What follows is a tale of poor planning, poorly trained soldiers, starvation, brutal treatment of civilians, in short, all the things that we have largely avoided in Iraq.
WHKMLA
On May 8th, Germany surrendered unconditionally (to Soviet forces on May 9th), and ceased to exist as a state. The allies had previously agreed on partitioning Germany in three zones of occupation - a large Soviet zone in the east, a British zone in the Northwest and an American zone in the Southwest. Austria was to be separated again from Germany, as was the SAARLAND, again to be placed under French administration until it’s future would be decided by plebiscite. Germany’s territories located east of the ODER and NEISSE rivers were given to Poland in compensation for it’s eastern territories which remained part of the USSR; the Northern half of EAST PRUSSIA was annexed by Russia. The German population of these territories, as well as the German population of territories located within the borders of restored eastern European States such as Czechoslovakia (the SUDETEN GERMANS), Hungary, Yugoslavia etc. was expelled. The total number of refugees moving into what remained of Germany exceeded 10 million. Breslau, Germany’s second largest city, was renamed Wroclaw, Danzig, the city of Schopenhauer, Gdansk, Koenigsberg, the city of Kant, Kaliningrad. In Germany, a 4th zone of occupation was established by the recognition of France as a victorious power; this zone was located in the southwest. BERLIN was treated separately, partitioned in 4 sectors.
Germans refer to May 8th 1945 as the STUNDE NULL (hour zero), in which life started again. The nightmare of 12 years of Nazi regime, the rule of terror, had ended. For everyone, the most serious problem was how to survive the next week or so.
In the last weeks of the war, both state and economy had virtually collapsed. There was plenty of money, but there were hardly any goods to buy. Prices were still regulated, so the store shelves were empty - who had something to offer didn’t want to sell cheap. People toured the countryside, went from farm to farm trying to trade their Persian carpet for a bag of potatos (HAMSTERN).
US soldiers, who were supplied with free chocolate and cigarettes, seeing the despair of the people, generously distributed those, especially to children and to girls. US cigarettes soon became a SURROGATE CURRENCY, on the emerging BLACK MARKET everything was paid for in cigarettes. On Dec. 31st 1946, in the middle of the first severe post-war winter, Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, in his sermon declared that theft in times of an existence-threatening emergency was acceptable; the acquisition of coal, wood etc. without pay then became known as “FRINGSEN”. On Cologne’s railway station, 900 tons of coal per day ‘disappeared’.
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Word IQ
After six years of war much of the European continent was devastated. Battles had been fought throughout the continent, covering a far larger area than in the First World War. The economies of the regions were ruined, millions were homeless, and the destruction of agriculture had lead to conditions nearing starvation in much of the continent. Many of the greatest cities including Warsaw and Berlin were in ruins, and others such as London were severely damaged. Especially damaged was the transportation industry as railways, bridges, and roads had been heavily targeted by airstrikes while much merchant shipping had been sunk. None of these problems could be easily fixed as the nations engaged in the war had exhausted their treasuries in its prosecution.
The one country not significantly harmed was the United States. It had entered the war late and had only once been significantly attacked during the conflict. The American gold reserves were still intact as was its massive agricultural and manufacturing base.
Originally it was hoped that little would need to be done to rebuild Europe. It was hoped that Britain and France, with the help of their colonies, would quickly rebuild their economies. By 1947 there was still little progress, however. Drought in 1947 and a cold winter in 1947-48 aggravated an already poor situation.
One of the strongest motivating factors were the beginnings of the Cold War. The American government had grown very suspicious of Soviet actions and concerned about possible communist domination of Europe. In both France and Italy the poverty of the post war era had provided fuel for the communist parties who had seen significant electoral success.
The American government of Harry Truman began to be aware of these problems in 1946. The emerging doctrine of containment argued that the United States needed to substantially aid non-communist countries to stop the spread of Soviet influence.
An early concept of the plan had been presented by US Secretary of State James Byrnes during a speech held at the Stuttgart Opera House (Germany) on September 6, 1946.
