Exorcising Hitler Read Online Free

not the same as that which, half a brutally eventful year later, formed the basis of the arguments at their post-war meeting in Potsdam, just outside the recently conquered German capital.
    By the time the Potsdam proceedings began, Hitler and Mussolini were no more, and one great Allied leader – Roosevelt – was also dead. Yet more terrible, bloody battles and massacres had occurred – the forced expulsion of millions of Germans from eastern Germany, Poland and the Sudetenland, the apocalyptic bombings of Dresden, Pforzheim and Würzburg, the siege of Berlin, the ‘death marches’ as the prisoner-of-war and concentration camps were emptied. Above all, a vast forced population movement had been set in motion, the greatest in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire – involving not just Germans but also Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Italians and others. Churchill, finally subjected to the verdict of the British electorate, resigned on 26 July 1945. The leader of the socially radical Labour Party, Clement Attlee, had been swept to power in a landslide that showed the British public moving on from the heroics of war to the hard practicalities of peace, making its resultant political choice clearly and without sentimentality.
    So a triumphant but anxious Allied presence met a dazed, disillusioned German populace, amid ruined cities and the general breakdown of communication and supply in what had once been the best-organised state in Europe. The possibility that harsh, or at least stern, treatment of the former Reich during the post-war occupation might somehow conflict with the aim of creating a future Germany fit to take its peaceful place in the family of nations seems to have dawned on most in the Allied camp relatively slowly.
    In Britain, all but a handful of critics, led by the Labour MP Richard Rapier Stokes and Bishop Bell of Chichester (both of whom had been prominent wartime critics of the bombing of German cities), plus the passionate, if eccentric left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, considered the Germans had brought their miserable fate upon themselves. The publication of press accounts of the liberation of the concentration camps forced this forgiving minority even further into their corner.
    Likewise, in America, many in high places – most prominently Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau – promoted rigorous post-war treatment of Germany, dismantling of all war-related industries, total decentralisation, and even the country’s forced downgrading into a purely agrarian state. It was a radical, in its way idealistic solution to the perceived problem, presuming continuing good relations between the wartime Allies, thereby allowing for a post-war condition of peace which only a militarily resurgent Germany could possibly disturb. The main, even only, aim was to prevent that resurgence, most crucially by removing the heavy industrial capacity that would permit it.
    Most of the US State Department and the Department of War – including Secretary Stimson – were, on the other hand, in favour of firm but flexible policies that would neutralise the Nazi danger but allow Germany to get back on her feet. The initial aim was to save her from being an undue burden to the victors, but politico-military reasons quickly started to play a role. Soon after the end of the war (in fact, arguably even before it, given the inter-Allied conflicts over the future of Poland that arose in the final wartime months), it became clear that a smoothly functioning Anglo-Russian-American-French-controlled Germany, run from a single coalition HQ in Berlin, was unlikely. The French were especially keen to sabotage this. However, ruthless Soviet behaviour in Eastern and Central Europe, and clear indications of communist ambitions elsewhere, combined with an awareness in the new Truman administration that fifty million hungry and unemployed Germans in the Western-ruled zones did not represent the raw material out of which a