After the Reich (97 page)

Everything was burned that winter. Germans might have regretted that they had been so quick to put their Nazi literature into the stove. A rumour went round that there were to be public burnings of Nazi books, but the truth was only that the Berlin public libraries threw out the now ideologically suspect material in September 1945, and the others naturally followed suit. Using Nazi paraphernalia as fuel had begun even before the Führer’s death. The anonymous Woman in Berlin was cooking on National Socialist literature on 27 April 1945. Later she burned the Movement’s sacred text to keep warm. ‘I suspect . . . Adolf ’s
Mein Kampf
will one day become a collector’s item.’
⁵⁵
Christabel Bielenberg, taking refuge in the Black Forest, wondered where the big portrait of the Führer had gone that had previously adorned the walls of the Burgomaster’s office: ‘In the stove,’ she was told.
⁵⁶

By 20 November 1946 the icy wind was causing alarm among Berliners, who were turning up their threadbare collars against the cold. On 6 December Ruth Andreas Friedrich and her friends were wondering if they could hold out. Ten days later it was minus twenty. The pipes were frozen. The women returned to fetching water from the pumps. On 21 December the ice had to be broken in the buckets to make morning coffee. In the American Sector the electricity was turned off for eight to ten hours a day, and the situation was worse in the British. As the lavatories were frozen over, the Berliners packed up their excrement and dumped it in the nearest ruin. Prices rocketed at Christmas. The Andreas Friedrichs were able to steal a tree in Teltow, but a goose at RM1,400 was more than a pair of shoes and much more than they had to spend. A pound of chocolate was RM500, a bar of soap RM40. The maximum monthly earnings were in the region of RM1,000.
⁵⁷

One of the sufferers that winter was the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, who was seriously ill as a result of his confinement in Ravensbrück. His wife was trying her best to treat an inflammation of his lungs by giving him access to fresh air, yet that meant freezing air. Suhrkamp literally risked life and limb every time he ventured to the lavatory. The cold had been so intense that it not only froze the water pipes, but also caused the pipe from the lavatory to explode, leaving the bathroom floor covered in frozen excrement. A hot-water pipe had been fed through the bathroom to afford some feeble warmth. This turned the sewage into a semi-liquid mass the colour of coffee ice-cream. The only way to rid the bathroom of this stinking mass was to scrub it with boiling water, but with the lack of combustible material and the terrible cold, it was not possible to get water that hot. It was weeks before a plumber could effect the necessary repairs; meanwhile the bathroom remained a serious health hazard.
⁵⁸

In the courthouse in Nuremberg the Seven survivors from the first IMT trial felt the cold like everyone else. Speer, who had been ruminating on how Air Marshal Harris had expressed himself when he spoke about the Germans - had he used words like ‘extinction’ or ‘annihilation’? - suddenly began to shiver. On 22 December he sat in his cell wrapped in a blanket, watching his breath. He was wearing his spare underwear around his feet. On Christmas Eve the men buried the hatchet, or at least declared a truce: Funk gave Dönitz a sausage and Schirach handed Speer a piece of bacon as neither had received any provisions from home. Neurath also shared his Christmas biscuits with Speer, while the American chaplain gave them all cigars, cigarettes and chocolate.
⁵⁹

That Christmas the grim news leaked out that a second frozen train had arrived from Poland. Of the refugees, thirty-five had died, stripped of their clothes at the border, 182 were seriously affected by frostbite, and twenty-five more required amputations. Among the victims were thirty children. The Berliners’ stomachs rumbled and they grumbled: under Hitler there had been potatoes. The political risk of letting them go hungry was becoming apparent.
⁶⁰
This might have prompted the reforms in the SBZ. Ration Card VI was scrapped and demontage halted. Seventy-four Berlin industries were returned to the people. On 7 January 1947 the barometer had plunged once again in Nuremberg, this time to minus eighteen Fahrenheit. Speer learned that in Berlin people were burning their last sticks of furniture. The prisoners’ shower had frozen.
⁶¹
The thermometer sank again on 31 January. The power in Berlin was cut for eight to ten hours a day again. The Berliners went out with their rucksacks to scour the Grunewald for kindling.
⁶²

