The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (33 page)

been a favorite target of the RAF. Between March 1942 and March 1945, Bomber Command sent no fewer than twenty-two major air strikes against Cologne, dropping about 30,000 tons of bombs on it and destroying over 70 percent of the city. Only Essen and Berlin received a greater tonnage of bombs. At first, the scale of the damage did not seem to perturb Allied commanders. Such destruction had been intended. On March 13, just a few days after the capture of Cologne, General Eisen- hower issued a public message of praise to Air Chief Marshal Harris saying that his visit to the Rhineland cities revealed “striking evidence of the effectiveness of the bombing campaigns…. City after city has been systematically shattered.” Ike acclaimed the “heroic work” of Bomber Command and the U.S. Air Forces.
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Such sangfroid proved hard to maintain. General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, saw Cologne shortly after its capture. “ The center of the ancient town was completely flattened,” he wrote, “a picture of absolute destruction greater than I had seen anywhere”—this from a man who had seen every Amer- ican battlefield in the European Theater. Time maga- zine’s Sidney Olson wrote that Allied soldiers who had “exulted over 1,000-plane assaults and 3,500-ton bomb loads” could now see for themselves what strategic bombing had achieved. “A mud-stained veteran stared

with dazed eyes at the desolation about him, murmur- ing over and over, ‘Ain’t it awful! Ain’t it awful!’” Olson was struck by the “silence and emptiness” of the city. A few timid cellar-dwelling citizens appeared, shaken and jumpy, deathly afraid of the sound of aircraft. In a remarkable survey of Cologne in late April titled “Dead German Cities,” the London Times correspondent wrote that “there are simply no words to describe the devastation of Cologne.” The future of the city seemed in doubt. “No plan for military government, however foreseeing, can have reckoned with the reality of the fearful retribution that has fallen upon the cities of the Rhineland…. The fundamental problems of living, of picking up the slender threads of existence from the mountain of rubble” were sure to stymie Allied military government, for bombing had turned the region into a “wilderness of blasted stone.” The correspondent felt it necessary to say, as if bucking up his courage before gazing at the horrors before him, that “we have to re- mind ourselves that the enemy brought it on himself.” But it was hard to see this once-vital, bustling place in ruins, without water, gas, electricity, transporta- tion, even roads or rails. “Cologne, indeed, is a dead city—silent as the grave and full of the grit and dust that swirl from the hillocks of rubble.” As for the inhab- itants, “it seems a little foolish to talk of the attitude of the people. So far as one could judge, theirs is the

numb bewilderment of any people who have survived a cataclysm and are down to the clothes they stand in.” Press reporters spoke of the densely packed, factory- filled cities along the Ruhr river as “inert,” “lifeless,” “spectral and morose,” looking like “the bowels of the earth.” Ben Hibbs of the Saturday Evening Post wrote, “Cologne is finished, I should imagine, literally erased from the map forever.”
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As Allied armies pushed farther into Germany, similar scenes greeted them. The cities along the Ruhr valley that formed the great industrial powerhouse of Germa-

ny had been hit repeatedly. Essen (hit by twenty-eight major RAF attacks between March 1942 and March 1945), Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Bochum, these towns “burned like torches for a night, smoldered for a day, then lay blackened and dead”— until they were reignited by repeated air strikes.
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Frankfurt, just a few miles across the Rhine and the city that would soon become the headquarters of the American zone of occupation, was taken by the 5th Di- vision of XII Corps on March 26. It had endured eleven major RAF attacks and received over 23,000 tons of bombs. The London Times reporter who arrived four days later described Frankfurt as a “melancholy sam- ple” of Germany’s cities. The shopping districts were in ruins, the streets clogged with rubble. In front of one of the cultural shrines of the city, Goethe’s birth- place at no. 23 Grosse Hirschgraben, a cardboard sign had been propped up with a handwritten message: “Here was the house where the old great poet Goethe was born.” The house was gone, as was the museum next door and indeed the whole street and neighbor- hood. The Romerberg, the medieval marketplace, was vaporized; the opera house was roofless, and its walls gashed open; the cathedral, scene of the coronation of German emperors, had lost its roof; only the tower re- mained, a blackened finger pointing skyward. “I have been in Frankfurt before,” reported Time magazine’s

Percy Knauth, but “today I found no single landmark I recognized. In these miles and miles of ruins, there is nothing but dullness and apathy, a state that seems like a sleepwalking trance.”
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Farther down the river Rhine, the city of Mainz, which had endured repeated incendiary raids, looked “like the excavated ruins of an earlier civilization, or like watered-down fragments of children’s sand-castles.” To the east, Nuremberg fell to the Americans on April 20, Hitler’s birthday. It was a heap of cinders and stone. Richard J. H. Johnston of the New York Times reported the next day that “there is no more hideous spot in Eu- rope today than Nuremberg, shrine city of the Nazis.” Not one building inside the walled old city remained standing. “Like timid ground creatures, a few Germans came up from their shelters, caves and cellars this morning to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbeliev- ing at the awful mess that was their town.” The ancient churches, historic homes, and cultural monuments were in pieces. The glorious Church of Saint Sebaldus was reduced to “a clutter of broken stone, bits of bro- ken stained glass, and little chunks of melted lead and statuary.” The storied buildings that had made the city a glittering showcase, such as the Gothic city hall, the Haupt Markt, the Frauenkirche, all were in total ruins. Beneath the rubble lay uncounted dead bodies. John-

