The Bitter Taste of Victory (6 page)

General Omar Bradley now prepared to continue the American counter-offensive launched in January by forcing an entry into the Eifel across the German border and summoned Marlene Dietrich (currently stationed with his troops) to his trailer in the Belgian part of the forest. He told her that his army group would enter Germany the next day and that the unit she was travelling with would be one of the first in. He thought that she would be in danger of capture and wanted her to stay behind. However, Dietrich was determined to accompany him. ‘He seemed distant, thoroughly uninterested in how much I cared to go in with the first troops,’ she reported to her ex-husband Rudi Sieber, with whom she retained a loyal though occasionally exploitative friendship. She decided optimistically that it was because Bradley was unbearably lonely and that all generals must be as lonely as he was. ‘GIs go into the bushes with the local girls, but Generals can’t do such things.’ They were guarded too stringently to ‘kiss and tumble’ in the hay and were desperately in need of female company.
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Bradley was certainly not the most licentious of generals but he seems to have been grateful for Dietrich’s concern. One way or another, she convinced him to take her with him. She was assigned two bodyguards who accompanied her to Stolberg and then to Aachen. This was her first sight of the ruins of her former homeland and she was as shocked as Erika Mann had been four months earlier. The streets were still lined with corpses and hardly any rubble had been cleared.

Billeted in a house where the bombing of the front wall had left a bathtub suspended in mid-air, Dietrich’s troupe took over the local cinema where they performed in freezing conditions with no fuel. At one stage the German caretaker produced a thermos and poured Dietrich a cup of coffee. Other members of her troupe were worried that it might be poisoned. She insisted that it was safe and asked the caretaker why he was wasting his precious coffee on an American citizen. ‘Yes, yes, but The Blue Angel,’ he said, wistfully recalling her most famous German film (
Der blaue Engel
). ‘Ah! I can forget what you are, but The Blue Angel? Never!’ Aside from her duties entertaining the troops, Dietrich was often instructed to shout in German into the loudspeaker in the main square, telling people to go home and close their shutters
instead of congregating in the street where they obstructed the tanks. She was infested with lice, she had to sleep with a wet towel on her face to deter the rats, but she was enjoying playing the part of soldier and had no sympathy for the inhabitants of the ruins, though elsewhere in Germany her mother and elder sister Liesel were among them.
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By February 1945, the Allies were hopeful that no further German counterattacks would be attempted and that a German defeat was imminent. They now had to decide how best to govern Germany when it fell into their hands. On 4 February the US, British and Russian leaders Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met for a week’s conference in Yalta, partly to plan the defeat and reconstruction of Germany.

