The German War (94 page)

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As the Allies fixed new borders in post-war Europe, both Soviet Ukraine and Poland were moved westwards, with the cattle truck continuing to service the demographic reordering of eastern Europe. The Soviet Union resettled 810,415 Poles, many of them from historical centres in eastern Galicia, from Lwów and Rivne. In parallel, 482,880 Ukrainians were moved eastwards into the newly enlarged Soviet Ukraine. In the deeply ‘mixed’ Polish-German region of Upper Silesia, the influx of Polish settlers from the east acted as the administrative trigger to expel the ethnic Germans in fairly orderly fashion. Elsewhere, expulsion was more punitive and symbolically laden. The liberated Czech Jewish ghetto of Terezín – Theresienstadt – now interned Germans, who pleaded with the local Russian commandant not to withdraw, fearful that the Czechs would kill them all. Czechs forced German civilians to sing and dance, crawl and do gymnastics, as they awaited the cattle trains to deport them to Germany. On 30 May 1945, all 30,000 Germans living in Brno – or, as they would have called it, Brünn – were roused from their beds and driven out on foot. They were beaten as they walked to the camps on the Austrian border. Some 1,700 of them died on what Germans soon called the ‘Brünn death march’. Leonie Bauditz and her family were expelled from Breslau in the snows of January 1946. It took five days for their cattle truck to reach Frankfurt on the Oder. By 1947, the rump Germany of the four Allied occupation zones had had to absorb 10,096,000 German refugees and expellees from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. In addition, as late as 1946, over three million wartime evacuees were still living in the countryside, unable or unwilling to risk returning to the ruined cities they had left two or three years earlier, especially if this meant crossing the tightly policed borders between the different occupation zones.
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In May 1945, 8 million foreigners had been liberated in Germany. During their first encounters with Allied troops, German farmers often asked their forced labourers to act as mediators with the invaders. Within weeks, the German population turned to their conquerors to protect them from roving gangs of foreign workers who appeared suddenly on outlying farms at night, demanding food, clothes and money, or simply wanting revenge for years of abuse. Their number continued to fall steadily, as the Allies implemented their policy of repatriating all ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs). By early 1947, there were just under a million foreigners in Germany. Most of those who remained were in western Germany, with 575,000 in the US and 275,000 in the British zones. Their numbers were augmented by Jews fleeing westwards to escape the pogroms which swept post-war Poland: the worst excesses were in Cracow and Kielce, where 42 Jews out of a 200-strong community were killed in early July 1946. By October 1946, over 160,000 Jews had arrived in western Germany. Against a general policy to repatriate all East Europeans from Germany, the US Military Government permitted this one group to migrate westwards. The US Zone was also unique in establishing separate DP camps for Jews. In the French and British Zones, they were placed in camps by nationality, a toxic recipe as Jews lived alongside former German collaborators who had their own reasons to resist ‘repatriation’.
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But even in the US Zone, Jewish DPs did not have an easy time. As Jews became a larger proportion of the remaining DPs, so the old image of the Jew as the archetypal swindler gained new currency. On 29 March 1946, 180 German police accompanied by dogs raided a Jewish camp in the Reinsburg Strasse in Stuttgart looking for blackmarket goods. Although they found only a few eggs, they provoked a full-scale fight with the Jewish DPs. One concentration camp survivor who had only recently been reunited with his wife and two children was killed. The American Military Government immediately responded by barring German police from entering Jewish camps.
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With the collapse of the Third Reich, the black market took off on a scale which eclipsed its rather modest wartime dimensions. The German economy was in chaos and heavy industry was at a standstill. In Berlin, centres of the black market sprang up on the Alexanderplatz and at the Tiergarten. Sewing needles, nails and screws ranked amongst its luxury goods. Just as in occupied Poland during the war, so now in Germany factories began to pay workers partly in kind, to allow them to enter the barter trade themselves. Children’s games quickly caught up with reality, with cops and robbers giving way to ‘coal thief and engine driver’, as shoals of children pilfered coal from the railway sidings. The Western Allies debated whether to ‘pastoralise’ the country along the lines of the Morgenthau Plan in order to prevent any future German threat or whether to restart industrial production in the Ruhr. In its zone, the Soviet Union dismantled industrial plant and shipped it back as reparations. As the cash economy fell apart, firms made wholesale barter arrangements with one another, further disrupting any chance of restoring an integrated market. The food supply was also critical. Germany had lost some of its most productive agricultural regions to Poland in the Allied settlement of national borders at Potsdam in 1945. During the first three post-war years, as crisis after crisis hit transport, food, heating fuel and clothing, Germans experienced levels of hunger which were far worse than anything they had endured during the war itself – mainly because the Nazi requisitioning of food had displaced shortages on to other Europeans.
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Cardinal Frings’s sermon in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 1946 authorised stealing the essentials of daily life, and he was commemorated for his gesture by a new local verb for theft:
fringsen.
No one group was responsible for the black market: its causes lay in the conditions of defeat and occupation. German police and local politicians blamed the racketeering and violent crime that engulfed Germany in 1945–48 on the DPs, as if they possessed the economic and institutional power to run the black market on their own. The rates of criminal conviction did not substantiate such assertions, even in courts run by an unreformed West German judiciary not given to thinking kindly about impoverished and downtrodden foreigners.
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In the semi-lawless conditions that prevailed in all four Allied occupation zones, two crimes struck the Chief State Prosecutor for Freiburg, Professor Karl Bader, as emblematic of the time: robbery and bigamy. With 8.7 million German men in prisoner-of-war camps in the summer of 1945, there were huge gender disparities. In Sachsen-Anhalt, there were three times as many women as men in the 20–30 age group and twice as many among 30 to 40-year-olds. Bigamy was most common amongst men who had been displaced by war and had been separated from their original families. Sometimes they simply wanted to legitimise children who had been born during the war. In other cases, people resorted to bigamy to hide their past identities. Equipped with false papers, the former Nazi mayor of a town in Saxony attested to his own death, after which he proceded to remarry his now ‘widowed’ wife, without fear of arrest for his Nazi activities. He even landed a job in the British Zone dealing with inter-zonal trade, where he went on to do well out of bribes and the black market.
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In a society desperate for moral anchors and respectability, the appearance of false doctors and pastors was particularly worrying. Former Wehrmacht medical orderlies masqueraded as doctors, surgeons and obstetricians, gaining access to drugs like morphine to feed their own needs or to sell on the black market. One former mechanic managed to persuade the Bishop of Mecklenburg of his clerical bona fides, serving as pastor in a parish near Schwerin until the end of 1945. Germany was awash with soothsayers. In July 1947 there were claims that

