Exorcising Hitler Read Free Page B

aggressive relationship with the conquered Germans during those early months, an understandable attitude on the part of the vulnerable individual soldier. More ominously, it would also be reflected in the lobbies and conference rooms of Washington and London, where by this time the hardline attitude had, at least temporarily, gained the upper hand. The word ‘revenge’ might not be uttered openly, but German collective guilt and an Allied policy of, in effect, collective punishment were soon unspoken assumptions, guiding the actions of the victors in the time shortly before and after the surrender.
    Civilian Affairs officers in the American army, trained before embarkation to administer and liaise in the liberated territories, and their rough equivalents in the Russian, British and French forces, became, once the border of the Reich was crossed, officials of the Military Government of Germany. The rules were now different. In the former German-occupied countries, relations with the locals had mostly been friendly and expected to be such. Even in the (fairly frequent) cases of misunderstandings and bad behaviour by Allied troops, enough basic goodwill remained to make the overall picture a happy one. After all, for the vast majority of civilians in all the formerly German-occupied countries, freedom felt better than captivity. And, more importantly, although there were problems and shortages, there was now hope that these would get better with time.
    The moment they crossed into Germany, the advancing Allied troops knew they were no longer among friends. This did not mean that the bulk of the German population necessarily hated them, or wanted them dead, or even that it planned to resist. The difference was visible, even in the last border town of a just-liberated country such as France, Belgium or Holland. The liberated locals’ response was to display their own, often long-hidden, national flag, perhaps combined with the flag of the liberators, if they possessed or could quickly make one. Across the line in Germany, mostly there was nothing. Germans shut themselves in their houses. If anything was displayed, it was a white flag, often improvised from a bed sheet hung out of an upstairs window, unreadable beyond its basic message of surrender.
    Germany, as it came under Allied control, resembled a blank object, a clean sheet. What government or political life had existed there before was viewed by the conquerors as unremittingly evil. In Belgium or Holland or Norway, even in the more frenetic and complicated conditions of Italy and Greece, the aim was to restore something like the situation that had existed before the fascists took power (the situation in Poland and Eastern Europe was different for a number of reasons, most notably because the Soviet ‘liberators’ had an aggressive and radical political agenda of their own). In Germany, however, the first aim was unquestionably to get rid of what was presently there, to destroy the fabric of Nazi totalitarian control, not just in the administration but throughout industry, the arts, education and the sciences.
    The question of what should, or could, replace these malevolent structures was much less clear and, in the initial stages, largely irrelevant. Germany had first to be secured by and for the occupiers, a task that was not expected to lack danger or difficulty. Aside from the likelihood of fanatical, Werwolf -style resistance, there was a vast, defeated German army of five million or so to be disarmed, detained, its surrendered ranks checked for war criminals and politically dangerous individuals. The weeding out and neutralisation of these latter categories was a process that combined the two most pressing tasks of the occupiers – the securing of the occupation from potential enemies and the parallel political cleansing of the country itself.
    The situation discussed between the Allies at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, with victory still months away, was