The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (31 page)

Both guides placed particular emphasis on an aspect of occupation policy that was later to cause a good deal of embarrassment: “ There must be no fraternization!

This is absolute,” barked the American guide. This term referred to informal contacts between soldiers and German civilians. The authors of the guides were all too aware of just how much fraternization there had been between soldiers and civilians in Italy, where brothels had been filled to the rooftops with Allied soldiers from their first days on the continent, and in France and Belgium, where bartering between soldiers and local women for cigarettes, food, and sex was com- monplace. In liberated countries, such warm relations between liberator and liberated could hardly be de- nounced by Allied authorities. But in Germany, the oc- cupation aimed to educate Germans about their moral and political failings, and this required a distant, cold, and firm demeanor. The Allied authorities wanted no repeat in Germany of the recent photographs of Belgian girls dancing on British jeeps, which had been pasted across newspapers in Britain and America. While the American guide merely stated the injunction against interaction with Germans, the British guide faced the issue squarely: keep clear of German women, it sug- gested. They would make the most of their distraught, helpless circumstances. Their “standards of personal honor, already undermined by the Nazis, will sink still lower” following the defeat of the once-invincible Third Reich. “Numbers of German women will be willing, if they can get the chance, to make themselves cheap for

what they can get out of you.”

Such stringent rules against fraternizing with the Ger- mans grew out of fears that the defeated Germans would try every tactic, both forceful and manipulative, to undermine the Allied occupation of Germany. By the middle of August 1944, SHAEF had outlined policies on these matters that held in place until the summer of 1945. Drawing for comparative purposes on the allied occupation of the Rhineland in 1918, when German at- titudes had ranged from “hatred, through friendliness, to fawning subservience,” planners believed that the Germans in 1945 would prove far more troublesome. The Allies’ massive air bombardment, the intense ground combat, sustained Nazi indoctrination of civil- ians, and the total occupation of the country would all make “German hatred…far deeper and more universal than in 1918.” The German “master Race” ideology was thought to be so widespread that “the Germans will ac- cept defeat only as a temporary phase of a continuing struggle…. Plans for an underground continuance of the struggle are believed to exist.” As a result, occupy- ing forces could not lower their guard; they must be “prepared for civil disorders, including sniping and as- saults on individuals, sabotage, provoked riots, perhaps even organized raids. Hidden arms will undoubtedly be available.” Yet more worrisome than underground ac-

tivities, which could be dealt with through sheer force of arms, military planners worried about ideas: “there is likely to be,” their initial document on fraternization argued, “deliberate studied and continuous effort by the Germans to influence the sympathies and thoughts of the occupying forces, with a view to minimizing the consequences of defeat and preparing the way for a resurgence of German power.” Germans would wage a “word-of-mouth propaganda” campaign. “Its methods will include attempts at fraternization by civilians (es- pecially by children, women, and old men); attempts at ‘soldier-to-soldier’ fraternization; and social, official, and religious contacts.” This campaign would make appeals to the occupiers for pity and sympathy while also playing on the shared racial and ideological soli- darity of Germanic-Anglo- Saxon peoples against the Slavs. Most common would be the portrayal of Nazism as an “alien idea implanted against the general will in the cultured and unaggressive minds of Germans.” For these reasons, Allied authorities insisted on a strict separation of officers and soldiers from the German people, meaning “the avoidance of mingling with Ger- mans upon terms of friendliness, familiarity or inti- macy.” No billeting among the civilians, no marriages, not even common religious services, no shaking hands, playing of games or sports, accepting gifts, no walking with Germans on the streets, attending dances, and

certainly no “discussions and arguments with Ger- mans, especially on politics or the future of Germany.” “ The Germans,” as Eisenhower put it simply, “must be ostracized.”
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No sooner had Allied soldiers put their toes onto Ger- man soil in mid- September 1944 than the ban on fraternization ran into trouble. When units of the VII Corps fought their way through the West Wall into the towns of Rötgen and Stolberg, just south of Aachen, a few timid Germans appeared in the streets to speak to

the not-unfriendly Americans. U.S. Army press pho- tographers snapped pictures, and these immediately appeared in newspapers under captions suggesting that the German people had given Americans a warm reception. Eisenhower reacted immediately. “Press reports and those from other sources indicate already a considerable extent of fraternization by US troops with the German Civil population,” Ike wrote to Gen- eral Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group. “ This must be nipped in the bud immediately.” Having then received an earful from Washington about these press reports, Eisenhower told his public relations staff that “the President has noted with concern pictures of American troops fraternizing with the German popula- tion.” There was only one way to handle this matter: censorship. “All pictures of American troops fraterniz- ing with German population, together with any stories playing up fraternization, are to be placed on the cen- sor list.”
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Between October 1944 and early March 1945, the Allies held merely a tiny sliver of German territory, mostly south of Aachen and, after February, the narrow band of land between the Roer and Rhine rivers. Fighting here was fierce, as it had been during the December- January Battle of the Bulge, and Allied soldiers had no difficulty in finding reasons to hate the Germans. There

