Page iii
The Divided Nation
A History of Germany 19181990
Mary Fulbrook
Page 129
Six
Occupation and Division, 19459
When Germany was defeated in May 1945, a demoralized population
was living among ruins. The big cities that had suffered bombardment
from the air were reduced to piles of rubble between gaunt, hollow
shells of bombed out buildings, lone walls with empty windows
forming a jagged skyline, the occasional intact building standing out
starkly amidst the ruins. People eked out an uncomfortable existence
in cellars. In towns and villages which had escaped the worst attacks
of the Allies, conditions were nevertheless comparably demoralizing,
as women worried about husbands and sons at the front, and about the
need for food and clothing for the children and old people at home.
Enthusiasm for Hitler, and for his war, had been waning steadily since
the turn of the war's fortunes with the Russian campaign, and faith in
the omnipotent Führer had given way to weariness and a longing for
the end of war. Yet there was no knowing exactly what the post-war
period would bring. Some Germans longed for 'liberation' and the
possibility of a radical transformation of Germany; others felt fear and
ambivalence about future retribution. When hostilities ceased in May
1945, few could have predicted what the future would bring. Yet in
the following four years patterns were developed and set which were
to stamp their mark on the next four decades of German and
international history.
The Allies and the Framework of Political Life
Initially the Allies themselves were not at all certain what to do with
post-war Germany. There were differences of opinion
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both between the Allies particularly between the Soviet Union and
the Western powers and within each Allied regime. In practice, the
developments following the defeat of Germany laid the foundations
for the double transformation that subsequently occurred: the
establishment of a divided nation, with a relatively conservative,
arguably 'restorationist' state in the West, and a hardline communist
state in the East. In neither Germany was the 'Third Way' taken, for
which many democratic, anti-fascist Germans had hoped the
transformation which would combine democracy and socialism, while
also permitting German unity and neutrality. While the division and
remilitarization of the two Germanies and their relative
'conservatism', although of differing political complexions only
became crystallized in the course of the 1950s, the initial steps in this
bifurcation can be seen even in the very early stages of the occupation
period.
During the war, a range of options for the future of Germany pending
what all agreed should be an unconditional surrender were mooted.
Some advocated relatively mild treatment, others harsh and punitive
handling; some sought the retention of a relatively centralized, if
federal, state, others radical dismemberment and division into a
number of smaller countries which could pose no threat to the balance
of power in central Europe. There were differences of opinion
between, for example, American President Roosevelt and his State
Department; British Prime Minister Churchill and the British Military
and the British Foreign Office; as well as, more obviously, between
the Soviet Union, the Americans and the British. One of the few
decisions which emerged from wartime planning which was however
to have decisive long-term significance was the agreement on zones of
occupation. A map (emanating from the Post-Hostilities Planning
Subcommittee in September 1943) was put before the European
Advisory Committee in London in January 1944, and accepted by the
Soviets in February 1944. This proposed three zones of
occupation and in the event drew the line of what was subsequently
to become the East-West division of Europe and the international
system. In September 1944 it was agreed that Berlin should be under
four-power control, and a little later a Control Commission
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The division of Germany after 1945
for the co-ordination of Allied occupation policies was decided upon.
At Teheran (28 November 1 December 1943) and Yalta (411
February 1945) there was vague and general agreement in principle on
the need to demilitarize, denazify and democractize Germany. It was
also agreed at Yalta that France should have a zone of occupation.
There was by now some friction and unease over this question: the
original zones had been drawn to give rough parity of population
numbers in each of the British, American and Soviet zones thus in
effect giving the Soviets a much larger land area, since much of their
zone was less densely populated agricultural land. The early
agreement over zones had
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been facilitated by Western fears that the Red Army might in fact have
overrun most or all of Germany by the end of the war, and would then
be committed or forced to retreat to its previously determined
occupation zone. However, in fact by the war's end it was the western
allies who had advanced deeper into Germany than they had expected;
and it was western troops who eventually had to withdraw from areas
that were to form part of the Soviet zone. By the spring of 1945, this
position had become clearer, and the western powers hoped that
France would gain her zone at the expense of the Soviets. This was
however opposed, and France's zone was carved out of western
territory in south-west Germany. Disagreements between the Allies
also continued over questions concerning the form and level
reparations should take, the eastern boundaries of Germany with
Poland, and the future shape of Germany itself.
These problems continued to bedevil the Potsdam Conference of 17
July2 August 1945. Although the war was over, with the surrender of
German troops to the Allies on 78 May 1945, there could be no Peace
Treaty since there was no German government with which to
conclude one. The eventual Protocol of Proceedings emanating from
the Potsdam Conference was a vaguely worded compromise again
assenting to broad and laudable aims, such as demilitarization,
denazification, and democratization which left many areas open to a
variety of interpretations.
Most potent sources of friction were again the questions of reparations
and Polish-German frontiers. The western Allies refused Stalin's
demands on reparations, and an agreement was reached by which each
power would take its own reparations from its own zone. In addition,
the USSR was to get ten per cent from the western Allies, and a
further fifteen per cent was to be provided by way of exchanges for
food supplies and the like. The reparations agreement both
consolidated the relative independence of the zonal administrations,
despite the mouthing of assent to the notion of central co-ordination of
policy, and provided the basis for subsequent disagreements and
divisions between East and West. As the British put it at the time, 'It is
inconceivable that a Germany which is not treated as an
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economic unit could very long be treated as a political unit.' 1
On the Polish boundary question, a decision had been largely preempted
by the de facto Soviet interpretation of Poland's western
boundary as lying along the western, rather than eastern Neisse river.
Poland was to be compensated with additional former German land on
the west for losses in the east to the Soviet Union, which expanded
westwards, and retained territory (including the Baltic states) taken
under the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. While British and American
leaders agreed with the moving of Poland's borders in principle, they
had understood the eastern Neisse river to be the limit. But under
Stalin's interpretation, German inhabitants of the relatively rich
Silesian territory between the two branches of the Neisse had already
been expelled and Poles settled on the contested land. Given this
circumstance, the Oder and western Neisse rivers were provisionally
agreed as Poland's western border; but a final decision in principle
(rather than simply a de facto movement of population) was
postponed until a peace conference which in the event never
occurred. (It was only with the unification of the two Germanies in
1990 that the western border of Poland was officially confirmed.)
Some commentators have suggested that the bargaining power of the
western powers in relation to Stalin was weakened by the fact that
Churchill was replaced by Attlee in the course of the Conference, as
the results of the British General Election were made known and a
Labour administration replaced the Churchill government. A further
problem lay in the fact that France, although it was granted a zone of
occupation, did not attend the Potsdam Conference and made little
subsequent attempt to co-ordinate French occupation policies with
those of the British and Americans.
In practice, after the end of hostilities the four zones of occupation
were treated in very different ways, with even British and American
policies diverging in certain respects. Moreover, there were not
necessarily clear or consistent lines of policy within any one zone of
occupation. Not only were there differences of opinion among
different factions and agencies within (or influencing) the
governments of each power; there were also major shifts of policy as
the military governments
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experienced unforeseen difficulties and constraints on policy on the
ground; and there was the wider question of changing priorities in the
context of changing international relations. In the American zone, for
example, the initial policy document the so-called JCS
1067 represented the hybrid outcome of a number of divergent policy
directions. It retained elements of the brief influence of Morgenthau's
draconian proposals for a 'pastoralization' of Germany as well as
reflecting other sources of opinion. General Lucius Clay found it open
to a wide latitude of interpretation in practice in the American zone,
and some of its measures, particularly concerning economic policy,
were in any case overtaken by the Potsdam Agreement. JCS 1067 was
finally formally jettisoned after major shifts in subsequent American
policies (described further below). There were comparable
ambiguities and changes in British policy. While American views
constituted a major influence on British policy, on many matters of
purely British concern the views of the British military government on
the ground tended to prevail over those of British politicians at home.
2 In any event, in the period from defeat and occupation in 1945 to the
division of Germany in 1949, the aims and practices of all the
occupying powers shifted dramatically. While the French were
somewhat unwillingly brought to toe the western line, the Soviets
initiated quite distinctive policies in their zone. In the unfolding story
of transformation and division, it can perhaps be suggested that the
attitude of the western powers to western Germany changed more
markedly, with 1947 representing a key turning-point. It is time to
explore certain aspects of this crucial period of transition in more
detail.
