-Caveat Lector-
"Deterring Democracy" by Noam Chomsky
Chapter 11 cont'd
The United States was determined to prevent expropriation of
Nazi industrialists and was firmly opposed to allowing
worker-based organizations to exercise managerial authority. Such
developments would pose a serious threat of democracy in one
sense of the term, while violating it in the approved sense. The
U.S. authorities therefore turned to sympathetic right-wing
socialists, as in Japan, while using such means as control of
CARE packages, food and other supplies to overcome the opposition
of rank-and-file workers. It was finally necessary to "wall off"
the Western zone by partition, to veto the major union
constitutions, to forcefully terminate social experiments,
vetoing state ("Laender") legislation, co-determination efforts,
and so on. Major Nazi war criminals were recruited for U.S.
intelligence and anti-resistance activities, Klaus Barbie being
perhaps the best known. A still worse Nazi gangster, Franz Six,
was pressed into service after his sentence as a war criminal was
commuted by U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy. He was put to
work for Reinhard Gehlen, with special responsibility for
developing a "secret army" under U.S. auspices, along with former
Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht specialists, to assist military forces
established by Hitler in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in
operations that continued into the 1950s. Gehlen himself had
headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern front, and was
reinstated as head of the espionage and counter-espionage service
of the new West German state, under close CIA supervision.
Meanwhile, as in Japan, the burden of reconstruction was
placed upon German workers, in part by fiscal measures that wiped
out the savings of the poor and union treasuries. "So
thoroughgoing was the U.S. assault on German labor that even the
AFL complained," Eisenberg comments, though the AFL had helped
lay the basis for these consequences by its anti-union
activities. Union activists were purged and strikes were blocked
by force. By 1949, the State Department expressed its pleasure
that "industrial peace had been attained," with a now docile and
tractable labor force and an end to the vision of a unified
popular movement that might challenge the authority of owners
and managers**.
As Tom Bower describes the outcome in a study of the
rehabilitation of Nazi war criminals, "Four years after the war,
those responsible for the day-to-day management of post-war
Germany were remarkably similar to the management during the days
of Hitler," including bankers and industrialists convicted of war
crimes who were released and restored to their former roles,
renewing their collaboration with U.S. corporations.
In short, the treatment of the two "great workshops" was
basically similar.
In later years, as we have seen, the U.S. was distinctly
wary of apparent Soviet initiatives for a unified demilitarized
Germany and steps towards dismantling the pact system. Western
European elites have been no less concerned, for the decline of
East-West confrontation might "let politics loose among those
people," with all of the dire effects. That has been one of the
undercurrents beneath the debate of the 1980s over arms control,
security issues, and the political prospects for a united Europe.
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**For more on these matters, see "Turning the Tide," 197ff., and
sources cited; Christopher Simpson, "Blowback" (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1988). On the recruitment of Nazi scientists, see Tom
Bower, "The Paperclip Conspiracy" (Michael Joseph, 1987), 310;
John Gimbel, "Science, Technology, and Reparations" (Stanford,
1990). A review of the latter in "Science" notes that Gimbel's
research "demonstrates the dubiousness of subsequent U.S. claims
of commercial disinterestedness in the occupation of Germany;
just like the Russians, and to a lesser degree the British and
the French, the Americans seized enormous quantities of
reparations from the defeated country," giving "some credence to
the Russian claim that Anglo-American seizures amounted to about
$10 billion," the amount demanded (but not received) by the
Russians as reparations for the Nazi devastation of the USSR.
Raymond Stokes, "Science," June 8, 1990.
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5. The Smaller Workshops
In France and Italy, U.S. authorities pursued similar tasks.
In both countries, Marshall Plan aid was strictly contingent on
exclusion of Communists -- including major elements of the
anti-fascist resistance and labor -- from the government;
"democracy," in the usual sense. U.S. aid was critically
important in early years for suffering people in Europe and was
therefore a powerful lever of control, a matter of much
significance for U.S. business interests and longer term
planning. "If Europe did not receive massive financial assistance
and adopt a coherent recovery program, American officials were
fearful that the Communist left
