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In the House of the Hangman

University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

May 8, 1945

The surrender of the German military to Allied forces took place at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims in the early hours of May 7, 1945. On April 30, Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide, leaving Grand Admiral Dönitz as head of state; on May 1, the last remaining German forces in Italy capitulated; the following day General Weidling surrendered Berlin to Soviet general Chuikov, though Weidling stalled as long as possible to allow Martin Bormann and others to escape from Hitler's bunker; on May 3, Hamburg fell to the British. By the first week of May, the endgame was played out, as had been inevitable all spring.

Dönitz's immediate goal was to delay surrender as long as possible to enable German troops on the Eastern front to avoid capture by the Soviets. The German command believed that German soldiers and civilians could expect particularly brutal treatment by Stalin's forces. Indeed, when the German chief of staff, General Jodl, arrived at SHAEF to discuss surrender, he pleaded with the Western Allies to allow the German army more time, on the grounds that every troop saved fromSoviet captivity (or worse) would be available for the coming struggle against the Communists. When Allied commanders insisted they would tolerate no further delays, Jodl sent a signal to Dönitz's headquarters in Flensburg asking for permission to sign the surrender documents. Dönitz responded at 1:30 A.M., at which point Jodl and his delegation sat before representatives of the Allied powers (though Supreme Commander General Eisenhower, out of disdain for the enemy, refused to be in the room) and signed four copies of the surrender document, which set the end of the war for one minute after midnight British time on May 9. In a brief statement, Jodl expressed a sense of victimization by history that would be a hallmark of the postwar years: "With this signature the German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victor's hands. In this War, which has lasted more than five years, both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity."

Neither history nor commemoration, it turns out, was nearly as final as this account suggests. Truman and Churchill had agreed with Stalin not to announce the Reims event until a parallel signing could take place in Berlin. Furthermore, the Reims document was not exactly the same one the Soviets had agreed to; the Soviet delegate Major General Ivan Suslaparov overstepped his authority when he signed the Reims agreement (he disappeared into Soviet custody immediately thereafter) and the Soviets threatened to repudiate it. By mid-afternoon on May 7, a press leak caused spontaneous celebrations in European capitals and on the East Coast of the United States before the Berlin ceremony took place, leading to accusations by the Soviets that the Western Allies were trying to cut them out of the victory (in truth it was likely more a matter of bungling than intention). In order not to appear to be latecomers, the Soviet leadership suppressed news of the Reims signing until after the Berlin ceremony, which was indeed grand in comparison to the one at Reims. The Soviet Union did not announce victory to its people until early on May 9. Interpretation of the victory was thus already divided at its birth.

Additionally, despite the celebrations of May 8 in the West and May 9 in the East, an undertaking as massive as World War II does not simply end. Fighting had ceased in some places months earlier, yet continued in others for several weeks after. The Allies allowed Dönitz's successor government to operate formally until May 23, when the British-under pressure from the Soviets and the French-arrested him. It was not until June 5 that the Allies assumed "supreme authority" in Germany, and exactly what that meant legally was ambiguous at best. For most Germans, moreover, there was little difference between the misery before May 8 (or 9) and after. Indeed, for those "ethnic" Germans in Eastern territories, new horrors of revenge and expulsion were just beginning; particularly in Berlin many German women (and girls) suffered brutal and repeated rapes at the hands of Soviet "shock" troops during these weeks; and many soldiers were dying of injuries or languishing in captivity (thousands of those in Soviet custody would remain there for many years). For complex reasons, many Germans (particularly leaders) have been heavily invested in seeing May 8, 1945, as a decisive rupture in history, a so-called "zero hour." Most Germans, however, experienced it as merely one day in the middle of an era of suffering begun at Stalingrad in 1943 and not to be over until the currency reform of 1948 (or, for some, not until the final return of POWs and sovereignty in 1955).