The winter bit everywhere in Europe. Britain had to cut back on its commitment to the fight against communism, so Greece became an American sphere of influence. The Soviets made more mischief at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers of 16 January 1947. Stalin’s advice appears so contradictory it is small wonder that the Western Allies could not get the measure of him. He told his delegation that if reparations obstructed German renewal they should drop their demands,
⁶³
yet the Soviets backed the Yugoslav leader Joze Vilfan, who was demanding $150 million, 2,470 square miles of Carinthia (including the provincial capital Klagenfurt and part of the city of Villach), and 130 square kilometres of Styria (although to the Russians the Yugoslavs said they would be happy with sixty-three square kilometres on the Drau, and an important power station). These areas possessed large Slovenian populations. The Soviets added that they wanted a special statute to protect the Croats in Burgenland. Lord Pakenham dismissed the Yugoslav request, adding that it was not worth the paper it was written on.
⁶⁴
The game came to an end the following year when Stalin and Tito fell out at the Villa Bled.

Business took Ruth Friedrich to Hamburg that winter. She noted a rise in the popularity of the Nazis. People had been scrawling ‘88’ on walls. Someone explained that H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, and 88 stood for ‘HH’ or ‘Heil Hitler’. The British were to blame. They were not sufficiently tough on the Nazis.
⁶⁵
They had lodged many of the bombed-out citizens in Nissen huts, where they froze. The police were turning a blind eye to thefts of coal. They believed that protecting coal supplies was down to the conquerors. Ruth Friedrich was keen to compare prices with Berlin. A half-packet of soap powder cost five marks, a quarter pound of tea a hundred.
⁶⁶
On her return she missed her connection to the military train in Hanover, and had to spend twenty-four hours there before she could catch the next. At first she found a sort of buffet in a bunker where the people smelled of fish and onions. She had to pay a ten-mark deposit for a beaker to drink some coffee. Later she ran across the black market where American soap was changing hands for fifty marks a bar. The hand of the woman who offered it to her was so dirty that she wanted to tell her to use it herself. She made her way to an official doss-house where she was put into the women’s dormitory. There she met a woman who had been raped eight times trying to cross the ‘green border’. She was bleeding badly and stank.
⁶⁷

Another smell permeated Berlin that winter: the carbide lamp that reeked like garlic. Filth, and washing, was a huge problem. Like Hitler’s victims who languished in concentration camps, it became imperative to retain human dignity that winter. Zuckmayer spoke of the necessity of keeping fingernails clean and brushing teeth. Germans went to extraordinary lengths to polish their shoes, even though there was no bootblack. Despite the outside temperatures, some Germans - particularly refugees from the east - were virtually naked and concealed their shame behind ragged blankets. On their feet they wore bits of planking tied on with lengths of cloth.
⁶⁸

Vienna was no warmer. General Béthouart recalled the miserable figures stumbling past his Hütteldorf villa returning from the Vienna woods with faggots. The Viennese spoke of the ‘blue hour’ when gas was issued to the pipes to allow the citizens to cook their dinners on a low flame.
⁶⁹
Food was scarce and money no longer had any value. As in Germany, American cigarettes had the greatest worth. Josefine and Leopold Hawelka had managed to reopen their café in the Dorotheergasse. Leopold went off each day to the Vienna woods to find kindling to keep the stove alight and boil the kettle for the coffee. Once Josefine forgot she had hidden some cartons of cigarettes in the stove, and lit it. A great deal of money went up in flames.
⁷⁰

