-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
BETRAYAL - Our Occupation of Germany
Arthur D. Rahn
Former Chief Editor of Intelligence
Office of the Director of Information Control
Office of Military Government, Germany
No Date - Printed in Poland
out-of-print
-----
---" NOT until I sat down to write this book and reflected on my experience
and organized my notes did I realize that what had seemed to me and my
friends in Germany to be a chaos of corruption and incompetence had actually
been a planned development following a very definite pattern. In fact, it has
become increasingly clear that the pattern of events in Germany from 1944 to
mid-1947 mirrored in sharp perspective what was happening at home in America.
Developments in Germany, too, have paralleled our actions in the United
Nations and our relations with the Soviet Union, Greece, Spain, China,
Britain, Israel — with the entire world."---
Om
K
-----
"I have assured our men in the armed forces that the American people would
not let them down when the war is won".
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT in a Fireside Chat, July 28, 1943.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
THIS book seeks to expose to the American people the actual results of the
Truman Doctrine in the nations where it is applied, how it betrays our war
aims and aggravates international tensions. I have limited the scope of this
essay to a discussion of the American Zone (of Germany) to focus on our own
policy and methods without becoming involved in tangential issues.
On the premise that many Americans do not fully understand such terms as
"reactionary", the "democratic middle", "the red menace", etc., I have
attempted to humanize these concepts through the use of explanatory anecdotes
and personalized experience.
Although some of the information presented here is not entirely new to
well-informed Americans, I think this is the first attempt to recount the
entire development of the occupation and to place events in their framework.
The material is, I believe, important in itself as historical documentation.
It has value, too, right now in indicating the general drift of American
policy at home and abroad since the end of the war.
I have brought the book up to July, 1947. It will still be timely if
published in the spring of 1950 inasmuch as the trends described in the book
will still be present, further evolved and more evident.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
CHAPTER ONE OPERATION AACHEN: FIRST VICTORY
AND DEFEAT . . . . . . . . 17
CHAPTER Two THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL
A Healthy Resentment . . . . . 29
"The Anti-Fascist Bastards" . 42
"Enough With The Kzler" . 49
CHAPTER THREE CREW CUTS AND WHITE COLLARS 59
CHAPTER FOUR PRELATES IN POLITICS
Germans After All . . . . . . 72
Munich Again, The Prince Bishop
of Bavaria . . . . . . . . . 80
CHAPTER FIVE THE COLLAPSE OF A GREAT ARMY
Breakdown . . . . . . . 95
The New Order . . . . . . . 111
CHAPTER: SIX TIMETABLE SELL-OUT . . . . . 125
CHAPTER SEVEN IN THE NAME OF CHRIST . . . . 134
CHAPTER EIGHT DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND
"We're Most Like You . . . . 148
The Unveiling of The Swastika . . 153
Out Of the Mothballs . . . . . 160
CHAPTER NINE THE OPPOSITION To THE OPPOSITION
The Common People . . . . . 163
The "Menace ... . . . . . . . 172
CHAPTER TEN DENAZIFICATION BECOMES RENAZIF-ICATION . . . . . . . . . .182
CHAPTER ELEVEN THE YOUTH
In The Atmosphere Of Despair . 192
Deutschland Erwecke! . . . . . 199
CHAPTER TWELVE WE CRIED PEACE . . . . . . . 204
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 1947, CULMINATION
The Occupation Yields Rotten Fruit 213
Revival Under Our Feet . . . . 227
CHAPTER FOURTEEN SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 231
=====
INTRODUCTION
"Victory is essential; but victory is not enough for you — or for us. We must
be sure that when you have won victory, you will not have to tell your
children that you fought in vain — that you were not betrayed."
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: From adress[sic] to
International Student Assembly, September 3, 1942.
"WHAT can you do with a country like this?"
It was a few days after VE day, May, 1945. A group of us were sitting with
our feet on the porch railing, smoking and watching the Germans promenade
past our Twelfth Army Group Psychological Warfare billets, the Hotel Bristol,
on the main street in Bad Nauheim, the famous, undamaged spa north of
Frankfurt. Every evening, it was the same question. It was rarely followed,
however, by any real discussion. Feeling -was too high for an argument on how
to treat the Germans.
One evening the colonel pushed his chair back angrily and strode into the
lobby, muttering, "God damm' these bastards, I hate these people." The
colonel had lost one of his sons in the war and the other had been seriously
wounded. He had the point of view of the combat men, and most of the fellows
in our detachment agreed with him.
Men don't hate and fight one day and then calm down and forget the next, just
because their commanders tell them — "take it easy now." That's the way it
had been. One day the fellows were fighting. Suddenly the dam had burst and
we had flooded over Germany, routing the enemy, encircling thousands of
German troops, obtaining mass surrenders and achieving a vast momentum. We
had developed all the enthusiasm, good teamwork and real efficiency in
accomplishing assignments that comes with constant success.
The next day, a group of generals sat down at a table in Rheims and the word
went out. We were having a bullsession before evening chow when some fellow
burst in with the announcement: "Hey, fellows, the Germans have
surrendered."' "Oh yeah," was someone's non-committal reply, "when do we
eat?" We laughed and went on talking. There wasn't any excitement. We'd been
expecting the capitulation for over a week. Now that it was here, we didn't
know how to react.
Then a couple of days later, the blackout was lifted. We put on all the
lights and pulled the shades all the way up. There were lights on the
streets, too. It was like Times Square in Bad Nauheim. Next we didn't have to
wear helmets or boots.
This was peace.
Well, we sat on the porch mornings after breakfast and smoked a while before
reporting. We didn't work evenings or Sundays anymore, either. We took off
afternoons to play tennis.
