-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
BETRAYAL - Our Occupation of Germany
Arthur D. Rahn
Former Chief Editor of Intelligence Office of the Director of Information
Control
Office of Military Government, Germany
No Date - Printed in Poland
out-of-print
-----
---" NOT until I sat down to write this book and reflected on my experience
and organized my notes did I realize that what had seemed to me and my
friends in Germany to be a chaos of corruption and incompetence had actually
been a planned development following a very definite pattern. In fact, it has
become increasingly clear that the pattern of events in Germany from 1944 to
mid-1947 mirrored in sharp perspective what was happening at home in America.
Developments in Germany, too, have paralleled our actions in the United
Nations and our relations with the Soviet Union, Greece, Spain, China,
Britain, Israel � with the entire world."---
Om
K
-----
CHAPTER ONE
Operation Aachen: First Victory and Defeat
"The true goal we seek is far above and beyond -the ugly field of battle.
When we resort to force, as now we must, we are determined that this force
shall be directed toward ultimate good as well as against immediate evil. We
Americans are not destroyers � we are builders."
>From Fireside Chat, December 9, 1941.
AACHEN was test case number one, where the GIs and MG first showed their
stuff in Germany and the conflict between the different philosophies on how
to deal with the Germans was first exposed.
On September 10, 1944, the first American shells burst on the soil of
Hitler's Thousand Year Reich. The GIs were swinging into the Nazi homeland. A
week later the American First Army began the siege of Aachen, our first
German city. At our headquarters in Twelfth Army Group Psychological Warfare,
we were taking bets again on the end of the war. "Christmas", fellows were
saying, "Christmas, for sure."
At the end of the month, on September 29th, in recognition of the beginning
of the occupation of Germany, General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme
Commander, announced our intentions in a proclamation to the Germans:
"We come as conquerors, but not as oppressors... We shall overthrow the Nazi
rule, dissolve the Nazi party and abolish the cruel, oppressive and
discriminatory laws and institutions which the Party has created. We shall
eradicate the German militarism which has so often disrupted the peace of the
world."
Even the cynical guys, the fellows who used to say. "What's the matter with
you dumb bastards? You think it's going to be any different this time than it
was after the last war?" � even they shook their heads. This was pretty good
stuff, the brass was doing all right.
But the German High Command realized that if Aachen didn't hold, we'd flood
through the Siegfried Line right to the Rhine before von Rundstedt; could
regroup the shattered Wehrmacht divisions we'd routed out of France. Von
Rundstedt issued an order of the day warning the German troops: "I expect you
to defend the sacred German soil with all your might to the last." And the
Fritz fought for every pillbox.
Aachen had important psychological as well as strategic significance, and
Hitler knew it as well as we did. As Charlemagne's capital and the repository
of his tomb and an ancient Roman outpost and medieval cultural center, Aachen
was a home of German legend and a shrine of German military glory. Now, as
the first German city under attack in the West, Aachen had new importance.
All over the Reich I the Germans were watching Aachen and waiting for
Hitler's decision � to spare the city or turn it into a symbol of German
resistance to the death. What happened in Aachen would determine what policy
the Nazis would follow in other cities.
To exploit the propaganda possibilities in the situation, we marshalled our
entire arsenal of psychological warfare in support of the combat forces,
spraying the city with leaflets from the big guns embanked in an arc about
the valley and from hundreds of planes overhead. Public address trucks inched
up to the frontlines repeating the messages we were broadcasting continuously
over powerful Radio Luxembourg: "Save Aachen from useless destruction...
further resistance is hopeless... Eisenhower promises conquest without
oppression... prisoners will receive good treatment."