In Berlin there is one

for every 1,000 people. 99 per cent of their customers are women who wish to learn something of the uncertain fate of their relatives. One fortune-teller in Neukölln has a daily income of 5,000 marks and was forced to employ four assistants in order to deal with the queue in front of his house each day.

Besieged by people seeking guidance, one pastor with the Protestant Inner Mission in Berlin remarked in 1946: ‘Earlier such people always had a goal or at least plans and wishes. These people do not. They cannot find their feet; they don’t want anything any more, they don’t wish for anything any more, they simply do not know any more.’
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In Pforzheim there had been no news of Helmut Paulus since 1 November 1943. His commanding officer wrote twice to tell Erna and Ernst Arnold Paulus how their eldest son had gone missing in action. He had just returned from a spell of home leave when he ran into an ambush; two search parties failed to find any trace of him and there was a possibility that he had been taken prisoner. In May 1945, Helmut’s two sisters, Elfriede and Irmgard, arrived home together, exhausted from tending the wounded in Heilbronn during the twelve-day battle for the town. Their younger brother Rudolf had managed to leave his army unit at Leipheim on the Danube and make his way back thanks to civilian clothes given him by a farmer. Only Helmut remained unaccounted for. His parents wrote to the Soviet Red Cross, to Bishop Dibelius in Berlin and to Helmut’s former comrades, all to no avail. It was not until September 1976 that the Search Service of the German Red Cross finally confirmed that Helmut had been killed in November 1943.
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In Görmar in Thuringia, Hildegard Probst admitted on 1 July 1945 that ‘I don’t want to write any more because every day I ardently await your return. For every day soldiers come home.’ But she was not yet ready to close the diary she had started when her husband Fritz was reported missing in action after Stalingrad. Their son Karl-Heinz was also unaccounted for: he returned; his father did not.
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Families pinned photos to the noticeboards of railway stations in the hope that a returning comrade might bring them news of their loved ones. Clergymen published prayers for the missing in their parish newsletters and in September 1947 the Protestant Inner Mission dedicated a week of prayer to them. The services were to take Jeremiah, 29:14 as their first reading. Its last verse ran:

‘I will be found by you’, declares the Lord, ‘and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you’, declares the Lord. ‘And I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.’

