Cruel World (93 page)

Young people under eighteen who were in mainstream German combat units were treated as regular prisoners of war. Like the Germans before them, the British and Americans were not prepared for the huge number of POWs they had to care for while the war still went on. The German prisoners were herded into enclosures that each held tens of thousands of men. On the way they were fed very little, if anything. In the big “cages” there was no shelter, and the prisoners, often lacking coats or blankets, were sometimes so crowded that they could hardly lie down, which was not desirable anyway in what was usually mud. These enclosures were little better than those set up by the Nazis, the difference being that the German POWs were generally moved on to better facilities after a fairly short time. As one progressed up the ladder of camps, rations improved very gradually, but weakness, and especially exposure, caused thousands of deaths. Large contingents of POWs were sent to France as forced labor and housed in compounds where the camp guards were mostly liberated Eastern European forced laborers who took considerable sadistic pleasure in making life as miserable as possible for their former
captors. But the treatment they received in France, though frequently brutal, was fine indeed compared to that in the USSR, from which many thousands never returned.

The British maintained a number of German military units intact as “Disarmed German Troops” under strictly supervised German command. These groups also were short on food, and the ravenous young soldiers, who were not kept in enclosures, soon resorted to stealing from local farmers and other illegal foraging. Incessant drills were held for a time in an effort to maintain discipline. Former Jungvolk leader Jürgen Herbst, conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the very end of hostilities, thought his captured unit was being prepared for a possible defense of the British Zone from the Russians, but the military exercises soon evolved into hard labor restoring Germany’s devastated infrastructure. None of the POWs were allowed to send or receive letters or even to inform their families that they were alive, but in the West their incarceration was short-lived, and most of those who were not known to have been in Nazi formations such as the SS would be released by the late fall of 1945.
²⁰

Once the basic elements of control were in place in Germany, the Allies turned to plans for its future. In the months preceding the surrender, the Allied governments had tried without much success to agree on precisely what would be done with the conquered Reich. Arguments raged over which of its parts would be controlled by each of the victors, and over the issue of reparations. But there was general agreement that Hitler’s empire should be dismembered, disarmed, de-Nazified, and have its economic power severely curtailed. Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, had early on proposed a draconian plan, remarkably similar to that proposed by the Nazis for Eastern Europe, which would reduce Germany to a totally agrarian economy and allow conscription of its workers by Allied nations. By the time of the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, these ideas, which were not considered advisable by others in the Roosevelt administration, had been modified, but the main American directive for the arriving Military Government, approved on May 11, 1945, still declared that Germany would “not be occupied for the purpose of liberation, but as a defeated enemy nation,” and that it should be brought home to the Germans that they “cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.”
²¹

In practical terms, as far as daily life was concerned, the directive meant that the mass of Germans now had to face many of the same problems
their government had imposed on the nations it had conquered. The directive declared that no action would be taken to “support living conditions in Germany … on a higher level than those existing in any one of the neighboring United Nations.” For the time being, the German population was to be allowed fuel and food rations sufficient only to prevent “starvation or widespread disease or such civil unrest as would endanger the occupying forces.” That food was to come from Germany’s own economy, and any “surpluses” could be used by the Allies to feed themselves or the DPs and P
OWS
.
²²
Viable dwellings and public buildings could be requisitioned at a few hours’ notice by the Allied military governments. Once again, families being evicted from their houses were watched carefully lest they remove beds and other necessities of life. Where the evicted went was their problem. There were, at first, no camps of any kind for these new refugees, who generally crammed themselves in with relatives and friends. And, once again, the incoming tenants could be faced with awful human problems. Ruth Anderson, posted to Berlin to work for the Allied Control Authority, was placed in a house with no hot water or window glass, but with the services of an ancient maid who had worked there for years. The owners had been killed by the Russians and were buried in the garden. To Miss Anderson fell the terrible duty of informing the couple’s son, a returning POW who appeared at the door, that his parents were dead. To make things worse, she then had to tell him that he could not stay in his dead parents’ requisitioned house.
²³

More precise policy for Germany was to be defined at the final summit meeting of the Great Powers scheduled for July 1945 in Potsdam. There, the policy of total suppression of German industry was modified to allow the development of a more balanced economy and the production of consumer goods. The Western Allies, at this stage, advocated a single economy for all of Germany. That would never come to pass, due to the Soviets’ refusal to participate. For the same reason, the Allied Control Council, set up to run Germany as a whole, never had any real power, and each Allied nation essentially ran its zone as it pleased. This would immediately create enormous problems, especially when it came to interzonal distribution of food and fuel. The problems would be exacerbated a hundredfold by another Potsdam decision, which authorized the expulsion back to Germany proper of all the ethnic Germans still living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, including the millions recently moved into those areas by the Nazi racial agencies.

The expulsion idea seemed a fine one to all of Germany’s recent victims. Czechoslovakia and Poland had been planning revenge for the Nazi
takeover of their territory and the expulsion of their people throughout the war. Brutal uprooting and detention of ethnic Germans, using all the methods perfected by the Nazis short of gassing and cremation, began as soon as German power was overturned, sometimes in incidents so violent that Allied troops were forced to intervene. As usual, tens of thousands of children and other innocents were swept up in the murderous process.
²⁴
The Allied leaders, after much debate, supported the expulsion policy for reasons of their own. The Soviet Union simply wanted the Germans out of its newly extended sphere of influence, and some British and American diplomats thought that the removal of German minorities from the nations bordering the former Reich would promote future stability, particularly in the large chunk of eastern Germany being ceded to Poland. Winston Churchill had opposed both the cession of German territory to Poland and the expulsion of the inhabitants, and correctly foresaw that the influx of millions more refugees into Germany would be disastrous, but he was voted out of office in the middle of the conference and his views did not prevail.
²⁵
Both Truman and Churchill had flown over Germany and toured Berlin. The devastation they had seen shocked them, though not enough, apparently, to cause Truman to think twice a few days later, when he would authorize the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. Though they too believed that the Germans “had brought this on themselves,” the difficulty of life in such a wasteland was obvious. The resettlement policy was, nonetheless, easily approved as Article XIII of the Potsdam Agreement, which specified that the transfers should be “effected in an orderly and humane manner.” It also decreed that the incoming Germans should not all be sent to one place, but that there should be “equitable distribution of these Germans among the several zones of occupation” in order to lessen the burden of their assimilation.
²⁶

