Exorcising Hitler (57 page)

Adenauer’s politics may have been Catholic and conservative, but he became an energetic, progressive leader for the city. Among other achievements, it was Adenauer who persuaded the Ford Motor Company to establish a major car plant in Cologne, rather than expanding their small facility in Berlin. And the dignitary privileged to open the first four-lane, intersection-free highway in Germany – the country’s first
Autobahn
– on 6 August 1932 was also Adenauer. The highway, the first exclusively for the use of motor vehicles (its official name was
Kraftwagenstrasse
, or automobile highway), ran almost dead straight for twenty kilometres from Cologne to Bonn. ‘This is how the road of the future will look,’ proclaimed the Cologne High Burgomaster, who had been closely involved in the conception of the new route.
¹
Six months later, Hitler took power – and the credit as ‘inventor’ of the
Autobahn
.

Deposed by the Hitler regime, Adenauer spent the next twelve years sporadically hiding from its violence or in its custody (for instance, after the June 1934 ‘Night of the Long Knives’ purge and the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler’s life). At the same time, however, he was confident enough to write long, rather flattering self-exculpatory letters to the Nazi authorities, by means of which he managed to retrieve his mayoral pension entitlement and gain compensation for his rather grand house in Cologne, which had been seized by the regime.

When the Americans occupied Cologne in March 1945, Adenauer was reappointed High Burgomaster of the city, only to fall foul of the British, into whose zone it was absorbed after the war ended. They sacked him that autumn, ostensibly for failing to master the food supply situation, and for some time banned him both from the city and from political activity.

A curious letter in British archives, dating from July 1945 and contained within a file dealing with Adenauer’s dismissal, throws a little light on the tense relationship between the High Burgomaster and the new rulers on the Rhine. It is from a General Ferguson, who had been British Military Governor of Cologne from December 1918 to July 1919, and contains some fascinating misinformation. Despite saying he ‘came to know him well’, Ferguson states that Adenauer was ‘a Prussian, not a Rhinelander by birth’ (untrue), that he had ‘served in the war and been severely wounded’ (untrue), and that he had ‘a metal lower jaw wonderfully camouflaged’ (also untrue).
*
The octogenarian retired general, who had spotted an interview with Adenauer in the
Scottish Daily Express
, warned his colleagues in Germany:

Adenauer was, and probably still is a man of great influence and undeniable ability. It may be true that he hates the Nazis, in fact if as I believe, he is of the Junker class, it probably is the case, but I am quite certain that unless he has changed very much in the last 25 years his hatred of Britain is far deeper than any other feeling. He is clever, cunning, a born intriguer and dangerous. I suggest that too much reliance should not be placed on him, and that in their dealings with him, our authorities should be on their guard.
²

That Adenauer didn’t like the British very much seems likely, and not entirely surprising. That he disliked both the Russians and the Prussians much more is probable. Noel Annan had a meeting with him when Adenauer, rehabilitated by the occupation authorities early in 1946, was Chairman of the post-war Christian Democratic Party in the British Zone. In an exchange of small talk, Annan, who was planning to return to his teaching post at Cambridge University in the near future, asked the venerable ex-Burgomaster what was the worst mistake the British had made in their relations with Germany. Adenauer answered that the mistake had been made 130 years before:

It was at the Congress of Vienna, when you so foolishly put Prussia on the Rhine as a safeguard against France and another Napoleon.
³

At the same meeting, Annan also gently queried Adenauer’s activities after the First World War (being an intelligence officer, had he seen General Ferguson’s somewhat excitable letter?). The future Chancellor denied being anti-British, though he admitted he found it difficult to regard Britain as a properly European state.

Prussia, at the time of this discussion, had just ceased to exist, on the insistence of the Allies (on 25 February 1947). It would have been missed by many, though not so many the further south and west the news travelled. In Bavaria, where the term ‘
Saupreuss’
(pig of a Prussian) has been a generally accepted insult for centuries, in Saxony, the Catholic Rhineland, and many parts of south-west Germany, the Iron Kingdom had been admired and respected, but never popular.

The only true Prussian to figure prominently at the time Adenauer became Chancellor was Kurt Schumacher. The Social Democrat leader and Adenauer’s greatest opponent had been born in West Prussia, a region lost by Germany to Poland in 1918. This fact made Schumacher no less a democrat, but perhaps more of a nationalist, and more liable, despite his fervent anti-communism, to look East as well as West in his search for his country’s advantage. Had the SPD not gained only 29.2 per cent of the votes against the CDU/CSU’s 31 per cent in the August 1949 elections, and had Schumacher consequently become Chancellor, the new West German state might have looked quite different. Under Adenauer, it turned its gaze west to France, and then even further westward. To America.

The French had finally been forced to give up their dreams of a permanently harmless Germany of small states and of an internationalised, exploitable Ruhr, when they realised that they could not carry anyone with them – not even the Russians, and certainly not most Germans in their own zone. In any case, like the British, by early 1947 the French were in deep financial trouble and suffering from a serious case of imperial overstretch. They needed more American money, on the tempting scale that was already being talked about and which would eventually begin to become available after Secretary Marshall’s great speech in June 1947.

