Interview with William E. Schaufele Jr.

401 Pages·2016·0.77 MB·English

Library of Congress
Interview with William E. Schaufele Jr.
The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project
AMBASSADOR WILLIAM E. SCHAUFELE, JR.
Interviewed by: Lillian Mullin
Initial interview date: November 19, 1994
Copyright 1998 ADST
Q: This is an interview with retired Ambassador William E. Schaufele, Jr. This interview is
taking place on November 19, 1994, on behalf of the Foreign Affairs Oral History Program.
I am Lillian Mullin. Ambassador Schaufele, would you first tell us something about your
background? That is, where you were born, where you came from, and where you went to
school.
SCHAUFELE: Well, I was born at home on December 7, 1923, in Lakewood, OH, a large
suburb on the West side of Cleveland, OH. It was then a town of about 70,000. When
I was about two years old, we moved about 500 yards up the same street and lived
there the rest of the time we were in Lakewood. I went to the local public schools: Grant
Elementary School, Emerson Junior High School, and Lakewood High School. My early
life was much affected by the Depression of the 1930's, not unlike the way it affected many
other families. My father, unfortunately, started a business in the fall of 1928. It failed in
1929. He was out of regular work for five years. However, we managed to survive that.
We “lost” our home but managed to continue living in it, on a rental basis. Eventually, we
repurchased it. My mother went back to work, part time, during this period. My father was
away during the summer because he returned to work on the Great Lakes on the iron ore
boats, as he had as a young man. We didn't see much of him during the summers.
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This all affected us, but I don't think that it was so much of a problem, since so many
people went through difficult times about then. There really wasn't any significant sign
of people “looking down on us” because we were having a difficult time. Perhaps in
an academic sense the school experience may have counted for more than it does
nowadays, though I'm not sure of that any more. Even though I was active — very active
— in high school, that was never an excuse for poor academic performance. So you
tended to do the work that you had to do.
I had, I think, an enjoyable childhood. My older sister was five years older than I. She
graduated from high school in 1936 and became a nurse's aid. She really wanted to
become a fully qualified nurse. However, she didn't realize her aspirations in that sense.
She lived in Lakewood, OH, or close by for the rest of her life. She married but had no
children. She died in 1994.
I was fortunate enough to be a good enough student. I hoped to get a scholarship, which
was the only way that I could go to college. At that time they didn't have all of the “checks”
which, I gather, they have now, when you apply for a scholarship. I got four scholarships
and chose to go to Yale University, which I entered in July, 1942, because of the “speeded
up” program which many colleges had during World War II. It became the normal thing to
go to college the year around.
I entered college in the pre-med program. This was a mistake, but I didn't realize it then. I
finished three semesters before I was called up to serve in the Army. I realized by the time
that the three semesters were over that serving in the Army gave me some time to figure
out what I might do instead of medicine.
When I went into the Army, I was selected for the Army Specialized Training Program
[ASTP], which was the possible fate of people who majored in the sciences, pre-med, or
engineering. I went through the ASTP screening process but realized that the program
was going to die, and I would have had to gain admittance to a medical school on the
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basis of my three semesters of undergraduate study at Yale. I didn't think that I was
entitled to enter medical school right away, and I was right on both counts.
Finally, after basic training and various starts and stops I was transferred to the 10th
Armored Division at Camp Gordon, GA. The division went overseas in September, 1944.
It was the first division to land, as a division, in Cherbourg, France, following the liberation
of Normandy. We fought across northern France in the fall of 1944. This was nothing very
spectacular because the big gains of the Third Army, of which we were a part, had kind of
slowed down after the liberation of Paris.
In many senses the highlight of my Army service was that we were caught in the “Battle
of the Bulge.” This happened when the division was “out of the line,” being re-equipped.
We were called up on December 16, 1944, I think. This was when we first heard about the
German counterattack through the Ardennes Forest. We took the road to Luxembourg.