The conference was dominated by internal tensions. Churchill was distrustful of Stalin and concerned about the Soviet takeover of Poland; Roosevelt was more trusting of Stalin but was interested primarily in the formation of the United Nations Organisation, which was to be his legacy; Stalin was determined to increase the Soviet power base in Eastern Europe. Since the leaders had met at Teheran a year earlier, the Soviet military position had improved enormously. Now that the Red Army was a mere forty miles from Berlin, Stalin felt able to dictate terms. However, there was broad concurrence when it came to the question of Germany. The three men agreed that Germany and Berlin would be split into four occupation zones (with France to be given a share of the British and US portions of the country) and that Germany would pay reparations and would undergo a process of demilitarisation and denazification.
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The Allies were explicit that it was not their purpose to destroy the people of Germany, but that ‘only when Nazism and militarism have been extirpated, will there be hope for decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the comity of nations’.
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This was an odd conversation to have in the context of a continued war. But then the situation itself was odd; the Allies were continuing to destroy a country they already partially ruled. ‘I dislike making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy,’ Roosevelt had
complained in October 1944, but this was just what he was doing. The future peace and prosperity of the US as well as Britain, France and the Soviet Union seemed to depend on creating a peace-loving and obliging Germany and on forging a world in which co-operation was more enticing than war. On the ground in Germany, Hemingway, Gellhorn and Dietrich certainly did not concern themselves with the fate of the Germans; Erika Mann asked only that they should all publicly repent and declare their collective guilt. But at home in Britain and the US, politicians, civil servants and academics were engaging in more specific conversations about the future of Germany and Europe and the more moderate among them saw culture and cultural figures as potentially crucial to denazification.
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Despite the conciliatory tone of the report from the Yalta Conference, there were influential voices in both countries calling for the harshest treatment of Germany possible. In 1941 the chief diplomatic adviser to the British government, Robert Vansittart, had published a small book stating that there was no such thing as a ‘good German’: ‘the better a German is the
more
likely he is to join in war’. For Vansittart, the Second World War had been largely perpetrated by the Prussians who had also brought about the First World War; the Germans were a ‘race of hooligans’ and ‘a breed which from the dawn of history has been predatory and bellicose’. Vansittart’s was not a lone voice. In September 1943 Churchill informed the House of Commons that the Germans combined ‘in the most deadly manner’ the qualities of the warrior and the slave. They hated the spectacle of freedom in others and their militarism had to be ‘absolutely rooted out’ if Europe was to be spared a third ‘more frightful conflict’.
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By September 1944 the US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau had gained wide support in the British Cabinet for his ‘Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III’, asking for a decentralised, demilitarised and deindustrialised Germany. Essentially this plan, if implemented, would turn Germany into a giant farm. Roosevelt echoed Morgenthau’s views in a memorandum complaining that too many Anglo-Americans believed the German populace was not responsible for events in Germany: ‘That unfortunately is not based on fact.
The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilisation.’
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These hard-line views were contested at every stage by more moderate figures. In 1942 the campaigning writer and publisher Victor Gollancz challenged Vansittart for his blinkeredness. As far as Gollancz was concerned, the war was caused more by monopoly capitalism than by German militarism. ‘If we concentrate our minds on the special German responsibilities and the special German problem, we are failing to see the wood for the trees.’ Given that numerous British politicans and journalists had supported Hitler in the 1930s, they shared some responsibility for the war: ‘I confess that self-righteous indignation about the cowardice of the German people, in the situation in which they find themselves, makes me feel a little sick. It comes particularly ill from those who hobnobbed with Hitler while in the next street Germans were being tortured for their bravery and independence by Hitler’s Gestapo.’
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Many of the actual government policy papers produced in both Britain and the US fell between the views of Morgenthau and Gollancz. It was generally agreed that the Germans would need to undergo a thorough process of ‘denazification’ and that this would entail a fundamental shift in the German attitude. In January 1944 a joint paper on ‘German Re-Occupation’ produced by the British Political Warfare Executive and the BBC suggested that the central aim of the media in Germany after the war would be the ‘control and remoulding of the German mind’, arresting the ‘development of a purely decadent trend as followed the last war and led to the rise of the Nazi type’. Although this paper echoed Vansittart in seeing the German people as universally flawed, it also offered more chance for change or ‘remoulding’ than he generally allowed, and offered the Germans the possibility of eventually living in a civilised denazified society rather than in the kind of giant farm proposed by Morgenthau.
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Both the British and the US government actively sought views about the future of Germany from independent intellectuals. In April 1944 a conference investigating ‘Germany after the war’ was organised at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University by the Joint Committee on Post-war Planning. It was attended by a range of
academics, psychiatrists and psychologists hoping to understand the effects of German culture on German character and to explore possibilities for modifying the national psychological make-up. A resumé of the conference was provided in Britain by Henry Dicks, a psychiatrist who was advising British military intelligence on German morale. According to Dicks, the main assumption of the delegates was that enduring peace with Germany would require a change in the Germans themselves. Nazism was one ‘grotesque and naked’ expression of ideals that had long prevailed in Germany and the behaviour of the Germans resulted from their national character. The following February Dicks would advise that in order to bring about a change of this kind, rations in Germany should be kept well below those of the Allies.
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One of the organisers of the conference was the American psychiatrist Richard Brickner, who claimed that the Germans as a race were paranoid and that for peace to endure the United Nations needed to create infrastructures that would make non-paranoia emotionally attractive. Brickner was influenced by the work of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had argued in a 1942 book that the American ‘democratic character structure’ could be a model for German re-education and global citizenship. In Mead’s view, ‘democracy’ characterised the generic American mentality and was evident in everything from their selection of governmental candidates to their behaviour in street cars. Although the democratic assumption was to say that all societies were equal, Mead believed that some societies (such as Germany’s) were incompatible with living on a world scale. Americans – ‘freedom’s own children’ – were poised as anthropologists to enlighten the world.
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Mead’s work was influential for the cultural programmes developed in Washington in the lead up to the Occupation, which were intended to serve the aims articulated at Yalta, offering the Germans a ‘decent life’ and a place in ‘the comity of nations’ once they submitted to a process of denazification and demilitarisation. If the Allies were going to transform the whole German psyche, then literature, film and the media would prove one way to do it. Semantically, the word ‘culture’ refers both to works of art and to the broader way of life of a community.
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It was therefore well placed to be at the centre of an initiative that sought to combine
social anthropology with artistic propaganda. The Allied cultural programme elided these two meanings of culture so that it incorporated everything from questions of public manners to high art.
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In September 1943, the chief of the Allied Forces Information and Censorship Section General Robert McClure had proposed the establishment of a Publicity and Psychological Warfare section for the Anglo-American Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). The following spring, as SHAEF’s Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower put McClure in charge of this division. At this stage he was entrusted with the task of convincing the German soldiers that the Allies were certain to win the war. It was agreed that later he would be responsible for converting (or ‘re-educating’) German civilians towards peace and democracy.

Already there was some discussion of cultural media that could be enlisted for this purpose. In Britain, the Political Warfare Executive issued a draft German armistice in February 1944, stipulating that the victors would seize control of German press, publications, film, broadcasting and theatre and explaining that this was necessary both on negative and positive grounds. Negatively, the Allies would need to ‘prevent the dissemination’ of news, rumours or opinions likely to endanger the occupying forces or foster resentment of the Allies; positively, they needed to appropriate the media in order to influence German opinion in directions calculated to minimise resistance, convince the German people ‘that the terms imposed upon them are the just and inevitable consequence of their aggressive war’ and ‘eradicate Nazism and Militarism and encourage democratic initiative and ideas’.
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