12 The German Times – 75 Years of Peace March 2020 PICTURE ALLIANCE/AKG-IMAGES

All quiet on the western front: A US soldier from the 12th Armored Division guards a group of Wehrmacht soldiers after their surrender. PICTURE ALLIANCE/ULLSTEIN BILD PICTURE ALLIANCE/ULLSTEIN

PICTURE ALLIANCE/GEORGIJ/SPUTNIK/DPA Singing a different tune: Horst-Wessel-Straße, named after a Nazi The ruins of the Reichstag: In 1985, German President Richard von Weizsäcker declared May 8, 1945, “a day of liberation.” propaganda martyr, becomes Francis Scott Key Street, named for the lyricist of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The skin of our teeth A war’s end and a fresh start: 75 years ago, the war launched in 1939 Europe by Hitler’s wanton, megalomaniacal and criminal ego came to a close. This began a difficult period for the Germans, but those on the western side of the country’s divide would soon gain some hope, and ultimately even a bit of brazen good fortune

1949, that West ’s Basic day – a total of 130,000, 25,000 of For tens of thousands of Ger- • 5 million German prisoners could be had: furs, jewelry, carpets, BY THEO SOMMER Law would come into force. whom died in Dresden alone. mans, the watchword month in of war who had the good fortune furniture, artwork, food, footwear The German Reich ended in One German city after another and month out was “shovel, clear to be allowed to return home over and clothing. Hot tickets were t 2:41 in the early morn- rubble and shame. The shame was was reduced to blood and fire. rubble and stack bricks.” Anyone the course of 1945 nylon stockings, chewing gum, ing of May 7, 1945, Chief of manifest – the war of aggression, The old Germany disappeared – at any time could be enlisted to • Several million Germans who soap and sweets. Athe German General Staff the cruel reign of the Swastika the land of half-timbered villages join in the monumental project of fled west as the Russians pro- In July 1945, Erika Mann , Commander in Chief in occupied lands, the gas cham- and towns, renaissance façades, clearing debris. Former members gressed from the east, plus, after recorded the following prices: of the German Navy Hans-Georg bers of the extermination camps. baroque buildings and Prussian of the Nazi party were forced to the beginning of the forced reset- butter – 1000 marks per pound; von Friedeburg and Luftwaffe The Nazi regime had brought the Classicism was no more. take on extra shifts. tlement, millions more Germans sugar – 175 marks; coffee – 500 General Wilhelm Oxenius fixed European continent under its This was the result of Hitler’s But the brunt of all the work brutally driven from their ancestral marks; tea – 600 marks. A loaf of their signatures to the German yoke, branded as sub-humans the fanatical perseverance and his will was borne by women. In 1945, homes in East Prussia, Silesia, Hun- bread cost 30 marks. The bulk of Instrument of Surrender in a conquered peoples in the east and to destroy, which culminated in his Germany had 7.5 million more gary and Czechoslovakia the goods sold on the black market little red school house in Reims, murdered six million Jews in its proclamation: “We may go down, women than men. The war had • And, finally, millions of bomb- originated from the supply stores the headquarters of US General death factories. but we will take the world with claimed the lives of 3.7 million ing raid evacuees who now strug- of the US and British Armies. Dwight D. Eisenhower. The cer- For the most part, it was Ger- us.” But it was also the result of the German men; 12 million had gled to get back home, including This was especially true of Amer- emony was then repeated the mans, willingly or otherwise, who Allied terror strategy of bombing been taken prisoner. It was now hundreds of thousands of youths ican cigarettes, which became next day, with greater fanfare, in wreaked the horrors. For almost campaigns. up to the women to hold families who had been moved out of cities the anchor currency of the black the mess hall of a former Weh- six years, the Germans had been Sure, Hitler began it all in together. They foraged the coun- as part of the Children’s Evacua- market. One carton – 10 packs of rmacht pioneer school in Berlin- perpetrators, now they became Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coven- tryside for food and goods. They tion Program. 