>From a wealthy citizen of Aachen we learned that our psychological warfare
had claimed an important victim, Graf von Schwerin, the commanding general of
the 116th Panzer (Armored) Division. He had opposed the forced evacuation of
the city ordered by the Fuehrer and advised citizens to remain in their
homes. He had desired to save Aachen by declaring it an open city. A scion of
one of the most ancient Junker families in Germany, von Schwerin had acted
like a "queer duck" before. From captured documents we knew he had sharply
disagreed with his superiors two or three times over the conduct of the
campaign in France and had in each case appealed directly and personally to
the Fuehrer. This time, however, he was summarily removed from command and
transferred to Italy. Things were going well when he could develop opposition
among Hitler's generals. This was big time, this Aachen battle. Finally, on
October 10th before our troops hurled the final assault at the city, we made
a last effort to reduce our casualties and to win a propaganda victory. Two
lieutenants and an enlisted man advanced under the protection of a white flag
through the smouldering rubble-strewn streets to the Wehrmacht headquarters
to present our ultimatum:
"The City of Aachen is now completely surrounded by American forces equipped
with both air power and artillery to destroy the city if necessary... You
will either unconditionally surrender the city with everything in it thus
avoiding needless loss of German blood and property, or you may refuse and
await its complete destruction. The choice and responsibility are yours."
Although the Germans rejected the ultimatum, we did win a strange
psychological victory with it. There were about 10,000 of the 160,000
inhabitants of the city still in Aachen, people who had refused to evacuate
when ordered to do so and had hidden themselves from the SS and SA men who
were sent to force them to leave. Representatives of these citizens assembled
before the Wehrmacht HQ to appeal to the Commanding Officer of the city to
accept the ultimatum and surrender the city. Slapping his gloves in
impatience, looking above the crowd as though he did not hear what their
leaders were saying, Colonel Wilck, a sneering, stoneyfaced Prussian,
listened briefly and then dismissed the Aacheners with the curt announcement
that in obedience to the order of the Fuehrer, Aachen would be defended to
the last man. But as a result, of Wilck's rejection of the appeal, there were
riots in the city and in one shelter at the Hansemann Platz, eight citizens
were supposed to have been killed by soldiers for inciting the other
inhabitants to revolt. Opposition among the well-disciplined Nazis! That was
a victory, too. Some of us thought that out of such opposition we might even
be able to organize an antiNazi administration when we took the town.
At the expiration of the ultimatum, we launched our final attack with fleets
of planes, batteries of artillery, brigades of tanks, columns of infantry all
acting in strict coordination according to the prearranged schedule. As we
closed in, out of the cellars and from behind the rubble heaps crawled the
halfstarved, lice-ridden, unshaven SS "supermen" waving our psychological
warfare safe-conduct leaflets. "Let Wilck fight to the last," they muttered
to our interrogators, "we've had enough."
On October 18th, after the inevitable collapse of the defense had become
obvious, in a radio broadcast to the Reich, Hitler announced an
intensification of the defense effort, the mobilization of the Volkssturm, an
auxiliary force to be composed of the sick, the crippled, the old and the
children � of all the males not yet in the regular army. The butcher,
Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and new commander of the Volkssturm, was to
see to it that everyone was to fight to the last � "zum letzten Mann, zur
letzten Patrone" (to the last man, to the last bullet). The Germans were
taking our victory seriously.
At last, on Saturday, October 21st, the Stars and Stripes, the Army
newspaper, carried a banner headline: "Nazis Lose First Big City As Aachen
Falls."
Our tanks rumbled on and the air squadrons thundered past Aachen, the Army
was pushing on to attack Cologne. Concerned with killing Nazis and winning
more victories, most combat GIs quickly forgot about Aachen. You didn't read
much in the Stars and Stripes about our first city, either, though the paper
pointed out in its editorial on November 10 how Gis felt we ought to treat
the Germans we were taking under our control:
"The Americans have come to Germany not to pat childslayers on the head or to
feed SS scoundrels with span. The Americans have come to this land of
gangsters in order to bring the villains to justice. "It is not only American
divisions that have entered Germany. Justice has entered Germany and not a
single German will venture to cry welcome to justice. For justice carries a
sword."
But for us in Psychological Warfare, Aachen continued to be big news. It was
our job to analyze German morale and attitudes and to provide intelligence of
general use for the occupation. Now at last we would deal directly with the
people of the tough, cocky paratroopers, of the stoney SS men, the sneering
Wehrmacht officers and of the beaten cattle, the ordinary lice-ridden
Landsers, whom we herded on the roads for mile after mile with their hands
above their heads back to the PW cages. Here we'd have our chance of treating
with the notorius[sic] industrialists who had financed and armed Hitler. We'd
meet the Hitler Youth and test the possibility of reeducating the Germans.
And now Military Government would have its opportunity to put the Eisenhower
proclamation and the demands of the fighting GIs into effect. MG was to be
"justice bearing a sword", as the Stars and Stripes had demanded.
