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.

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In the Catholic Rhineland, Carnival was celebrated with renewed vigour, a traditional time to make edgy political statements under the protection of ‘fools’ license’, but which had become a spectacle of conformism under the Nazis, with the motto ‘don’t complain, join in’.

The occupiers varied in their attitudes. The British banned carnival in Cologne in 1947 but the French in Mainz virtually ordered it to happen, seeing this expression of Catholic Rhinelander identity as a necessary part of deprussianisation. At the 1950 Aachen carnival, however, the prize for ‘dispelling all hated seriousness’ was given to a British military attorney, James A Dugdale from Burnley, who had allowed an imprisoned smuggler three days leave from prison for the event.

The ‘bafflingly good mood’ of many Germans reminded historian Friedrich Prinz of a funeral party atmosphere: ‘As soon as the corpse is in the ground, the mourners, coming back from the cemetery, turn towards the funeral feasts in the inn and merriment spreads at first hesitantly, then ever more emphatically, a feeling of joy at not yet having been stripped of the “sweet habit of existence”.’

A jazz craze erupted, prefiguring the rock and roll of the following decade, and the authorities were determined to prevent young people drinking at these music-filled parties. ‘It must have felt strange to them,’ the author notes: ‘that only a few months previously they had been old enough to be sent to their death with the Volkssturm, the people’s militia established during the last few months of the war, but were now not adult enough for a glass of wine.’ Theatre was also popular, running at 80 per cent capacity between 1945-48 and only going into decline with the end of the economic hard times, for with affluence came thrift.

People called the end of the war the ‘time of the wolves’ but much of the crime involved smuggling, which sometimes led to shoot-outs with customs men. Theft was indeed widespread, and accepted, and when Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne said that Christians should put Thou Shall not Steal into ‘perspective’, Fringsing became a verb to steal out of necessity. Cardinal Frings was even found Fringsing – when the British searched his church, they discovered piles of illegally stored coal. Yet there wasn’t anarchy, and while children lived in an ethical grey area much of the time, they grew up to be very law abiding, social-climbing generation of young adults.

Relations between the sexes were drastically altered. Journalist Marta Hillers wrote about how women’s role had changed because they had looked after themselves and men had shamed themselves both by killing and losing. ‘In earlier wars men could claim that the honour of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today we women, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.’

In pious women’s magazine Der Regenoume, Elfriede Alscher wrote that ‘Just as the woman who brings life into the world must always hate life-destroying war, she can never, if she is to remain true to her innermost feelings, agree with a dictatorship.’ (That certainly wasn’t the case when Hitler was at its most popular).

The author – or his translator – has an elegant turn of phrase. People were often seen holding up photos of missing husbands, and ‘these few pictures are so visually powerful that they imprinted on the German public memory of the first post-war years like an unchanging silent film – although, it must be said, half of life ends up on the cutting-room floor.’ Many found it difficult to adjust back into civilian life, and even years after their return, some men were termed Heimkehrer (home-comer) to excuse their strange behaviour.

To understand why it was hard for men to return to their wives after the experiences of combat, it is worth reading what Manfred Hausmann wrote in the US-sponsored Neue Zeitung in December 1945:

‘The war hauled you away overnight. It threw you into the most foreign countries. You saw the south, the easy charm of life in Greece, the bright colours of the Balkans, the great expanse of the Black Sea. You saw the boundless steppes of Russia, the mighty rivers, the frightening forests, the monstrous wastes. That in itself was a great deal. It had a stirring and shattering effect on your soul. But the rest of it was even greater. You had to fight, to burn, to destroy and to kill. You heard cries and saw faces that you will never forget. Now you know both the self-sacrifice of which mankind is capable, and the terrible depths of depravity to which he can plunge.

‘You know destruction in all its forms. You have stared death in its empty eyes time and again. You have experienced how insignificant and lost a man can feel as he stumbles through the world’s darkness. You have eradicated human lives, and strengthened your own a hundredfold by taking it to the edge. You have been more of a master than you ever were before or ever will be again. And time and again you have been driven harder than any slave. What you have been through, both the very high and the very low, obedience and coercion, risk and loss, triumph and despair, brotherhood and isolation, heaven and hell, that will never leave you. As one so changed, so deeply changed, you have returned home and turned up in front of your wife.’

Of German men born between 1920 and 1925, at least two-fifths didn’t return home. Unsurprisingly, almost 100 per men of that cohort got married.

The war also had eroded old sexual morality; divorce rates leapt. Beate Uhse became a pioneer on ‘marital hygiene’, birth control and sexual liberation. She liked to think that science was on her side, cited Kinsey and marketed her sex toys ‘with refined tact’; her sex shop empire would become part of a bourgeoning pornography industry in West Germany.

