A nation’s rebirth after Nazism

Germany’s integration miracle and other stories

On a train journey earlier this year between Cologne and Berlin, I began to read Harald Jähner’s Aftermath, a fascinating account of the years when Germany emerged from the destruction and shame of the Third Reich.

The war ended 80 years ago today, and in the defeated nation the scenes were primeval and apocalyptic. In Berlin, journalist Ruth Andreas- Friedrich, along with a doctor, actor and musical conductor, discovered a white ox wandering through the streets and, after finding a Russian soldier to shoot it, found themselves suddenly surrounded by a ravenous mob. She recalled: ‘Suddenly, as if the underworld had been spying on them, a noisy crowd gathered around the dead ox. They crept from a hundred basements. Women, men, children. Were they lured by the smell of blood? Within minutes they were scrambling for meat.’ The bourgeois of Middle Europe reduced to an animal state.

Germany was a pile of rubble; the ruins in the Reich’s capital amounted to 55 million cubic metres, enough for a wall 30 metres wide and 5 metres high stretching all the way to Cologne. In West Berlin, for the next 22 years, up to 800 lorries a day unloaded so much rubble on the former Factory of Armaments Technology that it became known as Teufelsberg, or Devil’s Mountain. The last ‘rubble brigade’ in Dresden only finished work in 1977.

Although Nazi party members were made to clear rubble as a punishment, the Germans hardly needed encouragement; on 23 April, the war not yet over, the municipal building of Mannheim had already declared WE ARE REBUILDING.

The communal process of clearing away seemed to serve a psychological function for a hungry, defeated people, and was encouraged by the new authorities - all the ‘heroic cinematic rhetoric’ employed by the UFA film company of the Nazi regime now used to get the country clearing up. There was even a cinema genre called Trümmerfilm, rubble films, one - And The Heavens Above Us - ending with the Lord’s Prayer being recited among the ruins of Germany.

German POWs, ‘dispirited, disciplined and dutiful to the point of submissiveness,’ made life easy for occupying soldiers while their former victims were far more troublesome. (Russian POWs in France caused such anarchy that they called in a Soviet liaison officer who selected ten at random and shot them, bringing the mob under control.) This led to a bizarre alliance between Allied and German law enforcement working hand-in-hand from the early days of the occupation, with joint raids and weapons searches on displaced persons from Poland and the Soviet Union, which the Poles and Russians ‘of course saw as an intolerable provocation’.

London cheered on May 8, 1945. In Berlin they searched for food and cleared rubble

In a strange irony, there was now a large-scale migration of Jews from Poland to Germany, fleeing fresh persecution despite the horror they had endured. Even here in a camp system under Allied control, there were anti-Semitic attacks from other survivors, so that Jews were eventually separated altogether following the conclusions of the Harrison Report. The Americans, in a likely first in European history, now made Jews an explicitly privileged group, with superior camp conditions.

The Polish Jews set up their own camp in the Munich district of Bogenhausen where locals were confused and disorientated by the new arrivals. These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. One local complained that ‘the Jews from the old days were really, how can I put it, very intelligent, polite and unusually friendly and elegant people. And of course the ones who turned up after the war included all sorts.’ The Jews ‘from the old days’ were ‘the good Jews’, he lamented.

Holocaust guilt was in the distant future for most, and newly re-established newspapers weren’t remotely shy about publishing anti-Semitic content. One printed a resident’s complaint about Polish Jews that ‘these were not people who had been persecuted’ but ‘the sputum, the yeast and the scum of elements who were never deported but, to avoid regular work, came here from the eastern states, in many cases completely illegally, and are now spreading themselves raggedly about the place.’

One camp, Föhrenwald, became exclusively Jewish from September 1945. Its 15 streets had been constructed as a model Nazi estate but now they bore names such as Kentucky Street and housed the Reich’s number one racial enemies.

As a contemporary recalled, behind a two-metre fence, ‘a regular Eastern Jewish shtetl life came into being, with its own administration, political parties, police, camp law-courts, religious institutions such as synagogues, a mikvah and a kosher kitchen, a health service, professional training facilities, schools, kindergartens, theatre groups, orchestras, sporting associations and much else besides.’

Here was published Bamidbar, ‘desert’, a reference to Exodus and the promise of a homeland, ‘the weekly newspaper of the liberated Jews’; a Jewish theatre was founded. But most of all Föhrenwald produced babies, boasting the highest Jewish birth rate in the world, with a bustling nursery, a sign perhaps that high fertility is a response to existential threat.

The last residents only left in 1957. Indeed, some came back from the promised land, including a man named Yossel who had emigrated to Palestine in 1946 but returned to his German displacement camp in 1952. He had spent his adolescence in concentration camps and displaced person’s camps, before living in a British detention camp in Palestine and then Israeli Army barracks. A child of the mid-20th century, he had known only the camp, and couldn’t cope with it.

There were 150,000 ‘Hardcore DPs’ who refused to return home, mostly Poles and Russians who feared and hated the communists. The new government in Warsaw sent recruiters, and banners were hung inside the camps calling on people to return. The Soviets were not so polite, and convinced their western allies to forcibly hand over displaced servicemen - but many British and American troops refused orders to force the Russians to return to Stalin’s rule, where they faced a grim future.

At Dachau in January 1946, GIs used tear gas to clear two unruly barracks of Russian DPs: when they stormed in, they found a scene of mass suicide. The Americans desperately cut down the dead and dying Russians, some of whom pointed at the guns of the guards, and then themselves, ‘begging us to shoot’.

