan looking toward the integration of a revived and democratic Germany in a reconstructed and self-supporting Europe means that we are busy repairing with our right hand the damage done by our left hand. It is as if one team of Americans were rebuilding a bombed dwelling while another team is destroying the foundations.
It would have been funny, were it not so tragic, to witness the unending struggle between those Americans who had been sent to Germany to revive industry and trade, and those whose orders were to destroy the German economy. The conflict between the destroyers and the rebuilders was even more acrimonious and bitter than that between competitive Washington departments.
In Frankfurt, Essen, and Stuttgart, I have smiled to hear American coal, steel, and railway experts plotting, or pleading, to stop dismantlement of the factories producing the mining, railway, and other equipment without which coal production could not be increased or the railways restored. I heard revealing conversations between American and German authorities in which the former warned the latter about which Americans were on the constructive side and which on the destructive.
If there were some sort of collaboration between the Germans and those Americans who are engaged in restoring the German economy and furthering the Marshall Plan, there was naturally a far closer relationship between the American "destroyers" and the British Military Government. The United States experts endeavoring to increase coal and steel production and to reconstruct transportation facilities were dependent on the British, since not only the mines and iron and steel works are in the British zone, but also most of the factories producing mining equipment and railroad supplies. The predicament of the American experts can be understood if one notes the fact that the dismantlement list includes forty-seven factories making mining equipment and thirty-two specializing in the production of supplies for the German railways.
Fortunately there were some enlightened British officials also, who were anxious to revive the German economy, so the conflict between the constructors and the destroyers was not as unequal as it might otherwise have been. The British official in charge of the Bizonal Iron and Steel office in Düsseldorf, for instance, worked in complete harmony with his American counterpart, and in 1948 they succeeded in bringing about an astonishing increase in steel production. On the other hand, while $24,000,000 worth of American mining equipment had been earmarked for Germany by ECA, the British insisted on continuing to dismantle the German factories which could have supplied this machinery. Among others they were dismantling the plants producing 90 per cent of the pneumatic mining tools produced in the Western zone.
Obviously the British, in view of their dependence on American subsidies, could have been induced to stop the dismantlement of German factories, the loss of whose production had to be made good by ECA allocations. The trouble was that some United States Military Government and Washington officials were still pursuing a camouflaged Morgenthau line of policy.
Whether or not the contradictory and self-defeating nature of American activities in Germany was due more to individual sentiments or to Washington's desire to win votes by being all things to all men, both the American destroyers of the German economy and its rebuilders could claim they were only doing their duty. Both were carrying out the orders they had received.
The situation was aptly summarized by one United States official who told me :
"We are caught between opposing policies and are unable to move forward. The forces of destruction, born of war hysteria, and set in motion by the Morgenthau Plan, are still in operation; while the constructive forces which the Marshall Plan was intended to release are stymied for lack of new directives from Washington." "The American people," he continued, "are only now beginning to realize that unconditional surrender and total victory force them to assume the same responsibilities in Germany as the inheritor of a property. Although the bills are rolling in, and America has to pay them; we still fail to understand fully that we must stop the destruction of Germany's assets if the United States is not to go bankrupt. At present the old destructive policy is merely overlaid by the new constructive one."
Some American officials were in the awkward position of holding positions with the destroyers and the reconstructors at the same time. Major Holbrook, for instance, whom I met in Stuttgart, was both Reparations Officer for Württemberg and Governor LaFollette's Chief of Industry and Commerce. While he had to fulfill the dismantlement orders which came to him from the Reparations Division of Military Government in Berlin, he also had to endeavor to increase production in his province. This he had managed to do with considerable ingenuity.
In the United States zone machinery is classified as already dismantled when the bolts attaching it to the floor have been unscrewed and it has been placed on wooden blocks. By allowing the Germans to continue using it in this condition, Major Holbrook had not only lightened the load of the American taxpayer by enabling more Germans to earn their own living than would otherwise have been possible; he had also kept the "dismantled" machinery in good working order for use in other countries when the time came to ship it. Elsewhere, particularly in the British zone, I saw piles of rusty factory equipment long since dismantled which was gradually becoming unusable as it lay in the open air or in unheated damp depots. For it is the British practice to dismantle machinery even when no country entitled to receive reparations wants it. Hence the tremendous waste entailed by the Revised Level of Industry program, which is implemented with the primary objective of depriving the Germans of the capacity to produce, rather than helping other countries to reconstruct their economies with German reparations. Were the latter the real aim, new and better machinery could be supplied to them in far less time by stopping dismantlement and allowing the Germans to work to produce reparations.
Major Holbrook had also restored production in many of the factories from which reparations had been taken, by scouring Württemberg for unused machines which could have been taken in the first place, had the Berlin Military Government authorities not preferred to interrupt production and waste German labor by taking reparations from factories actually working instead of from those closed down.
Before I visited Stuttgart toward the end of October, I had believed that the various statements made by General Marshall and other representatives of the State Department in Washington, and by General Clay and his subordinates in Germany, meant that dismantlement had been completed or stopped in the United States zone. I was as bewildered as the Germans when I found that the expected arrival of the ECA's "Humphrey Committee" experts—sent to Germany in accordance with the 1948 Foreign Aid Act to ascertain which plants on the dismantlement list could better contribute to European recovery by being left in Germany—far from stopping reparations deliveries had led to a speed-up in shipments of machinery out of the United States zone. Evidently it was not only the British and French who were anxious to confront Paul Hoffman's Committee with a fait accompli. The United States Reparations Office at Military Government headquarters in Berlin had issued orders to crate and ship out immediately the machinery which had hitherto been permitted to continue operating in its "dismantled" condition on account of the great need of its products in Germany or for export.
The Germans had been led to assume that the arrival of the ECA revision committee meant a halt in reparations deliveries. The Württemberg-Baden Ministry of Economics had been informed, in a letter written by the United States chief of the Commerce and Industry Group of the Bipartite Control Office in Frankfurt on October 11, that removal of equipment from five plants in that area would be held in abeyance until completion of the ECA review. But a week or two later orders had come to crate and rush shipment of this same equipment out of Germany in record time. I was told that the United States official in Berlin who had given these orders had said on the telephone that the European Recovery Program might or might not be a good thing, but that in any case it had nothing to do with him. Nor had he any interest in the contrary orders given by the United States Commerce and Industry authorities in Frankfurt.
The Germans, in addition to their impotent resentment at being deprived of their means of livelihood, could not but reflect that this democracy, which we told them was such a good and just thing, could not be trusted, since the official promises made by one set of United States authorities were not honored by others.
One of the factories which came under the hammer as a result of the determination of the Berlin Reparations Office of Military Government to forestall the ECA, was the Kiefer Works. In Stuttgart I visited this plant which produces ventilation and heating equipment for factories and hospitals. Although the only factory in Bizonia producing air-conditioning equipment for hospitals, it was to be shipped to Greece. The Greek mission which had visited the factory had told the Germans that they had neither the market, nor the raw materials, nor the technical experts to make use of it.
The machinery would, no doubt, end up on the scrap heap but it was "on the list." Its main equipment had been shipped and the Germans were trying to carry on production by cutting sheets by hand and nailing instead of soldering the parts.
I also saw the Zaiser Works in Stuttgart, now stopped from producing elevators and electric cranes, although the dismantlement by the Russians of the Flohr Works in Berlin and Vienna had left Germany with only five plants of this type, one of which was also being dismantled; and although British dismantlement of a multitude of cranes in the Ruhr had led to a large demand for new cranes which could not be met. Nor was there any hope of Zaiser's being able to acquire new machines : most of those they required are produced only in the Russian zone. I visited several other factories in Stuttgart, none of which could be classified either as potential armament factories or as "surplus" to Bizonia's needs, but all of which were having their machinery taken away, presumably to forestall any action to save them by the ECA authorities.
All over the United States zone the same thing was happening. One case brought to my notice was that of the Frank factory in Birkenau in Hesse, which produced artificial eyes for the blind, measuring instruments for the textile industry, and fine optical instruments. It should presumably never have been put on the dismantlement list. After representations to the Military Government by the owners, they had been informed that dismantlement would be halted pending review by the Humphrey Committee. But in the second week of October, orders came from Berlin to start crating and shipping the machinery at once. By October 22, before the ECA experts could arrive, the whole plant had been stripped and carried off.
Another example is that of the Gendorf factory in Bavaria which produced chlornatrium, a chemical required by the artificial fiber industry, which the Germans have been told is to be built up into one of their major export industries. The other major producer of chlornatrium in Western Germany, at Rheinfelden in the French zone, was long ago stopped from working. In September the United States Military Government ordered the Gendorf plant dismantled and shipped to Czechoslovakia.
The outstanding example of the determination of someone, somewhere, to sabotage the Marshall Plan, and strengthen the Communists, was the order given on October 4 to dismantle the power plant of the Norddeutsche Hütte at Bremen and ship it to Czechoslovakia.
Bremen is America's only large port in Germany and the gate of entry of all United States Army and ERP supplies. The hasty shipment to a Soviet satellite country of its main power plant at a time when Berlin was being blockaded and after an announcement that shipments of reparations from the Western zones would be halted pending the ECA review of the dismantlement list, could, it seemed, have no other explanation than the influence of the "Morgenthau boys" in Berlin or in Washington.
Dismantlement of the Bremen power plant caused an immediate drastic cut in the supply of current to the town and port, and one of the ECA experts informed me that it might be necessary to use United States Navy vessels operating off shore to supply the deficiency. While the United States Air Force had to be used to supply blockaded Berlin, the United States Navy might have to be called in to make good our voluntary curtailment of Bremen's power supply for the benefit of Communist Europe.
Under military government it is always difficult to fix responsibility. It is therefore impossible to say whether Washington or General Clay's economic advisors were responsible for the curious decision to ship as much machinery as possible out of the United States zone before the ECA could stop it. To the Germans it seemed that it was impossible to trust any American promises. The hopes raised by various official pronouncements that the dismantlement program was to be reviewed and shipments halted pending the ECA investigation were dashed. The assurances given that Germany was to participate in the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction could no longer be believed, since the Military Government had given orders to rush shipments even of the machinery recognized as vital to the minimum requirements of the economy of Bizonia.
When the German Economic Administration ventured to protest, it was forbidden by both British and United States military governments to approach the ECA authorities directly. In a letter sent on September 21, 1948, to Dr. Pünder, head of Bizonia's Economic Administration, and signed jointly by Mr. Wilkinson, economic advisor to General Clay, and Sir Cecil Weir, who holds the same position in the British Military Government, it was written :
"It is not appropriate for you to communicate directly with ECA, since the Military Governors, as the supreme authorities, are responsible for the relations of the Bizonal areas with the ECA."
ECA's representatives in Germany never admitted that they were precluded from any direct contact with the Germans. Unfortunately, however, Paul Hoffman, when he paid a flying visit to Germany in November, spent only twenty minutes with the German Economic Administration representatives who had come to meet him at Frankfurt. The latter were able to hand him the printed report they had drawn up on "The Effect of Envisaged Dismantling on Germany's Economic Situation and Her Role in European Reconstruction," but they were given no opportunity to discuss their case. Hoffman spent weeks in Paris, but either never had time to study the German situation, or was unwilling to challenge the Military Government's claim to exclusive power by a conference with the German representatives of Bizonia, or with German industrialists and labor leaders.
The Germans hate waste. These economical, hard-working and practical people simply cannot understand why, in the British zone, huge quantities of dismantled machinery lie rusting in the open or in unheated warehouses; why so much unallocated machinery is dismantled and converted into scrap; why the Germans are not allowed to work to repair the damage done by the Nazis in the countries they occupied instead of being converted into paupers supported by an American dole.
"We can understand the justice of demanding that we make reparations to the countries which suffered from German aggression," I was told over and over again in the British zone by German officials, workers, executives, and factory owners. "But we cannot understand the decision to destroy factory equipment taken from peacetime industries. This is not reparation; it is just waste." Of course, not all the machinery taken from German factories in the British zone is thrown on the scrap heap. But even in the case of machinery shipped abroad the huge gap between its economic value in Germany, and its "residual value" after dismantlement, as listed on the reparations account, is a measure of the waste entailed. If the cost of labor involved in the dismantlement and re-erection process is also taken into account the whole reparations program appears ridiculous.
The far-reaching effects of dismantlement on the German economy are obscured by the method adopted in valuing the machinery. This is done by first establishing its value in 1938 and then deducting not only war damage but a fixed yearly rate of depreciation which takes no account of repairs and improvements. This frequently results in machinery being valued at nothing, although prior to dismantlement it was working full time. From the German point of view it seems wholly unjust that a good proportion of the machinery they lose through dismantlement is not even booked to their credit on the reparations account.
This method of reckoning the value of the machinery taken as reparations is of no help in determining the effect of dismantlement on the German economy. The replacement cost of the machinery, or its "economic value"—capitalization according to the net profits obtained before dismantlement—would be much fairer methods of calculating the loss.
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According to figures furnished by the United States Military Government in October 1948, the value of the factory equipment already dismantled was as follows in 1938 value Reichsmarks :
| U. S. zone British zone French zone* |
187 496 84 |
factories—212 factories—600–700 factories—150–200 |
million marks million marks million marks |
This makes a total of only about a billion prewar Reichsmarks, equivalent to $400,000,000. According to German calculations, however, the 1938 value of the plants already dismantled in the Western zones was about $1,800,000,000 and would cost far more to replace today.
According to an estimate made by Senator Harmssen of Bremen, the 1938 value of the machinery and equipment already taken from rump Germany is as follows :
| Russian zone French zone Bizonia Berlin |
1.6 billion Reichsmarks 1.2 billion Reichsmarks 3.5 billion Reichsmarks 1.5 billion Reichsmarks |
This calculation, although it may be exaggerated, gives a truer picture of the losses the Germans have suffered, than the "residual value" figures of the Military Government which obscure the effect of dismantlement on the German economy.
The value of the 335 plants still to be dismantled in the Western zones is about two billion dollars, according to German estimates, but appears as only a fraction of this sum on the reparations account which gives its residual value. The cost of replacement of the dismantled machinery is reckoned by the Germans as ten times its residual value.
Since correct total estimates cannot be obtained, the best method of ascertaining the loss to the European economy through dismantlement is to consider individual cases of dismantled factories, concerning which precise details can be obtained.
In the great G.H.H. (Good Hope) Works in the Ruhr, which I visited after their dismantlement, the cost of moving the machinery and of shipping it to the eleven nations to whom it had been allocated, amounted to between 800 and 1,000 marks a ton.
* Exclusive of the machinery taken by the French for their own use without reference to the Inter-Allied Reparations Authority.
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The cost of producing and installing new machinery for delivery as reparations would have been only 400. This plant could have "reproduced itself," that is to say, manufactured new machinery for delivery as reparations, in less time than it took to dismantle it. It had had a big export trade but its products had been lost for years, perhaps forever, since it was unlikely that the various nations to whom its equipment had been sent would ever be able to make use of the "bits and pieces" they received.
Nowhere was the waste entailed by dismantlement better illustrated than here. The Yugoslavs, who had received the lion's share, had got the press and hammer works and other shipbuilding machinery, and had insisted on shipment also of the bricks and girders and wharves. The Greeks had received the boiler house, including its roof which had been built in 1871. The Australians had been awarded a five-thousand-ton press for pressing steel ingots which they had no place to house—it was lying on some rail-way siding. England had taken an old freight wagon and some molds as scrap. Pakistan had received a crane capable of lifting 125 tons which it probably had no use for; India received the equipment which should have gone with the crane. A press, a pump, and an accumulator taken out of one department of the works had each been sent to a different nation.
Prior to the dismantlement the G.H.H. Works had export orders on their books for a million D marks of oil-burning machinery, and the Germans believed it had been torn down by the British to eliminate its competition with their less efficient industry.
Fifteen thousand workers had lost their jobs through the dismantlement of this one plant.
In the case of the Hörde Iron and Steel Works at Dortmund the estimated cost of dismantling its 16.5-foot rolling mill was 1,000,000 D marks and the minimum cost of re-erecting it, including the building, foundations, and the furnaces that served it, was 13,000,000. But the residual value as stated on the reparations account was only 2,200,000.
In the case of the famous Thyssen Works in the Ruhr, dismantlement costs were calculated at 65,000,000 marks, while the residual value came to only 40,000,000. The cost of "putting Humpty Dumpty together again" abroad was estimated to be 263,000,000 marks. Thus, if allowed to retain the plants, the Germans could easily have supplied new machinery in less time and worth far more than the equipment removed.
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Rubble and steel scrap represent the end result of dismantling blast and open-hearth furnaces. Huge rolling mills and presses cannot be moved because their weight or size are too great for bridges or for rail clearances. Hydraulic piping, steam lines, electric conduits, automatic controls, and some other equipment cannot be economically dismantled and are a complete loss.
The State Department, in November 1947, said that the cost in labor and materials involved in the dismantling process is "relatively negligible." But the ECA experts I talked to in Germany estimated that the dismantlement program would cost about ninety thousand man-years of labor in Germany, and that at least the same amount of labor would be needed in the recipient countries to get the machines set up and working. In sum, their view was that the dismantlement program is wasteful, inefficient, and impractical. They said that if the high cost of moving the equipment, the time losses, and the production losses due to the separation of the tools and dies from machinery as well as the cost of replacing them, are all counted in, the value actually realized by the European economy through the recipient nations is negligible, when measured against either the cost of European recovery or the cost to the United States of meeting the deficit in Germany's balance of payments.
Whatever the exact cost, a telling argument was made in a New York Times editorial of November 13, 1947, which said :
Having poured out billions to aid Europe in place of the reparations that Germany did not pay [the United States] is entitled to ask that these billions be counted against German reparations at least to the extent of preventing an increase in American expenditures through economic strangulation and destruction in Germany. Let the plants stand and get to work. The United States has more than paid for them. (Italics added.)
Although every American taxpayer is bearing a share of the burden of supplying food and other essential imports to a semipauperized Germany, the connection between our German policy and high taxes is recognized by few. The cost of the vengeance wreaked on Germany in the first years of the occupation is not a subject which most politicians and journalists care to dwell upon. It is nevertheless essential to realize it, if Americans are not to pay as heavily in the future as up to date for the Morgenthau concepts which shaped our original occupation policies, and still color them in spite of assurances to the contrary.
The ignorance of the American public concerning the huge waste entailed by dismantlement is to be ascribed to a variety of reasons. In the first place, the Germans have neither a government, nor a free press, nor representatives abroad to present their case. In the second place, most American journalists, Congressmen and Senatorial committees take their information entirely from Military Government sources. Lastly, there is the fact that every one of the reports written by the experts sent out by the War and State departments and ECA have been suppressed. The Wolf Report, the Keenan Report, and most recently, the report of the ECA's Humphrey Committee, have all been kept secret. They are withheld both from the press and from most members of Congress.
The Germans had imagined that, since the United States is a democracy, all these visits and investigations would result in the American voters' learning the facts of the situation. Over and over again I was asked what had been the reaction in America to the reports of the United States experts who had carefully surveyed the situation, and had to inform them that no one knew what these reports contained nor what had been recommended.
My own method of investigation in Germany was first to go to the German authorities for information and then to see for myself on the spot whether or not what they said seemed to be true. After this I asked the Military Government for its answer to the German contentions and its explanation for what I had seen. This was apparently a novel method of procedure, and I found myself regarded, if not with suspicion, at least as unorthodox in my method of investigation, since it was unusual for journalists to listen first, if at all, to what the Germans had to say. There was a goodly number of United States officials, however, who were as anxious as I was to have the true facts concerning the effects of dismantlement presented to the American public. This was particularly true of the ECA authorities who told me their door was open to any German who had facts to give them or representations to make which concerned the European Recovery Program. So it was with the knowledge that I was not alone in my desire to stop what former President Hoover has called "Destruction at our Expense," that I advised the Germans in the British, United States, and French zones to visit the ECA officials in Frankfurt and lay before them the facts relating to the retarding of European recovery through dismantlement.
* The Humphrey Committee report was not made public until April 1949, after Congress had already voted the ECA appropriations demanded, without knowledge of the extent to which dismantlement is responsible for high taxes in America.
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Herr Nolting, the Minister of Economics for North-Rhine Westphalia, which comprises the Ruhr, told me in Düsseldorf that when the dismantlement list was handed to the Germans in October 1947, they had said to the British : "Look, you can have all the machines you ask for; only let us decide where they are to be taken from. If you will let us select the machines, present production need not be interrupted and our whole economy disorganized; if you will leave it to us to deliver what you ask for, we will also be able to ensure that the burden of reparations is equally distributed. Surely you can see the injustice of mining some employers and workers while letting others go scot free."
The British had refused, although acceptance of the German plea would have saved much time and labor as well as creating confidence in democratic justice.
The fact that the British, instead of taking general-purpose machinery, insisted on dismantling specialized factories whose production could not be compensated for by others, strengthened the impression that the objective was not reparations but the elimination of German competition.
In September 1948, after the announcement of the Marshall Plan had given hope to the Germans that the program of destruction of Germany's industrial capacity would be stopped, Nolting had had an interview with Brigadier Noel, the top British reparations official in the Ruhr. The German minister had informed Noel that, since representations to the British for changes in the dismantlement program had proved useless, he had referred the German plea to Mr. Hoffman. Brigadier Noel was very angry and said : "Mr. Hoffman is only a private individual in so far as His Majesty's Government is concerned, and the British Foreign Office will not consider any proposals brought forward by a private person." Brigadier Noel had gone on to advise Nolting not to rely on any "interference" by Mr. Hoffman.
According to what I was told by one of Minister Nolting's subordinates, Nolting had been summoned to London a few days later, and urged not to demand a general stoppage of dismantlement in the Ruhr, because this would not only embarrass the British Labour Government but would cause such a furor in France that De Gaulle might come to power. He had also been assured that if he would cooperate with the British, they would "discuss" with the Germans the elimination from the dismantlement list of certain plants.
This slightly more conciliatory attitude of the British was ascribed by my informant as due to ECA pressure and the British desire to prevent direct contact between the Germans and the ECA authorities of the United States.
As I shall relate in a subsequent chapter, the British have taken advantage all along of the German Social Democrats' tendency to regard the British Labour party as an ally, and to trust it more than "capitalist" America. But the touching faith of the German Socialists in the British Labour Government was now being sorely tried by the fact that the British, in the summer and fall of 1948, were rushing dismantlement in order to present the United States ECA investigators with a fait accompli. Like Nolting, other Social Democratic ministers in North-Rhine Westphalia, were not yet prepared to reveal to correspondents the secret of their negotiations with the British Labour Government, but some of their subordinates were too outraged by the contrast between British Labour's statements and practices to be discreet.*
It would be unfair to the British to hold them mainly responsible for the dismantlement program, although today, like the French, they are opposing its discontinuance. Originally it was the United States, under Roosevelt's directives, which joined hands with the Russians to implement the Morgenthau Plan for transforming Germany into a "goat pasture." The British in 1945 and 1946 were the only Allied Power which opposed this program. They understood then that the destruction of German industries and mass unemployment and destitution in Germany was hardly conducive to the "democratization" of the German people and would, in any case, prove impossible to carry out once the British and American people came to realize the mass starvation it would entail.
* According to the October 1948 report of the British Control Commission for Germany reports "continued progress" in dismantlement, with 25 plants completely dismantled that month. This made a total of 216 for the year with a further 208 plants in process of being dismantled. The volume of machinery already torn out of German factories was given as 528,000 tons, of which only 270,000 had been shipped to recipient nations.
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Even if all occupied Germany had been administered as an economic unit, as promised by the Soviet Government at Potsdam, millions of Germans would have been condemned to die of hunger under the original occupation directives. For the Polish and Russian seizure of Germany's bread basket east of the Oder and Neisse rivers not only deprived Germany of a quarter of its arable land, it also drove the millions of Germans who had lived in these territories for hundreds of years into the truncated Reich.
If the Soviet Government had not at once proceeded to cut the British, United States, and French zones off from the food supplies of Soviet-occupied Germany, there would still have been no possibility for the Western Germans to obtain enough food to keep alive under the Morgenthau Plan, which incidentally also advocated detaching the Saar, the Ruhr, and some slices of German territory next to Holland and Belgium. It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that in comparison with the Morgenthau Plan even the Nazis would have appeared as comparatively humane conquerors. Its recommendation that the Germans should become self-subsistent farmers on the already overpopulated German soil is shown to be only a disguised program for genocide by the fact that the average yield per acre in Western Germany is already 50 per cent higher than that in the United States. There is obviously no room for a larger agricultural population in Germany than already exists.
American soldiers were too humane to be capable of watching masses of the defeated enemy people dying before their eyes. Moreover, it was recognized even in Washington that the health and safety of Americans would be endangered by widespread "disease and unrest." So almost from the beginning the United States started importing food into Germany to provide a minimum ration, just sufficient to maintain life and prevent people from dropping dead of hunger in the streets.
Nevertheless, in 1946, a "Level of Industry Plan" was worked out with the Russians which, if carried into effect, would have precluded any possibility of the Germans ever being able to produce enough for their own support, and converted millions of them into paupers.
This result was in fact recognized by General Draper and his experts in the economics division of the United States Military Government. The Potsdam agreement with Soviet Russia had stipulated that the German standard of living was to be no higher than the average in Continental Europe, excluding England and
the U.S.S.R. The Draper memorandum stated that "the data indicates that the German standard in 1932 was near the average for the remainder of the Continent for the years 1930 to 1938. For this reason figures for 1932 consumption in Germany can be used as a secondary basis of comparison or guide."
In Germany the worst year of the Great Depression was 1932, when there were some six million unemployed. Thus, it was the declared aim of the United States in 1946 to reproduce in Germany the conditions which had brought Hitler to power. Since the Level of Industry Plan then drawn up would actually have reduced millions of Germans to far worse destitution than in 1932, the logical result could have been expected to be a bigger and worse Hitler in the future—in a word a German Stalin.
It is not necessary to go into the details of this plan, since it was based on the fictitious assumption that the four zones of Germany would be administered as an economic unit, and since the program for the huge destruction and removals of German industrial equipment it envisaged, was modified after it became obvious that the Russian zone would continue to be treated as a purely Russian preserve.
In 1947 a "Revised Level of Industry Plan" was worked out by the American and British Occupation authorities on the assumption that Western Germany would have to exist without the resources of the Soviet zone, as well as without those of the former German territories east of the Oder. A list of plants to be dismantled as "surplus" to German needs at the level of existence to be permitted by their conquerors was drawn up on the basis of this plan and published in October 1947.
A cursory examination of the Revised Plan shows unmistakably that it fails to allow Western Germany to retain sufficient productive capacity to pay its own way, even on the assumption that the Germans are to continue indefinitely on their present diet, described by the ECA's chief representative in Germany as "subnormal both in calories and proteins."
Western Germany with forty-two millions has more than half of the original Reich's population, less than half of its arable land, three-quarters of its hard-coal, and about a third of its brown-coal production. According to the evidence given to Congress in February 1949 by Mr. N. H. Collisson, Deputy Chief of the ECA mission to Bizonia, Western Germany can never produce more than 50 per cent of the food it needs to feed its non-self-suppliers within reasonable dietary levels. The remaining 50 per cent must therefore be imported, and this can only be done if Germany can "so revive its industries that it may produce cheaply and efficiently and compete on world markets."*
Mr. Collisson pointed out that production per acre in Germany is already 50 per cent higher than in the United States, so that there is little or no possibility of increasing the yield. He further stated that even the bountiful harvest of 1948 had only increased the average daily diet of the nonfarming population to about 2,400 calories; that the 1949-50 program plans for a still lower ration, and that the goal of the long-term recovery program is only 2,700 calories. By 1952-53 the Germans are expected to be still existing on a diet consisting mainly of potatoes and other carbohydrates, and insufficient for productive efficiency.
