The Bitter Taste of Victory (62 page)

14  
‘decent life’, ‘the comity of nations’: For the Yalta Conference report, see
http://www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Allied%20Policies%203_ENG.pdf

15  
Draft German armistice, February 1944, NA FO 898/409.

16  
‘reorienting and re-educating’, ‘an act of political warfare’: The Committee to Re-educate the Axis Powers, ‘The Re-education of Germany’ (1944), cited in Jennifer Fay,
Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany
(University of Minnesota Press, 2008) p. 32.

‘recognise the power’: Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Strongest and the Most Enduring Weapons’,
Publisher’s Weekly,
1810, 16 May 1942.

‘greater influence’, ‘mold public’: OMGUS/ICD, ‘History of the Information Control Division’, no. 33, 8 May 1945–30 Jun 1946 (NARA). For more information about this campaign see John B. Hench,
Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II
(Cornell University Press, 2010). The belief in the influence of books in Germany was based chiefly on the fact that the ratio of books per person in prewar Germany was one of the highest in the world and in 1938 there were twice as many books published in Germany as in the US (see OMGUS, ‘Functional Report Information Control,’ no. 42, 20 Dec 1948, NARA).

17  
For Yalta conference report:
http://www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Allied%20Policies%203_ENG.pdf

18  
‘Fires were still burning’: Victor Klemperer, Diary, 22–24 Feb 1945, in
To The Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer
1942–1945 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,1999). Information on Dresden drawn from Richard Overy,
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945
(Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 394–96.

‘every fighter is’: cited in Bessel,
Germany 1945
, p. 18.

19  
MG, quoted in ‘The Week’s Work’ by Amy Porter,
Collier’s
, 3 Feb 1945.

20  
‘I have always’: James Gavin to MG, 16 Apr 1945, MG Archive.

‘and a blacker’, ‘first girl’: MG, ‘Night Life in the Sky’,
Collier’s
, 17 Mar 1945.

21  
LM, ‘Through the Alsace Campaign’,
Vogue
, April 1945, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

22  
LM, ‘Germany – the War that is Won’,
Vogue,
Jun 1945, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War.

23  
For Cologne see Overy,
The Bombing War
, pp. 474, 638.

For the gash like a wound, see Stig Dagerman,
German Autumn
, trans. by Robin Fulton MacPherson, (University of Minnesota Press, 2011, first published in Swedish in 1947), p. 20.

24  
GO, ‘As I Please’,
Tribune
, 12 Jan 1945.

25  
For the figures for the US zone see Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 249.

‘2 Million Displaced Persons’: Ben Shephard,
The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War
(Bodley Head, 2010), p. 62.

‘Orwell was distressed’: GO, ‘Uncertain Fate of Displaced Persons’,
Observer
, 10 Jun 1945.

26  
‘I want to go back’: GO to Dwight Macdonald, 4 Apr 1945, cited in Michael Shelden,
Orwell: The Authorised Biography
(William Heinemann, 1991), p. 420.

27  
GO, ‘Future of a Ruined Germany’,
Observer
, 8 Apr 1945.

28  
Figures from Bessel,
Germany 1945
, p. 104.

29  
‘A girl’s been’: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Prussian Nights’, trans. by Robert Conquest, cited in MacDonogh,
After the Reich
, p. 48.

30  
James Gavin to MG, 16 Apr 1945, MG Archive.

3:
Victory

1  
General Patton’s response at Ohrdruf: Hitchcock,
Liberation,
p. 295. On conditions at Buchenwald: Hitchcock,
Liberation
, p. 297.

‘I picked my way’: report by Richard Dimbleby for the BBC, cited in Juliet Gardiner,
Wartime: Britain 1939–1945
(London: Headline, 2005), p. 674.

2  
The existence of the concentration camps was reported almost immediately after Dachau’s founding in March 1933, however, the reports failed explicitly to state what was happening there or speculate upon why. As Tony Kuschner and Katharine Knox observe in
Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century
(Frank Cass, 1999): ‘The detail provided was rarely accompanied by editorial comment. Moreover, the absence, or, at best, ambiguity of analysis was accompanied by a tendency to open up the possibility, in the name of “objective” reporting, that the Nazis might be justified in claiming that anti-Jewish atrocities were exaggerated. [. . .] Nazi antisemitism in the 1930s was framed within a discourse of “atrocities” which might or might not be true,’ (pp. 150–51). In early April 1933, in an article entitled ‘Nazis Herd Enemies Behind Barbed Wire In Big Prison Camps’,
The New York Times
noted ‘wholesale arrests of the Nazis’ political opponents’ in numbers presumed to ‘run well into the thousands’ (8 Apr 1933). Though the phrase ‘barbed wire’ appeared four times, the
NYT
wrote of the camp at Heuberg – whose population was ‘mostly intellectuals, who chafe under the monotony of manual labor’ – that ‘[t]he food [. . .] is plentiful and good, although simple’ and ‘the first impression might be that of a large farming community’. That July,
The Times’s
special correspondent paid a visit to Dachau: home to ‘saboteurs and killjoys’, where ‘the barracks were as clean as a whistle’, ‘good work is rewarded by an additional allotment of bread’, and ‘camp life has settled into the organized routine of any penal institution[. . .]. It is somewhat boring but not much different from regular army life,’ (‘
Times
Writer Visits Reich Prison Camp’, 26 Jul 1933). It was a benign article with only a few discordant notes, namely, that ‘[u]nder a smiling sky, there was not a smile in the 2,000’. The Western Allies had also heard about the situation at Auschwitz from Polish resistance fighters from 1942, but initially tended not to take what they heard seriously. See David S. Wyman,
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941
–
1945
(New Press, 2007).

