Category: Books I have read

9th January 2009

In last week's post I wrote about Patrick Gordon-Walker, who was one of the first British news reporters to visit Belsen concentration camp, five days after its liberation by British army forces on April 15th 1945. When he was there, he recorded the first Jewish service held in the camp, which was later broadcast by the BBC.

The description of Belsen and the conclusions he drew from this, form only one part of his book ‘The Lid Lifts’. In this week’s post I’ve written about his impressions of other parts of Germany, as described in the book, during two tours following the advancing British and American troops; the first from February 24th to March 1st and the second in the final days of the war, from April 16th to 22nd. On his second tour, in April 1945, he covered 1,250 miles, travelling from West to East, across what was soon to be the British Zone of Germany, from Luxembourg via Aachen, Krefeld, across the Rhine to Essen, through the industrial area of the Ruhr, to Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel, north to Celle and Belsen, and then back east again via Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Düsseldorf and Aachen.

‘The Lid Lifts’ is the diary of these two tours, plus some concluding reflections. In the introduction he described the book as follows: “I kept a diary during these two trips – describing without art or afterthought what I saw. This diary follows. It is probably the best way of conveying what Germany is like today. There is no overall generalised picture. There are only innumerable impressions of a country, reeling and rocking on its feet. To this diary I have added certain conclusions and reflections based on my experiences as a whole.”

In the final chapter, titled ‘Reflections in Tranquillity’ he tried to sum up what he had seen, “draw a picture in as firm outline as I can manage” and at the end provide “my personal opinions on some of the problems of the future.” (It’s interesting to observe that he wrote two separate concluding chapters to the book. In ‘Reflections in Tranquillity’ he makes no reference to Belsen. His thoughts on the concentration camps are covered in the previous chapter ‘The Challenge of the K.Z.’ which I described in my post last week.)

Patrick Gordon-Walker was a very junior member of the post-war British labour government and had no official responsibility for policy towards Germany, but as one of the very few members of the government who spoke fluent German and knew something about the country, it seems likely that he had at least some unofficial influence, perhaps in his role as parliamentary private secretary to Herbert Morrison. He certainly remained interested in German affairs. As late at 1974, the same year he retired as an MP from the House of Commons, he took part in a conference, organised by a group of British and German historians, on German emigration and resistance to Hitler: “The ‘Other Germany’ in the Second World War”, attended by many of the German socialists he had known from their time as exiles in London during the war.

I have quoted some extracts from his book below at some length, not because I want to argue that Patrick Gordon-Walker’s views were right or wrong, but because much of what he advocated, as his personal opinion, became official British policy, such as: the re-education of POWs, the promotion of democracy from the bottom up, the reversal of the non-fraternisation policy, and the concern for the future German youth.

Like many other British observers (described in previous posts on this blog) he was shocked by the scale of destruction he saw all around him:

“The most emphatic impression that today’s Germany leaves in one’s mind is the fantastic scale of the destruction…. Some of the destruction was due to last-minute defence of towns – Düren and Jülich paid with their lives as towns for their defence. In most cases the destruction seems to have been due to air attack. But all of it – all the significant destruction was done since last autumn. Everywhere you hear – the real destruction was done in twenty minutes last October, last November, last December, this March. The destructive power of air raids seems to have made an advance in kind in the autumn of 1944…. In Germany today you can see the exact price of fighting on till five minutes past twelve.”

In addition to physical destruction, the social fabric of the country had collapsed. “In Germany, the whole apparatus of a modern state, capable of sustaining a population of millions, lies in destruction. That’s the lasting impression one brings back from Germany. Just below the surface you find a parallel social collapse. The Nazi party has run away; the army is in our prisoner-cages. These were the two principal organs of state. Without them there is no central Government. This does not just mean no Cabinet, no Ministerial Departments. It means no post, no telephones, no pensions, no law-courts. It means each community is isolated unto itself. The only means of movement is on foot. Local government too has collapsed. The whole apparatus for looking after sewage, trams, schools, has just packed up… Garbage has not been collected for months in Germany: in every town stand derelict trams where they last came to a stop. Most of them are not even overturned. German towns are Pompeiis petrified by the volcano of modern war.”

“The second most obtrusive impression left by Germany today is the vast number of Displaced Persons, as they are called. In all there are some ten-twelve millions of foreign workers and prisoners. They present a problem of vast dimensions. As a result of the allied victory the greatest slave-revolt in history has taken place in Germany – a white revolt. The slaves are the masters. And as they roam and wander, taking what they will, plundering and sometimes killing their oppressors and recent masters, they add to the German confusion and collapse. This problem is a passing one: it will be solved by the physical removal of the foreigners to their own countries.”

“There is one other extraordinary characteristic of Germany today. It is a country without men. Never do you see a young German man, except those pouring back to our prisoner cages. The streets are filled with women, young boys and men over sixty.”