All over the Zone hundreds of thousands of American young men grounded their
planes, parked their tanks and trucks, left their artillery and ackack.
It was all over.
Now the GIs were to do guard duty, to check identifications and to take part
in raids for weapons and blackmarket. That was all.
"Your job is done" said the Generals, "MG, Military Government, will tak[e]
care of the enemy."
But this somehow was not the way the GIs had expected " victory", everything
shouldn't have been finished so suddenly. The fellows were afraid that maybe
we weren't going to accomplish all we had set out to do in the war.
They certainly weren't at all sure about these MG men. "Nice racket you guys
got," was their laughing comment if you told them you were in MG, for there
was more than the accepted condescension of an air corps man for a
footslugger in the infantry in the attitude of the combat men for the
"chairborne" occupation officers. It was one thing to meet the "'krauts" in
hand-to-hand combat and another to study about them in books. And wasn't it a
joke — real "Army" — how most MG officers couldn't even talk "kraut" and how
ignorant they -were about this country? (A few weeks of conversational German
was supposed to overcome the language barrier and brief surveys in German
history and geography allegedly prepared them to tackle the complex political
problems involved in the occupation.)
Of course, word did not get around about the numerous conscientious MG
officers who quietly and thoroughly were applying themselves to the
accomplishment of the aims that we were all fighting for. Suspicion of MG had
seeped down to the troops as a result of the actions of the obviously
incompetent officers. These were the men who made MG a laughing stock.
On the other hand, GIs smiled when they talked about MG because many of them
remembered how back in 1943 when the Provost Marshal ordered the various Army
posts and military camps to furnish a quota of men to be trained in
occupation duty, many units took the opportunity to rid themselves of their
duds. Word got around, too, of how the Army had given direct commissions to
ex-local ward heelers, state assemblymen and small town commissioners of
sanitation, men with "administrative experience" who had connections and
wanted to do a little war.
And later, packets of men arriving in the ETO were dumped into MG, no matter
what their training had been, just because the Army did not know where to
assign them. What a laugh! — back in 1943, the Army suddenly transferred to
the infantry and the aviation ground corps hundreds, of GIs in the ASTP (Army
Student Training Program), fellows who had almost completed courses preparing
them for occupation duty.*[ * Of a typical class of 32 men who had completed
an ASTP course in 1943 at the University of Pennsylvania, only five ended up
in MG, where they belonged. Another case of typical Army snafu occurred with
the graduates of the advanced Military Government school in Brondisbury,
England, who had been prepared for specific positions in specific German
towns and become experts in their assigned tasks. They found that no note
whatever was taken of their specialization when they were finally assigned to
MG units in Germany.]
The GIs were demoralized by their sudden inactivity and their mistrust of the
MG personnel, and their anxiety was intensified by their fear that there was
no clear direction in the occupation. "Every guy in MG has a different idea
about how he's supposed to treat the Germans. What a hell of a mess that's
going to lead to."
In our detachment most of the fellows were either "haters" or "non-haters."
There were dangers in both approaches to the Germans. "Hate-all-krauts" MG
officials, considering all Germans equally incorrigible, would fail to punish
them according to their individual responsibility for the war and the Nazi
atrocities and would provide little supervision and direction for reorienting
the nation. They would probably end up working with the "krauts" who were
most efficient, whether politically trustworthy or not ("none of them is
trustworthy"), and eventually learn to like many of the wrong Germans.
With their sentimental, forgiving approach, the "non-haters", on the other
hand, would probably underestimate the guilt of the Germans for the war and
the Nazi terrorism and succumb to the flattery and cunning of the
smooth-tongued Germans, the very Germans who would insinuate themselves into
the favour of the "haters." In practice, these seemingly contradictory
philosophies could lead to the same, unfortunate results.
Few of our fellows back in May, 1945 were advocating a policy of careful
discrimination among the different varieties of the Nazis and of the vast
number of Nazi collaborators and among the various kinds of anti-Nazis. This
was the only policy that would guarantee the accomplishment of the GIs'
objectives — punishing the bastards responsible for all the killing and
fixing up Germany so we'd never have to come over again to the mud, the cold,
the K rations, the blood and the suffering again. The few MG men with this
approach would accept the principle that those who fought hardest against
Hitler now deserved the leadership in the nation. They would subordinate the
reconstruction of Germany — and what GI gave a damn how fast the Germans
rebuilt their homes and their factories — to the cleansing, thorough
cleansing of the country.
The GIs sensed the existence of a hodgepodge of approaches in MG and feared
that without strong direction and a clearly defined policy the occupation
would never achieve the objectives for which they had fought. Discouraged by
their enforced uselessness, cynical about our MG personnel, and suspicious of
our lack of a definite, uniform policy, the GIs turned against the Germans in
a helpless rage, not knowing themselves at whom they were really so angry.
A heavy-set, politically unsophisticated lieutenant, a hefty six-footer, told
me how he had pushed a German cripple, a war casualty, flat on his back into
the street — "damn' kraut, didn't know enough to get out of my way. Who the
hell do they think won the war anyhow?"
That was the rancor at the end of the war.
The history of our occupation during the first year is the story of the
conflict between the two opposing philosophies which eventually emerged in
our Zone; the "be good to the Germans" philosophy, which in practice often
proved to be more opportunistic than idealistic or humanitarian and led to
the substitution of new objectives for many of our original war objectives;
and the "discriminate carefully among the Germans" philosophy, which
consistently aimed at the accompIishment of our original purposes. The
struggle began as soon as we entered Germany, in Aachen, back in October,
1944. By the end of 1945, it was clear that the former philosophy had won out.
pps. 6-16
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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