Exorcising Hitler Read Online Free Page A
Author: Frederick Taylor
recovering Western Europe could be communism-proofed, also served to send the star of the Morgenthau group into inexorable decline.
It would take some time to elapse after the end of the war, and some bitter clashes within the occupation administration, before the pragmatists gained a clear upper hand over the idealists. After they did, however, policies towards the German population, Nazi or not, became much more pragmatic, and, to some, disappointing. The Morgenthau Plan to divide Germany and make it new gave way to a three-quarter Germany, rebuilt within a democratic framework, but with its industrial potential intact and with the country’s structure including old, suspect materials the occupiers had initially, in the flush of victory, never planned to use. Germany would, of course, in the end be made new – but it would take almost fifty years.
In the case of the Russians, any post-war status quo would be an imposed one, in their occupied parts of Germany as much as elsewhere in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe ‘liberated’ by the Red Army. Any such considerations therefore inspired mostly tactical, as opposed to strategic, reactions.
Certainly, the creation of a communist-totalitarian satellite state in East Germany was Moscow’s achievement. There is very little likelihood that without Russian direction and control, not to mention its cohorts of tame German communists, such a state would have evolved spontaneously out of the ruins of Nazism. The form of statehood achieved in the Western-occupied parts in the late 1940s was, perhaps, more complicated in its origins and took a lot longer for its final shape to become clear. In particular, the Western-oriented ‘Federal Republic’, created almost exactly four years after the end of the war out of the British, American and French zones, would, at least initially, remain much more like pre-war Germany than its rival, the Soviet-controlled ‘Democratic Republic’.
The consensus on the success or failure of the occupation(s) of Germany has wavered and changed in the years since 1945. At the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a valued ally and bulwark against communism, the story ran that the Germans had embraced democracy pretty quickly after 1945 – at least where they were given the chance, i.e. in the West. The Western Allies, so this version of the story went, had provided the Germans in their zones with the framework and the education for this successful transformation. Within a few years, West Germans were firm friends of America, France and Britain, fellow members of NATO. This was the natural consequence of the wise occupation policies pursued. The Western victors had embraced a much less harsh attitude than had been apparent after the First World War, and more especially a less punitive economic policy.
Certainly, by and large, the positive story was the one that the elites of the countries involved, including West Germany itself, France (which by the 1960s was locked in a positively romantic embrace with its former hereditary enemy), America (whose own free and easy popular culture and decentralised politics had also influenced the new Germany) and Britain (which prided itself on giving the West Germans a liberal education system and efficient trade unions) had agreed upon.
The Soviets, with their mass expulsions, rapes and pillage, had made an even worse start than the Western Allies. Their belated and often clumsy attempts to curry, if not favour with the natives, then at least a little less unpopularity, failed to conceal the fact that the East German government was essentially an imposed puppet regime. The discontent of the population compelled the building of a fortified border, first (1952) in the German–German interface that ran down the middle of the former country from Lübeck to Hof and then (1961) in that last refuge of inter-Allied rule, Berlin. In 1953 the population of the Soviet Zone rose up in an open rebellion that
It would take some time to elapse after the end of the war, and some bitter clashes within the occupation administration, before the pragmatists gained a clear upper hand over the idealists. After they did, however, policies towards the German population, Nazi or not, became much more pragmatic, and, to some, disappointing. The Morgenthau Plan to divide Germany and make it new gave way to a three-quarter Germany, rebuilt within a democratic framework, but with its industrial potential intact and with the country’s structure including old, suspect materials the occupiers had initially, in the flush of victory, never planned to use. Germany would, of course, in the end be made new – but it would take almost fifty years.
In the case of the Russians, any post-war status quo would be an imposed one, in their occupied parts of Germany as much as elsewhere in the rest of Eastern and Central Europe ‘liberated’ by the Red Army. Any such considerations therefore inspired mostly tactical, as opposed to strategic, reactions.
Certainly, the creation of a communist-totalitarian satellite state in East Germany was Moscow’s achievement. There is very little likelihood that without Russian direction and control, not to mention its cohorts of tame German communists, such a state would have evolved spontaneously out of the ruins of Nazism. The form of statehood achieved in the Western-occupied parts in the late 1940s was, perhaps, more complicated in its origins and took a lot longer for its final shape to become clear. In particular, the Western-oriented ‘Federal Republic’, created almost exactly four years after the end of the war out of the British, American and French zones, would, at least initially, remain much more like pre-war Germany than its rival, the Soviet-controlled ‘Democratic Republic’.
The consensus on the success or failure of the occupation(s) of Germany has wavered and changed in the years since 1945. At the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a valued ally and bulwark against communism, the story ran that the Germans had embraced democracy pretty quickly after 1945 – at least where they were given the chance, i.e. in the West. The Western Allies, so this version of the story went, had provided the Germans in their zones with the framework and the education for this successful transformation. Within a few years, West Germans were firm friends of America, France and Britain, fellow members of NATO. This was the natural consequence of the wise occupation policies pursued. The Western victors had embraced a much less harsh attitude than had been apparent after the First World War, and more especially a less punitive economic policy.
Certainly, by and large, the positive story was the one that the elites of the countries involved, including West Germany itself, France (which by the 1960s was locked in a positively romantic embrace with its former hereditary enemy), America (whose own free and easy popular culture and decentralised politics had also influenced the new Germany) and Britain (which prided itself on giving the West Germans a liberal education system and efficient trade unions) had agreed upon.
The Soviets, with their mass expulsions, rapes and pillage, had made an even worse start than the Western Allies. Their belated and often clumsy attempts to curry, if not favour with the natives, then at least a little less unpopularity, failed to conceal the fact that the East German government was essentially an imposed puppet regime. The discontent of the population compelled the building of a fortified border, first (1952) in the German–German interface that ran down the middle of the former country from Lübeck to Hof and then (1961) in that last refuge of inter-Allied rule, Berlin. In 1953 the population of the Soviet Zone rose up in an open rebellion that
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