The eastern and western conquerors treated the defeated very differently. The Soviet invasion had brought with it an orgy of rape, as vengeance and sexual frustration was meted out against the wives and daughters of the former tormentors. The Red Army eventually gave ink pots to German woman so they could mark the men who assaulted them, but there was a risk of just angering them even more

In contrast, when the Germans briefly retook Aachen in March 1945, one SS man reported what he was told by locals: ‘The Americans made a genuine effort to establish a good relationship with the population by giving them tins of food, chocolate and cigarettes.’ Townspeople had ‘the best opinion’ of the Americans, and women said how well treated they had been while their own troops simply ‘threw them into the street’. The Americans had stayed in apartments and left them undamaged with nothing stolen; it was said that they behaved better than Germans.

This wasn’t always the case; where there had been tough fighting and deaths at the hands of snipers, civilians might suffer the consequences. Western soldiers were also especially aggressive towards German civilians after seeing the conditions in death camps.

In some cities administrators forced people to watch footage of those camps: ‘Many viewers simply looked away, or else spent the whole film staring firmly at the floor. Some who had seen the mountains of corpses on the screen vomited or collapsed in tears as they left’.

Holocaust guilt would become a cornerstone of German identity by the end of the century but this was not the case in the immediate aftermath. Jews weren’t even mentioned in the admissions of guilt by Protestant and Catholic churches in August 1945; only a few individuals like Karl Jaspers explicitly mentioned anti-Semitism.

German journalists seemed especially clueless about what their country had done. An article in Der Standpunkt in January 1947 asked: ‘What makes us so unpopular around the world?’ Gosh, I wonder.

‘Germany is the problem child of Europe, the whipping-boy of the world. It is as true in the family of the world’s nations as it is in human families: there are favourite children. The role of the pet is played by Switzerland – and the enfant terrible is Germany. Chance? Fate? It cannot be explained in terms of nature, history or national development.’ Perhaps it was all the invasions.

American soldiers were told by the Conduct of American Military Personnel in Germany handbook that ‘without demonstrating vengefulness or spite, the behaviour of the American should express cool hostility and distaste.’ They should make the Germans know that they have brought ‘down upon herself the contempt and horror of those whose affection she would actually like to have.’ Yet many Americans were obviously not too hostile, since by 1988 an estimated 170,000 soldiers’ brides from Germany had moved to the United States.

While the western allies feared there would be a continual violent resistance to their rule, opposition died almost immediately; it was as if a switch had been flipped. In November 1945 three American soldiers went to a football stadium in uniform and no one bothered them, to the surprise of one, Stefan Heym, of German-Jewish origin. The Allies had also anticipated violent revenge against former regime men but there were no reprisals by anti-Nazi Germans against former oppressors. People just moved on.

The Russians, meanwhile, could be comradely as well as cruel. ‘Their impulsive warmth was as legendary as their volcanic violence. They loved dance music and classical concerts, theatre and acrobatics, and immediately after the guns finally fell silent they began a bacchanalian round of revery.’

While ‘the Americans had always stressed civilian mass sympathy and participation in the Nazi regime,’ the Soviets theoretically treated the Germans as victims of a Nazi power elite. Indeed, ‘they were much less inclined to see the Germans as fundamentally evil in a way that many Americans, and some Britons, did.’ This had much to do with communist ideology, which could not accept that extreme nationalism might be popular.

The denazification process required a certificate called a persilscheine proving one’s political credentials, but former members of the party could get non-incriminated acquaintances to vouch that they had joined but had still done the right thing; perhaps they had helped Jews or made jokes about the regime. Former 20 July plotter Eugen Gerstenmaier, later a CDU politician, was in particularly high demand afterwards.

Yet many Nazis returned. Lawyer Hans Globke was made head of the Chancellery despite having been an author of Nuremberg race laws; when he entered the Bundestag he was beaten up by SPD deputies. Such was the German respect for procedure that former SS members were stunned and upset when the Allies denied them their pensions - before the occupiers succumbed to the universal law that governments always cave into pensioners.

The far-right even won election victories. In Wolfsburg in Lower Saxony, a rootless new town which the Nazis had proudly built without churches, the German Right Party won 15,000 of 24,000 votes at the 1948 elections, before they were banned.

Wolfsburg would become home to a gigantic Volkswagen planet, symbol of the economic miracle that ended these hard times. Since cigarettes had become a unit of currency in post-war Germany, the good times unleashed by finance minister (and later chancellor) Ludwig Erhard became associated with the fat Dannemann cigars he smoked. With West Germany’s basic law of 1949, the political chaos had ended, and with currency reform and the arrival of the Deutsche Mark came a new age of abundance.

Writer Werner Richter recalled the first day of the new currency, and the psychological effect it had: ‘On the way we passed a small shop in which we had previously paid with ration cards, an essentially miserable corner shop, and it was here that the miracle of currency reform, the actual miracle, began. The shop appeared completely changed. It was practically bursting with goods.

‘The displays were decorated with every imaginable kind of vegetable: rhubarb, cauliflower, white cabbage, spinach, everything that we had been deprived of for so long…. We went into the shop and now another miracle happened. If before the service had been not exactly unfriendly but often sulky, now we were welcomed with great politeness. We had gone overnight from being ration-card buyers and supplicants to being customers.’

Germans had begun to smile again, and the capitalist miracle of the post-war era had begun.