There the division was split up, according to what was needed in the various parts of
the line. My Combat Command, which amounted to one-third of the division, was sent to
Bastogne Belgium, which I had never previously heard of. We went into Bastogne and
realized that we were being attacked on all sides. We managed to hold one road open
until the 101st Airborne Division came in by road. Thereafter, the German ring closed, and
we were encircled for — I'm guessing now — nine or 10 days. We were supplied from
the air, when the weather was good. We took in 54 tanks and came out with three. We
had heavy casualties, but morale was always surprisingly good, I thought. Nobody ever
gave up, even when the battalion commander, who was standing by my tank, was hit and
killed by shrapnel. That didn't have much effect on morale. We were finally relieved after
“volunteering” to stay in the line until the Germans were pushed back a certain distance.
The rest of the war was not uneventful, but its end was obviously in sight. It was just a
matter of time, and we didn't suffer very heavy casualties from then on. We ended the war
in Garmisch-Partenkirchen [Bavaria], which always amused me, after the fact, because
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we, the combat troops, took the town and then were supplanted by battalion, Combat
Command, Army Corps, and Army headquarters. We were moved about 70 miles away.
I stayed in the Army until January, 1946. The 10th Armored Division was deactivated, and
the unit I was transferred to was supposed to land in Japan. I must say that I probably
welcomed the news about the atomic bomb. I had no taste for a combat landing in Japan,
in the face of a very determined enemy. I was discharged in January, 1946, and returned
to Yale in March, 1946.
I had decided by then that what really interested me was the liberal arts and humanities. I
changed my course of studies to what was called a major in international relations at Yale,
which concentrated on history and political science. Yale had a very good faculty then
for what was a fairly rare major, although it's fairly common now. I went back to singing,
as I had done before. I reactivated a small singing group. Most of my extracurricular
activity was in music. The interesting and, I think, the most valuable part about getting
a scholarship to Yale at that time was that you were required to work. So I worked all
the time I was there. It was done on a decreasing scale. You worked more hours as a
freshman. I worked as a waiter and as an assistant in the Department of Economics.
Finally, I worked as an assistant to the university organist, who was also the Director of the
Chapel Choir and, eventually, the Dean of the Yale Music School. So even in that sense I
was still active in music.
I graduated with a B.A. degree in 1948 and decided to go to Graduate School. I still had
some time left under the G.I. Bill of Rights. I went to the Columbia School of International
Affairs, which was a new school at that time and which required two years of study for
a Master's Degree. I found the first year somewhat redundant, but the second year was
useful and interesting. I lived off campus. I did not center my life around the university. I
still centered my life on music. I sang with the Robert Shaw Collegiate Chorale, where I
met my wife.
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During that period also I had to decide what to do. I suppose that it was normal, with my
background in education, to take the Foreign Service examination, which I did in 1949. I
passed it, except for the language part. I had never studied a modern language. German
was the only foreign language that I had ever heard spoken. I enrolled in a semester
course in German and then passed the language test the second time around. At that time
we were warned that it would take 18 months to two years to be appointed to the Foreign
Service because of the backlog. I went looking for a job. In fact, I was looking for a job
before I got my Master's Degree.
As a result of the switch in responsibility for the occupation of Germany from the
Department of Defense to the Department of State, the State Department, in its wisdom,
called up, perhaps not all of us, but many of us who were waiting for appointment as
Foreign Service Officers. We were offered Foreign Service Staff appointments and were
sent to Germany, as “Kreis” Resident Officers. “Kreis” is the German word for county. I
think that there must have been 75 or 80 of us in three groups.
We didn't all become Kreis Resident Officers. Some of us became heads of American
libraries in the cities. Some of us were assigned to other jobs. I served as a resident officer
in a town called Pfaffenhofen, about 25 miles North of Munich, a small, agricultural town
with a population of 7500. Its claim to fame — then and now — was that it was the center
of the “Hallertau,” the best hops-growing area of the world. It was there that I learned a lot
about growing hops and making beer, which I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
Q: When you were given the opportunity to become a Kreis Resident Officer, how many
people were in the first group that you went over to Germany with?
SCHAUFELE: There were 28, I think.
Q: What kind of preparation did they give you in Washington before you went to Germany?
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SCHAUFELE: There were pretty general briefings in Washington about how the United
States Government was organized to exercise its responsibilities in its zone of occupation.
