The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War
/Die Heimatvertriebene: PART II
Fittkau arrives in Frankfort an der Oder
In the fall of 1946 Father Fittkau arrived at the half-destroyed railway station in Frankfurt an der Oder feeling “miserable and helpless.”[1] The less famous Frankfurt now lay astride Germany’s eastern border, and like Görlitz it had become a dumping off place for refugees from the east who were determined to make it to Berlin. Earlier on the same trip, Fittkau had met a refugee couple who had come from Berlin who told him that Berlin was “buried in debris,” where people tried to get by with “money which had no buying power,” which they could spend on “a bread ration of three slices a day.”[2]
Precisely at the moment when Germany was at its weakest point, that the Volksdeutsche who had been expelled from their native provinces in the east began pouring into devastated cities like Görlitz.
The Americans and the British had collaborated with the Russians in the abolition of “Heimat,” roughly translated as homeland or native place. The expelled Germans were now free to go anywhere but home. As Father Fittkau’s train crossed the Oder-Neisse line which was now Germany’s eastern border, he and his fellow expellees were told “You are now in the new liberated Germany. Tomorrow you will be completely free to do as you want. You will be supplied with food for two days. You can go anywhere in Germany you want.”[3] As the disembodied voice droned on, it became clear that there were exceptions to the new rule of unbounded freedom. “It is forbidden,” the voice continued, “to go to the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg-east-of-the-Oder, Posen, Upper Silesia, Lower Silesia….” As Fittkau pointed out, “the list included the places that practically all of us present called home. Where would we go?”[4]
Bereft of any consolation from what this desolate world had to offer and feeling totally abandoned by the now defunct Nazi state, Fittkau’s hopes revived when he saw “a real-life priest, dressed as a priest!” on the platform two tracks away. Full of hope, Fittkau stumbled onto the tracks and fell. Unable to get up, he struggled over the tracks on his hands and knees ignoring the lacerations the stones between the railroad ties were causing. In his attempt to meet another priest and “claim again the great, warm, all-conquering fellowship of the priesthood,” Fittkau, with his hands on the platform but too weak to drag himself onto it, cried out “Laudetur Jesus Christus. Sacerdos sum. I am a Catholic priest. Just back with this transport from nine months at the Petchora. Bless me, Padre.”[5]
Without breaking stride, the priest turned to Fittkau and said in perfect German, “‘I am not a German. I am a Pole. There is nothing I can do for you.’” The Polish priest then turned away and resumed his conversation with his “well-dressed companion.”[6] Unable to process what had just happened to him, Fittkau slumped back on to the tracks and eventually made it to the platform he had recently left so full of hope. He then crawled into a dark corner of the boxcar which had been his home for weeks and wept:
at the black meaning of the thing that had just happened more than at my own frustration. This was how deep the hatreds engendered by the past years had penetrated! This was the price that would have to be paid for the crimes of all our nations. This was the most intimate and most painful wound of war that would first have to be suffered and then slowly healed. I was so saddened that I thought it would have been better if I had died and not come back… Cast down by this completely unexpected blow, I did not have the strength to realize that at that very moment I was being called to atone for this outgrowth of hatred which had entered like a cancer even into the living body of the world-wide community of the Church.[7]
After his return from Petchora, Father Fittkau learned that the eastern provinces were to be divided up between the Russians and the Poles and that the German residents who had lived there for centuries were to be “humanely transferred” out of it across the former Polish Corridor into the German mainland.[8] Fifteen million people were to be:
uprooted from centuries of tradition-soaked living and dumped where there was neither room for them nor place for their way of life? How could this be done “humanely”? The thought passed my mind that the spirit of Hitler had triumphed after his death. He had attained his wish that if he fell he would pull all Germany down with him. The communities of my own Ermland had survived and kept their continuity through a dozen invasions by Poles, Lithuanians, Hussites, Russians, Swedes and French. They had seen Gustavus Adolphus and Napoleon fight great battles over their land long before Hitler and Stalin. Now they would cease to be. I saw the tremendous work among distressed people that would lie ahead if I managed to survive to take part in it.[9]
Germany had arrived at “die Stunde Null” (Hour Zero). At around the same time Father Fittkau arrived in Frankfurt an der Oder after being expelled from East Prussia, Josef Cardinal Frings, archbishop of Cologne, near Germany’s western border, was trying to make sense of the suffering Catholics had endured at the hands of the Nazis and then at the hands of those who liberated them from the Nazis:
For those of you who still carry the marks of that war in your bodies, comes the oppressive consciousness that it was all in vain and all of that effort was pointless. In addition to that once again as in 1918, world public opinion blames our people for everything that happened in this catastrophe. Things are now being revealed which were done in the name of the German people which must be described as terrible and crying to heaven.[10]
Frings’ oblique reference to the Holocaust, however, should not prevent the German people from understanding that they too “lived under a reign of terror during these years,” and that “this authoritarian system permitted no influence of the people on the measures taken by the government.” Warnings from the Catholic Church were ignored:
