The Allied Occupation of Germany

The Refugee Crisis, Denazification and the Path to Reconstruction

Francis Graham-Dixon

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In the years following World War II, the allies occupied a shattered Germany. Britain held North-Western Germany for ten years, overseeing the rehabilitation of 'the biggest single forced population movement in modern history', as Germans from around Europe were expelled from the crumbling Third Reich. This was a humanitarian crisis - with most hospitals, houses, transport networks and schools destroyed during the war, and the British and Americans running enormous and often inhumane refugee camps. Here, Francis Graham-Dixon assesses how the British squared their ethical focus on liberalism with their status as an occupying power, and examines the economic, military and political pressures of the period through the key turning points of the end of World War II - the bombing of Hamburg in 1943, the mismanagement of the refugee camp system and the fallout between occupiers and occupied after the Nuremberg trials of 1945/6. The first book to compare German and British sources from the period, this is an essential contribution to the literature on World War II, the Cold War and post-war Europe.

CHAPTER 1

OCCUPATION POLICY AND GERMAN REFUGEES: THE CASE FOR REVISION

The literature on refugees and expellees has tried either to provide a digestible overview of an area of scholarship that is demandingly complex by its very nature, or has sought to address certain very specific aspects – for example, their expulsion, flight, arrival, integration and assimilation. Neither of these two distinct approaches places the entire topic in the wider Anglo-German comparative framework needed to understand these extraordinary events. Likewise, much of the British and German historiography on the British occupation has tended to examine specific aspects of British foreign and occupation policy – for instance, denazification, education, industrial dismantling, reparations, economic reconstruction and the rebirth and rehabilitation of the political parties – without paying sustained attention to, or indeed drawing wider links with, the problematic role of the refugee question in such surveys. As one German-based British official aptly summarised the daunting challenge, ‘the so-called “refugee” problem touches every aspect of Military Government’.¹ Such historical approaches, while undeniably valuable, tend to compartmentalise these various major contributory aspects of Germany’s post-war reconstruction at the expense of analyses that might show the importance of seeing the elements as part of an interrelated whole. A unique feature of this book is that it aims to redress the imbalance in the historiography by synthesising the study of the refugee and expellee problem within this broader comparative analytical framework. It is perhaps in recognition of the challenges in reconstructing the complexities of this period that much of the groundbreaking German scholarship of the last 20 years or so has looked at regional and locally based studies of refugee integration and assimilation in Germany after 1945, encompassing a broader purview of the refugee problem by focusing on a single town or area. It is thus difficult to offer new interpretations without presenting this wider focus that elucidates the interplay between significant political, diplomatic, economic and socio-cultural factors that impinged upon and exacerbated the refugee and expellee crisis.

For this reason, this study examines the occupation in the context of wider British policy, but in Chapters 4 and 5 focuses on one key geographical region within the British Zone – Schleswig-Holstein (SH) – to illustrate how this policy functioned in practice from both German and British perspectives. Amongst the many reasons for choosing this region is that, of all the Western zones, it absorbed the greatest concentration of refugees and expellees as a percentage of its indigenous population. The following sections in this chapter address a wide-ranging historiography, and have been divided so as to reflect the book’s subsequent structure. However, for ease of reference, the literature specific to refugees and expellees has been integrated within the SH case-study and its introduction.

As suggested above, the British and American historiography on ethnic German refugees and expellees has suffered by comparison with other aspects of policy more commonly discussed in assessments of British occupation policy. This is understandable in the American case, where historians have preferred to look at aspects of US or overall Allied occupation policy. Consequently, the magnitude of the refugee problem has been insufficiently integrated within this literature,² often reduced to no more than a general paragraph in most studies, as is shown later in this chapter. German historians have dealt with the topic more systematically, but in their generally more exhaustive studies often concentrate on a single town or location within a particular zone of occupation. Both the German and British historiography on British Military Government and the Control Commission have looked at an entire province or region (Land), but have hitherto excluded discussion of many of the wider moral issues about the implications for ethnic German civilians of wider wartime policy towards Germany that shaped ideas about its later occupation. Instead, attention has focused disproportionately on political debates, decisions and consequences behind the ‘population transfers’, or focused on milestone events such as the conferences in 1941 at Moscow, and later at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, without analysing the broader questions of the victors’ moral mandate as role models in shaping the post-war settlement. In this sense, the refugee question becomes of central importance to the arguments put forward here. This book also contends that extrapolating the complexity of the crisis requires this broader analytical framework, by placing the refugees and foreign policy within the contexts of British attitudes towards Germany, notions of retributive justice with regard to wartime bombing policy and the Nuremberg Trials, international debates on human rights, the efficacy of the British churches’ and humanitarian organisations’ interventions, and Britain’s adverse economic situation. The case-study is situated within these discussions.