The first substantial aid went to Greece and Turkey in January of 1947, who were seen as being on the front lines of the battle against communist expansion. In February Britain desperately requested aid from the States to shore up their economy.
The main alternative to large quantities of American aid was to take it from Germany. This notion became known as the Morgenthau plan, named after US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.. It advocated extracting massive reparations from Germany to help rebuild those countries it had attacked, and also to prevent Germany from ever being rebuilt.
This plan was rejected, however, as many drew parallels between German dissonance due to reparation claims following World War I and allowing for the rise of Nazism. By April of 1947 Truman, Marshall and Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson were convinced of the need for substantial quantities of aid from the United States.
The final plan was announced by Marshall at a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 where he outlined the U.S. government’s preparedness to contribute to European recovery.
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Global Security
On V-E Day, Eisenhower had sixty-one U.S. divisions, 1,622,000 men, in Germany, and a total force in Europe numbering 3,077,000.1 When the shooting ended, the divisions in the field became the occupation troops, charged with maintaining law and order and establishing the Allied military presence in the defeated nation. This was the army-type occupation. A counterpart of the military government carpet, its object was to control the population and stifle resistance by putting troops into every nook and cranny. Divisions were spread out across the countryside, sometimes over great stretches of territory. The 78th Infantry Division, for instance, for a time after V-E day was responsible for an area of 3,600 square miles, almost twice the size of the state of Delaware, and the 70th Infantry Division for 2,500 square miles. Battalions were deployed separately, and the company was widely viewed as the ideal unit for independent deployment because billets were easy to find and the hauls from the billets to guard posts and checkpoints would not be excessively long. Frequently single platoons and squads were deployed at substantial distances from their company headquarters.
The occupation troops manned border control stations, maintained checkpoints at road junctions and bridges, sent out roving patrols to apprehend curfew and circulation violators, and kept stationary guards at railroad bridges, Army installations, DP camps, jails, telephone exchanges, factories, and banks. In the first months troops were plentiful and almost everything of importance-and some not so important-was guarded.2 In effect, the combat forces became military government security troops.
The army-type occupation was comprehensive and showed the Germans that they were defeated and their country occupied. This type of occupation was presumably capable of squelching incipient resistance since none was evident. On the other hand, it employed a much larger number of troops than would be available for the permanent occupation and did so at considerable cost in combat potential and discipline. The larger units lost their cohesiveness, and in the platoons and companies discipline weakened. Ironically, the supposed chief beneficiary, military government, concluded after two months’ experience that the better plan would have been to form the occupational police battalions General Gullion had asked for and been refused in 1942. The tactical troops thought in terms of military security and therefore often followed different priorities than would have been most useful to military government. The public safety officer in Marburg, for instance, complained that he was having to spend most of his time explaining to the tactical troops why they should, besides protecting potential sabotage targets and checking passes, also supply guards for the $200-million worth of art work, 400 tons of German Foreign Office records, and 84 tank cars loaded with mercury, all of which were in military government custody.