The Democratization of German Politics?
What did the reorganization of German domestic politics look like in
the early months after the end of the war? The war's end had been
greeted with a range of responses among Germans. On the whole, the
political attitudes of most Germans may be characterized in terms of
apathy, a weariness in relation to
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'politics' and what it brought with it, and an overriding concern with
sheer physical survival from day to day. Only a minority at either end
of the political spectrum were ideologically committed and active.
Certain Nazi diehards were determined to follow Hitler's 'scorched
earth' policies and defend their strongholds to the last; other Germans,
equally loyal to the defence of their fatherland, felt that it was better
served by an orderly handover to the Allied forces, thus protecting life
and property. Some feared the consequences of German defeat; others
welcomed the prospect of release from oppression and the chance of
making a new beginning. A wide spectrum of political tendencies
started to emerge from the silence of the Third Reich, with varied
hopes for a possible future. In the different zones of occupation, the
aspirations of these groups were suppressed, subverted, facilitated or
transformed in different ways, as the politics of occupiers and
occupied began to interact.
In the closing months of the war, a number of anti-fascist groups had
emerged, determined finally to oust the Nazis and take control of local
government in order to facilitate what they perceived as their
liberation, rather than defeat, by the Allies. The 'non-defence
committees' (Nichtverteidigungs-komitees) had varying degrees of
success in different areas. In some, they were captured and summarily
shot by the SS. In others, they were able to have some impact on the
course of events. In Bavaria, for example, the Freiheitsaktion Bayern
(FAB) was a military resistance group linked with conservative
resistance circles, with the Demokratische Bewegung Deutschlands,
and with the Bavarian separatist movement Bayerische
Freiheitsbewegung, (BFB) as well as with cells in industrial concerns
in Munich. Although ultimately unsuccessful in its Munich uprising of
28 April 1945, the FAB was able to avert late Allied bombings of the
city and while in control of the local radio station sent out the order of
the 'pheasant chase' (Fasanenjagd). As a result, the BFB in other areas
of Bavaria chased the Nazi 'gold pheasants' (Goldfasanen), and
although the SS retaliated in some instances, in others the hunt was
successful. 3 Such actions were to be important in the formation of a
post-war democratic identity, as indicated by the celebration of the
FAB by the Süddeutsche
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Zeitung in the winter and spring of 1945 and 1946; but despite the
anti-Nazi credentials of these spontaneous movements the western
Allies were to treat them with considerable caution and to suppress
their organizational forms while co-opting certain individuals into
service under the Military Government.
This disbanding of' antifas', or indigenous German democratic groups,
was symptomatic in both the western and Soviet zones of the way in
which the Allies sought to impose their own, differing, conceptions of
the reorganization of German political life. There has been
considerable debate subsequently about notions of 'missed
opportunities', suppressed historical alternatives, and avoidable
'restoration'. On some views, the anti-fascist groups, if given
appropriate encouragement and support, might have provided the
basis for a democratic socialist transformation. Against this, some
historians (such as Rolf Steininger) have argued that these groups
were insufficiently strong or united to have achieved much by way of
positive policies. 4 In any event, the question remains hypothetical,
since such organizations were suppressed and disbanded by the Allies,
in both west and east. This was a source of considerable
disillusionment and disaffection among members of these groups, a
disaffection which was later compounded by the political climates of
both East and West Germany in the 1950S.
The impact of the occupying power on the reorganization of German
political life was most marked in the Soviet zone. Already before the
end of the war, in April 1945, a group of Moscow-trained German
Communists under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht had been flown
in to the area which was to be under Soviet occupation. One of the
first measures of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) was the
licensing of political parties, in order to legitimize the existence and
activities of the KPD. The KPD, under Soviet direction, rapidly
sought to take control of all key positions in local
administration often choosing a non-Communist, such as a respected
member of the local community with impeccable 'non-political',
'bourgeois' or moderate credentials, for the formal figurehead position
(such as mayor), while a Communist wielded the real power in a
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secondary post. This is not to suggest that the KPD did not encounter
problems. There were tensions and differences of view both between
the German Communists and their Soviet masters, as well as within
the KPD itself. Those members of the KPD who had weathered the
Third Reich in exile in the west, or underground in Germany, or who
re-emerged from imprisonment, often subscribed to a humanistic
version of communism which differed considerably from the Stalinist
variant propagated by the Moscow faction. Nevertheless, the KPD
certainly enjoyed a privileged position in the emerging political life of
the Soviet zone, and at first felt strong enough to resist overtures
towards unification from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which
had lost little time in re-founding itself.
Other parties soon founded in the Soviet zone included the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), a German-wide party of former Catholic
Centre party members and former conservative and nationalist
Protestants thus seeking to form a conservative party with a wider
constituency of support than the narrow confessional basis of the
earlier Centre party. Similarly, the liberal LDPD sought to bring
together a variety of liberal views. Initially, these parties were
independent; in the event, their members and leaders were subjected
very soon to immense pressures, such that by the time of the
foundation of the GDR in 1949 they had become more or less puppets
of the Communists. Two further parties in the Soviet zone were
actually founded as Communist puppet parties: the NDPD to
encompass people of right-wing, nationalist sympathies, and the DBD
as the peasants' party.
In the course of the summer and autumn of 1945, particularly as the
results of local elections came in, it became clear to the KPD that they
could never win mass electoral support in competition with an
independent SPD. Even though the KPD was unfairly advantaged in
the provision of such materials as paper, election posters, the
availability of rooms for meetings and even electricity for lighting
those meetings the Communists simply did not win enough votes to
convince anyone of their democratic right to rule. Accordingly, in the
winter of 19456 immense pressure was put on a now less than willing
SPD to
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enter into a merger with the KPD. Many Social Democrats now chose
to leave for the western zones rather than continue in what they saw as
the dictated political circumstances of the Soviet zone. A forced
merger with the rump of the SPD, hammered out in a deal still not
fully understood, was finally ratified at a unification meeting in April
1946. 5 The KPD and SPD merged to become the Socialist Unity
Party of Germany (SED), with formal parity between former
Communists and Social Democrats. Over subsequent years, the latter
were increasingly pressurized and purged, so much so that the
Communists came to exert clear control in the SED. Under Soviet
occupation, the SED was to spearhead Soviet policies in its zone of
Germany, and the 'democratization' of East German politics became
increasingly predicated on the Marxist Leninist interpretation of
democracy as 'democratic centralism'.
The impact of the western powers' political views on the
reorganization of West German political life was more muted, but
nonetheless important. The decision to license the re-foundation of
political parties was taken later, in response to the Soviet initiative and
the energetic activities of the Communists. The western Allies
believed in a grass-roots approach, with the foundation of political
parties first at a local level. Groups of individuals wishing to form
new political parties were invited to apply for licenses in the autumn
of 1945. Licensing was strictly controlled to ensure the democratic
character of the new parties.
The re-founded SPD in the west, under its leader Kurt Schumacher,
was bitterly hostile to the activities of the Communists. Despite the
merger to form the SED in the Soviet zone, in the west the SPD and
KPD remained very firmly separate and opposed organizations. As in
the east, a new conservative grouping of both Catholics and
Protestants formed the CDU; in Bavaria, this retained a separate
identity as the Christian Social Union (CSU). With the 1947 Ahlen
programme, the CDU/CSU initially adopted a relatively radical or at
least progressive social programme as part of official party policy.
This was later downplayed and replaced by the more conservative
views of the individual who was to dominate the CDU and West
Germany
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for the next decade and a half: Konrad Adenauer. Several liberal
parties sprang up over the western zones of Germany, which
eventually merged to become the Free Democratic Party (FDP). This
grouping had a strong, right-wing, pro-business emphasis, in addition
to more obviously 'liberal', individualist elements. There also existed a
large number of very small parties, some never transcending the level
of local politics, others laying more serious claim to wider
representation of regional or special group interests (such as the Bund
der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten representing refugees and
persons expelled from their eastern homelands). Many of these were
separatist in aims; some were quite right-wing. In the occupation
period and even at the beginning of the 1950s the party system in the
western zones looked very like that of the Weimar Republic, with a
relatively large number of small parties which under a system of
proportional representation might bedevil attempts to find stable
governmental coalitions. It was only in the course of the 1950S that
the configuration of two main parties with a third small party holding
the balance of power began to emerge.