There was no sign of resistance or any ‘Werewolf’ organisation. “There is total revulsion against the war and all it has brought in its train” together with “sincerely expressed bitterness against the regime and its leaders … here and there are groups of individuals who have not given in – in particular some of the Hitler Youth. But these traces of an embryo resistance movement seemed, in my observation, more than overweighted by the general readiness to denounce such people to the Allies. I am pretty confident that there is no danger of a mass-resistance. No immediate danger: what happens in the future depends on many things, some of them under our control.”

What of the future?

“For a long time the problem of Germany will be the problem of material reconstruction on a scale that it is hard to imagine. So vast that more destruction may have to be done: many buildings are unsafe – many must be completely pulled down. Towns, or sections of towns, may have to be burned. When I was in Brunswick the early hot spring-sun came out. At one there was the smell of death. Under the ruins of many towns must lie hundreds, even thousands of corpses – waiting to revenge themselves upon the living by spreading disease.”

In general, his impressions of the British Military Government were favourable. They were “sympathetic and firm, took their job very seriously and worked extremely hard.” But although Military Government was “tackling its immediate problems with vigour and considerable success” he was concerned that there appeared to be no long term aim. Military Government had “shown itself adept at rubble clearing. What is lacking is any policy beyond getting things running again as quickly as possible. There is vigour but no direction.”

In his view, Allied policy should be based on a positive engagement with the German people, not upon the fear of future German aggression. Taking the policy of non-fraternisation as an example, he argued that, although it was appropriate for Allied troops to conduct themselves with “a certain dignity and restraint”, the order had been imposed, to some extent, due to a fear that “our conquering soldiers will be wheedled and twisted by the diabolically clever Germans.” This was wrong and a better approach was to allow and encourage Allied soldiers to engage directly with German people. “One of our aims is to bring democracy to Germany; this can only, in the long run, be done positively, by regarding our soldiers as practical prophets of democracy – by bearing ourselves as moral and confident victors over evil.”

Another example of the need for a positive policy, as he saw it, arose from British and American fears that myths might form in Germany, similar to those that were formed after the First World War and subsequently exploited by Hitler, (such as the legend that Germany was only defeated by a stab in the back). Rather than “fight against the formation of all myths” it would be better to “encourage the right myths and create the possibility of their birth by our own positive and confident policy.”

“We want a Germany that is purged of national socialism and militarism – and of the myths that go with these things. But we also want a Germany that is, in the end friendly, co-operative, and truly desirous of democracy – that is desirous of our way of life and of the idea and impulses that underlie it. A Germany friendly to Western civilisation must be our ultimate ideal.”

Germans should not be treated as an oppressed people. “If Germans remain a proletariat in the heart of Europe – there can be no certainty of peace. Some fifty million people who reject Europe, who come to regard themselves as a permanent outcasts and react as outcasts, are an immense danger … The only policy an oppressed people need have is to upset the applecart in the hope that there will be some apples to pick up at the end … One of the evil consequences of such a course is that a people becomes conditioned to the ways of a proletariat nation – conspiracy, violence, ruthlessness and exaggerated nationalism.”

Foreshadowing subsequent events, he went on to say that the greatest immediate danger, so he believed, was a split between the occupying powers (ie the British, Americans, French and Russians) with “each power playing off its own Germans in its own zones and in its neighbour’s zones against the German adherents of other occupying powers.” Although neither Communism nor Democracy were well understood within Germany, both, in his view, could have a great appeal. “For Communism in the sense in which many Germans who profess themselves communists understand it, there certainly is a future in Germany – namely in the sense of radical egalitarian solutions. German socialists want much the same thing. Their persisting fear of Communism is a mixture of dislike of communist ethics and methods and of distrust of Soviet domination of the party.”

The ideal solution, in his view, was the development of democracy from the bottom up, through local trade unions, local government and other cooperative undertakings: “In the long run Germany’s fate might be a happy one. Democracy might be learned from the bottom up without capitalism. For there are at the moment none of the preconditions for capitalism. Co-operation will prove far more efficient and easy to organise. Capitalism could no doubt be revived in Germany: but it would have to be done by deliberate interference from outside – by the same sort of interference that would be necessary for the organisation of Communism in the technical Russian sense.”

Finally he mentioned two other problems; both related to “the absence of German manhood – the main cause for the lack of initiative in Germany today.” The first was the need to prevent young people becoming disillusioned and to harness their enthusiasm and energy to work for the community in a time of need, and for democracy. The second was to re-educate the millions of prisoners of war, and encourage those who were “eager to learn preach and practise Democracy” so that some would return early to their own country and others could be “sent as missionaries amongst the remaining prisoners.”

“By these means the new manhood that grows up in Germany and returns to Germany can become a force for good. Eager to do the hard work of rebuilding, starting schools and hospitals again, practising democracy and finding a peaceful and fruitful outlet for German energies.”