Not that we had forgotten our misgivings about MG. No, we were wary and
unconvinced when the American flag was raised in Aachen on October 22nd and
the MG officer announced: "Nothing of Nazism will be allowed to remain. The
keynote of our policy towards the Germans is one of strict justice." And when
G-2 (military intelligence) persisted in restricting the activity of our
Psychological Warfare intelligence men in Aachen to hasty, superficial
investigations, there was a lot of shoulder-shrugging in our detachment. Not
until January, 1945, did G-2 finally grant permission for two of our men to
make a thorough study of conditions in Aachen.
Sure enough, our investigators, Paul Sweet and Saul Padover, history
professors and excellent intelligence men, discovered that the MG officers
had revealed reprehensible ignorance of German politics in their
administration of the city. Just as many of us had expected. The MG-appointed
mayor, Franz Offenhoff and some of his leading assistants had never been
members of the Nazi Party but as former officials of the important Veltrup
Armaments Works, they were under suspicion of having made considerable
contributions to the Nazi war effort. But the political orientation of the
mayor was exposed in his appointment of Nazi Party members to 22 of the 72
key positions in the city. They were all, he assured MG, absolutely
"indispensable" to the administration and reconstruction of the city.
Sweet and Padover discovered, too, that most of the city officials, whether
Party members or not, were pro-Nazi in their sympathies. They admired the
Fuehrer for smashing the "troublesome" trade unions, for eliminating
democratic elections, for fighting the "bolshevik menace", for regaining
German national prestige, building a great Wehrmacht and for supplying the
Veltrup Armaments works with large contracts, plenty of pillaged materials
and cheap slave labor. Now they had turned against Hitler because he was
losing the war after having promised to win.
There was no pretence of democracy in the city. The 750 municipal bureaucrats
� there was one city official for each 15 inhabitants � were excused from the
compulsory work of rubble clearance and harvesting just as the Nazi
politicians had been. The workers were grumbling about doing their share of
the work while the bigshots were taking it easy. But the opposition received
little comfort from MG. When a Social Democrat distributed a mimeographed
leaflet attacking the "democratic" policies of the German administration and
the retention of Nazis in high places, the mayor labeled him a "communist"
and expressed regret that we had so "misled" the population with our
"propaganda" promises (the Eisenhower Proclamation) to remove the Nazis from
power.
The individual responsible for the very dubious appointments in the municipal
administration was Johann van der Velte, the Bishop of Aachen, a person of
great influence in this predominantly Catholic community. Upon arriving in
Aachen, one of the MG officers had immediately driven the Bishop to the camps
where we had evacuated the Aacheners and asked the Bishop to point out men
who would be capable administrators for the city. The man appointed mayor had
been the Bishop's legal representative before becoming an official in the
Veltrup plant. The whole Aachen administration was actually a kind of
theocratic oligarchy directed by the Bishop, who advised on policy and on the
appointments of officials. To a large section of the Aachen population (and
to Sweet and Padover), the results of the change from the Nazi regime to this
new Church regime were not very apparent.*[* For a full report of this
Padover-Sweet investigation, see [S]aul Padover's book Experiment in Germany,
Duell, Sloane & Pierce, 1946.]
The Padover-Sweet report created a lot of excitement at our headquarters,
where it was quickly rewritten in the form of an official memorandum and
expedited through channels. As we expected, the SHAEF people sat up and
passed the report on to General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander himself. A
shake up of MG and purge of the Nazis in the city administration was ordered
immediately. SHAEF recognized the significance of Aachen. We had to do well
here. ** It was our first victory in Germany, our first city. For us it meant
the first test to our war objectives in the new phase � the phase of final
victory and of the occupation. For the Germans suffering under new Nazi
terrors and deprivations, Aachen was the symbol of liberation, of what they
could expect upon the defeat of the Nazis.[ ** Unfortunately, only a few,
superficial changes were instituted as a result of the SHAEF orders. Mayor
Offenhoff was assassinated under very strange, unexplained circumstances. The
man who replaced him and most of the original city officials, including many
of the Nazis, continued the undemocratic oligarchy
A year later, in January, 1946, the mayor was dismissed by the British (who
had assumed control of the Aachen area in the summer of 1945) for having been
a leading member of the VDA (League of Germans in Foreign Contries[sic], the
organization that stimulated and financed such fifth-column groups as
Henlein's Sudeten Nazis and the German-American Bund) and for being
responsible for having Hitler named an honorary citizen of Aachen in 1939.
