Almost 40 million human beings from 21 different countries had
lost their lives in the war that had just ended in Europe. Half
of them were civilians. This was more than twice the total dead
in the war against Japan and more than twice the total of dead
on all fronts in World War I.
A. Casualties
The worst casualties had been incurred in Eastern Europe. Poland lost nearly 5.5 million of its people-more than one-sixth of the prewar population. The Soviet Union lost a horrendous 20 million people-more than a tenth of its population, including over 13 million civilians. Germany, too, paid a fearful price for Hitler's war. Six percent of the prewar population, totaling nearly 7 million, died as a consequence of the war:
- 3,250,000 military
- 3,640,000 civilians
- 2,000,000 post-hostilities expellees.
Of all Germans born in 1924, 25 percent were dead by the end
of the war, and 31 percent wounded-a casualty rate of more than
one in two. The worst casualty ratios were among ethnic groups,
who fell victim to the Nazi racial extermination program. Nearly
6 million Jews perished out of the estimated 10 million living
in Europe before the war-most of them from Poland and the Soviet
Union. The Gypsies of Eastern Europe, totaling some half million,
were virtually exterminated.
By comparison with this horrific tally of dead, the Western Allies
suffered relatively light casualties in proportion to their populations:
These figures ignore the no less horrendous totals of wounded-2
million in Germany alone-and the tens of millions of people uprooted
from their homes by the war and its aftermath: a displacement
of peoples on a scale without precedent in the history of the
human race. The sheer size of this disaster was due to a number
of causes:
The concept of total war brought with it the moral acceptance
of civilian casualties as a means of achieving a strategic military
objective, as in the area-bombing of German cities. The idea of
total war also involved the achievement of political goals, as
in the Germans' use of terror against subject populations.
B. Material damage
The material damage caused by the war was as cataclysmic as
the human slaughter. Air raids, artillery bombardment, street
battles and scorched-earth tactics had partly destroyed cities
as far apart as Coventry, Rotterdam, Lyons, Naples, Cracow, Leningrad
and Kiev. These tactics severely damaged capitals like London,
Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade. Warsaw and Berlin had been almost
obliterated. Countless smaller towns and villages had been razed
to the ground or turned into ghost towns. Wiener Neustadt in Austria
emerged from the air raids and the street-fighting with only 18
houses intact and its population reduced from 45,000 to 860. In
Russia 6 million houses had been destroyed, leaving 25 million
people homeless. In Düsseldorf 93 percent of the houses were
left uninhabitable.
The basic economic infrastructure of Europe had ceased to exist
and industrial production had fallen by two-thirds or more. In
Russia 3,000 oil wells and 1,000 coalpits had been destroyed and
nearly 70 million head of livestock were taken by the Germans.
Yugoslavia had lost two-thirds of its industrial resources, Poland
and France a half. In the whole of the continent only two ports,
Antwerp and Bordeaux, were working normally. The rest were blocked
with dynamited jetties and sunken ships. More than half the railway
stock of France and Germany had been destroyed. Half of Britain's
mercantile fleet had been sent to the bottom. The financial system
had been destroyed and international trade completely disrupted.
Some currencies collapsed completely and inflation got out of
hand in many countries: in Hungary one American dollar was worth
11 sextillion pengoes. Britain was bankrupted by the cost of the
war: her exports had declined by nearly 70 percent; her foreign
debts had increased by 600 percent, largely on account of her
borrowings from the USA. Only the United States came out of the
war a good deal better off than she went into it. Its war production
had grown to enormous size and its domestic economy had been maintained
at a high level; its exports alone had risen by 300 percent during
the course of the war.
For the second time in the century Germany's expansionist dreams
lay shattered in ruins. Once again, as in 1918, Germany was the
passive object of policy by her conquerors. This time, however,
the costs of the adventure were more gigantic and more terrifying
than ever before in its history. Furthermore, unlike 1918, there
was no political or revolutionary action this time against the
former rulers.