The Catholic Church stood many times in open opposition to this regime, and the Holy Father in Rome reinforced this position when he issued the encyclical “Mit Brennder Sorge” which condemned the errors of Nazism with unusual sharpness. The Church opposed the myth of “blood and race” and described it as a return to pagan idolatry. The Church advocated the equality of all races. At the pontifical masses of Christmas 1943 and Easter of 1944, I protested in my homily against the injustice which was committed against the Jews and members of other nations. We all remember clearly how the bishop of Muenster protested against the murder of “Lebenunwertesleben.” Germany was paying the price for ignoring the voice of the Catholic Church when Frings, in particular, proposed the Ten Commandments as the only suitable foundation for public good. The priests who opposed Hitler ended up in prison and in concentration camps for the courageous words they spoke from the pulpit. God alone knows how many had to die for their steadfast defense of the faith. Germany would have been spared untold suffering if those in power had listened to the Catholic Church.[11]
Frings then turned his attention to the new boss and reminded those Americans bent on implementing the Morgenthau Plan that “our people are threatened by starvation because Germany is now incapable of feeding its own people because the highway and rail systems have either been blown up by their own people or destroyed by allied bombing campaigns…. Thousands of innocent children along with widows and the old stretch out their hands for bread. Who will hand them a stone instead of bread and a scorpion instead of a fish.”[12]
Meanwhile, Fittkau was entering the brave new world the Americans had created. Courageous priests who had stood up to Hitler now shared the same fate as the Nazi war criminals who had persecuted them:
The Allies had the power of life and death over the Germans. They could shoot to kill. Habeas corpus was suspended and Germans could be imprisoned at will. The Germans had no rights or authority of any kind. Their country was like a gigantic concentration camp in which they lived in enforced isolation from the world. Nonfraternization laws at first forbade them to converse with British or American soldiers except in the course of duty. They could not travel, send letters, or receive newspapers or books from abroad. They were subject to curfew. They could not use the telephone or travel more than six kilometers from their homes. Their bank accounts were frozen. They could be searched or seized and their property requisitioned at a moment’s notice. Meetings of more than five people were prohibited. Males between 14 and 65 and females between 15 and 50 were liable to compulsory labor. They were defeated, disillusioned, demoralized. They were saddled with a history of which they were ashamed and treated as barbarians whether they had been Nazis or not.[13]
Unlike the Holocaust narrative, which is made up almost entirely of personal memoirs, the story of the German expulsions is “remarkably well-documented.”
In Bonn the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims later published the results of a fact-finding commission entitled Documentation on the Expulsions of the German Population from East Central Europe which contained hundreds of verified eyewitness accounts running into 5,000 pages in eleven volumes: the English digest of this vast work itself runs into more than a million words. Similar compilations of evidence were produced by the Goettingen Research Institute, the Bishops of Western Germany and others. Obviously it is impossible to cite here more than a handful of specific incidents which typify the range of experiences endured —the long columns of people, battered suitcases in hand, pulling handcarts and pushing prams along the country roads, jeered at, spat on, beaten, eaten up by lice and other vermin; the trains of open cattle trucks full of mothers, children and old people packed shoulder to shoulder in sun, rain and snow; bewildered, exhausted people at the end of their tether, owning only what they can carry, with nowhere to go and no hope for the future.[14]
By the early 1950s:
over 10 million of the expellees had ended up in Western Germany—nearly all of them in the British and American zones. By the end of 1950 Germany, having lost one-quarter of her prewar territory to Poland and the Soviet Union, had undergone within her reduced, devastated and occupied area a 17 percent increase in population, made up of people all of whom were destitute and less than half of whom were capable of productive work.[15]
In East Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudentenland, and Silesia, there was no more room for the vanquished. According to historians, approximately 14 million Germans were forced to leave their homes. The exact number is still unknown. The first stop for the expellees were the quickly thrown together and hopelessly overcrowded barracks in the vicinity of the eastern border. Whether the rest of their journey headed to the western or eastern parts of German was decided by fate or coincidence. Approximately 8 million German refugees ended up in what would later become the Bundesrepublik, and another 4.1 million ended up in the Soviet Zone, where they were sent off into the countryside. In many of the villages in Mecklenburg, there were more foreigners than natives. Twenty-four percent of the entire population of what would become the DDR was made up of foreigners.[16]
From May to July 1945, 800,000 Sudeten Germans were driven out of Czechoslovakia, a consequence of World War II which set a cycle of hatred and revenge in motion. The expellees ended up stranded in German border towns like Görlitz. That city on the Neisse was completely overwhelmed and famine broke out there, until finally the refugees were driven from the town.