were incidents of fraternization behind the lines, and accounts from press reporters suggested that Ameri- can GIs were indeed tempted to act with expressions of kindness toward elderly, homeless, war-weary Ger- man civilians, and toward the children who flocked with curiosity around the foreigners. Yet there was a palpable distance between occupier and occupied. Drew Middleton of the New York Times reported in Oc- tober that “American soldiers’ initial reaction to Ger- many and German civilians is a mixture of contempt and indifference and in the case of many front line out- fits, hatred.…There is very little fraternization of any sort…. Their attitude seems to be that of the old Indi- an fighters, that a dead German is the only good one.” Middleton also noted in a later article that the German civilians were adopting precisely the self-defense that Allied planners had most feared, and which had moti- vated their ban on fraternization in the first place. In a piece called “ The Great Alibi in the Making,” Middle- ton depicted Germans as engaged in massive denial for the crimes of the Third Reich. They refused to accept responsibility for Hitler, claimed to have no knowledge of his atrocities, and affected to have been anti-Nazi all along. In the same breath, however, they were happy to acknowledge that at least the Germans had “saved the world from Bolshevism” by fighting so tenaciously against the Russians. Middleton found these explana-

tions an indication of “the moral poverty of the Ger- man nation” and suggested that Americans would have to be on their guard against this exculpatory German propaganda.
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“No one is a Nazi. No one ever was,” wrote the caustic American journalist Martha Gellhorn of this exculpatory banter. “It should, we feel, be set to music. Then the Germans could sing this refrain and that would make it even better.”
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Clifton Daniel of the New York Times also hinted at the difficulties ahead for the Americans. Writing from Aachen in December, he reported that Germans and Americans “pass on the streets without looking directly at each other. They manifest no hostility but they invite no intimacy.” The Germans “accept the authority of the military govern- ment,” and obey orders. But they were sycophants who “try to ingratiate themselves with their new masters…. By their very docility, the Germans help thwart those who advocate rougher treatment of the civilian popula- tion.” Beneath this outer docility lay a cynical attempt to deny responsibility for the war. “ The Germans gen- erally show no consciousness of wrongdoing,” Daniel reported. “ They seem either surprised or distressed at suggestions that collectively or individually they may be held responsible for Germany’s crimes.” Judging from early encounters in Aachen, Americans concluded that controlling the Germans would be fairly easy; persuad- ing them to accept responsibility for the crimes of the

Third Reich, however, looked like a far taller order.
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Poised to enter farther into Germany in spring 1945, SHAEF remained on guard against fraternization. Not only did SHAEF release the Pocket Guide to its sol- diers, but it also ran radio spots on Armed Forces Radio that tried to boil down the issue in simple terms. These spots, placed at intervals between regular program- ming, reveal the anxiety of military planners toward the natural inclination of soldiers to make friends with the local German civilians:

Remember—the Germans you see now are just the same people who strutted with pride when Warsaw was bombed; who roared with approval when Rotter- dam was flattened; who cheered when London burned. These are the same Germans. Don’t fraternize.

After a good clean fight, you can shake hands with your opponent. This hasn’t been a good clean fight—not on the German side. You can’t shake hands with a Hun. Don’t fraternize.

Don’t be misled into thinking of Germans, “Oh, well, they’re human.” So is a murderer, so is a cannibal. The German people have loved war too long. Let them see it doesn’t pay. Show them clearly. Don’t fraternize.

That frau going to market may look harmless enough. The odds are she walks in a dead woman’s shoes, sent from the murder furnaces of Maidenek. Don’t forget that in a hurry. Steer clear. Don’t fraternize.

Kids are kids—all over the world—except in Hitler’s Germany. Sure they’re loveable—but ten years ago, the Jerry that got your buddy was loveable too. It’s tough to do, but make the kids realize now that war doesn’t pay—they may remember when they think about start- ing the next war! Don’t fraternize.

You can’t tell a rotten egg by the shell. Don’t let looks fool you! When you’re tempted to fraternize with the friendly looking German civilian, remember the rotten egg! Don’t fraternize.

Soldiers wise don’t fraternize!21

These radio spots sought to sustain the wariness of sol- diers about civilians, and also to reinforce Allied policy that all Germans were responsible for Hitler’s crimes: that the German public bore collective responsibility, and that they must be collectively punished. But when the Allied soldiers moved into full command of Germa- ny as occupiers, they confronted a nation that looked as if it had already been punished, indeed punished

more severely than anyone could have imagined.

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IT WAS IN Cologne that I realized what total de- struction meant,” wrote the poet and author Ste- phen Spender. He had gone to Germany in July 1945 on an official British government assignment to seek out German intellectuals in the hopes of finding some nonfascist life still flickering amid the ruins of the Reich. Spender knew well what aerial bombing had done to London and other cities in the British Isles. But what he saw in western Germany, where he had once

lived and studied, stunned him.

My first impression on passing through was of there be- ing not a single house left. There are plenty of walls but these walls are a thin mask in front of the damp, hollow, stinking emptiness of gutted interiors.…One passes through street after street of houses whose windows look hollow and blackened—like the open mouth of a charred corpse…. In England, there are holes, gaps, wounds but the surrounding life of the people them- selves has filled them up, creating a scar which will heal. In towns such as Cologne, and those of the Ruhr, something quite different has happened. The external destruction is so great that it cannot be healed and the

surrounding life of the rest of the country cannot flow into and resuscitate the city, which is not only battered but also dismembered and cut off from the rest of Ger- many and from Europe. The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city’s wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcass, digging among the ruins for hidden food.…They resemble rather a tribe of wanderers who have discovered a ruined city in a desert and who are camping there, living in the cel- lars and hunting amongst the ruins for the booty, relics of a dead civilization. The great city looks like a corpse and smells like one, too.
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