20 cigarettes each – cost between Karlshorst, the headquarters of victims. try: “We will obliterate their cities!” trudged into the forest with axe They were all caught up in the 1,000 and 1,500 marks; so, five Soviet Marshal . By the end of the war, the Ger- But the conscious, premeditated, and saw to chop lumber. They maelstrom of chaos following or sometimes even 10 marks for Stalin had insisted on the second mans started suffering to no end merciless conversion of Germany’s gathered mushrooms and dried the end of the war in Germany, one butt was the going rate. The event to make it clear to all the – flight and expulsion, the bombing residential neighborhoods into apple rings. They queued at the where hardly one stone still rested Reichsmark, the currency in which world that the German Reich had war by the Royal Air Force and its piles of rubble by far surpassed any slaughterhouse for a boar’s head, on another, where all machines in workers and employees were paid, laid down their weapons on all US comrades, the mass raping of strategic necessity. Even Churchill a couple of horse chops or maybe all factories had come to a stop, played comparatively no role; its fronts. This time, it was Chief of civilians committed not only by expressed misgivings when he just a handful of soup bones. They where schools and universities use was more-or-less limited to the Armed Forces High Command the Red Army, prisoner-of-war and saw the aerial photographs of raised chickens and rabbits and were closed. Of the 60,000 kilo- purchasing officially rationed food who signed for the detention camps, humiliation and destroyed German cities. “Are we fashioned jackets for their children meters of German railroad, one- or clothing. Germans. When he departed, he deprivation, hunger and exposure animals?” he asked. “Are we taking using their fathers’ old uniforms. third was unnavigable; a half of all An illustrative example of how raised his marshal’s baton, but no was our lot. But there is no ques- this too far?” the black market functioned can one took notice of his farewell. The tion about it: German suffering The retribution turned out to be be found in a report to the US capitulation took effect at 12:01 was born directly from our own much more severe than people in Rubble was the only thing in Congress. There was a miner who a.m. on atrocities. the US imagined, cabled General earned 60 marks a week. But he May 9. The war was over. Germany was a landscape of Lucius Clay to the US Department abundance in the world of debris also owned a hen that laid an aver- had shot himself ruins. When the survivors looked of War after the cessation of hostil- age of five eggs a week. The miner in the head ten days earlier in the at what lay around them after the ities. “Our planes and artillery have that the war had left in its wake usually ate one of the eggs himself Führerbunker of the Reich Chan- unconditional surrender of the really carried the war directly to and exchanged the other 4 for 20 cellery in Berlin. For the three Wehrmacht, they saw massive the homes of the German people.” cigarettes on the black market. As weeks following his suicide, the destruction everywhere. Rubble Theodor Eschenburg described Often enough, they forwent their rolling stock was now scrap metal. each cigarette fetched a price of German Reich was presided over was the only thing in abundance the resulting circumstances as own rations of bread to feed their Furthermore, the system of food 8 marks, the 4 eggs sold for the by a government in Flensburg in the world of debris that the follows: “The number of home- children. And these Trümmer- provisioning had more-or-less equivalent of 160 marks. Thus, on a under President Karl Dönitz, war had left in its wake: around less people was in the millions. In frauen, the rubble ladies as it were, completely broken down. weekly basis, the hen earned almost the Supreme Commander of the 400,000,000 cubic meters of it. many cases, entire families lived in have become legendary. They The only option left was to 3 times more than her owner. Navy. On May 23, all members of From the beginning of January a single room. Cellars and attics, cleared the lots and streets in every “organize” things. Countless army According to estimates at the the government were arrested by until the end of April, 1945, Brit- barracks and Quonset huts, ruins city and town across Germany. supply depots and food storage time, a half of Germany’s commer- the Western Allies. At the Mürwik ish Bomber Command alone con- and warehouses – anything was Moreover, conditions in defeated facilities were plundered in the cial revenue derived from barter- naval academy that sunny morn- ducted 79,000 sorties. In the last used as a shelter,” wrote the politi- and occupied Germany were pure bedlam immediately following the ing and the black market, and was ing, the Imperial War Flag of Ger- four months of the war, Bomber cal scientist from Tübingen. “In the chaos. Millions of people were war. After that, people just made thus beyond the reaches of state many was lowered for the last time, Command and the US Air Force inner cities where narrow streets on the move as part of the most do as best they could. Parks were regulation. It goes without saying never to be raised again. There together dropped 370,000 tons and alleyways had been the norm, comprehensive mass migration of