05.02.1998

History lessons

Anna Weber reviews ‘Crimes and mercies - The fate of German civilians under Allied occupation, 1944 -1950’ by James Baque

As a young German, I was taught a particular fairytale. Once upon a time there was a country where the people had a democracy, but nothing to eat. A real bad man came, promised them the world and they all followed him. But thankfully there were also the good guys - the Allies. They fought the Nazis and saved the world. Then they taught the Germans real democracy and brought them sunshine, prosperity and everlasting happiness.

Or some of them, at least.

James Baque, author of Crimes and mercies, objects to this facile view of German history. In his book, he tries to reveal the ‘real story’ behind the Allied policies after World War II, primarily their crimes against the German population. But he tilts at windmills instead of uncovering the big secrets he claims.

In fact, it is common knowledge that this view of the Allies as ‘saviours’ is a myth. Even Konrad Adenauer, the first German chancellor after 1945 who was a forceful proponent of the integration of Germany into the west, did not argue anything so stupid. He wrote shortly after the war that the policies of the Allies (including those of his American friends) led to the expulsion of 14 million Germans from Eastern Europe and death on a huge scale.

But despite the fact that the plot is so well known, Baque cannot resist hamming it up. “Here was the outline of a moral struggle so vast it defied definition,” he breathlessly tells his audience. “This seemed to me to be the same struggle between good and evil that had gone on in the mind of Jesus Christ, as he stood on a hillside in the desert and was tempted by the devil” (p xxii).

But there was very little by way of redemption. James Baque encapsulates the ‘mercies’ bestowed upon German civilians with just two words: Herbert Hoover. Over 80 pages he celebrates the “inventor of universal human rights” (p32), who organised food relief after both world wars..

But Baque is definitely more interested in the dark side of post-war politics and this is where the book starts to become interesting. His main argument is that the Allies purposely let millions of Germans die after the war as an act of revenge on a nation that had supported the Nazis: “For several years the Allies wreaked a vengeance on the German such as the world has never seen. A whole nation was converted to a starvation prison” (p57).

He calculates that between nine and 13 million Germans died as a result of Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after World War II. The Allies confiscated 25% of the arable land and expelled nearly all the inhabitants into the damaged and shrunken remainder. Germans were prevented from growing sufficient food to feed themselves; they were forbidden to use fertiliser; were not allowed to manufacture goods to pay for food imports; and no foreign food relief was permitted in the year immediately following the war. “By autumn 1945, industrial production was deliberately reduced to around 25-30% of pre-war levels, thus preventing the chance of buying food imports. This was not a consequence of the bombing or the military campaign. In Germany as a whole, 80-85% of the machinery and plant survived intact, but in 1946 in the US zone, exports were forced down to only three per cent of pre-war levels” (p124).

These are certainly facts that post-war USA in particular - the ‘liberator’ of Europe - does not like raked up. I would not go so far as to call their politics a ‘war of propaganda’, as Baque does.  But US politicians certainly do not boast of the real effects of the occupation of western Germany. The description of US post-war policies and the conditions in Germany make this book really worthwhile reading.

Unfortunately however, Baque revels in the role of ‘truth-bringer’. It is not enough for him just to present the damning facts. No, he insists on uncovering imagined conspiracies. For example, he alleges that the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ which anticipated a divided, agricultural Germany, has in reality never been withdrawn: “Although the American people had been told that the Morgenthau Plan had been abandoned, Roosevelt now told Keynes [Lord Keynes, British economist - AW] in secret that the plan would be implemented. The German economy would be reduced to a level not quite ‘completely agrarian’, he said” (p26).

Despite the fact that his only proof for this is a “memorandum of conversation, Lord Keynes, August 1944” he repeats this accusation over and over again

And this is the real weak point of the book - the unreliable sources of the author’s material, combined with his own over-wrought feelings to make the facts prove his own assumptions. The book is consistently and annoyingly emotive.

Despite the title (concerning the fate of German civilians) he describes in three chapters the fate of German prisoners of war in the allied camps, where POWs were kept till long after the war. Apart from the recollections of ex-prisoners, his main sources are Allied official documents. “On 4 August 1945, 132,262 prisoners were reported by the prisoner of war section of Eisenhower’s command to have been ‘transferred’ to Austria. The responsible political commissioner reported that in the month of August a total of 17,953 prisoners arrived in Austria. If the 114,309 missing prisoners were transferred away as ‘other losses’, but never arrived in Austria, what happened to them? There is only one way to leave a place and not arrive anywhere else, and that is to die” (p59).

Of course, he mentions the other possibility to this “only way” a few pages earlier: falsification of documents. In contrast to the Soviet Union, which believed it would never be brought to account and therefore did less to hide the truth about German war prisoners, the western Allies falsified such documents. Mainly because of pressure from charity organisations in their home countries, they revised the numbers of deaths downwards.

But Baque takes every opportunity to amend these numbers upwards. This tendency to exaggerate Allied crimes, while failing to mention at all the Nazis’, gives the book the feel of contrived revisionism. Whereas Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s willing executioners equates all Germans with Nazis, Crimes and mercies tends to see all Germans as just innocent victims. This impression is reinforced with comments like this: “Many people who have cast doubt on German crimes were jailed. But everybody who denies our post-war crimes is celebrated” (p158).

But I do not think that Baque is a British Nazi. Rather he dives over-enthusiastically into a previously neglected area of research. More than once he loses the thread of his argument and is often trapped by details. This is a real pity, because the subject is worth serious study instead of this rather moralist and subjective effort.

Anna Weber