The British and Americans were determined to give the Germans an
experience of democracy working in practice at the level of local
government. They wanted to install a basic framework, including
rules of fair play, but encountered a number of difficulties in the
process. Local studies have indicated that some obstacles were of the
Allies' own making: Barbara Marshall's detailed study of Hanover, for
example, has indicated that the British Military Government tended to
favour and give unfair advantages to conservative groups rather than
Social Democrats. The traditional penumbra of SPD youth, sporting
and special interest groups was forbidden, depriving the SPD of one
of its main organizational means of gaining and sustaining support. 6
Other studies, such as that by Rainer Schulze of the Chambers of
Commerce and Industry, have shown how British support of these
employers' organizations allowed them to secure advantages in
influencing the policies of, and placing individuals within, emerging
right-wing political parties.7
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There were also more politically neutral difficulties: the British, for
example, set great store by the attempt to separate 'politics' from
'administration', politicians from civil servants, which in German
traditions of local government had been conflated (as in the office
which combined the functions of chief executive and mayor). There
were also attempts in the British zone to replace the proportional
representation voting system with the British system of 'first past the
post', resulting in the hybrid compromise found in the later voting
system of the Federal Republic (which combines both, as discussed
further in Chapter Seven). Unforeseen problems were encountered
with some of the aspects of democracy in post-Nazi Germany in
practice. The Americans were somewhat taken aback when in one
town a former Nazi mayor was re-elected, by democratic majority
vote, as the new mayor. It was not immediately clear whether the most
'democratic' thing to do would be to reject the democratic vote for an
undemocratic person, or to install, undemocratically, a democratic
candidate against the wishes of the majority. What was clear, however,
was that many Germans had little conception of what was meant by
'democracy': it was associated for those who were old enough to have
experienced it as adults in the Weimar Republic with national defeat
and humiliation, economic crisis, and political chaos. Now it was
associated for many with the undemocratic imposition by victors on
vanquished, and again with national defeat, humiliation and economic
devastation. Concerted efforts had to be made to try to convince
Germans that the ruins around them were the harvest of the Nazi
tyranny and its consequences, rather than the necessary concomitants
of political democracy. Many saw the occupation by the Allies as a
'Fourth Reich', no better than the Third. Even despite all these factors,
however, in the course of the spring of 1946 local governments were
formed in the western zones, and local German politicians who had
been elected by Germans, rather than appointed by the Military
Governments, were able to start co-operating with their erstwhile
enemies in the rebuilding of post-war Germany. They played what
was certainly a subordinate, but
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by no means unimportant, role in the reconstruction of German life.
Denazification and Re-Education
The problems facing the Allies in 1945 were immensely complex.
They had to administer a war-torn country, attempt to get basic
transport and communications functioning again, feed and house the
hundreds of thousands eventually millions of refugees fleeing or
expelled from former eastern homelands, and combat problems of
homelessness, malnutrition and disease among the native population.
At the same time, they had to be extremely suspicious of those
Germans who were in a position to help administer affairs; they had to
deal with the problem of taking over a society which had been run by
Nazis and immersed in Nazism for over a decade.
Along with democratization, denazification was an agreed aim of all
the occupying powers. It was generally accepted that in some way
Germany must be cleansed of Nazis, that those guilty of sustaining
Nazi rule must be punished, and that it was essential, if future peace
was to be secured, that Germans should be convinced of the error of
Nazi views and persuaded to assent to more democratic and peaceful
values. Yet it was not at all clear how these various goals should be
effected. In practice, the Allies in different ways stumbled through a
series of changing conceptualizations and policies which produced
their own quite curious and frequently wayward effects. Neither the
negative tasks relating to denazification, nor the more positive
programmes of re-education, could be said to amount to a
straightforward success story in either the western or eastern zones.
The only part of these processes in which all the Allies collaborated
was that of the Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals. These
lasted from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946. The war guilt of
individuals was investigated, as well as that of the German
government, the General Staff of the Army, the SA, the SS, the SD,
the Gestapo, and leaders of the NSDAP. The government and the
Army General Staff were
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cleared in general terms, but the other organizations mentioned were
declared to be criminal. Three individuals were acquitted of charges of
war crimes: Franz von Papen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hans Fritzsche.
Death sentences were pronounced on, among others, Joachim von
Ribbentrop, Generals Keitel and Jodl, and Gauleiter Julius Streicher
and (in his absence) on Martin Bormann. Goering committed suicide
after being sentenced; Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life
imprisonment, and remained in Spandau prison until his death in
1987; Walther Funk and Admiral Raeder also received life sentences
but were released early because of ill-health. Others received shorter
sentences: Admiral von Dönitz was released in 1956, Baron von
Neurath in 1954, Baldur von Schirach in 1966, and Albert Speer also
in 1966.
The Nuremberg trials raised a host of questions, legal, moral and
political. To what extent could people be punished for actions which
were not at the time a crime? Had war atrocities only been committed
on the German side, and was it not simply a case of 'might makes
right', with the victors claiming a spurious moral superiority over the
vanquished? Would the German public not simply gain sympathy with
their leaders who were on trial, and not really believe or become
immune to the evidence of the atrocities that had been committed in
their name? Despite initial war-time discussions about possible
vengeance on a mass scale, the Allies finally agreed that it was
important to restore a sense of the rule of law and justice in Germany;
but in some respects the Nuremberg trials did not adequately fulfil
these tasks. Nevertheless, these and succeeding war crimes trials did
serve to raise a host of questions about the nature of guilt in Nazi
Germany, such as that concerning the relative importance of giving
orders from behind a desk far removed from the actual scene of the
crime, or the implications of following orders and committing acts of
the utmost inhumanity under threat and duress.
Individuals continued to be investigated and tried for alleged war
crimes by the Germans and other affected governments for decades
after the end of the war. The German statute of limitations, which set a
limit of twenty years in prosecutions for
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murder, was lifted in 1969 to allow continued prosecutions for war
crimes. Many criticisms have been raised about the Nazi war crimes
trials. At first, it seemed that the Germans were less than energetic in
pursuing prosecutions. A Central Office of Land Justice Departments
was established at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, in 1958 to co-ordinate
investigations. By the end of 1964 two decades after the end of the
war it had just over seven hundred cases in hand, leading to the trials
of the later 1960s. Much of the credit for tracking down former Nazis
must be given to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, set up by a Jew who
was determined neither to let the perpetrators of atrocities retire into
happy civilian life nor to leave the nature of their crimes unrecorded.
In the process of acquiring testimonies and accumulating evidence of
the post-war fates and whereabouts of former Nazis, uncomfortable
facts were discovered about the Allies' own treatment of some of them
after the war. In particular, certain Nazis had been found very useful
by the US government in its efforts to combat Communism in the
Cold War, and had therefore been protected and aided in their
disappearance in the post-war period. But despite both this sort of
revelation, and the mounting and perpetually disturbing evidence of
Nazi atrocities, later war trials gave rise to a range of criticisms.
Elderly, pathetic figures were being brought to account for deeds
committed in their youth, and while it could be fairly said that the
disturbance to their health, reputation, tranquil retirement or family
life was totally incommensurable with the appalling deeds for which
they were being tried, legal aspects of some of the trials gave rise to
concern. War crimes trials were increasingly hampered, too, by such
problems as the reliability and availability of eye-witness testimony
and of other evidence, decades after the events which were alleged to
have occurred. They could however be justified in a number of ways,
including the importance of educating a younger generation.
In the immediate post-war period, trials of individual war criminals
could hardly help to deal with the far broader question of what to do
with, and how to transform, a society which had been imbued with
Nazism at all sorts of levels and in a variety of ways. At the more
general level, that of the transformation of
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German society, what denazification meant in detail depended on a
variety of factors: on theories of the nature and roots of Nazism as a
sociopolitical system; on assumptions about German society, about
the bases of certain beliefs and behaviour, and the social
determination or social location of political guilt; and on
considerations about the exigencies of post-war reconstruction. The
major difference was between the Soviet interpretation of Nazism as
rooted in certain socio-economic conditions, with the correlate that the
eradication of Nazism required major structural change, and the more
individualistic, psychological western interpretations of the problem.