References:

Patrick Gordon-Walker, The Lid Lifts (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945)

Lothar Kettenacker (ed), The ‘Other Germany’ in the Second World War: Emigration and Resistance in International Perspective (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1977)

4th January 2009

According to Wikipedia, Patrick Gordon-Walker is now best remembered for losing his parliamentary seat for the constituency of Smethwick, in the 1964 British general election. At a time when voters in most parts of Britain were swinging to Labour, Smethwick went the opposite way, as his Conservative opponent fought a racist campaign, exploiting fears among the local inhabitants of large numbers of immigrants moving into the area.

At the time, Patrick Gordon-Walker was expected to become Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s first Labour cabinet. Despite losing his seat in the House of Commons, he was still appointed Foreign Secretary and a by-election was arranged for the supposedly safe Labour seat of Leyton. He lost this election as well, resigned as Foreign Secretary and his political career never recovered from the setback, despite regaining the seat in the general election of 1966, and being briefly appointed to the cabinet as Minister of Education and Science. He retired from this position in 1968 and as a Member of Parliament six years later, in 1974.

Twenty years earlier, in 1945, Patrick Gordon-Walker was one of the first British reporters to enter the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. During the war he worked for the BBC, broadcasting regularly to Germany. In the last few months of the war he made two tours of occupied Germany, following the advancing British and American troops; the first from February 24th to March 1st and the second in the final days of the war, from April 16th to 22nd. He made several recordings on these tours, some of which were broadcast on the BBC or Radio Luxemburg (which was now under Allied control). He kept a diary on these tours, which was published later in 1945 as a short book with the title ‘The Lid Lifts.’

Before the war he had taught history at Oxford University. He spoke fluent German, having spent a year in the country in 1931. During the war, while working for the BBC, he met and became friends with many of the German socialist exiles in London, especially the members of the Neu Beginnen group, such as Richard Loewenthal. He first entered parliament in 1945, was soon appointed PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to Herbert Morrison, and in 1947 joined the government as a minister in the Commonwealth Relations Office. During the Labour party’s years in opposition from 1951 to 1964, he was principal spokesman on foreign affairs and shadow foreign secretary.

He entered the camp at Belsen on Friday April 20th, five days after its liberation on April 15th, and in ‘The Lid Lifts’ he described how that afternoon he recorded the first Jewish eve of Sabbath service held in the camp:

“A group of around a hundred or so, in the open air amidst the corpses. Two or three women sang duets and solos. The [Jewish] padre read the service in English and Hebrew. No eye was dry. Certainly not mine. Most of the celebrants were in floods of tears.”

The following day he returned to the camp and recorded the Sabbath morning service:

“During the service, singing and the reading of the traditional prayer for the dead – all round women and men burst into tears and cried openly. We were packed tight in a wooden hut – people standing to the walls.”

The following day, Sunday April 22nd, he recorded in his diary: “I was feeling very angry with Germans.” But in the final two chapters of ‘The Lid Lifts’ written a few weeks later, after time for reflection based on his experiences during the tour as a whole, he came to a different and broader set of conclusions.

The first of the two concluding chapters was titled 'The Challenge of the K.Z.' It was dated May 18th, nearly a month after the end of his second tour of Germany. He started by asking what was it that made the concentration camps unique and “one of the exclusive characteristics of our own age.” The only parallel he could think of was the holds of the slave ships. “And when I heard of the maintenance of orchestras in the worst concentration camps I was reminded of the fiddlers engaged by slave traders to keep their cargo quieter.” However, unlike the slave ships, the concentration camps were imposed by a European government on large numbers of its own citizens, who were deprived of their liberty and their most basic legal rights as human beings. “Here is the link with the slaves in the holds of the ships. Here, too, is the distinction. The slaves are now amongst your fellow citizens. The slave ships, driven from the Atlantic, have anchored at Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald, in the midst of Europe.” 

A second factor which, in his view, made the camps unique, was their scale, mass-extermination, and the deliberate degradation of humanity. “Never have human beings been brought so low – deliberately and with calculation brought so low.”

What conclusions did he draw from this?  He was concerned that the camps had changed standards of morality, not only in Germany, but in Britain and elsewhere as well: “They have raised our standards of horror to dizzy heights. Slaughter and torture must be on a colossal scale or achieved by a novel means it is to draw attention at all today. How many people must be gassed or burned alive to make the headlines today? … We used to turn away our eyes and shut our ears because we did not wish to know: we look away now because we know too much. Because Hitler has played hell with our standards.”

He continued by saying “we must be doubly careful how we react” and horror alone was not enough. “The first and easy reaction is dangerous – kill them all – let the Germans starve. Hitler will triumph from his grave if this is our only reaction.” Not only were there German victims in the camps “Jews and political opponents and homosexuals” but “even overlooking that, such a reaction of blind vengeance would ignore our own share of the guilt.”

