The following article is from our May 2005 issue.

New Life Blossoms in the Ruins.

Germany after the surrender: a tough start into a new epoch. By Theo Sommer The Germans knew what was in store for them. General Dwight D. Eisenhower did not mince his words on August 6 – the day of the bombing of Hiroshima – in a radio speech to the German people in the American Occupied Zone: “The coming months are going to be hard for you. You will just have to be tough – there is no alternative. Every sign indicates a severe shortage of food, fuel, housing and transport. It is therefore up to you to alleviate your hardship by working very strenuously and helping one another. The prospects for this year’s harvest look good. But people in the cities will have to go out and work in the countryside. There will be no coal available for heating homes this winter. To meet your basic requirements in the next few months you will have to go into the woods and cut your own firewood. A third priority is the provision of living accommodations. As far as the weather allows, damaged property must be repaired to offer as much protection from the winter as possible. To this end, you will have to collect scrap material over the widest possible area and gather dead wood in the forests. These are your problems.” At least Eisenhower offered the Germans one ray of hope with his words: “Your courts of law and schools will be open as soon as they are purged of Nazi influence.” Denazification and demilitarization stood at the top of the Allied agenda. “The National Socialist Party with its affiliated organizations and suborganizations must be destroyed,” declared the Potsdam Agreement. It further decreed that “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions and any other persons dangerous to the occupation and its objectives shall be arrested and interned.” During the first wave of denazification, all public officials were removed from office in West Germany: 150,000 from public and semi-public office, 73,000 from positions of responsibility in business. They received neither salary nor pension and were permitted only to pursue “lowly work.” Around 180,000 were arrested and detained – sometimes for years – in internment camps. At the end of 1945, the result of these measures were “full internment camps and empty offices.” In the East, however, the Soviets soon brought concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen back into operation. They filled them with arrested Nazis, but also increasingly with obstreperous democrats who refused to cooperate with the burgeoning Communist dictatorship. With the second wave, denazification increasingly turned into a bureaucratic inquisition. Its salient feature was a questionnaire used by Western Allies to screen Germans and their Nazi past. It contained 131 questions and was both feared and ridiculed. It was feared, because it aimed at exposing the less significant supporters of the Nazi regime, too. And it was ridiculed for its many senseless questions. For example: “List all the titles of nobility held in your family or in your wife’s family or by both your grandparents.” Another example is: “On an extra sheet of paper give the titles and publishers of every work that you have completely or partly written, compiled or edited from 1923 to the present as well as all public speeches and lectures you have held, listing the topic, date, edition and audience.” In 1951, Ernst von Salomon wrote one of the first German postwar bestsellers: “Der Fragebogen,” a caustic account of the questionnaire mania. In the American zone, 1.4 million questionnaires had been filed by March 1946. The denazification centers were flooded with “denazification certificates,” bills of good conduct for friends and acquaintances. In the end, they decided on dismissal for 19 percent; recommended dismissal for 7 percent; and discretionary dismissal for 25 percent. No proof of National Socialist activity was uncovered in 49 percent of the cases. Merely 0.5 percent of those examined could prove they had been involved in the resistance. There were 3.5 million indictments and 950,000 proceedings. The three-and-a-half years of denazification lasted until 1948. During these three-and-a-half years 1,549 persons were classified as “major offenders,” 21,600 as “offenders,” 104,000 as “lesser offenders,” and 475,000 as “followers.” Around 9,000 received a prison sentence; 500,000 were fined and 25,000 were dispossessed. At the same time 22,000 persons were removed from public offices. The French and English pursued denazification less vigorously. For the most, part the Soviets took advantage of the process of denazification to get rid of “class enemies.” In the Russian zone, 30,000 people were tried for war crimes; 200,000 Nazis were removed from positions in administration and business; 20,000 teachers (from 40,000) were dismissed; and 500 were sentenced to death and executed. Lesser Nazi party members, however, were soon to be wooed. Denazification ended on March 31, 1948, in the western zones, and around the same time in the eastern zone. Professionals are no more immune against temptation than others. But they, in particular, are needed the most in desperate times, especially following a major upheaval. It soon turned out that many former Nazi party members had to be enlisted to put the administration back on its