Crimes and Mercies (29 page)

Gimbel is very clear on the myth-making that went on: ‘Historians of the Marshall Plan have fallen into a familiar trap. They have [described] what
must have been
the reasons for the origins of the Marshall Plan … by extrapolation, rather than by interpretation of documents, sources and contemporary evidence … government officials were not averse to misleading the public. State Department and other officials often simply told the Congress, the press, the American people or whomever,
what they
wanted to tell them
at a given time, and they often did so without regard for what was true and accurate.’
¹⁰⁸
And of course historians using the ‘must have been’ theory uncritically accept whatever story has by then become predominant.

To revise history this way largely means to ignore the evidence. The creation of the world food shortage belief depended, and still depends today, upon aversion to the facts. It might be called a world truth shortage. One of the most important sets of papers bearing on this post-war food problem has been ignored by historians.
¹⁰⁹
This is in the collection of the papers of Robert Patterson, who as Secretary of War in 1945–47 had a great deal to do with solving the food problems abroad. Much of this material was declassified for the first time in 1993 during research for
this book.
¹¹⁰
Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of letters, memos, notes of meetings, or draft manuscript, is there anything to show that Patterson or his Cabinet colleagues thought the shortages in Germany were caused by a world shortage of food.

The Western Allies understandably exaggerated the amount of money it was costing US and British taxpayers to feed the Germans a starvation diet. Freely to feed a vanquished enemy who had committed such horrors was unprecedented among the nations, so they were proud of their magnanimity. But, as Gimbel found, ‘the
actual
costs of the German occupation to the British and American taxpayers were much smaller than those to be found in the heavily inflated figures that circulated publicly and in the Congress at the time’.
¹¹¹
The Western Allies hid what they were doing under a false accounting system: ‘Germany’s exports of coal, timber and “invisibles” … were never classified as reparations and they have not been regarded as such by historians.’
¹¹²

German reparations, taken by every ally as soon as the war ended, were astronomically high. By the most conservative estimates, they amounted to at least US $20 billion, which would be somewhere in the region of many hundreds of billions in 2007, given the inflation and increase in economies since 1950.

¹¹³
Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky told Churchill in 1945 that the Soviets expected to take $10 billion of the $20 billion in overall reparations which the Soviets judged they could pay.
¹¹⁴
The minimum worth of German reparations to the US was probably around $5 billion.
¹¹⁵
The British and Americans between them took at least $10 billion in reparations for war damages, the French less. No one can be sure of the amount the Germans actually ‘owed’, because war damage could only be assessed according to the damage itself, and to the degree of war guilt.

Certainly the amount was huge, and certainly the Germans have repaid well over $100 billion since 1945, and are still paying the relatives of some of the Nazis’ victims.

The main point of reparations was to restore so far as possible the well-being of Germany’s victims, but since this was neglected in favour of punishing Germans
en masse
, Hitler’s victims suffered
further. We see here again Chekhov’s Sakhalin discovery, which had been repeated in the Gulag and then in Hitler’s slave camps: a starved hen lays no eggs. The more the Germans were punished, the less they restored the economy of Europe. There was almost universal agreement among the American government experts in 1948 that the Marshall Plan could not succeed without ‘major industrial production from Germany’, as John Gimbel said.
¹¹⁶
The significant measure for reparations, therefore, was how much Germany could contribute to restoring the European economy, whether by reparations or by trade. Only the first option was chosen.

The Americans took from Germany at least twenty times the amount the Germans retained under the Marshall Plan. They took possibly far more than that. It was at least $1 billion more than the whole Marshall Plan devoted to the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Austria. Clearly the Marshall Plan was generous and far-sighted, a typically American good idea, which would not have been possible without German money.

Reparation was only one aspect of the policies that the Allies tried to pursue. Many skilled Americans and British made energetic efforts to teach Germans democracy during the first years of the occupation, but failed because of German bitterness caused by the policy of vengeance. This attempt and failure had their parallels in the French zone as well. In the French zone, the starving Germans were offered tickets to performances by French artists. Fed even less than the starvation rations in the neighbouring zones, the Germans did not respond enthusiastically to a lecture by a novelist, or a concert by the likes of Edith Piaf. In the summer of 1945, the British wisely installed Konrad Adenauer in office as Lord Mayor of Cologne, but then ordered him to cut down Cologne’s famous trees to feed the furnaces that winter. When Adenauer refused, the British angrily kicked him out of office.

The reason for the failure was clearly expressed by an editorial in the
Marburger Presse
in 1949, commenting on six German workers who had just been sentenced to prison for
refusing to help dismantle a factory in Dortmund. ‘The Allies criticize us Germans for deferring to authority, try to educate us to be democrats, but demand respect for Allied authority.’ The Germans felt that the dismantling had gone much too far, and that to resist it showed democratic reaction to oppression.
¹¹⁷

The Germans missed the point. There was no democracy because the Allies ruled by force; the Allies ruled by force to make sure the Germans did not rule
them
by force. Nevertheless, the Allies were not wholly hypocrites: if the
Marburger Presse
editor had been able to look sixty years into the future, he would have been astonished to see Germany somewhat democratic, and supporting Western domination in the Middle East.

But the Americans also missed the point. Democracy is not rule by fear. The more a government rules by threat of force, the less it is democratic. ‘Seek not to enslave hearts, and all hearts will be yours,’ Voltaire said.
¹¹⁸

In that same small city of Marburg in the American zone in 1945, prisoners returning from the American prison camp nearby told of trucks taking away fifty starved bodies every night to a secret burial site hidden from the Germans. A huge influx of expellees from the east arrived, virtually all of them women, children and old, feeble men. They added to the housing problem, subtracted from the food supply and could scarcely find work.

