After the Reich (94 page)

Stalin continued indisposed. Truman wrote to his mother and sister. He was not convinced that Stalin was ill. Perhaps the generalissimo genuinely missed Churchill, for it was certain that Attlee would make just as many concessions, if not more. Stalin did not please the American leader: ‘You never saw a more pig-headed people as the Russians. I hope I never have to hold another conference with them.’
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The end drew near. The eleventh and penultimate meeting took place on the 31st. The Ruhr was British, and Bevin fixed the Russian share at 10 to 15 per cent. That meant 15 per cent in commodities or 10 in reparations. Bevin also held out for the Eastern Neisse, but Byrnes was ready to concede and grant the Russians the plum they longed for. Truman added forlornly that it was only a temporary measure. Bevin was still insisting on the 1937 borders and hoping for a deal of some sort before he would concede. The Americans pulled the carpet out from under his feet. He wanted to know if the British could also give away parts of their zone to other countries.
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Truman added in what was no doubt a resigned tone: ‘we all agreed on the Polish question’. Stalin said, ‘Stettin is in Polish territory.’ Bevin added, ‘Yes, we should inform the French.’ And they decided to tell the French. The French had wanted it thus all along.
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The Anglo-Americans had lain prostrate while the Russians had walked all over them. Truman thought the Polish compromise was ‘the best we were able to get’.
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It begs a number of questions: had Stalin placed the border at Berlin and the Spree, would the Allies have consented? Berlin had a Slavic history too, as indeed did Magdeburg. Why not fix Poland’s border at the Elbe? For the Germans on the right bank of the Oder, however, Potsdam gave an ambiguous verdict, leaving the Oder-Neisse issue open until 1974 and later. The final decision was to be left until a peace treaty was agreed. This never happened. The Oder-Neisse Line therefore became a temporary frontier until a permanent one was fixed at a later conference. In the meantime the Poles resumed their expulsions from the areas allotted to them by the Soviets. The cities of Breslau and Stettin felt this decision acutely. The Anglo-Americans had not intended to leave them in Poland, either permanently or temporarily. They had planned to divide Breslau, leaving the bulk of the city in German hands, and the right-bank suburbs were to go to Poland. At Yalta Churchill had said, ‘It would be a great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.’
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Zhukov claimed that the Oder-Neisse Line had been settled at Yalta, and that Churchill was backtracking.
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Without Churchill’s at best limp resistance, Truman agreed to the Oder-Neisse Line including the Eastern Neisse and Breslau.
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At the next meeting Stalin was after booty again. He wanted a line drawn from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and the opportunity to appropriate any German property to the east of that marker. They discussed war criminals: the Russians wanted the Krupps indicted. Krupps had made possibly the greatest demands on the Nazi government for Russian slave labour and raw materials. The Russians complained that Rudolf Hess was living comfortably in England. Bevin replied that the British would send the Allies a bill for his upkeep.
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Attlee thought the Russians had Goebbels. Stalin was evasive. He wanted to have a list of war criminals who might be in the Soviet Union, but the Americans opposed this. Stalin asked for just three names, at which Attlee suggested Hitler: ‘Stalin replied that we do not have Hitler at our disposition but that he had no objection to naming him.’
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Stalin reverted to the western Polish border at the last meeting, which began at 10.40 p.m. on 1 August. Molotov had amended the line on the map. Stalin said that he wanted it fixed immediately west of Swinemünde, but that the precise location would be decided by the Poles and Russians. Bevin objected. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the British could not cut themselves out of this . . . The line must be recognised by the United Nations.’ The delegates continued to bicker about Swinemünde and how many other German villages to the west of the coastal town would fall to Poland. The session broke up at 3 a.m.
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The Potsdam Conference laid down the guidelines for the transfer of populations. An estimated 3.5 million Germans were to be brought out of the new Poland and settled in the British and Soviet Zones in an orderly and humane manner as enshrined in Article 13. A schedule was drawn up which foresaw the entire number crossing the frontier before August 1946.
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The Big Three agreed to create a number of ‘central agencies’ that would be law in all four zones. The French smelled a rat: central agencies smacked of the ‘Reich’. ‘There is thus a German state,’ complained de Gaulle; that was ‘inadmissible’.
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It was not only the French who were unhappy. Potsdam ended in recrimination. The path to the Cold War was open. From now on decisions would be taken at the regular meetings of the Allied foreign ministers. The Russians had the dropping of the US atom bombs on Japan to concentrate their minds. On 22 August Truman put an end to Lease-Lend while de Gaulle was on a visit to America. Franco-American relations were marked by mutual incomprehension. France, which had signed a treaty with Soviet Russia in December, was playing the communist card. It was easily done with the Communist Party the largest in the French Assembly.
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The Western Allies were shocked that they had made so many concessions to the Soviets. They had managed the conference badly. Soviet power was at its height, while the British were at the nadir of their fortunes. The death of Roosevelt in April had meant that the only delegation to have maintained the same
dramatis personae
at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam had been the Soviets, and they had known how to invoke past agreements.
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Although Truman had accepted Morgenthau’s resignation, it was only at Potsdam that the politician’s thinking really became a dead letter.
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One of the most influential critics of Potsdam was the diplomat George Kennan, who was stationed in Moscow and knew the Soviet leaders well. He viewed the whole conference with ‘unmitigated scepticism and despair’. ‘I cannot recall any political document the reading of which filled me with a greater sense of depression than the communiqué to which President Truman set his name at the conclusion of these confused and unreal discussions.’ Quadripartite control was, thought Kennan, ‘Unreal and unworkable’.
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He believed that the agreement was wrong, point by point. War crimes needed to be settled by immediate execution, and there was no common ground to be found with the Soviets. ‘In all fairness’ the granting of Königsberg to the Soviet Union had been agreed by Churchill and Roosevelt, ‘but the casualness and frivolity with which these decisions were made . . . the apparent indifference on the American side’ appalled Kennan. He also showed how Truman and Byrnes had been hoodwinked. The Russians required an ice-free port, and felt they deserved one after the sacrifices made by the Soviet people. Kennan pointed out that they already had three - Ventspils, Libau (Liepaja) and Baltisky - and Königsberg was forty-nine kilometres from the sea. The result was a disaster ‘without parallel’ in modern times.