Even within the western camp there were considerable differences of
interpretation. Some held the extreme view that all Germans were bad
Germans, and endorsed the notion of 'collective guilt' which initially
informed at least American policy in Germany. Others wished to
distinguish between real Nazis, nominal Nazis, and non and anti-Nazi
Germans. Once the principle of distinction was accepted, the problem
arose of the criteria by which people could be thus classified. Leftwing
and Marxist-influenced intellectuals in Britain and America held
the view that certain prominent social groups bore a greater burden of
responsibility than others. But, in practice, after the initial period
when automatic arrest categories were employed (for example, for SS
personnel), the question was refocused at the individual level, and the
task became one of trying to find appropriate external indices or
evidence for internal predispositions and states of mind. The
complications proved to be immense. For example, Party membership
might indicate commitment to Nazi ideals; it might indicate (as for
those joining after it became compulsory for certain professional
groups in 1937) a desire to support one's family by retaining one's job;
it might even indicate a desire to work against Nazism from within, or
to fill a position for fear of replacement by someone worse. More
problematic, membership could subsequently be represented as having
been motivated by the highest ideals, there being no real means of
checking claims about inner state against ambiguous external
evidence. Most people could in any case persuade themselves of the
acceptability and justifiability
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of their actions, and produce appropriate testimonies to their character,
forgetting the ambivalence, the compromises, and the baser
considerations of the past. Important, too, were the practical problems
of implementation, the unintended effects, and the other
considerations which arose to alter the subsequent course of
denazification. In no zone did denazification present a simple, clear,
consistent story.
In the Soviet zone, given the primarily structural and socio-economic
interpretation of Nazism which prevailed, major efforts were devoted
to the radical transformation of social and economic organization.
Apart from the land reform which served to abolish the Junker class,
the resources of certain Nazi industrialists were expropriated, and
there were reforms of industry and finance which had not merely
reparations as their aim. The Soviets were concerned also to oust
individual Nazis from important positions. They carried out purges
not only in the political and administrative spheres, but also in the
teaching profession and the judiciary. The degrees of thoroughness
varied in different areas. By October 1945, only 26% of remaining
teachers in Mecklenburg and 24% in Brandenburg had been members
of the NSDAP, while in Saxony and Thuringia the figures were 67%
and 68% respectively. 8 The office of the US High Commissioner for
Germany produced a report on the 'Sovietization of the Public School
System in East Germany' in 1951 which estimated that by 1949 over
80% of lower school staff in the Soviet zone were new teachers, and
that in 1948 two-thirds of schoolteachers were under thirty-five years
of age.9 The Soviet purge of the Land bureaucracies produced
comparably variable results, with Thuringia again notably lagging
behind. More lenient attitudes appear to have been adopted in relation
to the medical profession, given the concern about public health.10
Distinctions had been made between 'nominal' and 'activist' Nazis as
early as November 1945, and from 1947, there was something of an
amnesty for 'small Nazis' who were prepared to join in the building of
a new society. Restrictions on the activities and rights of former Nazis
were removed in stages in 1948 and 1949, and in 1952 full rights as
citizens of the GDR were granted to all former Nazis insofar as they
were not war criminals.11 On the
Page 146
positive side of re-education, strenuous efforts were devoted to
changing the content of education in schools, to the production of
newspapers proclaiming the Soviet line, and to evening classes and
Party schools expounding the tenets of Marxism Leninism as
currently interpreted.
Denazification lurched along in curious ways in the western zones. It
was not quite clear whether the aim was to punish or to rehabilitate
former Nazis; and whether the intention was to cleanse the political,
administrative and economic spheres of their presence, or to cleanse
former Nazis of the taint of Nazism in order to reinstate them in their
former areas of expertise. In contrast to the Soviet zone, which
effected a major restructuring of society, along with a replacement of
old elites by new personnel, as well as permitting individual
rehabilitation, the western zones tended towards rehabilitation rather
than transformation. In this respect, the charge of certain radical
critics that West German history represents a case of missed
opportunities, and restoration rather than transformation, may with
qualifications be upheld.
By the early summer of 1945, there were at least four directives,
partially mutually contradictory, concerning denazification in the
American zone. These gave way to the directive of 7 July 1945, which
decided on the notion of 'guilt-by-officeholding', with 136 mandatory
removal categories. 12 This was followed by General Lucius Clay's
Law no. 8 of 26 September 1945, which extended denazification into
the economic sphere, decreeing that Nazis should be employed only in
menial positions. (This gave rise to considerable re-labelling of jobs,
to make elevated jobs appear more mundane.) Law no. 8 marked the
first shift away from an emphasis on structural location and towards a
focus on individual beliefs and private predispositions. This shift was
consolidated when on 5 March 1946 the compromise Law for
Liberation from National Socialism (Befreiungsgesetz) came into
force. The automatic arrests of the previous year had produced, by the
winter of 1945 6, full internment camps and empty offices (in
Niethammer's formulation), with associated problems both of injustice
to individuals and loss of expertise
Page 147
in administrative and public life. Under the new law, individual cases
were to be considered in detail by tribunals, staffed by Germans but
supervised by the Allies, on the basis of previously completed detailed
questionnaires (Fragebögen) with 131 questions on all aspects of
political orientation and activity during the Third Reich. The
information provided in these questionnaires was intended to permit
the classification of individuals into one of five categories: (I) major
offenders; (2) offenders; (3) lesser offenders; (4) followers or fellowtravellers;
(5) exonerated. Appeals could be made to the tribunals, on
production of appropriate evidence, to achieve an amelioration of
classification. On the basis of final classification, individuals might be
imprisoned, or fined, or restricted in their activities and employment,
or given a clean bill of political health and permitted to return into the
community as free citizens. The whole procedure was immensely
cumbersome, producing vast and unmanageable quantities of
paperwork and ever-increasing backlogs of unprocessed cases. 'Easy'
cases were dealt with first, with the result that those who were more
compromised by their political past were left until later, when greater
lenience prevailed, or even managed to escape the net altogether.
There were gross differences in implementation across the zones:
while in the British zone nearly ninety per cent emerged as
'exonerated', only just over a third were similarly exculpated in the
American zone and just over a half in the French zone. Equally, only
one-tenth were deemed to be 'followers' in the British zone, compared
with over half in the US zone and a little under a half in the French
zone. 13
The denazification process involved manifest injustice, giving rise to
assorted criticisms from different sections of society. In Bremen, for
example, it was reported that while the middle classes were
maintaining that denazification was too severe, and bemoaning the
loss of expertise because of the penalization of purely nominal and
professionally necessary party membership, the working classes were
by contrast complaining of lack of sufficient severity and that, as
usual, the really big Nazis were getting away free.14 Many felt that
the 'small fry' were being caught and punished while the 'big fry'
escaped the net. The
Page 148
need for paper credentials led to the mass production of' Persil
certificates' (Persilscheine), as people sought testimonials from
worthy and respected members of the community, such as priests and
pastors, affirming that they had always been good Christians and only
nominal Nazis. The tribunals soon came to be likened to laundries:
one entered wearing a brown shirt and left with a clean starched white
shirt instead. Denazification had finally become, not the cleansing of
German economy, administration and society of Nazis, but rather the
cleansing and rehabilitation of individuals. Gradually, as practical
problems mounted and other preoccupations began to take
precedence, denazification processes were wound up, at different
dates in the different Länder, such that by the early 1950s they were
all terminated. There was even a swing in the other direction; under a
law based on Article 131 of the Basic Law, former civil servants were
granted their jobs back, or retired on full pensions.
The actual effects of denazification procedures appear to have been
somewhat wayward. Apart from the failure to effect a general purge
or a far-reaching replacement of old by new elites, the ultimately
rehabilitative focus of western denazification efforts did not even
appear to provoke much serious soul-searching or confrontation with
one's past on the part of most Germans who went through it. The
major concern was for individual survival: for self-justification, a
whitewashing of the past, the production of testimonials reinterpreting
former activities in a favourable light. Most Germans now attempted
to represent themselves as always having been (at least secretly,
whatever their outward behaviour) 'against it' (immer dagegen), and as
having had the best of motives for having done, or belonged to,
whatever they did. Some observers bitterly commented that, the way
Germans were talking now, Hitler must have been the only Nazi in
Germany. Moreover, the manifest discrepancies in the treatment of
different individuals, and the general sense of injustice at the crudities
of Allied conceptualization and approaches to denazification, arguably
served to create a 'community of the aggrieved', a sense among
Germans of a common fate and a common hostility against the
occupying powers. These were hardly appropriate conditions
Page 149
in which to attempt to transform German political attitudes in
democratic directions.