Britain’s ‘moral leadership’

Much of the more recent extensive secondary literature on British foreign policy has reached a broadly consensual position insofar as most historians have rightly argued that Britain’s approach towards a defeated Germany was largely informed by pragmatism.³ Their conclusions are supported by several edited survey collections of foreign policy studies, whose omissions of any chapters concerning the British occupation suggest the greater relative importance attached by policy-makers to other geopolitical priorities, for example, reviving the wartime Anglo-American alliance as a bulwark against anticipated Soviet hegemony,⁴ or maintaining British superpower status by developing the British Empire’s global network as an alternative power bloc.⁵ Other historians have emphasised the primacy of Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union to help evaluate the motivations of Labour’s foreign policy.⁶ One argues that Labour’s ‘entanglement’ in the Cold War began with the Foreign Office’s decision during the Second World War to secure Britain’s role as one of three Great Powers, and to sustain Britain’s ‘world-wide mission’. Bevin regarded Britain’s world role as beyond question and writes to the Cabinet of the Soviet ‘Threat to Western Civilisation’.⁷ Others see 1945–50 with Britain no longer a superpower but still a ‘Great Power of the first rank’.⁸ Most historians concur that the overriding constraint on Britain’s entire post-war foreign policy was the relative decline of its own economic base. There is another view that limitations in the scope of foreign policy were domestically driven. This foregrounds a critique of how hopes were dashed on the Labour Party Left for a more socialist approach to foreign policy, seen here as Britain’s missed opportunity.⁹ More recently, it was argued that Labour’s approach tried, not always successfully, to elide its democratic principles with universal moral norms. This assessment concludes that Labour’s ‘missionary zeal to reform and reshape the world in its likeness, [was] sometimes at odds with its commitment to working through international institutions’.¹⁰

To develop a fuller picture of occupation policy, it is necessary to examine published memoirs and diaries to glean the first revealing insights into Cabinet and Foreign Office thinking concerning Germany during wartime when occupation policy was first formulated. Despite interesting accounts by diplomats, framing part of Chapter 2’s discussion of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’,¹¹ these alone do not offer a full picture. Private papers of British officials and advisers closer to the practical realities of life in occupied Germany lend these perspectives added weight and significance, particularly as they witnessed the formulation of key policy decisions in London or by CCG in Berlin. Much of the evidence here, therefore, is drawn from archival papers and documents from post-war government ministers or key advisers on Germany such as Austen Albu, John Hynd and Lord Strang,¹² and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), Churchill’s key wartime scientific adviser on bombing policy¹³ and other Germany policy matters. These are supplemented by War Cabinet minutes and the cabinet secretaries’ notebooks, the latter only released by the National Archives in 2006–7, and papers of officials such as Sir Maurice Dean, an expert on RAF history who served in the Control Office for Germany and Austria [hereinafter COGA], and was familiar with arguments adopted by such ‘official’ historians as Frankland and Webster, Woodward, Harris and later by Martin Middlebrook. These give sharper focus to FO documents and other official publications on Germany’s treatment after its capitulation.