Not only were the East Prussian population subjected to the most ghastly fate imaginable (and in many cases it was unimaginable), but - as Kennan pointed out - it resulted in the most terrible squandering of the resources of a rich agricultural province. Gone were 1.4 million head of cattle, 1.85 million pigs, four million tons of wheat, fifteen million tons of rye and 40 million tons of potatoes in a yearly average.
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Some Germans, however, were relieved to hear the outcome of the Potsdam Conference. For Ruth Friedrich it was as if a ‘stone had fallen from our hearts: so there is not to be a fresh war but they were going to rebuild and rule together’. The order was enshrined in Control Council Proclamation No. 1 of 5 June, which informed the German people that the four powers would jointly govern Germany.
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For the Potsdamer life returned to what they now called normality. Hanna Grisebach was free to scrump again, stealing potatoes from the crown prince’s garden. She was caught red handed by a Russian: ‘Zappzarapp kartoscha!’ Her daughter pacified the soldier with a little school-book Russian. He dismissed them: ‘Na Haus!’
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The shadows lengthened and the cold set in. By February it was fifteen degrees below, and there was no glass in their windows. They slept in their coats and animal skins. The shortage of potatoes had been joined by a dearth of coal and wood. It was Karl Jaspers who finally helped them out by recalling August Grisebach to his chair in the newly reopened university. His wife and children had to remain behind in Potsdam until repeated visits to OMGUS, the American HQ in Berlin-Dahlem, yielded the necessary papers.

19

The Great Freeze

Whenever I think of the winter of 1946 to 1947 in Germany, I always recall the glitter on the walls and in the interiors of houses, that I must have seen a hundred times in German homes and which resembled the sparkly sheen on the unpolished side of a granite block. It was the glitter of a wafer-thin layer of white frost, an icy blast of damp; the frozen moisture in the atmosphere created by men, sweat, coughing and breathing; men whose clothing was sometimes soaked though with snow, and who dried out slowly when they got home.

Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Göttingen 2004, 82

After Potsdam the stage was set for the Cold War, but it did not come for a while. One reason for this was that Stalin did not want a war, hot or cold; and it was the Western Allies, first Britain, and then America, who pushed him into it. He had no desire to reach the North Sea, the Rhine or the Atlantic. The Soviet Union was exhausted by war. If Stalin had considered resuming the march west, he knew that his country needed a good twenty years to recover first. When goaded to invade western Europe by one of his generals, he answered, ‘But who would feed all its people?’
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Similarly, he tried to restrain Tito’s wilder ambitions - although this did not come out at the time - when he appeared to back his territorial claims. Stalin’s system was about security, and his almost paranoiac sense that the Soviet Union was in danger. Poland was the lynchpin: he wanted a good, deep buffer. In Germany he saw something more akin to an ally. He sought to avoid division, although he allowed certain policies - such as agrarian reform - which could only have been intolerable to the West. The Cold War was the result of what Vojtech Mastny has called the ‘Western perception of a Soviet threat’.
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Stalin kept his options open.

There was friction at Potsdam, but the Allies went home in the belief that they were policing the globe together. They had instituted a regular conference of foreign ministers (CFM) to keep the world in check. The merry-go-round had taken the foreign ministers to London in September 1945. It was their first meeting since Postsdam. There was a predictable scrimmage over who was to receive what in the way of German resources. The French were still clamouring loudly for the Rhine and the Ruhr and ‘justice’, by which they meant coal, machinery, locomotives, consumer goods and men. They were pre-empted by the Soviets, who had awarded themselves 50 per cent of reparations, with 20 per cent each to Britain and America. France and the other claimants had to make do with 10. Bevin was still firm on the Ruhr. He was generally sympathetic to the French, but in this instance he realised that any internationalisation of the area would be tantamount to opening the door to the Russians.
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French behaviour upset Molotov and led to a chilling of relations between the two countries. On 7 October 1945
Pravda
ran an article saying that the French had less right to discuss eastern Europe than the Yugoslavs, Czechs or Poles. Moscow complained that the French were not prepared to deport Russian POWs, by which it almost certainly meant those Russian citizens who were hiding under French skirts because France had not been party to Yalta. The Russians responded by saying they would not return French POWs, which meant Alsatians who had been recruited into the German army after 1940.
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They would have to spend another winter in the Gulag.

The winter of 1945-6 was not abnormally cold, but the terrible lack of coal and food was felt acutely by the very large numbers of Germans without proper roofs over their heads. The ground was rock hard and the lakes froze. The Kommandatura authorised a
Holzaktion
in the Grunewald woods, allowing Berliners to cut down the venerable trees of the former royal hunting reserve. That winter 167 people committed suicide from despair, and the British authorities in Berlin decided to evacuate children aged between four and fourteen to their zone. This involved 50,000 children and 10,000 accompanying adults. Despite this precaution, 60,000 Berliners are believed to have died before March 1946. The following winter killed off an estimated 12,000 more when temperatures hovered around thirty degrees below.
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