In February, 1946, the leaders of the trade unions and of the Social
Democratic and Communist parties requested that the local Technical College
be closed after the students had flatly refused to express their opinions on
the Nuremberg trial when asked to do so by a British MG officer.
Evidently, one could not recondition MG just by writing a sensational report.]
Two months after the fall of Aachen, on December 16th, however, von Rundstedt
unleashed the final German offensive on the western front. He smashed through
our forward defenses and threatened to break through to France and envelop
Aachen and our other German towns. But on December 27th, in the snows and the
cold of the Ardennes in the little town of Bastogne Brig. Gen. Anthony C.
McAuliffe of the tough 101st Airborne answered an ultimatum from an SS
general with a single word � "Nuts!"
That was the answer of the airborne, the combat men, to cynicism and
compromise. Just a few miles away, however, in Aachen, the chairborne, the MG
men, were selling out.
After we crushed the Rundstedt offensive, we paused to regroup our forces for
the final push. The fellows waiting in the mud in front of the Roer River,
sweating it out in front of the Siegfried Line, took heart from the news of
the great Soviet onslaught on the Eastern front. The guns were booming out
victories every night on the Moscow radio. GIs were saying: "It would be a
good idea if the Russians would occupy this whole country. They'd know how to
deal with the Nazis."
When we started to roll again, we raced across the Rhine and swept through
Germany so fast that Army HQ often did not know how far our advanced tanks
were. It was during these vast final victories that we received the news of
an event that was to affect the whole future of our occupation.
That morning I was in Gonzenheim, outside the city of Mainz, at a huge
displaced persons camp. I had assembled all the newly-arrived Russian DPs in
the court between the boxlike barracks buildings. "The brooms, mops and pails
can be collected by volunteers from each floor at the administration
building," � I said. They smiled when I told them that I had assured the
colonel in command of the camp that their buildings would be a model to all
the other national groups. Some of the women were saying to each other: "It's
a good thing we're having a thorough cleaning... some of the rooms down the
hall are in filthy disorder."
I had hurried through these directions. I had something more important to
announce. I paused for a moment, and then slowly I told them: "Today we
Americans have received very sad news. One of the great leaders of the
freedom-loving nations is dead. President Roosevelt is dead."
There was a hush. Some of the women began to weep. A man said: "Hats off!"
The thousand Russians stood grieving silently.
April 12, 1945. The millions of us, GIs and officers, were in mourning. As we
watched the great fleets of planes roaring overhead to blast the last German
cities in the hands of the Nazis, fellows said: "Too bad he didn't live to
see the end... You know, we needed him at the peace table." The GIs trusted
Roosevelt as a leader and considered him the spokesman of their own hopes and
objectives.
Well, the MG personnel followed the advancing troops and took over. Because
of the sudden breakthrough, we had to spread our MG personnel thin over the
large area we were occupying. The detachments were badly understaffed and the
officers were overwhelmed by the catastrophic destruction and complete
disruption of life in the cities to which they had been assigned. With
characteristic American efficiency, they set out to "get things moving."
Unfortunately they often gauged the success of their activity by the speed
with which they repaired the electricity, the gas and the sewage and cleared
the streets.
The combat men, who in many forward areas had acted as temporary MG
officials, shrugged their shoulders when they saw some of the MG officers
dismiss the German officials they had appointed and undo the rigorous, if
crude, denazification and reorganization they had initiated. The troops had
been afraid we'd be soft with the Germans. And sure enough that started
immediately. Concerned with "putting their towns on their feet", MG officers
restricted the requisitioning of billets and in some places GIs even had to
live in tents or railroad cars after VE day (as many of them did in Munich,
for example). "Who was MG representing anyway?"