Indeed, some sense of the extent of Germany's physical destitution (which does not minimize a sense of the destruction Germany wrought on its enemies) is essential for understanding the cultural and moral dilemmas of Germany's defeat. During the war, for instance, the Western Allies pursued an escalating strategy of carpet bombing that reached far beyond many definitions of military or industrial targeting. This air war left approximately six hundred thousand civilians dead, and wounded as many as nine hundred thousand more; more than 7 million Germans were left homeless at the end of the war (around 10 million people had been evacuated from the cities to avoid the bombings). "Population transfers" from eastern Europe and the eastern parts of the Reich numbered as many as 12 million, and at least a half million ethnic Germans died or were killed in the process. More than 5 million German soldiers were killed in the war, leaving more than a million widows; the gender disparity after the war-more than two "marriageable" women for every man-was among the most significant demographic consequences of the war, which is to say nothing of the large number of fatherless or entirely orphaned children. Just one consequence of the mass rapes of German women toward and after the end of the war and of the rampant prostitution and semiprostitution born of extreme necessity, moreover, was an astoundingly high venereal disease rate among German women (to say nothing of among Soviet and other soldiers).

The physical, moral, and social devastation symbolized by May 8, 1945, was thus unprecedented and decisive, though its meaning remains disputed to this day. Was Germany defeated or liberated on May 8, 1945? Does that date mark a caesura in German and world history, or was it merely an arbitrary moment in a long historical process, one characterized as much by continuity as by rupture? These two questions-defeat versus liberation, rupture versus continuity-are no matters of mere historiographical pondering: They posed basic dilemmas for all Germans contemplating the future of their collective national existence, to say nothing of their personal and material circumstances. At the root of these dilemmas was the issue of whether, and in what ways, all Germans were responsible for National Socialism and everything it had wrought: Were ordinary Germans perpetrators, bystanders, or victims? To what extent was National Socialism a product of German culture and to what extent was it a deviation, accident, or even foreign plague?

While these questions were ultimately matters for the Germans themselves, how the Allies posed and answered them affected the course of the war and the nature of the occupation, and thus the contexts in which Germans confronted them in the moment of their abjection. The purpose of this and the following two chapters is to investigate both the evolution of Allied framings and the ways in which these framings have entered into collective memory, German and otherwise.

Mythic Frameworks

The story of U.S. and British planning for the occupation of Germany is commonly told as a Manichean struggle between irresponsible Germanaphobes bent on vengeance and pragmatists who believed harsh measures were more likely to sow the seeds of a new war than to help avoid it. In this standard account, the U.S. treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. is the central figure. Labeled by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as the "Jewish Angel of Revenge" (jüdische Racheengel), Morgenthau stands as the emblem of misguided policy. A witless lackey, according to the standard narrative, Morgenthau allowed himself to be manipulated by Jewish groups and Communist sympathizers, and called for the wholesale destruction of Germany; because of failing health, President Franklin Roosevelt momentarily went along, though he never would have let things go so far had he lived until the end of the war. In some versions of this story, the ultimate occupation statute-JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, which stated that "Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation"-was a last residue of Morgenthau's vision, to be undermined by all means; in others, JCS 1067 was a refutation of Morgenthau because it lacked some of his putatively more draconian desires, such as flooding the mines and dismantling all industry in the Ruhr and Saar regions. Either way, the story of the occupation of Germany is told as one of overcoming the vengeful impulses for which "Morgenthau" stood and developing the supposedly more levelheaded policies that ultimately won the Cold War.

There are many reasons why this account has dominated. Perhaps the most generous explanation would be in terms of the compartmentalization of historiography: for analysts of postwar Germany, or even of U.S. occupation policy after 1945, the complex story of the vicissitudes of American policy planning is a matter of prehistory, easily reduced to a few standard sentences. For historians of the occupation and of West Germany, "Morgenthau" has been useful as an emblem for a vast array of opinions, proposals, discussions, and theories from before the end of the war to be contrasted with what eventually happened. For Germans themselves during the occupation and afterward, "Morgenthau" was evidence of the Allies' punitive stance, the source of German suffering. Not only German commentators in the postwar period, but many scholars since then have thus referred vaguely to Morgenthau and his plan to "dismember," "pastoralize," or "deindustrialize" Germany without further analysis; especially sophisticated accounts mention as well "Vansittartism," a label referring to the position articulated by Lord Robert Vansittart, a high-ranking British diplomat (commonly referred to as "the propagandist Robert Vansittart," as if that were a job description) who had opposed Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing the Nazis in the mid-1930s and who delivered important speeches during the war warning against a "soft peace." Rarely, however, are such mentions qualified by close analysis-or even reference to close analysis-of what exactly Morgenthau or Vansittart proposed, and why. "Pastoralization" and "Vansittartism" are thus convenient mythic emblems, often as much for historians as for political actors at the time.