The price Paris paid for American support was abandonment of its grand post-war plan for breaking up Germany into a multiplicity of states and thereby ensuring that it would never again be an economic or military threat. The British–American ‘Bizonia’, which had existed since January 1947, had now to become a British–American–French ‘Trizonia’. Although the expression ‘Trizonia’ was current from mid-1948 on, the French took their time making it all the way to the altar for this exercise in politico-economic troilism. France participated in the currency reform in June 1948 and helped the Anglo-Americans break the Soviets’ blockade of Berlin, and was engaged in increasingly close de facto economic and political collaboration with London and Washington in Germany throughout 1948 and into 1949. Nevertheless, the final, conclusive legal steps for the three-way merger were put into place only in the spring of 1949. The way was now clear for the three Western zones to become a West German – possibly, ultimately, an all-German – state. This was the very thing Paris had spent the first years of the occupation trying to avoid, and represented, in the circumstances of the time, a major sacrifice for the French political establishment.

Meanwhile, the German population managed to glean some fun from the uncertain national situation, which had its absurd side. One of the great pop music hits of 1948 was the popular Cologne singer-songwriter Karl Berbuer’s humorous ditty,
‘Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien’
(‘We Are the Natives of Trizonesia’). With its play on the name of Indonesia, the new South-east Asian nation that had just emerged from the wreckage of the Dutch East Indies, it became, for many, a sort of substitute national anthem for the not-yet-born new German state.

French convergence with the Anglo-American unified zone accelerated shortly after Stalin, frustrated by the clear progression of the Western zones towards self-reliance, and by the introduction of a new, hard currency in all three Western zones, gathered up his chips and put them all on the bet of getting the Western Allies out of the former German capital. In June 1948 he blockaded Berlin.

The eleven-month-long Berlin blockade, during which the Anglo-American air forces succeeded in carrying out an ‘air lift’ of supplies to the beleaguered Western-ruled sectors – but during which the black market skills of the Berliners also came into the equation – provided the basis for a significant act of defiance against Soviet aggrandisement. Apart from the more furtive business of Iran, this was the first instance since 1945 where Stalin had failed to get what he wanted.

The blockade also made heroes of the Berliners. Instead of being cast in the minds of their former enemies as the dark denizens of Hitler’s capital, his helpmeets in atrocity, Berliners became heroes of the free world. Noble, stoical, cheerful under pressure. Rather like the British in 1940. Cockneys with a German accent. Survivors. For the first time, ordinary post-war Germans – not just anti-Nazi martyrs – garnered an unreservedly positive press in Western Europe and America. Stalin stopped being the wartime ‘Uncle Joe’ and became the villain of the piece.

The currency reform of June 1948 took a little while to translate itself into jobs and security for ordinary people. But now that the money in circulation was suddenly worth something, items from coffee to candles, typewriters to textiles, appeared miraculously for sale. The cigarette economy did not quite die overnight, but the speed with which it became relatively insignificant was amazing. This showed the value of a sound currency, but also the size of the hidden ‘real’ market economy that, after years of concealment, could burst into plain sight once it was allowed to do so.

Germans in the Western zones rolled up their sleeves. They had already cleared the rubble from their streets and patched up their buildings, even when money was worth nothing and they were permanently hungry. Now they had the chance actually to get their country and their lives back. They even had a government of their own again: limited in its powers, subjected to an ultimate veto by military governors who had now turned into ‘High Commissioners’, but a government all the same.

So what did the population of former Trizonia, now the Federal Republic of Germany, feel when it came to confronting the past, almost five years after Zero Hour?

The answer was, in most cases, nothing at all. The country had decided to take the sleep cure.

On 20 September 1949, five days after his election as Chancellor of the new, democratic German state and hours after his first Cabinet had been sworn in, Konrad Adenauer gave his first official address to the Federal Parliament (
Bundestag
). It was a policy statement on behalf of a coalition that included the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the right-wing Christian Social Union (CSU) – the party that had given the American denazifiers so much trouble – the liberal, market-oriented Free Democrats (FDP) and the national-conservative German Party (DP).

Adenauer talked a lot about the law-making that lay ahead of the parliament, cleaning up the legal mess of Nazism, about the practical problems the country faced, and about the tasks of rebuilding bombed and shelled cities and reviving German industry and farming. What the new Chancellor did not do was indulge in breast-beating about German guilt. True, he talked about the mistreatment of the Jews, within the context of general mistreatment by the Nazis, and abhorred the fact that there were still anti-Semites in post-war Germany. But he did not believe in purges. In fact, he told the deputies:

Much unhappiness and much damage has been caused by denazification. Those truly guilty of the crimes committed during the national socialist time and in the war should be punished with all rigour. But for the rest, we should no longer have two classes of human beings in Germany: the politically flawless and the politically flawed. This distinction must disappear as quickly as possible.

He went on to plead even more clearly that the denazification process be all but nullified:

The government of the Federal Republic, in the belief that many have atoned for a guilt that was subjectively not heavy, is determined where it appears acceptable to put the past behind us.
⁴

To loud cries of approval from his own side of the chamber, Adenauer suggested that he would consider the possibility of petitioning the three Allied High Commissioners about an amnesty for those sentenced by their military courts in the immediate post-war period.

If this seems like complacency on Adenauer’s part, it is worth remembering that he was himself a social and economic conservative. Moreover, in his somewhat unsteady coalition, he was reliant on parties such as the CSU, which had not distinguished itself in the denazification process in Bavaria, the DP and the FDP. Finally, as Adenauer well knew, the five million or more expellees from the eastern provinces, who were still adjusting to life in alien environments hundreds of miles from their established roots, were already turning into a powerful political force. They were for the most part, and perhaps understandably, among those voters least inclined to support a Chancellor who apologised all the time for Germany’s past.