Mr. Collisson stated that even the maintenance of the "sub-normal" diet in Western Germany and the continued denial to the Germans of "desperately needed essential commodities" and adequate housing, would require imports of $2,800,000,000 worth of food and raw materials and a correspondingly high level of exports of German manufacturers and coal.
As against these ECA estimates, the 1947 Level of Industry Plan envisages exports amounting to only two billion dollars to pay for Western Germany's essential imports of food, fertilizer, and raw materials. This figure of two billion dollars, although well below the ECA estimate, requires a 15 per cent increase over the 1936 figure of German exports.
The authors of the plan themselves recognized that this estimate is probably too low, difficult as it is to imagine where in the world such a volume of consumer goods is to be sold. They say that "at least" two billion dollars is the minimum import requirement, but they add : "Since trade between the Bizonal area and the rest of Germany is subject to greater uncertainty than former internal trade, the result may be to increase still further the need for trade with other countries."
* In a pamphlet entitled Is There Still a Chance for Germany? (Hinsdale, Ill., Henry Regnery Company, 1948), Karl Brandt, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Food Research Institute, Stanford University, and an internationally recognized authority in this field, maintains that "doubt is warranted that Western Germany, as presently constituted, will ever be able to attain the degree of productivity that will permit her to pay her food bill" (p. 14). Brandt is not alone in this opinion; it is shared by other competent experts. But it is studiously ignored in public discussion, whether unofficial or official, because, if the thesis is true, it takes away all ground from under Allied policies since Potsdam.
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In other words, as late as 1947, American authorities, in deciding how much machinery to tear out of the German economy, still refused to recognize as the basis of their calculations the fact that the Eastern zone under the Russians is completely severed from the rest of Germany.
Even assuming that two billion dollars is a correct figure for the volume of exports required to meet Western Germany's minimum needs, the Revised Level of Industry Plan makes it impossible for her ever to export this much, for it drastically limits her production of steel, and thus precludes large exports of the machinery and construction materials in greatest demand on the world market, which made up the bulk of Germany's prewar exports. Instead, Germany is envisaged as having the possibility of exporting unlimited quantities of textiles, ceramics, and other products of light industry. The difficulty of finding outlets for the planned huge increase in consumer-goods exports is recognized, but not taken into account. The preamble to the plan states :
Before the war, the broad fields of metals, machinery and chemicals accounted for two-thirds of the total exports. Production of textiles, ceramics, and consumer goods can be raised, but the extent to which additional sales above prewar levels can be sold on the export markets is difficult to predict. Exports from the unrestricted industries would need to be increased approximately 90 per cent if the higher export requirements were provided entirely from the unrestricted industries, which is obviously impracticable. Therefore the level of exports from the restricted industries will need to be greater than prewar.
Having cut the ground from under their own feet by this statement, the authors of the plan proceed to outline the cuts to be made in the productive capacity of the German steel industry, mechanical and electrical industries, chemicals and other vital branches of a modern economy. It also expressly states that no provision is made in the plan for repayment of the advances made by the occupying powers for imports of food, seed and fertilizer. Reparations are thus given priority over Germany's debt to the United States.
The plan limits Western Germany's steel production to 10.7 million tons a year, as against her 1936 production of 17.5 million tons, and the United States estimate of 19.2 million tons as her end of the war capacity. According to the Germans this latter figure takes insufficient account of air-raid damage. They claim therefore that the 6.5 million tons of steel capacity being dismantled will actually reduce Germany's capacity below the 10.7 million tons allowed in the Revised Level of Industry Plan.
Whichever figures are accepted as correct, there is no doubt that the planned dismantlement must deprive Western Germany of any possibility of becoming self-supporting. It envisages a Germany producing far less, and exporting more, than before the war. It makes no provision for the rebuilding of Germany's bombed cities and bridges, the repair of railroads and rolling stock, and the replacement of the engines and freight cars looted by the Russians, Poles, and French; nor for the housing of the millions of expellees from the East; nor for the support of the uncounted numbers of disabled men, women, and children; nor for the hospitalization of the many prisoners of war sent home from Russia, France, and Yugoslavia only after they have become too ill and weak to be of any use as slave laborers.
Like the old Level of Industry Plan it provides, even theoretically, for a German income at the lowest level of the Depression years, when Germany had six million unemployed. It is specifically stated that per capita productive capacity is to be reduced to 75 per cent of the 1936 level, which is precisely the 1932 level. In practice, Germany's per capita income would be reduced even lower than this, for the plan gravely underestimates the present and expected population increase of the Western zones.
The number of expellees from Silesia, the Sudetenland, and other parts of Eastern Europe was about twelve million. Some three million are estimated to have died of starvation and exposure, and some are in the Soviet zone. But against this reduction of the total figure of those who have to be provided for in Western Germany, there is the constant and increasingly large influx of refugees fleeing to Germany both from the Eastern zone and from all the countries under Communist dictatorship. These refugees include many nationalities, even Russians, but are not, for the most part, admitted into the DP camps, and have to be provided for by the German economy (see Chapter 7.)
If all these factors are taken into consideration the envisaged reduction in the standard of living of the population of Western Germany is almost 50 per cent below prewar. Without American subsidies it is bound to be even more miserably inadequate than at present.
Since it provides only for minimum German needs, the Revised Level of Industry Plan is also incompatible with the Marshall Plan, which envisages German industries and skills contributing to the rehabilitation of Western Europe. The ceiling placed on German steel production is alone sufficient to preclude any possibility of Germany's contributing to the reconstruction and defense of Western Europe.
As the London Economist pointed out on August 6, 1946, Germany used five million tons of steel before the war for the output only of such necessary peacetime requirements as nails, sheet iron, cutlery, stoves, furnaces, pipes, tools, and household utensils. Even in the last year of World War II 40 per cent of Greater Germany's steel output (8 or 9 million tons out of 22 to 24 million, according to the Economist figures) was used for civilian purposes.
According to the calculations of German economists, Western Germany needs, not 10.7, but at least 14 million tons of ingot steel a year for the next five years for domestic use, even if a very low standard of living is maintained. No one who has seen the havoc wrought by bombing and battle all over the Western zone will quarrel with this estimate. With rare exceptions every town, large or small, is in ruins. British and French removal of vast quantities of timber from German forests has increased the need of metal in place of wood for rebuilding. Yet Germany's structural-steel production is being reduced by 40 per cent.
Steel allocations for highway maintenance and repair of the Rhine bridges alone came to 8,000 tons in the first half of 1948. The future need is calculated at 40,000 tons a year for the next seven years. Rail repair requires a minimum of 150,000 tons a year for several years to come.
To anyone not blinded by the desire for revenge, it is obvious that Western Germany can never support itself unless permitted to produce at least as much steel for its own requirements, and to export even larger quantities of machinery, than before the war. As Mr. Collisson told Congress :
The industries of Western Germany need steel for the processing and manufacturing of the machinery, apparatus and precision goods which constitute the bulk of its export trade. Into these finished goods go the skills and craftsmanship which represent the ingredient contributing the most to the value of the finished article. . . .
Germany is a country with practically no raw materials except coal; her "riches" consist in the skills and industry of her working population. Unless allowed to use them for her own benefit and that of Europe she cannot support her people. At the same time Europe desperately needs German machinery. Nevertheless ninety-four iron and steel plants were placed on the dismantlement list handed to the Germans in October 1947. The list included Germany's most up-to-date and efficient plants.
As every American iron and steel man will tell you, a blast furnace, or melting or annealing furnace, can not be transplanted. It can only be destroyed. Thus a "dismantled" iron and steel works yields as reparations, at most, 20 to 25 per cent of its former production facilities. Germany's loss of her capacity to produce steel constitutes a lasting loss to the whole European economy.
The American public has not been permitted to see the Wolf Report on the German iron and steel industry. It is, however, no secret that Mr. Wolf reported that even the 10.7 million tons of steel ingots permitted under the Revised Level of Industry Plan would be useless if the machinery necessary to roll it at low cost in labor and materials is not retained in Germany; and that scheduled dismantlements of rolling mills would make this impossible.
Some 80 per cent of German steel production consists of rolled products. According to the German Bizonal Economic Administration the dismantlement of rolling mills being carried out will reduce productive capacity far below the 10.7 million tons steel level prescribed, and nearer to the 6 million tons level insisted upon by the Russians in 1946.
Since the capacity of the United States to meet even the home demand for sheets and strips is estimated to be insufficient, where is Europe to obtain its basic requirements if the British insist on carrying through the scheduled dismantlements in the Ruhr? As Mr. Collisson said in his evidence before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "The critical shortage of steel in the world today demands maximum use of facilities permitted to remain in Germany."
According to the Herter Committee report, the United States, up to 1951, will not be in a position to supply either the home market or the European and Near Eastern demand for rolled pipes of large diameter. Yet 46 per cent of Germany's welded-pipe producing capacity is being dismantled, and her large-diameter pipe production entirely destroyed.
Ten per cent of Germany's rolled milled products consists of steel wire. Thus she should have been left the capacity to produce 800,000 tons, but scheduled dismantlements are reducing it to only 530,000.
In visiting the Ruhr I was made aware of the fact that the manner in which dismantlement is carried out also greatly increases German costs of production, coal consumption, and transport charges. With an eye mainly to the elimination of German competition, the British are crippling a large number of plants instead of completely dismantling only a few. By this method they raise German costs of production to noncompetitive levels, while making it appear that the total reparations removals are comparatively small.
In a modern iron and steel works the whole process of extracting iron from the ore in a blast furnace, making steel ingots from pig iron or scrap in a furnace, and shaping the red-hot steel into bars, plates, wire, or tubes is carried out in the same plant. This economizes fuel, power, and transport. The British in the Ruhr disrupt the process by removing a part of the equipment.
In one plant they remove the rolling mill, in another the presses, and in others they destroy the furnaces. Thus, in one iron and steel works the steel used can no longer be produced on the premises, while in others it can no longer be rolled or pressed and has to be sent elsewhere for processing.
At the Hörde Works in Dortmund, for instance, I saw the giant 16.5-foot rolling mill, which is the only one of its kind in Europe and has a production capacity of 200,000 tons of rolled steel a year, standing idle by British order. It had been producing some 7,000 tons a month before the British ordered it dismantled in the fall of 1948. The greater part of the steel produced at Hörde's and formerly immediately processed, now had to be cooled and sent elsewhere for use, with consequently greatly increased coal consumption and transport costs. The latter charges were high since there was no water transport and no other rolling mill in the vicinity to make use of the steel produced at Hörde's.
Not only would the Hörde Works no longer be able to operate profitably. The Dutch, Swedes, and Norwegians had placed orders in the Ruhr for 200,000 tons of wide metal plates for shipbuilding, which England and France could not supply, and which dismantlement of the Hörde 16.5-foot rolling mill prevented Germany from producing. There was no other rolling mill in Europe making such large plates. The two German plants in existence producing 14.7 and 13.5-foot plates had insufficient capacity to fulfill the whole foreign shipbuilding order in addition to their existing commitments, since the demand in Germany for wide steel plates was also very great. The Hörde Works had, for instance, produced the plates for rebuilding the bridge over the Rhine at Cologne, reopened in the fall of 1948, and there were many other destroyed German bridges waiting to be rebuilt.
In February 1949, following the visit of the Norwegian Foreign Minister to Washington to discuss Norway's adherence to the Atlantic Pact, it was reported in the press that the United States had promised to deliver American steel plates for the reconstruction of Norway's mercantile marine, in place, presumably, of the German deliveries which had been cut off.
The Germans had offered to deliver a new rolling mill in place of Hörde's. This new equipment was already half finished and could have been completed in nine months, whereas three and a half years would be required to dismantle, pack, and ship the Hörde mill, if it could ever be accomplished, and this was most unlikely in view of its huge size and weight. Nevertheless the offer was refused by the British Reparations Office in Düsseldorf.
The Hörde workers, at the time of my visit, had succeeded in preventing dismantlement by forming a picket line and preventing the wrecking crew from entering the plant. The giant mill stood idle, since use of it was forbidden, and no one knew whether the British would use troops to force the workers to give way, and use DP's to destroy the mill should German workers refuse the task.
The workers had put up notices on blackboards which read :
"Hands off! You are taking away the livelihood of 8.000 workers and their families."
"Marshall Plan : Reconstruction or Destruction?"
"Let us work! We want to help in the rebuilding of Europe!"
I spent several hours at the Hörde Works where thin and undernourished German workers left their arduous labors in the smelting works to ask me if there was any hope that America would intervene to prevent the destruction of their livelihood. I gave them all the encouragement I could, saying that I was sure that in time the American people would stop the senseless and cruel destruction of Germany's industrial capacity. But not wishing to raise false hopes I admitted that America's awakening might not come in time to save their jobs.
Early in 1949, while writing this book, I received a letter from Herr Wilms, the engineer in charge of the 16.5-foot rolling mill. He wrote to tell me that after stopping dismantlement according to their promises to the ECA the British had removed and shipped to England the turning lathe and grinding machine without which the mill cannot operate. He added :
On November 1, 1948, in "honor of the visit" of Mr. King, the Wolf Commission expert, the first of these machines was removed; and now, on Christmas Eve, the second one has been torn out and both essential machines shipped to England via Hamburg. Yet there is no one in England who wants them. The Thomson Houston Company in Rugby has refused to take them, and Messrs. Francis Shaw in Manchester have accepted delivery with reluctance.
At the end of his letter Herr Wilms remarks :
The belief in Germany that the American view concerning European rehabilitation would prevail and bring an end to dismantlement, is fading. I myself still hope for the best while preparing for the worst. Can you give us some good advice? Perhaps now that masculine reason is in eclipse, feminine feeling will achieve better results!
Unfortunately for the Hörde workers, the ECA Commission deferred to the British, who presumably wish to prevent reconstruction of the Norwegian and Dutch merchant marine. So the giant rolling mill is now being torn down.
In Dortmund I also visited the Dortmund Union Works which after the decartelization operation had been cut off from its coal mines, subsuppliers, and markets. Here again I found that the whole works was not being dismantled, but measures had been taken to ensure that the steel produced in its foundry could no longer be used on the premises in its molten state. A gigantic press, far too big to be moved but nevertheless placed on the reparations list, was being destroyed. The ovens which served it had already been torn down, and the press itself being irremovable would presumably be broken up and converted into scrap. It had originally been constructed on the premises and was the largest press in Europe. Two other presses and four steam hammers had already been dismantled and 29 ovens destroyed; one crane able to lift a weight of 250 tons had been torn down, and five smaller cranes removed.
This plant had formerly manufactured equipment for the mining and electrical industries, and gears for large sea-going ships, all of which production depended on the presses which were being destroyed or dismantled.
The value of the annual output of the Dortmund Union Works prior to dismantlement had been 25,000,000 marks a year. Its residual value on reparations account was only a fraction of this sum. The plant could not be reconstituted because its former affiliated works, the Wagner Company which made presses, had already been dismantled and its equipment shipped to India.
The Germans had offered to supply new machinery to India instead, and India would have preferred to receive machinery made to its specifications, but the British had insisted that Wagner's be dismantled. It could only be presumed that from the British point of view it was better that the Indians should receive factory equipment they could make no use of, than machinery with which to compete with the British. Dismantlement both eliminated German competition and prevented the creation of effective new competitors.
Following its dismantlement, the Wagner Company in Dortmund had made a contract with the British to use its labor force to dismantle other factories. But, faced with the rising tide of German resentment at the destruction of their country's assets, the reluctance of all German workers to dismantle the machinery which their fellow trade-unionists depended upon for their livelihood, and the general opprobrium attached to all Germans who collaborated with the British in destroying Germany's productive capacity, Wagner's in October 1948 had refused to renew their contract. As punishment the British, at the time of my visit to Dortmund, had announced their intention of tearing down the empty Wagner buildings which had hitherto been spared and used as a storage depot for the machinery torn out of other factories in the town.
The "captains of industry" I met in Dortmund considered the Revised Level of Industry Plan limiting future German production worse than dismantlement, costly as the latter is. This was also the view of the trade-union representatives with whom I talked in the Ruhr. Executives and workers, indignant as they all were at the senseless destruction of machinery going on, had faith in German capacity to repair the damage if only they were allowed to work.
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The most terrible thing about Allied occupation policies was the setting of limits to man's endeavor, inventiveness, and willingness to work.
Germany's coal, iron, and steel industry was formerly the most closely and economically integrated in Europe. Combines used their own locally mined coal to produce steel and roll it immediately into plates or strips or press it into shape while still red hot. In many plants production from blasting to finished products, such as pipes and wire, was all carried out on the same premises, with a minimum cost for handling and transport.
Dismantlement, coupled with so-called "decartelization" is wiping out these economies and reducing Germany's coal, iron, and steel industry to a nineteenth century level of efficiency.
"Decartelization" was originally sold to the American people under a false label. It was represented as a method of eliminating "monopoly," and clearing the ground for free private enterprise. In fact, however, under the influence of Communist fellow travelers in key positions in the economic division of the United States Military Government, decartelization became an instrument for undermining the capitalist system. "Operation Severance," as it was called, first set 1,000 employees as the maximum for any German enterprise. Later the figure was raised to 10,000, but even this number of permitted workers destroyed the former economic and efficient vertical integration of the German coal, iron, and steel industry.
Communist sympathizers, in combination with the disciples of Morgenthau, no longer enjoy predominant influence in the United States Military Government. Many of them have been sent home. Those who remain are careful to camouflage their real objectives. Nevertheless they are by no means eliminated and still exert considerable undercover influence. They can still work through the British, who, although they never subscribed to the absurdities of the Morgenthau Plan or let Communist sympathizers direct their policy, took advantage of the decartelization program to decrease Germany's productive capacity and raise her costs of production to the advantage of her British competitors on the world market.
The outstanding example of dismantlement of a model enterprise is the August Thyssen works in the Ruhr. This was the most efficient smelting works in Europe. It formerly produced 1,250,000 tons of crude steel, all used on the spot to turn out high quality dynamo and transformer sheets, materials for bridge building, and heat resistant and acid-proof steels. Situated on the river, it had its own wharves for the landing of coal and iron ore and for shipping of finished products. The Thyssen works formerly accounted for half of Germany's total production of the transformer sheets now so desperately needed. Ever since the end of the war the British have prohibited its operation, and it is now being dismantled.
Repeated testimony before Congressional committees, and statements by ECA and United States Military Government spokesmen, confirm the fact that the basic limiting factor in the German recovery program is the power shortage. This is caused by the result of our air raids, long-neglected repairs, dismantlement of power plants, and shortage of coal supplies. Without new supplies of electrical sheets for transformers and dynamos the power shortage cannot be remedied. Fifty per cent of Bizonia's capacity for the production of electrical sheets was located in the August Thyssen Works.
Yet the State Department, in its memorandum of March 1, 1948, asserted that "no plants producing electric generating equipment are scheduled for dismantlement in the British Zone."
How is this statement to be explained? Are the experts of the State Department even more ignorant of technology and the requirements of modern industry than the author of this book? Or is someone interested in misleading the Secretary of State, Congress, and the American public? Or is it worth nearly a billion dollars a year to preserve the reputations of the incompetents who made the past mistakes?
Technical progress in all countries is leading to increased use of electric and fine steels, and the Level of Industry Plan requires that Germany produce more, not less, of the high-grade machine tools and fine optical and electrotechnical instruments which require such steel. But Germany's capacity to produce electric steel is being reduced to a mere 300,000 tons a year. One hundred and eighteen electric furnaces out of a total of 209 are being dismantled.
Thus, while promising that the Germans would be allowed to increase their production and export of machine tools and optical instruments, we are busy depriving them of the capacity to procure the specialized steels these industries require.
This crippling of Germany's capacity to produce the fine steels increasingly in demand on the world market is of particular importance to the American taxpayer, since it drastically reduces Germany's capacity to export high quality tools, and perpetuates the unfavorable balance of trade now met by American food subsidies.
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It also cripples the chemical industry because Germany will henceforth be unable to produce sufficient quantities of heat- and acid-proof stainless steel.
It was promised in the Revised Level of Industry Plan that the fine machine-tool mechanics and optical-instrument industry would not be touched, but even in this field factories have been dismantled in the United States zone, sometimes with the excuse that they had been "substantially modified" for war use. There has also been dismantlement of factories producing fine precision tools essential to the permitted export industries.
It was also stated that the production of agricultural machinery and road tractors in the Bizone was insufficient, and none should be taken for reparations. But here again a promise to the Germans was broken. In 1948 the section of Krupps producing agricultural machinery was dismantled in spite of bitter protests by the workers employed there.
In spite of the admitted necessity to increase German exports of machinery, the 1947 plan provides for the following removals of productive capacity :
Thirty-five per cent of the production facilities of the heavy mechanical engineering industry.
Twenty-three per cent of the capacity of the light machinery industry.
Thirty-five per cent of the present productive capacity of the machine-tool industry.
Removal of "only" three electrical engineering plants, because "the pre-war requirements of the Bizonal area were in large part met from capacities in Berlin, which have been almost totally dismantled."
Regarding automobiles and trucks, the plan states that capacity to produce 160.000 passenger cars and 61,500 commercial vehicles will be left in Western Germany. Prewar production was far above this level. It should be noted that up to 1948 practically the whole production of Volkswagen and trucks was taken by the British and French occupation authorities for their own use or for sale for their own profit. Moreover, a large number of German automobiles and trucks were confiscated at the beginning of the occupation. Thus very few Germans still have automobiles and those still in their possession are usually very old. Most business enterprises lack essential transport. The backlog demand is accordingly huge.
As for chemicals, 40 to 50 per cent of existing capacity is to be removed or destroyed. All explosive plants are to be removed or destroyed. A quarter of the capacity of the plastics industry is made available for reparations. Less than the prewar capacity of dyestuffs is to be retained. The production of atabrine is to be reduced below prewar by removal of a pharmaceutical plant. Fifteen per cent of the capacity of the "miscellaneous chemicals" group is to be removed, and 17 per cent of the capacity of the "basic, organic and inorganic" chemical industries.
The prohibited list of industries still includes ships, aluminum, beryllium, vanadium, magnesium, ball bearings, synthetic ammonia, rubber, gasoline, and oil.
Under a temporary provision Germany has been allowed to continue producing some ball bearings until such time as her exports shall enable her to buy them abroad. Both the British and Americans now agree this is impracticable, but in the meantime half the equipment at the large ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt in Bavaria has been sent to the Soviet Union.
The British, obviously because they want no German competition in this sphere, have as yet refused to agree to remove the ban on shipbuilding except for small and slow vessels.
The British in their implementation of the plan have included the light-metal industries in the category of "light machine industry" scheduled for a 23 per cent reduction in productive capacity.
In spite of German protests the British have dismantled factories making coffee pots, skillets, kettles, and other household goods made of sheet metal. Some 40 plants producing such peacetime necessities were included on the British dismantlement list.
The State Department has contended that the task of selecting the plants to be dismantled was performed with great care, that none of them could be used in Germany if retained there, and that their removal facilitates the economic recovery of the recipient nations.
This statement must be based on inadequate information. For nothing is more obvious in Germany than the fact that many of the plants being dismantled are precisely those working to full capacity, having been given priority in the allocation of coal and raw materials, precisely because their products were essential to the working of the civilian economy. Telling the Germans that the machinery being dismantled is "surplus" to their requirements is a heartless joke.
The State Department's contention that the plants dismantled were those which could not be used in Germany if retained there is contradicted by information given by the Military Government, as well as by the evidence presented by the Germans. I was told by Military Government authorities in Berlin in November 1948 that the plants dismantled in the United States zone were now once again producing half as much as before they were dismantled. They had been put back into production by providing them with equipment formerly unused in plants which were not dismantled. In other words, reparations were not taken from "surplus" capacity in idle factories, but from those working to capacity.
In any case the contention that German reparations have not impeded recovery because capacities are not fully utilized, begs the question. It should, instead, be asked why potential capacities have not been fully utilized in view of Europe's needs. The answer reveals the vicious cycle for which the Allied wrecking policy in Germany is responsible.
The inadequate food supplied to the German miners and their families, and their miserable housing conditions, combined with the dismantlement of the factories producing mining equipment, has held down coal production.
The obligation to export 20 per cent of the Ruhr's coal production (mainly to France) and the loss of the Saar and of the brown coal of Eastern Germany, has further drastically curtailed the amount of coal available for German consumption.
This in turn limits steel production and has led some iron and steel works to be represented as "surplus," only because Germany is not permitted to obtain the coal and iron ore she requires to make a major contribution to European recovery.
The real reason for dismantlement is that given by the head of the Steel Production Board in Düsseldorf, who in August 1948, said to my friend Mrs. John Crane, who was representing Senator George W. Malone : "There is no intention that Germany will be left with enough steel-making capacity ever again to be able to export steel or steel products in significant quantities."
The Revised Plan would be unrealistic in view of the necessity for increased German exports, even if based on a correct estimate of existing capacities. There is, however, evidence that the list of plants to be dismantled was drawn up without a proper survey of what equipment remained in Germany.
The Germans contend that the basis of United States-British calculations of productive capacity was the maximum output reached temporarily during the war and impossible to sustain. Normal utilization is only 80 to 90 per cent, and the many years during which no repairs were carried out have reduced the capacity by a greater degree than normal depreciation. These facts too were not taken into consideration. They also contend that the use of gross capacities in Allied calculations results in an overestimation of production facilities, since some subsuppliers are counted twice over.
Secondly, the Germans say, since the most efficient plants were chosen for dismantlement, and since the destruction of one branch of an industry deprives others of the material they use, the net reduction in productive capacity is far greater than indicated by the total figures of dismantlement. Insuperable bottlenecks result from reparations deliveries which affect the whole German economy, and in some cases the whole of Europe, since some plants can never be reconstructed in other countries, and even those which are re-erected take months or years before they can produce again.
Thirdly, the basis on which Germany's productive capacity was calculated was not, as the State Department has asserted, any "careful" investigation of existing capacity. The basis was apparently the so called "Mecit" reports of the winter of 1945-46 when the German factory owners were instructed to fill in forms stating the productive capacity of their plants. The object of these questionnaires was not stated at the time and the Germans thought they were to be the basis for fuel and raw-material allocations. Human nature being what it is, they almost all overestimated their productive capacities at a time when no one expected to be supplied with anything but a small proportion of their needs. It was certainly the Germans' fault that productive capacities were accordingly overestimated, but the fact remains that these "Mecit" reports are not reliable, and should not have been taken as the basis for the calculation of which plants are surplus under the Revised Level of Industry Plan.
There are numerous established cases in which data on plants have been so inaccurate that they were not even listed in the right industry.
Even if the original Anglo-American estimates of Germany's productive capacity are accepted as correct, British "multilateral deliveries," French "prélèvements," and "restitutions" from all three zones have destroyed their validity. No one, not even the Germans, now knows exactly what is left of Germany's productive capacity.