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Global Security
“The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle,” Third Army G-5 reported more than a month after V-E Day, adding, “The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer.” 1 In official terms, however, the questions were not difficult to answer at all. SHAEF had long ago worked out automatic arrest categories ranging from the top Nazi leadership to the local Ortsgruppenleiter, from the top Gestapo agents to leaders of the Hitler Youth, the Peasants’ League, and the Labor Front. Furthermore, thousands of suspects were being arrested: 700 a day in May and June, and a total of over 18,000 in August. In September, 82,000 suspects were being held in internment camps, away from the political scene and available for possible trial and sentencing as members of criminal organizations.2 They were all presumed to be confirmed Nazis and, with some allowance for excessive zeal on the part of the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), the vast majority doubtless were. Usually, of course, they did what they could to conceal their identities and their pasts. Some succeeded no doubt, but most were not hard to find. Capt. Arthur T. Neumann, whose detachment’s out-of-the-way Landkreis, Alzenau in northwestern Bavaria, was a favorite refuge for those fleeing automatic arrest, reported that nearly all suspects, once they were identified, could be brought in by postcards telling them to report to the detachment office at a specified time.3 Finding out who had been party members, whether important enough to merit arrest or merely rank and file, was also not difficult. The party had kept excellent records, which often passed into military government’s hands intact. The detachment at Wasserburg am Inn, for example, had twenty-eight lists and rosters covering everything from party and Hitler Youth membership to deliveries of boots and uniforms.4 The best evidence, the party’s entire central registry of 12 million cards with photographs, turned up in Munich in a pile of wastepaper waiting to be pulped.5
It was on the gray fringes of denazification that the question of who and what were Nazis vexed military government, as much after V-E Day as when the first municipal appointments were made around Aachen nine months before. The cases of Reuters and Jansen at Wuerselen and Ragh and Deutzmann at Stolberg were being repeated all over the U.S. zone. Having been a party member did not prevent a man from being better at his job and having a more agreeable personality than someone who was not. Too often, in fact, the opposite seemed to be true. Frequently the Nazis had training, experience, energy, affability, and not a bad political record. ‘The Americans respected efficiency and trusted the men who seemed to be friendly. In the words of one detachment commander, if “all the Nazis had been exceedingly unpleasant and rude, denazification would have been easy.” 6 Moreover, the man who was individualistic enough to have stood out against the Nazis was probably not going to fit in easily with the Americans either. As the Aachen experience had shown, non-Nazi and anti-Nazi were not necessarily believers in democracy or even, to the American mind, very different from the Nazis in their thinking. A recurring suspicion among military government officers-acquired probably from the Germans they had talked to-was that many so-called non-Nazis were people who had wanted to join the party and been rejected, which made them worse in a sense than those who had joined out of expediency or under compulsion. The Fragebogen, the Bremen detachment pointed out, required disclosure of membership in the party and auxiliary groups but not of applications for membership or rejections.
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Global Security
The Hadamar Hospital case in which German medical personnel were charged with having killed 45 Poles and Russians by injections, began on 8 October at the War Crimes Group headquarters in Wiesbaden, thus beginning the cases involving concentration camp and other mass atrocities. During the next month, Seventh Army began its trials at Ludwigsburg, and Third Army courts at Dachau began what was going to be a three-year session during which they would hear 489 cases against 1,672 accused and pass 297 death sentences.62 The Hadamar case was tried under a military commission. All the subsequent cases were tried by special military government courts that had nothing to do with current offenses against the occupation, dealt exclusively with war crimes, and were more like military commissions than like regular military government courts. Procedurally, however, the distinction was significant. Military commissions operated under the elaborate regulations for courts martial. The regulations for military government courts, on the other hand, specified
. . . rules may be modified to the extent that certain steps in the trial may be omitted or abbreviated so long as no rights granted to the accused are disregarded. Opening statements in particular may frequently be omitted. No greater formality than is consistent with a complete and fair hearing is desirable and the introduction of procedural formalities from the Manual of Courts Martial or from trial guides based thereon is discouraged except where specifically required by these rules.
The military government courts, moreover, were held to have extensive powers where war crimes were concerned, “because a state adhering to the law of war as a part of international law is interested in the preservation and envorcement of it irrespective of when or where the crime was committed, the belligerency or non-belligerency status of the punishing power, or the nationality of the victims.” 63 With such streamlined procedures and extensive powers and the principle of common design, the Dachau concentration camp case, involving forty persons implicated in thousands of murders, was begun on 16 November 1945 and completed in four weeks.
