Exorcising Hitler (19 page)

As it happened, the final version of the EAC surrender document, now reframed as the ‘Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by the Allied Powers’ was not accepted by all the Allied governments until 21 May. During this interval, both Churchill and Eisenhower seem to have toyed with the idea of allowing the dubious legal husk of a Reich government to remain in place in some form or another.

In Churchill’s case, he considered letting the Flensburg government continue ‘for a while’, in the hope that allowing its temporary survival would help bring order to the occupied areas. It would also provide a ‘fallback’ German authority. This could be useful if, as Churchill had begun to fear, war should now suddenly break out between the Western Allies and the Soviets, and the West needed to call on the support of the defeated German armed forces in a new anti-communist crusade.
¹⁶

Eisenhower, more realistically, saw the continuance of some kind of all-German authority as potentially a useful aid in organising, disciplining and feeding the unexpectedly vast number – five million or so – of German prisoners of war now in captivity within the areas controlled by the Anglo-American forces, a problem already threatening to turn into a humanitarian disaster. To this end, on 11 May, three days after VE-Day, Eisenhower sent a senior American officer, General Lowell W. Rooks, up to Flensburg to establish a ‘Supreme Headquarters Control Party’. Rooks, accompanied by a British deputy, Brigadier E. J. Foord, and a high-level political adviser, Ambassador Robert Murphy, had particular instructions to liaise with what was left of the Wehrmacht High Command there and ‘impose the SCAEF’s [Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force’s] will’.

For their part, Dönitz and company harboured somewhat pathetic hopes that this visit represented some kind of recognition of their authority. During their visits to his quarters aboard the
Patria
, a requisitioned German passenger ship moored in the Flensburger Fjord, they made desperate attempts to impress General Rooks with their indispensability. However, after their first encounters with this ‘strange politico-military ménage’, the American general and his advisers rapidly came to the conclusion that it was ‘a rapidly decaying concern with little knowledge of present events and practically no work to do’ and therefore pretty much useless for any of the anticipated purposes.
¹⁷

With the press in Allied countries attacking this embarrassing anomaly, and now, on 21 May, the EAC declaration accepted as policy by all the Allies, an end to the Flensburg ‘government’ was inevitable. On 22 May, having formally consulted the British and the Russians, the American War Department ordered the arrest of Dönitz, his government and the surviving members of the Wehrmacht High Command. This took place punctually the next day.

At a meeting with General Rooks around a long table set up in the bar aboard the
Patria
, the German officers were given the bad news, then were marched ashore and into their cars, and driven back to their quarters to collect their belongings. Army photographers were present to record the scene.
É finita la commedia
.

One of the Reich’s chief negotiators, who had been on board the
Patria
with Dönitz, General Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, shot himself before he could be formally taken into custody. Most former Reich ministers and senior military officers were quickly flown to the American detention centre for high-ranking Nazis near SHAEF at Reims, in France, known as ‘the Ashcan’. Many of those who had played leading roles in the regime’s final pantomime would face trial as war criminals at Nuremberg.

The EAC’s victory declaration now became the crucial document determining the status of surrendered Germany. ‘There is,’ it proclaimed, ‘no central Government or authority in Germany capable of accepting responsibility for the maintenance of order, the administration of the country, and compliance with the requirements of the victorious powers.’ The declaration continued: ‘The Governments of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom, and the Provisional Government of the French Republic, hereby assume supreme authority with respect to Germany, including all the powers possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal or local government or authority. The assumption, for the purposes stated above, of the said authority and powers does not effect the annexation of Germany.’

So, Germany was deemed to have surrendered unconditionally, as planned since the Casablanca Conference in 1943. Its government was declared to have been abolished, and the Allies to have assumed absolute power in the country – although the second sentence allowed that the German state had not been permanently extinguished and might therefore be re-established if the victors so decided at some future point.

For all practical purposes, however, Germany had ceased to exist, and the powers of the occupiers over its population and institutions were unlimited.

Many Germans, like those in Göttingen, exploited the temporary vacuum, after the collapse of their own government institutions but before the occupiers settled into the task of ruling, to steal, loot, settle old scores or make arrangements to secure their futures. Most did not turn from obedient citizens into criminals, but equally, most realised that in the new post-war world the old rules did not apply.

Three of the four occupying powers were representative democracies, but nevertheless exercised total and far from liberal power over the areas of Germany that they had assigned themselves. The final power, the Soviet Union, claimed to be a democracy but was nothing of the kind. It was, however, paradoxically also the only one of the powers to immediately introduce its ‘own’ German officials, to allow political activity and to set up something resembling a ‘normal’ administrative network in its zone.

The advantage that the Soviets possessed over the Western Allies during the early days after victory was quite simple. They had their own German communists, many of whom had spent the war years in exile in Russia, and some of whom had survived in Nazi-ruled Germany and therefore could be realistically presented as ‘resistance’ activists.

When the Red Army appeared in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1945, these German party members, wherever they came from, were biddable, used to discipline, accustomed to conspiratorial political practice, and, overwhelmingly, quite clear that their aim was the same as it had been before 1933: to assist in the construction of a communist-dominated political structure, at first in the Soviet Zone and then, if possible, in the whole of occupied Germany. This gave the Russians a head start.