"Multilateral deliveries" is the British term for the removal of specially valuable, or special-purpose and frequently irreplaceable, machinery from German factories to England. "Prélèvements" is the French term for their seizure of whole plants and of individual machines in their zone without reference to the Inter-Allied Reparations Authority (IARA) in Brussels. Both terms are a "legalized" synonym for what would be described as looting if practiced by an enemy country.
In the British zone a commission would come to a German factory not on the dismantlement list, pick out certain machines, and order them dismantled "to meet United Kingdom requirements." Although on October 18, 1947, General Robertson made an official promise that no further multilateral deliveries would be demanded, in the fall of 1948 they were resumed in some places. In Düsseldorf, for instance, in September 1948, the British demanded seventy-two machines, this time however from factories on the dismantlement list. The point, of course, was that these machines had to be delivered earlier than the dates set for general dismantlement, and the Germans were convinced that the British hoped thus to forestall the ECA commission's recommendations.
The machines taken as multilateral deliveries were for British use, since they were not being allocated by the IARA at Brussels. Some of the machinery thus torn out of German factories and not taken into consideration in drawing up the Level of Industry Plan is irreplaceable, because it is made only in the Russian zone. Many factories have been permanently crippled although they do not figure on the dismantlement list.
"Restitutions" have further invalidated the original estimate of Germany's productive assets. Originally the term "restitutions" was taken to mean only the restoration of property stolen by the Germans in occupied countries, or transferred to German ownership "under duress." Confined to this interpretation restitutions are entirely justified on both moral and economic grounds. But, in July 1948, the United States Military Government began to give an interpretation to the term "restitutions" which has no basis in law or equity. The 1946 ruling by General Clay, according to which "duress" had to be proved, was canceled, and it was decreed that no transfers of property under German occupation were to be considered as "normal commercial transactions." According to this ruling machinery and other goods, bought and paid for by German merchants or manufacturers, must be returned to the country of origin as restitutions without any need to prove they were sold under duress.
Even if the German buyer can produce documentary evidence that the seller considers that he was properly paid and does not now claim return of the property, the German purchaser has to give it up without compensation, because, "restitution claims are government claims and not those of individuals." As a result of this United States Military Government ruling, property for restitution is not delivered to those who originally sold it to the Germans, but to foreign governments. Most of the foreign governments who thus obtain restitution of the machinery and other goods originally sold by their nationals are Soviet satellites today, and they often dispose of the "restored" property by sale to foreign countries for dollars. In a considerable number of cases they have offered to sell these restitutions to their dispossessed German owners for foreign currency—to be used presumably for strengthening themselves against the "menace of American imperialism."
The only exception to this American ruling concerning the restoration to former occupied countries of the machinery and other goods bought by the Germans, is the proviso that if a German can produce "figures and dates" to prove that he bought the same kind of machinery or other goods in the same quantities before the war, he may perhaps be allowed to retain his property.
Commerce between Germany and France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and other East European countries, always large, naturally increased greatly during the war and blockade, especially since the Nazis concentrated as much production as possible in Czechoslovakia and France because of our air raids on Germany. The demand that all goods delivered to Germany during the war should be now returned to the country of origin, even if paid for, therefore opens up limitless demands on the economy of Bizonia.
A country like Czechoslovakia, which probably received more equipment from Germany than it sold to Germany, is in a particularly happy situation under the United States interpretation of restitutions, although it must be noted that in the case of Czechoslovakia the United States does not accept claims for the restitution of property sold to the Germans prior to the Allied London declaration of January 5, 1943, which warned Germany that we would set aside all forcible transfers of property in occupied countries. Nevertheless, Czechoslovakia, whose country was not bombed and never became a battlefield, and whose manufacturers made profits working for Germany during the war, is in far better position today in claiming "restitutions" than the Poles who suffered so much more under the German occupation and whose country never became a Nazi arsenal. The destruction of Warsaw caused the Poles to lose many of the records necessary to claim restitutions of the machinery taken from them by the Germans without compensation, whereas the Czechs and the French find little difficulty in specifying, finding, and claiming the machines they sold to Germany.
Perhaps it makes little difference in the end since Poland and Czechoslovakia are both under Stalin's domination, but I found myself sympathizing with the Polish officer who represented his country at the United States Restitutions Office in Karlsruhe, when he told me how great a handicap it was to the Poles not to be allowed to visit German factories, unless authorized to do so by the United States authorities, and unless they could give a description of the Polish machinery they expected to find and the date on which the Germans had taken it. Clearly Poland was at a great disadvantage as compared with Czechoslovakia and France which had collaborated with the Germans and knew to whom they had sold their manufactures, or as compared with Germany's former allies, Italy, Hungary, and Rumania, whose representatives in the United States zone also found it easy to claim restitutions.
The British, said my Polish informant, were far more co-operative than the Americans in enabling Poland to receive the machinery looted by the Germans. In the British zone the Poles could inspect all German factories at will, and had received hundreds of loaded railway cars of restitutions.
If the Poles were dissatisfied at the small number of restitutions they had been able to obtain in the United States zone, the sum total of which the Soviet satellite countries was getting was not inconsiderable.
When I arrived in Karlsruhe, where the Restitutions branch of the United States Military Government is located, I first ran into a group of Yugoslav officers whom at first sight I took to be Russians, on account of the similarity of their uniforms and gold and scarlet epaulettes. Then I met Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, and Rumanians and learnt that almost every nation in Europe (including Germany's former allies) is busy claiming something or other from Germany at our expense.
No accounts are kept concerning such "restitutions" to show the effect on the German economy. The head of the United States Restitutions Office, a German born American citizen, who has changed his name from von, to de, Kaiserlinck, told me that he "had not the least idea nor any interest in the quantity and volume of machinery" taken out of Germany in the form of restitutions. The only figures he could give me were the over-all values of restitution deliveries which amounted to 287,000,000 Reichsmarks of 1938 value.
I told Herr von, or Monsieur de, Kaiserlinck that, although my main interest was the economic effect of restitutions, I was also interested in ascertaining the legal justification for the wide interpretation given the term by his office, since in the future we might, like the Germans, be arraigned as "war criminals" for our failure to observe the Hague rules of land warfare concerning enemy property. His indignation at my statement was, at first, unbounded. But after a while he started telling me that if I would visit the Poles, the French, and other Allied representatives in Karlsruhe, I would revise my estimate of the attitude of the United States Restitutions Office. After talking to the Poles I understood what he meant. Nevertheless I continued to have my doubts about the legality of the orders issued by the United States Restitutions Office.
Just how broad the distinction of "restitutions" can he made is illustrated by a French demand in the summer of 1948 that certain pure-bred horses in Germany should be returned to France. None of the horses was more than three or four years old, and could not therefore have been stolen during the Nazi occupation. The French, however, contended that the horses in question had been sired by French stallions. It was assumed that a good and patriotic French horse could only have acted "under duress" when confronted by a German mare.
Other and less humorous examples of what restitutions can be held to cover are the following :
A tailor called Hans Schweighofer of Regen, having been bombed out, bought an old second-hand sewing machine of Czech make and got it repaired. He was ordered to "restitute" it to Czechoslovakia, and thus deprived of the possibility of earning his living and supporting his five children.
Frau Leni Kraus, whose husband was killed in action, lost all her property in Berlin by bombing. She bought some second-hand furniture at Mülhausen in Alsace and took it with her when she was evacuated to Bavaria. Now the French are claiming the bed she shares with her son as restitution.
The list of such cases could be continued indefinitely.
The French have given the term restitutions so wide a meaning that they have confiscated automobiles of French make bought by the Germans before the war.
The Americans are now confiscating the automobiles they sold to the Germans in the first years of the occupation from confiscated Wehrmacht supplies. Several thousands of automobiles paid for by the Germans are now being taken from them without compensation in the combined British and American zones, and "restituted" to the French and others who originally sold them to the Germans. American and British military governments, having first derived a profit from selling confiscated Wehrmacht property to the Germans, are now annulling the contract, and restoring it to the original seller at no cost to the Military Government.
The British with the respect for law which they display whenever it does not conflict with their vital interests, originally refused to accept restitution claims unless duress could be proved. Only such items were restituted from the British zone which had been illegally acquired from occupied territories. Since September 1948, however, the British have adopted the "more comprehensive" American interpretation of restitutions, and have been declaring property brought to Germany by legal business transactions as liable to be returned to the countries from which it was bought.
A confidential instruction issued by the British Foreign Office on August 18th, 1948, Reference No. 45 Basic (Saving), a copy of which was obtained by the Germans, reads as follows :
I also believe it to be in the economic and security interests of Europe that some of Germany's surplus industrial equipment should be removed and put to productive use elsewhere, and a liberal restitution policy would be consonant with this aim (italics added).
There is little doubt that the change in British practice last fall was due to the expected halt in the dismantlement of German factories to be shipped abroad as reparations. When I left Germany, restitutions from both the British and United States zones were already threatening to supplant reparations as the means to reduce Germany's industrial capacity and increase her need of American ECA aid.
On February 28, 1949, Dr. Kutscher, of the German Economic Administration for Bizonia, wrote to me that since I left Germany "the situation in the field of restitutions, especially in the British zone, has gone from bad to worse." According to the information he sent me, the productive assets being withdrawn from Western Germany under the heading of restitutions now almost equal reparations, and in the United States zone they are even greater.
According to the official statistics of the United States Military Government the value of restitutions from the United States zone, up to September 1948, amounted to 287,075,915 marks, as against a figure of 235,000,000 marks given as the residual value of the plants dismantled on reparation account.
In Hamburg, in the British zone, the Allied Missions compute restitutions already delivered as totalling 36,000,000 marks, as against the 32,000,000 marks residual value of the plants dismantled on the reparation account.
My German informant also wrote concerning the fresh blow delivered to the German economy by the decision to hand over to the Netherlands as restitutions five of the few surviving modernly equipped trawlers of the German fishing fleet, thereby reducing Germany's present small catch by 30 per cent. This is being done at a time when the United States is considering appropriating ECA funds for the purpose of enlarging the German fishing fleet, in order to reduce Germany's dependence on American food imports.
The Netherlands are also claiming restitution of nineteen tankers, the withdrawal of which from Germany will mean that Bizonia's crude oil supply will require the gift of American tankers. The fact that Holland is using her resources to impose the same kind of servitude on the Indonesians as the Dutch suffered under the Nazis, makes such restitutions at America's expense seem not only absurd but an outrage.
Restitutions are also now affecting the supply of essential machinery to the Ruhr mines. A number of coal mines are threatened with the necessity to close down or curtail operations, because the new equipment they need will not be delivered on account of restitutions.
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According to a compilation made at the instigation of the Anglo-American Bipartite Steel Production Office, restitution claims affecting the iron and steel industry amount to a total of more than 40,000,000 marks (1938 value). Losses through the disruption of production entailed by the removal of bottleneck machinery as restitutions, are calculated to amount to a far larger sum.
The Germans, having earlier been led to believe that the Marshall Plan meant an end to the wrecking of their economy, are becoming thoroughly disillusioned, now that restitutions are held to cover machinery legally acquired and fully paid for, and are taking the place of reparations as the means to deprive them of any possibility of earning a living.
They can see no end to the various methods adopted by their conquerors to reduce them to a pauper status. They can no longer place any trust even in the 1947 Revised Level of Industry Plan, which, harsh and unrealistic as it was, at least promised to allow them to retain the industrial capacity to produce to the limit in certain purely peacetime industries. The factories already dismantled, or now being dismantled, include many which are outside the categories scheduled to be delivered as reparations according to the Revised Level of Industry Plan.
Factories making soap, toys, furniture, pots and pans, fine optical instruments, agricultural machinery, hospital equipment, and a multitude of other peacetime needs and exports have been dismantled not only in the British and French zones, but also in the American. There were bad enough examples in the United States zone, but there seemed no limit to the injustice caused by the British desire to eliminate competition, or to the hypocritical excuses made by the British to obtain German assets for the purpose of decreasing their own dollar deficit.
There was, for instance, the case of the Diana Toy Factory in the French zone, making air guns, which the British had induced the French to classify as an "armaments factory" in order that they might obtain its equipment.
On the way out of Germany in December 1948 I happened to share a compartment on the train to Ostende with a British toy manufacturer on his way home from Nuremberg. He showed me samples of toy motor cars with three gears, and other examples of German inventiveness and ingenuity, saying that no other toy manufacturers could compete with the Germans. Then he told me how, immediately following the war's end, he and other British manufacturers had been told by the Board of Trade that they would be furnished suitable army or navy uniforms to go to Germany and pick out as "reparations officials" any machinery they wanted or thought they could make use of. He himself was friendly to the Germans and had no desire to deprive them of their livelihood, so he had not accepted the offer. In any case, he said, it paid him better to buy German toys than to make them in England. Because British workers were less efficient and refused to work as hard as the Germans it was cheaper to import German toys than to take German machinery to compete against them.
The outstanding example of the failure of the Western Powers to allow the Germans to retain even those industries which are not supposed to be on the dismantlement list, is the watch and clock industry. Centered in the Black Forest and consisting mainly of very small enterprises, this is one of the oldest of German industries and in no way related to armaments production. But the French at the beginning of the occupation started to destroy it and remove its equipment to France. The British were equally interested in stopping the Germans from making watches and clocks, and thanks to the efforts made by some liberal Englishmen, who have endeavored to stop dismantlement, the following excerpt from the trade journal, British Jeweler and Metal Worker received wide publicity in 1948.
Lengthy negotiations and discussions have been conducted by Mr. Barrett (Chairman of the Export Group) over the past three years with a view to fixing the future level of the German horological industry below the 72 per cent of the 1938 level which had been agreed by the Allied Control Commission. It is pleasing to be able to record that the final result has been to reach agreement that the German industry is to be reduced to 50 per cent of the 1938 level. This result is what we wanted to achieve; and although there can be no doubt that the Germans will ultimately re-develop their horological industry on a strong basis the present position means that the British industry has been given a certain amount of breathing space in order to become organized on a sound basis. The thanks of the Association have already been conveyed to Mr. Barrett for his patient and untiring work in achieving this result. Following upon this, the contents of a number of German factories are to be thrown up for reparations, and Mr. W. W. Cope has recently made an inspection of these factories, as also of certain other machines which are available to this country.
The scandal occasioned in England by this exposure of the commercial motive which inspires dismantlement led to the appointment by the Foreign Office of a commission, headed by the former Soviet-friendly Labour M.P. Crossman, to investigate what was happening to the German watch and clock industry. In Frankfurt I happened to meet the wife of an old English friend of mine, H. N. Brailsford, who is among the small number of liberals who have always fought for justice. Mrs. Brailsford had accompanied Crossman on his tour of the French zone, and had been horrified at what she had seen. She was full of sympathy for the German workers deprived of their livelihood by dismantlement, but, she said to me, "After all, America is to blame for it."
I couldn't quite get my bearings. America's sins might be great and her stupidities even greater, but I could not see how the United States could be held responsible for France's and England's destruction of the German watch and clock industry. Mrs. Brailsford enlightened me : "Don't you see," she said, "it's all due to America's failure to give enough dollars to Britain and France. They have to do these mean things in order to get enough dollars."
Although Mrs. Brailsford's remarks must strike any American as not only ungrateful but absurd, they revealed the basic problem which no Marshall Plan can resolve. Whether or not one believes that it was commercial competition which was the root cause of both world wars, the fact remains that Germany and Britain are the two European countries which must "Export or Die." True as this was before America's wartime President agreed to let Russia have most of Eastern Europe and its agricultural resources, it is even truer today. It would now seem that America has only the choice between subsidizing a Western Germany deprived of the possibility of sustaining itself because of British and French destruction of her assets, or of continuing to supply dollars to Britain under an everlasting European Reconstruction Program.
According to a report from the Ruhr, published in the New York Herald Tribune on February 27, 1949,
Britons here do not deny that the West Germans with increased population and greatly decreased resources will have good arguments for raising production even beyond that of prewar. But they foresee that the production drive designed to end the billion-dollar-a-year subsidy being poured into Germany, mainly by the United States, will probably bring a bitter struggle for world markets.
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Is America to side with the defeated enemy country which has become her ward, or with her British ally? The British, of course, have no doubts as to what American policy should be. "The British view as explained by a high official in Düsseldorf," continued Miss Marguerite Higgins' dispatch in the Herald Tribune, is as follows :
It is true that the slogan "Export or Die" holds good for both Britain and Germany. But from our point of view, if anybody has to die in the ensuing struggle for world markets, it is going to be the Germans. We feel entitled to demand the fruits of victory. Britain will demand sufficient priority on world markets to insure the success of its own great battle to become self-sustaining.
Miss Higgins further reports that the British view is that German production must be allowed to expand, but not to a point where it would interfere with efforts of Britain and France to sell enough abroad to pay for imports on which they must live.
I am not presuming to pronounce judgment, but it seems high time that Americans understood that, having twice intervened in Europe's "interminable wars" to prevent a settlement by the verdict of arms without benefit of American aid of the conflict between Germany and England for industrial and political supremacy, the United States cannot now refuse to arbitrate, unless all Europe is to succumb to Soviet Russia by reason of its internal conflicts.
The British, having lost a large part of their colonial Empire and foreign investments, are now in a situation comparable to that of the Germans between the two World Wars; but the Germans, by reason of their defeat and lost territories, are in a far worse situation. The old commercial rivalry between England and Germany, therefore leads inevitably to cutthroat competition, in which Britain's advantage as a victor is counterbalanced by Germany's greater capacity for hard work, and America's interest in preventing her remaining an economic dead weight around the American taxpayer's neck.
On the other hand, the bitter competition for markets among the nations of Europe seems an absurdity today since the whole world is short of the manufactures they can supply. Moreover, Germany and England, however difficult it is for them to be reconciled, have an equal interest in preventing further encroachments on European territory by Soviet Russia. Some way must be found to stop the internecine struggle, if Western European and American civilization are to be saved. The issue and the desperate need for a solution are only obscured by the passionate appeal to hatred and the desire for vengeance on the Germans as an aggressor nation.
When I returned to Berlin at the end of November, I endeavored to ascertain not only the cause of our self-defeating reparations policy, but also how it was that the Military Government's official statements on dismantlement failed to correspond to the facts as I had seen them.
After interviewing various Military Government officials, it seemed to me that the explanation of both phenomena was partly political and partly ignorance. The camouflaged influence of Morgenthau's remaining disciples, some of whom are still ensconced in the economic and financial divisions of the United States Military Government, had, it seemed to me, given the highest authorities an incomplete, if not actually false, account of the dismantlement operation.
Either because of their preoccupation with the Cold War in Berlin and consequent reliance on civilian subordinates for economic information, or because of sentiment at home and Washington's directives, or because of the reluctance of the British and French to back up the United States against the Soviet Union, I found that the highest United States Military Government authorities in Berlin refused to consider dismantlement as a matter of urgent importance.
General Hays, who is General Clay's deputy, and is far from being an apostle of vengeance, was clearly misinformed on the question of the cost and effect of dismantlement. He quoted a figure of only sixty or eighty million dollars as the value of the equipment of the 215 German factories in the American Zone on the dismantlement list. This he considered negligible in comparison with the need to reach an agreement with the French on the Ruhr and the formation of a West German state.
Besides having accepted the fictitiously low value placed on the machinery delivered as reparations, General Hays, like so many other Americans, thinking in American terms of large natural resources and industrial capacity, considered German losses through dismantlement as easily remediable by ECA aid. In the summer, when I had interviewed General Clay, I had found him similarly inclined to dismiss German complaints and to consider Germany's loss through dismantlement as insignificant and easily remediable.
The assumption that a few more million dollars of ECA aid can make good the loss ignores the social and political effects of dismantlement. As Carlo Schmidt, the Social-Democratic leader from the French zone, said to me in Bonn :
"Men are losing hope and the spirit of enterprise. Denied the right to work and be independent by Western occupation policies, they are beginning to view foreigners in the light of who can give them something. You are destroying morality and self-respect and pauperizing us by your dismantlement and other economic policies. Those who only hope for charity will never be able to resist Communism."
I understood the obstacles to clear judgment better after I heard the views expressed to me by Mr. Wilkinson, General Clay's chief economic adviser.
Mr. Wilkinson, who had served in Germany since the beginning of the occupation and was appointed while Mr. Morgenthau and his friends ran the Treasury Department, told me that he "couldn't care less" about what the Germans felt about dismantlement. He had, he said, very vivid memories of what the Germans had done in occupied countries when they were the conquerors. He "neither liked nor trusted any Germans."
Having thus proclaimed his readiness to indict the whole German nation, Mr. Wilkinson proceeded to tell me that the Germans, in his view, "did not deserve any consideration" from their conquerors. He was, however, intelligent enough to realize that Europe could not recover unless the Germans were allowed and encouraged to work. "Just as you can't get a horse to work unless you give it enough to eat," he said to me in his Berlin office, "so also the German people must be made contented enough to labor."
The inverted Nazi sentiments expressed to me by General Clay's chief economic adviser went far to explain the otherwise incomprehensible policies I had seen being implemented in the United States zone. Racial antipathies, or the blind desire for retribution on a defeated people, preclude wise statesmanship. By playing upon such feelings the Communists are able to induce us to follow policies detrimental to our own interests. I was therefore not greatly surprised when Mr. Wilkinson handed me a copy of the latest issue of the journal of the "Society for the Prevention of World War III," with the suggestion that I read the article it contained on dismantlement and reparations. He was, I presume, completely unaware of the manner in which this notorious organization's propaganda of hatred and vengeance helps the Communists.
After talking to Mr. Wilkinson in Berlin I have been better able to comprehend why dismantled equipment from the United States zone is still being shipped to the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. One example is that of the firm of Martin Beilhack at Rosenheim, from which 115 tons of machinery were shipped to Czechoslovakia and 190 tons to Yugoslavia as late as February 1949. A horizontal forging press of 900 tons pressure capacity is also, I learned in a letter received from Germany, to be handed over to the Czech Communists. The fact that this Beilhack firm is listed in the ERP program to be aided with new machinery for the construction of freight cars shows the cost to America of dismantlement for the benefit of Soviet Russia and her satellites.
Sir Cecil Weir, the British Chief of Reparations whom I interviewed next day, could not be accused of hatred for the Germans like his American counterpart. He is a mild little man who, far from desiring to treat the Germans as work horses, was full of humane and decent sentiments. Unfortunately, he obviously had no idea of what was going on in the Ruhr. He assured me over and over again that no machinery was being removed as reparations which was not surplus to the needs of the German economy. I felt convinced that he believed his assertion that reparations were not being taken from factories serving the essential needs of Germany's peacetime economy and that "never had a victor treated a vanquished nation so well" as the Western Powers were treating the Germans. It was no use telling him that he was misinformed. He simply would not believe that I had seen machinery being dismantled which was anything but surplus, and that much of it was being thrown on the scrap heap.
Mr. Wilkinson had appalled me by his cold-blooded hatred of the German people. Sir Cecil Weir made me wonder whether the ignorance of highly placed members of the Military Government was not even more destructive of the democratic cause in Europe than the race hatred of Morgenthau's disciples. Since leaving Germany I have wondered if he knew that his subordinates were shipping the Borbeck Krupps Armaments Works to the Soviet Union. The London Times reported this on December 20, 1948, but it is possible that Sr. Cecil Weir does not know it.
My interview with Mr. McJunkins, chief of the reparations division of the United States Military Government and a subordinate of Mr. Wilkinson, was far less revealing. According to McJunkins, the United States Military Government had no choice but to deliver the reparations promised to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and other Communist countries. He was the model civil servant carrying out his orders without prejudice or favor. I was unable to judge how far he himself was responsible for the orders to dismantle and ship from the American zone the machinery which would otherwise have been able to contribute to both German and European recovery. He never once displayed his personal antipathies as Mr. Wilkinson had done. Yet he is held mainly responsible for the sabotage of the ECA program by local United States authorities in the American zone.
One thing I learned in Berlin in November gave cause for hope of a future intelligent United States policy. The United States Military Government had begun to take the line that the Revised Level of Industry Plan was not intended to tie the German economy down permanently to the low levels prescribed, but was merely an estimate of how much machinery could be removed as reparations. In practice, in the United States zone, no obstacles have been placed in the way of German installation of new machines to replace the dismantled ones, when the factory owners are able to do so. The British and French have, however, not accepted this view, nor, in fact, does it seem that this was the original American attitude. It is rather that the United States authorities, without admitting that the Level of Industry Plan was a mistake from the beginning, have adapted themselves to the changed international situation. They have not stopped dismantlement and reparations shipments, to which they consider themselves committed by earlier agreements, but they see the necessity for letting the Germans produce all they can if Europe is to resist the Communist threat and America be relieved of permanent annual contributions of billions of dollars to Europe.
In regard to steel, however, the 10.7 million tons of steel capacity envisaged in the plan is still accepted by the United States as a permanent ceiling in spite of the tremendous need for steel in Europe and the strain on the United States economy of supplying even a part of the present European deficit. According to the Herter Committee's report, fulfilling the most urgent requirements of the sixteen nations receiving ECA assistance will increase the steel deficit in America from 1.6 to 5 million tons.
The whole futility, stupidity, and expense of the dismantlement program is best illustrated by the long-term report of the Bizonal representatives to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in October 1948. This report recommends a 10 per cent increase over the 1936 level in Germany's productive capacity, to be realized by 1952 through Marshall Plan assistance. Washington ECA authorities consider that, if Western Germany is to be able to support itself, an even greater increase is required15 or 20 per cent instead of 10 per cent.
Thus, while busy reducing Western Germany's capacity to three-quarters of the 1936 figure by dismantlement, the United States is planning to increase it by 10 or 15 per cent out of funds supplied by the American taxpayer.
Dismantlement today no longer even pretends to remove only surplus equipment. The 1947 Revised Level of Industry Plan has become an absurdity now that we plan to replace the machinery being torn out of German factories. As the ECA representative in Germany has said : "We find in Western Germany today the paradox of outside aid for recovery, and on the other hand, restrictions as to the extent to which such recovery is permitted. The current dismantlement program is one under which a percentage of industries will be removed or scrapped."
There is no validity left in the State Department argument that shortage of labor and materials precludes the use of Germany's existing productive capacity, and that reparations removals are therefore economically as well as morally justified. For the OEEC rates Germany as a country where there will be unemployment in the future even if the Marshall recovery plan, as now drawn, is carried out. As regards shortages of raw materials, it is surely one of the main objectives of ECA to enable the countries of Europe to obtain the raw materials necessary to make them self-supporting instead of living on an American dole.
Digging holes in the ground and paying the unemployed to fill them up again in the United States in depression years was an economic operation as compared with present United States policy.
The cost of vengeance is even higher than the cost of economic crisis and unemployment. The State Department may, or may not be justified in its insistence as late as February 2, 1948, that : "The obligation of the aggressor to pay the maximum reparations compatible with economic political realities is incontestable." The important point is that the economic and political realities of the world situation require an end to reparations and the reconstruction of Germany as an integral part of a self-supporting Europe, able to resist Communist propaganda and Soviet aggression without making impossible demands on American resources.
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In the present world situation our endeavor should not be to make restrictive plans on the basis of incomplete information, but to encourage the highest possible amount of production. Only by reviving the profit motive and encouraging initiative, self-help, and hard work can Germany and Europe be rendered self-supporting and cease to be a millstone around the neck of the American people.