In his view, there had been a “long descent into degradation” and loss of moral standards, from the British concentration camps of the Boer War, through the Spanish civil war, to the compromises made at Munich. But above all he was concerned by a trend he observed among people at home, which he described as a “readiness to follow the trend that led to Belsen and Buchenwald.” In his view, the desire for revenge made people believe that the use of murder as a political weapon was acceptable. “Murder is often more convenient. Mass-murder often seems the convenient way out of intractable problems.”

The first step against this trend was to “restore our respect for death” and “no human life should be taken away without due formality.” Those responsible for the concentration camps would need to be punished, with the death penalty, but this should be done, not through using the same methods as the Nazis, but by following proper formal legal processes.

He believed that all German people had a special responsibility to face the implications of the existence of the camps “on a vast scale in the midst of Germany”. As “the most deliberate and logical development of the concentration camp so far happened in Germany, a development that plumbed the depths of the inhuman and the anti-human … Germans have a particular duty to face the question of their moral guilt. … We can demand of the Germans that they regard the Hitler era that produced these things with horror and loathing, which must be expressed in their laws, their poetry, their songs, their schools, their newspapers.”

But he ended the chapter by saying: “The road back from Belsen and Buchenwald is a road not only for the Germans, but for all of us.”

The chapter in ‘The Lid Lifts’ about Belsen is its most striking part, but by no means the whole of the book. Most of it describes what he found in the towns and cities of Germany, following Allied bombing and the advance of the British and American armies in the last six months of the war. Next week I’ll write about this, and his second concluding chapter titled 'Reflections in Tranquillity.'

References:

Patrick Gordon-Walker, The Lid Lifts, published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1945.

 

15th December 2008

What British people aimed to achieve in Germany after the war, depended not only on what they found when they got there, but to a large extent on their views and beliefs as to why they fought the war, and why it started in the first place.

This helps to explain some of the complexity and apparent contradictions in the attitudes of British people, who were in Germany as soldiers in the army of occupation or as diplomats and administrators in the Military Government and Control Commission, towards Germany (the country) and the German people (collectively and as individuals).

If they thought the war was caused by a tradition of ‘Prussian Militarism’, as some did, the answer was to disband the German army and dissolve the state of Prussia (which still existed as a legal and administrative entity through the Weimar republic and the Third Reich). If they thought, following Marxist lines, that both the war and the rise of the Nazi Party were due to desperate attempts by industrial capitalists to preserve their power and wealth, the answer was to nationalise the steel factories and coal mines and dissolve or split the large industrial holding companies and cartels. If they thought it was due to weaknesses in the Weimar constitution, which allowed one party to seize power too easily and establish a totalitarian dictatorship, the answer was to reform the political institutions of the country, to establish more checks and balances, and so, they hoped, create a liberal democracy. 

For some people, social and political explanations such as these were not enough. In addition to materialist, economic or historical causes, they believed the war had a religious and spiritual dimension. It was a battle between good and evil, and the rise of the Nazi Party within Germany was due, so they believed, to spiritual factors, or more precisely, to a lack of spirituality and a lack religious faith. The growing secularisation of society, (in Germany and elsewhere) so some people believed, meant that young people were all too easily attracted to an ersatz religion, with the ceremonies and the sense of belonging to and being part of a larger group, that the Nazi party provided.

When I started to study this period I was surprised to find, in the sources I read, British people speaking of their work as a ‘crusade’ or as ‘fighting a battle for the soul of Germany’.  For example, an army sergeant wrote in a letter to the British Zone Review, as part of the debate on ‘Feeling Sorry for the Germans’, that: “We have called ourselves the Army of Liberation, the Crusaders of Truth, Justice and Liberty. If we are democrats and liberators of the oppressed, entrusted with the mission of enlightening and reaching the principles of truth, justice and liberty, then, in the name of logic and commonsense, why not practice what we preach?” and a Colonel in the Information Services Control Division wrote in another letter that: “the re-birth of Germany is fundamentally a moral and not a material issue. It is in fact a moral Crusade … Too much talk about ‘democracy’ (that overworked word) and not enough about Christianity will tend to place the whole of the vast undertaking to which we are committed on too low a plane.”

Some British people in Germany after the war appeared to see their task in missionary terms, as converting the heathen. Both Field-Marshal Montgomery, Military Governor of the British Zone from 1945-6, and his deputy and successor, General Sir Brian Robertson, spoke of the need to save the ‘soul of Germany’. For example, in a letter to Robertson after visiting the city of Berlin in early 1948, Montgomery wrote that in Berlin: “In fact you find yourself in the front line of the conflict between the East and West. This conflict, I have always maintained, is for the possession of the German ‘soul’; once this is realised everything becomes quite clear,” and in an oral history interview in 1970 for the Truman presidential library, Robertson summed up their task as follows: “The truth of the matter was that in those early days we were fighting a battle over the soul of Germany.”