In Germany we went first to Frankfurt and were put up in a hotel outside the city. We
studied German every day but also got briefings from officials on the staff of the High
Commission in Germany [HICOG], which was then still located in Frankfurt. I would say
that we must have been there for almost six weeks. I don't remember exactly how long this
introduction to Germany lasted, but it was a matter of several weeks, at least. Pfaffenhofen
is in Bavaria. Eleven of us went to Bavaria. When we got to the Office of the Land (State)
Commissioner for Bavaria, we got a “nuts and bolts” briefing on how that office operated.
Q: That was in Munich?
SCHAUFELE: That was in Munich, yes.
Q: Do you remember who the HICOG Commissioner for Bavaria was?
SCHAUFELE: George Shuster was the Land Commissioner. He was a former President of
Notre Dame University. The briefing was very general. It wasn't anything in particular.
Q: Were you going to take over a position that had already been set up by the military?
Had there been a military officer there — a colonel or something like that?
SCHAUFELE: There had been military officers there. I had two “Kreise” — Pfaffenhofen
and Schrobenhausen, but the posts had been empty for some time. I suspect — and I
really should check on this some time — that the last person there before me had been
military, because the post had been empty long enough. It's conceivable that the military
had left and that they hadn't appointed a civilian to take over the job. A lot of resident
officers “civilianized.” That is, they were discharged from the Army and just stayed where
they were. They were military governors of “Kreise.” They took their discharges from the
Army and stayed on the job for the State Department. I would have to look at the Foreign
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Service lists of those days to determine just what the proportion was of former military
governors and new people.
Q: Just to add this to your review, there was another group. The military had done the
same thing that the State Department had done, a year or a year-and-a-half before. At the
time at various colleges and universities they were looking for graduates who wanted to go
to Germany to train and take over these jobs in the High Commission. A number of people
went to Germany about a year before, and they were trained in Berlin, as I recall. Then
they were sent out to several of these posts. I think that most of them were sent to posts
which had been “empty,” but probably not in Pfaffenhofen, since there was nobody there
when you got there.
SCHAUFELE: I wasn't aware of that. There was a group there before our group — about
six months before — but they were nearly all FSO eligibles, as we were. The group which
followed us was also composed mostly of FSO eligibles. I am not completely sure that
this was the case but feel that most of them were. I'm not sure how many in the last group
actually became resident officers. I have a feeling that an awful lot of them were “fed
into” the American Consulates that already existed in Germany. We knew that we were
going to have to close down because negotiations were going on toward reestablishing a
West German state. The Germans had adopted their constitution, which was the “trigger”
which transferred authority from the U.S. military to the State Department. However, the
final agreement between the three occupying powers in West Germany and the new
government in Germany was not reached until 1952, when West Germany regained its
sovereignty.
We closed the post in Pfaffenhofen earlier than that — at the end of 1951, I think. I was
sent to Augsburg. Since the status of these entities hadn't yet changed, the resident officer
in Augsburg now had responsibility for six “Kreise.” We didn't know how long the transition
to the sovereign West German state would take. So we agreed that I would live up the
road, North of Augsburg, where I could cover the three northern “Kreise” from my house,
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if necessary. I went into Augsburg most days, but some days I just stayed up there and
visited my “circuit.” Actually, that situation only lasted about six months, less than some
people expected.
So then I had another choice to make. I wanted to stay in Germany. My thesis in my
senior, undergraduate year and my Master's thesis had both been done on different
aspects of Germany. These were mostly historical.
Q: Before we go any further, I would like to put you back in Pfaffenhofen, your first post as
a “Kreis” officer. When you first got there, was the “Denazification Program” still going on,
and did they have you continue that?
SCHAUFELE: No. The “Denazification Program” was finished by the time I arrived in
Germany. The people who were not eligible for public office were identified. There had to
be a fair number of them in Pfaffenhofen because the town had been a good recruiting
center for the original Nazi Party in 1924. There were a lot of people who had what they
called, “The Golden Party Badges” in Pfaffenhofen. That is, they were in the first group of
members of the Nazi Party. Those men — they were all men, I think — were denied any
possibility of holding public office.