The situation in the zones assigned to the Western Allies was quite different. It was true that many non-communist anti-Nazis had gone into exile after 1933, and had eventually ended up in America or Britain, but unlike the communist exiles they were not a homogenous, disciplined group. The same went for those who had either survived imprisonment during the Nazi era or somehow managed to lie low. In 1945, they could re-emerge, but they did not form a group with a clearly defined aim. In fact, unlike the German communists, who were from the first favoured by the Soviet occupiers, they were not even given preferential treatment by the Western Allies, who in that same crucial period tended to treat Germans of any kind – Nazi or not – with uniform distrust.

Within weeks of the German surrender, a group of pre-war German communists under the command – this is not too strong a term – of the former (1929–33) Party Secretary for Berlin and Brandenburg, Walter Ulbricht, had established itself in the Soviet Zone. Ulbricht, born the son of a saddler in the Saxon industrial metropolis of Leipzig in 1893, learned the trade of cabinet-maker but, after serving in the German army in the First World War, quickly became a full-time political agitator and official. He counted as an ultra-loyal servant of Stalin who had refined his ruthless skills during twelve years of exile, first in Prague and Paris, and then, from 1938, in the Soviet Union. His cold efficiency, relentless energy and unquestioned loyalty to Moscow (he was also a signed-up member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) enabled him to survive Stalin’s frequent purges of foreign émigrés. These characteristics also made Ulbricht a natural choice as the head of the elite group of German communists flown in a Soviet military aircraft into the shattered ruins of Berlin at the end of April 1945, during the final days of the battle for the city.

During the first weeks of peace, it was the humourless, goatee-bearded Ulbricht who explained how, in the power vacuum that preceded the final adjustments of the zones and the admission of Western troops to the status of co-occupiers in Berlin, the communists would covertly establish control of the post-war city. The pattern established was one that would become familiar throughout the Soviet Zone: ‘It has to look democratic,’ Ulbricht told his colleagues with exquisite cynicism, ‘but we have to hold everything in our hands.’
¹⁸

In the Western zones, by contrast, nothing looked democratic at this stage – perhaps because the Western Allies, unlike the Russians, could not feel confident that they possessed a viable political base among the German population. Millions of Germans had fled from the Russians in the first months of 1945, increasing the population of the Western-controlled zones by some ten million homeless, bereft souls, and although they were spared the worst of the rape, pillage and political terror visited on the inhabitants of the Soviet Zone, neither the situation they fled to, nor the population among which they found themselves, were especially friendly.

There was another complication. The lines drawn on VE-Day, when the fighting stopped, were dictated by military chance and necessity. Owing to the sudden collapse of the German forces in middle Germany, by May 1945 the Americans had advanced into parts of western Czechoslovakia, and into tracts of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, which under the EAC agreements reached the previous winter were destined to be part of the Soviet Zone. The British, likewise, had advanced from Hamburg and Lübeck along the Baltic coast and also, like the Americans, into parts of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, including the area around Aschersleben. In some parts, the ‘line of contact’ between the Western Allies and the Russians lay as much as two hundred miles east of the designated zonal boundaries.

The question was, given Soviet attitudes – already clear from their behaviour in Poland and elsewhere – as well as in the negotiations for co-administration of Berlin, should the Western Allies withdraw from these areas at the end of June, as agreed, or should they find excuses to hold on to them and use them as bargaining counters with the Russians?

Churchill, his long-harboured anti-communist instincts once more coming to the fore now that the war was won, wrote a lengthy and frank memorandum to his Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, arguing that further advance by the Red Army into central Germany would be a disaster. He favoured finding excuses to hold what the Western Allies had, as a bargaining counter against further Russian non-cooperation.

The Russians, meanwhile, were still full of ‘technical’ reasons as to why the Western powers could not yet put any of their troops in Berlin. There Ulbricht’s people were purposefully and with Machiavellian guile attempting to present the world with a communist-controlled fait accompli in the former Reich capital. And in Austria, where Soviet troops also controlled the capital, Vienna, ahead of a planned four-power occupation, Moscow had installed its own selection as Chancellor of the newly ‘liberated’ country, with – ominously for those who knew how the comrades operated – a communist as Minister of the Interior, in control of security and the police force.
¹⁹

Just the day after the arrest of the Dönitz government, on 24 May, the British Foreign Office once more suggested to the Americans that the Western troops should only evacuate the areas due to Russia once these ‘outstanding matters’, especially those regarding Germany, Austria and Poland, had been settled.

The Americans replied two days later that the withdrawal could be postponed ‘for a short period’ but that they would ‘not hold up withdrawal into zones indefinitely’.
²⁰
Too much ‘fragile china’ could be broken in a serious disagreement with the Soviets – and any standoff over withdrawal into the agreed zones could affect Russia’s willingness to join the war against Japan later that summer.

Churchill might rage at the American envoy, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, about the Soviets’ ‘Gestapo methods’ in their occupied areas,
²¹
but there was little he could do to push the US government into a more aggressive stance. The British Prime Minister would have been perfectly but helplessly aware that Ambassador Davies, while American representative in Moscow back in 1936, had publicly asserted the fairness of Stalin’s show trials.

In the event, the Soviets successfully faced the West down. The four Allies, having abolished the German government, were faced with the duty of ruling, feeding and keeping order among seventy million or more Germans in a country whose infrastructure was largely wrecked, its industry and agriculture severely damaged, and whose towns and villages were flooded with homeless refugees and non-German ‘displaced persons’. Clearly, the country (that was no longer technically a country) needed governance.