As an atheist with no religious faith myself, I found it hard to understand just what did Montgomery, Robertson and others mean when they spoke of the ‘soul’ of Germany. I can accept that some people believe quite sincerely that every human being has a ‘soul’ that outlives their physical and material existence, but how could they believe that a nation of 70 million individuals had some kind of collective ‘soul’ that could be fought over and possessed by other nations? Did they believe that every country had a ‘soul’ that survived the physical destruction of land and buildings and millions of individuals who once lived there?

I think I now understand what we could call this ‘spiritual dimension’ to the war and its aftermath, a little better, after reading the book ‘Darkness over Germany’ by Amy Buller. This was published in 1943 and so had nothing to say about Germany after the war, but she was very clear in her view of the causes of the rise of the Nazi party and thus of the war itself, and therefore, by implication, of what needed to be done to ‘win the peace’ after the war was won.

She refered to the “fundamentally religious appeal to the Nazi youth in much of the teaching given to them” and at the end of the book summed up her views as follows:

“It is commonly recognized that Hitler gained support because he assured the youth of his country not only that there would be jobs for them but they had an important part to play in the great struggle for the resurrection of the nation from defeat and despair. It is less often recognized that in addition to these two things he made them feel they belonged to something much greater than the organization they were in and that their destiny was linked with a kind of mystical destiny of the Fatherland. Now it is this last point which is so important and which constitutes what I have called the essentially ‘religious’ side of the Nazi movement.”

In her view, the experience of the fellowship and ceremony of the party gave young people, many of whom had suffered hardship and unemployment during the economic depression, a “new life and energy” which “transcended as well as transformed their immediate tasks and gave their own little existence a cosmic significance and eternal destiny.”

“To a generation without faith, the Nazis gave a brutal philosophy and millions of lives have been sacrificed to free the world of this false answer to a real need, but let us not fail to understand that it was caused by real need. We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations including our own. I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction.”

Please note, if you have read this far, that I make no judgement as to whether this view of the rise of Nazism in Germany, and its appeal to young people, was correct or not. The focus of my research is not on Nazi Germany before or during the war, but on who were the British people in occupied Germany after the war, what was it they aimed to achieve and why, and how did this change over time. But the past is connected to the present, and reading Amy Buller’s book, ‘Darkness over Germany’ prompted me to find references by other British people to the ‘soul’ of Germany and to the ‘spiritual dimension’ to the war and its aftermath. To my mind, this helps explain what now, more than sixty years later, appear to be the extraordinary and almost incomprehensible things that some people said at the time.

For some British people, there was something unique to Germany and the German people, which explained a history of unmitigated evil, going back at least 2,000 years to the time of Julius Caesar and Tacitus – much like the religious doctrine of original sin. Lord Vansittart wrote in his notorious book ‘Black Record’, published in 1941, that “The ages during which civilizing influences have changed other nations have so far left the Germans relatively untouched” and “The ground was already prepared for Nazism before Hitler sowed the dragon’s teeth in it.” In a passage referring to a need for a change of heart, mind and soul, he wrote that:

“Of course there have been potential reformers in Germany, but they have always been a weak minority, and have never been able to impede the iniquitous habits and course of the majority. That does not necessarily mean that it is hopeless ever to expect them to be in the ascendant. But the facts which I am going to connect for you do show that if Germany, after a long and unbroken record of evil-doing, is ever to cease to be a curse to herself and to everyone else, she will have to undergo the most thorough spiritual cure in history; and part at least of that cure will have to be self-administered. It will have to comprise a complete change of heart, mind and soul; of taste and temperament and habit; a new set of morals and values, a new, a brand-new way of looking at life.”

For others, such as Robert Birley, Education Adviser to the British Military Governor in Germany and later headmaster of Eton, (as also for Amy Buller), the moral and spiritual problem was expressed in very different terms and was not confined to Germany. In a lecture given in London in December 1947, Birley said that the experience of the First World War had “…taught us that military victory was not enough and that Germany would only cease to threaten the peace of the world if there were a change in the mind and outlook of the German people. Above all we were faced with what was pre-eminently a spiritual problem…

Our occupation of the British Zone of Germany should force us to face the truth. We are now committed to a direct interest in and responsibility for a country which openly accepted Evil as its Good. The eventual success of this occupation depends very largely on our readiness to appreciate the real nature of the responsibility we have accepted. That responsibility means that we must attempt to change the spirit of the people that we have defeated in battle. It is undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks we have undertaken in our history….

First, it is necessary to recognise that this moral collapse was not merely an isolated German phenomenon. It was largely a manifestation in an extreme form of a diseased condition in Western civilisation as a whole.”

