31 Monday Mar 2014
If you ever wondered where to go for some authentic postwar German history, check out the new Places page. I’ve kicked it off with the allied power centers in postwar Berlin with brief descriptions and photos. Over time, I’ll be adding more places from around Germany and museum collections around the world. As always, your suggestions are very welcome!
30 Sunday Mar 2014
Sometimes I wonder about the people who think up names for military and espionage operations. Sometimes those names are perfect.
Like Unthinkable.
It’s April 1945. The Allies sweep into Germany on two fronts, racing toward Berlin. The German capitol could’ve been the scene of a catastrophic clash of west and east if both sides had insisted on the prestige of taking the city. But the Americans wanted to avoid a confrontation with Moscow, and the Red Army was the first to raise its flag over Berlin.
This seemed to form part of a rude awakening for Winston Churchill. He’d assumed the Soviets would end the war weaker than American and British forces. But the Red Army had rolled over eastern territories, greatly expanding its sphere of influence. Above all, Poland had slipped into this Russian net. Britain’s responsibility for defending Poland’s sovereignty was a basis for entering the war to begin with. How could Britain stand by and let the Russians finish what the Germans started?
Mix this with Churchill’s anticommunism, and the unthinkable — a third world war directly after the second — was actually considered.
Churchill asked the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan to advance forces east against their old ally, the Soviet Union. It would have to be a surprise attack, because the staff recognized this would be the West’s only advantage in the face of Soviet strength.
Even more unthinkable, the plan called for German Wehrmacht troops to fight alongside the West. About 2 million Germans had surrendered to British custody. Some units weren’t disbanded; they were renamed Dienstgruppen (service groups) and used for labor. Confiscated weapons weren’t immediately destroyed. Some were stockpiled, while others were destroyed after a lag time that puzzled German soldiers held prisoner but with full kits and equipment. As one ex-soldier recalled, they could have started another war.
British planners concluded the whole idea was too big a risk. The Red Army was too strong, and the political fall out of an offensive war was too large. With a few exceptions such as the notoriously bellicose General Patton, the Americans weren’t interested in continuing a military advance into eastern Europe (at that time). In Britain, public opinion wouldn’t be on Churchill’s side. The Russians were still considered an ally that fought heroically against a common enemy.
So Operation Unthinkable never got off the ground. An active, hot war between west and east was discarded for a cold one that might not be as finished as we thought it was.
If you understand German, check out this video that summarizes Operation Unthinkable. The British historian Dr. Christopher Knowles (congrats on the PhD!) summarized the operation a few years ago on his excellent blog.
25 Tuesday Mar 2014
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I found this little gem during my last trip to London. It’s a reproduction of the handbook published by the Foreign Office in 1944. The war was still on, and as British forces pushed into Germany, the Tommies needed a bit of guidance for how to deal with what was still an enemy people. Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany could be called a pre-occupation manual. It looked forward to the immediate postwar era, and has much in common with the similar American handbook I mentioned on the blog awhile back.
Maybe the biggest similarity is the booklet’s appeal for soldiers to rein in their natural tendency to feel compassion for people who look like (and are) suffering. That these are Germans, collectively held responsible for the war at that time, didn’t matter. The writers from the Political Warfare Executive recognized what might happen to young soldiers sweeping into an environment largely free of German men. Ruined cities and towns where women, old people and children welcomed western troops like liberators. The American and British booklets were clear. Western forces didn’t enter Germany to liberate it, they came to conquer.
That meant establishing a conqueror’s distance from the defeated. Fraternization was forbidden, and shortly before the end of the war, soldiers could be fined for doing it. The reality of life in occupied Germany soon put a stop to the stricter rules. In the forward of the Bodleian Library’s reissued Instructions, John Pinfold mentions a Daily Express cartoon from July 1945 that showed German women chasing British soldiers through a wood. The caption: “Rough on us chaps that don’t want to fraternise, isn’t it?”
