Exorcising Hitler (52 page)

The other three powers may have harboured their own conflicting ambitions, may have conspired against each other in this and that way, and had their own reasons why they desired to retain as much freedom of action as they could in their own zones, but none of them took a principled stand against a single Germany under four-power control, as France did during the first post-war years.

Therefore, in the summer of 1945 de Gaulle made it clear – visiting Truman in August, shortly after the Potsdam Conference – that France would oppose the establishment of central agencies in Berlin and any treatment of Germany as an ‘economic unit’.
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One of the ‘opt outs’ from Potsdam upon which the French insisted related to the situation of the Germans expelled from Eastern Europe and from Germany’s forfeited eastern provinces as a result of the post-war settlement. Since France was not a party to the agreement of the ‘Big Three’ that victims of ‘the orderly and humane’ expulsions would be accommodated in the occupied zones, it essentially refused to take any. In fact, during the winter of 1945–6, thousands of refugees from the East already living in the French Zone were put on trains and dumped in neighbouring zones, mainly the British. Many had been in the area some time and had put down roots, even found employment.
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Apart from a lack of desire to be swamped, as wide swathes of the other three zones already were, by a tide of refugees from the East – who of course would all need feeding and housing – the French were also concerned that their part of Germany be kept relatively homogenous. They had plans to encourage separatism here, to bring the people of the southern Rhineland into the French cultural and political orbit. When forced by protests from the British and the Americans to take some of the refugees in late 1945 and into 1946, the French managed to ensure that Catholic refugees were given preference, thus avoiding the danger of hordes of Prussian Protestants changing the character of the French-governed provinces. In this they had the support of many local German officials and politicians. In December 1945 the German government president for the Koblenz district declared in a report to his French masters:

From a denominational point of view, the catholic character of the Rhineland would be strongly diluted by the resettlement of the mostly protestant eastern Germans, which in view of your relationship with overwhelmingly catholic France would be highly undesirable. This congruence in religious matters is extremely important from a cultural point of view. The dangers of such a solution being imposed arise from the alien mentality of the eastern population. This has long been militaristic and nationalistic, and latterly much more inclined towards national socialism than the western population. In among the flood of refugees, countless National Socialists of all shades would be resettled here, and secretly act as carriers of Hitlerian ideas.
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The French Zone was by no means the only part of Germany where the way eastern refugees were viewed verged on racist. Many Silesians and East Prussians were sneered at, especially in the inward-looking rural areas of western and north-western Germany, as ‘Polacks’ or ‘Russkies’.
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However, it was only in the French Zone that the occupying authorities colluded in such prejudice.

As for the notion that eastern Germans were somehow more Nazi than the westerners, there was in that a grain of truth. Not so much in the case of relatively heavily Nazified Koblenz, which differed in some regards from the surrounding area, but certainly in most of the rest of the French Zone, where Nazism, partly for religious reasons, had been less strong than in other regions such as Bavaria, Saxony, Silesia and East Prussia. This, plus a tradition of anti-Prussian particularism in the westward-looking Rhineland, did give the French rule certain advantages.

For the French, like the British, denazification was regarded as chiefly a security concern. They had a long border with Germany and a history of mutual invasion going back many hundreds of years. In the French case, therefore, the question of security was geographically immediate in a way that it was not for the Russians, with their newly acquired cordon sanitaire of satellite states in Eastern Europe, nor, across the other side of the Channel, the British. And certainly not for the Americans, who, whatever happened in the future, would continue to enjoy the safety of 5,000 kilometres of Atlantic Ocean between them and a resurgent Germany.

The rule of the
grande nation
in defeated Germany had started violently and in some cases chaotically. Rape and pillage had accompanied the French armies’ advance through west and south-west Germany in the spring of 1945. And there was the small matter of the French occupation of the capital of Württemberg, Stuttgart, on 21 April – and their refusal to evacuate it, despite the fact that it lay in the zone allocated to the United States and that the French General Lattre de Tassigny had been ordered by his superior, the American General Devers, to do so. De Gaulle seems to have seen the city as some kind of useful bargaining counter. Only on 8 July did the French finally leave, after Eisenhower had threatened to cut off all their supplies.

The French record as a hoarder of German prisoners of war, whose services it claimed for reconstruction work back in France, was also extremely dubious. At least 30,000, possibly more, German POWs may have died in French captivity, of starvation and malnutrition, of disease and neglect and mistreatment. Around 5,000 are thought to have been killed during work on clearing minefields alone. The International Red Cross certainly considered the French, after the Russians, the most reprehensible of the major powers in their treatment of German prisoners of war. The French claim that most of the POWs concerned had died of wounds acquired before their capture did not inspire special confidence in their official figures.
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All the same, once they settled into their curious, hourglass-shaped zone bordering Alsace and Lorraine, by far the smallest with fewer than six million inhabitants, the French found the task of running it, from their capital in the elegant spa town of Baden Baden, not quite so onerous as did their fellow Allies. The zone’s towns had remained for the most part relatively undamaged, with Koblenz as the great exception. The region was favoured with rich agricultural resources, including the famous vineyards of the Middle Rhine and the Moselle valleys, and – because of the French refusal to accept any of the millions of Germans displaced after VE-Day – unlike the other zones, its population had actually fallen since 1939.