Denazification was the negative aspect of the attempted
transformation process; re-education represented the more positive
side. Yet the story of re-education attempts is similarly one of policy
confusion, difficulties in implementation, and minimal, irrelevant, or
wayward effects. At school level, the western Allies failed to
restructure the education system in any radical manner, giving way to
German conservative and Christian insistence on retaining the
tripartite selective system and the confessional schools. Within the
old, pre-Nazi school structure, the main problems were those of
adequate staffing, the provision of politically acceptable textbooks,
and the finding of suitable accommodation among the ruins. That the
schools functioned at all, and kept ill-clad and hungry children off the
streets, is in itself something of an achievement. But there is little
evidence to suggest that at this most direct of levels, the education
system managed to inculcate much in the way of democratic attitudes.
In higher education, there were persistent complaints of collusion
among senior university administrators and academics to protect
former Nazis, and accusations that these institutions had failed to
denazify themselves adequately. There was also considerable evidence
of the persistence of right-wing and racialist attitudes among students.
15 The impact of explicitly propagandist films, like Todesmühlen, on
concentration camps, is hard to ascertain; but it appears not to have
been very deep or widespread. Perhaps the most successful organ of
re-education was the licensed press: newspapers produced by
politically acceptable Germans do appear to have had a wide and
receptive readership and may arguably have played a notable role in
some transformation of attitudes in the early post-war years. In the
Soviet zone, however, the overtly propagandistic and ideological line
of the newspapers was so patently belied by personal experience that
it is likely they had little impact.16
Probably more important than the explicit denazification and reeducation
programmes in the remoulding of German society in the
eastern and western zones were the social and economic
transformations of the occupation period. In the
Page 150
west, the change from the initial punitive measures to a focus on
economic recovery set West Germany on the path to becoming a
flourishing capitalist economy; in the east, the radical socio-economic
reforms in agriculture, industry and finance started the process of
transformation into a Soviet-style society. In each case, such measures
played a major role in the reshaping of the political attitudes and
perceptions of the population. But the fact that West Germany
ultimately developed into a stable democracy, to a considerable degree
as a result of post-war economic success, should not serve to obscure
the shortcomings of the denazification and re-education processes of
the occupation period. 'Nazism' may not have survived, for other
reasons; but the effects of the western Allies' policies were to feed the
collective amnesia evident in much of post-war West German history
and to compound the difficulties many West Germans experienced in
coming to terms with their past, just as surely as the Communists'
failure to confront the German legacy together with their assumption
of a clean bill of political health formed part of the historical
distortions and difficulties which hampered the creation of a new
national identity in the truncated state of East Germany.
Economic Revival and Transformation
The economy was the key arena for the transformation of Germany
into a divided state and diverging societies. Differences in economic
policy between the occupying powers both precipitated and
symbolized their wider political dissimilarities; and differences in
economic policy in the different zones set the pattern for long-term
contrasts in the social and political structures of the two Germanies. In
the east, despite no initial Soviet commitment to staying in Germany,
the measures taken nevertheless radically altered East German socioeconomic
structure and were consistent with the subsequent
sovietization of the zone; in the west, the initial fairly draconian
attitude gave way to a focus on reconstruction, under the broad aegis
of the Marshall Plan, which facilitated West Germany's renowned
Page 151
economic growth, material prosperity, political conservatism and
western integration. On both sides, economic circumstances were
probably far more important than directly political measures (such as
re-education) in affecting the political attitudes of the people.
The beginnings were scarcely promising: a devastated, war-torn
country, with few functioning means of communication, little fuel,
food or resources, appalling housing conditions particularly in the
cities, and, by the winter of 19467, the serious danger of famine. An
additional problem was the mass movement and resettlement of
around ten million people. Apart from the problem of returning
prisoners of war, there was the massive problem of refugees. Those
from the eastern provinces who had not joined the treks westwards
fleeing before the advances of the Red Army in the closing months of
the war now found themselves being expelled from their homelands as
a result of Germany's changed boundaries agreed at the Potsdam
Conference. Taking what few possessions they could carry, they were
herded onto trains for the west; in the course of the journey, frequent
ambushes plundering the trains meant that many arrived only with the
clothes in which they were dressed. Although some settled in the
Soviet zone, others saw this as only a transitional stop on the way to
resettlement in the western zones. Agricultural and less populated
areas which had escaped the bombing inflicted on the towns and cities
bore the brunt of housing the refugee population. In some areas in
north Germany, refugees formed as much as fifty per cent of the
population, and there were inevitably frictions between natives and
refugees. Conflicts were based not only, and obviously, on resentment
over differential distribution of scarce resources (food and fuel), but
were rooted also in differences of culture, religion, dialect and lifestyle.
Furthermore, it was not only refugees who were facing immense
problems of adaptation to changed circumstances: natives as well had
to come to terms with the radically changed conditions of post-war,
occupied Germany. 17
Social and cultural problems compounded the more purely economic
and material sources of stress. Overcrowded, cramped living
conditions, with several families sharing rooms, cooking
Page 152
and washing facilities, and widespread exhaustion and illness in
addition to psychological disorientation, were exacerbated by
prejudices and misunderstandings. For both natives and refugees,
there were breakdowns of 'normal' family life, with the loss of many
husbands and fathers, and women bearing the brunt of what has been
called 'survival work' in the 'hour of the women'. 18 Women took a
large share, not only in feeding and caring for their own families, but
also in the hard physical labour of rebuilding from the rubble and
ruins of post-war Germany. The concept of Trümmerfrauen, bands of
women passing stones and bricks from one to the next in the
reconstruction of ruined buildings, encapsulates and symbolizes the
circumstances of the time (see plate 12). In what was barely a
subsistence economy, money became almost meaningless. The
severely restricted calories nominally available on ration cards had to
be supplemented with the products of bartering, 'hamstering', and the
exchange of goods and services on the black market. It was more
profitable to go out foraging in the countryside, or to engage in
'trading upwards' through a succession of goods, cigarettes, drink,
chocolate, and services (including prostitution), than to labour in a
paid, full-time job precluding such activities. Archbishop Frings
unwittingly gave his name to a new activity, fringsen, when in a
sermon he implied that stealing coal to keep one's family warm was
not a heinous offence in these circumstances. Many took this to
legitimize their or their children's activities. The black market
became an essential sector of the economy, and one which had
eventually to be conquered in order to restore more orthodox life.
The Allies were torn between, on the one hand, concerns for both
punishment of the Germans and reparations for themselves, and, on
the other, the desire to avert widespread starvation and associated
social unrest. Particularly in the west, it was feared that Communism
would spread rapidly if economic conditions were bad. Moreover,
each of the Allies was also attempting, in however confused and
tentative a fashion, to reshape its part of Germany in a new image,
appropriate to varying visions of a future political and economic order
in Europe. Hence there were inconsistencies and changes
Page 153
in policy, although Soviet policies can perhaps be seen as the most
consistent combination: the exaction of maximum reparations
alongside maximal restructuring, throughout the occupation period.
The Soviet zone of occupied Germany had certain initial economic
advantages. Although its population was about 40% of that of the
western zones, its fixed industrial capital was about 48% of that of the
western zones. The northern parts of the area were largely
agricultural, but in the south, particularly in Saxony and Thuringia,
there were major industrial centres. The Soviet zone had been less
badly affected by war damage and bombing than the western zones
(with notable individual exceptions, such as Dresden): its loss of
productive capacity through war damage has been estimated at
approximately 15%, compared with 2 % in the west. However, it did
suffer from certain disadvantages. The area covered by the Soviet
zone had been a rather specialized, non-self-sufficient economy: in
particular, it was dependent on the west for raw materials. It had, for
example, produced only 2% of the Reich's hard coal and pig iron, and
7% of the Reich's steel, by the end of the war. It was also to some
extent dependent on lost provinces further to the east for agricultural
imports and some coal. Thus, while it was intrinsically a highly
productive area, it was dependent on a particular network of trade
links in the former Reich, and would suffer particularly adverse
consequences from a severance of these links. Furthermore, it had a
relatively unfavourable demographic structure. Partly owing to the
war losses of young males, there was a preponderance of the old and
of females. Initially there was an influx of refugees fleeing from
territories further east, and exacerbating shortages of food and
housing; before the advantages of the increased labour force could be
realized, however, there were subsequent losses of population through
further movements to the western zones. 19
Whatever the initial disadvantages and advantages of the economic
situation in the Soviet zone, matters were undoubtedly worsened by
Soviet occupation policies. Soviet dismantling reduced the productive
capacity of the zone by about 26%, compared with a figure of 12% for
the western zones. By the
Page 154
spring of 1948, the Soviets had dismantled over 1900 plants, almost
1700 of them completely. Including war damage, the total loss of
productive capacity was about 50% compared to 1939 (although
according to some economists, productive capacity was still greater in
the late 1940s than in the mid-1930s, due to the increased productivity
of the last pre-war years). The scale of dismantling was one indication
that the Soviets had no initial firm intention to remain on German soil
in the long term; they at this time appeared to want to get in, take what
they could, and get out although only on certain terms. However,
even from this point of view, their dismantling policies which were
obviously detrimental to the economy of the area proved problematic.