Some clergymen gave permission for headstones to be laid over empty graves for men who had not returned, including those whose status was never clarified. While she awaited the return of her son in Hildesheim, Frau R. wrote to a Catholic priest on 2 September 1947 about her conversations with men who had come home. She had become convinced that conditions of captivity in the USSR were ‘much worse’ than in the ‘German concentration camps’. Whereas ‘innocent people who had only done their duty at the front’ had to suffer for a long time, ‘the people in the concentration camps were immediately anaesthetised in the gas chambers’, even though, she added, ‘it was terrible and not nice to treat people like that’.
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The majority of the 17.3 million Wehrmacht soldiers had served on the eastern front, but only 3,060,000 men entered Soviet captivity. Most managed to switch across the fronts and surrender to the Western powers in the final weeks of fighting: 3.1 million prisoners were taken by the Americans, 3,640,000 by the British and 940,000 by the French. In the United States and Britain, prisoners were deployed in agricultural labour; in France and the Soviet Union they were rebuilding the shattered infrastructure. Although their labour was in breach of the Geneva Convention, the victors continued to use these men for several years after the war ended. By the end of 1948, however, most prisoners of war had returned to Germany from Western and Soviet captivity.
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In December 1949, Dr August Töpperwien was released from his prisoner-of-war camp in Poland and returned to Solingen. His house had been bombed, but Margarete and their two children had survived the war. Töpperwien rejoined the staff at his old grammar school in the position, as a senior high-school teacher, a
Studienrat,
which he had occupied for the fourteen years before he was called up to the Wehrmacht.
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Returning prisoners of war soon became a source of medical and psychiatric concern, as German psychiatrists turned to the term ‘dystrophy’ to describe their plight. Malnutrition and the endless space of the Russian landscape brought on apathy, depression and a loss of all moral inhibitions. Apparently, even German prisoners’ ‘nature and facial expressions have become Russian’ and they ‘had lost much of their actual humanity’. Psychologists, who had lauded the superiority of German manly virtues over Soviet barbarism such a short time before, now feared that the sex instinct might have died among the German prisoners held in the east. It was one thing to diagnose Germany’s military casualties; quite another to listen to them. The medical files of former soldiers reveal the extreme anguish and guilt they continued to feel about the war, usually towards comrades who had been killed. According to his doctor, Helmut G. carried ‘a strong sense of guilt around with him’. Helmut’s first tour of duty had come right at the end of the war when in May 1945 he and his men were ordered to make their way back to the Elbe to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. The 19-year-old felt he had failed the mix of very young and late-middle-aged men under his command by only saving those who could keep up with the forced marches. He felt he had broken the first rule of ‘comradeship’.
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Rudolf B. sought out psychiatric help in 1949. He had signed on as a professional soldier and been wounded in the upper arm in early 1943. In his hospital bed he kept dreaming of the events which led up to his being wounded and shouted out military commands in his sleep. Some of his obsessive preoccupations surfaced in his fragmentary and rambling account to the psychiatrist who admitted him: ‘Involuntarily I have to think that it’s over. Am I imagining it all? Why all the sacrifices and losses? All for nothing. Betrayal, sabotage. I cannot . . .’ A moment later, Rudolf raised his voice in anger: ‘Is that so then. All for nothing, yes, yes. Am I mad or am I going mad? . . . (Have people changed?) People, people are worth nothing. And I tell you, Doctor, it was so, we did have the secret weapon.’ In the end, he switched from Goebbels’s slogans to the Ten Commandments, ‘yes, yes, you shall not kill’, before lapsing into silence. Everything he had believed in – the value of true sacrifice, the betrayal of the officers’ plot, comradeship and Germany’s possession of ‘secret weapons’, the guarantee of ‘final victory’ which justified every death and every escalation – remained vividly present four years after the end of the war. Unlike the rest of German society, Rudolf B. could not stop repeating the ideas and beliefs that had sustained him since 1939.
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