Thinking Small (34 page)

Even in the mountains, Heinrich had trouble sleeping. He felt guilty for leaving his colleagues. He had been in charge of hundreds of men, and now he was alone with his girls, removed from the noise and relatively safe. The moment he was almost fully recovered from his sickness, he told Charlotte that he wanted to go back to work. Charlotte thought the risk too great; the bombs were everywhere now, and much of Germany was already occupied by the various Allied troops. Falling into the hands of the Soviets meant sure death, if one judged by the stories being heard, and the Soviets could be in Berlin. She pleaded with him to stay. He said he’d sleep on it one more night, but he felt he had a responsibility to his men he couldn’t avoid, even though he of course also felt a responsibility to his wife and his girls.

The next day was clear and crisp, and Charlotte and Heinrich decided to go for a walk along the ridge of the mountain and talk. As they left the house, Nordhoff grabbed a pair of bird-watching binoculars and hung them around his neck. Once they were out in the trees, they were startled by the sound of
gunfire. They found their way to a place where they had a view into the valley, and Heinrich took out the binoculars to gaze below before passing them to Charlotte so she could look. American troops had arrived, and German soldiers were putting up a futile fight. Heinrich and Charlotte watched the battle in silence, conflicted emotions pounding away in their chests.

Some hours later, American jeeps pulled up to the little house where they were staying. Because of all his studies and trips to the States, Heinrich spoke very good English, and the soldiers found that a relief. The troops eventually moved into the house and set up a post in its living room area, and Heinrich and his family found themselves living alongside American soldiers for a time. One of Nordhoff’s daughters had fallen ill by then—perhaps with the same pneumonia her father had recently recovered from—and an American soldier, who also happened to be the army doctor, took care of her, often sitting with her by her bed and telling her stories to raise her spirits and teaching her English too. Heinrich tried to stay out of the way, but the Americans liked him and invited him to come and sit with them and talk. They had a large map spread out on the table and they showed him what areas had been taken by the Allies. The Soviets were entering Berlin, he was told, and that meant nearby Brandenburg and the Opel factory were probably in their control. The question was settled: Nordhoff couldn’t go back. In fact, as he’d later discover, he had left the plant only days before the Soviets arrived there. They had confiscated its machinery and started disassembling the plant. Nearly all of his coworkers were arrested and deported to Russia, most of them never to be seen again. Heinrich had barely escaped the same fate.

In the Harz Mountains, however, Heinrich still didn’t know these details and he was concerned for his colleagues. He decided to travel to the main Opel plant, the one a good 200 miles outside of Berlin, in Rüsselsheim, an American-occupied area. He found a truck that could run on charcoal. He took his youngest daughter with him, while the eldest stayed back with Charlotte;
Heinrich managed to return for them in a few weeks, and once they were in Rüsselsheim he was able to rent a hotel room where they could all live.

For months after the end of the war, Nordhoff would put on his suit, comb his hair down, and go to the main Opel offices. But he felt out of place. There was no real position for him there, and a lack of work left him depressed. It seemed people were only humoring him, letting him hang around because they knew his own job was gone. His future looked more uncertain every day. According to the American policies of the time, his former position as head of the truck factory meant he’d collaborated with the Nazi government, and under their rules of denazification, it looked as if Nordhoff would not be allowed to work in any position of management again. In the autumn of 1945, Nordhoff’s employment eligibility at Opel was suspended indefinitely: The Americans needed time to deliberate his case. Nordhoff saw such measures as understandable, as necessary, and yet he held out hope: He’d never joined the NSDAP, all those who knew him knew he’d never liked or supported the Nazi Party. He imagined the Americans would eventually see this and allow him to continue his work with GM. It was an idealistic thought perhaps, but it kept him going.

After 1942, once General Motors had lost control of the Opel plant and declared it a tax loss, Alfred P. Sloan found (for the moment) he had no further desire to try to build an American presence in Germany; thus, once the war came to an end, he and the others at GM were very slow in resuming operations there. It was not until more than three years after the war, in November 1948, that GM made the decision to resume official control. In the interim, the Opel plant was in a strange state of flux, officially in the hands of the American military government, still unclaimed by its owners. Many former employees hoped that once GM took control, the job situation would be sorted out. But until then, their fate was in the hands of the American occupying government. Time passed at a grueling pace, and Nordhoff soon found himself in desperate need of work. And work did
come, just not in the way he’d hoped. In the winter of 1946, an unexpected message arrived from Hamburg, a port city about three hours northwest of Berlin. An old friend of his, Herr Praesent, had died, and the message asked if Heinrich could come to Hamburg; the man’s wife, Lisa, who was also a friend, needed someone to manage Dello & Co., the small Opel garage that her husband had left. Nordhoff took the job, packing a few bags, and moving to Hamburg.

Heinrich and his family had lost their home and possessions in the bombings of Berlin, and Berlin itself was little more than a pile of rubble now, but still, the city of Hamburg had suffered even more damage than any other city Nordhoff had seen yet. The Allies had considered Hamburg a “war center” of Nazi Germany and thus its industries and ports had been bombed extensively. The time Nordhoff spent there would be a straining time for his marriage, as Charlotte and the girls stayed in Rüsselsheim in the company of family and friends. And it would be straining on his confidence as well: By taking a garage management position, Heinrich found himself at the bottom of a ladder he’d spent most of his adult life trying to climb. It didn’t look like he would ever be in charge of an automotive factory again, at least not in the American sector as he wished. Many of his friends and colleagues wrote to the Americans and testified on Nordhoff’s behalf, but month after month passed and still Nordhoff did not receive any definitive word on his former job.