In 1949-50 the American taxpayer contributed close to a billion dollars to Germany ($987,000,000), consisting of $573.400.000 of Army appropriations for the "prevention of disease and unrest," and $414.000,000 under the European Reconstruction Program which consisted mainly of raw material supplies. The total for 1949-50 is estimated at $881,600,000, but the ECA authorities consider that the capital investment figure included is too small to contribute appreciably to the recovery essential to make Germany self-supporting.
The strain on the American economy resulting from the European Recovery Program as a whole could be appreciably diminished if dismantlement were stopped, the Revised Level of Industry Plan scrapped, and Germany permitted to supply the countries of Western Europe with the steel, machinery, and other industrial products which America now has to give to them.
To quote Mr. Collisson once again :
I have stated my firm conviction that recovery in Western Europe is not possible without the important contribution which Western Germany can and must make. Every foreign trade delegation coming to Western Germany has pleaded for more goods of the kind Germany once supplied, in fact in amounts far beyond Germany's present ability to produce. To satisfy these requirements for a peaceful rehabilitation of Europe, recovery in Western Germany must be brought about. It is in this light that we have made our recommendations; not a pattern of what is good for Germany alone, but of what is best for Europe as a whole.
There is little doubt that if the American public were made aware of the facts of the situation, the postwar policy, described by the London Economist as one of "keeping Germany in chains and Europe in rags," would be completely abandoned, instead of modified as at present by American subsidies.
Unfortunately most Americans are unaware of the degree to which the ECA and the State Department have deferred to Britain's desire to eliminate German competition and the blind fears of France. When on April 13, 1949, the State Department announced the final intergovernmental agreement on dismantlement, reached with Britain and France, the American press as a whole failed to point out that destruction at our expense is to be continued.
The Humphrey Committee, whose report was made public at the same time, had considered 381 of the original 900-odd factories on the 1947 dismantlement list, and had recommended the retention of only 148 in whole and of another 19 in part. And the State Department gave way to France and Britain concerning the most important plants recommended for retention in Germany by the ECA; for example, the August Thyssen and the Bochum iron and steel works and the Oppau fertilizer plant (see Chapter 10). The ECA Committee had proposed retaining only 21 of the 84 steel plants it surveyed, and allowing 47 to be removed, with another 16 to be partially allocated as reparations. The State Department went further and agreed to sacrifice the five largest and most efficient of the steel plants recommended for retention by the ECA. In spite of the grave shortage of power in Germany which now prevents further recovery the State Department agreed that two power plants are to be torn down. Similarly in regard to the chemical industry : 43 plants are "released" for reparations and only 32 retained out of a total of 75 surveyed. Thus the final agreement on dismantlement has only slightly modified the original program, and therefore not substantially altered the picture given in this chapter.
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Chapter 4
Tragedy in Siegerland
Billion-dollar calculations and over-all statistics are less easy for the human mind to grasp than individual tragedies. My visit to Siegerland in the southeast corner of the British zone enabled me to appraise in human terms the effect of the blueprint for dismantlement drawn up in Berlin without regard for the social and political consequences, or the ruin it brings to innocent people.
Siegerland takes its name from a river which flows into the Rhine below Bonn, winding first through a beautiful valley at the edge of the Westerwald—the western forest which extends southward into Hesse in the United States zone.
The town of Siegen, which like Rome is built on seven hills, is seven hundred years old and the center of an ancient industry based on the iron ores of the surrounding hills. These ore deposits, although not abundant according to modern standards, are of good quality and have been mined since the fourth century B.C. A century ago, before Prussia had forged the modern German state, the ironmasters of Siegen had begun to develop a modern, highly specialized industry. Even today nearly all of the Siegen factories are small and individually owned, and have always depended on skill, enterprise, and hard work, not on large capital assets or government favors, for their existence.
The Siegen workers, who usually spend their whole lives in one factory, and apprentice their sons there, feel themselves part of the enterprise in which they work. Many of the factory owners started as workers and class divisions are almost nonexistent. Some of the workers own small tracts of poor land cleared on the forest hillsides, or garden plots, and graze a cow on the common land.
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Some come to work in Siegen from little villages ten or twenty miles away in the forest, depending on industry for a part, but not all, of their income.
Neither Nazis nor Communists had ever been able to make headway in the town and villages of Siegerland where almost everyone has a stake in free private enterprise, and almost all the people are devout Protestants.
Here in a word was the Germany of pre-Hitler and pre-Prussian days. The peaceful Germany which gave America some of her best citizens : a deeply religious, industrious, and hardworking people among whom skillful farmers, artisans, and engineers predominate. Yet, Siegerland had been marked out for destruction. Twenty-eight factories had been or were to be dismantled, and a third of the working population deprived of its main income. The Russians could hardly have done a better job in destroying private property, free enterprise and the free institutions built upon it, and in preparing the way for Communism, than the British were doing in Siegerland.
Driving to Siegen from Frankfurt for the first time, on a lovely September morning, I first crossed the Taunus Range which once formed the limits of the Roman Empire. I stopped at Saalburg to see the Roman fort there, which had been one of a chain of fortified posts stretching between the Rhine and the Danube. The Saalburg fort was restored by Kaiser Wilhelm, and was never bombed, so it looks much the same as it did nearly two thousand years ago when Roman legions guarded the gates of the Empire from the Teutonic tribes to the north.
There is a museum at Saalburg stocked with spears, swords and armor, pottery, old shoes, and other relics of the days before the Franks, who were to give their name to the future kingdom of France, burst the barriers of the Empire and entered Gaul. The Romans are long since forgotten, but the wars between Teutons and Latins seem to go on forever, although the people of South Germany and Northern France are of similar mixed ancestry.
From Saalburg the road winds downward and passes through picturesque Old World cities and villages before entering the green Westerwald. As we drew near to Siegen the glorious woods of pine, fir, and beech were broken by small villages close to ancient iron works, and green meadows where the cattle owned by the peasants grazed on the common land as in centuries past.
As in Roman times, as in the Middle Ages, as in the terrible days when the Thirty Years' War between Protestants and Catholics drenched these lands in blood, and as in early modern times when Siegen formed part of the domain of the Princes of Orange, the people are part farmers, part miners, ironworkers and leatherworkers. There has also always been hunting in the forest but the soil is too poor for the little farms to support the people. Today they produce only enough food to feed Siegerland forty days in the year. Part of the living of the population always had to be gained in the forges of Siegen and its surrounding villages.
Before the war, in spite of its belching factory chimneys, Siegen still had a medieval appearance with narrow streets of Hans Christian Andersen houses, a fine old Rathaus and the strong walled castle of the Princes of Orange-Nassau dominating the town.
Two bombing attacks completely destroyed more than half of the town altogether, and partially destroyed another quarter of it. The old Evangelical Church of St. Nicholas was reduced to a shell, and many other beautiful buildings wiped out. But war could not impair the beauty of the wooded hills and meadows which surround the Siegen Valley.
Many factories had been bombed and many people killed and maimed in the air raids, while others had died in the fierce fighting which occurred before the Nazis blew up the bridges and died or retreated northward. Those who survived had started to work again, expecting they could at long last live in peace in the fruits of their labor, however hard the task of reconstruction. But in the fall of 1948, they had to fear something worse even than bombing : the ruin of their land by the conquerors who were busy removing the machinery without which they could no longer earn their bread. One of the oldest industrial centers in Europe was being destroyed by dismantlement.
Although never a center of war industries, nor a Nazi stronghold, Siegerland had been marked down for relatively heavier losses of productive capacity than any other area I visited, or heard of, in Germany. It only covered 43 square miles and had some 35,000 inhabitants, but was losing 25 factories. Several neighboring villages were also having their factories dismantled, bringing the total figure to 28. Originally there had been 29 on the list, but one, belonging to a Catholic, a rarity in Siegen, had been saved by the intervention of a Catholic Cardinal.
The ruin of one enterprise affected many others dependent on it for supplies or as customers. At least a quarter of the population was losing its income, and even before dismantlement there were already fifteen hundred unemployed.
Siegen not only had its own population to take care of, including sixteen hundred disabled people, and widows and orphans of the fallen and of those still held in Russia as prisoners of war. It also had a large number of expellees from the East of Germany to house and feed. A large transient camp had been established in its damaged barracks, through which nearly a quarter of a million of these destitute victims of racial persecution had already passed, and kept on coming. Three thousand German refugees were permanently quartered on the town and had to be provided with food, clothing, and furniture, as well as precious space in the bombed houses and cellars where most of the population lived.
It was in Siegen that I learned that in Germany as a whole only one of every four or five children has a bed of its own, and that five million children are orphans, half of whom come from the lost Eastern territories.
Siegen's hinterland, from which it had formerly derived food, was now in the French zone where all agricultural produce which could be wrung out of the peasants is taken for French consumption. So in 1946 the Siegen population had starved and even in 1947 it had had to exist on less than 1,000 calories a day. Tuberculosis had increased alarmingly. Children of fourteen and fifteen who were already working looked no more than ten or eleven years old, so stunted was their growth.
The local British reparations officer hated his job and told me he felt like a criminal, especially because Siegen reminded him of his own North Country England. "A miniature Sheffield," he called it. He told me that all his life until now he had been engaged in constructing, having been apprenticed in a Lancashire engineering works at the age of twelve and having worked his way up to an executive position. "I just can't feel it's right to destroy machinery." he said, "but if I didn't keep this job someone else would take it; and at least I try to carry out the dismantlement program with as little damage as possible."
As against this kind and decent Englishman I was told about the local Gauleiter, the British military governor of the area who had left-wing sympathies and had carried through many highhanded acts, and took a malicious joy in ruining the Germans under a "socialist" cover. His personal reputation was also unsavory, for he had sent a man to prison on a false charge to clear the way for his seduction of a German woman. The victim, whose name was Zezulak, spoke good English and acted as interpreter for the Germans. He had a wife and child whom he was obviously devoted to, and he had had no interest in the woman the governor coveted, but had protected her from the English major's rude advances. This all sounds like a grade C movie, but such things do happen, and the truth of the story was attested to by the doctor who had subsequently performed an abortion for the lady at the British major's expense.
The factories being dismantled in Siegen were producing mining and railway equipment, pipes and flanges, welding torches and cutting machinery, rolling-mill equipment, food-processing machinery, steel containers for the transport of gas, fittings for the automobile industry, kitchen utensils, garbage containers, and other necessary articles for a peacetime economy. The one really big plant dismantled was the Waldrich Iron and Steel Works, shipped to Czechoslovakia. One smaller plant which had manufactured munitions, the Inko Works which had made flame throwers, and whose owner was a Nazi, was not to be dismantled and was producing typewriters.
Many Siegen factories had already lost their most valuable machinery through the "multilateral deliveries" demanded by the British for their own use. In other factories also the most necessary machinery was now being removed even when they were not "on the list" for total destruction.
There was, for instance, the case of Herr Steinmetz, whom I found up a tree picking apples in the garden behind his small factory on a Saturday afternoon. In addition to losing half his sheet scrubbing and shearing machines, his crane was to be removed the following Monday. He had offered to supply a new crane instead of the old one, so that his factory would not be put out of commission for months by his inability to get a motor to work the new one he had managed to buy. The offer had been refused although the old crane would have to be cut in two to get it down. The old crane must be delivered to the scrap heap although Herr Steinmetz had a hundred thousand dollars worth of orders to fulfill. Unable now to fill his orders from Holland and Belgium for sheet-metal-working machinery, such foreign exchange would be lost to the German economy and American taxpayers.
The decisions of the British authorities in Düsseldorf were quite incalculable. In another case they accepted a new crane instead of the old one scheduled for dismantlement, but decreed that the new one should at once be converted into scrap!
Most of the machinery I saw being dismantled in Siegen would never be set up and utilized in other countries. Having been built for a special purpose, and much of it being too old to be used by any other workers than the skilled men of Siegen who had worked on it for decades, it was of no use to anyone else. Yet many machines could not be replaced because they were made only in the Russian zone.
In every one of the nine Siegen factories I personally visited, the representatives of the countries entitled to reparations had expressed no interest in acquiring the dismantled machines. It was all taken away to rust at the depot. The same was true of most of the others scheduled for dismantlement. The British were taking away the livelihood of thousands of people for no rhyme or reason—except vengeance, or, in some cases, for the advantage of Germany's British competitors in European markets.
Saddest of all was my sight of Herr Fuchs, an old man of sixty-eight who had lost his only son in the war, who had never taken a holiday in his life, and whose whole being was wrapped up in his factory which had produced nothing but stowing pipes for the Ruhr mines—the pipes of highly resistant steel which are used to blow rubble by air pressure into the empty spaces left after the coal has been mined, to prevent collapse of the walls.
Every bit of machinery had already been taken out of Herr Fuchs' plant and his life's work wrecked. And to what purpose, I thought, as we stood in the empty building, and he told me, with tears in his eyes, that after his son had fallen in the war, and his factory had been bombed and left with only walls standing, he and his faithful workers had just managed to rebuild it and repair the machines, when the British ordered it to be dismantled.
Although the Bizonal coal commission had placed Herr Fuchs' factory on the list of essential factories, and although no foreign country wanted his machinery and it was now rotting away at the storage depot, he had been ruined and his 130 workers and their families deprived of their livelihood. I was close to tears myself as I said good-bye to poor old Herr Fuchs as the sun went down behind the mountains in sad Siegerland.
Herr Fuchs was too old to start again.
Others, like Herr Hensch, whose factory I visited the same day, made me think that all the cruelty and stupidity of Allied occupation policies could not permanently down the German people. However hard we tried to turn them into paupers, they would insist on trying to go on working.
Faced with utter ruin, for the British had already torn down his furnaces and dismantled almost all his machines, Fritz Hensch was going somehow or other to start over again. His factory, the Siegerthaler Works in the village of Eisenfeld, made vacuum equipment (giant pressure cookers) for the food industry, and flanges for large pipes. He had been allowed to keep a few machines for a few weeks longer to complete an order for the Iraq Petroleum Company because no British factory could supply the large diameter flanges required. But as soon as this order was fulfilled dismantlement was to be completed. His ten cranes and all his buttwelding machinery, specially built for his factory and useless to anyone else, was to be put on the scrap heap.
Hensch had started life as an apprentice without a cent, since he was one of ten children of a tailor. Through the years he had built up his own factory, adding machine after machine through his own efforts, each built to his specifications for a special purpose. Production was so efficiently arranged that each worker could help himself by means of the many small cranes built into the roof.
Here was a man who loved his machines, knew every detail of every process in his factory, and had a craftman's pride in his products. Middle-aged, thin and wiry, with keen intelligent eyes, Hensch was a living embodiment of the spirit of free enterprise which will not be killed however hard we try to extinguish it in Germany.
The 300 tons of machinery being dismantled was valued at half a million marks in 1938 and would cost one and a half million D marks to replace today, but the British had put it down on the reparations list as worth only 160,000. Hensch had no money to replace the machinery scheduled for destruction, but he was building a new furnace out of the bricks torn out of the dismantled one and left lying around; and he had managed to borrow one new ring-bending machine from a friend in another town. He was starting again. He was the living embodiment of the German people who, knocked out and kicked while down, refusing to die, stagger to their feet and start struggling again.
The Bender brothers, whose factory I also visited, were like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, fat and short with faces so alike that I could not tell one from the other. They were old and seemed resigned to the fate which was stripping their factory bare, although, like Herr Fuchs', it manufactured stowing pipes for the Ruhr mines, and 90 per cent of Bizonia's production of this essential product would be wiped out when the Benders' machinery followed Fuchs' to the scrap heap.
One of the Bender brothers had a son who was as eloquent as his father and uncle were dumb. This young Bender had been a prisoner of war in the States, spoke slangy colloquial American with great fluency and hoped eventually to be able to emigrate to America where he has relatives. He was certain that the Bender factory was being dismantled by mistake, but owing to British competition. The dismantlement list referred to "boilers, tanks and oil pipes" and did not mention stowing pipes. Young Bender suggested that some ignorant British official did not know the difference between one kind of pipe and another, but knew that the British wanted to wipe out German competition in oil pipe lines and had therefore put Benders on the dismantlement list.
It was this young Bender who also first drew my attention to the fact that dismantlement on a big scale had begun following the currency reform of June 1948 which had wiped out all savings. If it had been carried out sooner the factory owners might still have been able to get new machinery, and German competition would still have been dangerous to the British.
Dismantlement, like bombing, or the rain, takes no account of the just and the unjust. The factories to be torn down had evidently been selected by rule of thumb, not by any idea of punishing the guilty any more than of preserving the elements most likely to contribute to the conversion of Germany into a democracy. The case of the Weber family, with whom I stayed in Siegen and whom I came to know well, is an illustration.
While her four sons were away fighting on the Russian front, the widow Weber and her teen-age daughter Margarita, had got into trouble with the Nazi authorities on account of their kindness to the French and Russian prisoners assigned to work in the Weber factory. Frau Weber could not forbear from occasionally giving a good warm meal to the poor wretches who worked in the factory by day and slept in a little house at the bottom of her garden. One of the prisoners was a young Frenchman who used to talk to Margarita from the barred window of his prison as she worked in the evenings in the Weber vegetable patch. René was frail and unaccustomed to hard physical labor, so kind-hearted Frau Weber, seeing him one day staggering under a heavy load, had assigned him to clerical work. Soon he was being invited into the Weber house and started giving French lessons to Margarita. The young couple fell in love. Unfortunately, a Nazi workman in the factory heard of this "fraternization" with the enemy and reported it to the authorities. Frau Weber was severely reprimanded and René was removed to another factory in Siegen where he was so brutally treated that he ran away, and, after being caught, was assigned to a punishment camp in Poland. Here he developed tuberculosis and was sent to a prison hospital in Cologne. On Christmas Eve of 1944 Margarita traveled there with a cake and a few apples which she tried to smuggle in to her lover. She was caught and sent to prison for six months by the Nazis, and a Nazi manager was installed in the Weber factory.
One of Frau Weber's sons, Otto, on leave from the Russian front at the time, tried to commit suicide but survived with the loss of one eye. Later the Weber factory was bombed to the ground. Their house, also bombed, was saved from complete destruction by Russian prisoners who, remembering Frau Weber's kindness, rushed to put out the flames. At the war's end these former prisoners also saved Frau Weber from being robbed by the many other ex-prisoners who now became displaced persons.
The second of Frau Weber's sons, Günther, died of starvation in April 1946, after working for two years as a Russian prisoner in the stone quarries near Kuibyshev. One of his comrades, who later returned to Siegen, told the Webers that Günther, who had been a big man weighing 260 pounds, had been reduced to a living skeleton weighing 48 pounds before he died. A Russian doctor had tried to save his life after he collapsed and was sent to a hospital, but it was too late. Frau Weber had loved Günther best of all her sons. He was, she told me often, the boy with the sweetest disposition, the strongest and most loving. All the rest of her days she would live with the thought of the agonies he had suffered before dying of hunger, and remembering him, she would weep even when the rest of the family was happy.
The youngest Weber boy, Helmuth, is today slowly dying in hospital from the injuries he sustained during and after the war. His kidneys having been injured while a soldier, the disease was rendered incurable by the treatment he received after the war's end. As an American prisoner of war, although ill, he was kept for months sleeping on the cold wet ground without even a tent to cover him. His shrunken kidneys now no longer function to clear the bloodstream of poisonous matter, and the doctors expect he will go mad or blind before he dies.
Erhardt came home after three years at the Russian front as a private, and a year and a half of slave labor. He had first worked in a coal mine at Karaganda in Siberia, 800 miles from the Chinese frontier. After he had been discovered throwing dirt instead of coal into the tubs, he was beaten and threatened with death. This had meant little to him. "Many of us," he said, "had reached the point at which one no longer cares whether one lives or dies."
After it was found that he was a qualified engineer, Erhardt had been taken out of the mines but he had already developed water swelling in his feet through starvation and was sent to a hospital on the Volga. The patients here were all Germans and they were as badly starved as before. Sometimes they received no bread for a month and existed entirely on spoonfuls of gruel given them morning and evening and a midday bowl of watery soup. When they complained to the woman doctor in charge she told them to go to Hitler for food. Finally, in November 1945, when his weight had sunk to 92 pounds and he could not stand upright Erhardt had been sent home to die. But he had gradually recovered under his mother's care. When I met him he was still terribly emaciated, with deep sunken eyes, still a young man but one who smiled rarely and talked very little. When I asked him what had sustained him through his terrible experiences, he said simply that it was the hope of coming home. He had fought through the whole war, been at Dunkirk and in occupied France, marched thousands of miles and refused a commission because he hated the army, but he had done his duty as a man and a German and felt the ruin of his country as deeply as his family's personal losses.
Margarita had meanwhile married her René, who had been sent home by the Germans after he became useless as a slave laborer, but had rushed back to Siegen from France to find his love, immediately the war ended.
René Devilliers was slim and elegant, witty, intellectual, and sophisticated. Margarita was like a little girl in a fairy tale, simply dressed, without make-up, gay and sweet, with her heart on her sleeve. I have rarely seen two young people so much in love and so devoted to one another. Margarita had a kidney ailment as the legacy of her ill treatment in prison, and René was tubercular, but they were both radiantly happy, and when they visited the Weber house the sad atmosphere gave way to gaiety.
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Erhardt and René, so different in temperament, one so very French and the other so very German, were good friends—better friends than Erhardt and his brother Otto who was the black sheep of the family, and earned his living by his wits rather than by hard work. René and Erhardt had both fought and suffered and endured the horrors of forced labor and hunger as prisoners of war, and although they had been on opposite sides they understood and respected each other while Margarita adored them both. Each represented in his own way the best qualities of their two nations. Erhardt complained that René, being a Frenchman, did not know how to work hard, while René said Erhardt was married to his factory and had never learned to enjoy life.
I used to think, while staying with the Webers, that I had the whole picture of Germany and France in that household. If only the two nations could get together and combine their virtues and their talents, the Germans putting diligence and endurance into the French, and the French teaching the Germans the graces of life, Europe could be made peaceful and strong. In fact, there is not really so wide a gap between the South Germans and the Northern French. René came from the Vosges district on the other side of the Rhine and in ages past his ancestors and Erhardt's were one people.
As soon as he was able to walk and work, Erhardt had started to dig out the machinery from under the debris of the Weber Works, and repair it with the aid of the skilled workers who from generation to generation had worked for the Weber family. By 1947 the factory was working again producing welding torches, gas cutting machines, and other badly needed reconstruction machinery, and employing a hundred workers. Frau Weber now had German refugees from the East to feed and care for instead of Russian and French prisoners. Otto was married and had a child. The vegetable and flower gardens which were Frau Weber's pride were both blooming. New red brick walls were rising where the original bombed-out buildings had stood. For a few months it had seemed that the Webers' troubles were ended, although Frau Weber's dearest son, Günther, would never come home and Helmuth was slowly dying.
Then the British ordered the Weber works dismantled. All Erhardt's gallant labors had gone for nothing. He and his family were to be ruined. Margarita and René would also be destitute, for René having married a German had to give up the career of an officer in the French Army, which his father had followed before him, and was also working for Webers.
The residual value of the Weber Works was calculated at only 36,000 marks, but the cost of replacing the machinery to be sent to the scrap heap was 750,000, a sum way beyond the reach of the family, for they had not hoarded before currency reform, but sold all the product of their factory. The annual production of their works, according to the orders on their books, was five times its dismantled value.
The planned destruction of the Weber Works could affect many other firms, since Webers supplied the welding and cutting equipment and sheet-metal-working machinery required to start up production again after dismantlement. This was proved by the fact that the Webers had received orders from other countries for their machine tools but had been refused permission to export by the Allied authorities because of the need for their products in Germany. Czechs, Yugoslavs, Belgians, Indians, and representatives of other countries entitled to reparations had inspected the Weber Works, but none had desired to acquire the machinery, much of which was old and all of which required skilled labor to operate. The whole equipment to be dismantled was destined for the scrap heap.
I spent hours watching the Weber workers, who were working night and day in two long shifts to earn as much as possible before being deprived of their livelihood. One of them said to me : "We thought that after Hitler's overthrow the German workers would be helped. Now we must assume the contrary. England and America evidently want to destroy us. Why else would they be taking away our jobs?"
In an appeal which Erhardt Weber subsequently sent to the ECA authorities in Frankfurt he wrote :
This is a last hour appeal to the victors of this war not to create new wounds, and by senseless destruction create more misery. At this hour when reconstruction of Europe is required and can be carried out only by substantial sacrifices, lend a helping hand to the peaceful will to work for it.
Dismantlement of the Weber Works was to begin on October 2, a few days ahead of my first visit to Siegen. I was so disturbed by this injustice, and had by then already come to feel such sympathy for the Weber family and their workers, that I decided to go to Detmold and appeal to Mr. Whitham, the British official responsible for reparations shipments.
Erhardt drove me there in his ancient Mercedes which was liable to break down occasionally but was the only one of their automobiles which had not been confiscated by the British. On the way north he told me what the men of Hitler's armies had gone through in Russia, both during and after the war. A reserved and embittered young man whose best years had been spent in fighting, and whose experiences in Russia as a prisoner had been too terrible to talk about even to his family, he slowly relaxed and unburdened himself to me, after I had convinced him that I, too, knew the bitterness of existence in Soviet Russia. He had served three years on the Russian front before being wounded and taken prisoner. He had been starved and frozen and had suffered about as much as a human being can bear, both physically and mentally. I began to understand that his absorption in the Weber factory was his defense against memories which would otherwise make life unendurable.
We passed out of Siegerland into Sauerland and thence through the flat plains of Hanoverian territory. Every now and again in Sauerland Erhardt would point to the ugly naked hills where forests had once flourished, but which had been stripped bare by the British, who had not spared even the young trees and had left nothing but raw stumps.
We spent the night at Bad Oyenhausen, headquarters of the British Army of the Rhine, where I had a friend whom I had not seen since 1938 in Singapore, and who was now a brigadier in charge of all British Army automobile transport.
British quarters at Bad Oyenhausen were surrounded by barbed wire to keep out "the natives." Erhardt was probably the first German whom Joss and his wife had received in their house. But one had to admit that the British were better than the Americans in at least one respect. They allowed their soldiers to marry German girls and live with them in camp, whereas the United States did not permit such marriages unless an officer or GI was about to return home. It was also true that although the British army of occupation was enjoying far better material conditions than the British at home, their allowances of food were far below the United States standard. In respect to housing and personnel services they were, however, exacting a higher toll from the Germans than the American occupation forces.
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Erhardt spoke little the whole evening while I argued with Joss and his wife, who nice as they were, often resorted to the stock British argument when confronted by examples of our treatment of the Germans : "We won the war, didn't we?" But next morning, on our way to see Mr. Whitham at Detmold, Erhardt remarked that it was kind of funny that the British used this phrase so often since, whoever had won the war, it certainly wasn't England.
Joss had warned me that Mr. Whitham was a tough nut to crack; that he even insisted on dismantling factories needed by the British Army for repairs and equipment. "Be very American," he had said to me, "but don't lose your temper. Try to appeal to him as a gentleman and maybe, though I doubt it, you will save Herr Weber's factory."
I succeeded with Mr. Whitham, though only after more than an hour's argument and only temporarily. He finally agreed to suspend the dismantlement order, but would not say for how many weeks. In the course of our discussion during which Erhardt waited outside because Whitham did not wish to see him, this British official who wielded such great power waved his hand toward the window and said, "These Germans still have more resources than we have."