The transfers were no small undertaking: 6.5 million people were to be moved and would now join the 4 to 5 million who had started back months before and were far from settled. Allied personnel were unnerved by the ubiquitous, pitiful groups: “To be compelled daily to see people struggling from place to place under back-breaking loads is awful. Many families can move only at night in the unlit, cluttered streets. I have heard such expeditions—the creaking carts, the grunting exclamations of the mother, the frightened outcries of the small children, the heavy breathing of the grandparents as they try to help.”
²⁷

All of the expellees would, in theory, be taken care of by the “old” Germans, who had not, however, been consulted about the whole idea, and whose food situation had deteriorated steadily since the surrender. A special
Combined Repatriation Executive, quite separate from the simultaneous DP and infiltree operations, was set up in October 1945 to organize the German transfers. The new agency decided that from December 1, 1945, to July 31, 1946, 28,000 people a day should be moved into Germany. This theoretical schedule proved to be impossible in reality, and the first transfers, like the grim unofficial trainloads full of half-clothed and dying Germans that had been arriving for months, were certainly not “orderly and humane.” An UNRRA worker reported: “Someone had put some German children on an unheated train and sent them to Germany from Austria. Two children died of the cold. Others were found to have their legs frozen. General Truscott is very upset, as indeed is everyone.… Surely such things should not happen.”
²⁸

It was not surprising that they did. Those loading the trains in the expelling countries had no sympathy for Germans, and Allied coordinators were exhausted after months of fourteen-hour days, working on the logistics of the successive waves of vast human transfers. Enforcing the transportation regulations was challenging to one’s humanity. One Allied train commander had to order a boxcar holding thirty-five women and children, which had been procured and somehow illegally attached to his train by a German refugee and a German Red Cross nurse, to be detached and left on a siding. It seemed cruel, but as Ruth Anderson put it, “You can’t have little groups of people everywhere trying to get home, hitching their freezing box cars to Allied trains.” Later she described her fellow workers in the office that arranged the eternal trains as having

But those who were coping were aware enough of the terrible conditions on the trains and at the arrival points to delay the expellee program until after the worst of the winter was over. To the problem of cold was added a shortage of trains, which were also busy carrying DPs and POWs back and forth, so that large numbers of expellees were not moved until March 1946. By the summer, 10,000 people a day were being transferred
into the U.S. Zone, which would receive 1.5 million expellees by October. The process was temporarily halted at that time, as there were some 100,000 refugees stuck in transit camps for whom no lodgings could be found in German communities.
³⁰
The British reported 1.2 million new arrivals in their zone by the end of August 1946, not including those who had come by “illegal movement.” Because able-bodied men tended to be kept back for forced labor, 80 percent of the expellees were women, children, and old people, who were “undernourished” and arrived in “an exhausted condition.” Poorly clothed and with few possessions, the old were incapable of “any form of heavy work” and the women who could work “are accompanied by young children.”
³¹
The Soviets too would receive 2.4 million in their zone by the spring of 1947. In addition to the expellees authorized by Potsdam, tens of thousands of POWs and “obnoxious” Germans were being returned to the homeland from nations around the world, 17,000 of the latter from the Netherlands alone,
³²
and all of them would have to be fed and housed.

The idea was that the new arrivals would be spread out so as not to form “ghettos” or minority enclaves of any kind. A British publication said that it “was to be hoped that a future central Government in Germany would make sure that those expatriated should remain where they are now: in the heart of Germany, scattered among the original inhabitants where there is a hope that within the lifetime of one, two or, at the most three generations they will be absorbed by the people and only faint memories of their origin remain.”
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Responsibility for settling the new arrivals was given to local German authorities. Hitler’s desire to bring together all those of Germanic blood had finally been achieved, but, alas, without the necessary
Lebensraum
.

Processing the new Germans was much the same as it had been in the Nazi empire. In five huge and horribly crowded centers, the hapless families were once more paraded past officials who gave them physical examinations, delousing, new documents, and various classifications. From there they were sent to subcamps across Germany, where they would await lodging, usually with indigenous families. The only trouble was that their fellow Germans were not in the least pleased to have whole families thrust into their communities, much less into their households. U.S. Military Government reports alluded diplomatically to “discord” and “initial lack of mutual understanding.” A German cardinal was blunter, noting in August 1946 that “there was scarcely a German family living alone; of course they quarrel, and homes are disrupted”; and the
New York Times
reported that police had to be called at times to “stimulate the hospitality of reluctant householders.”
³⁴
In many communities, the expellees were treated like vagrants, and to be called
Evakuierte
was not a compliment. In one town the “old” residents put up this sign, not exactly welcoming, at the railroad station where the expellees arrived:
WHEN THE
RESETTLERS
CAME AND THE BARK BEETLES MOVED IN, THAT WAS THE END OF PEACE AND QUIET
. The old residents were not joking: