Exorcising Hitler (40 page)

The majority of the inhabitants of the American Zone, according to the Military Government’s busy pollsters, followed the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg with interest, at least at its beginning and end. A large majority (79 per cent) said they thought the trial fair (procedurally, that is). As for the lesson to be drawn from it, 30 per cent thought it was to avoid following a dictator, and 26 per cent to never again start a war. A mere 3 per cent of respondents mentioned justice and 2 per cent human rights.
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The trial went on for almost a year and was extensively covered in the newspapers and newsreels. It was almost like a giant film being projected on to a screen behind the German people, or a radio soundtrack, as the vanquished went about the task of surviving that first post-war winter, spring and summer. Every day, the men who had ruled without pity over the fates of millions sat in their courtroom, crowded in there with their accusers, their defenders and the host of observers in the witness galleries from all over the world, who were hanging on their every word, interpreting their every argument and remark.

As for the Germans on the level below them – the plausible businessmen, the colourless civil servants and the wealthy and powerful backers without whom such criminals could never have taken power – they were also being subjected to a reckoning all over Germany. In many cases justly, but often not, because the victors’ justice could be ignorant and capricious.

There were groups of people in Germany, as the Nazi regime collapsed, who could be easily identified as ‘guilty’ in some way or another, at least so far as the conquerors were concerned. Anyone in an official uniform, anyone who had played an active role in the Nazi Party. Landowners, officers and industrialists, who in the official Allied view had nurtured Hitler and benefited from his dictatorship. Leading artistic, sporting and media figures in Germany who had acted as the attractive face of the regime.

The most horrifyingly immediate retribution against such people occurred in the east. Amidst the general mayhem unleashed by the men of the Red Army, following on the rape, the plunder and the destruction, the treatment of members of the German and more especially ‘Prussian’ aristocratic elite was merciless. They were triply doomed: as an overwhelmingly nationalist group, whether Nazi or not, seen with some justice as aiding Hitler’s rise to power; as the backbone of the German militarism that had allowed Hitler to devastate Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga; and as reactionary class enemies of the communists, Russian or German. Just as the Bolsheviks had massacred the old Tsarist aristocracy during the revolution and civil war more than a quarter of a century earlier, so they and their German protégés now saw little reason to spare the White Russians’ German equivalents.

Many landowners understood the danger they were in and took steps, along with their families, to flee to the west. It was hard for them to leave lands where they had been established for many years, perhaps centuries. Marion Gräfin (Countess) Dönhoff, scion of an ancient East Prussian aristocratic family, had already lost a brother to a wartime air crash and a beloved cousin to the gallows at Plötzensee prison, where he had died an agonising death along with other aristocratic leaders of the plot against Hitler’s life. Anti-Nazi since her student days, the unmarried thirty-five-year-old Gräfin had spent the wartime years managing the extensive family estates on the flatlands south-west of Königsberg, known as ‘Prussian Holland’, while the males of the family fought – and in two cases died – for Germany. Ever since Hitler’s invasion of Russia, she had expected the tide to turn and her ancestral lands to be lost. Every time she and her sisters and workers bought some new farm machinery, or undertook some improvement on the estate, they had joked: ‘The Russians will be pleased.’
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But old habits die hard, and, despite everything, they worked as if the family would prosper there for another five hundred years.

Even when the end was very close, when the sound of distant artillery could be heard to the east, Gräfin Dönhoff, her sister and her sister’s husband, who was home on leave from the front, spanned up the horse sledge and embarked on one last afternoon out hunting across the frozen landscape, tracking wild boar and finally a young fallow buck. That same day, she also heard from contacts among the High Command that a Russian breakthrough was imminent – something she would never have learned from the Nazi-controlled press.

So Gräfin Dönhoff saddled up her horse, Alaric, and with her family and household headed west on a gruelling, fear-driven trek that would take her 1,200 kilometres to Hamburg and a post-war future as a famous journalist. Those who stayed – or fell behind – were not so lucky. In one village in Pomerania, also part of the heartland of the old Junker class, a German witness reported that a Ukrainian boy who had spent three years on one of the local farms as a forced labourer was ordered by the invading Red Army to take them from dwelling to dwelling, from humble cottage to manor house, and report on those who lived there. The witness’s father, a small farmer, had treated his foreign labour well and thus escaped with his life. The squire in the manor house had his eyes poked out by the soldiers before a rifle bullet put an end to his misery.
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Everywhere, a world unchanged for centuries was forcibly being turned upside down – and not just by the Russian soldiery. Elsewhere in Pomerania, a descendant of another grand Prussian family, Baron Jesko Ludwig Günther Nikolaus Freiherr von Puttkamer, woke up one morning in early March 1945, saw fires spreading across the horizon they had hoped to flee towards and realised there was no escape. He put on his officer’s uniform, complete with medals from both wars, and then roused his family – his wife, the Baroness, and his stepdaughter, Libussa, who was pregnant with the child she had conceived with her serving officer husband. ‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Let us go into the park.’ Both the women knew what he meant, and what the code of their caste foresaw for such a moment. The Baron’s service pistol was loaded and ready. ‘It’s time,’ he explained. ‘The Russians will be here in an hour, two at the most.’

Libussa, though, feeling the unborn child inside her, refused to go. ‘Mother, wait, please, I can’t do it.’

The Baroness tried to calm her daughter. ‘It will be quick and painless.’

But Libussa was determined. ‘No, no, it isn’t that. I’m not afraid. I want to go with you, but I can’t. I’m carrying the baby, my baby. It’s kicking so hard. It wants to live. I can’t kill it.’
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Her words changed all their fates. The Baroness decided not to die, but to stay with her daughter. Baron von Puttkamer followed this conversation in a bemused fashion. The decision that the two women had taken was completely alien to his world view. Libussa’s brother, born of Prussian Junker stock, who later chronicled her life, wrote of the transfer of power that took place at this moment:

Our notions of right and wrong, our sense of order, our values have for centuries been formed one-sidedly: they are masculine to a fault, Protestant, Prussian, and soldierly. Self-sacrifice in the name of ideals. Obedience to the state and to superiors. Readiness to serve and fight even unto death. It is from these values that our achievements as well as our destruction have come. Our conditioning pushed us toward an either/or rigidity: friend or enemy, all or nothing, triumph or defeat.

But in defeat, when it suddenly materialises, these masculine principles lose their power and value. Survival in defeat, and ultimately in life itself requires something else.
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The Baron looked helplessly at the women. ‘And what about me? What am I supposed to do?’

Libussa was firm. ‘The first thing you can do is get out of that stupid outfit and throw it in the pond, and the pistols with it! If the Russians find any of those things, we’re finished.’

And reluctantly, he did as she told him. The Baron changed into civilian clothes and they waited.

When the Russians arrived, they stole everything, but there was no rape. Then a headquarters unit took over. The aristocrats were in luck. They suffered many further tribulations, but they did not die at the hands of the enemy.

Hundreds of Junkers, sometimes whole families, did commit suicide in these terrible weeks of defeat and violence. Another 1,500 or so have been judged to have died in air raids, in Russian and Polish detention camps, or to have disappeared, presumed murdered, during the trek westward.
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Most aristocrats who survived the initial flood tide of the Russian advance found their way, in the early days of peace, to the Western zones. They had good reason to do so. They were granted a special place in the demonology of the post-war era, alongside the evil business magnates who had financed Hitler. As early as June 1945, the German Communist Party’s first post-war programme called for