One of the most fateful aspects of the whole story of this post-war
period derives from the fact that the German people failed to
do anything themselves to throw off the yoke of the Nazi dictatorship.
Even under the hammering blows of Allied bombings and of Allied
armies pushing deeper and deeper into the country, there was not
a single instance of Germans rising up to overthrow even local
Nazi authority.
In Fascist Italy, at least in the north, the coming of Allied
soldiers was preceded by anti-fascist acts of liberation. Mussolini
was ousted and finally done away with by Italian hands. But Germany
experienced not a single revolutionary outbreak. The only signs
on the walls which greeted the advancing Allied armies were Nazi
slogans and calls for a fight to the death under the Führer.
Germany was freed from the shackles of totalitarianism by outsiders,
by foreign armies and by foreign sacrifices. Nationalist sentiment,
disciplined obedience, and dazed inertia and apathy combined to
stay the hands of Germans from doing even as much as the Italians
had done. Or was it also the fear of another "stab in the
back" legend that paralyzed the anti-Nazis? Once again, democracy
was initiated in Germany with the odds heavily pitted against
it. Once again democracy came as the gift of the former enemy
and the outside.
The condition of the country at the close of hostilities in May
1945 can be described by one word, chaos-chaos in its most literal
and classical sense. Unlike World War I, which ended with German
armies everywhere on enemy soil and which left German territory
unscathed, World War II bequeathed to Germany, as it did to the
rest of Europe, appalling physical destruction.
A. Allied bombers
Continuous battering by Allied bombers, despite Göring's
proud boast that his Luftwaffe would never permit Allied planes
to invade the German skies; violent house-to-house and street-to-street
fighting by last-ditch fanatical Nazi formations, and willful
destruction of bridges, public buildings, and roads by retreating
Nazis, all brought physical decimation to a very substantial part
of German territory. There was hardly an important city or town
that did not present a spectacle of mounds and mounds of rubble
and ruins, of half-destroyed buildings, shattered dwellings, battered
railroad stations and disorganized public utilities.
Among the larger cities only Heidelberg, Celle, and Flensberg
remained intact, with Lübeck and Bamberg not too badly hit.
But Kassel, Nürnberg, Cologne, Mannheim, Darmstadt, Essen,
Koblenz, and Würzburg seemed almost completely destroyed.
Berlin, Dresden, Breslau, Munich, Hamburg, Mainz, and Frankfurt
were almost as badly damaged. People lived huddled together in
the ruins of houses, in cellars and in bunkers, and trudged in
a dazed condition over what they once knew as streets but what
were now only heaps of rubble. The stench of dead bodies buried
underneath the rubble lingered on for many, many months.
The New York Herald Tribune correspondent, entering Berlin
on May 3, 1945, wrote:
"Nothing is left in Berlin. There are no homes, no shops, no transportation, no government buildings. Only a few walls are the heritage bequeathed by the Nazis to the people of Berlin. Berlin can now be regarded only as a geographical location heaped with mountainous mounds of debris."
The Russian Pravda correspondent told of the terrified and starving housewives of Berlin plundering the shops, and described Berlin as a city of desolation and shattered dreams, inhabited by a half mad, half starving population, clawing its frenzied way into battered food shops, slinking for shelter into dark cellars, and currying favor with their conquerors as they emerged from the catacombs, raising their clenched fists and shouting "Rote Front."
B. Destruction of infrastructure
The breakdown of transportation and communication, the collapse
of the banking system, and the resulting financial chaos added
to the physical destruction to produce anarchy, especially in
the urban centers. Even more important was the disintegration
of all government. Nazi government officials, aware of their potential
status as war criminals, committed suicide, fled, went into hiding,
or were captured by Allied troops. The complete governmental structure
of the country, not only at the top but even on the smallest municipal
and village levels, collapsed in its entirely. The elite leadership
which had held the country in its grip for the preceding decade
disappeared abruptly from the scene. Nor was there a new leadership
elite to take its place.
Anti-Nazi political figures had either been murdered, tortured,
or forced into emigration. Some emerged haggard and physically
debilitated from liberated concentration camps. A few came back
later from exile. But the situation immediately following the
cessation of hostilities found Germany completely devoid of any
class of political leaders ready to take over the administrative
machinery left vacant by the routed Nazis.
The German masses were psychologically unprepared for defeat and
the loss of the war. True, there were many who had managed to
listen to foreign broadcasts and who after Stalingrad had seen
the handwriting on the wall for Germany. There were also many
Germans, their numbers unknown, but their lot perhaps the most
tragic of all, who with their own kin in the German fighting forces,
yet with deep love of humanity, knelt in silent prayer, as Allied
bombers came over to destroy their homes and cities to plead for
Allied victory to destroy Nazism.
For most Germans, however, the glory of Hitler's triumphs was
too recent in memory to allow for the complete reversal to defeat.
The mass of people were mentally stunned by it all. Accustomed
as they were to look to orders, direction, and force from above,
they floundered about either in complete apathy or in a mad psychological
scramble, when their superiors were gone.
C. Displaced persons
Germany at the close of the war became the center of one of
the most gigantic population movements in modern history. To the
approximately 66,000,000 Germans, were added close to 8,000,000
nationals of other countries, liberated from concentration camps
and labor camps. These were later joined by thousands of infiltrees
who came trekking into Germany-Jews from Poland and the USSR,
and anti-Communists, taking advantage of disorganized conditions
to flee from the Soviet dictatorship.
After 1947 came refugees from other Soviet-dominated countries
who found Germany, by virtue of its geographical location and
because of the absence of civil government, the most convenient
place to find shelter. Added to these were some 8,000,000 soldiers
of the invading armies of the major powers and the various missions
of the smaller powers, making a grand total of over 15,000,000
non-Germans of varying degrees of political status and economic
situation who constituted a completely foreign body in the demographic
structure of the country.
To these must also be added close to 10,000,000 German refugees.
These were, in the first place, ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Poland, in order to cleanse
those countries from German minority problems. Secondly, there
were Germans who fled or were expelled from the former German
territories annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union in the east,
namely, Silesia and East Prussia.
The great majority of these German refugees filtered into Western
Germany. Homeless and without means, they came into the rubble-ridden,
half starved and congested West German cities and created a heavy
drain on the physical resources of the native population. The
native Germans at first regarded them, for the most part, as aliens,
and in general resented their coming and the political and cultural
baggage which they brought with them.
This huge amorphous population of post-war Germany was further
disorganized by the division of the country into four zones of
occupation. In the beginning each of the zones was sealed off
tightly from the others. The ruined economy, the disrupted transportation,
and the divided families all found further difficulties and complications
created by four zones, four occupying powers, four different political
and administrative setups, four different mentalities, and four
borders to cross.
D. Tension of occupation
The effects of the strain of war, the influence of twelve years
of nihilistic National Socialist rule, the shock of defeat, and
the tension of occupation combined to bring about a profound moral
disintegration and loss of all sense of values. The primary preoccupation
of most Germans was with the most elementary problems of food,
shelter, and work.
There came the days of a wildly flourishing black market, of a
tobacco-starved population that threw official currency to the
winds and improvised a wildly fluctuating cigarette economy, in
which goods and services were traded for cigarettes, often measured
not by the carton or even by the pack, but by the single cigarette.
There came the Stummel period when foreign soldiers and civilians
found themselves followed by Germans waiting to pick up discarded
cigarette butts. There followed the days of the Fräuleins,
who, whether the official military orders were for or against
fraternization, carried on with Allied soldiers in varying degrees
of intimacy in return for chocolate bars, nylon stockings, or
K rations, to supplement the family food rations.
All these manifestations, in part the concomitance of any military
occupation, now assumed vaster dimensions than ever before in
history. They continued on well into 1947, until by various actions
of the Allied powers, they gradually disappeared. Among these
Allied actions were the repatriation of displaced persons (DPs)
and emigration of others; economic reforms; relief administration;
and more rigid control of their own troops. The more shocking
and glaring aspects of this occupation period were thus gradually
eliminated. Deep scars of a moral and psychic nature remained.