Another sore point was with the DPs. The beginning of May, 1945, 1 sat in on
a conference between Brig. Gen. Doyle O. Hickey, CO of the crack 3rd Armored
Division, Colonel Shorthouse of UNRRA and Colonel Kompanyeets, the head of
the large Russian DP camp at Darmstadt. General Hickey asked: "Why is it,
Colonel Shorthouse, that I see the Germans walking around freely in the city
and our Russian allies sitting behind barbed wire" In the discussion, the
General learned, as he had expected, that the local MG officers were
insisting on certain restrictions and withholding various kinds of supplies
from the Russians, including mattresses and bedding, in order not to deprive
the local Germans. The General's angry comment was: "If I knew that there
were Russian DPs living in these conditions in other parts of Germany, I
would get up with my division and go and liberate them."
In selecting German officials to help them "get things moving," most MG
officers applied American standards of judgment, the only standards they knew
and appointed men with starched collars, good educations � the regular
churchgoers, the leading citizens, the Rotary Club-Chamber of Commerce types,
the kind of men "you can talk to", the men "you can trust will get the job
done."
Unfortunately, some of the best of these well-dressed, experienced
administrators with their "connections" and "established reputations", they
discovered, had either been members of the Nazi Party or had closely
collaborated with the Nazis. But strangely enough, after having read all the
Stars and Stripes stories of the brutality of the Nazis, many MG men found
that individual Party members did not have horns; many of them were just
plain businessmen with whom it was easy to get along.
All of the Germans, of course, assured MG that they had been mere "muss"
(must) Nazis � "for the sake of business", "otherwise you'd never get a
promotion". They had never really supported Hitler, had all helped a Jewish
family once, had not signed their letters with "Heil Hitler!" and had even
listened to the foreign radio broadcasts, and that, you know, had been streng
verboten (strictly forbidden).
After a few weeks on the job probably a good percentage of the MG officers
had come to agree with the "realistic" statement of old "Blood and Guts"
Patton, the Military Governor of Bavaria, that there was no more difference
between * Nazi and an anti-Nazi in Germany than there was between * Democrat
and a Republican back home.
Even highest headquarters was appointing important Nazis or collaborators
with the Nazis to get things moving again � men like Dorpmueller, Hitler's
Minister of Transport, retained by MG to rehabilitate the German railway
system; and Seegar, the MG-selected head of construction and building
materials in the province of Wuerttemberg-Baden, who, as the adjutant to Todt
(the great slavemaster of all the foreign forced labor), had helped build
sections of the Atlantic Wall from whose pillboxes German shells mowed down
allied troops during the invasion.
Each MG officer had the power to retain Party members in their positions if
they were not "more then nominal" Nazis. But only the few MG officers who
differentiated sharply among the different kinds of Nazis and anti-Nazis
carried out a rigorous denazification, the kind the combat troops would have
applauded. All over the Zone there developed confusing and demoralizing
situations where in one county an aggressive officer impervious to German
flattery and whining, had almost completely denazified the civil
administration, while in the surrounding counties the more usual type of MG
men had retained almost all the Party members in office to assist in �
"getting things moving."
Unfortunately, many of our MG officers had not only brought over their
American enthusiasm for efficiency in getting things done ("We'll show these
'krauts' the American way of getting things done") and their partiality for
"men you can deal with", as a result of which they frequently appointed
untrustworthy Germans to positions of importance; but they also brought over
all their stateside (our term for US) prejudices. Many of them were
anti-labor at home and strongly antagonistic to the trade unions. "You can't
expect me to appoint a machinist mayor simply because he once ran an
underground radio," such MG officers would exclaim in officious annoyance.
The anti-Nazis � often workers inexperienced in government and administration
and lacking university degrees �, they complained, were "no help in getting
life moving in my city."
At the basis of much of the opposition to the aggressive anti-Nazis was the
blind prejudice of many of our MG officers against the "communists." Aware of
the growth of the Communist Party throughout Europe and fearful of the
"bolshevization" of the bombed-out, impoverished and demoralized German
population, many MG men immediately began to combat the "red menace". This
campaign against the "reds" has been one of the most wasteful and destructive
developments in the history of our occupation.
With our shortage of well-trained personnel and our lack of a clear, uniform
policy, there was danger of our stumbling at the very outset of the
occupation: befriending unreliable Nazi collaborators, rejecting the
anti-Nazis because of our fear of a "bolshevik" bugaboo and delaying the
ousting of the Hitler followers � the warmakers, the slavemasters and the
plunderers � from their positions of power and influence.
pps. 17-28
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