transformed into vegetable gar- that the black market was fertile was no more Third Reich. To put of high-explosive and incendi- new paths formed over the moun- modern times: dens; a bartering economy took ground for organized crime. For it more bluntly, there was no more ary bombs over the Reich, which tains of rubble. Forsythias, lilacs • 300,000 survivors of the con- hold; people begged at farms; many normally law-abiding citi- German Reich. Supreme authority amounted to one-quarter of the and jasmine grew freely and furi- centration camps others resorted to “Fringsen” – zens, however, the black market now lay with the Allied victors. total dropped on Germany during ously in the gardens of houses that • 8.5 million forced laborers, the stealing in small quantities but with was a savior, as it allowed people At that time, no one was capable the entire war. This final four- no longer stood." former work slaves of the Third the blessing of Cologne’s Cardinal to meet needs that they could not of imagining that just a few years month phase of the war accounted According to official statistics, Reich, who were now displaced Josef Frings, who, in his New Year’s otherwise fulfill. later, a new German state would for one-quarter of the half-million the British occupation zone had persons awaiting return to their sermon, granted his flock prophy- Decades after the end of the war, appear on the scene in the form of people who were killed by Allied an average of 6.2 square meters home countries, were left to pro- lactic absolution for taking what Germans were at odds about how the Federal Republic of Germany; air attacks on German cities over of living space per person. Living vide for themselves any way they they need in order to live, particu- to classify what had happened in indeed, by accident of fate, it was the course of the war. During this quarters in the American, Russian could, which often meant plun- larly coal in times of emergency. 1945: Was it a collapse or libera- exactly four years after the capit- period, the bombing war claimed and French zones were only insig- dering the surrounding region and Bartering was a slippery slope to tion? To be sure, this question was ulation in Flensburg, on May 23, and average of 1,000 casualties a nificantly more spacious. raiding local farms the black market, where anything seldom asked during that fateful March 2020 The German Times – 75 Years of Peace 13 PICTURE ALLIANCE/ULLSTEIN BILD PICTURE ALLIANCE/ULLSTEIN

Rubble, rubble, toil and trouble: Trümmerfrauen at work cleaning up after the men

PICTURE ALLIANCE/EVERETT COLLECTION

PICTURE ALLIANCE/UNITED ARCHIVES

spring. But the answer is: both. It adox of history for all of us. But the American zone, 742,000 of radioactive material was forbidden German newspapers. The schools opposing state systems. Pariahs was a collapse as well as a liberation. why? Because we were at once which had been processed. The altogether, along with commercial and universities opened the gates became partners. The collapse was patently obvious. redeemed and destroyed.” results were that 19 percent would shipping and aviation. anew. And, most astonishing of Third, we had tremendous luck Many had survived by the skin of Redeemed and destroyed: be fired; 7 percent were recom- When the beaten Germans all, culture began to flourish again. with respect to our economy. their teeth. Countless Germans had With most Germans, the feeling mended to be fired; 25 percent looked back six months after Theaters that Goebbels had closed Instead of the planned $80 billion lost their homes, others their home- of having been destroyed out- would be fired at the sole discre- capitulation, they saw nothing in September 1944 raised their cur- in reparations, the Allies ultimately land. The cities lay in rubble. Indus- weighed the relief of redemption. tion of their employer; and in 49 but gloom and doom. Add to this tains and found audiences eager exacted only $12 billion. But to the try, commerce and manufacturing In 1985, only after 40 years had percent of cases, there was no mix the beginnings of the division for artistic and cultural experi- extent that they succeeded in their all but ceased to exist. Government passed could another president of evidence of any National Socialist of Germany into East and West. ences. Gotthold Lessing’s Nathan process of de-industrialization, stopped functioning; schools and the Federal Republic, Richard von activity. One-half of one percent While the East was not yet barri- the Wise was the favorite. At long by means of their dismantling of universities remained closed for an Weizsäcker, count on widespread of those examined were found to caded with barbed wire and walls, last, concert halls and churches per- German factories right up to 1950, extended period of time. understanding when he said: have verifiably aided the resistance. officially