The booklet has sections that made me laugh and cringe. A section titled “What the Germans are Like” was so good, I had to read it to my German husband. The list of negative traits and stereotypes was long, but I giggled at the sentence, “The Germans have, of course, many good qualities.” (My husband says the same thing about Americans, and with the same dry tone.) A British person reading the booklet now would probably be interested in the section “What the Germans Think of Us.” Generally positive, due to what the booklet called British “national virtues” like tolerance, fairness and decency.
And that’s the booklet’s true value. It helps us understand one view of how Britons saw Germans and themselves at a turning point in the Twentieth Century.
12 Wednesday Mar 2014
Maybe you’ve noticed. I don’t hyphenate. To me, it’s postwar. Just why and how Americans eliminated the hyphen and scrunched the words together, I have no idea. It may come from the American habit of simplifying usage whenever we can.
The Oxford Dictionary tells me the British way is post-war. That’s fine, except that I don’t like hyphens if you can get rid of them and the word flows better. A hyphen is like a stutter in the middle of a word. In this case, it’s not needed.
But I’m not British, and I can do what feels natural. Many of you readers out there are British or use British spellings. I just wanted to let you know I’m not doing it wrong, and neither are you.
24 Monday Feb 2014
Posted in Denazification
≈ Comments Off on 8 million Nazis
After the war, when Germany went into denial (which lasted quite a few years, if 
not decades), many people insisted they had never been in the Nazi Party. Their papers, they thought, were destroyed, or unavailable in the eastern lands then controlled by the Soviets. Impossible to confirm their claim, right?
One German’s gutsy gamble in the last days of the war spoiled this game.
His name was Hans Huber, manager of a paper mill in Munich. On April 15, 1945, Hans had a visitor who informed him a large amount of paper would arrive soon that must be destroyed — immediately.
Three days later, the trucks began to arrive. Twenty trucks per day, nine days long. Each contained mounds (or rolls) of paper.
But not just any old paper. The central membership register of the Nazi Party.
Every party member from the NSDAP’s founding had a duplicate card stuck in the register and stored in steel cabinets in Munich’s Arcissstraße. Everyone including Hitler.
But there was more. The party applications themselves, with personal information, photos,and signatures also fell into Huber’s hands. SS documents too, handwritten notes from Himmler, Gestapo papers. In all, he had 50 tons of paper that could incriminate big and small Nazis alike.
When he realized what he had, Huber – no Nazi – decided to bluff. He delayed pulping the paper. He claimed he didn’t have enough coal, or his machines broke down because they didn’t have spare parts. Two weeks later, the Americans took Munich.
You’d think they would have jumped on such a treasure. But at first, the army was looking for real treasure — gold and art — not paper. Huber said he approached the Americans in May 1945, but no chance. They didn’t want paper.
In the fall, he finally came across an army archivist who took a look at the paper. “Any damn idiot” could see how important it was, Sargent B. Child told colleagues later.
But even then, the Nazi documents weren’t a sensation. They traveled to a warehouse near Kassel where the US military government collected and cataloged material found across Germany. As focus shifted to war crimes trials, the Allies saw the untold value of Huber’s paper. Right there was the documentary proof of membership in the NSDAP, along with other papers that could be used in war crimes trials.
In January 1946, 15 train loads of papers traveled to their final home — the Berlin Document Center. In his memoir, George Clare described the center that year.
I had expected to find a big barracks of a place but what I actually saw when I arrived at Wasserkäfersteig was a largish suburban villa, like so many in Zehlendorf. However, the high barbed-wire double-fence round the periphery of its extensive grounds, the floodlights and the armed, steel-helmeted sentries told me I had come to the right spot.
The Americans controlled the archive until 1994, and it’s now a part of the German Bundesarchiv.
And no one who was ever in the German Nazi Party could deny it and get away with it.
*Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1129-300 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Postwar Germany 