It didn’t help that the Americans and British had constructed a protective welfare state in the camps to shield these DPs from outside hostility, accidentally creating a dependency culture. But there was also considerable hostility among locals to their fellow Germans, too.

The conflict had ended with 14 million German refugees expelled from the east, in lands which they had called home for centuries, often so pitiful looking that they were nicknamed ’40-kilo gypsies’. It was this exodus which inspired international agreements like the 1951 UN Convention of Refugees, the albatross which now forbids western countries from deterring an unprecedented wave of migrants. In the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, expellees comprised 45 per cent of the population, in Schleswig-Holstein 33 per cent, and in Bavaria 21 per cent.

Yet after the war the idea of volksgemeinschaft, the national community, had become unpopular – rather unsurprisingly. The term volk was disavowed, and regions revived their identity: ‘Many people saw the internal German migration as a kind of multicultural attack on themselves’, and he writes that that ‘the attitude of many Germans towards their expelled compatriots was no less hard-hearted than their behaviour towards the foreign DPs.’

Some locals lodged the refugees in hay barns under dirty straw even when their homes were half-empty. ‘Other villagers who were hosting refugees assigned them rooms, but not before they put the furniture in the attic and unscrewed the lightbulbs from the lamps, in case the “Polacks” used up the electricity.’

One girl, 16-year-old Ursula Wullenkordt from East Prussia, was housed in the village of Güby near the Danish border and ‘the family missed no opportunity to let her know they wished her in hell’. One hissed to her that ‘not nearly enough refugee boats went down.’ (Thousands of German refugees had died on the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, the worst maritime loss of life in history.)

In Bremen, where 50 per cent of housing was destroyed, posters went up reading WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE PEOPLE! A STOP TO IMMIGRATION!

In at least one case, British soldiers responded to reports by lining up villagers and demanding better treatment of their fellow Germans, otherwise they’d place foreign displaced persons with them instead. Some locals in Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein resisted billeting so much that armed guards with machine guns accompanied them.

Despite Allied attempts to encourage hospitality, Jähner writes, ‘It was in vain. The Zuzugler (incomers or immigrants), as the authorities called them at the time, encountered a wall of rejection.’

Fear and hunger was mixed with a western German prejudice that their compatriots were inherently more authoritarian, a view that has survived to this day. ‘As Prussians, the deportees were accused of being born militarists and yes-men, and all allegedly particularly responsible for Hitlerism.’

North German farm owner Hans Oheim wrote in 1947: ‘you need not imagine that the spirit of Prussia has died. No, it lives on in all the people who have come to us from the East, and under whose alien rule we must go on living after the state parliament elections.’ The farmers in the west also worried that the newcomers would vote in the Social Democrats in their constituencies (and they were right).

The newcomers were also seen as more Slavic in behaviour. In Hesse, a local observed that ‘The openness of the refugees was interpreted as garrulousness, the display of emotion as a lack of self-control, good manners as servility.’ Differences of religious practice between locals and refugees were viewed with suspicion, while Catholic May devotions and maypoles, and discussions about who could sit where in Mass, led to mass brawls.

The expellee housing estates were known locally as ‘camps’ just to illustrate their otherness, and their neighbourhoods acquired nicknames like New Poland or Little Moscow. The children of expellees, ashamed of their accent, often came to speak a form of perfect German – local children followed suit, and so the migration led to the disappearance of dialect in many regions.

Near the border, the Danish minority raged against the newcomers because they were changing the ethnic mix. Journalist Tage Mortensen called them ‘Hitler’s guests’ and created a fictional character, ‘Frau Schiddrigkeit’ from East Prussia, filled with overt racial prejudice.

‘Frau Schiddrigkeit’s hair changed between black and dark brown, her eyes are greenish, her cheekbones wide and her fingers strong and thick like those of the Polish girls who used to work on the turnip harvest on the southern islands of Denmark… The Southern Schleswigs call the East Prussian mass of refugees a mulatto race. “Mongrels”, mixed stock. Margretha Schiddrigkeit is, judging by her appearance, a typical “mongrel”, the descendent of many races and many nations.’

The sense of being viewed with western racial disdain must have weighed heavily, the new arrivals often coming from mixed areas ‘where their status as Germans had previously brought them all kinds of privileges and caused all kinds of conflict’.

Theo Breider from Munster, a director of the local tourist office, was given the task of looking after the refugees, and so wrote a poem in a regional dialect which was aimed at increasing national solidarity:

‘Let them in! They are folk of our blood
who have lost their homes and everything,
They are German people, they are our children,
Their husbands were our soldiers
Open up your homes, open up your doors.’

The country came so close to disaster that Allied rulers even spoke darkly of civil unrest or even civil war, and it was with relief as well as pride that West Germans later talked of their ‘integration miracle’. Historian Friedrich Prinz wrote that ‘a contented look back at the successful integration of the expellees sometimes distorts our understanding of how close we were to social catastrophe; it was entirely possible that the expellees could have become Germany’s “Palestinian problem”’.

Perhaps this explains why Germany’s leaders of the 2010s were so confident about integrating migrants from the east in such large numbers, as they’d done it before. The difference is that Pashtuns are not Prussians; they are not ‘folk of our blood’.

The newcomers became an important political force in western politics. An association of expellees was formed to keep their traditions alive and they formed the most reactionary groups in the Federal Republic, and were often active in far-right agitation (and so proving some of those western prejudices correct). Yet the economic miracle that became apparent from the start of the 1950s couldn’t have happened without them; many were highly educated and proved vital to the mid-sized industries that grew up in Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg.