The Many Faces of Defeat: The German People's Experience in 1945 PDF
Preview The Many Faces of Defeat: The German People's Experience in 1945
American University Studies Edward N. Peterson The Many Faces of Defeat The German People's Experience in 1945 Peter Lang The Many Faces of Defeat American University Studies Series IX History Vol. 88 PETER LANG New York • Bern • Frankfurt am Main • Paris Edward N. Peterson The Many Faces of Defeat The German People's Experience in 1945 PETER LANG New York • Bern • Frankfurt am Main • Paris Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP-Titelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek Peterson, Edward N. (Edward Norman) Peterson, Edward N.: The many faces of defeat : the German people's The many faces of defeat :the German people's experience in 1945/ Peterson, Edward N. experience in 1945 I Edward N. Peterson. - New p. em. - (American university studies. Series IX, York; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Paris: Lang, History ; vol. 88) Includes bibliographical references. 1990. I. World War, 1939-1945-Germany. 2. Germany (American University Studies: Ser. 9, economic conditions -1945- 3. Prisoners of war History; Vol. 88) Germany-History-20th century. I. Title. II. Series. ISBN 0-8204-1351-8 D757.P48 1990 940.53-dc20 90-5829 ISBN 0-8204-1351-8 CIP NE: American University Studies I 09 ISSN 0740-0462 Excerpts from We Chose to Stay by Lali Horstman, published by Houghton Mifflin Company is reprinted with permission of the publisher. Excerpts from Russia: 7he Post War Years by Alexander Werth, published by Robert Hale Limited is reprinted with permission of the publishers. Excerpts from Die Revolution entlti{3t ihre Kinder by Wolfgang Leonhard '':1 1955, 1981, 1987 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Koln is reprinted with permission of the publisher. Excerpts from Tage des Vberlebens by Margret Boveri, Berlin 1945, !iJ R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Miinchen 1968 reprinted with permission of the publisher. © Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 1990 All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, offset strictly prohibited. Printed by Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt, West Germany TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 THE DYING MADNESS 7 THE AMERICAN AMERICA AS VICTOR POWERFUL BUT DISTRACTED BY FEARS 13 PRISONERS IN AMERICA WELL FED, NOT WELL LED 19 PWs IN EUROPE DEATH , SLAVE-TRADED OR SENT HOME 2 7 THE ZONE ALLIES ARE THE TROUBLEMAKERS 3 9 THE BRITISH BRITAIN AS VICTOR POOR BUT WITH THE BEST CONSCIENCE 57 PRISONERS OF BRITAIN TREATMENT FAIR BUT BEWILDERING 6 7 THE ZONE GREAT EXPECTATIONS & DISAPPOINTMENT 73 THE FRENCH FRANCE LOSER BECOME POOR VICTOR 10 3 THE PRISONERS CAMP STARVATION TO FAMILY SERVANTS 111 THE ZONE POMP AND POVERTY IN ISOLATION 125 BERLIN: THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS 153 THE SOVIET/RUSSIAN THE USSR VICTOR IMPOVERISHED 17 5 PRISONERS GERMANS IN THE GULAG 193 KONIGSBERG - A CITY BURNED, MARCHED AND STARVED 207 THE SOVIET ZONE DESTRUCTION TO CHAOS TO REPRESSION 231 THE POLISH POLAND A VICTOR EXPLOITED AND EXPLOITING 2 7 3 POLISH PRISONERS - REVENGE ON THE HELPLESS 289 TERRITORIES OF "POLISH ADMINISTRATION" TERRIBLE FLIGHT, CAPTURE AND EXPULSION 295 SUMMATION DEFEAT AND VICTORY RECONSIDERED WHAT SAD EXPERIENCE TEACHES 339 BIBLIOGRAPHY 351 INDEX 365 INTRODUCTION Bertolt Brecht-Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht. Bright pictures have shown us time and again the faces of victory, the pa rades, the bands, sailors and soldiers grabbing and kissing joyous girls, "The Happy End." Victory was sweet. "We won and they lost!" Such scenes have demonstrated that war is good because its end is good. A war which brought in calculable suffering to most of the world therefore can be remembered by nos talgic Americans as "The Good War." Seeing only this joyous end could convince the viewer that everyone rejoiced and indeed many Germans were delighted at the end of Nazi tyranny and most were happy that the war had finally found an end: "Better a terrible end than a terror without end." That terrible end was also a beginning, with drastically new conditions for the Germans, some of which began to end first in 1989. Victory has been celebrated year after year with fanfares for graying veterans. Americans, otherwise prone to forgetfulness, remember with mixed feelings the one-time Russian ally, and since-then adversary. Americans also remember with ambivalence the West Germans, one-time enemy, and since then ally. Germans also have ambivalent feelings on V -E Day, which reminds them of the tragedies to millions, who fell purposelessly in the war, and the living, who fell from one kind of tyranny into another. The barriers, which began to come down in 1989, between East and West Germans and between East Germans and their freedom, began to go up in 1945. Any lament at that result of defeat is understandable, but conquest by the Red Army was only one aspect of the enormously varied experience of Germans in 1945, a year which brought them some of the most memorable events enjoyed or endured by any nation. Although understanding Europe would require a knowledge of this dramatic history, these events have remained largely unknown even to the informed public outside Ger-many, which gives them insufficient data to put the series of events beginning in 1989 into perspective. Mountains of material have been published and filmed, most of it sensational, about Germany before its defeat, as the world has seemed unable to see enough of the hideous Hitler; and his sadistic SS. Yet ignored have been most of the sensational happenings accompanying their defeat, which is rather odd because readers and viewers are usually attracted by stories of sex and violence. The victors were better able than the defeated to obscure any unpleasantness which they caused. This is unfortunate because in our age of mass propaganda most people are ignorant of the behavior of their armies, what "our boys" and "our friends" did, while constantly reminded of what the enemy did As a GI interpreter-interrogator in 1945-47, I was fascinated with the lives of ordinary Germans, who had experienced Nazi despotism and its defeat, and I 2 became further fascinated on discovering ever more aspects