These scars added more complexity to the already difficult problems
of the new German state.
West Germany built in many styles on its ruins. In the first
stage a roof was put over a ground floor, a theater, or a "hotel"
was made of an air-raid shelter. Many of the later structures
look like American apartment houses and office buildings. Others
are solid mixtures of concrete and glass or cinderblock-functional,
durable, and unimaginative. The cities are hybrid. The Hochhäuser-the
semi-skyscrapers-are likely to stand in no sensible relationship
to the architecture around them.
Where there were so many wide fields of blasted stone, new buildings
sprouted one at a time, or rose in apartment blocks that imposed
a sensible order on a small area. These structures often conflicted
sharply with the architecture of the old city. In almost all the
cities the rubble has left its marks. In West Berlin, for example,
much of the rubble has been moved and planted to form artificial
parks and hills.
A. Marshall Plan
It was a prosperous Germany that became sovereign in 1949. The United States had poured into it more than 4 billion dollars in aid, in the form of gifts and loans. The effects had been prodigious, equaled in no other European country, although Germany got a relatively small proportion of Marshall Plan aid. Europe received in all 20 billion dollars from the United States. In 1954 the figures per capita had amounted to
- $29 for Germany
- $33 for Italy
- $72 for France
- $77 for England
- $104 for Austria.
But in Germany the aid came at precisely the right time, when
the accumulated pressures for both physical and psychological
reconstruction had reached a bursting point. The recovery had
been intensified too by the continued immigration of the East
Germans, who came to the West with the drive and urgency of the
uprooted to find a new habitation, who had to make good or be
nothing again, for whom work was a boon in which they could lose
themselves, shutting out the past and keeping warm and nourished
with the present.
The prosperity continued as the rate of improvement leveled off,
but year after year there were more goods to consume and there
was money with which to buy them. One test of the new German democracy
would come if the boom collapsed or even receded sharply. The
number of able-bodied workers had not risen a third as much as
had those dependent on their efforts.
B. The surge of enterprise
The surge of enterprise which brought Germany its remarkable
improvement in the standard of living made the way of a liberal,
democratic economy an easy one for the working population to accept
and cherish. West Germany lost through strikes from 1949 to 1954
an average of only 103 man hours per thousand employed. This compared
with an average between 1952 and 1954 of 151 for the United Kingdom;
1,244 for France, and 1,515 for the United States. The German
worker clung to his job. It was the only thing that was sure to
make sense.
Such was the bounty of the recovery that from 1954 on some two
million Germans a year could travel to Italy. There were also
countless excursions of factory workers and other groups traveling
through Germany and neighboring countries on trips that had once
been possible only for the well-to-do. The Nazis started this
movement in their "Strength Through Joy" campaigns,
but it has continued in the republic on a much greater scale.
The philosophy of the free market was developed further by the
CDU coalition than by the dominant political parties of any other
country. Americans had long preached the crusade against monopoly
and extolled the virtues of free enterprise, but the German economic
leadership gave these economics a metaphysical form.
C. Franco-German cooperation
The efforts to reduce European tariffs, the Economic Payments
Union, the development of the idea of the Common Market in the
European Economic Community, the European Monetary Agreement,
the French-German agreements to pool their resources in the development
of European and African industry - these were the product of powerful
forces in Germany and France and throughout Western Europe. People
now recognized that new ways would have to be found, not only
to deal with the Communist threat outside their borders, but also
with the anarchy and disintegration within Europe itself.
These efforts were not confined to economic measures. Although
the French had feared Germany's industrial competition almost
as much as its rearmament, Schuman and others, who wanted German
forces as part of a European army, thought it best that German
industry should be revived in a European context. The settlement
of the Saar dispute was an example of this kind of thinking. It
came about as a result of profound political changes. Yet it was
also a decision of reasonable men, determined to resolve controversies
that were being blown up far beyond their worth to either country
alone. The Saar has gone back to Germany, but both France and
Germany share in the production of its industries. It has become
a place where the two countries meet and collaborate, instead
of a cause of endless friction.