Arriving back at Siegen at midnight we found that dismantlement, which had started that morning, had been stopped in the afternoon. Knowing that I had secured only a suspension of sentence, I determined to see what could be done with the Industry and Commerce Division of the Bizone administration in Frankfurt. But first I spent a few days more in Siegen seeing other factories, and also visiting the barracks where thousands of German expellees were being cared for in Siegen. Other flüchtlinge, as the Germans call the millions of poor wretches expelled from their homes in Silesia, the Sudetenland and other Eastern territories, were housed in private homes. A considerable number of them were working in the factories marked down for destruction.
The other family I came to know well in Siegen were the Bartens who owned the ancient firm of Achenbach Söhne. This modern iron and steel works had grown out of a forge which began working the iron ores of the Westerwald in 1452. It had begun its development as a modern factory in 1846, before Bismarck had been heard of, and while Siegen was still part of a principality of the house of Orange which today rules Holland. Achenbach produced high quality rolling-mill equipment which used to be exported all over Europe and which is so well known that a British Birmingham firm today advertises the quality of its products by showing a picture with the Achenbach name on its machinery. This part of the plant had already been dismantled and shipped for England. Now Achenbach was also to lose the special purpose machine tools used exclusively for the production of spare locomotive parts. Achenbach was producing 90 per cent of the piston ring requirements of Bizonia's railways, but dismantlement was scheduled to begin in December. The absurdity of the proceeding was apparent since this department of Achenbach had been placed on the list of "absolutely essential plants" to be immediately reconstructed following dismantlement. Allied officials concerned with the reconstruction of the German transport system had recently visited Achenbach's to find out how quickly it could get production going again. But, as old Dr. Barten pointed out, the British were not only removing his machinery; they were also going to tear down and destroy the three cranes which were built into the roof of his railway plant, and this damage was irreparable at the present time. (As I learned later in Stuttgart, the reparations branch of the United States Military Government was busy there dismantling one of the few factories in Western Germany which makes cranes.)
Repeated protests to the British authorities had been unavailing, although several British officers had admitted that an error had almost certainly been made in the first place. There is hardly ever any way of getting errors on the dismantlement list corrected. One office refers the matter to another, and no one can or will take the responsibility of canceling an order once given.
Achenbach's was a larger enterprise than the Weber Works and had employed three hundred workers. The residual value of its equipment was set at only 17,000 Reichsmarks, but its replacement value at 1948 prices was 3,000,000 D marks. Before the war its monthly output was 250,000 marks a month—a larger figure than the total value of its dismantled machinery as calculated by the reparations authorities. Thus Achenbach's could have produced in a single month new equipment worth more than the total being destroyed. Dismantlement in this and many other cases could have been aptly described as "Operation Killing the Goose."
When I visited the Achenbach factory I was struck by the number of young women working there. When I spoke to them I found they were all refugees from the East, whom the Bartens were housing as well as training. They were quick and able workers and some were already earning 1.20 marks an hour turning out piston rings. A large proportion of the expellees are women, since the Poles and Czechs and Yugoslavs kept many German men as slave laborers while throwing out the women and children. These women, shortly to lose their jobs through dismantlement just after having acquired the means to support themselves and their children, would have to return to the crowded refugee camps again to become paupers.
Even the machines on which boy apprentices were being taught to be engineers were to be taken away. Thirty youngsters whom I saw as immersed in their work as if they were constructing toy airplanes, were to be deprived of the opportunity to learn a trade. The Achenbach foreman, having a brother in Milwaukee who sends him food parcels, feels very friendly to America. But, he said to me, how can we or the British hope to save Europe from communism if we drive the German workers to despair by our policies, and deprive their sons of technical training?
Later in the day I visited some of the refugee workers in the temporary homes constructed for them close to the factory. Here I talked to an old gaunt worker from Silesia called Winter. He had been a blacksmith with his own small forge in a village near Glatz where the population was part German and part Polish. He had been on friendly terms with the Polish peasants of his district, and they had tried to save him from expropriation. But the Polish Communist government had thrown him out of his house together with his wife and his grandchildren, and they had all walked hundreds of miles before they got to Berlin. There he had managed to find work, but the Russians soon came and dismantled the factory where he had a job. So they had started again on their travels and ended up at Siegen. Now for the third time the old blacksmith faced destitution just when he had expected to live out the rest of his life in peace.
The Bartens were better off than the Webers in some respects. There was a better chance of saving their factory, as I found out later in Frankfurt. The only Barten son, a tall handsome young man with a gay temperament, had come home safe from the wars, and was newly married to a charming girl from the Saar. Young Barten had endured the hardships of the Russian front like so many others of the men I talked to in Siegen, but he had not been a Russian prisoner of war like Erhardt Weber, and there were no such shadows of death and horror at the Bartens as those which darkened the Weber home. On one occasion I asked young Barten and his wife how they managed to be so happy in spite of the ruin which threatened them, and he said : "We younger Germans who have survived the war have learned to live in danger; we know how good it is to be alive, whatever the future may bring."
Barten senior was stout, red faced and kindly; the type of German who is represented in caricatures as swilling beer in some summer cafe on the Rhine, but was energetic and intelligent and kindhearted. His wife is a Berliner and looked almost young enough to be his daughter. Fair, elegant and witty, with a lovely singing voice, she had the same happy temperament as her son. She did not mind so much that the British had requisitioned the Barten home and were keeping its twelve rooms for the use of two bachelors, but she longed to get her piano back. When I happened to be invited in for a drink by the two British officials who occupied the Barten house, I asked them whether they did not think they might let Frau Barten have the use of the piano which meant so much to her. They protested that although they could not play themselves, it was used when they entertained, and I should remember that the British in Siegen had precious little to amuse them. This was of course quite true. If the pattern of occupation had followed normal lines, with the conquerors billeted in the houses of the conquered instead of throwing them out of their homes for an indefinite period, whether or not the whole space requisitioned was needed, the British Tommies and American GI's, officers, and civilians, as well as the Germans, would have been far happier. The race discrimination policy adopted by both the British and Americans was almost as hard on the occupying forces as the occupied. True, the original "nonfraternization" rules had been modified, but a great gulf still separated the conquerors from the conquered in both zones.
In Siegen the racial bar meant that the handful of Britishers there had nothing much to do in their leisure hours, if they were married men unwilling to seek the only companionship possible : association with ladies of easy virtue. In a small community like Siegen, where almost everyone knows everyone else, and where puritanical Protestant morality was little undermined by the Nazis and has not been destroyed even by defeat and hunger, "fräuleins," in the accepted occupation meaning of the term, are few and hard to come by. On the other hand the British reparations people were naturally not persona grata with the Germans, while the resident British "governor," as I have already mentioned, was extremely unpopular both on account of his reputed seductions by pressure, and his suspected Communist sympathies. So it was seldom that the lonely British occupation officials entered a German home.
There were no British military forces in Siegerland, which was part of the area occupied by Belgian troops. The latter, while occupying a great deal of precious housing space, were doing a profitable black-market business. Like the French they are unhampered by the regulations and customs controls which rendered the import and sale of cigarettes, cognac, coffee, and other luxuries, and the export of German manufactures or currency, hazardous for the Americans and the British. The Belgians were on better personal terms with the Germans than the British or Americans, since there was less of a language barrier as well as no regulation "master race" behavior. The Germans regarded them as a minor pest, since although they complained of their dirtiness and drunkenness, they were not concerned with dismantlement, and their cigarette and coffee black-marketing brought prices down. Compared with the Belgians even the French soldiers in Germany looked smart—which is saying a lot. Frenchmen, whatever their other vices, rarely drink too much, but the Belgians I saw in Siegen were as drunk as they were dirty and unmilitary in appearance. Nor did they make any pretense of ever intending to fight. They frankly told the Germans that if war came they would at once run away.
I spent a few more days in Siegerland after my return with Erhardt Weber from Detmold. I visited many factories, talked to the workers and visited their homes; spent a few hours in the museum in the castle where there was also an exhibition of striking paintings of Russia done by returned prisoners of war; visited René and Margarita in their home a few miles away in the French zone, and spent another day in the French zone with Otto and Helmuth. I now felt as if I had known these people all my life; I was admitted to the intimacy of their family quarrels, and came to appreciate the good and bad qualities of each member of the family. The differences in their characters and outlook were as great as their solidarity as a family. Poor Frau Weber used to sigh for her husband who had known how to reconcile these differences among her sons, while she could only bewail them and mourn the death of Günther who had had the virtues of each and the vices of none. The curious thing in the Weber family was that only the men quarreled. Otto's wife, Margarita, and Frau Weber lived on the most amicable terms.
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I returned to Frankfurt, determined to see what could be done to save the people of the town and forest villages, whose troubles I had come to feel were my concern. Surely, I thought, either the Anglo-American officials engaged in restoring the railways and increasing coal production, or the ECA authorities, would be interested in stopping the destruction of some of the Siegen factories.
The first morning in Frankfurt I left the Press Center bright and early to visit the Commerce and Industry Division of Bicom, the joint Anglo-American administration of the combined British and American zones. Frankfurt is the de facto capital of Bizonia and the Bipartite offices are situated in the huge I. G. Farben building which we refrained from bombing during the war. It is not much smaller than the Pentagon and, since the various departments are continually playing General Post, you have to be employed there to know where to find what any day in the week. However, there is always the fun of traveling up and down in the moving boxes accommodating two persons, which take the place of elevators or escalators in the most modern German buildings.
Finally, I located the brigadier supposed to be at the head of the British section of the Bipartite Commerce and Industry Division. I could accomplish this feat because I was an American correspondent and could wander about the corridors at will. But few Germans, permitted to enter the buildings only if they got a pass, and able to get a pass only if they knew exactly whom they needed to see, could succeed in putting their grievance or appeal before the proper authorities. To make it just so much more difficult for them, the Information desk is situated inside, so that they cannot find out whom they want to see and where they are to be found, until after they get the permit which allows them to pass the sentries at the door. Not that the girls at the Information desk usually know anything, but at least you can consult the book giving the names and locations of the many and varied departments; although the rooms given are rarely the right ones, you can start out and eventually find what you want.
The British brigadier was amiable and quite decent as well he might be since he didn't seem to be doing anything, and his room and anteroom were empty of visitors. He told me he had just been appointed to his job, and as yet didn't know the faintest thing about it. "Go and see Mr. Radford, further along the corridor," he suggested. "He's the fellow who knows all about German industry."
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So I walked along the corridor and found Mr. Radford. Unfortunately, Mr. Radford hadn't the slightest interest in my story. He made it clear at once that he was a Vansittartist—the British equivalent of one of the Morgenthau Boys. He smiled coldly when I started to tell him about Siegen, and said : "I have fought twice against Germany and lost my brothers in the war. This time, I assure you, we are going to make the Germans pay."
It was obviously useless to argue with a man like Radford, even about the outstanding case of Achenbach, although as deputy head of the British Section of the Bipartite Commerce and Industry Division, he was supposed to be concerned with reconstruction rather than vengeance.
So I left him and sought out his American counterpart, Mr. Messler. Here I had a totally different reception. Mr. Messler was very much interested, although he told me that the decisions of the Military Government reparations authorities in Berlin were "outside the terms of reference" of the Frankfurt authorities. Here for the first time I was up against the disastrous duality of American occupation policies. The officials concerned with reconstruction of the German economy had nothing to do with the reparations authorities whose mandate was to destroy Germany's capacity for self-support.
Messler sent for a Mr. Yule who was in charge, among other things, of the reconstruction of the German railways. Mr. Yule proved to be one of the most active, well-informed and unprejudiced United States officials I met in Germany. He said that he knew Achenbach's production was absolutely essential to the railways; that it was quite true that it produced almost the whole of the Bizonia railways' piston rings, and that its dismantlement would be disastrous. Mr. Yule took me off to see the two United States technical experts concerned with Reichsbahn supplies, Mr. Pumphrey and Mr. Hartlaub, on leave of absence from the Pennsylvania and New York Central railways to help the German railways overcome the difficulties which threatened to block European recovery.
Unlike the offices of the big shots with military titles, the room and anteroom occupied by Mr. Pumphrey and Mr. Hartlaub were full of Germans, and wonder of wonders, both these Americans spoke German themselves. They were actually dealing directly with the Germans and helping them solve their problems and ours. It was a refreshing experience, for most United States officials in Germany seemed only to deal with the Germans through their secretaries, and it was almost as hard for a German to get to see an American official as for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye.
I told these Americans that I was a Readers' Digest correspondent, but that I had come to see them, not as a writer seeking information, but in order to tell them some facts I had learned of immediate concern to them, and indeed to all Americans. Since I am not an engineer and could not therefore give them all the details, I suggested they should talk to Dr. Barten.
All three immediately agreed and asked me to try and get Barten to come over from Siegen the following day. They warned me, as Mr. Messler had done, that reparations deliveries were outside their sphere, but they nevertheless made it clear that they were prepared to fight to prevent the Morgenthau boys in Berlin from dismantling, or permitting the British to dismantle, the factories most essential to the reconstruction of the railways.
Dr. Barten will never forget his meeting with these American technical experts. They were the first Americans he had met, and he was overwhelmed; not only by the contrast between the way they received him and the manner in which he was accustomed to be treated by the British, but also by the difference between American and German officials.
Beaming with joy as we left the I. G. Farben building after the interview, he said :
"Really, we Germans have something to learn from America. It's almost incredible! Those American gentlemen didn't even keep me waiting a half hour or so to show their importance, as a German bureaucrat would certainly have done. And they talked to me so kindly, as if I were a friend, without any pompousness or formality. Perhaps this American democracy really means something. Ach, its unbelievable how I was treated. I want to get back home to tell everyone about it."
Dr. Barten wanted to take me off to have dinner at a German restaurant with him and Zezulak, who had accompanied him from Siegen as interpreter, but whose services had hardly been necessary since Hartlaub spoke German fluently, and both Pumphrey and Yule were sufficiently conversant with the language. I insisted that they should both, instead, come with me to Schuman Hall, the Post Exchange cafeteria where there are no race or class distinctions, and GI's and officers can both bring their German guests. Here again Dr. Barten waxed enthusiastic over American ways. "How sensible it was to take a tray and wait on yourself." "How extraordinary to see American officers standing in line behind GI's." "How friendly everyone seemed." "How unexpected to see Germans and Americans sitting down together. One could not imagine such a thing happening in the British zone where no Germans are admitted to British restaurants and clubs."
"Wirklich, wir könnten von den Amerikanern viel gutes lernen," he repeated again, too busy observing the noisy crowded cafeteria, to eat his sandwiches. He had received a practical lesson in democracy worth more than a thousand lectures, or any amount of radio and newspaper propaganda. He had seen the reality of American democracy, usually obscured by Military Government, and had met Americans who behaved as if they were at home, instead of as conquerors ruling over a beaten people.
I was not, of course, satisfied by the prospect that Achenbach's would in all probability be saved. Dr. Barten's plant was only one of the most obviously indefensible examples of dismantlement in Siegerland, but the United States railways experts whom I had found to be so keen on their reconstruction job, could not help the Webers, or Hensch, or others, the destruction of whose factories constituted sabotage of the Marshall Plan, but was not of direct concern to the railways.
My next appeal, accordingly, was to the ECA authorities. Thanks to Mr. Haroldson, the State Department representative in Frankfurt and one of the real liberals I met in Germany, I met Mr. Collisson, the ECA representative in Germany, and Commander Paul F. Griffin, USNR, who had just arrived from Washington with the experts of the Humphrey Committee charged by Congress to find out which plants on the dismantlement list could better contribute to European reconstruction by being left in Germany.
I first asked the ECA representatives whether they intended to get information direct from the Germans, or would deal with them only through Military Government. I was assured that "the door is open here to anyone who has information to give us which bears upon the European Recovery Program."
I welcomed this statement and subsequently passed it on to the Germans in the Ruhr and the French zone, with the result that the ECA offices in Frankfurt received quite a stream of letters and visits from the German industrialists and labor leaders I met in my travels. I made it quite clear, of course, that Mr. Collisson and his colleagues could not be approached by just anyone who had a grievance; that their competence extended only to such cases where the question of European recovery was involved.
For the moment, however, I was still concerned mainly with enlisting ECA's interest in the Siegerland tragedy. After hearing my story with great patience and interest, Mr. Collisson agreed to receive a deputation from Siegen.
A week or two later, after I had left Frankfurt for the Ruhr, five representatives of Siegerland industries were received by Mr. Collisson, who, after hearing them state their case, promised that Siegen would soon be visited by the ECA technical experts.
Actually the ECA experts visited Siegen twice. The first time, the British refused to allow the Siegen people to have their own interpreter and the factory owners who could speak no English were at a serious disadvantage. Those, like Erhardt Weber, who understands English moderately well, heard the British interpreter giving false information to the delegation, but did not know whether his protest, in halting English, was understood or not. However, Mr. Lewis, the ECA expert, made a great impression in Siegen, for he arrived early in the morning and worked without let-up all day, noting everything and refusing British offers of hospitality. He was, it seemed, a man with a big and difficult job to do, working ten to twelve hours a day, showing favor to none, an impartial highly qualified expert making the detailed survey assigned to him and caring nothing for anything but his job.
After my return to the United States I received a letter from Hans Zezulak, informing me that members of the Humphrey Committee had visited Siegen on December 3 and 4 and inspected fourteen of the plants on the dismantlement list. Mr. Lewis came again, but this time he was accompanied by Frederick V. Geier of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, who was said to be a brother-in-law of Albert Einstein. Mr. Geier, Zezulak wrote, seemed to be very well informed in every detail and when a British Military Government interpreter was offered him, declined on the ground that he spoke German fluently. This turned the tables on the British who had refused to let the Germans have an interpreter on the occasion of Mr. Lewis' first visit. As Zezulak reported to me : "So the British left their interpreter behind and all the firms spoke German to him, and the British could not follow the conversation and the people could speak what they liked freely. It was a great day indeed.".
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Whether or not Paul Hoffman or Washington would make proper use of it, there seemed no doubt from the example of Siegen that Mr. Geier and Mr. Lewis and their colleagues must have provided Washington with the material to make an intelligent and realistic decision about dismantlement.
I visited Siegen again after visiting the Ruhr in October, and was detained there for a week, having developed an inflammation of the lungs—no doubt on account of my too strenuous investigation of dismantlement in Düsseldorf, Dortmund, and Essen. During my stay in bed at the Weber house I got to know this family better than many old friends, and also had frequent visits from the Bartens, Senior and Junior. Even Mr. Paisley, the British reparations officer, came to visit me and became distantly friendly with the Webers, once he realized that they did not account him personally responsible for dismantlement. He said I was probably depriving him of his job by my activities on behalf of Siegen, but he did not resent this and was himself longing for the day when he would be working to create instead of to destroy. One evening, in his presence, the Webers told me that many Siegen people were asking if there was not something they could do for me in gratitude for my attempts to save the town. I said, laughing, that I thought they ought to erect a gold statue to me in the market place, if it proved that I really had saved Siegerland from destruction. Paisley thereupon remarked that if so the statue should represent me standing with my foot on his dead body.
This joke had a sequel which touched me very much. Just before I left Germany the Bartens, Senior and Junior, Erhardt Weber, and Zezulak arrived in Frankfurt with a small bronze replica of the huge old medieval statue of an ironworker which used to stand beside the bridge over the river Sieg. On it they had had inscribed : "In friendly remembrance of the visit of Mrs. Freda Utley to Siegerland, and her successful efforts in saving the existence of the industries of the district."
They told me it was not a gift only from themselves, but was intended to express the gratitude of many others. The statue weighed at least a hundred pounds and, as I was flying back to the United States, I had to leave it to be sent on to me. I only hoped that I had really helped to save the livelihood of the people of Siegerland, and not merely postponed the day of their ruin.
Erhardt Weber now looked more gaunt than ever. His brother was in the hospital and had been given up for lost by the doctors.
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Otto, the unstable though charming and gay member of the Weber family, had taken to drink and no longer did any work. He saw no sense in working, since Germans were apparently doomed to become paupers. Why struggle? He would gather such few rosebuds as might come his way and forget his own and others' sorrows in alcohol.
Erhardt was of stiffer fiber. Whether or not the Weber factory would finally be dismantled, he was continuing to rebuild it. Another red brick wall had gone up. Three buildings would soon be restored. In spite of Otto's protests that it was senseless to reconstruct if all the machinery was to be taken away; in spite of Helmuth's contention that the only way to make money in Germany today is by buying and selling on or off the black market, Erhardt, head of the family (or its dictator as his brothers said) insisted on work, and yet more work. If the British took away all the fruits of his and his workers' labors, he for one, was not going to give up hope. Grimly and silently, insisting that work must go on, and sparing himself least of anyone, Erhardt refused to say die. He epitomized the best of the German spirit, which seems indomitable, perhaps because it has never been softened by facile conquests and easy living. Erhardt had never been a Nazi and had refused a commission in the German Army, but he was a patriot in the best sense. No one I met in Germany made me realize as vividly as Erhardt the bitter sorrow which the destruction and virtual enslavement of their country means to the Germans.
Old beyond his years, unmarried and with no time for the women attracted by his aloofness and lean good looks, he was a lover of music and poetry, with a gentle sense of humor under his reserve; loved less by his mother than her weaker sons, given to few words or expressions of affection, but sensitive and intelligent, Erhardt had an unconquerable spirit. He might die of overwork but he would never surrender to Giant Despair.
Germans like Erhardt Weber and other Siegerlanders, given the chance to utilize their energies and talents for peace instead of the wars they fight but never want, are capable of rebuilding Germany and teaching Western Europe how to live by its own labors, instead of depending upon the revenues from vanishing colonial empires or the American subsidies which have taken their place.
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Chapter 5
German Democracy between Scylla and Charybdis
The Marshall Plan is based on the assumption that poverty and despair lead people to reject democracy and follow the Communist lead; and that, in order to save the Western world from totalitarian tyranny, America must give the European nations on our side of the Iron Curtain enough dollars to reconstruct their economies and afford their people the opportunity to earn a decent living.
This theory is not, however, applied to Germany. We refuse to admit that it was poverty, unemployment, and despair which brought the Nazis to power, and may once again drive the German people to reject the political concepts and moral values of the West. Instead, we regard the Germans as a naturally aggressive people with a predilection for authoritarian rule, and treat them as if they were possessed of a devil which must be driven out by chastising them.
It is today forgotten that the Nazis did not win power by advocating war. They appealed in the first place to the German people's longing for delivery from intolerable disorders and economic chaos. Their main slogan was "bread and work." Hitler did not start to talk about the need to obtain Lebensraum by force until after he came to power, and while many a German joined the Nazi party because it was anti-Communist, others supported it because of the failure of the democratic parties to solve the unemployment problem or to induce the democracies to make the concessions necessary for the German people to exist.
At the First Assembly of the Nazi Reichstag on May 17, 1933, Hitler specifically abjured war, saying :
The outcome of war would be greater insecurity, increased economic misery and yet more wars. To start such utterly senseless action would lead to the collapse of the present order of society. A Europe sinking into Communist chaos would produce a period of crisis the duration of which cannot he estimated. The three principles which are the mainspring of our revolution do not menace the interests of other nations at all. On the contrary they can prevent the threatening Communist upheaval and lead to the construction of a people's state based on the principle of private property as the basis of culture. The re-establishment of a stable and authoritative state leadership.*
Since many foreigners believed Hitler's lies, it is hardly surprising that so many Germans did. To account them all guilty of Hitler's crimes, after it was too late for them to escape from his tyranny, is to be unaware of the nature of totalitarian rule. It is doubtful whether any other nation, placed as Germany was, would have resisted the lure of Nazi propaganda. It should have been our objective after the second World War to convince the German people that Hitler had not only failed but had been wrong, and that democracy offers life and hope.
Instead, for the second time in thirty years, democracy has become synonymous in Germany with submission to intolerable conditions, and the denial of freedom, security and self-respect to the German people.
It is one of the paradoxes of modern times that in an age in which psychology is studied even in the schoolroom, and psychological warfare has become a branch of military science, we should conduct our foreign policy with less understanding of other peoples than our ancestors whose knowledge was confined to history and philosophy.
The lessons of psychology are apparently considered as having no application to the Germans. For although most Americans have been sold on the idea that criminal tendencies are the result of environment and that juvenile delinquency can be cured by psychological treatment, they believe that the way to reform the Germans is to treat them as hardened criminals, and punish them all, including the children who were unborn when Hitler came to power.
"If you call a child a thief often enough," a German said to me, "he eventually becomes one. Similarly by treating all Germans as Nazi criminals, you have made more Nazis than Hitler ever did."
* Quoted by Gunther Reimann in Germany : World Power or World Revolution?
The same idea was expressed in a variety show called "Mousetrap" which my friend Joan Crane saw in Stuttgart. In one scene a dog who had done something naughty was shown as very ashamed of himself. But after a succession of people had screamed "Guilty, guilty," and punished him, the dog became very fierce and completely untamable.
People cannot be bludgeoned into repentance. They must retain their self-respect if they are to admit their guilt. Many Germans never realized what they were doing, or abetting, under Nazi rule, but might have been shocked into repentance after Nazi atrocities in occupied countries were revealed to them following Germany's defeat, had not they themselves become the victims of similar "crimes against humanity." All we have done is to convince them that everyone is bad and cruel.
How can we expect to bring home to the Germans a consciousness of their "guilt", if we ourselves or our allies treat them as the Nazis treated the conquered? Today the Germans, far from being repentant, consider themselves to be the most oppressed of all peoples, and see no difference between Nazi rule and that of Western military government.
As Dr. Helmuth Becker, son of the internationally known educator who was Minister of Education in Prussia before 1933, said to me at Nuremberg : "If the Military Government's conception of democracy continues much longer, there will be no chance for democracy in Germany for a hundred years."
"Few Americans," he continued, "realize that Germany followed Hitler because the democratic parties were bankrupt. Nor do they see that Military Government is very similar to Nazi rule. The Nazis and the Military Government would have got on very well together. They have the same belief in authoritarian rule, and they are regarded by the Germans in much the same light.
"We don't believe your propaganda any more than we believed Nazi propaganda after the first year or two. We judge you by what you do, not by what you say, and what you do is much the same as what the Nazis did."
There is an inescapable contradiction between democracy, which means government by consent of the governed, and military government based on force and the power of the conquerors to impose their will on the conquered. This contradiction has been accentuated by the attitude and behavior prescribed for the occupation forces in Germany; but it would in any case preclude the growth of a vigorous democratic movement in Germany.
Inevitably the German democrats in the Western zones appear in the eyes of most of their compatriots as quislings carrying out the orders of the conquerors. Since those orders have kept the Germans starving in the bombed-out remnants of their cities without allowing them to rebuild them, deprived the workers of their livelihood by dismantlement, and the whole population of freedom, democracy has once again become synonymous with defeat, misery, injustice, and servitude.
Once again, as in the days of the Weimar Republic, and to a far greater degree, we are denying the German democrats any possibility of proving to their countrymen that justice, the right to work and earn a living wage, and equality among the nations can be obtained except by force.
The predicament of the German Social Democrats outside of Berlin illustrates the sad consequences of our undemocratic attitude toward the Germans.