Another explanation for the persistence of this standard account has to do with the retrospective legitimation of U.S. policy in the Cold War. Here "Morgenthau" stands for those who did not recognize the threat the Soviet Union posed, and for the bankruptcy of accommodation. Particularly important here is the fact that Morgenthau's chief advisor (and principle author of the plan), Harry Dexter White, was accused in 1948 by Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) of being a Soviet agent; by implication, the only ones who would benefit from the radical restructuring of the German economy for which Morgenthau called were the Soviets and their sympathizers. The implication is that following Morgenthau would have spelled disaster for the West: we won the Cold War, in other words, because we chose the other path. As Michael Beschloss puts it, "History now shows that by destroying a barrier to Soviet power and alienating the Germans from Britain and America, the plan could have also opened the way for the Soviet Union to dominate postwar Europe."

Such triumphal assessments of U.S. decisions at the end of World War II, of course, redeem the position of Morgenthau's opponents both leading up to and immediately following May 8, 1945. Though one could easily overlook them in the minimal standard references, however, there are other possible interpretations of Morgenthau's motivations and the potential effects of having rejected his plan (as I show in chapter 4). While "Morgenthau" has certainly long been iconic for those on the far Right, the myth is commonly assumed to be true across the spectrum; the only difference is in people's evaluations of how important it was that "Morgenthau" wanted to "pastoralize" Germany. The interesting point here is the myth's durability and its role in legitimating U.S. policy in the Cold War: it serves as the first chapter in the story of successful American Cold War strategy.

There is, however, a third and even more troubling explanation for the power and endurance of the "Morgenthau" myth, articulated most clearly in a recent book by the German historian Bernd Greiner, whose more critical take is already apparent in his title-The Morgenthau Legend: On the History of a Disputed Plan. "It is scurrilous," Greiner argues, "which names imprint on the collective memory and which not. Who recalls which politicians were in charge of the American War and State Departments as the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In contrast, Henry Morgenthau is still fresh in memory here, even for those who think Henry Stimson is the quarterback for the Washington Redskins or James F. Byrnes is Clint Eastwood's double." For illustrative purposes, Greiner reports on an informal 1992 survey of seventeen high school students in Hamburg asking what the students associated with the name Henry Morgenthau. Fourteen replied, "Turn Germany into a cropland and grain silo for the USA," seven mentioned "American Jew," and two said "Jew, therefore extreme and adhering to thoughts of revenge."

The ad hominem response to the Morgenthau plan, of course, was simultaneous with its formulation. As the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put it, "Hate and revenge of truly old-testament character are clear in these plans dreamed up by the American Jew Morgenthau. Industrialized Germany should be literally turned into a huge potato field." This much was to be expected from Goebbels, who sought to use the image of a vengeful Morgenthau to encourage fiercer German resistance and to underwrite Hitler's "scorched earth" policy. Perhaps more troubling is that such ad hominem dismissals of Morgenthau's motives were also potent in the U.S. administration. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, for instance, believed that Morgenthau was "so biased by his Semitic grievances that he really is a very dangerous advisor to the President." For Stimson, the connection between Morgenthau's Jewishness and his policy ideas was more than obvious: "Morgenthau is, not unnaturally, very bitter and ... it became very apparent that he would plunge out for a treatment of Germany which I feel sure would be unwise." In a note to himself, Stimson wrote that the "objective of punishment is prevention but not vengeance.... Reason why Jew is disqualified." Nevertheless, Stimson found Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to be right-thinking because, "[a]lthough a Jew like Morgenthau ...," Frankfurter discussed the matter "with perfect detachment and great helpfulness" (emphasis added). Stimson's final assessment of Morgenthau's plan was that it "is Semitism gone wild for vengeance." In a discussion with Roosevelt, of course, Stimson was sure to refer to his "personal friendship for Henry Morgenthau who had been so kind to me when I first came into the Cabinet."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from In the House of the Hangman by Jeffrey K. Olick Copyright © 2005 by University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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