Bizonia

Clay was in favour of inter-zonal co-operation from the first. Once more it was the French who stood in the way. He had put his hope in the provision for central agencies that had been decreed at Potsdam, but the French didn’t like the idea of resurrecting the ‘Reich’. ‘If these agencies cannot be obtained and/or the boundaries of occupied Germany are to be changed, the present concept of Potsdam becomes meaningless,’ he wrote in the spring of 1946. There was no exchange of commodities between the zones. Clay thought it essential to have a common financial policy and freedom to travel from one to the other. He was so angry with the French by 16 June that he sued for permission to retire.
⁷¹

In Paris on 11 July 1946, Byrnes offered to merge the American Zone with anyone who was interested. The British took up the offer at the end of the month and all the problems were ironed out by 9 August. The joined zones would have a common standard of living, pooled resources and a common export policy, and would fix imports necessary to supplement indigenous resources.
⁷²
Heralded by General George Marshall’s Harvard speech that laid the keel of the famous ‘plan’ to relieve impoverished, war-torn Europe, Bizonia kicked off with an Economic Council in Frankfurt in June 1947. For the first time in fourteen years the national tricolour was raised. When the Americans noticed, they objected, and it had to be hauled down. In the course of the Council the Transitional Law was passed that legalised federal authority over the provincial
Länder
. It was a move towards the creation of a sovereign, federal state.

A Thaw in the Weather

In March 1947 milder weather set in, bringing fresh dangers. The hospitals had filled up with cases of broken bones: people who had slipped on the ice; and there was now a great stink to replace the great freeze.
⁷³
It was time for the Moscow Conference, which came hard on the heels of the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, which was designed to lure Europe away from communism by stick and carrot. Marshall, who had replaced Byrnes as secretary of state, would develop the policy into the Marshall Plan in his prize-giving speech at Harvard in June. General Mark Clark considered Moscow the most important planning meeting between the Allies since Potsdam. The idea of a peace treaty for Austria was brought up, and returned to the files. There were attempts to conclude peace with Germany as well, which had faltered at Paris and New York in December, and which made no progress in Moscow either.
⁷⁴
Already the London Conference discussions just prior to Moscow had been bogged down by Yugoslav demands. Moscow was a trying time for Clark, who had already made up his mind to go home. During the night he was woken by calls from females asking if he needed anything, so that he had to wrap his telephone in a towel and put it in a drawer. The rooms at the hotel were bugged, and for privacy the American delegates spoke to each other as they walked around the Kremlin walls.
⁷⁵

Stalin was comparatively unmoved by the Truman Doctrine and still hoped to effect German unity. The French predictably blackballed it. In April that year French policy changed a little, as the French communists left the government which they had haunted since the liberation. It was the Marshall Plan that seemed to threaten Soviet security, in that it extended offers of assistance to countries within Stalinist eastern Europe. Molotov was instructed to break off talks with the West in Paris on 30 June when it became clear that the Anglo-American plans were directly aimed at the Soviet Union. The Soviet satellites were ordered to ignore the siren offers of aid.
⁷⁶
The Soviet response was Cominform. It was intended to keep the Eastern bloc on the straight and narrow.

Bevin was more fearsome than Marshall in his belligerence towards the Soviet Union. There is a story about the London CFM in November 1947, when Bevin confronted the Russian foreign minister. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded to know. Molotov replied, ‘I want a unified Germany.’ Molotov came to the conclusion that it had been easier to work with the patrician Eden than with this man of the people. After the London meeting Soviet policy changed - the Russians were seeking confrontation. The Cold War had begun.
⁷⁷

The Carthaginian peace was aired for the last time in October 1947 when the British and Americans announced an unpopular scheme to dismantle all industries that had originally been constructed for the war effort. Adenauer protested, pointing out that industrial production was a third of pre-war levels. Lord Pakenham also had his doubts about the fairness of a policy which was reminiscent of the savage demontage in the Soviet east that had stripped industry down and bled the zone white.

Nacht und Nebel