Wild rumours spread around the country because all the press, radio, teaching and publishing were controlled by the Allies, and so were not fully believed. Gimbel notes: ‘The American occupation gave rise to a strain of anti-American sentiment among even the most democratically-inclined Germans and provided them with a convincing rationale for that sentiment.’
¹¹⁹
The Germans demonstrated throughout the British and American zones for an end to demolition and the restrictions on manufacture for export.

The British played an ambivalent game, especially with the coal miners, trying to increase their production while simultaneously reducing their food rations. In 1946 and again in 1947, the standard of living of the coal miners actually deteriorated, despite increased production. The major reason was that the British were
paying only $10.50 per ton while the European market price was more than double that, sometimes triple. If the Germans had received full value for their work, there would have been little need for subsidies from the British taxpayers.
¹²⁰

The Germans felt that the Americans were hypocrites, beginning with President Truman at the top and going right down to the lowest private in the occupation forces. The Americans talked a lot about the spirit of justice, love and forgiveness, but it was not much in evidence among the Americans in Germany, at least not those in OMGUS.
¹²¹

What you learn from studying history is how little mankind learns from studying history. The learning is bound to be minimal wherever history is managed to benefit the mighty. After fifty years all officials in the West are still denying the mass deaths in the French and American prison camps; only in Germany are the deaths of the two million expellees remembered and mourned. No one anywhere has remarked on the fact that five to six million more people disappeared entirely from the German population without note, or explanation. No historian, whether British, French, Russian, American, Canadian or German – not even a German historian – has remarked on this. Millions of people disappear under the Allies’ rule, and
no one notices
.

Victorious generals are always in training to fight the last war, and diplomats may be no better. One of the effects of the Morgenthau Plan was that the West, chiefly the US, went on fighting the war long after they had won. While the democracies were concentrating primarily on the vanished German danger, they continued to help the Soviet Union. Western policy was anarchically ambivalent for the first few years after the war. The West gave the Soviets great help as part of the momentum of the wartime alliance; the West also began to oppose Soviet expansionist ambitions. Despite the great tension over Poland and Eastern Europe, the Allies were still sending massive quantities of supplies to the Russians in late 1946. The Canadians sent over 1.6 million
tons of wheat in three months during that summer, the Americans more than that, and the Argentinians contributed greatly as well.

From Canada went electrical machinery, steel rails and so on; from the USA, all kinds of supplies except weapons were sent. But at the same time, the Americans especially put up fierce resistance to attempts by the Soviets to expand their influence into Japan and the Dardanelles.

All this help given the Soviets was free. It was the physical expression of the overall policy of trying to get along with the Russians to build a better world. This was happening at the time when the Russians were spying on Canada’s top-secret, atomic program, the most advanced in the world at the time after the Americans. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko defected to the Canadians, taking with him documentary proof of the Soviet treachery. Eventually twelve persons were convicted of spying, the most dangerous spy success against the West of the twentieth century, except perhaps for the Rosenbergs in the US. The stolen secrets enabled the Soviets to build their first atomic bomb. The tranquil flow of aid and the court case went on simultaneously.

To experience is to learn, whether the experience becomes history or not. In 2007 the human race is experiencing events similar to those we experienced in 1945. Democracy’s greatest enemy has been defeated, while America’s leaders prepare to fight shadowy new enemies. They see the danger of the drug lords, terrorists, crackpot dictators and jungle leaders who defend their ancient territories against ‘natural resources’ companies from the ‘advanced’ countries. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States was the greatest creditor nation the world has ever known, and now it is the world’s greatest debtor. The US is technically bankrupt, while its leaders maintain enormous defence budgets to fight one enemy which has disappeared, and another for which conventional expensive arms have proven worse than useless.

It appears that the tremendous centralizing tendencies of modern industrial life have degraded many of the more civilizing instincts of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Fighting totalitarian states,
they have grown more totalitarian themselves. Since the 1930s, the rise of prisonership in the USA has been absolutely phenomenal. Proportionally the US now has more people in jail than Tsarist Russia did in one of its most repressive phases. The US has more people in jail per capita than Nazi Germany did in 1939, and that includes in concentration camps.
¹²²
This has happened partly because we have failed to defend freedom of expression. The crimes against the Germans by the Americans and the French, and by the British against Mennonites and Russian prisoners, are only a few of those covered up – think of the denials, lies, censorship and so on practiced by the French in Algeria and Indo-China, by the US in Cambodia and Vietnam, by Canada in Somalia and Vietnam. According to the former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, vast crimes against the Iraqi people were committed by the US and Britain during the two Gulf wars and the sanctions period approved by the United Nations. More than a million people died.

Surely there is something significant in the fact that so many Second World War fighting men and leaders stayed in power after 1945, or came to power as a result of wartime fame. They brought their attitudes with them, and influenced all the politics of the post-war era. Their names are legion – Truman, Churchill, De Gaulle, Macmillan, Eden, Eisenhower, Marshall, Smith, Dulles, Kennedy, Bush. Even as late as 1996, the Republican Party presidential candidate Bob Dole was renowned for his heroism in the Second World War.

War is born of propaganda. That is why the first victim of war is truth. We are still victims of propaganda about the Second World War.

*
‘First the grub, then the preaching.’

*
Patterson succeeded Stimson in 1945

**
A corollary to this might be that anything proposed that was
against
public opinion did
not
express good-will. Therefore it had to be kept secret..

*
They are at the foundation of this section of the book. To my knowledge, they have never been used
in extenso
by any writer before to describe Germany as it then was.