Much of the equipment became rusty or was damaged during its
transportation to the Soviet Union; and more complex equipment,
once dismantled, could not be successfully reassembled in the USSR.
One solution was to ship out German experts along with their
machinery, in order to reassemble and operate it in the USSR. Another
was to leave equipment in Germany but appropriate the product. In
June 1946 twenty-five Soviet joint-stock companies (SAGs) were
formed, with 213 firms, producing thirty-two per cent of the total
production of the Soviet zone, taken over into Soviet ownership.
These were gradually phased back into German state ownership in the
period 194954. The Soviets also exacted considerable reparations and
occupation costs. Up to 1953, about one quarter of the zone's national
product was spent on occupation costs and reparations payments
(compared with a figure for the west of perhaps 1115% in the period
up to 1949). It has been estimated although precise calculations are
highly contested that by 1955 the total value of goods and services
taken by the Soviets was in the order of $30 billion, as against an
agreed figure of $10 billion.
Quite apart from their attempts to gain some form of compensation for
the enormous material and human losses imposed on them by German
aggression, the Soviets implemented certain economic policies
designed so to transform the socio-economic structure of their zone
that there could never again, in the Soviet view, be the material basis
for a
Page 155
Nazi/capitalist militarism. They sought to eradicate the Junker class
and the large capitalists in a stroke.
In September 1945, about seven thousand large estates (those over
100 hectares, approximately 250 acres) and those belonging to former
'Nazi activists' were expropriated. This amounted to about thirty per
cent of the agriculturally fruitful area of the zone. Some of the land
was redistributed to form peasant smallholdings; the rest was taken
into state-owned farms (Volkseigene Güter). The small peasant landholdings
were too small to be economically viable, and lacked
adequate equipment to be farmed properly. This cunningly produced a
situation in which those in receipt of land might be both grateful for
what they had been given, and yet dependent on state support to make
any use of it. 20 This strategy aided the later development of cooperative
forms of organization (such as the introduction of tractorlending
stations) and facilitated the first collectivization of agriculture
in 1952.
In July 1945 there was a move from private to centralized state
banking, and private insurance companies were merged into five
public insurance corporations, one for each Land. In industry, there
were comparable moves. Thuringia started transferring mines and
minerals into state ownership in September 1945, followed by other
states in the next two years. In October 1945 ten thousand individual
enterprises owned by 'Nazi activists' were sequestered. In June 1946
there was a plebiscite on expropriation in Saxony. This produced a
high turnout, with an overwhelming majority in favour of
expropriation. (There was a 93.7% turnout; 77.6% voted in favour,
16.5% against, with 5 8% of the votes cast invalid.) It is notable that
some of the economic measures of the Soviet occupation were at least
initially welcomed by sizeable numbers of the populace, despite their
hostility towards Soviet politics. This was taken as a general mandate
legitimizing expropriations in other Länder in the zone without prior
plebiscite. In April 1948 expropriated enterprises became Volkseigene
Betriebe (VEBs). Along with the Soviet-owned SAGs they accounted
for about 60% of industry's gross product. Between 1949 and 1955
remaining private enterprises suffered detrimental tax, price and
planning measures. By 1955, the
Page 156
private sector accounted for about 15 % of industrial production; by
1970, as little as 2%, frequently in the form of part ownership with the
state.
The western Allies were not initially clear about their economic plans
for post-war Germany. Just as in the sphere of denazification there
was a switch from drastic notions of collective guilt to an eventual
policy of rehabilitation, so in the sphere of economic policy there was
a radical change in approach. It was obvious that a primary aim of the
Allies must be to prevent a resurgence of German militarism as a
threat to peace, but it was not clear as to how best this was to be
achieved. The early Morgenthau plan for the deindustrialization of
Germany, despite its mixed reception, found some echoes in the
economic proposals in the Potsdam Agreement, as well as in the
Level-of-Industry Plan of March 1946. According to this, Germany's
standard of living was to be reduced to the 1932 level, and was not to
exceed that of other European countries; industrial capacity was to be
reduced to about 5055% of the 1938 level; about 1546 plants were to
be dismantled in the western zones; and there were limits on the
output of almost all industries, with some (armaments and warrelated)
banned entirely. Only coal output was to expand. This plan
was related to reparations agreements which, because of the
deterioration of East-West relations, were not in practice effected; in
particular, after a couple of months the agreement on partial exchange
of food and raw materials from the Soviet zone for products of
western dismantling was terminated. While opinion in the USA had
been divided, Britain was always strongly conscious of the problems
that a deindustrialization of Germany would bring, particularly with
respect to feeding the German population. However, it was not only
for practical reasons (the attempt to prevent mass starvation) but also
because of the developing Cold War, that western approaches to the
German economy changed.
The change was signalled in the speech by US Secretary of State
James Byrnes in Stuttgart on 6 September 1946, when the German
public learned for the first time explicitly that it was to receive more
lenient treatment. In the spring and summer of 1947 the shift in policy
was confirmed. On 1 January
Page 157
1947 the Bizone was created out of the British and American zones,
ostensibly to allow for a more efficient joint economic administration,
but to all intents and purposes actually creating a new, West German
political unit in which the Economic Council acted as quasigovernment.
In March April 1947 the Moscow Conference of
Foreign Ministers saw a breakdown in East-West relations and the
Truman doctrine enunciated the American policy of containing the
advance of Communism. Associated with this shift in priorities, away
from anti-Nazism and towards anti-Communism, was a major shift in
economic policy. On 5 June 1947 US Secretary of State George
Marshall, in a speech at a Harvard graduation ceremony, called for a
European Recovery Programme. This was rejected in July by the
USSR and by the East European states, because it was predicated on a
market (rather than state-controlled and centrally directed) economy
which would benefit American exports. Effectively the USA was now
to support the economic recovery of western Europe, and in particular
of western Germany, both for the economic benefits it would bring to
the American economy which was seeking overseas markets, and for
the political motive of seeking a bulwark against the expansion of
communism in central Europe. The USA now officially supported the
view that 'an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic
contributions of a stable and prosperous Germany'. 21 In late August
1947, the revised Level-of-Industry Plan permitted increased
production in the American and British zones to approximately
7075% of the 1938 level.
Subsequent developments in economic policy in the western zones
were closely linked with the political division of Germany. Both to
facilitate the introduction of Marshall Aid, and to combat the
problems of the black market, a currency reform was introduced in the
western zones on 20 June 1948, in which the new Deutschmark
accomplished an effective devaluation of the old Reichsmark and
achieved, in conjunction with the lifting of price controls on many
items, a stabilization of the economy in the western zones and a return
to money as the unit of currency (rather than cigarettes or direct barter
and exchange of goods and services). The currency reform in the west
was
Page 158
soon followed by both a comparable currency reform in the Soviet
zone, and by an attempt by the Soviet Union to cut Berlin off from
communications with the western zones. The 'Berlin Blockade' lasted
from 24 June 1948 to 12 May 1949, when the road, rail and water
routes to Berlin were blockaded, and the western powers flew supplies
into Berlin by air routes, dropping food to Berliners from so-called
'raisin bombers'. As Grosser has pointed out, this transformed Berlin
overnight from being perceived as a bastion of Nazism and Prussian
militarism to being the symbolic last outpost of freedom and
democracy in the western sense, to be protected at all costs. 22 The
end of the airlift which amounted to 277,000 flights came when the
political division of Germany was effectively accomplished, as will be
seen below.
