Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (40 page)

Russian-backed regimes in eastern Europe developed this kind of ethnic cleansing more systematically. Anti-communist underground armies, stay-behind teams and sabotage units, in many cases equipped by the Germans in 1944–5, constituted a thorn in the side of these new regimes and prompted them to respond with both repression and expropriation. In Romania, for example, where the Waffen-SS was parachuting paramilitaries into Transylvania late in 1944, the Soviet authorities acted swiftly and harshly to stamp out any potential resistance. On 7 January 1945, nearly 100,000
Volksdeutsche
were deported
for forced labour to the Soviet Union. The reform decree of March 1945—yoking together wartime, class and ethnic enemies—expropriated the farms of those who had collaborated with the Germans, of war criminals and of anyone who held more than ten hectares but had not farmed it themselves.
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In Hungary, the land reform decree of the same month singled out the “enemies of the Hungarian people,” thus again targeting both the class enemy—the large landowners—and the ethnic foe—the German minority. Such measures, introduced under a communist Minister of Agriculture, were enormously popular among the peasantry. In the words of an impartial source: “It was a social revolutionary measure of supreme importance that ruined the powerful landowners and released a pent-up energy which enlivened the countryside some time after.”
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Confiscation of German property took place on an even vaster scale in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Large estates and thousands of urban properties were abandoned and became available for resettlement, a means for incumbent governments to purchase popular backing by appealing to nationalist sentiment as well as economic interest. Sometimes, the expulsion of the Germans formed part of a more concerted scheme for eradicating minorities from the country. Following bitter internecine struggles during the inter-war years and under the German occupation, the Poles also took their revenge on the large Ukrainian minority, forcing 480,000 to leave for the Soviet Union; in 1947, some 150,000, who had escaped the earlier deportations, were forcibly resettled in the west of the country.
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Such examples indicate the contrasting nature of the purges in western and eastern Europe. In the former, they were limited in scope, rapidly brought under the control of the courts, and quickly scaled down as the Cold War developed. In the latter, judicial activity formed only part of a variety of measures against “war criminals” and “enemies of the people.” Post-war purges became an instrument for a total economic and ethnic reshaping of society. As such they were a means for post-war regimes to mobilize genuine popular support (just as bourgeois governments had used land reform after 1918 in much of eastern Europe), and allowed left-wing figures to claim leadership of
the nation. As before in the Soviet Union so now in eastern Europe, social revolution went hand in hand with national assertion.

THE DIVISION OF GERMANY

“Already it is clear,” wrote Basil Davidson in 1950, “that the drawing of a frontier line down the middle of Germany has meant as well the dividing of Europe.” In retrospect there can be little doubt that even in defeat Germany held the key to Europe’s fate, and that it was partition which finally divided the continent. What, however, is far from obvious is at what point partition became inevitable and as a result of whose actions. After all, the Big Three were all agreed in 1945 on the need to keep Germany together. How, then, did partition happen? Was it the result of Soviet intransigence? Was it rather, as Davidson argued, the result of Western policy? Or did it flow from the basic incompatibility of the ideologies of the occupying powers, an incompatibility which some observers believed had revealed itself even before May 1945 in the very first steps taken by the military governments that the Allies and the Red Army set up in the territory they had conquered?
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The Allied policy of “unconditional surrender,” first announced in 1943, finally prevailed. Hitler’s successor, Admiral Dönitz, authorized the signature of surrender on 7 May 1945 and his government led an increasingly controversial half-life until he and the remainder of the German High Command were arrested two weeks later. His efforts to win Allied support for a rejuvenated Third Reich standing against the Bolshevization of Europe were belatedly rejected, and central political control in Germany passed into the hands of the conquerors.
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The victors shared many basic goals at the start. All were agreed upon the need to eliminate Nazism for the sake of European security; all were pledged to punish German war criminals. The Yalta Declaration alluded to the possible “dismemberment” of the country, but also made reference to central German institutions. Both the Russians and the Americans accepted the desirability of sweeping economic reform
through decartelization and land reform in order to break the power of those interests which were believed to have backed Hitler. Finally, all were agreed upon the need to “democratize” Germany. Such goals amounted to nothing less than a social and political revolution.

This common ground formed the basis for the declarations which followed the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Drawing a distinction between National Socialism and the German people, the agreement talked of preparing the latter “for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis.” At the same time Potsdam skated over the widening areas of Big Three disagreement. Yet none of these was of such immediate significance in the summer of 1945 as the position taken by the French, who were not invited to Potsdam at all, but who had been given their own occupation zone. De Gaulle was the prime opponent of a united Germany. He doggedly opposed the idea of a central German administration operating under the control of the Control Commission, and wanted to annex German territory and break up the old central state. Ultimately the French would fail in their territorial ambitions. But by then their veto had obstructed the chances of German unity, and in the meantime, the policies being pursued in the different Occupation zones created increasingly divergent social and political regimes.

In small but far from meaningless ways, the repudiation of the Nazi regime took similar forms across the country. Street names were changed (once more), Nazi literature was cleared out of public libraries and in general visible signs of the old regime were erased. But beyond such measures, the differences of approach became more obvious. In the Soviet zone, de-Nazification was regarded as a means of destroying the economic and social bases of reaction. There was no systematic search for Nazis or war criminals and their life was often easier there than in the Allied zones. Lumping together Nazis with other “enemies of democracy” the authorities focused upon a swift and far-reaching administrative purge, extending into the judiciary and the teaching profession, and set up short training courses to create new cadres.
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As in eastern Europe, anti-Nazi slogans became the justification for sweeping economic reforms. Large landed estates were confiscated in 1945, bringing into being a new class of smallholders tied to the new regime. Banks and heavy industry were expropriated.
The dismantling of industrial plant proceeded rapidly, despite the fact that it caused tremendous wastage and threw thousands out of work.

