The defeat of Germany and the Germans in 1945 was not intended to relieve the pressures which had made them what they were. And it didn’t. On the contrary, to all the old pressures which produced totalitarianism and aggression, it added, necessarily, new ones—the guilt-finding and punitive processes; the dismemberment first of the country itself and then of its business and industry; reparation costs, indemnification costs, occupation costs—and the Occupation.
If any occupation ever had a chance of succeeding, it should have been the American (sometimes called the Allied) Occupation of western Germany. As occupations went, it was probably the most benign in history, in part because the fortunes of their history have nourished benignity in the American people, in part because the Occupyees turned out to have the same kinds of tastes and talents, and even cousins, as the Occupiers. That the Occupation did fail—if its object was to do any better than Versailles—is now clear, I think, to anyone who does not define peace as order or democracy as balloting. It failed because it was an occupation, and no occupation has a chance of succeeding.
The day the American troops came to Kronenberg, a sergeant rode through the town in a jeep and designated homes which were strategically located for occupancy by the troops responsible for maintaining security. One of the homes belonged to a woman with two babies; within a few hours her furniture was out on the street, along with her and her children. She addressed the corporal in charge of the eviction, explaining to him, in English, that she was not a Nazi but an anti-Nazi. His reply was not unfriendly. He said, “Too bad, lady.”
It was too bad, lady, but that’s the way it was. It was an occupation; worse yet, a civilized occupation, which, as such, violated Machiavelli’s inviolable injunction either to liberate or exterminate a conquered people but under no circumstances to irritate them by halfway measures. The halfway measures of the American Occupation were halfway just, but they were halfway unjust, too. How could they, being civilized, have been otherwise?
The American determination to do something about Nazism meant that something had to be done about each of some twenty-five million Germans. It required the employment of thousands of their countrymen, selected, necessarily, in great haste by Americans who were themselves selected in great haste; and this meant the wrong men all around. Long before the de-Nazification process came of its own weight to an ignominious halt, it had become a bottomless swamp. In the absence of records—anti-Nazi and Nazi files had both been destroyed as first the Nazis and then the anti-Nazis swept through Germany—the defendants invariably accused their accusers. It was a field day for paying off old scores. Oaths piled up on every side until they reached the heavens to which they were addressed. In Kronenberg University, eight years after the war, there were still pending one hundred and sixty libel suits filed by faculty members against one another.
Of course the American Military Occupation was Draconian; men cannot be taught to hate and kill on Wednesday and to love and cherish on Thursday. But by 1948 those Americans who wanted to participate in the punishment of the Germans had had enough blood to drink and had all gone home. With the substitution of civilian for military control of occupied Germany, things looked up. Unfortunately (and ironically), the advent of civilian control coincided with the outbreak of war—the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The civilian High Commission for the Occupation of Germany began its work in the shadow of that new situation. United States Commissioner McCloy commuted twenty-one of the twenty-eight remaining death sentences of Nazis and vigorously pushed the program of “reorientation and re-education” that had been laid out, in dreamy detail, in the post-1945 and pre-1948 world. But the brave new program was doomed from the start. Between 1950, when the Korean War began, and 1952, when the dreamers disappeared from the American government, the program limped along, ever more lamely.
In 1952 it ended, without notice. Local “Resident Offices” of the High Commission reverted to their prior status of United States Army subposts; the re-educators and reorienters, who had been coming and going at the Germans’ expense, went. German-American Youth Centers and German-American Women’s Clubs closed quietly; dedications of new hospitals and schools, with German “counterpart” funds and American oratory, stopped. The members of the “United States Occupation Forces in Germany” were informed by the United States that they were now members of the “United States Defense Forces in Germany.” Only the State Department propaganda establishments—the United States Information Centers, or Amerika-Häuser—remained to mark the spot where the German character was to have been transformed.
Between mid-1950 and mid-1954 the budget of the United States High Commission and related agencies was reduced 75 per cent, and personnel was cut from 2,264 Americans and 12,131 Germans to 780 Americans and 3,650 Germans. Even more spectacular was the reduction in the number of automobiles operated (usually with German chauffeurs) to serve the urgent needs of the re-educators, from 1,545 in mid-1952 to 251 in mid-1954. The decline in civilian activity was more than matched by the rapid-as-possible redevelopment of the American military establishment in Germany. In the fall of 1954, although the remilitarization of Germany was not yet legalized, Robert S. Allen reported in his Washington column that, in addition to all American forces and facilities in Germany, there were being built by the United States a $250,000,000 weapons stockpile and a $100,000,000 food stockpile for six German Army divisions.
The failure of the American Occupation had little or nothing to do with German resistance to it. Apart from their impotence and their hunger and the Occupation’s absolute control, the Germans were ausgespielt, played out, for a while at least. Nine of my ten Nazi friends were positive that they would never again join a political party, any party. Always credulous and submissive, the Germans had just had twelve years’ intensive training in total credulity and total submissiveness; the Occupiers found them marvelously docile, even unresentful, Germans to the manner born.
They were actually indifferent to the general civil corruption—something unknown even in the Third Reich—introduced by the American black market. It was not for them, good Germans, to complain of the morals of their new rulers. They might grumble, in their poverty, at having to pay fifty cents for a package of cigarettes while the rich who had come to democratize them paid a dime, but by and by American cigarettes so saturated the black market that the grumbling was inconsequential. The rich Americans got still richer, but the poor Germans got good coffee for half the legal German price; one way or another, every third German was a direct or indirect beneficiary of the black market. In a few years they were hardened—these once pretentiously honest Bürgers—to monstrous financial scandals. The State Department’s construction of “Westchester-on-the-Rhine” for American officials—including five $100,000 homes and one at $240,000—did not, in 1953, excite even the Opposition in the Bundestag. Hadn’t Germany’s rulers always been kings?
The failure of the Occupation could not, perhaps, have been averted in the very nature of the case. But it might have been mitigated. Its mitigation would have required the conquerors to do something they had never had to do in their history. They would have had to stop doing what they were doing and ask themselves some questions, hard questions, like, What is the German character? How did it get that way? What is wrong with its being that way? What way would be better, and what, if anything, could anybody do about it?