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Global Security
From the first sight in the spring of unplowed fields, shutdown coal mines, and ruined cities, the winter to come had loomed ominously in the minds of those who would be responsible for administering the occupied country. In June, predicting a barren winter for Europe, the Potter-Hyndley Mission contemplated a possible need “to preserve order by shooting” in Germany.1 When he talked to the Germans in August, Eisenhower warned them of the hardships in the months to come. By early autumn, the U.S. and British newspapers were printing stories about the approaching “Battle of the Winter,” a battle against sickness, starvation, and cold. The occupation forces figured in some accounts as semiallies, in others as dispassionate observers of a people enduring the consequences of aggression, and not infrequently as the potential target of the unregenerate and the desperate. The third possibility occurred also to the US command, and in October Eisenhower and Smith decided there was “a strong likelihood of incidents . . . in the winter” that would require “strong retaliation.” At the end of the month, they instructed military government to warn German officials, from the minister presidents on down, that they and their communities would be held accountable for acts against the occupation forces.2
At first the Germans seemed too stunned and, as the summer wore on, too preoccupied with day-to-day existence to think about the future. When the harvest was in and the daily ration barely above 1,200 calories, when the weather turned cold and there was no coal, when the farmers and other producers became increasingly unwilling to part with their products for money, the people, as the Wuerttemberg-Baden Office of Military Government reported, sank “deeper and deeper into despair as they saw a cruel, cold, hungry winter ahead.” 3 The harvest, all things considered, had been a good one but could not under any circumstances have been good enough to feed the zone population throughout the winter. Coal output in the British and French zones had increased, but the rail and water transport systems were only able to move about 60 percent of the coal away from the mines. The US zone received half a million tons in August but only 150,000 tons more in December, just enough to run the railroads and essential public utilities. When cold weather came, military government in Stuttgart and other places requisitioned all coal supplies over a quarter ton, and throughout the zone children were required to bring a piece of firewood with them to school each day to heat the classrooms.
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Global Security
Three days before he departed to assume his appointment as Army Chief of Staff, Eisenhower had to tell the troops that the conduct of a “relatively small minority” among them could give the US forces “a lead reputation that will take our country a long time to overcome.” He cited reckless driving, poor uniform discipline, and low standards of military and civilian courtesy as the chief shortcomings.62 Two weeks later, Seventh Army’s CIC reported, “The general, opinion of the Germans is that ..American soldiers are men who drink to excess; have no respect for the uniform they wear; are prone to rowdyism and to heat civilians with no regard for human rights; and benefit themselves through the black market.” 63 While Eisenhower was no doubt right that the troops involved were a minority, reports from Seventh Army CIC and other investigations showed the nature of the misconduct to be more serious than he implied. After V-J Day, what appeared to be almost an epidemic of unprovoked attacks on German civilians and robberies by US soldiers had spread across the zone. The Stuttgart police recorded fourteen acts of unprovoked violence against civilians in the last week of October. During one night in Landkreis Eschwege in the Western Military District, five drunken soldiers heat a local German official, and another civilian had his jaw broken when lie tried to reason with a soldier molesting a woman. In one small town, Boblingen, within five days in November soldiers beat up two civilians, tried to stab another, broke windows, tried to steal dogs, and robbed four civilians of watches and money.64 The Office of Military Government for Bavaria described the death of a German boy in a hunting accident involving soldiers as “a result of such carelessness as to be almost criminal. In Landkreis Burgen, also in Bavaria, three soldiers hunting illegally shot and killed an 18 year-old girl, and in the same Kreis the chief of police told investigators that soldiers had emptied several clips of ammunition at him at various times.65 Nearly all incidents involved liquor or women, often both. The population of vagrant women -which the Army inadvertently increased after November when it released penicillin for treating venereal diseases in German women, thereby shortening for some the “turn around time” from jail or hospital and attracting others who had been deterred by the fear of infection- was often at the root of soldier attacks on German officials and police. By December, these attacks had grown so alarmingly frequent that Truscott had to issue what the Office of Military Government for Bavaria called “a public plea” for troop cooperation with the U.S.-appointed German officials.66 Misbehavior was not confined exclusively to the enlisted ranks. In one instance an American officer took an Austrian girl from Linz to Stuttgart, raped her three times, and then transported her to Ulm, where he turned her over to the military police on a charge of having improper papers.
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