Talking to German labor leaders in the Ruhr, I could have imagined myself back in the days of the Weimar Republic when I had often visited Germany. The old Socialists who had survived both Nazi persecution and the war were back where they had been twenty years ago, but more gravely handicapped in their efforts to "sell democracy" to the German people. Yet they still had faith in peaceful methods and rational argument. They eschewed "direct action" or revolutionary methods to obtain just demands. They still believed in the possibility of uniting the "workers of the world"; they still placed their trust in British and French Socialists; they are as law abiding under British Military Government as under former German governments; they are not lacking in courage, but they seem incapable of bold and decisive action in a crisis.
They are in the tragic position of not being able to learn from past experience because to do so would be a denial of the democratic basis of their beliefs. And since the situation they face today is similar to the one they faced following the first World War, they are once again in danger of losing the support of the German workers, and giving the right of way to the demagogues and apostles of violence and tyranny : to the extreme nationalists on the right and the Communists on the left who once before destroyed German democracy.
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The Germans always seem to "go the whole hog." Either they are extreme nationalists and violently aggressive, or they are more pacific, rational, and internationally minded than the socialists and liberals of any other country.
As one young German trade-union official said to me in Düsseldorf : "Placed as we are in the center of Europe, influences from all sides meet and clash most violently in Germany. Here issues are more sharply defined than in any other country. Germans are inclined to make every issue a question of basic philosophy. The religious wars were more destructive in Germany than anywhere else because we embrace our beliefs so wholeheartedly and see no virtue in compromise. So today in politics we go to the same extremes : from ultranationalism to the repudiation of all nationalist sentiment. We adopt our politics with religious conviction and see an enemy in everyone who thinks differently. Like the power generated by positive and negative in electricity, the strongest incentives for good or ill are present in the German character."
When nationalism is in the ascendant, the Germans are among the most violent and unscrupulous peoples; when they turn to pacifism, internationalism, and reasonableness, they turn the other cheek with a restraint in face of provocation, injustice, and suffering which few other nations ever exhibit. This tendency to go to extremes and eschew compromise also accounts for the violent party strife which helped destroy the Weimar Republic. Unlike the English, who instinctively put the national interest above party interests, the Germans carry political antagonisms to such lengths that, except when united for war under authoritarian rule, internal conflicts split the nation into warring factions. This is no doubt the reason why even liberal Germans will tell you today that Germany needs a monarchy, because only an established authority recognized by all parties can overcome the schisms which tear Germany apart.
Germany is not, perhaps, peculiar in this respect. The French are displaying a similar incapacity in making democracy work, and the British had their civil wars in the past. It is the comparative youthfulness of the German state which has caused the swing from overemphasis on nationalism, to internecine strife regardless of the national interest, and back again to extreme nationalism.
The renunciation of nationalist sentiment and aims by the German Social Democrats plays into the hands of both the extreme nationalists, and the Communists, who use German national sentiment to further Russian aims : Many German Socialists in the Western zones strengthen the impression that they are puppets by seeming to echo the views of the conquerors who demand that the Germans, unlike other nations, should have no national feelings.
Patriotism, regarded as a virtue by the victors, is considered to be a sign of perverse tendencies when displayed by Germans. Every sign of "reviving German nationalism" is made the excuse for the revival of repressive measures. We treat the Germans like sexual delinquents who must be castrated or kept in prison and deprived of normal sexual intercourse, while their jailers are permitted to indulge their natural human instincts to the full.
Yesterday it was the Nazis; today it is their erstwhile allies and spiritual brothers, the Communists, who are taking advantage of Germany's treatment at the hands of the Allies and of the weakness of German democracy. The Communists are appealing to the same passions and hatreds and aggressive nationalistic sentiments as the Nazis. They are leading the struggle against dismantlement and the so-called internationalization of the Ruhr, and in general showing up the incapacity of the German democrats to obtain, and the unwillingness of the democratic powers to grant, elementary justice to the German people.
Although German experience of Communist terror in the Eastern zone and Berlin, and the German Army's first-hand view of Soviet Russia as soldiers and prisoners of war, have so far prevented the revival of a strong German Communist movement, there is a substantial minority of Communists in the Ruhr held in check only by the Socialists and Christian Democrats who still hope the Western Powers will come to their senses in face of the Soviet danger and permit the German people to live and work.
About a third of the German trade-union members in the coal and steel industries of the Ruhr are reputed to be Communists or to follow the Communist lead. This substantial minority is bound to increase if only the Communists seem to be fighting against dismantlement. It must also grow if the occupation authorities, desirous of re-establishing free enterprise in Germany but refusing to release the German economy from the burden of reparations payments and the tight controls established in the interests of Germany's British and French competitors on the world market, continue to promote the scarcity and inflation which keep the German workers without the necessities of life.
If the German Socialists who control the trade unions in the Ruhr fail to see that they will never obtain a fair deal from the British by collaborating with them; if they continue to hold back the rank and file from organized strikes against dismantlement; if they fail in every possible way to support the German workers who are going to jail for refusal to obey British orders to destroy or remove the machinery on which other Germans depend for their livelihood, the Communists will inevitably win the leadership of the German workers, in spite of German fear and hatred of the Soviet Union.
The British, so far, have derived great profit from the trusting attitude of the German labor leaders. But in the long run the advantage they have taken of the German Socialists' faith in the British Labour Government is likely to rebound to the advantage of the Communists. Just as the British are deriving temporary profit from the sale to Soviet Russia and her satellites of armaments and planes or the materials and machinery with which to manufacture them, but are likely in the future bitterly to regret their exclusive preoccupation with the accumulation of dollar funds to the detriment of their defenses, so also in Germany they may come to rue the day when they sacrificed to a commercial motive the good will of those who trusted them and could have become their strongest allies.
My visit to the Ruhr in the fall of 1948 brought home to me not only awareness of the similarity in the victors' treatment of German democracy today and following the first World War, but also understanding of the weakness of German social democracy.
Before Hitler came to power, when German social democracy still held the allegiance of a majority of the German working and professional classes, the German democrats had believed that the Western democracies would not allow them to perish by refusing the concessions which could keep the German people under peaceful leadership. In 1948, in the Ruhr, I found that the German trade-unionists had been convinced that the British Labour Government would not actually carry through the dismantlement program which must drive the German people once again to reject democracy.
Others had apparently been won over to accept dismantlement by a British promise to support socialization of the mining and steel industries against the Americans who favor private enterprise, if the trade-union leaders would collaborate with the British Military Government, or at least take no concerted measures to prevent the removal of machinery from German factories. This apparently accounted for the refusal of Hans Boekler and other old German trade union leaders to accede to the demands of the rank and file for a general strike against dismantlement. Like Samson, German labor had been shorn of its strength, the temptress being the Socialist ideal. Hoping to establish socialism by collaboration with the British conquerors the old German trade-union leaders had disarmed the working class.
Whether or not a bargain had actually been struck between the British and German Socialists, it was made clear to me in my conversations with Ruhr labor leaders that they were anxious above all not to embarrass or annoy the British Labour Government.
On the other hand I also had to realize that the German trade-union leaders had little choice but to collaborate with the British. The dependence of the Germans on the food supplied by their conquerors constituted a terrible weapon in the hands of the British and American military governments, and was used with few scruples. No one could forget that in 1947 the Western Powers had threatened to stop food shipments if the German workers went on strike.
As an outsider I cannot judge whether it is the carrot or the stick which plays the greater role in inducing the German trade-union leaders to collaborate with the British Military Government. The stick, starvation, is in all probability more potent than the Socialist lure. Starvation as a method of coercion is used less blatantly by the British and American occupation authorities than by the Soviets, but hardly less effectively. It is the dependence of Western Germany on food imports which has cut the ground from under the feet of the German democrats, and placed German labor in an even weaker position today than under the Nazi tyranny.
It was essential for the Nazi government to encourage the Germans to work to the limit of their capacity, since compulsion alone cannot secure maximum production. But the British Military Government has no such interest. The British, to use their favorite expression, "couldn't care less" if German labor chooses to starve by going on strike. Cessation of production in German factories may even be welcome to the British conquerors who are also Germany's competitors. Thus the German workers in the Ruhr have in effect been deprived of their only weapon against the destruction of their means of existence.
Since every German working class family is at all times on the verge of destitution, and dependent for its inadequate food on the good will of the conquerors, no German labor leader can lightly defy the occupation authorities. "A week without work and wages," one of them said to me, "means so many more thousands tubercular children, so many more invalids; we are so undernourished and weak that we can barely keep alive, and have no reserves of strength or food. One little extra push can mean collapse. How can we stand up against the organized might of the conquerors who hold our lives in their hands, and treat us all as criminals, or at best as prisoners on parole?"
Nevertheless, it was hard for me to understand the attitude of such men as Hans Boekler, the William Green of German labor. He had recently returned from London where he had talked to Ernest Bevin. When I asked him what answer Bevin had given to his argument against dismantlement, Boekler made excuses for the British Foreign Minister. "Bevin is so overburdened with other cares," said Boekler, "so absorbed in the difficulties of foreign policy : Palestine, Russia, and the rest, that he simply has no time to attend to our German problems."
After this conversation I was hardly surprised when one of the Ministers in North-Rhine Westphalia, who is himself a Socialist, told me that Boekler was "too much orientated toward Britain." The middle ranks of trade-union officials, this Minister also told me, realized that the German workers were being victimized by the British and the workers themselves wanted to strike against dismantlement, but Boekler had prevented any effective action being taken. Boekler is both head of the metal workers trade union and chairman of the Federation of German Trade Unions.
Arnold Schmidt, the German miners' leader, holds the same pro-British opinions. When I interviewed him in his house near Bochum I had already heard him speak to the British and American Military Government officials assembled at Essen on October 2, and waited in vain for him to protest against dismantlement. So I was hardly surprised when he told me that the German workers were "full of admiration for the Socialist achievements of the British Labour Government." Either from discretion or conviction, he had nothing to say against British policy.
Much as I respect the old-fashioned trade union leaders I met in the Ruhr I found it pathetic to witness their touching faith in the British Labour Government. In spite of the superior attitude adopted toward them as toward all other Germans by British Military Government officials, and in spite of the abundant evidence of British determination to wipe out German competition by ruthless dismantlement, they refused to believe that a British Labour Government was not their friend. So, instead of leading the strikes and demonstrations demanded by the rank and file, they continued to argue that if the Germans were patient and submissive the British and French would eventually listen to reason and stop taking the bread out of the mouths of the German workers.
I was accompanied on some of my Ruhr visits by a German from the Social Ministry, recommended to me by Richard Stokes, the English Member of Parliament who has fought hardest to stop dismantlement. Although I speak German, my knowledge of the language is not such as to make it easy to understand every word when technical terms are involved. So Stokes' friend, Zilliken, who spoke English fluently, was of great assistance to me in investigating dismantlement in the Ruhr. He was, moreover, an intelligent, fearless and well-informed young man.
When I expressed my astonishment at the confiding trust which the older generation of German labor leaders appeared to place in the British Labour Government, Zilliken remarked, "Yes, the relationship which the British Labour Government has managed to establish with the Social Democrats of the Ruhr is similar to that between the English aristocracy and the British working class."
This comparison is not as apt today as fifty years ago. It would be truer to say that the Social Democrats in Western Germany stand in much the same position in relation to the British Labour Government as the Socialist Unity party (SED) in the Russian zone to Moscow. Both are dependent for such power as they have on the occupation authorities. Certainly the Social Democrats have more popular support than the SED, but they are well aware that if the occupation forces were withdrawn they would in all probability be swept from office. This is not a reflection on the integrity of the German Socialists, but a result of the identification of democracy in German eyes with subservience to the will of the conquerors.
In spite of its weak position German Social Democracy does not lack leaders who advocate a bolder course than that pursued by the Boeklers and Schmidts. There is a militant opposition which argues that effective direct action against both dismantlement and the conversion of the Ruhr into an Anglo-French colony, is possible; and that if the Socialists fail to fight for the rights of German labor and the German people, the Communists will take the lead. This militant wing of the German Socialist and trade-union movement advocates mass strikes and demonstrations against dismantlement, believing that the British will not dare, at this stage, to crush the German working class by naked force, seeing that the only beneficiaries must be Communists.
Early in 1949 the militants appeared to be assuming the lead in the Ruhr, no doubt because the Communists had begun to take the lead in opposing dismantlement, and because the number of registered unemployed has risen to a million in the combined British and American zones.*
In Dortmund I visited an outstanding personality among the militant Socialist trade union leaders, who was in hospital after losing his right hand in a street accident a few days before. Herr Meyer had started life as a miner, been a trade-union organizer before Hitler came to power, and subsequently earned his living in such various occupations as a film company publicity agent, electric-bulb salesman and hotel manager, and had been both a soldier and a draftee in a glass plant during the war. But he looked like Beethoven. His massive torso, pale face, aquiline nose, generous mouth and massive forehead, shock of black hair streaked with grey, and burning black eyes made an unforgettable impression, and I was no less struck by his outspoken and fearless attitude, and the contrast between his views and the narrow sectarian Socialist attitude of such men as Boekler and Schmidt.
Meyer told me how, after being redrafted into the army, in spite of his age, in the last desperate weeks of the war, he had been taken prisoner by the Americans but had been lucky enough to be interrogated by a former trade-union colleague who had emigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. This friend of Weimar Republic days had at once released him, and he had thereupon joined up with his former trade-union chief, Boekler, in reconstituting the German trade-union movement.
Meyer did not, however, agree with Boekler in his present tactics. In the summer of 1948, when dismantlement on a big scale began in the British zone, he had proposed that the German trade unions, chambers of commerce and guilds of artisans, executives and owners of German factories, together with the Protestant and Catholic clergy, should all simultaneously go on strike and refuse all co-operation with the British Military Government.
Meyer's proposal, he told me, had been squashed by Boekler's lieutenants who had said that Boekler did not want any disturbances or threats to mar the good results he expected from his talks in London and Paris. It was also probable that Boekler was averse to taking any action which involved forming a united front with "the capitalists" and the churches in defense of the whole German people.
* These unemployment figures do not include the mass of German expellees living in camps.
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Fritz Hentzler, the Socialist mayor of Dortmund, whom I interviewed the same day, although not a young man, was also a militant man of broad outlook. Like Ernst Reuter of Berlin he represented the interests of all his people, and was more concerned with human needs, freedom and justice than with "state ownership of the means of production and distribution." He shared none of the illusions of the Boeklers and Schmidts who like Rip Van Winkles in a changed world, continue to believe that the Socialists of other countries are as internationally minded as themselves.
Hentzler told me that the German trade-union leaders had at first refused to believe that a British Labour Government would ever deprive the German workers of their means of existence, and that the majority of German workers had accordingly never imagined that dismantlement on a big scale would actually be carried out. They had ascribed the outcry of the employers and executives as merely a capitalist or nationalist reaction against disarmament measures. Thus the trade unions in the Ruhr, voting to restrict their activities to particular objectives, refrained from causing difficulties for the British occupation forces. Later when the full effect of the planned dismantlement was becoming obvious, the German workers had been confident that the Marshall Plan meant that it would stop, and that a higher level of industry would be permitted to Germany. Having first vainly placed their trust in the British Labour Government, they were now looking for justice from capitalist America.
Hentzler and a few others had realized from the beginning that dismantling was a serious menace and had little hope that America would stop it. For, in his view, dismantlement on a big scale had been planned by the United States and Britain as the means to bring about an accord with France; and he thought that in 1948 they had promised to carry it through, whatever its cost and however disastrous the consequences to the German workers and the German democrats.
Hentzler also told me that when he had first spoken to General Robertson about the financial consequences, the British Military Governor had been sympathetic but now was "ice cold." Evidently there was a firm Anglo-French-American agreement on steel, designed to destroy Germany's productive capacity and double French and Belgian production.
"Since antidemocratic and destructive are synonymous terms, the net result of dismantlement," said Hentzler, "is the 'demontage* of democracy.' "
"Every economic difficulty," he continued, "is a reflection on democracy and is welcomed by the Nazis and other extreme nationalists in Germany, as well as by the Communists."
The Ruhr is the center of Communist influence in Germany and the Communists take every possible advantage in their propaganda of the ruin brought about by dismantlement. They play upon nationalist sentiment almost as effectively as the Nazis did, proclaiming that dismantlement and the Anglo-American-French agreement on control of the Ruhr, are planned to turn Germany into a colony of slaves working for the profit of the Anglo-Saxon and French imperialists. Their propaganda contains sufficient truth for it to be effective. Seeing their Social-Democratic leaders failing to protect their livelihood and Germany's basic interests, the German workers would naturally follow the Communists, were it not for their firsthand experience of the Russian terror.
When I asked Hentzler how it was possible for any German to fall for Communist propaganda, since all knew or heard of the terrible treatment Germans received in Russia and in the Eastern zone, Hentzler smiled sadly and said :
"You underrate the stupidity of the masses. Roosevelt and Churchill were both hoodwinked by Stalin, so why shouldn't the German people be?"
He went on to tell me that some German nationalists believe today that they can rearm Germany with the help of the Soviets. "They are ready to be Russian mercenaries today in the hope of creating an independent Germany in the future."
As an example, Hentzler pointed to the case of Graf Einsiedel, Bismarck's grandson, who today plays an important role in Russia's "Free German" movement, because he wants to revert to his grandfather's policy of friendship with Russia.
I asked Hentzler whether he thought that such German nationalists really believed that Germany could regain her independence by collaborating with Russia against the West, or whether they were preparing to betray the Russians when they got the chance. He replied : "People on the negative side are always more apt to unite than progressives."
* The German and French term for dismantlement.
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I asked Hentzler if he thought that many former Nazis were now Communist collaborators, and he replied, "Very few with the idea of winning Germany for the Russians. A great many on the basis of the belief that they must win Russia's aid to rebuild Germany and free her from Western domination." He went on to point out that only a minority, such as the Nazis had been, was needed to swing a country. "The former high Nazis and many former Wehrmacht officers," he continued, "will never be satisfied with low positions. They long above all for a system in which they can once again occupy the seats of power."
Arnold, the president of North-Rhine Westphalia, whom I interviewed in Düsseldorf, drew my attention to the aid and comfort given to the German Communists by Bevin's reported statement to General Marshall that dismantlement in the Ruhr should be continued "on security grounds," since otherwise the Soviets might capture intact plants which could be put to their service.*
Naturally, he said, if it was expected that unarmed Germany would not be defended, but surrendered to the Russians in the event of war, many Germans would feel that there was no choice but to get on good terms with the Communists in advance.
"The anti-Communist sentiments of the Germans," said Arnold, "are good and strong." If only England and America would draw up an occupation statute giving the Germans freedom, self-government, and responsibility, there would be a solid basis for a democratic development. "Then," he continued, "we could speak to the East zone with a strong voice."
The effect of a declaration that dismantlement was to be stopped at once would have an electrifying effect on the Germans. "Germans are so ready to cooperate in European reconstruction," said Arnold, "that 'Europa über Alles' would then supplant 'Deutschland über Alles' † in German hearts."
It is easy to dismiss such statements as this as unworthy of belief and to argue that the Germans under the pretext of being good Europeans plan to dominate the Continent. Such distrust ignores the "all or nothing" nature of the German character. Since they are inclined to pursue a line of policy to its logical conclusion, the Germans today, given the chance to utilize their brains, skills, and capacity for hard work in peaceful ways are perhaps more, not less, likely to become good Europeans than other nations with less singleness of purpose.
* Cf. Newsweek, XXXII (September 27, 1948), 11.
† "Europe over (or above) all" instead of "Germany over (or above) all."
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War propaganda has obscured the true facts of history, otherwise Americans might realize that the German record is no more aggressive, if as aggressive, as that of the French, British, and Dutch who conquered huge empires in Asia and Africa while the Germans stayed at home composing music, studying philosophy, and listening to their poets. Not so long ago the Germans were, in fact, among the most "peace-loving" peoples of the world and might become so again, given a world in which it is possible to live in peace.
Mistaken as the Boeklers of Germany may be in believing that concessions can be won from the Western powers by negotiation, their attitude proves the willingness of many Germans to trust to peaceful means to obtain their ends.
There is unfortunately little prospect that they will be able to do so. Again, as in pre-Hitler days, the German Social Democrats are between two fires. Twenty years ago they had to struggle against the Nazis on the one hand, and the Communists on the other. Today they are weakened in their struggle against the Communists by British and American Military Government.
"We are compelled to go softly in the Ruhr," I was told, "because there are strong Communist groups among the German workers, who interpret any action we take against dismantlement as opposition to the Western democracies."
The force of this remark had already been borne in on me by what I had read in the Russian-licensed press in Berlin, which inveighed against dismantlement in the Ruhr (though not of course in the Russian zone), and the treatment of Germany as a colony by the Western Powers. But it seemed to me that the German Social Democrats had no hope of maintaining their leadership of the workers, or any other Germans, if they were so afraid of seeming to be on the side of the Communists that they failed to lead Germany's struggle for national freedom and the right to work. This was notably the case with regard to the so-called internationalization of the Ruhr agreed upon by the British, French, and Americans early in 1949. This agreement provides for the permanent, or long-term, control of Ruhr industries by Germany's conquerors with only a minority voice for the Germans in the disposal of the product of their labors. There is no question that it does, in fact, reduce the Ruhr to the status of a British Crown Colony under tripartite control. The leaders of German labor in the Ruhr, however, have seemed to display more interest in ensuring the appointment of their nominees as trustees of the Ruhr coal mines and iron and steel industries, than in opposing the virtual detachment of the Ruhr from the German economy.
So in January 1949 the Communists took advantage of the wonderful opportunity presented to them to pose as the champions of the conquered and oppressed German people. Max Reimann, the Communist leader in the Ruhr, struck a powerful blow for the Communist cause when he said in a public speech :
"German politicians who today co-operate with the occupation forces under the international Ruhr statute should not be surprised if they are considered quislings by the German nation. They may one day have to face reprisals."
The British hardly helped their Social-Democrat friends by arresting Max Reimann for this statement and turning him into a hero of the German resistance. The Communists turned his trial into a mass demonstration against the conversion of the Ruhr into an Anglo-French-American colony.
The crowd assembled by the Communists sang the "Internationale" so loudly during Reimann's trial that it forced a recess, and compelled the British public-safety officer, Colonel Pollock, to beg the Communist leader to calm the crowd and tell them to go away. Max Reimann was thereupon reported to have "smiled broadly" and answered, "I didn't call them here."
Finally German police dispersed the crowd, but when Reimann emerged from the court room he was carried for miles on the shoulders of cheering crowds. As a high British official is reported to have ruefully admitted : "It looks like the trial is backfiring. It has made the Communists the champions of all Germans who oppose the control given to the International Ruhr Authority over German coal, coke and steel."*
Reimann was nevertheless sent to prison by the British court on the charge of having broken a Military Government law against "interference with persons who give aid and sustenance to the occupying powers," that is, persons who collaborate with the conquerors.
* New York Herald Tribune, January 19, 1949.
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Nothing could have suited the Communists better. Their leader was now able to pose as the champion of the oppressed German nation. Anti-Communist German politicians were compelled to come to Reimann's defense. Kurt Schumacher, chairman of the German Social-Democratic party, stated that if the principle of "obedience" to Military Government was applied as a protection for German politicians, it would prove helpful to the Communist cause; and Heinrich Hellwege, chairman of the right-wing Deutsche Partei, declared that Reimann's conviction appeared to confirm the Communist charge that non-Communist German politicians were "performers of the will of the occupation power," and that those who openly criticized measures of the Western Powers were subject to punishment.
Subsequently Military Government officials reported privately that they were again having trouble in getting Germans to take responsible administration positions.*
Unfortunately for the democratic cause, when some German workers at Essen were arrested by the British for their refusal to dismantle the Bochum Iron and Steel Works, or to permit its being dismantled, there was no such powerful popular support for them as the Communists had organized for their leader, Max Reimann. They were sent to jail unheralded and unsung. Nor did the Social-Democrat trade-union leaders do anything effective to prevent the use of British troops to compel the Bochum workers to give way, after the British had announced, on January 5, 1949, that "there will be sufficient British troops standing by to insure that the job will start, and that if the Bochumer Verein workers try to interfere this time, we are prepared to take counter measures."
A year earlier, in January 1948, the Social-Democratic leaders in the British zone had been intimidated by the double threat of starvation and British tanks into preventing the general strike demanded by the rank and file. The Ruhr workers had been literally starving that winter of 1947-48 when for a long period the daily ration had been reduced to 800-900 calories, which is less than the Nazis gave their concentration camp victims. Finally the trade union leaders had been called into a conference by the Minister of Food of North-Rhine Westphalia and told that there were only 3,000 tons of fat in the whole Ruhr area. The question was whether to divide it so as to give a four-week fat ration to the miners, on whose labors all industry depended, or to give each worker an ounce a month for two months.
* New York Times, February 4, 1949.
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The trade-union leaders had refused to decide this awful question. Then the Minister of Food, having referred the decision to the Economic Council at Frankfurt, was told that even the 3,000 tons did not exist—that in the whole of North-Rhine Westphalia there was only 460 tons of fat, which constituted a bare week's supply for the miners if no other Germans received any fat at all.
In this desperate situation an appeal was made to Bavaria, which came through and supplied some fats.
"If we had allowed a general strike as was demanded by a third of the Ruhr workers," one trade union official said to me, "the last possibility of acquiring fats would have been destroyed by the stoppage of transport."
"We told the workers the truth," he continued, "and asked them to continue working without any fat ration. We prevented riots believing that if they occurred, the British would have used tanks, and there was a real danger that the Russians would then have come as our 'liberators' from Anglo-American tyranny. Anything was preferable to that."
In that terrible month of January 1948 Boekler had told the British and American authorities that they had better use their troops to get food from the German peasants, rather than send their tanks against the Ruhr workers.
It was hard in the Ruhr to resist the conclusion that by their law-abiding nature, their pacifism, and the mixture of respect, trust, and fear with which they regarded the British Labour Government, the German Social Democrats had indeed made themselves appear to be quislings. As in the late twenties, they were losing popular support and preparing the way for their own demise.
If most of the Ruhr's trade-union and Social-Democratic leaders appeared to have learned no more than the Occupation Powers from the tragic history of the past thirty years, the same could not be said of other Social-Democratic leaders in Germany. In an earlier chapter I have spoken of the clear-sighted and courageous Berlin Socialists. The views of Carlo Schmidt, the Social-Democratic leader from the French zone, offered a similar contrast.
Carlo Schmidt is an outstanding personality. The son of a French mother and a German father, he combines Teutonic strength and determination with Gallic wit and fire, and love of life and beauty. A poet, a philosopher, and a professor of international law, as well as an eloquent speaker, Carlo Schmidt is too well known in the European literary world, and too influential, for the French to dare imprison him. Lesser German "heroes of the resistance" against French tyranny are summarily disposed of by the Sûreté. But Carlo Schmidt, who ruled a French province during the days of the German occupation, and achieved an enviable reputation for justice and fair dealing and courage in protecting the French from the Gestapo, is a man who can neither be smeared nor easily repressed.