Soviet policy reflected two key considerations. One was the prevailing communist analysis of Nazism itself. Walter Ulbricht argued in 1945 that “Hitler fascism” had emerged from the reactionary nature of German capitalism; hence it was necessary to destroy capitalism and socialize the economy if German authoritarianism was to be eradicated. But even more important than this was the overwhelming Soviet concern to exploit German resources to the hilt to rebuild their own shattered economy and to take full advantage of the reparations provisions agreed with the Allies. In the long run these two goals—the creation of a pro-Soviet Germany and high levels of reparations—were incompatible, but this was not clear in 1945.
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De-Nazification in the Western zones took the form of judicial investigation on a case-by-case basis. This satisfied Western conceptions of fairness but proved increasingly impracticable, especially as the scope of the purges
increased
in 1945 following publicity over a number of de-Nazification failures. The infamous
Fragebogen
(questionnaires), a basic element in the investigations, accumulated in enormous numbers—over 1.6 million in the US zone alone by June 1946—and as a result the whole de-Nazification process turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. By late 1946, with more than two million cases still to be dealt with, it was already being wound down. A case study of the town of Marburg under US occupation concludes unambiguously that de-Nazification was a failure: it neither excluded former Nazis from office, nor made for a more democratic life. The more pragmatic British and French reached a similar conclusion early on. Several million Germans were affected by the purges, but German public opinion believed that they had targeted the lesser fry while allowing big fish to swim free. In short, Allied procedures were not obviously superior to those adopted in the Eastern zone.
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Just as in the Soviet case, so in the Western zones de-Nazification practices reflected more general theories of the nature of the Third Reich. Rather than seeing Nazism as a socio-economic phenomenon (requiring drastic intervention in the economy for its eradication), the Allies were more inclined to see it as a dictatorial regime imposed
from above. This suggested that the conscientious removal of former Nazis would simply release the natural democratic urges of the German people. Social reform was therefore less important than juridical surgery.

Unfortunately, German attitudes to defeat did not bear out this rosy view. As they monitored public opinion, the Allies were increasingly concerned at what they found. On the one hand, the resistance to occupation which many had feared failed to materialize: the Werewolves proved toothless and the Alpine redoubt a fantasy. Total defeat, following the SS violence of the final apocalyptic months of the war, seemed to have discredited Nazism. Unlike 1918, no one had been left in doubt about the scale of the catastrophe. Yet the Allies expected more than this: they hoped to see signs of repentance for the events of the past six years, and some kind of desire for democracy’s return.

The initial reports from Germany were disheartening. People seemed dazed by the total and sudden collapse of the Reich. They were apathetic and individualistic, concerned about food rather than democracy. “Without me” was the stock response to thoughts of grass-roots political activism. Having once feared the prospect of class revolution, the Allies now worried more about political passivity. When they circulated a film about the death camps, most Germans who watched it regarded it as propaganda.
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Nazi patterns of thought outlived the fall of the regime, often manifesting themselves in the most incongruous ways. Saul Padover, one of the first US intelligence officers to assess the popular mood in Germany, describes meeting the Social Democrat who advocated stern measures against the Nazis, stating that: “Nazi blood is something unclean, biologically unhealthy and incurable … Those with Nazi blood cannot be redeemed. They must be made permanently sterile.” And there was the Bürgermeister of Hamborn, who greeted Padover with an instinctive Hitler salute before stammering: “It’s an old habit. One has to stop oneself.” Few Allied officers realized that the ugly term
Entnazifizierung
(de-Nazification) itself replicated the pattern of Nazi jargon.
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Slowly seeing that de-Nazification alone would not change mentalities, the Allies embarked upon an ambitious peacetime extension of
psychological warfare targeted at the German public. “Re-education”—a propaganda campaign to democratize an entire society—turned into one of the most extensive such ventures of the twentieth century. School books were rewritten, schools and universities restructured and exposed to new theories and interpretations. And whereas de-Nazification was painful because it looked back to the past, “re-education” offered the promise of a brighter future.

The British remained the least optimistic about its chances of success; as late as 1952 a senior civil servant observed gloomily that “it is unlikely democracy will develop in Germany in the near future.” The French, by contrast, attached far more importance to it and focused with some success on German youth. De-Nazification, after all, was not really the issue for the French; they were concerned about Germans not Nazis, and felt that transforming German culture was the key to peace. Their travelling exhibition “Message from French Youth” was visited by 120,000 Germans, and their teacher-training reforms and exchange-visit programmes were highly successful. The American effort was more wholehearted than the British, and resulted in a purge of German universities in 1946. Yet like the British, the Americans found their efforts to reform the school system ran into vocal German opposition. They too were forced to retreat, though it took them longer.
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Thus in both de-Nazification and re-education the Allies reaped meagre returns for massive outlay. In the Soviet zone, by contrast, substantial educational reforms took place—notably the establishment of a comprehensive school system—largely because the sources of opposition which were so important in the Western zones were silenced. But this reflects the basic divergence in the occupation regimes: in the West, de-Nazification took place without radical social reform, while in the East, it provided the opportunity for this. Back-pedalling from their earlier policy commitments, the Allies were reluctant to countenance sweeping social and economic change. They vetoed land reforms, for example, and allowed Ruhr industrialists to escape the vigorous decartelization which was envisaged in 1944. The main reason for this social conservatism during 1945–6 was not so much anti-communism as the Allies’ reliance upon existing interest groups in their zones and their fear of adding to the food shortages
and economic difficulties which were currently the chief political concern throughout the country.