Whilst it is true that America, Russia and France each held their very distinctive views about how Germany should be treated after victory was assured, Britain’s particular stance made as strong, and arguably a more pronounced impact in influencing the course of policies that would determine the future of German refugees and expellees. This book shows that within certain political and diplomatic circles, prosecution of the war entrenched certain rooted negative British attitudes towards Germany whilst further radicalising more preconceived anti-German views of the Vansittartist sympathisers,¹⁴ well before the final decisions were taken between 1942 and 1945 over what to do with a defeated Germany. In its wartime propaganda, the American government made clear distinctions after 1945 between ‘Nazis’ and ‘Germans’, lending itself to differentiating between ‘guilty’ Nazi leaders and ‘innocent’ German civilians, or as described recently, ‘even at the height of the war, American views of Nazi Germany never coalesced into a well-focused, negative image of the enemy.’¹⁵ Consequently, America was the one power to prioritise an expeditious withdrawal of troops ‘with as little political involvement in German affairs as possible’.¹⁶ Richard Merritt’s study claims the Germans realised early that if they had to submit to a foreign military power, ‘[Germany] could do worse than have the United States as its occupier’. One reason given was the USA’s early abandonment of ‘bureaucratic pettifoggery’. As we shall see, this contrasted with Britain’s leviathan bureaucracy. He suggests Germans increasingly saw the USA as the most sympathetic of the occupiers to German concerns, particularly when contrasted with ‘vindictive France and the unspeakable Soviet Union’.¹⁷ The uniqueness of the British case can also be shown by outlining how the other powers tackled the refugee and expellee question. Britain, more interventionist in German affairs and committed to a lengthy occupation but without the means to finance this, was forced into compromise, as it was not in a position to adopt policies that in reality might have secured better outcomes. Primarily, Britain’s economic dependence on the USA made it difficult for the British to persuade America – which was safeguarding its own interests – to accept a redistribution of further numbers of expellees, as Chapter 5 shows. France, in trying to compensate for its diminished world status in 1945, preached the virtues of its own civilising mission,¹⁸ its Germany policy characterised by de Gaulle’s comment that after three invasions in one lifetime, ‘we never wish to see the Reich again.’ Britain hoped that a French occupation zone, proposed by Churchill at Yalta, might reduce its own responsibilities, but the Governor of the French Zone, the Gaullist General Robert Koenig,¹⁹ was intent on maintaining its very low refugee and expellee population, despite British pleas for a more equitable distribution, as Chapter 5 also explains. The Soviets, reacting to their own high numbers of refugees and expellees, had to plan for their long-term integration through an active social policy, the redistribution of accommodation and land reform. Redistribution aimed to pass on property from indigenous Germans to refugees,²⁰ very different to Britain’s approach, as Chapter 4’s section on the housing crisis shows.

Adolf Birke drew a distinction between British occupation policy success, duly acknowledged in reviving German traditions of self-government and parliamentarism, with continuing British reservations, distrust and occasional enmity towards the Germans as people. In his view, the catastrophes of the twentieth century, in British eyes, were closely linked to the idea of German exceptionalism (Sonderweg), a deviation from the ideals of Western democratic principles that fuelled deep British resentments over supporting a former enemy.²¹ This theme is echoed in reverse by William Wallace who showed how Britain’s adherence to the notion of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism exerted great strains on foreign policy, and that earlier rivalries between Britain and Germany were to overshadow their later successful partnerships.²² Anthony Nicholls took this a stage further, showing how an apparently harmonious relationship at the turn of the twenty-first century has obscured the difficulties, suggesting the need for a more revisionist view of the so-called ‘exemplary’ regime of military occupation,²³ a consensus that is shown in many of the earlier ‘official’ accounts by ex-government officials of the day.²⁴ The Federal Republic was born out of defeat, and at the first Bundestag elections, all political parties in Germany were very critical of the British occupation authorities, as the Schleswig-Holstein case shows. For example, the chronic coal shortages and food crises, discussed in Chapter 4, were increasingly blamed on the British. This is hardly surprising, as Britain – Germany’s longest-serving enemy from 1939 to 1945 – had, with their allies, played a major and decisive role in devastating through bombing the zone they subsequently administered, and the consequences of this left enduring scars for the early post-war generation of civilians and refugees. Regarding residual negative attitudes towards Germany, some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps and list of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Occupation policy and German refugees: The case for revision
• 2. ‘Germanity and Humanity’
• 3. Realities of the occupation
• 4. A region in crisis: Schleswig-Holstein
• 5. Crisis compounded: German reaction and the impact on policy
• 6. Occupation policy and the civilising mission: a compromising legacy
• 7. The Janus faces of occupation, 1949–55
• Notes
• Select Bibliography