feet and get supplies flowing. Later Adenauer justified his having employed so many party members – over 60 percent in the Foreign Office – with the remark that it was impossible “to throw out dirty water if you don’t have clean water.” Bertolt Brecht meant about the same when he said: “The house was built of stones that were there.” These were the “stones” left in the ruins of the Third Reich. In the end the disagreements among the Allied Powers over the question of German reparations proved to be insurmountable. Before the reparations, came the collecting and bagging of the spoils of war – that is, everything the victors freely grabbed and hauled away before a formal program could be planned, organized, and supervised. These spoils were not insignificant. Above all, the Soviets did a thorough job here. In June and July, they began a large-scale looting campaign in their occupied zone, far beyond what the soldiers had appropriated for themselves. The descriptions of an American observer who saw the boulevard Unter den Linden may apply to other areas of the city: “The entire boulevard is strewn with rubble. Two trucks are parked in front of the Hotel Adlon. The first is heavily loaded with wind instruments: tubas, trumpets, trombones, covered with heavy Buchara rugs. Sitting on top of the carpets are three fierce-looking soldiers of Mongoloid descent, their uniforms in rags. They are eating bread. The second truck, lopsided, with only three tires, is blocking the thoroughfare. It is filled with thousands of typewriters without covers, a cow elk in the midst. Two very young Russian officers have removed the fourth tire from the truck. Observed by a silent group of tattered children, they are inspecting a tire tube in a bowl of dirty water.” A British Control Council official told a story not uncommon at that time: “A Russian soldier stopped a German girl and demanded her watch. She said she didn’t have one. The soldier refused to believe her. Despite their difficulties in communicating, the girl finally convinces him. “A pretty girl like you ought to have a watch,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and revealing an arm covered with watches. He selected the most attractive one and gave it to her.” The Western occupation forces were less susceptible to such plundering. To be sure, the French did not hesitate to seek compensation for the damages they had suffered by helping themselves to existing production and by dismantling the armaments factories. But their looting was haphazard at best whereas the Soviets plundered massively and systematically. Even General Clay took 400 works of art from German museums in November and shipped them to America, where he felt they could be more safely stored. To his honor, however, he successfully lobbied for their return before leaving Germany years later when he heard that the National Gallery wanted to keep them. Back then, the victors reminded Germans that they themselves had plundered much worse when they still sat on their high horse. And for that matter, when Germans complain that the Black Forest and the northern German forests were deforested, the French only retrieved a third of the timber that the Germans seized in France. Areas occupied by the German military had been forced to ship large amounts of food and consumer goods to Germany. Around 200,000 stolen machine tools boosted the German inventory of such machines from 976,000 in 1938 to 1.3 million in 1945. And if over 40 percent of the tax revenues from the three western zones in 1946 went to the costs of the occupation, one must not forget that France alone had been forced to pay 700 million francs for the costs of its occupation. “It’s hard to imagine what the Nazis did not consider as booty,” said the Briton Michael Balfour. He cited from a long list compiled by the Allied Control Commission: “The applications for reimbursement include 1,113 church bells, 2,000 river ships, 1,100 cranes, 700 locomotives, 1,670 horses, 2,800 rail cars, 14,500 pieces of clothing, 2,600 radios, numerous machines, Hollerith devices, furniture, gas pumps, circus inventory, a scientific collection of colonial wood from the Museum of Vincennes, the Queen of Holland’s special train, laboratories, radium, trolley buses, fire engines, rugs, pianos, plane propellers, karakuls from the Caucasus, cigars and 36 truckloads of art objects.” Germany was to pay 20 billion dollars in reparation, half of it to the Soviet Union. In those days, 20 billion dollars was the equivalent of 80 billion reichsmarks. Three billion marks were to come from dismantling factories, the rest was to come from current production. Germans were aware of the dismantling campaign. It caused great agitation everywhere and set off a flood of protests, strikes and threats. But it was never completed. All told, German reparations amounted to no more than 12 billion reichsmarks. Anyway: It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. What was not realized back then is that the dismantling program stripped the Germans of much of their obsolete machinery. After the currency reform in June 1948, they could afford to refit their industry with state-of-the-art equipment. This paved the way to Germany’s economic miracle of the 1950s. * © 2005 The Atlantic Times * :: Subscription Service * :: Privacy Statement * :: Contact us * * :: Imprint