It is notable that, in contrast to the Soviet zone, there were no radical
transformations in economic structure in the western zones of
occupation. In the case of land reform, the argument could be made
that there were in any event few large estates to be divided in the west.
The Soviets had in their zone the main areas of the Junker estates.
Nevertheless, what land reform there might have been in the west was
deflected, partly by the representations of interested German landowners,
partly because of lack of clarity and forcefulness in Allied
policy-making in this area. In some areas, there were moves for a
serious restructuring of the German economy moves which were
often met with considerable German resistance, and which did not
always achieve lasting changes. In banking and industry, attempts
were made to break up trusts and cartels. The Deutsche Bank,
Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank were to be split into thirty
successor institutions with geographic limits; I. G. Farben was broken
up into four successor companies in 1953; the twelve largest coal and
steel concerns were turned into twenty-eight independent successor
companies, and the links between coal and iron were broken. But
despite Allied pressures for decartelization, and the eventual passing
of a watered-down decartelization law in 1957, the concentration of
the West German economy continued in the post-war period.
Page 159
Nevertheless, it can be argued that in more subtle, less immediately
obvious ways, there was in fact a major socio-economic reorientation
taking place in the western zones of Germany. In the immediate postwar
period, many people thought the way was open for a socialist
transformation of Germany. The Allies' decision to suppress
indigenous anti-fascist groups and support moderate and conservative
political parties was paralleled in the sphere of economic policy.
Indigenous demands, for example, for the socialization of mines, were
peremptorily dealt with by the Americans. Socialization measures
proposed by the Land governments of Hesse and NorthRhine
Westphalia were suppressed by the Americans and under
American pressure the British respectively. Subtle pressures were
exerted by the Americans to split communist and socialist trade
unions, to isolate the former and moderate the latter. A frequently
overlooked aspect of the Marshall Plan was its influence on what
might be called the political culture of the economy. Beyond the
giving of Marshall Aid with attached conditions and constraints, there
was a great emphasis on exporting a notion of an 'American way of
life'. This stressed the importance of enhanced productivity and the
reduction of political disputes to technical problems of producing a
greater shared abundance. 23 A potential 'Third Way', to which many
Germans had looked with hope in the later 1940s, was as much
suppressed in the West channelled into an American-influenced
mould as it was in the East by the obviously and visibly radical
sovietization of the economy.
This is not to suggest that American views were simply imprinted on
West Germany. The so-called 'social market economy' which emerged
under the guidance of Ludwig Erhard a former Professor of
Economics who became West Germany's first Economics Minister,
and eventually Chancellor from 1963 to 1966 was a complex product
of American influence and German interest group pressures, on the
part of both employers and employees. There was considerable
resistance and opposition by German political and economic elites, as
well as by trade unionists, to different aspects of American economic
policies. Initial measures by the Americans such
Page 160
as those relating to decartelization were met with hostility, and
subsequent developments tended to reverse, water down, or amend
certain aspects so as to deflect their impact from original intentions. It
can also be argued that the strength of radicalism in late 1940s
Germany was not as great as some interpretations of 'missed chances'
suggest: for example, the depoliticization of strikes which narrowed
their goals to purely economic demands on wages and conditions was
evident already in 1947. Yet, however difficult to quantify, a certain
weight must be given particularly to American influence in setting
West Germany on the course of a moderate, liberal-conservative form
of western capitalism. And the importance of the economic success of
that form of capitalism for the subsequent political stability of West
Germany can scarcely be overrated.
The Cold War and the Division of Germany
In 1949, two German states were founded, dividing German soil.
Between them lay the border that Winston Churchill, in a famous
speech in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, had dubbed an 'iron
curtain' dividing west from east, the free world and democracy from
dictatorship and communism. West Germans and the western allies
effectively jettisoned the Germans living in the Soviet zone in the
east, in favour of integrating a partial state into a new order in western
Europe.
Who was responsible for the division? Debates continue over
interpretations of the Cold War more generally was it the Soviet
Union or the USA which was the primary aggressor? Did the
Americans misjudge and exaggerate Soviet expansionism, or did they
simply act appropriately to contain a real Soviet threat? These wider
debates obviously have relevance to attempts to understand the
division of Germany, but further factors are also of importance here.
For example, whatever the origins of the Cold War, it is conceivable
that Germany could have remained united, as a neutral power (as was
in the end the case with Austria), with the Iron Curtain running along
a different frontier. Moreover, in asking who was responsible for the
division of Germany, one must focus not only on the superpowers, but
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also on the role played by the Germans themselves. While the
chronological stages of division may relatively easily be
recounted with the west appearing to take the initiative at almost
every turn the balance of interpretation must remain somewhat more
tentative.
Elements of a post-war division into 'spheres of influence' had already
been mooted in informal 'friendly agreements' between Churchill and
Stalin in 1944. But while recognizing the legitimacy of spheres of
influence in an informal way, no decisions had been reached on
Germany in particular before the end of the war. An important factor
after the cessation of hostilities was the zonal, rather than central,
level of effective administration, as we have seen above. This
inevitably led to the defacto divergence of socio-economic and
political conditions in each zone. But a major factor was the
increasing concern of the Americans with a perceived Soviet threat.
It was the British who first seriously considered, not the
dismemberment of Germany into a number of small states (as had
been mooted in some wartime plans) but rather division with a
western partial state corresponding to the western zones of
occupation. In April 1946, amidst growing fears about Soviet
intentions, the British Foreign Office decided that the West German
Länder would have to be strengthened and made able to resist any
communist dominated central government; and that if it were to come
to a division of Germany, the Soviet Union would have to be made to
look responsible. 24 The dissolution of the former province of Prussia,
and the founding of North-Rhine Westphalia as a large state
encompassing the industrially important and politically contentious
Ruhr district, must be seen in this context. So must the discussions
between the Americans and the British which led to the fusing of their
two zones into the Bizone, coming into effect in January 1947. The
British had quite pragmatic considerations: their economy was
suffering badly after the war, with bread rationing being introduced
for the first time in July 1946, and the British having to borrow
American dollars to feed the Germans while their own people who
had 'won' the war were suffering economic hardships in peacetime.
For a range of different reasons the Americans came round to
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the view that German economic recovery was to be encouraged. The
Stuttgart speech by James Byrnes in September 1946 was the first
official signal that the punitive approach to post-war Germany had
finally been dropped.
In 1947 the Cold War became public. On 12 March 1947 American
President Harry Truman made his famous speech to the American
Congress enunciating what became known as the Truman Doctrine.
Initially arising as a specific response to a specific crisis the situation
in Greece Truman's emphasis on the 'containment of communism'
was generally interpreted as having wider, indeed universal,
implications. America was formally committed to a world policy of
stemming what it saw as the tide of Soviet expansionism, wherever it
might occur. With the failure of the Foreign Ministers Conference in
Moscow, the British and Americans set in train moves to transform
the economic administration of their new Bizone into a quasi-political
structure, providing the embryo of a new western state. The new
Economic Council of the Bizone prefigured the immediate political
future of the Federal Republic in more than purely formal respects.
The SPD delegates, failing to obtain the position of
Wirtschaftsdirektor for their party, opted to sit in 'constructive
opposition', renouncing the chance of fundamentally affecting
economic policy and foreshadowing their role in the best part of the
next twenty years of West Germany's history. In June 1947, the
Marshall Plan for the recovery of post-war Europe was announced on
terms which made it impossible for Soviet-occupied East European
states to accept. As the economic division of Germany became more
apparent, so the political division the need for political institutions to
administer economic policies in the west became more inevitable. It
was clear even before it began that the Foreign Ministers Conference
in London of November December 1947 was doomed to fail. France
still proved a recalcitrant partner for the British and Americans,
having designs on the coal-rich Saarland (which was in fact
administered separately from the Federal Republic until it rejoined
West Germany after a plebiscite in 1957) and disagreeing with British
and American policies on the Ruhr. But in 1948 the latter pair went
ahead with their plans for
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the political reorganization of the Bizone into a shadow state; and
finally, recognizing the inevitable, France joined to form a 'Trizonia'
in the spring of 1949.