permitted border cross- formed works by those compos- in many cases this proved to be a To most Germans, occupation by The flaws of this process, the ings were few and far between. ers who had been outlawed by the blessing in disguise. The outdated the Allied victors at first felt more May 8 was a day of liberation. It harassment it unleashed and, Those wanting to get from East to Nazis, including Felix Mendelssohn facilities went to the victors, but the like oppression than liberation. liberated all of us from the inhu- ultimately, the solidarity it engen- West or West to East had to hoof it Bartholdy, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Germans, after the currency reform, Sure, people were liberated from manity and tyranny of the National dered induced the US military across the “green border” through Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky. were able to succeed in modern- the fear of getting killed in the next Socialist regime. Nobody will, because government to soften its approach forests and fields avoiding Soviet And museums exhibited “liber- izing their industrial sector to state- night of bombing; from the fear of of that liberation, forget the grave as early as in January 1946. The control points and patrols. Many ated art” that for 12 years had been of-art standards. Germany’s “eco- losing a husband or a son on the suffering that only started for many Law for Liberation from National were apprehended and detained banned as “degenerate.” nomic miracle” of the 1950s relied front; from the fear that the war people on May 8. But we must not Socialism and Militarism estab- while attempting to cross. One In June 1945, author and satirist heavily on this fortuitous upgrade. could go on forever. But these were regard the end of the war as the cause lished 545 German Spruchkammer woman from – in the Erich Kästner managed to capture And there is still a fourth dimen- then replaced by new fears: How do of flight, expulsion and deprivation – or civilian tribunals – employ- Soviet zone – who wanted to visit the spirit of optimism: “If you try sion to the luck Germans experi- I survive until tomorrow? What will of freedom. The cause goes back to ing 22,000 staff that would now the Schwabenland – in the West – to describe what you’re experi- enced in the immediate postwar become of me – and of Germany? the start of the tyranny that brought deliver verdicts on the basis of the was intercepted between the towns encing all around you, only anti- period: the fact that America’s How complicit was I in all that hap- about the war. We must not separate 13 million submitted question- of Probstzella and Hof and forced to quated terms come to mind, like first successful test of an atomic pened under Hitler? Am I guilty for May 8, 1945, from Jan. 30, 1933. naires. This process concluded spend several days in a prison cell. ‘gleams of hope,’ ‘aurora,’ ‘creative bomb was on July 16, 1945, and things that I did, or thought, or tol- with 3.5 million accusations and While detained, she noticed that joy,’ ‘rush of exhilaration’ and ‘vital not six months earlier. Had “Little erated? Am I guilty for not having Immediately after the war, 950,000 trials. In the three-and- a former inhabitant of the cell had courage.’ The stomach churns but Boy” and “Fat Man” already been protested all the injustice? few Germans were in a state of a-half years of denazification carved these words into the lime- the eyes sparkle.” available, the first two targets of Those who truly felt liberated mind to entertain such weighty ending in 1948, 1,549 Germans stone wall: “Here I sit, a German The title of Thornton Wilder’s America’s nuclear arsenal would after the war were the political thoughts. Coping with everyday were found to be “major offend- imprisoned in Germany / Because I play, The Skin of Our Teeth, cap- likely have been German cities. opponents of the Nazi regime, life exhausted all of their strength; ers,” 21,600 “offenders,” 104,000 went from Germany to Germany.” tured the sentiments of most Ger- Hiroshima and Nagasaki would those who were active in the resis- coping with the past was a “luxury” “lesser offenders” and 475,000 The land reform that took effect in mans at the time. From today’s not have been incinerated and tance, the Jews, the Sinti and Roma that would only come much later. “followers.” The tribunals issued the Soviet zone in the fall of 1945 vantage point, even we Germans contaminated; it would have been and the homosexuals who were And those who brought feelings of 9,000 prison sentences, more than marked the beginning of the expro- can say that we got away lightly, Berlin, perhaps Munich, Cologne, persecuted. They all breathed a guilt upon themselves felt an extra 500,000 fines and 25,000 seizures priation of the middle class and the that is, by the skin of our teeth. Bremen – or Dresden. sigh of relief