of the mosaic of "The Great German Drama of 1945," Even though "there," and observing the defeat of some Germans, I was largely ignorant of what was happening to our condemned enemy, even in PW camps that I could see. In 1946 interrogations at the border of the Russian zone gave me a good idea of what was not being reported in our censored media, because it would imply that an ally was doing wrong. At the Bebra border station, I photographed people, arriving in box-cars for delousing, but had little concept of what they had experienced as expellees. Evenings I heard on the radio endless lists of names of Germans being sought by their loved ones, but had no clear idea of how so many families had been torn asunder. A tremendous drama was evolving with tens of millions of actors but with its scenes so scattered and so hidden that the non-German world very slowly has come to have learned of an event here and there. With such popular ignorance, a sensation can be created by the accusation that hero Eisenhower was involved in the deaths of as many as a million German prisoners. I If we do not understand what it meant to be defeated, we can not fully under stand post-war Germany, nor the postwar Victors, nor really understand war "as an instrument of national policy." People need the perspective of all aspects of a war, defeat as well as victory. A balanced summation is important because an ignorance born of prejudice is dangerous. Holocausts happen because one group thinks that it need not concern itself with what happens to another group, which has been defined as enemy. A human sympathy of a victor for the defeated does not mean a lack of objectivity, any more than a sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust implies a lack of objectivity. War is not the simple solution to problems so often imagined. To think otherwise is a dangerous illusion. War may end some problems, but it creates, worsens or fails to solve others. Such reflections may blunt the proud nostalgia about World War IT, and the accompanying hope that "the free world" can solve problems of dictators, as it solved the problem of Hitler. What is attempted here is to put the events of defeat into perspective by us ing the best available sources to describe objectively the events in their great variety, the good and the bad. Even the comedic aspects of the tragedy have been included. Some pieces are terrible sagas of human degradation and misery, which remarkably did not dissuade some Christians of God's goodness. Some accounts are ennobling, showing a humor-filled or faith- filled human spirit, which had grown larger and wiser in defeat Others grew needy or greedy enough to drive the famous "Economic Miracle" of the 1950s. The Many Sources: The Credible Memoirs Writing histories about ordinary people has special problems, because unlike the rich and famous, they seldom leave a written record. To document this tremendous drama of what happened to many ordinary people one has to use many ordinary people as witnesses, thus creating in large part an anthology of the "short and simple annals of the poor." These "little people" had the real 3 experience of defeat, which are much more truthful than the remote-from-life speeches of statesmen and plans of bureaucrats. German memories are criticizable as being prejudiced, but so would be the many Allied memoirs, the vibrant substance of World War II classics. The task of the historian is to winnow the truthful grain from the truthless chaff. Conversations with countless survivors of 1945 have helped in that process. Interviews and documents for the books on Hitler and on the American Occupation added perspective.2 Fortunately, the intense quality of the expe riences in 1945 has elicited an outpouring of written memoirs. Some take the form of simple stories of simple people; some are book length, complete with a philosophical, and more often a religious, framework. The West German government, risking the charge of revanchism, recorded memoirs of this piece of its past, as it assembled the sworn statements of tens of thousands of Germans, involved in the expulsion from the east and prisoner of war camps.3 Particularly the latter compilations are noteworthy for their objectivity; the former PW s very often express praise of those who imprisoned them. In the interests of credibility, only the most truth-full memoirs were se lected. Those unforgiving and hate-full have been passed over as less reliable. German witnesses who demonstrated a historical perspective by seeing the good side of the victors and the bad side of the losers have been accepted as the more credible. Also included has been the German criticism of other Germans as, even in defeat, behaving worse than the victors. Those selected for inclusion showed an awareness of German misdeeds and sufficient contrition to say that in some ways Germans deserved what they got Such memoirs invariably begin with a criticism of Nazi policies, racism and war. Germans are more likely to criticize their past than any of the victors. A further credibility is from the basic consistency in the reports from a wide variety of people, from all walks of life, some from doctors, but many from farmers. Note- worthy is that often the best memoirs were written pastors or their wives. Backing up the stories included here are many more similar pub lished stories and the oral accounts of the many people whom I came to know as honorable. An account of a "gang rape" is made more credible by the accounts of many similar occurrences. To add to the credibility enough stories are included, risking the reaction of belaboring the obvious. In the repitition can also be observed subtle variations in behavior, a spectrum in intensity of the events and their duration. The many stories also show subtle variations, including the frequent mention of a kindness of some victors among the violence of others. They also generally agree that the troop behavior improved as the war receded in time and generals regained some control. There is also a variation in the German reaction, even about rape, from amusement at the oddity of the soldier who keeps his pipe in his mouth, to the cold realism of another woman to find a powerful "wolf," an officer as lover to protect her against a repitition of rape.
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