3  
The Nazis built concentration camps from 1933. A small number of these early camps served as a blueprint for the later system: Dachau, Oranienburg-Columbiahaus (Berlin), Esterwegen (Emsland), Sachsenburg (Thuringia), and Lichtenburg on the Elbe. Theodor Eicke (a man with a reputation for violence and questionable sanity) had jurisdiction over these camps, and was responsible for drawing up regulations which remained central to Nazi camp organisation. Hitler supported Eicke’s vision, and in June 1936 officially sanctioned the rule of the SS within camps. From 1936, as Germany’s priorities shifted towards rearmament, new camps were established. Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were completed in 1938. The punishment camp of Mauthausen, which provided labour for work in stone quarries, and the women’s camp at Ravensbrück were both completed in 1939. War itself served to vastly extend the camp system across occupied Europe, with twenty main camps and 165 sub-camps in existence by 1944. So too, war heralded a darker evolution: some labour camps, already lethal, took on the further function of ‘killing factories’. The camp at Natzweiler, for example, was established in 1940 for the purpose of mining granite deposits; it also served as the site of secret executions. In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau (also established in 1940), half the camp was dedicated to the provision of slave labour (including work in a gravel pit and the building of a factory), whilst the other half was turned over to killing. The first murders by Zyklon B (of Communist Soviet prisoners) were carried out in September 1941; 1942–43 saw the enlargement of the killing facilities at Auschwitz, and the large scale transportation of Jews to the camp; selection processes upon arrival determined who was to work, and who die. Other camps that functioned in part or wholly as extermination facilities were Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Maidanek, Sobibor, Riga and Maly-Trostenets. For a more detailed account of the development of the Nazi camp system, see Richard Overy,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia
(Penguin, 2004), pp. 599–608.

4  
This account is based upon reports in
Stars and Stripes
, 2 May 1945 and
The New York Times
, 30 Apr 1945. See Bessel,
Germany 1945
, p. 162 and Hitchcock,
Liberation
, pp. 303–05.

5  
‘mobbed, kissed’: Peter Furst, ‘Dachau Cheers its Liberation from Horror of Living Death’,
Stars and Stripes
, 2 May 1945.

6  
‘Nobody seemed’: LM, ‘Germany – the War that is Won’,
Vogue
, June 1945, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

7  
‘feet which ached’: LM to Audrey Withers, undated service message, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

8  
‘less fabulous’: LM to Audrey Withers, undated service message, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

9  
Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’ (‘
Todesfuge
’), trans. by Christopher Middleton, in
Modern German Poetry, 1910–1960,
ed. by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton (London: Mcgibbon and Lee, 1966), pp. 318
–
21.

10  
See Michael T. Booth and Duncan Spencer,
Paratrooper: the Life of General James M. McGavin
(Oxford: Casemate, 1994), p. 292.

11  
‘I did not know’: MG to Hortense Flexner, cited in Moorehead,
Martha Gellhorn
, p. 283.

‘It is as if’: cited in Moorehead,
Martha Gellhorn
, p. 284.

‘No expression’, ‘We were blind’: MG, ‘Dachau: Experimental Murder’,
Collier’s
, 23 Jun 1945.

12  
See Beevor,
Berlin
, pp. 398–400.

13  
See Bessel,
Germany 1945
, pp. 180–82. In Tübingen on 23 April the French demanded that the French medical officers hand over the surgical clinic together with all its medical instruments. All the patients, including the seriously ill and those who had just undergone operations, were removed.

14  
‘to make her’: cited in Bach,
Marlene Dietrich
, p. 303.

15  
‘The railway’: LM, ‘Germany – the War that is Won’,
Vogue
, Jun 1945, in Penrose,
Lee Miller’s War
.

16  
‘It is to’: GO, ‘Bavarian Peasants Ignore the War – Germans Know They are Beaten’,
Observer
, 22 Apr 1945.

‘veritable hotbed’: MG, ‘We were never Nazis!’,
Collier’s
, 26 May 1945. For a discussion of the lack of collective guilt explored from the perspective of the remaining and returning German Jews, see Grossmann,
Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
(Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 39–46.