. . . the liquidation of large landholdings, of the large estates of the Junkers, counts and princes and the assignment of their entire ground and land as well as the living and dead inventory to the provincial or state authorities for distribution to farmers ruined and expropriated by war.
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These estates would be confiscated without compensation and redistributed to the less privileged. ‘Junker land into farmers’ hands’ as the famous communist slogan ran. Towards the end of October 1945, the SMAD (Soviet Military Administration in Germany) published its decree no. 110 authorising just such a ‘land reform’. There was a small ‘escape clause’ in the confiscation law that permitted compensation in the case of proven anti-fascists, but in reality the break-up of the Junker estates was total and universal. Those landowners who stayed on in the Soviet Zone in hope of being allowed some kind of role had made a bad decision. The size of landholding classified as liable for confiscation was fixed at 100 hectares (approximately 250 acres), involving around one-third of the total agricultural land in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The landholdings of ‘activist Nazis’ could also be confiscated, whatever their extent. Thus when the ‘land reform’ began to be implemented, soon after the end of the war, many thousands, including non-aristocratic, merely prosperous farmers – essentially, the equivalent of the
Kulaks
Stalin had liquidated during his collectivisation campaign during the 1930s – from the decidedly non-Prussian, non-feudal states of Saxony and Thuringia, were rounded up under the supervision of the Soviet NKVD and in many cases transported to the island of Rügen in the Baltic. Here they lived under abysmal conditions, without proper shelter or food. It was one of the stipulations that the owners of these estates lost not only their land but
all their other property
. During the winter of 1945–6, one letter written to the communist authorities in Saxony from Rügen by a Saxon landowner interned there pathetically detailed the cold, the hunger, the spread of disease. ‘Help us, please . . .’ it pleaded. ‘We are dying.’
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Capitalists could be equally subject to rough justice, especially in the Soviet Zone. In Berlin during the early days of the Soviet occupation, a manufacturer of meat-processing machinery, eighty-one-year-old Richard Heikle, was identified to a Soviet patrol by ‘anti-fascists’ and shot on the street in full view. His son, who ran the company, was arrested a little later and disappeared to the Russian Gulag. He was never seen again.
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Sometimes Russian officers combined class warfare with other pleasures. The head of the Soviet Information Bureau in Zittau, eastern Saxony, named in the records only as ‘Lieutenant R.’, invited a group of local German industrialists and their wives to his birthday party. The ‘celebration’ involved his raping one of the women in front of the other guests. It appears that his ‘punishment’ amounted to an enforced leave of absence.
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Although the initial Soviet line opposed radical social and economic change – Stalin was keen not to frighten either his Allies and co-rulers or the moderate and bourgeois majority of Germans – many industrialists and businessmen were, in fact, immediately subject to arrest and to confiscation of their businesses.

At around the same time as the ‘land reform’ was being pushed through, the property and businesses of ‘fascists and war criminals’ were also being declared forfeit. SMAD order no. 124 of 30 October 1945 authorised the requisition of the entire productive property of ‘Nazi activists, armaments manufacturers, war criminals, and financiers of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Nazi Party) in Saxony. The breadth of the definition was, of course, sufficient to include almost any business enterprise the SMAD and its German helpers saw fit, especially as the forced mobilisation of previously harmless, consumer-oriented industry in the interests of the war effort had reached almost every corner of productive manufacturing during the latter stages of the conflict.
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A few days later, another order authorised the immediate expropriation of all property of the former Nazi Party and its affiliated organisations. The German communists, meanwhile, began organising a plebiscite that would approve expropriation of the large landowners and farmers as well as this radical move in the direction of industrial collectivisation. In June 1946 this vote – approved by 76 per cent of the electorate – would legitimise the nationalisation of around 1,000 larger business or branches of businesses employing more than 100,000 workers in Saxony alone. These and other concerns, nationalised when the rest of the Soviet Zone followed suit, included holdings belonging to Krupp, IG Farben, and especially the Flick steel and armaments empire, which at its height had 120,000 employees and three-quarters of whose plants were situated in the Soviet-occupied area.
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Similar developments were afoot elsewhere in the Eastern Zone.
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A year into the zone’s post-war history, major changes were well advanced there, and contrary to the Soviets’ protestations they were very radical. Already, despite the Western Allies’ insistence on their own commitment to purging their parts of Germany of alleged feudal, militaristic and anti-democratic elements, a clear political and socio-economic divide was emerging between the Soviet Zone and the other three.