Above all else, this placed a tremendous responsibility on English people to set an example to the rest of the world, as: “We have our own troubles, of course, but the traditional foundations of public morality in our country remain secure. The contrast seems still too great to be convincing. We have not yet a real sense of the break which has occurred in the history of civilisation….

Englishmen should realise that there are millions in Europe today, who feel that we in this country will decide whether the way of life of our western civilisation will survive or perish. Material resources can only come, no doubt, from across the Atlantic, but the spiritual example must come in very large measure from us, just because we are ourselves suffering the same crisis. It is surely not enough to tell ourselves only that ‘we work or want.’ On our readiness to work, which depends ultimately on our solution of our spiritual problem, will depend the survival of faith in other lands that our own. We are fighting a bigger battle than many of us realise.

One thing, at least, we can do ourselves. We can offer the strength of our own traditions to Germany.”

 

15th November 2008

I’ve recently read ‘GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949’ by Petra Goedde (Yale University Press, 2003).

In summary, the argument put forward in the book is that personal relationships between the occupiers and occupied preceded and, in part, caused the changes in US policy towards Germany in the two years after the war.

“Within the first year of occupation, American soldiers developed a feminized and infantalized image of Germany that contrasted sharply with the masculine, wartime, image of Nazi storm troopers … By 1947, Americans saw the Soviet Union as a greater threat to their security than Germany, not so much because the Soviet Union had become more of a threat but because Western Germany had become less of a threat. … The cold war was therefore as much a consequence as a cause of the improved relationship between Germany and the United States.”

The German people the US soldiers met did not correspond to their “government’s official wartime image of a monolithic people unified by their support for the war. Instead they found a defeated population devastated by the destruction of the war and rather desperate in its desire to make peace with the Allies. While the Army pamphlets warned solders about ‘the German’ – mostly in the masculine singular – soldiers saw a plurality of Germans, men and women, young and old, Nazis and non-Nazis, locals and refugees, perpetrators and victims. The lines that once had so clearly separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ became increasingly blurred … Just as American military officials could not prevent the emergence of mutual friendships between their soldiers and German women, so too policy makers could not hold on to a punitive directive in the face of the socio-cultural rapprochement in occupied Germany.”

This was the first time I have found a historian explicitly claim, in Petra Goedde’s words in the conclusion to her book, that: “the process of rehabilitation began before the emergence of the cold war. It thus refutes one of the major assumptions of postwar German-American relations: that American policy toward Germany became conciliatory as a result of the cold war. In fact, as the preceding study shows, German-American rapprochement was as much a cause as a consequence of the cold war.”

‘GI’s and Germans’ refers almost exclusively to the US Zone of Occupation, as you would expect from the title, but much of what she wrote would appear to apply equally to the British Zone, and not surprisingly, given my own research as described on this blog over the past 3 years, I tend to agree with her conclusions. See, for example my posts on British and US First Impressions of Germany in 1945, and How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945.

A year ago, in a post about the book The Struggle for Germany, by Drew Middleton, the highly regarded US journalist and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, I asked the question: “When and why did British and US policy towards Germany change after the war?” and the answer I gave at the time was:

“In my research so far, I have found that British policy and attitudes towards Germany changed in the transition from war to peace, in many ways which had little to do with fear of any threat from the Soviet Union. It seems to me that this change in policy was led as much by those on the ground, in Germany, as by the politicians and civil servants in London. The British in Germany realised very soon after the end of the war that there was no threat of further German resistance. They were shocked at the scale of destruction they saw all around them and made great efforts to restore order and start the process of economic reconstruction. They did this partly because the need appeared self-evident, and partly to reduce the cost of occupation to the British taxpayer. In time, they came to feel and express sympathy for the suffering of Germany people as individuals. Both British and US soldiers and administrators found they could work well with German administrators and were increasingly willing to transfer responsibility for government back to local German control. All this happened well before Cold War concerns started to dominate foreign policy in Britain and the US, with the Berlin Air Lift in 1948 and the Korean War in 1950.”

However, as always, there are no simple answers. The more I look into the question of why British soldiers and administrators in Germany reacted to the end of the war in they way they did, what they aimed to achieve, and how this changed over time, the more difficult and complex it appears.

For a different view of the book ‘GIs and Germans’ see the review on H-Net

 

30th March 2008

I’ve recently finished reading Konrad Adenauer‘s Memoirs 1945-53 and a biography of Adenauer by Terence Prittie, who was the Guardian newspaper’s correspondent in Germany from October 1946 to June 1963, and who, in his own words, "covered all but the last four months of what has come to be known conventionally as the Adenauer Era."

I am not qualified to comment on Adenauer as a politician and statesman, but I was interested in what these books reveal about his attitude to the three Western Allies, the US, France and Britain, during their occupation of Germany after the war.