Heinrich’s situation was only too common at the time. No one knew what kind of rules, or what kind of government, would eventually rise in Germany. Opinions and plans changed by the hour, as the complication of so many occupying forces in one area began to take its toll. For decades, the very countries now joined together in occupation of Germany had been arguing about what kinds of policies were best when it came to international trade, and now they found themselves packed together in one place, in a situation that required an even more intimate
kind of exchange. The biggest problem they faced had existed long before the First World War: In an increasingly connected world, how could different countries put their products into an unrestricted international market, and buy products from foreign countries, without weakening themselves or feeling threatened? If America bought coal from England, did that mean the United States was the weaker country? If Russia traded with France, did that mean they were bowing to the capitalist principles they were so against?

Germany now became a heated microcosm of this question and conflict. In the agreements set out at the Potsdam Conference, the various zones were supposed to exchange Germany’s resources among themselves. Each zone contained its own precious raw materials. Exchange was necessary to keep everyone supplied. It soon became clear, however, that the Soviets were not going to comply. They didn’t keep their word or send the supplies as stipulated, and in retaliation, other zones stopped sending their supplies to the Soviets. And that was only the most flagrant of the disagreements; this kind of behavior meant Germany was desperate for just about every resource and raw material it had. It was part of the reason why the winter of 1946 and 1947 was so unforgettably painful and cold: The veins of the country were no longer operating; nothing could flow.

On May 26, 1946, the military governor General Clay sent a memo to the Pentagon trying to explain the German situation. The Allies, especially the French and the Russians, were not cooperating with American ideas, he wrote. Neither Russia nor France wanted to see a united Germany again, and this view directly opposed that of America and Britain. There was also a degree of desperation and a lack of resources in France and Britain that the Americans did not always understand, and this exacerbated the lack of cooperation. These disagreements, as Clay claims in his report, meant that communication had shut down among the four zones to the point that there was “almost no free exchange of commodities, persons and ideas.”
¹
In Clay’s view,
the only hope for the situation was if there was some way for all the countries to unite their zones economically. Knowing that France and Russia would probably reject the idea, Clay went on to suggest that at the very least, Britain and the United States should join forces. Having
one
united zone would be better than having none.

The authorities in Washington were listening, and by the following July, at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris, Clay was able to convince Secretary of State Byrnes, as well as two important members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg, that the British and the American zones must be fused: Economically, the more agricultural areas that were in American control would be joined with the industrial Ruhr areas of the British Zone. Alongside this change, there would be a change in America’s position on Germany: They would begin trying to help rebuild German industry, rather than trying to control it and take it apart. Together, they agreed that Byrnes would make a public statement about this on his visit to Stuttgart a few months later. Byrnes would eventually title his speech the “Restatement of Policy on Germany.”

This change in America’s posture toward Germany happened just in the nick of time. Conditions in much of Europe were deplorable. Germany was bad, but people in both France and Britain were struggling to find food and shelter too, and all this was happening while Britain and France were meant to be using their own resources to maintain their occupied zones in Germany. As Secretary Clark Clifford, who was counsel to President Truman in 1947, later said: “Here was a
situation that was not ever going to
²
get better by itself. There was no way for the Western countries to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There weren’t any boots, there weren’t any straps.” Or, in the words of Ambassador Hervé Alphand, who was the French foreign minister at the time, “We needed everything.
³
We needed
raw materials. We needed food. We needed machinery. And we needed credits and foreign currency to pay for it.”

Truman realized that in considering what was to be done for Europe, it was imperative that he listen to the advice of men who had seen the destruction firsthand: He was especially interested in talking with General George Marshall and General Lucius Clay, and both generals felt that it made little sense to keep German factories and workers from producing the items that the entire continent was desperate to get. In addition, by keeping Germany’s factories from working, they were keeping Germany from making money, meaning it would only become more dependent on the Allies. If Germany would be able to pay the Allies back all this money spent in the occupation, they needed their industry. On top of all this, there was the new threat rising from the Soviets, which was beginning to look a lot like the threat that had just been faced with Hitler. Winston Churchill, in his letters to President Truman, had already started to speak of the “iron curtain.”

In other words, as 1946 eased into 1947, Germany began to look less like the enemy and a lot more like a possible ally in a new war—the Cold War, as it was already being called. Having Germans think of Americans as “dictators of democracy”
⁴
(a term Hartrich heard being used at the time) did not bode well for such a war, nor did it make sense to continue with a policy of turning Germany into a “farming state.” Other influential Americans were coming to this conclusion too. When former U.S. president Herbert Hoover toured Germany in 1947 at the behest of Truman, he was horrified by what he saw: thousands of homeless children, millions of refugees, and a quickly deteriorating condition of life. There was no way to convert Germany to an agricultural state, Hoover said, “unless we exterminate or move twenty-five million people out of it.”
⁵

The event announcing America’s policy change toward Germany took place in Stuttgart on September 6, 1946, and it was
one that would have made PR man Edward Bernays proud. It was held just miles away from where Porsche had once worked, and all of Stuttgart was swarming with press from the Allied countries. Members of the United States Senate were there, as was General Clay. In many places, the event would make the cover of the papers. In his speech, Secretary of State Byrnes said that America was dedicated to staying in Germany for as long as it might take to help them recover. But he also said that it was time for the German people to begin to experience their own sense of freedom again, and to find ways of creating their own systems of government and industry. Byrnes stated that by merging the British and the American zones—making their industrial, political, and economic policies into one—the Allies were taking one step further toward unifying Germany itself. In the end, Byrnes said: “The American people want to help
⁶
the German people win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.” His speech was translated live and broadcast across German radio. It became known as the
Rede der Hoffourg
(speech of Hope) because it was the first time the German public was given the chance to believe they would indeed be allowed to control their own destinies again.