A World at Arms (153 page)

In any case both Polish governments had plans for major post-war territorial revisions vis-à-vis Germany. While both had hopes for the cession of all of East Prussia, both were willing to accept its division with the Soviet Union. Both also assumed that the territory of the Free City of Danzig would be incorporated into a liberated Poland, as that city had been for centuries before its annexation by Prussia in 1793. As
for the western border, Sikorski had been urging the government-in-exile to demand a new border along the Oder and western Neisse rivers as the shortest and most easily defensible line.
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The British government was increasingly favorable to a new border in the west; although there was reluctance in London and Washington, both to thinking of this border change as compensation for Polish territorial losses to the Soviet Union on her eastern border as well as to the massive number of Germans either being included in Poland or being transferred out of these areas, Great Britain and the United States came increasingly to accept both concepts.
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There would be a great deal of subsequent diplomatic and propagandistic maneuvering about the new German–Polish border, but there was never any likelihood of major change.

On the subject of the new government of Poland, there had been and would continue to be major differences between the Allies, but the Lublin Committee, installed in stages in the territory liberated by the Red Army, intended from the beginning to crush the underground Polish army loyal to the government-in-exile and to establish a “people’s democracy” permanently aligned with the Soviet Union in post-war Europe.
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And there was little anyone could do to stop it–except for the ceaseless hostility of the mass of the population to their new masters.

The plans of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile for the future had two central aims. One was the recognition by the victors that the German destruction of the Munich settlement of 1938 by the occupation of March 1939 ended the earlier borders and thus re–established the pre-Munich boundaries with Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary. By 1944, this aim had been attained. So had the second one: as mentioned above, the Czechoslovak government wanted and received the agreement of the major Allies to the expulsion of the country’s inhabitants of German descent. The easternmost portion of pre-Munich Czechoslovakia had to be ceded to the Soviet Union, but in the rest, including the territories ceded to Germany, Hungary, and Poland in 1938, the government-in-exile would be installed with the authorization by the Allies to remove the three and a half million Germans.

The prospect of these Germans, added to over nine million from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line (together with hundreds of thousands more fleeing or expelled from other portions of East and Southeast Europe), being transferred out of their homes into a residual German area opened up the possibility of an entirely new population movement of a size unprecedented in European history. The Germans had rejected the effort made at Versailles in 1919 to adjust boundaries to population, and they had substituted the concept of drawing new lines
and then moving or killing the population to fit those lines. This new procedure was now to be applied to them on a massive scale; and in a world the Germans had terrorized, few could muster sympathy.
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BRITISH AND U.S. PLANS

The Western Allies also had their plans for Germany and were already ruling a small portion of it in the Aachen area. Both the Americans and the British planned to install military government systems.
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The policies to be followed were laid down in directives which reflected two basic assumptions. One was that the German people needed to be reoriented toward a democratic order in a lengthy process; the other that this process required not only the end of Naziism and militarism and the removal of industry capable of supporting still a third attempt at military expansion’ but some sort of slow political rebuilding from the ground up.

During the mid-years of the war there had been all sorts of schemes for breaking up Germany into small states–the term used at the time was “dismemberment”–and the Soviet Union had also favored such a project, but when the three governments faced the question of how and where to do the dismembering, the concept looked less and less practical. Each of the three Allies slowly abandoned the idea and looked increasingly to a Germany reduced in size and divided into zones of occupation with the zones still constituting parts of a single entity. In their own zones, about the location of which the Americans and British argued at great length, both would expect new democratic institutions to begin at the local level and later grow in scope. Since the Americans and British believed that the Germans had been turned to Naziism by terrible errors and bad leaders, not as a result of the structure of the economy, they saw the future very differently from the Russians. Whatever changes might or might not be made in the German economy–and the Americans were especially keen on applying their ideas of “trust-busting” to Germany–the new Germany would be erected from the bottom up, not from the top down as was contemplated for the Soviet zone. At the beginning, therefore, the British and Americans foresaw a prohibition of political activity rather than the sponsorship of a political party dedicated to one view of the future. As the public became “re-educated” and democratized, new parties and structures would be created on a local and subsequently broader basis.

On the economic side, several questions dominated discussion within the American and British governments and between them. In the first place, it was obvious that eastern Germany included a major portion of the agricultural land, and that unless the Soviet Union agreed to the continuation of substantial internal transfers of food from the east to the west of occupied Germany, there would be a massive problem of feeding the population of the British and American zones. In case the Soviets declined food shipments westwards, as looked ever more likely and came to be the post-war situation, the population of the western zones would either be allowed to starve or they would be fed either through British and American food shipments–and this in practice would mean American shipments–or they could be allowed to rebuild their economy and earn the cost of importing food. Each of these three possibilities had its own problems: the first–starvation–was incompatible with the values of British and American society and unlikely to be tolerated for any length of time by the people at home, especially as it produced food riots and disease. The second would impose indefinite burdens on the British and American taxpayers and was not likely to receive their long-term support. The third risked the danger of a rebuilt German industrial might which could lead to a renewed bid for European if not world domination and would certainly make even more difficult a post-war recovery of British world trade, an essential pre-condition for a revival of the country drained by years of extraordinary effort in the war.