By the summer of 1948, with the currency reform and the Berlin
blockade in full effect, the division of Germany appeared more or less
a fait accompli. There was one last-minute attempt to consider
alternatives, in a plan put forward in May 1948 by the British Military
Governor in Germany, Sir Brian Robertson; but this was rejected by a
sceptical British Foreign Office. In the West German zones, a
Parliamentary Council formed of representatives from the West
German Land parliaments met to draw up a new constitution for a
West German state. This, a document deemed to be sufficiently
impermanent and committed to reunification to warrant the term
'Basic Law' (Grundgesetz) rather than 'constitution', was formally
approved on 8 May 1949 and, with the signature of the Allies, came
into effect on 23 May 1949, four years to the day after German
capitulation and the dissolution of the government of the German
Reich. On 14 August 1949 the first national elections were held in the
new Federal Republic of Germany; and, after some bargaining with
the FDP, Konrad Adenauer of the CDU became West Germany's first
Chancellor four weeks later. The Federal Republic had been launched
onto a particular course; and, under Adenauer's leadership, it was to
set its face firmly towards the west in the coming decade, suppressing
both memories of the past and concern for the lost Germans in the
east.
In response to, and lagging behind, developments in the west were the
steps towards the establishment of an East German state in the Soviet
zone. The radical socio-economic measures in the Soviet zone had
been paralleled by increasing Communist control of political life, with
the Stalinization of the SED and increasing coercion by the SED of
the other parties. Given what was occurring under Soviet influence
elsewhere in Eastern Europe (particularly Poland and
Czechoslovakia), there was good reason for the western powers to
fear Stalin's ultimate designs in respect of the Soviet zone of
Germany. Attempts at co-operation between the former war-time
allies had clearly broken
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down. Yet the formal stages in the foundation of the GDR arose as
responses to western initiatives. On 14 June 1947 the Soviets founded
the German Economic Commission (Deutsche
Wirtschaftskommission) in response to the western foundation of the
Economic Council. The German Economic Commission took over
central administration of the economy in the Soviet zone in March
1948. The German Democratic Republic was formally founded on 7
October 1949, after the foundation of the FRG. The first constitution
of the GDR was in principle very similar to that of the FRG, so as not
to prejudice the possibility of reunification; as we shall see, it was
subsequently amended in 1968 and 1974 to conform somewhat more
accurately to the realities of East German political life. Wilhelm Pieck
was elected first (and only) President of the GDR, with Otto
Grotewohl as Prime Minister; the real power, however, lay with the
SED and its leader, the Moscow-trained Walter Ulbricht, who was to
consolidate his power in the coming decade.
Who, then, was primarily responsible for this division of Germany?
The most obvious first answer to this question must be one which is in
fact frequently overlooked: the Germans themselves. Had they not
unleashed a World War, had they not declared war on the Soviet
Union and the USA, and involved these powers in the affairs of
central Europe, there would have been no post-war reorganization of
the international system. This simple fact should not be forgotten and
particularly not by self-pitying Germans who want to place the blame
on one or the other superpower. However, even beyond this obvious
point, there is a further degree of responsibility to be apportioned to
the post-war Germans themselves, particularly in the west. West
German political elites, whatever their lip service to the goal of unity,
were prepared to contemplate with some equanimity the prospect of
material prosperity and political and military security at the price of
jettisoning their East German relatives. They participated actively, and
co-operated efficiently, in the establishment of a new economic order
and a new political framework for a partial nation, a western state, and
did remarkably little to attempt to hinder or alter the course of
division. Even on the one occasion when it appeared that all German
politicians were hoping to
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discuss frankly among themselves the consequences of Allied
policies the meeting of German Prime Ministers in Munich in June
1947 the western politicians were not prepared to keep open channels
of communication between themselves and their eastern counterparts,
or explore the extent to which the latter really were dominated by
Moscow. They showed intransigence in refusing even to let the East
German politicians read out a prepared statement prior to the start of
proceedings. As will be seen in the next chapter, the determination of
certain West German politicians to achieve western unity at the
expense of the east was even more apparent in 1952, when
reunification for a moment appeared a possibility. So while many
Germans might have been longing for unity, certain West German
politicians in key positions were acting to undermine whatever formal
noises they were making about national reunification.
In relation to the respective contributions of the superpowers, analyses
of Soviet policy must remain partly a matter of guesswork. It does
however seem clear that western integration of part of a divided
Germany, and the reconstruction of the West German economy in the
wider framework of West European economic recovery, was very
much in both the political and the economic interests of the USA.
Politically, a strong, well-integrated, materially prosperous western
Europe would provide an effective military defence against
communist aggression, while also being less susceptible to communist
infiltration or subversion from within. Economically, American
capitalism required the sort of international market which a
flourishing western Europe could provide. So it was clearly a
realignment of the international system which would operate to
America's advantage. Whether the American perception of the Soviet
threat was exaggerated must remain an open question. The Soviet
Union, with its war-ravaged economy, and its experience of invasion
by western powers in 1919 and in 1941 was clearly concerned to
have a defensive belt of compliant satellite states between itself and
the west. The extent to which it wanted to have an East Germany as
one of these satellites is however another matter, and it seems likely
that for a considerable period of time Stalin was keeping his options
open on this. It might have suited Soviet
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interests just as well to have taken what was possible by way of
reparations, and then left a united, neutral Germany in central Europe,
in a position rather like that of Austria. The British and French were
influenced by consideration of possible future alignments of a united
Germany: the 'Rapallo complex', or fear of an arrangement between
Germany and Russia, undoubtedly played a large role, particularly in
French thinking. In any event, both superpowers made the best of the
final outcome; and the communist bloc certainly benefited from the
inclusion of industrialized, productive East Germany in its economic
camp.
What then did Germany look like in the year of the foundation of the
new Republics? In the West, an economic upswing was already
becoming evident: the black market had disappeared almost overnight
after the currency reform and a return to, or a development of,
'normal' life seemed to be possible even for the many refugees who
were beginning to find jobs and new lives in what was essentially a
new country. Moreover, the people of West Germany were beginning
to be valued by the western powers as good democrats, partners in the
international freedom fight against the evils of communism. With the
foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April
1949, following the Organization for European Economic Cooperation
(OEEC) one year earlier, the western world was becoming
reorganized militarily and economically. At first, West Germany's
western neighbours particularly France treated her with some
caution, and measures such as international control of steel and coal
production in the Ruhr were designed to contain any future German
threat. In the longer term, these developments were to feed into closer
West European economic co-operation and in particular into the
European Community even in 1990 seen as a means of binding a by
then powerful and wealthy Germany into a wider set of containing
structures. In 1949, many West Germans saw a potential new role in a
new Europe. They could set their sights forward, and try to forget or
repress the traumas of the recent past. In the East, things did not
appear nearly so rosy. Economic conditions were by no means as
favourable as in the West; and political repression was increasingly
evident, particularly after 1948. Yet even in the East
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it had been made clear to former 'small Nazis' that they could find a
role for themselves in the new state if they were prepared to
participate and help in the new tasks of building socialism. In the East
as well as in the West, many Germans wished simply to forget the
past, and lived day-to-day, seeking to make the best of current
circumstances and harbouring their respective hopes for the future.
Yet the foundations which had been laid by 1949 set the pattern for
paths followed in the future: diverging paths which shattered the
hopes of many for another kind of new Germany after the defeat of
Hitler's Reich.
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Seven
Crystallization and Consolidation, 194961
The period from the foundation of two separate states in 1949 to the
erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 is one in which the division of
Germany was confirmed, and in which the peculiar characters of the
two new states were consolidated. While in 1949 much still appeared
open, by the beginning of the 1960s patterns had been laid which were
to shape the next quarter of a century of German history.
Before considering the historical development of East and West
Germany in this crucial decade, we must briefly consider certain
features of their constitutions and political systems. The very different
political systems liberal democracy in the West and a 'democratic
centralism' based on Marxist Leninist theory in the East provided the
framework for the very different patterns of political, social and
economic development in the two German states which succeeded the
Third Reich.
The Constitution and Political System of the Federal Republic
The Federal Republic of Germany represented Germany's second
attempt at a liberal parliamentary democracy in the twentieth century.
The writers of the constitution in 19489 had an ever-present regard for
the failures of the Weimar Republic, and although the Basic Law
(Grundgesetz) was the result of many positive considerations, it was
also a document written with an eye to perceived weaknesses in the
Weimar