The French denazification programme was characterised by a curious mixture of cynicism and idealism. There was cynicism in the sense that, unlike the British and the Americans, many French officials and military men were so convinced of the bad character of the German nation as a whole that it seemed hardly worth their while to distinguish between Nazis and anti-Nazis. Tellingly, the French did not call their process ‘denazification’ but simply
épuration
, or ‘purification’. On the other hand, there was idealism in the sense that the French could not resist trying to export the country’s proud republican rationalism to their zone in Germany – especially since this might draw the traditionally more liberal folk of the Rhineland and Swabia and Baden towards the longer-term French goal of their permanent detachment from the rest of Germany.

There was also the Saar area with its steel-making and coal-mining wealth, which Paris hoped to absorb into France on a much shorter timescale – so much so that rations for the population there were kept artificially high (higher than in metropolitan France, in fact). This favouring of the Saarlanders was calculated to encourage pro-French feeling as well as to increase vital coal production. Understandably, it caused huge resentment among the rest of the population of the French Zone.
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It also didn’t work. Most Saarlanders voted for a return to Germany once they got the chance.

So far as rations, dismantling of industry and day-to-day routine went, especially in the early stages of the occupation, the Germans inside the French Zone also had a tough time. Onerous reparations in the form of transfers of German industrial machinery and entire factories into French hands continued beyond the time when the British and the Americans gave up on their reparations demands in kind. Within a little over two years of the end of the war, the French had dismantled thirty entire factories, with another ten former armaments and fifty-eight other factories earmarked for the same fate. Ships and German property in France to the value of some five billion francs
*
were also confiscated.
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General Tassigny and his successors were determined to exhibit French strength and firmness at all times. The Germans were to recognise who was master. In June 1945 an instruction was issued through posters in public places:

The German civilian population is to salute Generals and official cars bearing a general’s insignia (men by removing their hats). Failure to obey this order will be penalised by collective fine or personal punishment.
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German civilians were to give way to French soldiers, right down to the rank of private, under all circumstances and at all times.

Perhaps to counterbalance the macho posturing, there was also a cultural offensive. French teachers and advisers were parachuted into places of education, the study of French became compulsory in schools, replacing English, and most schools had at least one French
assistant(e)
to ensure that young post-war Germans did not fail to appreciate the beauties of their new masters’ language. Local appreciation of this cultural force-feeding was mixed, likewise the students’ regard for what seemed like pampered representatives of the occupying power stationed in their classrooms.

Helmut Schnatz, then twelve years old and in his second year at the
Gymnasium
(selective secondary school) in Koblenz, recalls his freezing classroom during the fierce winter of 1946, when wood and coal were reserved mostly for the occupiers, with all the students huddled at their desks in sweaters and coats. He still treasures the vision of an elegant young French
assistante
, new to her job, as she turned up wearing little more than a light dress and a cardigan – the clothing which, presumably, had more than sufficed in the generous warmth of her requisitioned apartment. She was forced, out of pride, to sit through the class without complaint, even though her teeth were chattering and her lips turning blue with cold. The boys laughed. To see the privileged representative of the victors suffer was something of a tonic.
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All the same – and Dr Schnatz is clear about this as well – as time went on, relations between the French and the Germans improved. They got used to each other. A popular feeling among Germans in the French Zone was that, as the battle-hardened veterans of the Maquis who had made up a considerable part of the French army that conquered south-west Germany were replaced by post-war conscripts and other, more well-disposed types, so the attitude of the occupiers softened.

The fact that many French commanders – and officials – had also served the country’s collaborationist Vichy regime (in some cases quite happily) and got used to familiar relations with Germans during the occupation years, also played a part. A common assertion by contemporary German witnesses is that, after the war, many Frenchmen who had been POWs between 1940 and 1945 rejoined the army. These men, who were in many cases sent to labour on German farms in wartime, had often ended up on extremely good terms with their employers and their families. They were, so the popular perception went, therefore far less hostile towards Germans than their predecessors, more likely to treat them as human beings like any others.
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None of this indicated a lack of toughness, where necessary. After all, it was the French who in their first months in Germany, against all the rules of war and occupation, took hundreds of hostages from among captured Nazis, as a guarantee for their comrades’ behaviour. This was, of course, publicly denied, even in the face of the fact that four such hostages were shot in the market square of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, in retaliation for the murder of a French soldier.
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Even Egon Plönissen’s father, the innocuous Koblenz dentist, was forced to flee out of the back door of his home one day a few months into the occupation when French gendarmes turned up with a warrant for his arrest. The family is still not sure whether he had been confused with his cousin, the Nazi
Ortsgruppenleiter
, or whether the French planned to take him hostage until the guilty party made himself available. In any case, Herr Plönissen did not stay around to find out. He fled over the border into the British Zone – by now known as a relatively safe haven to miscreants from the French Zone as well as the American – and stayed with relatives there, in Krefeld, for a couple of weeks until the fuss died down. By the time he returned home, the matter had been sorted out. The
Ortsgruppenleiter
Plönissen was in custody, and his cousin the dentist Plönissen’s professional and family life resumed its orderly and relatively comfortable rhythm.
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