Ironically, the argument over the first of these alternatives was initially resolved in a Great Britain which insisted on obtaining that portion of Germany in which the economic problem was certain to be the most difficult of all the occupation zones.
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Some food would simply have to be shipped in. That this would turn out to be an issue of enormous difficulty for the British–and one which would eventually make their policy in occupied Germany practically subservient to American preferences–was due to the division into occupation zones as well as the allocation of zones primarily in accordance with a British proposal. A special committee of the British Cabinet had worked out a division which was marked by two main features, one affecting the division between the Soviet and the western zones of occupation, and the other the location of British and American zones within the western portion. A plan dividing the Soviet and western zones at what carne to be the border between East and West Germany was drafted and submitted to the European Advisory Commission, the body established by the three major Allies after the October 1943 Moscow Conference to work out details of cooperation.
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This line left Berlin out of the three occupation zones as a separate
district for joint occupation but placed that district deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation. At a time when the British government was still gravely concerned about a possible Soviet withdrawal from the war or from active operations on the main front, this proposal gave the Russians a major objective to fight for in Central Europe. It was presented to the European Advisory Commission without prior agreement with the Americans on the doubtless correct assumption that the Americans would object. The Russians promptly accepted the British proposal and thereby left the Americans little choice but eventually to go along.
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This was in part due to the fact that when these lines were drawn in the spring of 1944 the Red Army was in great strength on the continent whereas the Western Allies had not yet landed on the coast of France. The other reason for American acquiescence was President Roosevelt’s order of priorities on the subject of occupation zones.

Roosevelt’s own November 1943 map for the occupation of Germany divided the country in such a fashion as to provide a large zone for the Americans in the northwest, and smaller zones for the British in the south and the Russians in the east. The American and Russian zones would meet in Berlin.
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Earlier, Roosevelt had repeatedly mentioned his interest in having American troops enter Berlin first, but he had not before sketched his ideas in detail. In the discussions at that time, however, he had been most insistent on the United States having the northwest zone with direct access to the Atlantic, not a zone in the south which would be land–locked and dependent on land communications across France. Fearful of post-war disturbances in the latter country, he insisted for a full year that he would not accept a southern zone. Although there is no explicit evidence, he may have been influenced by the memory of the American garrison in the Philippines, so recently cut off and isolated abroad; he was certainly affected by a continuing concern about the internal stability of France.

In the subsequent negotiations, Roosevelt held out far longer on the issue of the northern as opposed to the southern zone but agreed to the border between the eastern and western occupations. The British insisted on the north, citing proximity, their own maritime interest, and the impracticality of having the British and American armies cross over after hostilities, during which they would have moved into Germany with the British on the northern and the American on the southern flank (though experience in Tunisia and later in Germany itself would show these fears largely groundless). There was a further idea behind the British obstinacy. Since the Americans, including Roosevelt, repeatedly said that their troops would not remain in Europe for more than a few, perhaps two, years, it made sense for the French eventually to replace
the Americans in the south. Given Roosevelt’s concerns about post-war France, this was obviously not an argument to put to him.

The American Chiefs of Staff eventually persuaded Roosevelt to accept the southern zone with the proviso that the United States was to have an enclave in the British zone at Bremen on the coast to assure a means of direct communication across the British zone and the Atlantic without any need to traverse France.
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Most of the discussion of access and transport was accordingly between the Americans and the British, not with the Russians.

In subsequent years, those problems which had been anticipated turned out to be far easier than expected: France after its liberation settled down much more readily than Roosevelt had feared, the shifting of troops into occupation zones proved much easier than anyone had thought–at the end of hostilities the American XVIII Corps was at Wismar on the Baltic–and the supplying of the American zone across the British proved so smooth that the complicated Bremen arrangement turned out to be unnecessary after all. What remained were two issues which turned out to be vastly more complicated than anyone had thought: transit to Berlin and feeding the vast population of the northwest zone which the British had received but which they had themselves bombed most heavily during the war, and where the question of how the Germans were to be fed was naturally most acute.

The economic future of Germany was of special concern to the Allies. The Soviet Union, after the terrible devastation of war, wanted as large a contribution as possible to its recovery. The British were concerned about the future competition of German exports with her own efforts at economic recuperation from a war into which she had poured her assets and resources. The United States had no desire for a third round with Germany. If there was general agreement that Germany should be stripped of the capacity to make war again, there was much argument over how this could best be done.

In the United States, occupation had traditionally been a military affair under general but remote civilian control. The assumption was that this would be the case with Germany, and in the War Department some preparations were accordingly begun.
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As these preparations went forward, their generally rather mild implications for occupied Germany alarmed some, especially Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. A Hyde Park neighbor and long-time friend of Roosevelt’s, Morgenthau was probably the President’s closest confidante after Hopkins, and like Hopkins totally devoted to Roosevelt. An administrator of enormous energy and talent, he combined a frugal and conservative fiscal policy with a heart for the disadvantaged. In these regards he was the ideal
assistant to the President, sharing his values, tempering Roosevelt’s flights of fancy with a dour punctiliousness, while combining the ability to get things done with complete loyalty to the President.
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Concerned about the general tone of American military government planning, Morgenthau, with the help of high Treasury Department officials, especially Harry Dexter White, drew up an alternative proposal which came to be known by his name.
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Turned over to Roosevelt and initially agreed to by him, it provided for removing heavy industry from a Germany of which one substantial portion of the previously most heavily industrialized part would be internationalized, and another ceded to France; but it also provided that most of the major agricultural area east of the Oder-Neisse line would remain German.
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The not so heavily industrialized area would be divided into a northern and a southern state with the southern one in a customs union with Austria in its old borders. The models which the Treasury officials had in mind were Holland and Denmark, both advanced countries with a high standard of living in pre-I939 Europe, both heavily agricultural, and neither militarily important.
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