When the United States Army occupied Pfaffenhofen, they appointed a German Social
Democratic Party (SPD) member as the “Landrat,” or county supervisor. I can tell
you that there weren't many Socialists there, either before or after the war. But it was
finally decided to elect the “Landrat.” The CSU, or Christian Social Union, the Bavarian
counterpart of the Christian Democratic Union [CDU], nominated an elderly, minor noble
who happened to be a hop-farmer but who also happened to have a “clean” record during
the Nazi period. He was already 77 when we arrived. He served as elected “Landrat” until
1958, I think. He remarried in 1952.
However, when I reached Pfaffenhofen, the really “dominant” party in an ideological
sense was the Bayernpartei [Bavarian Party], which was the farthest Right of any party
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in Bavaria, at least. It had elected one of the county's two representatives in the state
legislature. The man elected just before I arrived was a young man my age who became,
in effect, my closest friend. The Bayernpartei disappeared, and he went into the CSU,
where he always should have been. However, he had joined the Bayernpartei for the sake
of his father, who was an old Bayernpartei man. His father was a hop-farmer. My friend
was a Ph.D. from the agriculture university. In effect, the Bayernpartei disappeared when
we were in Pfaffenhofen, and the CSU became the dominant party. A few of the Socialists
who were there — and there were a few — were local people. However, most of them
were refugees from East Germany. Not only were many of these refugees Socialists, but
a lot of them were Protestants. There was a Protestant church in Pfaffenhofen, but the
population was overwhelmingly Catholic. The Catholic Vicar of Pfaffenhofen was a very
important man, both religiously and politically. He was not a very nice man, as I recall. I
didn't see him that often.
Q: Regarding these refugees from East Germany, were there fairly large numbers of them
in Pfaffenhofen and in your “Kreise”? When did most of them move to West Germany?
SCHAUFELE: They weren't there in large numbers, because there weren't enough
facilities to absorb too many. I can't remember what the estimated East German population
was. I had two of them on my staff — one from Silesia and one from Prussia. Most of
them came to the West in 1947. There was also a small group of non-German refugees
from the East, including some interesting “Kalmuks” who had been refugees for centuries
— from one place or another. [Laughter] Actually, although there was tension among
the “Einheimsichen” and the local refugees, including Germans, there were no special
problems with them. There was just a kind of psychological attitude.
For instance, I happened to notice — and checked on it — that an East German refugee
mother was talking to a local teacher. The mother's son was with her. I noticed that the son
was talking quite a bit. I managed to get nearer to them and listened. While the mother did
not understand the Bavarian dialect, the son did. He was going to a local, Bavarian school
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and spoke both the dialect and standard German. He was translating from “standard”
German into “Bavarian” German for his mother and vice versa. That always sticks out.
The difference between people is always evident. Even while we were there — and we
were only there for a little over a year-and-a-half — the difference between dialects was
disappearing. I noticed that in the elections held just before we left for the City Council of
Pfaffenhofen one of the winners was a Socialist woman from East Germany. I thought that
the Bavarians never expected to be represented by a woman, let alone a Socialist. So you
could see these regional differences starting to break down at that point. Now Pfaffenhofen
has a population of 25,000. The world is not as it used to be.
Q: What kind of activities were you involved in as a Kreis officer, or “Herr Gouvenneur,” as
I think you were called by the local people?
SCHAUFELE: You know, there was no guide book to follow for this particular job. There
were aims which, one hoped, could be achieved, but they couldn't be achieved by us.
They had to be achieved by the Germans. We could only help in that sense.
Personally, my first goal, so to speak, was to visit every town and village in my two
“Kreise.” That involved 116 localities. I did that — I visited every one of them. Some of
them more than once, I would say. I wanted to get a sense of how the officials functioned
at the different levels, from the “Landkreis,” the county, to the city, and to the “Gemeinden,”
the communities or villages. For instance, I went to every meeting of the county council. I
didn't say anything, except to officials to whom I was introduced. However, I could follow
the politics. I would pick whom I would talk to on certain subjects. In effect, I advised them,
to a certain extent, on how things might be done, particularly as they didn't have any
experience.
Perhaps I should expand on that a little bit, because what is important, in the first place,
is to understand that the German county did not have structures or habits in it which
fitted in with American customs. For example, “volunteerism” was not highly developed in
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