in May 1945. weight of oppression. of assets. The Soviet occupation oppression of all “bourgeois ele- First, Germany was spared from In 1945, the Germans oscillated However, all those whose naïveté In an initial wave of denazifica- zone saw 30,000 war-criminal ments,” which spurred the eventual being as fragmented as the Allies between hope and fear, the hope and idealism had led them to tion, all office holders in West Ger- trials, 200,000 Nazis banned from division of Germany. had originally contemplated. sprouting only with hesitation. A believe in Hitler experienced the many were stripped of their jobs: public service and industry, 20,000 But there were also rays of hope, While Roosevelt had imagined flyer published by the resistance end of the Third Reich as an utter 150,000 working in public service – of 40,000 – teachers fired and the which grew brighter and ever splitting the country into five or movement known as the White collapse. They became embittered and 73,000 employed in trade and delivery of 500 death sentences. more frequent. Life amid the ruins seven states, Churchill envisioned Rose had once augured that “we by the miscarriage of their illu- industry. They received neither The denazification trials were gradually began to normalize. one state in the west, one in the will forever be the people that sions, by the futility of their devo- a salary nor a pension; they were accompanied by the process of People settled in to their world of north and one in the south. The are hated and outcast by all of the tion and the hollowness of their now permitted only to do “ordi- dismantling German industry and rubble, became accustomed to the eventual division of Germany into world.” The fact that this proph- suffering – and then fully so when nary work.” Around 180,000 were the exaction of reparations by the black market and its cigarette cur- east and west, a burden born by the ecy proved wrong will forever be they toured the liberated concen- detained, sometimes for years. victorious powers. Germany was rency, resigned themselves to the Germans for 40 years, was not ulti- a credit to those men and women tration camps, as decreed by the In the second wave, denazifi- to make amends for the destruc- occupation and established new mately an element of the punitive who, 75 years ago, set out to craft a occupying powers, and saw the cation procedures resembled a tion it had wreaked from the political organizations and new peace, but rather the result of the better future for our people on the mountains of corpses; once and bureaucratic inquisition, culminat- Atlantic to the Volga. The Potsdam administrative bodies. They rolled Cold War, which began in earnest rubble and wreckage of a loathsome for all they had to relinquish the ing in the questionnaire campaign Agreement stipulated that German up their sleeves, spat into their in 1945. When the East-West con- war. Without them, we would not cold comfort that the documen- by which the Western Allies sought production would be reduced to palms and went to work. Under flict subsided, the Germans could be what we are today: not hated and tary films and photographs dis- to vet the Germans by tooth and between 50 and 55 percent of its the most adverse conditions they finally redress the division. outcast, but accepted and respected played everywhere after the war nail. The questionnaire comprised capacity in 1938, which corre- learned to develop initiatives, Second, this Cold War, as para- – esteemed not spurned. were mere phonies produced as 131 questions. It became both sponded to totals reached in the to improvise and to make ends doxical as it may sound, had its Allied propaganda. feared and ridiculed – ridiculed for bleak crisis year of 1932. Germany’s meet, while embracing humility upsides. As opposed to being fur- Theodor Heuß, who in 1949 its many pointless individual ques- primary production was to be set and accepting that life may be a ther ostracized and minimized, became the first president of West tions and feared because the future at 40 percent of the 1936 levels, long hard slog. both Germanys, ours and theirs, THEO SOMMER is the executive editor of this Germany, once described the end of many Germans hinged on the which would deplete the pharma- Already in the first fall after the rose in rank rather quickly to newspaper. He was 15 years of the war as follows: “In essence, questionnaire’s findings. ceutical industry by 80 percent. war, news bulletins published by the become something akin to guest- old when World War II came this eighth of May remains the By March 1946, 1.4 million ques- The production of gasoline, ball military government became more victors. Almost immediately, they to an end. most tragic and questionable par- tionnaires had been submitted in bearings, synthetic rubber and and more frequently supplanted by took on crucial roles within the