I’m also interested in the story of his dismissal by the British as Oberbürgermeister (Mayor) of Cologne in October 1945. He was first installed as Mayor of Cologne on October 18, 1917, when he was 41 years old. In 1933 he was dismissed by the Nazis and spent the next 12 years in retirement, apart from brief periods when he was arrested on suspicion of opposing the regime. In May 1945 he was reinstated as Mayor of Cologne by the Americans, only to be dismissed by the British five months later. Ironically, this gave him more time to devote to national politics, the creation of a new political party, the CDU, and his eventual  election as Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany in 1949.

Possibly Adenauer’s greatest achievement as Chancellor was the rapprochement with France and the acceptance of West Germany into the various international organisations formed in Western Europe after the war, promoting peace and stability after decades, even centuries, of conflict. In his memoirs, shortly after describing the admission of the Federal Republic as a full member of the Council of Europe on 2nd May 1951, he wrote:

"One must never forget that between Bonn and Paris lie the gigantic graveyards of Verdun [referring to the battles of the First World War], and that it required a common and continuous effort of the good will of all at last to put an end to one of the most tragic chapters in the history of Europe and to begin a new one."

Adenauer spoke favourably of the US on several occasions, for example, when he was reinstated as Oberbürgermeister of Cologne in May 1945:

"The Americans with whom I dealt were all intelligent and reasonable men. We soon understood each other,"

when describing the work of former President Hoover, who led a commission to investigate the food shortages in Europe after the war, and in Germany in particular:

"I want to take this opportunity to thank President Hoover on behalf of all Germans and to express my admiration to him for this report on the situation of the defeated and ostracized Germany. The report is a great humanitarian document. It must have been the first time in the history of the last few centuries that a humanitarian spirit animated the victor and that the victor desired to help the vanquished to emerge from their misery,"

and when expressing gratitude for CARE packages, donated by private individuals in the US, which started arriving in Germany in the Spring of 1946:

"No one who was not living in Germany at that time can imagine what this relief, coming from private or church sources, meant to hungry and defeated Germans. The arrival of a CARE parcel made any day into a feast day for a family."

References to the British, on the other hand, were mixed, to say the least. He spoke favourably of General Sir Brian Robertson, for example on his leaving Germany in 1950. (Robertson was British High Commissioner in Germany from 1949-50 and before then deputy Military Governor from 1945-7 and Military Governor from 1947-9).

"I must here pause to say that to my great regret Sir Brian
Robertson was no longer British High Commissioner. He had been in
Germany for nearly five years. He had come at a time when we Germans
were in an extremely difficult situation. By his personality, the
honesty of his convictions, his humanity and sincerity he had made a tremendous contribution to changes which none of us would have dreamed of in 1946 or 1947."

But most of his comments on the British were far from complimentary. Here are a few examples:

Firstly when the British took over responsibility for Cologne from the Americans:

"My relations with the officers of the American forces were, as I have said, very good. Things changed when, after a while, on 21 June 1945, the Americans left Cologne and were replaced by British troops. Conflicts soon arose between me and the British administrative officers. In my opinion the British were treating the population very badly. Their attitude to me was very negative."

Secondly a general comment on the administrative abilities of the British in general:

"The British and other occupying powers were not equal in practice to the extraordinary tasks involved in administering a destroyed country."

Thirdly his opinion of British attempts to improve productivity in the coal mines:

"On the orders of the British Military Government, men from all parts of the British zone were forced to work in the mines. This proved completely futile. Also, miners were given special food rations which they were supposed to eat alone, away from their families. It is easy to imagine the psychological consequences. The miner was expected to eat his fill at his place of work while his wife and children went hungry at home."

And fourthly on British lack of participation in discussions in the early 1950s which were to lead to greater European integration:

"In the face of the new European possibilities Great Britain assumed an attitude of hesitation, irresolution and indecision."

An interesting insight into what the British thought of Adenauer, and his criticisms of them, is provided by Sir Christopher Steel, who was a senior and influential British diplomat in Germany, as Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief in Germany in 1947, Deputy High Commissioner in 1949 and British Ambassador in West Germany from 1957-63. In his Forward to Prittie’s biography, Steel wrote:

"Naturally it is Adenauer’s relations with the British which have principally interested me. The question will always be asked whether he found us fundamentally unsympathetic from the start, whether he was permanently alienated by Brigadier Barraclough [the senior British officer in Cologne], when dismissed from his post of Mayor of Cologne, or whether as I believe, and I saw him repeatedly over the whole period of his chancellorship, he only settled into petrified hostility to us when he had lost his touch and was blindly trailing de Gaulle."

This appears to me to be an extraordinary statement, for a diplomat, all the more surprising as Steel knew Adenauer well and was "… considerably in his [Adenauer’s] confidence because he was a friend of my father-in-law, who was Military Governor of Cologne after the First World War." (Steel’s father-in-law was General George Sidney Clive, the British commanding officer in the Rhineland during the occupation at the end of the First World War. Prittie described in his biography how Clive worked with Adenauer at the time, tactfully counteracting French separatists who wanted to split the Rhineland from the rest of Germany and link it more closely with France).