ston concluded gloomily: “Nuremberg is a city of the dead.”
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Cornelia Stabler Gillam, a young Quaker from Philadel- phia who signed up with the USO to play piano concerts in Army canteens across occupied Germany, wrote home to her family in late June and described her first journey from Belgium into Germany along roads lined with shattered tanks, concrete pillboxes, and devas- tated villages. The destruction of Aachen stunned her. Not a house was left standing, she wrote, and “it makes you tremble inside. People crawling like rats out of the ruined buildings where they live. Sad-faced children trying to play in the streets blocked with stone and plaster. I was afraid several times that I would cry, and I knew it would be misunderstood. I would not be weep- ing for the Germans but for all the world.”
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* * *

T

HE AMERICAN ZONE of occupation extended over 41,000 square miles of southern and cen- tral Germany, including all of Bavaria and some

chunks of Baden-Württemberg and Hessen. This area, the size of Tennessee, included about fifteen million Germans—a number in constant flux, due to the large refugee flows across Germany in 1945. The Americans

had 1,622,000 men in Germany on V-E Day, a number that began immediately to decline as troops were ei- ther reassigned to the Pacific or sent back home. The

U.S. zone included some of the most beautiful land- scape of Germany, including the Bavarian Alps where Hitler had built his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Its main cities were small: Munich had a prewar popu- lation of 800,000; Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Stuttgart about half a million each; Mannheim less than 400,000; Karlsruhe 300,000. All had been heavily bombed, but the countryside in Bavaria had not been badly dam- aged, and the zone contained a few miracles, like the ancient university city of Heidelberg, which emerged from the war wholly unscathed.

With amazing speed, the Army dispatched 269 Military Government detachments across the zone to establish official control and begin the process of registering ci- vilians, rooting out top Nazis, arresting war criminals, and assessing the state of the damage in the zone. In small towns, a Military Government unit could work effectively. But in a city like Frankfurt, the shortage of American staff was readily apparent: nineteen officers and twenty-four men had to look after this shattered city by themselves, carefully avoiding the use of lo- cal administration until they had been vetted for Nazi Party connections. A reporter who watched the work of

these initial detachments was impressed by the order- liness of it all:

The prostrate body of a city is given artificial respira- tion. The dead are buried, and the streets are cleared. Wherever possible, the water system is restarted as a first check against epidemics. Reliable Germans must be found to run the show. I say they must be found be- cause every Military Government team in the Ameri- can zone has from the start been so desperately un- derstaffed that it could not dream of operating without civilian assistance. Luckily, there was no hitch in get- ting the civilians to collaborate—to everyone’s amaze- ment, most Germans did not seem to bear any grudge against the invaders. Besides, the Germans are well trained in obeying orders and putting themselves at the disposal of the authorities, whoever they are.
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Whereas SHAEF had prognosticated darkly about pockets of fanatical armed resistance, sabotage, un- derground terrorist cells, and so on, occupied Germany was extremely quiet in the first months. Advance units reported that the people were “passive,” and were in a state of “stunned despondency over their misfortunes.” Other than petty looting, and a good deal of theft and sporadic violence by migrating displaced persons and former forced laborers, the country was calm. The only

thing that irked occupation officials was the marked tendency of Germans “to disclaim all responsibility for the action of both the Wehrmacht and the NSDAP [Nazi Party]. Many, for instance, when told of the horrors of the concentration camps have almost indignantly dis- claimed all knowledge of or responsibility for these institutions.” Otherwise, the weekly field reports re- ported little crime committed by Germans, and an “at- titude of civilian cooperation and resigned adherence to occupation policy.”
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American soldiers, by contrast, were not always quiet and cooperative. “ The behavior of some of the troops,” according to an American officer attached to the Psy- chological Warfare office of SHAEF, “was nothing to brag about, particularly after they came across cases of cognac and barrels of wine. I am mentioning it only because there is a tendency among the naïve or the malicious to think that only Russians loot and rape. After a battle, soldiers of every country are pretty much the same.”
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The Army’s Judge Advocate General was even more direct: “A tremendous increase in the number of rapes occurred when our troops arrived on German soil,” concluded the JAG’s report, which also noted that 88 percent of the reported rapes of German women by U.S. soldiers occurred in March and April 1945. “ We were members of a conquering army, and we came as conquerors,” the JAG continued. “ The rate of reported rapes sprang skyward.” The JAG believed that the sudden increase in rape was partly due to Nazi propaganda, “which had prepared the way by telling the German people that the American troops would rape and pillage and kill. The German population was cowed.” This explanation seemed to blame the victim: a cowed woman, it suggested, was a vulnerable target. In fact, the American Army had spent the previous year

instructing soldiers to view German people as treach- erous enemies, prone to sabotage, deceit, and malice. The fighting of the winter and early spring had been extremely difficult and the Germans had put up a fero- cious resistance to the advancing armies, only stoking American hatred. And the discovery of the concentra- tion camps, and the massive publicity they received in April, made soldiers feel that the German people deserved whatever awful fate awaited them. In the words of the JAG, “the situation was ripe for violent sex crimes, and the avalanche came.”