More than ever before, the French and Germans attempted to develop
means and methods of mutual comprehension. From the beginning
of the occupation, the French, despite the arrogant airs of conquerors
who had been placed in power by the arms of others, had developed
the idea of meetings between small groups from the two countries.
Every Frenchman believed that Germany had much to learn from France,
and some thought both countries had a good deal to learn from
each other. In the first three years of the occupation, there
were gatherings of German and French youth.
While it was not until 1948, that the French permitted Germans
to travel to France, there were many later meetings of people
with special interests in common-teachers and religious groups,
for example. French families, like the Americans, took German
children into their homes for holidays and sent their children
to Germany. French theatrical companies appeared before enthusiastic
German audiences. As early as 1957 it was even possible to place
French troops under the command of a German general.
D. A new concept of Europe
A new concept of Europe could grow out of this French-German
collaboration. Every country has been made aware of what Western
Europe, despite its profound historic differences, holds in common.
Somewhat awkwardly expressed, a sign in German at the Strasbourg
bridge connecting France and Germany read in the mid-1950s:
"You are leaving Europe-You remain in Europe."
The economic order was changing, blurring old linguistic and ethnic
borders. Goods and people could move across them with greater
freedom. As the curtain closed in the East there was all the more
need for common markets, and the intricate measures of mutual
defense. It became possible to foresee an end to the mutual destruction,
the causes of which were part of the political thinking of other
centuries. The murder of an archduke, a Hohenzollern on a foreign
throne, one flag or another flying over a splinter of border territory,
would not be the grave threat to national security in the later
half of the 20th century.
A common danger made Europe aware of its common heritage. The
industries of war and peace made their alliances over the ancient
borders. General de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer met in the
summer of 1958 only to reaffirm the policies of collaboration.
There is no place under the long shadow of Russia, in the glare
of mid-century science and technology, for any other long-range
policy.
With one third of the population under twenty and 10 percent over
sixty-five, the German army threatened to be a serious drain on
the already limited supply of able-bodied and productive workers.
But the Germans were more concerned with the kind of army they
were going to have, than with its economic effects. The idea of
an army of civilians, like the Swiss or American, was attractive
to a population that would have preferred to be without armed
forces of any kind. Plans for placing the army under the control
of parliament and a civilian minister were approved unanimously
in the press. But there were some who thought the amenities were
going beyond nonmilitarist aims, when it was rumored, that the
young soldiers were to serve a nine-hour day, and need not salute
their officers, or wear uniforms when off duty.
The look of the old army would be missing: the militarist haircut
was abolished. The uniform was slate gray, non-inflammable, proof
against infrared rays, and resistant to radiation. Helmets resembled
those of the Americans. Jackboots were replaced by rubber-soled
shoes, such as the GI wore. Only the East Germans kept the helmet
and the cut of the uniform of the Reich. In the West the recruits
were to be served their meals by waitresses without having to
wait in the line for their food, as they did in the democratic
army of their American tutors.
E. A new German army
In the summer of 1955, the Bundestag passed the Law for the
German Army. It was a different type of German army which this
law created. The Minister of Defense, Theodor Blank, was an anti-Nazi
trade-union official, a former carpenter, who during the war had
been a lieutenant in an armored unit and had been captured by
the Russians. Officers, the law stated, were to be chosen without
regard to birth, religion, or social standing. An order was to
be disobeyed if it would lead to the commission of a crime, but
if the soldier obeyed without knowing his act was unlawful, he
was to be adjudged innocent.
The army was to uphold the "free democratic order as laid
down in the Basic Law." It was to be an army that would have
the confidence of the entire people, recognizing the value of
personal freedom, and unreservedly
devoted to the democratic system.