I met Carlo Schmidt first in October 1948 in Bonn, where he was a delegate to the Parliamentary council endeavoring to hammer out a Constitution for Western Germany. In late November I met him again in Berlin where he had come to help his Social-Democratic colleagues in the elections. On both occasions I was impressed, not only by his intelligence and understanding of the problems of our time, but also by his humanity and freedom from class, racial, or national prejudices. Like Ernst Reuter of Berlin, and unlike most of the Socialists I met in the Ruhr, Carlo Schmidt represents a new, nondoctrinaire, Socialist movement, which is more liberal than socialist, more concerned with the preservation of freedom and the basic values of Western civilization than with economic theories.
"If the Allies decide to let us live," Carlo Schmidt said to me in Bonn, "they must be reasonable, they must leave us the means to earn our bread. If not, they should announce that they intend us to die of hunger, and, if they are merciful, they should provide the necessary gas chambers for our painless extermination."
The least harm, he said, was being done by the Americans, who took account of economic realities. But the British were determined to wipe out German competition whatever the political and moral cost, while in the French zone destruction had been carried to such lengths that the exports of major industries had been wiped out, and there was no longer any possibility of self-support.
Carlo Schmidt thinks it is a mistake to believe that Communist propaganda in Germany today falls on deaf ears. "If the Germans are driven to despair," he said to me in French, "they will follow the Communists, if only with the hope that the others will also die like dogs."
Later, at a factory in the French zone, I was told that some of the workers were already saying, "Let the Russians come. Whatever they do to us, we shall at least be able to cut the throats of the French first."
I had no reason to doubt the value of Carlo Schmidt's warning that the day might come when the masses would get out of control. Like other German democrats, he also told me that the day after victory the Western Allies could have done anything they liked with the Germans.
"America," he said, "was like Almighty God in those days. Had she known what she wanted and announced it, she could have shaped Germany and Europe to her will. Today this is no longer the case, not only on account of Soviet Russia, but because the Germans have been disillusioned by the wide gap between democratic pretensions and practices, and the vacillation, weakness, and contradictions in American policy."
When later in our conversation I commented on the contrast between the heroism of the Berlin Social Democrats and the weakness of their Western colleagues in dealing with British and United States Military Government, Carlo Schmidt said this was not due to the cowardice of the latter, but to bitter experience. In Berlin the Germans could look to American support, but in the Western zones they were alone and defenseless. Moreover, the fact that they realized that all open and strong criticisms of the Military Government played into the hands of the Communists, put them in an extremely difficult position.
In Berlin the German democrats had the Western democracies on their side; in the Western zones they had no support since they refused to accept the Communists as allies, or play off Russia against the West.
Nor could the German democrats in the Western zone count on having grievances and injustices remedied by publicity or appeals to the Congress of the United States and the British Parliament. The Germans have no government to speak for them. They are without rights and live in what is in many respects a vast internment camp. Very few Germans are allowed to travel abroad; foreign newspapers and books are generally unobtainable; their contacts with foreigners outside the Military Government are few, and they are not even informed about the debates in Congress on Germany, or given the official texts of documents, such as those relating to ECA, which most intimately concern them.
After fifteen years of semi-isolation under Hitler, the Germans under Western Military Government are still cut off from the free world outside.
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At a meeting of Generals Clay and Robertson with German industrialists, officials, and trade-union leaders which I attended at Essen on October 2, 1948, I was astonished to hear neither Hans Boekler nor Arnold Schmidt speak up strongly against dismantlement. Here was a meeting open to the press of the world in which the Germans had had a rare opportunity to cry out loud and be heard. But only Kost, the representative of the coal owners, did more than give utterance to polite platitudes. When a few days later in Düsseldorf, I asked for an explanation from an official of the metal-trades union, he said :
"Boekler and the others have for so long had dealings only with the Military Government authorities that they didn't realize that for once they had an opportunity to speak to the outside world. We are rather like prisoners brought suddenly into the light of day, blinking and unable to believe we are free."
Nor are they free. Although the Germans are today allowed far greater freedom of speech than in the first years of the occupation, the press is still controlled, and any editor who publishes articles or comments reflecting the real opinions of the Germans is liable to be slapped down and told he is encouraging "nationalism." Even Americans are not exempt from this charge as was proved when Kendall Foss, the former correspondent of the New York Post who was made editor of the United States Military Government's newspaper, Die Neue Zeitung, in 1948, was reprimanded in January 1949 and placed under the supervision of three representatives of the Information Services Division. This action was taken by Colonel Textor as a means of assuring that "a strong American staff would control the editorial output of the paper."
Mr. Foss, who is that rara avis, a real liberal, had made the mistake of assuming that freedom of the press meant that a newspaper should be "a forum for the expression of German ideas." He learned, rather later than most Germans, that the "freedom" the United States Military Government allows means only the expression of opinion favorable to itself. Since Die Neue Zeitung is privileged with respect to paper allocation, communication, and transport facilities, it has a much larger circulation than other German-language newspapers. So the curbing of its freedom of expression was particularly harmful and its German editors resigned in protest.
With respect to freedom of speech and opinion, it would be more honest and less discreditable to democratic principle, to proclaim openly that such freedom is not permitted in Germany, than to pretend that it exists. As one German said to me, "We should have more respect for America if she stopped preaching what she does not practice, since we now no longer have much hope of her practicing what she preaches."
The Germans are today a little better off than in the first years of the occupation, only because of the disagreements among their conquerors. While the Russian-licensed press exposes us, we expose the Russians; and Anglo-French-American antagonism makes it possible for British-licensed German newspapers to criticize the American Military Government, American-licensed papers to criticize the British, and the French to criticize both.
If the German people have been permitted to raise their heads again on account of the quarrels among their rulers, this right is not unquestioned. Every time the Germans dare to protest against their intolerable situation and claim the rights of free men, a spate of articles is let loose in the United States press concerning this dangerous manifestation of "nationalism."
An article published in the excellent and outspoken Wirtschaftszeitung of Stuttgart on January 29, 1949, concerning Allied complaints of German "arrogance" is very much to the point :
As long as the Germans were pulling their hand wagons and had no idea in their heads other than getting to the country to "organize rucksacks of potatoes," the Germans seemed more agreeable than today.
They were then too engulfed in misery, physically weak, and overwhelmed by the catastrophe which had befallen them and the revelation of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, to arise and plead their case. They were too discouraged and apathetic then to have much interest in the future. They grumbled, but they did what they were told.
But since they are now a little better off, they are becoming more active—perhaps sometimes even rebellious. Above all they are now industrious and filled with a pathetic desire to reconstruct their country.
The Allied occupation authorities, having permitted the Germans to be a little better off, are now surprised and indignant that there is no gratitude for the improvement. The Germans complain that there is insufficient improvement and demand more opportunity to develop their strength and have become "too bold."
One might say with some exaggeration that, as compared with the former apathy which prevailed, the smallest expression of the will to live on the part of the Germans is now regarded as "arrogance."
Not only is the German press under military government still kept in a strait-jacket; the Germans are not allowed any direct communication with the outside world, or any press representation abroad, so they are entirely dependent on American, British, and French correspondents for the expression of their grievances, which are therefore rarely brought to the attention of their conquerors.
Officially the Germans may have no communication with any authority outside and above the Military Government.
As one German Social Democrat said to me : "The American people are far away but General Clay is very near. We have little faith in the effectiveness of the principles and good will of the American people, as against the power of General Clay. Since General Clay is badly advised, especially on economic questions, we have more reason to fear him than to trust to the good will of the American people."
When at a meeting of the Minister Presidents of all the German states, one bold German proposed to address an appeal direct to Congress on the dismantlement question, begging for help, the majority voted against the proposal saying that the result was uncertain and it would anger the American occupation forces.
"Hoffman does not exist for us," said Carlo Schmidt. "The ECA people will have to come to us, for we are not allowed to communicate with them."
It caused much resentment that the Military Government should use the situation of the Berliners as a means to blackmail the Western German democrats. In effect, the Germans were told on more than one occasion that protests against dismantlement might result in the starvation of Berlin. The threat was, of course, made in more veiled terms. The German authorities in the Western zones were told that if American, British, or French people were antagonized by active opposition to dismantlement, it might be impossible for the Military Government to obtain the means to supply and hold Berlin.
This seems to the Germans not only a denial of the unity of interests between the Western powers and the German democrats in face of Soviet aggression and Communist crimes against humanity. It also recalled the early days of the occupation when the Americans had not scrupled to coerce individual Germans by the threat of handing them over to the tender mercies of the Russians. To hint that Berlin might have to be surrendered to the Communist terror, if the Germans of the Western zone refused to submit quietly to the loss of their livelihood through dismantlement, was both dishonorable and politically stupid.
While in Germany I was often reminded of the story told by a South American ambassador to a New York audience. I cannot vouch for its authenticity but it illustrates my point.
The Foreign Minister of San Marino, the story ran, came to Washington to try to get a loan. At the State Department the first question put to him was : How many Communists are there in San Marino? The diplomat answered that San Marino was a very small state and a happy one and had no Communists. "Very sorry," said the State Department; "in that case we can't give you a loan."
So the Foreign Minister of San Marino went to Paris, and said to Monsieur Bidault, the Foreign Minister : "France and San Marino have always been friends, would you do us a favor and lend us a few Communists in order that we may get a loan from America?"
"I regret it exceedingly." replied Monsieur Bidault. "I would be delighted to help the good people of San Marino if I could. But unfortunately we cannot spare you a single one of our Communists since we need them all for the same purpose."
The sequel to this story provides the moral. Today the Republic of San Marino has a Communist-dominated government.
If there had been a strong Communist movement in Germany, as in Italy, the Germans would be receiving far better treatment at our hands. The great majority of Germans, having met communism in Russia face to face, or having suffered under it following Germany's defeat, or having relatives in the Soviet Union's concentration camps, or having seen the living skeletons of the former soldiers who return from Russian imprisonment, or being immune to Communist blandishments on account of their experiences under Hitler's similar regime, are anti-Communist. This has led the British, French, and American authorities to believe that however badly we treat the Germans they must take our side. We seem to act on the theory that we should bribe those whom we fear may become our enemies, while we can safely maltreat those most certain to be on our side.
Thus the Germans who, for good or ill, are a consistent and straightforward people, suffer today in consequence of the belief that, however hardly we treat them, they will never join our Communist enemies.
While seeking by endless subsidies to maintain the weak forces of French democracy, we insult and browbeat the German democrats, and cut the ground from under their feet by appeasing France, as we formerly appeased Soviet Russia. It is therefore hardly surprising that Communist influence in the Western zones is far from being negligible. Although very few Germans have any illusions about Communism, a considerable number are beginning to think that "it couldn't be worse" under the Russians, and that perhaps in the long run it might be better. A more powerful incentive to coming to terms with the Soviet Government is the refusal of the West either to guarantee Germany's defense or allow her to defend herself.
A former high German administrative official under the United States Military Government said to me in Munich : "If the Germans continue to be told that the United States is only concerned with the defense of France, England, and the Low Countries, and doesn't care a damn what happens to Germany, Western Germany may be forced to join up with Soviet Russia."
A young German employed by the Military Government in Munich said that more and more Bavarians were saying : "If after being disarmed by the United States we are also going to be abandoned in the event of war, we had better not offend Russia."
This same young man told me that he was reproached by everyone, including people who had always been anti-Nazi, for working for the Military Government, so complete is the disillusionment with America among liberal circles which had first welcomed us as liberators.
Moreover, he said, it was considered very dangerous now to work for the Military Government, since anyone who did so could expect to be liquidated "when the Russians come."
"Everyone is now looking for a Communist friend who will protect him, and wants to be able to say to the Russians. 'I never collaborated with the Americans.' Factory owners who refuse contributions to the other parties give money to the Communist Party as a form of insurance."
Dr. Mauritz, a German working in the Public Opinion Section of Military Government, said that the uncertainty of United States policy and the fear that Germany would be left defenseless before Russian attack played into the hands of the Communists. American Military Intelligence, however, seemed to ignore the danger because it took the election returns as proof of the small number of Communist sympathizers. It ignored the fear and the desperate search for security which led men to try and establish "good relations" with the Communists.
"Men who have lived through both the Nazi terror and the Communist terror and have come here after losing everything they possessed," said Dr. Mauritz, "are now in deadly fear that the Russians will come, and are seeking for any kind of security."
Some, he continued, think that they can win only with the Communist Party, not against it. Others, whose houses and furniture have been taken from them for the use of the occupiers, or who have been rendered destitute by currency reform, say : "The Americans have stripped us of everything we possessed; what more can Russia do to us?"
These sentiments were not confined to the former middle classes who are now paupers. They were also expressed to me by a considerable number of workers. At Lindau on Lake Constance, for instance, where the train on which I was re-entering Germany from Switzerland stopped for an hour, I spoke to some of the men working on the railway. When I asked how people felt here about Russia, one of them shrugged his shoulders and said, "What can they do to me? I have nothing more to lose."
The feeling that there is no hope on either side, is reviving the belief that "only a strong man can save us." Whereas the Nazis were utterly discredited by the end of the war, many Germans now think that, after all, Hitler was right. The success of Military Government in creating Nazis, is illustrated by the joke about the German who came to the denazification office to register as a Nazi. "Why the h-- didn't you come three years ago?" he is asked. "I wasn't a Nazi then," he replied.
After spending a few weeks in Bavaria, I could appreciate the force of Carlo Schmidt's speech at a Social-Democratic party meeting in Berlin which I attended on November 27, 1948. He said that thousands of marks had been collected in Bavaria for the Communist Party by people who were "laying in stocks of Persil* for the next cleaning." People who were preparing for any eventuality were trying secretly to insure themselves against a Communist victory while voting for "reaction," meaning the Christian-Democratic party (CDU)
"I wish," Carlo Schmidt said, "that I could take some of the strength of Berlin back with me to the West. In the Western zones—where, as compared to the East, we enjoy some freedom and peace—there is defeatism. The future seems to offer us nothing but suffering, and hope is almost dead. But here in Berlin you are showing that we Germans can still make history as well as suffer—here a glorious chapter is being written in the record of man's struggle for freedom. The Berliners are showing the world how a brave people can behave in defeat under alien occupation."
* A well-known brand of soap flakes.
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"The German name," he continued, "has been rehabilitated in Berlin. It is honored once more. We have only Berlin to thank for the fact that there is today some sympathy for the German people.
"We in the Western zones are sending you a few calories, but we are receiving from you something infinitely more precious : our moral calories come to us from Berlin. We owe it to you that Germany has regained its self-respect, and that we can hope that at last Germans will again be at home in their own country."
The hall was icy cold, unheated except for the body warmth of the thousands assembled. Carlo Schmidt had fired them; Ernst Reuter, who spoke next, evoked a warmth of affection which few democratic leaders in the world today can inspire. Looking like a sad sea lion, in his overcoat and with a muffler around his neck, hoarse and tired and with a bad cold, Reuter spoke to the crowd as their elected mayor rather than as a leader of the Social-Democratic party. Schmidt had spoken against the Christian-Democratic party in the Western zones, although he had been careful to distinguish between the Berlin Christian Democrats fighting together with the SPD for liberty, and the Bavarian CDU leaders whom he called "hard-faced men" who "mean money when they speak of God." But the only part of Reuter's speech which could be construed as Socialist appeal was also a plea for unity. "Adenauer."* he said, "is a foreigner to Berlin which he does not visit. He lives on the lovely Rhine, but he should remember that Berlin is also German and that the Rhine belongs to us too."
"The Communists," continued Reuter, "will never win power if the Germans remain united against them."
Carlo Schmidt had appealed to the Berliners to "free us of the West" from the domination of the reactionaries who "deny the right of the masses to be a subject instead of an object in the economic process." The people, he had said, see no value in democracy if it means that they have to "endure despotism in the factories six days a week, and become free men only once in every four years when sticking a paper in the ballot box."
Reuter, however, addressed this Socialist meeting in much the same terms as I had heard him speak to the hundreds of thousands of Germans of all parties assembled outside the Reichstag in September.
* The leader of the CDU who was also chairman of the Parliamentary Council at Bonn engaged in drawing up a constitution for Western Germany.
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"We are the only people in Europe still forced to live in war conditions," said Reuter. "We cannot rebuild our besieged city; we still live in fear and deprived of the possibility to work and reconstruct our devastated homes."
And again, as on every occasion on which I heard him speak, Reuter insisted : "We are not enemies of the Russian people. We are fighting against the policy of the Soviet occupation power."
"We cannot help it that our women will never forget what happened to them at the hands of the Russian soldiers." Reuter continued, "but we are haters of no people, race, or nation."
Both speakers emphasized Berlin's position as the capital of Germany, and Schmidt assured the Berliners that the Germans of the Western zones would insist on Berlin's being represented in the Parliament of Western Germany.
I did not meet Kurt Schumacher, the chairman of the SPD, who was in the hospital recovering from the amputation of a leg while I was in Germany. So Ernst Reuter and Carlo Schmidt are the two outstanding Social-Democratic leaders I got to know. I cannot say which is the greater man of the two, since their experience and the problems they face today are so dissimilar. Reuter spent the war years in exile in Turkey; Schmidt was an officer in the German Army, although never a Nazi. Reuter is leading the German resistance in Berlin against Communism with some Anglo-American support. Schmidt is fighting a battle on two fronts : against Communism and against the Western Military Governments which still treat the Germans as unworthy of the rights of free men.
Both men are brave, sincere, and unflinching in their defense of democracy. Both are physically strong and dynamic personalities. Reuter, the Prussian who used to be a professor, and Schmidt the poet who was a soldier, are at one in their repudiation of the narrow, doctrinaire socialism of the past. The basic aims and values of both men are primarily liberal. They have both assimilated the experience of the past decades and understand, far better than most Western Labour and Socialist leaders, that the economic organization of society is secondary to the preservation of basic liberties, justice, respect for the dignity of man, honor and truthfulness and fair-dealing between men and groups and nations. They are also realists who refuse to accept words for deeds, and know that all the fine proclamations of the United Nations mean nothing, if denied by actions contrary to the principles professed by the democracies.
As I sat listening to Reuter in my seat next to his wife, I sensed her fears as well as her love and pride. Few others have thus defied Soviet terror at close quarters and escaped death. Frau Reuter lives in perpetual fear that the Russians will murder, or kidnap and execute, her brave husband. She also had good reason to dread that his health will break, since he never spares himself and works night and day without sufficient good food, for the Western occupying powers, unlike the Soviets, give no material aid to those who fight our battles.
Three months earlier I had sat with the Reuters in the little garden of their house in Zehlendorf, where in his "spare time" Ernst cultivates his vegetables like any other Berliner lucky enough to have a small plot of land to produce some food to supplement their inadequate rations.
We had discussed the chances of continuing American support of German democracy, and I had expressed my horror and disgust of the conqueror versus conquered attitude of the British and Americans in Berlin, which reminded me of the behavior of the "whites" toward Asiatic and African peoples. Reuter had replied that all that was "your business," not his. He had made me understand, without precisely saying so, that just as he, like all Germans had to suffer the consequences of Nazi crimes, so we in the West would similarly be held responsible before the bar of history for our government's "crimes against humanity" in defeated Germany. It was our affair, not his. He was concerned with Germany's present fight for freedom against the Communist totalitarian tyranny which threatened to supplant Hitler's.
Reuter told me that it was he who had first formulated the slogan "Berlin is not Prague." He was expressing the feeling of the Berliners that if they could stand firm, in spite of hunger and cold and Communist terror, they would eventually be able to win freedom and "make it impossible for the West any longer to treat us as natives."
The world, having seen the fall of Czechoslovakia without a struggle, had merely watched and said, "Who will be the next victim of Communist aggression?" But Berlin had shown that even an unarmed people, given the will and courage to resist, could withstand the Communist assault.
Reuter was amused, instead of bitter, about the British. While not at all flattering in his remarks about the United States occupation authorities, he said that the Americans were less self-confident, more curious and somewhat more human in their contacts with the Germans than the British, who are "the real master race." Conversations with the Americans in Berlin were "possible"; although he and other Germans were still treated as underlings, they could at least discuss with the Americans the situation caused by the blockade. But the British continued to be "stiff." The British knew their business and made fewer mistakes than the Americans, but the latter at least behaved as human beings. The behavior of British officers, on the contrary, seemed similar to that of the stiff-necked German officials who respected nothing but force.
One day, Reuter said, he had got really angry with the British and told them that he would no longer obey their orders unless they changed their attitude. "Tell your general," he had said, "that he can expect complete disintegration of the administrative machinery." The result of this defiance was a call to visit the British general in command.
"Is it true," Reuter was asked, "that you have said you will no longer obey us."
"If the situation continues as at present, I cannot obey," Reuter replied.
The British general thereupon smiled and terminated the interview. He had wanted to make it clear that the Germans must obey under any circumstances. Confronted with a blunt refusal, he had climbed down.
The Communist menace had forced the Western Powers to start treating the Germans with more politeness. After the Soviet blockade of Berlin began, both the American and British representatives in the Allied Kommandatura had actually got up when the German representatives arrived.
Reuter was convinced that the Social-Democratic party's majority in Berlin had been won through the confidence engendered by its behavior. Eventually this confidence would enable it to become the leading party in Germany as a whole, and thus enable it to carry out its economic and social program. But, he said, "we shall never try to establish a socialist economy by force. We shall endeavor to lead Germany to socialism, but not to force it upon our people. We don't think of economic problems in the old terms.
So many things formerly believed impossible have been proved possible; and so many simple solutions have proved fallible. We are no longer doctrinaire Socialists, for according to theoretical writings we all ought to be dead. We know, from our terrible experiences, that reliance on absolute theories can lead us to ruin; we must experiment and judge by trial and error what are the best forms of economic organization, but always conceiving of freedom and respect for individual rights, justice, and human dignity as the criteria of progress."
It had been warm and peaceful in Reuter's garden, and he had stilled my fears that Western civilization was doomed, by his calm and confident belief that in the end right and decency and reason would triumph. Afterwards, in the Western zones, it had been far harder to believe in the victory of democracy than in Berlin. In the West instead of the sound of American planes flying in supplies to defend democracy, there was the sight of factories being torn down to discredit it.
How long would German fears of the Communist terror prevent their coming to terms with the Russians if we continue to demonstrate that there is no hope for Germany on our side?
In Berlin no one is ever likely to forget the murder and rape and pillage of the Russian occupiers when they held the whole town, and everyone knows what is going on now in the Eastern zone. But in the Western zones they are mainly concerned with their own grievances under Western occupation.
One of the German Defense Counsel at Nuremberg who has a French wife and lives on Lake Constance under French occupation, said to me :
"Russia could create a powerful pro-Russian movement in Germany in a few weeks, if she would give even the smallest practical proof of good will in deeds, instead of words. She would only have to offer to give back our lost territories and give us a national government. The Russians have this chance to play on German patriotism while the Americans haven't. Moreover, the Americans want us to have no patriotic feelings at all.
"Although almost all Germans are anti-Communist and terrified of what the Communists would do to them, if the Russians came with patriotic slogans and ceased to use the German Communists, they would be wonderfully successful.
"Most Germans would think twice before becoming soldiers of America. Not only is there little faith left in your democratic professions after the way you have treated us. The very fact that we still recognize that you are more humane and civilized than the Russians plays into their hands. Having little confidence that America will defend Germany or win the war quickly, it seems safer to go along with the Russians who will kill everyone who opposes them if they occupy Germany. We know, on the other hand, that those who fight for Russia won't all be killed after America's victory.
"Since the West offers us nothing to fight for and we have no illusions left about anybody or any political creed, don't expect us to think nowadays about anything but our personal security. Having been both Nazified and denazified with equal disregard for justice and honesty, and having also observed America's benevolent attitude toward the Communists so long as it suited her interests, we Germans are today disinclined to believe anything or fight for anybody."
This young German lawyer, although anti-Communist, had conceived a great affection and respect for the Russian people while on the Russian front in the early stages of the war. He had marched on foot from the Polish frontier to the Sea of Azov and been very much moved and impressed by the kindness of the people and the virtue of the women. When the German soldiers arrived footsore, hungry, and weary at the end of a long day's march the villagers would come with milk and make them comfortable.
"Their instinct was to help the suffering because they themselves have suffered all their lives. Yet the women who tended to us were extremely virtuous. They were friendly, but they would have no sexual intercourse with us. They were human beings helping other human beings and unconcerned with national hatreds and passions."
"Coming from Nazi Germany where everything was action, it made a tremendous impression on me to come to Russia where suffering is constant and borne with passive courage. Many of us who were soldiers in Russia now feel that we have more to learn from Russia than from the West.
"By being so active and working hard, we Germans have made the whole world unhappy. Our greatest need is to develop our contemplative faculties, and here we can learn much from the Russian people.
"We Germans are always either too hostile or too friendly to other people, whereas the Russians take people as individuals, and know that principles are just principles, and that it is human behavior which counts. We ask, What has he done, but the Russian people ask, What kind of a man is he?"
This is a romantic view. But there is no doubt that many Germans feel sympathy for the Russian people, who are as miserable, oppressed, and poor as themselves.
A few of the returned prisoners of war I talked to in Germany, without having any such philosophical concepts as those I have just quoted, felt friendly toward the Russians who had suffered as much or more as themselves. And down in Munich where I met a whole group of Russians who had been prisoners of war or "slave laborers" in Germany, I found a reciprocal friendliness toward the German people. The maxim that suffering makes all men brothers may yet bring the Germans and Russians together against the rich, comfortable, and complacent West. The Germans and Russians are held apart only by the cruelty and stupidities of the Soviet Government. Should the latter be able or willing to reverse its policies, I have no doubt that it is true that Russia could win immense influence in Germany. Fortunately for the Western world the crimes and follies of the Soviet dictator are greater even than ours. Nevertheless our belief that however badly we treat the Germans they must remain on our side, is a dangerous delusion.
The fact that the United States Military Government has its headquarters in Berlin probably gives it an unduly optimistic view of German sentiments. As a well-known German politician in Bavaria said to me : "The sentiments of the Berlin population are quite different from those of the Germans in the Western zones. Not only do the Berliners know better what to expect from Russia : they are also terrified at the prospect of the revenge the Soviet Government will exact if Berlin is abandoned by the West. But in the Western zones where the people have experienced only the injustices perpetrated by America, Britain, and France, and where there has been no such strong opposition to Communism as in Berlin, the people are less afraid of Russia."
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Chapter 6
The Nuremberg Judgments — Is Germany our Colony?
The material cost of vengeance is high enough, but the moral and political consequences are incalculable. It is as urgently necessary to revive the German people's faith in democratic justice as to cease destroying their assets and capacity to work for the rehabilitation and defense of Europe.
Four years after their unconditional surrender the Germans are still rechtlos : without civil or political rights and without the security offered by a government of laws not of men.
As one prominent German lawyer said to me at Nuremberg : "We have merely exchanged one dictatorship for another; after twelve years of Hitler's lawless rule, we have had four years of military government with its similar arbitrary decrees and denial of justice."
The basis of democracy is government of laws not of men, and this means that the law is known and applied to all. But at Nuremberg we not only applied ex post facto law but also stated that it applied only to Germans. According to the judgments of the United States tribunals at Nuremberg the will of the conquerors is absolute, and the vanquished have no right to appeal to international law, American law, or any other law against it.
Instead of teaching the Germans that "crime does not pay," we have enunciated the theory that the victors are entitled to do anything they please to the vanquished once the war is over. According to the logic of our judgments at Nuremberg, the Germans are punished, not for having committed war crimes, but for having lost the war.