The story of Adenauer’s dismissal as Mayor of Cologne by the British has been told many times. According to Prittie and Adenauer’s own memoirs, he was summoned to Barraclough’s offices on 6th October 1945, summarily dismissed for incompetence, ordered to leave Cologne as soon as possible and instructed not to engage in any political activity.

Prittie also quotes an account Barraclough gave later in an interview in the Daily Express soon after Adenauer ceased to be Chancellor and which was republished in a biography of Adenauer by Rudolf Augstein, editor of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and a long-standing political opponent of Adenauer’s.

In this interview, Barraclough said Major General Templer (Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government at the time of the invasion of Germany and later Deputy Chief of Staff under Robertson), had told him he was disturbed by the lack of progress in Cologne. Barraclough arranged a meeting with Adenauer to discuss the problems of the city, asked him to sit down, and in response to his concerns Adenauer showed him plans for the Cologne of the Future, built outside the city: "Surrounded by the chaos which I have described [Cologne after the war] here we had the senior paid official with his head well in the clouds."

Adenauer’s own account in his memoirs is quite different. Adenauer had to stand, and the meeting was short and consisted of the reading of a 500 word statement dismissing him. The reason given in the statement was that Barraclough "was not satisfied with the progress which has been made in Cologne in connection with the repair of buildings and the clearance of the streets and the general task of preparing for the coming winter," an accusation Adenauer dismissed as ridiculous.

Prittie says in his biography, that Steel told him later neither he nor Robertson had any knowledge of Adenauer’s sacking, and added:

"Sir Christopher [Steel] compared Templer’s part in the affair with a stray remark of King Henry II of England, which resulted in the murder of Thomas a’Becket."

This seems to me another extraordinary remark. Did Steel really mean to compare Templer with King Henry II and Adenauer with Thomas a’ Becket. One a king and the other a saint and martyr? If not, did he understand that this was exactly how Adenauer could present the story?

According to Prittie, Adenauer retold the story of his sacking a great many times afterwards. Sometimes he tried to make a joke of it, as when he told Brigadier Barraclough, many years later, when he was Chancellor, that he had two files in his office, one headed ‘Dismissal by the Nazis’ and the other ‘Dismissal by the Liberators’.

In his memoirs, Adenauer also refers to the story in describing his first meeting with the newly appointed Sholto Douglas, who succeeded Field Marshal Montgomery as Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation, in 1946.

"The British Commander-in-Chief and Military Governor, Air Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, arrived amid a roll of drums and a blare of trumpets."

Members of the Zonal Advisory Council (a representative body of leading German politicians) were presented to the Military Governor. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the Social Democrats, had a "long and cordial welcome." Adenauer’s own lasted one minute and forty-five seconds:

"Douglas asked me about my political career to date. I said: ‘In 1917 I became Oberbürgermeister of Cologne; in 1933 I was removed by the National Socialists because of political unreliability. In March 1945 I was reinstated by the Americans and in October of the same year dismissed by the British for incompetence. That is why I am now on the Zonal Advisory Council.’ Douglas looked rather surprised and walked on without saying a word."

In his biography Prittie refers to personal conversations with Robertson and also with Lord Longford (who succeeded J B Hynd as the British Minister with responsibility for Germany in 1946), saying that both of them "believed that he [Adenauer] regarded his dismissal as an affront and that it left a mental scar which never entirely healed."

This is pure speculation, but it seems to me this story shows how little many of the British in Germany really understood Adenauer (or German politics in general after the war). Above all, Adenauer was a consummate political operator. His dismissal by the British was a political gift, which he was able to exploit, for many years, for all it was worth. He didn’t really care very much what the British thought about him, (something British politicians and diplomats, with a great sense of their own self importance, probably failed to understand), but he did care a great deal about what the German people thought about him.

He could make a subtle comparison between the British Military Government and the Nazis, passing it off as a joke, drawing attention to the fact that both could act in an authoritarian manner and arbitrarily dismiss local city officials. In so doing he could reinforce his own legitimacy and authority as an elected representative of the German people, (and imply that if the British occupiers really believed in democracy why didn’t they practice what they preached?).

He could suggest (with some justification) that on occasions the British were incompetent and lacked judgement, and in so doing reinforce the view that the sooner the Allies restored responsibility for governing Germany to the Germans, the better.

He could emphasise his independence from the Allies, and his willingness to stand up to them, at a time when he was under constant criticism from his political opponents, the Social Democrats, for being too subservient to them (an issue which reached its peak when Kurt Schumacher accused him in a debate in the German parliament of being the ‘Chancellor of the Allies’, a remark he later had to withdraw).

And if the British were offended by this, why should he care, as they were far less important for the future of the new West German Federal Republic, than the French or the Americans!