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The belief that Might makes Right is clearly stated to be the basis of the trials the United States has conducted at Nuremberg. "We sit," said the American judges, "as a Tribunal drawing its sole power and jurisdiction from the will and command of the four occupying powers. . . . In so far as Control Council Law No. 10 may be thought to go beyond established principles of international law, its authority, of course, rests upon the exercise of the 'sovereign legislative power' of the countries to which the German Reich unconditionally surrendered."*
Few Americans at home may be aware of it, but their representatives at Nuremberg have expressly stated that the victors are not bound by the same laws as the vanquished. When the German defense counsel argued that if it was a crime against international law for the Germans in occupied Poland and Russia to confiscate private property, use civilians and prisoners of war as forced laborers, and starve the people in the occupied territories, then why is it not also a crime for American, British, French or Russian Military Government to do the same thing, they were told :
"The Allied Powers are not subject to the limitations of the Hague Convention and rules of land warfare."
Why?
"Because," said the American judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg, "the rules of land warfare apply to the conduct of a belligerent in occupied territory so long as there is an army in the field attempting to restore the country to its true owner, but these rules do not apply when belligerency is ended, there is no longer any army in the field, and, as in the case of Germany, subjugation has occurred by virtue of Military conquest." † (Italics added.)
In other words, if Germany had won the war, she would have ceased to be bound by international law, and none of her nationals could be held guilty of having committed war crimes or "crimes against humanity." Since we won it we are not limited in any way by the provisions of the Hague or Geneva conventions, or by any international or recognized law.
The argument that what is a crime during war ceases to be one as soon as the fighting stops, is surely the choicest bit of legal sophistry thought up by Mr. Justice Jackson, or Brigadier General Telford Taylor who succeeded him as chief United States Prosecutor at Nuremberg.
* P. 14 et seq. of the Judgment in case No. 3. See also the Krupp case (No. 10) and other trials where the same thesis is repeated.
† Ibid., p. 10.
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It is tantamount to saying that you must not hit a man below the belt while you are fighting him, but you can kick him in his most sensitive spot once he is down and out.
The argument that the Hague and Geneva conventions ceased to be binding on us the moment the Germans surrendered unconditionally was continually repeated by the American judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg : "A distinction is clearly warranted," it was stated in the Judges case, "between the measures taken by the Allies prior to destruction of the German Government, and those taken thereafter. Only the former need to be tested by the Hague Regulations, which are inapplicable in the situation now prevailing in Germany."
This theory was given immediate application after Germany's surrender. Many German prisoners of war in American hands, who had hitherto been decently treated, suddenly found themselves transformed into rightless men liable to be forced to work long hours for a pittance in consequence of a disposition made in Washington. Instead of being sent home at the war's end, according to the Geneva Convention, their American captors handed them over to the French to be used as slave laborers in mines and factories. The French thereupon deprived them even of their warm clothing and the dollars they had earned as prisoners of war. The British similarly kept German prisoners of war as forced laborers for years after the end of the war.
President Truman's agreement at Potsdam, that "reparations in kind" should be exacted from Germany in the form of labor conscripted to work in the victor countries, gave Stalin the right to add hundreds of thousands more German slave laborers to the gangs of prisoners of war already working in Russia.
This imitation of Nazi practices was given a "legal" basis by the convenient thesis that international law ceased to be binding upon the victorious "democracies" on May 15, 1945, when Germany surrendered unconditionally.
The fact that only the Germans are liable to punishment for war crimes, because they were defeated and have no government to protect them, was expressly stated at Nuremberg :
"It must be admitted that Germans were not the only ones who were guilty of committing war crimes; other violators of international law could, no doubt, be tried, and punished by the state of which they were nationals, by the offended state if it can secure jurisdiction of the person, or by an International Tribunal of competent authorized jurisdiction."
"The apparent immunity from prosecution of criminals in other states," the Germans were told, "is not based on the absence there of the rules of international law we enforce here" [at Nuremberg], but is due to our exercise of sovereignty in Germany as against the impossibility of any international authority assuming power "within a state having a national government exercising sovereign power."*
In other words, the conquest of Germany and elimination of her government makes German nationals liable to prosecution while the nationals of undefeated countries are not so liable. The fact that only the defeated are liable to punishment for breaches of international law was expressly stated in the Generals case (No. 7). When the German defense counsel argued that such acts as "devastation unwarranted by military necessity"; the seizure of private property; the infliction of general penalties, "pecuniary or otherwise," upon the population of occupied territories; "requisitions in kind and services demanded from municipalities or inhabitants except for the needs of the army of occupation," and "out of proportion to the resources of the country"; seizure of "cash funds and realizable securities which are not strictly the property of the state"; compulsory recruitment from the population of an occupied country for labor in the occupying country; and other acts expressly forbidden by the Hague and Geneva conventions had all been committed by the victors as well as by the Germans, the American Tribunal replied :
"It has been stated in this case that American occupational commanders issued similar orders. This Tribunal is not here to try Allied occupational commanders, but it should be pointed out that subsequent to the unconditional surrender of Germany, she has had no lawful belligerents in the field.†
In their anxiety to prove that only Germans should be punished for war crimes, the American judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg with their theory concerning the difference between what is permitted under a "nonbelligerent" occupation, but not permissible while fighting is going on, have got the Americans and the British into an ambiguous position. Mr. Richard Stokes, the English Labour Member of Parliament, argued in a speech made in the House of Commons on June 30, 1948 :
I doubt very much if we are legally entitled to take reparations until there is a peace treaty. I should like to hear the opinions of an international lawyer about that. I believe that reparations form a part of peace terms, and are not a consequence of the cessation of hostilities, even if this involved unconditional surrender. I believe that reparations taken before a peace treaty are loot, and nothing else. Honorable Members may not like the term, but that is what I believe it is in international law.
* Ibid., p. 22.
† Statement by the Tribunal on "The Hague and Geneva Conventions."
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Such legal and moral scruples have not troubled the American prosecutors at Nuremberg, who have felt secure in the knowledge that the American public has been left completely ignorant by its press and Congress of the moral and legal issues at stake. Some of the United States Judges sent to Nuremberg, however, have felt qualms in applying an unprecedented law based on nothing but the power and will of the conquerors. In the "Judges Case" where the basis for the judgments pronounced at Nuremberg was most clearly expressed, the United States Tribunal endeavored to reassure itself by saying : "Surely Control Council Law Number Ten, which was enacted by the authorized representatives of the four greatest powers on earth, is entitled to judicial respect." The will of the Big Four Powers was thus held to provide the sanction reserved to the Deity or to a rational concept of the Rights of Man in other legal systems.
While maintaining that international law does not apply to our occupation of Germany because her unconditional surrender transferred sovereignty to the occupying powers, it was also stated at Nuremberg that "the fact that the Four Powers are exercizing supreme legislative authority in governing Germany for the punishment of German criminals, does not mean that the jurisdiction of this Tribunal rests in the slightest degree upon any German law, prerogative or sovereignty."
This latter statement is obviously in direct contradiction to the first, which claims that the transfer to us of sovereignty in Germany justifies our repudiation of international law. We have the Germans both going and coming. We refuse to observe international law because we are the "sovereign" power; and we refuse to apply American or German law because our tribunals derive their power from "international authority." The Germans are left rechtlos—without the protection of any law and subject to the arbitrary decrees issued by their conquerors. We have, in fact, outlawed the whole German "race" as Hitler outlawed the Jews. In the name of democracy we have subjected the German people to the rule, not of laws but of men.
Since no peace treaty has been signed and yet our occupation of Germany is held to be "nonbelligerent," the question arises : "What is its legal basis?" Is the United States ruling its zone in Germany as a colony in theory as well as practice? In that case should not either "native" law or American law be applied, since international law has been ruled out? The answer given to the German defense counsel was in the negative.
Neither international law, nor German law, nor American law, nor the basic principles of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence were the basis of the indictments, procedures, and judgments of the Nuremberg Tribunals.
The British, French, and Russians withdrew from Nuremberg after the first and only "International Military Tribunal" (I.M.T.) had tried and condemned Goering and other top Nazi leaders. The other twelve trials which subsequently took place at Nuremberg and only came to an end in November 1948, were all-American shows. The judges and prosecutors were all American citizens; the trials were held under the American flag; the proceedings began each morning by the Marshal of the Court asking God's blessing on the United States of America; and the indictments ran : "The United States of America, plaintiff versus the defendants." Nevertheless the tribunals were supposed to be "international" and to derive their authority from the Allied Control Council even after the latter ceased to exist.
Neither the principles nor the procedures of American jurisprudence were followed, and the defendants were debarred from appealing to the Supreme Court or any higher authority than the United States Military Governor. The verdict of the American judges who constituted the Tribunal was absolute, except for the right of General Clay to mitigate the sentences.
The "legal" basis for these trials was Control Council Law No. 10, drawn up by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France for the "Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Peace and Against Humanity."
Far from being the beautiful child of International Justice as Mr. Justice Jackson still maintains, CC Law No. 10 is the monstrous offspring of Communist "Peoples democratic justice" and the savage principle of "Woe to the Vanquished."
It is based on the totalitarian concept of collective guilt and punishment. It decrees that anyone, who in any capacity, military or civilian, aided or abetted the German war effort, is guilty of the crime of waging aggressive war. Its scope is so wide that it defeated its purpose. American judges sent to Nuremberg to judge war criminals have not known where to draw the line without incriminating the whole German population and creating a precedent for the incrimination of all Americans in any future war designated as "aggressive" by the Communists. For CC Law No. 10 can be held to mean that the peasant or farmer who produced and sold food, the industrialist who continued to give employment and the workers employed, the civil servant and the soldier who obeyed orders, are all guilty.
CC Law No. 10 seems in fact to have been a "legal" attempt to indict the whole German nation and thus justify the Morgenthau Plan. But such was the reluctance of most American judges to administer totalitarian "justice," that none but the top policy makers condemned by the International Military Tribunal have been sentenced on this count, in spite of the passionate efforts of the American prosecution to secure convictions.*
Unfortunately, however, the articles of Control Council Law No. 10 relating to "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" which are equally wide in their scope have been the basis for the sentences imposed at Nuremberg by American Tribunals.
According to CC Law No. 10 you are accounted guilty of a war crime or atrocity if you "took a consenting part therein" (i.e., obeyed orders); were "connected with plans or orders involving its commission"; were "a member of any organization or group connected with the commission of any such crime"; "held a high position, civil or military" (including General Staff), or "held a high position in the financial, industrial or economic life" of Germany or its allies or its satellites.
* Since this was written von Weizsäcker has been convicted on the aggressive-war charge as concerns Czechoslovakia. It is an ironic commentary on the Nuremberg trials that the man whom Lord Halifax and British Foreign Office officials testified had done his utmost to try to stop Hitler from going to war, and who, as a leader of the German opposition, escaped death after the July 20, 1944 plot only because he was Minister to the Vatican, should have been convicted by the United States Tribunal on an aggressive-war charge. Judge Powers, of Iowa, wrote a dissenting opinion, but the views of the prosecution were accepted by the other two judges.
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This latter provision suggests the influence of the Communists in drawing up the CC Law No. 10, since it indicts most of the capitalist class.
The American judges at Nuremberg insisted on drawing a line and would not apply the principle of collective guilt in the manner demanded by the prosecution. They insisted, for the most part, on proof of some direct responsibility or overt act, and thus modified the law, instead of acting like Soviet judges. Nevertheless, in many cases the judgments at Nuremberg have no basis in international law and bear the imprint of a Communist conception of justice. This was notably the case when Alfred Krupp was indicted and condemned in place of his father, although the younger man had never been in control of the Krupp enterprises.
It was strange and horrifying to sit listening to the proceedings in the Ministers case (No. 11) in the same courtroom in which the representatives of the Soviet dictatorship had formerly shared the bench with American, British, and French judges, and to hear American jurists in November 1948 refer to the judgments of the International Military Tribunal as precedents. When one reflected that General Rudenko, who was the chief Russian prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal trial, is now commandant of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in the Russian zone, one could appreciate what kind of "justice" was being administered by American judges at Nuremberg.
The powers and procedure to be followed by the American Nuremberg Tribunals were laid down in United States Military Government Ordinance Number Seven. This ordinance specifically states that American rules of evidence are not to be applied by the judges. Hearsay and double hearsay evidence is permitted, and it is left entirely to the discretion of the judges whether or not the defense be permitted to question the authenticity or probative value of evidence. It is worth reproducing Paragraph VII of Ordinance No. 7, since it is one of the bitterest complaints of the German defense lawyers that all known rules of evidence were jettisoned by the Nuremberg Tribunals :
The Tribunals shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. They shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which they deem to have probative value. Without limiting the foregoing general rules, the following shall be deemed admissible if they appear to the tribunal to contain information of probative value relating to the charges : affidavits, depositions, interrogations, and other statements, diaries, letters, records, findings, statements and judgments of the military tribunals and the reviewing and confirming authorities of any of the United Nations, and copies of any document or other secondary evidence of the contents of any document, if the original is not readily available or cannot be produced without delay. The tribunal shall afford the opposing party such opportunity to question the authenticity or probative value of such evidence as in the opinion of the tribunal the ends of justice require.
The Judges were also given the right to be informed beforehand of any evidence to be presented by the defense, and could refuse to allow it if they did not consider it "relevant." Considering the close proximity in which the judges and prosecutors lived in the small closed American community in Nuremberg, this proviso was taken by the Germans to mean that the prosecution would always be informed beforehand of the defense's evidence. The assumption that the judges and the prosecutors had an identity of interest was justified in at least one trial by the spectacle of the prosecutors shaking hands with the judges and congratulating them on their verdict.
The defense counsel were in any case in a very weak position. The accused had all spent a long period in prison before being brought to trial and their papers had been seized and searched by a large American staff. Whatever was useful came into the hands of the prosecution, while the defense lawyers had the utmost difficulty in securing any documents. Only in the last trial, that of Baron von Weizsäcker and other Foreign Office officials, was the defense allowed to peruse the files of captured documents in the possession of Military Government, and even in this case only a few weeks were allowed in comparison with the years during which the prosecution had prepared its case.
In the Krupp case the German lawyers never had an opportunity to search the files carefully and didn't even know if all the files had been made available.
The accused, weakened by long imprisonment and insufficient food before being brought to trial, had to rely for the most part on their memories, instead of upon documents, for their defense.
The gravest handicap of all under which the defense labored was the difficulty of finding witnesses, obtaining access to them, and inducing them to testify at Nuremberg. The prosecution had all Military Government information and facilities at its disposal for locating witnesses, and the right to imprison them, interrogate them endlessly and exert fearful pressures to induce them to testify as the prosecution desired.
The defense lawyers had neither access to Military Government information, nor communication and transport facilities, nor funds to spend on searching for witnesses, since the property of all the accused was sequestered before they were proved guilty.
At the time of the International Military Tribunal trial of major war criminals, nearly all the witnesses were in jail, and could not be interviewed by the defense if the prosecution claimed them as its witnesses. By 1947 the situation had improved so that most witnesses were free, although some were still in prison and could be interviewed by the defense counsel only in the presence of a representative of the prosecution.
Naturally, witnesses whose release from imprisonment depended on the favor of the United States Military Government were reluctant to give any testimony contrary to the desires of the prosecution. Moreover, even those not in custody were frightened by the close connection between the prosecution and the denazification authorities.
There was a "Special Projects" branch of Military Government in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, which analyzed all the documents presented at the trials with a view to uncovering such evidence as might convict the witnesses in denazification courts. Thus many witnesses found themselves hauled off to prison to be tried by denazification courts supplied with evidence against them by the "Special Projects" branch.
The fear of all witnesses that they would land up in prison themselves if they came into the United States zone to testify at Nuremberg was so great that in the fall of 1947 Military Government had to give "safe conducts" guaranteeing their return home to witnesses living in the British and French zones.
Witnesses at Nuremberg were never subject to the horrible tortures used at the Dachau Military Tribunal trials, which I deal with in the next chapter. At Nuremberg the pressures exerted on witnesses by the prosecution were mental rather than physical. It was often possible to get the testimony required from a witness by keeping him in prison for two or three years in terrible anxiety for the fate of his family, left unprovided for, or by threatening him with being arraigned as a war criminal himself if he refused to testify against the accused.
In some cases the all-too-familiar weapon of Military Government in Germany was employed : the threat of handing over an un-co-operative witness to the Russians. This practice was dramatically revealed in the trial of Baron von Weizsäcker and other German Foreign Office officials, in the fall of 1948.
Van Weizsäcker had so many eminent liberal friends abroad who testified to his innocence that it was possible to raise funds to hire an American lawyer for his defense. Mr. Warren Magee of Washington, D.C., came to Nuremberg and, being an American, was able to obtain access to documents denied to the German defense counsel. He managed to get hold of a transcript of the interrogation of Friedrich Gaus, who although designated as the "Grey Eminence" of the German Foreign Office, and as "Ribbentrop's evil spirit," had become the prosecution's chief witness. There was a sensation in court when Mr. Magee read out the transcript of Gaus's first interrogation which showed that Mr. Kempner, the American prosecutor, had threatened to hand Gaus over to the Russians, if he did not help the prosecution.
The highhanded manner in which the American Tribunal treated the defense counsel in several of the trials, and the denial to the defense of the right to examine or cross-examine many witnesses, led to one of the biggest scandals of the Nuremberg trials, and finally discredited American justice in German eyes.
The American judges in the Krupp case were from all accounts more prejudiced and un-American in their method of conducting a court of law than any others who came to Nuremberg. They continually overruled the defense counsel, while allowing the prosecution to shout and rant at the witnesses and the German lawyers. Finally, Judge Daly drove the defense counsel to leave the court in a body in protest. He first overruled the German lawyers' objections to the examination of witnesses out of court by a commissioner, and then arranged for the examination to take place while the Tribunal was sitting, so that the defense lawyers would have no opportunity of being present unless they could arrange among themselves which of them would stay in court and which of them be present at the commissioner's examination.
When one of the defense counsel started to ask for an adjournment in order that this could be done, he had hardly opened his mouth before Judge Daly, then presiding, said to him : "Take your seat or I'll order you out of the courtroom." The German, Dr. Schilf, having started to say, "Ich bitte darum" ["I beg you"], Judge Daly told him to "remove himself." Thereupon the other defense counsel followed him out of the court in a spontaneous protest.
Not having been permitted to speak, the German lawyers sat down to draft a written statement asking to be allowed to exercise their right to be present at the examination of witnesses. Before they could present it to the Tribunal, they were all arrested and taken into custody. They were kept in prison over the week end and then asked to apologize for their "contempt of court," although the apologies would seem to have been clearly due to them, not from them.
Dr. Kranzbuehler, who was Krupp's counsel and a brilliant jurist, had been absent on a case in the French zone when this incident occurred. On his return, which coincided with the release of his fellow defense lawyers from prison and the demand that they all apologize to the court, he made a statement to the Tribunal, part of which I reproduce below. Because of the contempt of American justice shown by this Nuremberg Tribunal applying the bastard law based on CC Law No. 10 and United States Military Government ordinance No. 7, Kranzbuehler was able to shame the American judges.
Referring to the question of whether or not the German lawyers had been guilty of "contempt of court" he said :
I am in the unfortunate position of not knowing according to which law this decision is to be taken. Yesterday the Tribunal through Judge Wilkins explicitly refused to apply American law. It has rather tried to base its decision, or based its decision, on Ordinance Number Seven which gives the authority to the Tribunal to have a summary proceeding "with contumacy," as it is said there.
I would like to comment on this as follows : The question of which law is to be applied is of fundamental importance. The attorney has grown up and is trained in the legal concepts of his country. When, in a task that he has undertaken as a German lawyer, judgment is suddenly passed under the legal system of a country which is foreign to him, or according to a legal system which does not belong to any country at all, but the significance and interpretation of which is entirely up to the discretion of the Tribunal, then there is great danger that decisions are passed which in his eyes are a grave injustice.
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The German defense counsel is already surprised to ascertain that his conduct is considered according to the same procedural regulations as apply to the trial of alleged war criminals, that is, rules which are drawn up for a specific purpose, and that this is the opinion of the Tribunal has definitely been confirmed to me when I moved that Judge Daly should be excluded because of prejudice. Therefore, without regard to which law the Tribunal will finally consider using, I state the principles which would be guiding for such incidents as occurred here under German law. Only then will the Tribunal understand the basis of the instinctive reactions of the defense attorneys present here.
According to German procedural law, it is first of all a breach of duty for a judge not to hear a motion by defense counsel. Such a breach of duty entitles a German defense counsel, among other things, to complain to the superiors of such a judge. Furthermore, a German defense counsel has the possibility, when he deals with a tribunal which is made up of several judges, to object against the ruling of one of the members of the tribunal and to appeal beyond that to the decision of the whole of the tribunal. Therefore, according to German procedure, it was right for Dr. Schilf to do what he did. In addition, a German judge is not permitted to dismiss a defense counsel from the courtroom so long as he performs his duty.
Under German law there are very often long and heated discussions between the tribunal and the defense counsel, and no judge would think that he could hold a defense counsel guilty of contempt of court because of objections on the part of the defense counsel to the statements of the tribunal. For such a conception, Your Honor, is not included in German law. The judge has no disciplinary authority against a defense counsel. . . . If the tribunal believes that the defense counsel has not fulfilled his duty properly, then it can appeal for a decision to the bar association having jurisdiction. On the other hand, however, the defense counsel has the right to complain about the tribunal if he believes that their attitude caused him to be dismissed from the courtroom.
With biting sarcasm, Kranzbuehler observed :
These in large outlines are the fundamentals of German law. Your Honors will probably agree with me that under such legal training the events look entirely different than they look from your point of view under the legal training of an American Judge.
While making his oblique denunciation of "American" justice as applied at Nuremberg, Kranzbuehler made good use of his opportunity to protest against the unfairness of the whole proceedings; and he was heard through to the end, perhaps because Judge Schick, United States president of all the courts, had told Judge Daly and Judge Wilkins that they had got themselves into a mess and warned them to behave with more circumspection.
This is the third trial [Kranzbuehler said] which I am experiencing at Nuremberg. I cannot say that I am spoiled in my expectations of Nuremberg trials which is partly caused by the nature of the whole procedures. . . . Many and grave anxieties have overshadowed the defense counsel in this trial to an enormous degree.
After protesting the kind of evidence decreed as inadmissible by the Judges, he concluded by saying :
I would ask the Tribunal to consider that these defendants have been in an almost hopeless position from the beginning, and are entirely dependent upon our being able to assure a fair trial for them. I know the Tribunal will probably say or perhaps think : "That is our business as judges, to safeguard a fair trial." But, Your Honors, you will probably have to admit that—I still remember the words which were said at the beginning of the session yesterday—that "ultimately this is a trial of the victors against the vanquished." In the judgment in the Flick case, right at the beginning, this fact was mentioned specifically. The Tribunal deduced from this its duty to safeguard all the rights and privileges of the defendants in every detail; but in these trials, here in Nuremberg, such a guarantee is only valid if either the Tribunal itself creates all the prerequisites for a fully fair trial, or if the defense counsel is in a position, because of their motions and objections, to insist that the trial be a fair one.
If you consider for a moment, Your Honors, that you have here the unlimited authority of an American judge, which you know from your own home country, but that we have not all the guarantees here which you have in your country to prevent a wrong or, in the eyes of the defense counsel, unjustified use of such authority. These defendants have no constitutional rights. It has been confirmed again and again to them that guarantees as given in American procedure are not applicable to them. . . . Neither is there a powerful press, which in complete independence, can see to it that no misuse of power can occur. . . ."
Dr. Kranzbuehler, also referred to the enormous responsibility of the German defense counsel at the Nuremberg Trials owing to the fact that there is no higher court of appeal. He had himself, on February 27, 1948, sent a telegram to President Truman saying that "all endeavors to secure a fair trial" had been frustrated "on account of rules originating from American military authorities," and appealing to the President of the United States for "help and relief." His appeal was not answered. It was referred back to the United States Military Government on the ground that the "international status of the Nuremberg tribunals based as they are on quadripartite agreement precludes any responsibility or duty resting upon any executive agency of the United States Government to entertain any such petition or plea." Kranzbuehler was further informed that no such German petitions would in future be transmitted by Berlin.
Thus, by the hypocritical pretense that the American Nuremberg Tribunals were "international," the United States washed its hands of responsibility for the conduct of its own judges. If this is the way we expect to teach respect for justice and democracy to the Germans, we must be among those whom the gods mark out for destruction by first making them mad.
The subject of the Nuremberg trials requires a book, not a few pages. I have endeavored here only to present the basic assumptions of the trials, so that the American public may know how justice is mocked in their name.
A Swiss journalist pointed out the disservice which these trials have rendered to the interests and reputation of the American people. Writing in Die Weltwoche of Zürich in October 1948, Robert Ingrim, quoted what Alexander Hamilton had said in 1788 :
To establish an act as a crime after it has been committed, or in other words to punish people for things which did not violate any law when committed, and the practice of arbitrary detention, were at all times the most favorite and also most horrid tools of tyranny.
Many of the condemned at Nuremberg were, no doubt, guilty of hideous crimes and deserved their sentences. But, as the Swiss journalist pointed out, the effect of verdicts based on ex post facto legislation violates the sense of justice so that even justified convictions leave doubts among a large number of people. We have made martyrs of criminals by the Nuremberg trials, and given a new lease on life to Nazi doctrines by our own transgressions against fundamental democratic principles.
Lastly the Nuremberg trials have aroused a justified suspicion, not only in Germany but also in other European countries, that the real objective of the Americans responsible for them was to "level the social structure of Germany." The aim of the prosecution at Nuremberg seemed to be to prove that "the capitalists and landowners" were the main support of Nazism, and to obscure the resemblance of the Third Reich to Stalin's Russia. Hence the endeavor to indict Flick and Krupp and other German industrialists as war criminals. Hence also the trials of German generals, some of whom had in fact opposed, not encouraged, Hitler's mad ambitions. Hence also, and far more unjustly, the arraignment at Nuremberg of Baron von Weizsäcker, the aristocratic diplomat who had continued in office under the Nazis, but whose endeavors to prevent war and to save the victims of Nazi terror were attested at his trial by such persons as Lord Halifax and other Englishmen in other responsible positions; the former French Ambassador François-Poncet : Carl Burckhardt, former High Commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig; von Steiger, the President of Switzerland; Bishop Berggrav, the leader of the Norwegian resistance movement under German occupation; the Pope; the American Catholic Bishop Muench, of Fargo, North Dakota, now Apostolic Visitor in Germany; the Protestant Bishop Wurm of Stuttgart, who was persecuted by the Nazis : and many of the relatives of Hitler's blood purges, including Jews.
As the afore-mentioned editor of the Swiss Weltwoche suggested, "by dragging the Junkers, militarists and industrial barons in the dust, not on the basis of individual guilt but collectively," the prosecution at Nuremberg was endeavoring to pave the way for Stalin by obscuring the fact that Nazism was akin to communism, and by falsely representing it as a "concoction of the German upper classes." They were endeavoring to destroy, not the Nazis but the pre-Nazi social structure of Germany, based on private property, free enterprise, and the European tradition.
The Kempners of Nuremberg [wrote Robert Ingrim] cannot get over the fact that the list of those executed after [the plot against Hitler of] July 20, 1944, looked like an excerpt from the Almanach de Gotha. Dee