In addition to the hardship involved in a forced march through a war-devastated country, the German refugees now had to face the ethnic hatred which had been seething for six years only to break out into a bloody boil after German forces surrendered on May 9, 1945. With no German troops to protect them, the Volksdeutsch of the Sudentenland were delivered into the hands of Czech “partisans” who could kill and rape them with impunity firm in the knowledge that the Benes government supported terror as the best inducement to ethnic displacement. Most of the victims were children and juveniles who had been locked up “because they were Germans” in revenge for the German purges which locked up Jews because they were Jews, and more often than not the Germans ended up in the same concentration camps where they were more abominably treated than the Jews had been during the Nazi occupation:
The worst excesses were committed by young male Czechs in their late teens and early twenties, most of them members of the so called National or Revolutionary Guard, who resembled the SS even in appearance and gave themselves over to bouts of the most disgusting sadism. In these places German babies were drowned in the camp latrines while their mothers were forced to look on; German doctors were forced to crawl along the ground eating human excrement; men had their legs and arms systematically broken while they were still alive.[17]
In the aftermath of the Potsdam conference, 14 million refugees were being transported to a country which was incapable of feeding and housing those who had survived the Allied bombing campaign. Nuremberg was “91 percent dead,”[18] except for the old town, which was 99 percent dead. Ninety-three percent of the housing stock in Düsseldorf had been destroyed.[19]
In the Soviet zone, 2.34 million out of a total of 16 million houses had been completely destroyed and another 4 million had sustained 25 percent damage or more. In the British zone, 3.5 million of the 5.5 million total housing stock had been destroyed.[20] In the combined American and British zones, 20 million people were homeless. All 22 of the rail bridges over the Rhein had been destroyed, making the transport of food virtually impossible.[21]
The collapse of Germany’s infrastructure led to a situation in July 1945 in which the daily civilian ration was 800 calories, an amount which could not sustain life and was in fact lower than the rations distributed at Nazi concentration camps. Weakened by malnutrition, the German survivors of the war were now forced to drink from a water supply which had been contaminated by sewage leaking from pipes fractured during the Allied bombing raids, leading to the spread of typhoid fever, diphtheria, and dysentery. As a result, “The death rate of the very young and the very old reached a level not seen since the Thirty Years War nearly three hundred years before: in August, four thousand people died each day, compared with one hundred and fifty before the war.”[22]
Henry Morgenthau
At this point the Jews who had fled Germany before the war returned bent on vengeance and determined to make a bad situation worse. Seventy percent of the lawyers at the Nuremberg War Tribunal were Jews. Jews like Theodore Kaufman and Louis Nizer were advocating the sterilization of German men after which they were to be deported to neighboring countries where they would work as slave labor until they died. The Morgenthau Plan, another Jewish plot against the German people, proposed the de-industrialization of Germany, knowing full well that 20 percent of the population would die as a consequence.
In March of 1946, the United States stopped all grain shipments to Germany, forcing rations to fall to 1,015 calories in the British zone, which had enjoyed higher than average rations. By the end of 1946, as Germany headed into the unusually severe winter of 1946-47 which has gone down in German history books as Das Hungerjahr, food consumption in the British Zone had been reduced to 400 calories per day or “half the figure for Belsen concentration camp under Nazi rule.”[23] Starvation paved the way for disease:
Hunger typhus, spread by lice, began to appear among Berliners who were too listless and demoralized to keep themselves clean. The German people were getting closer to starvation every day. By September 1946 their average weight was at its lowest since the beginning of the Occupation. Their faces turned gray or yellow, with dark rings under their eyes. Women cried for bread in the streets. People walked at a painfully slow pace and grew old with dramatic suddenness. Cases of hunger oedema soared—in Hamburg alone there were over 100,000 hospitalized cases in October 1946.[24]
Civilians suffered more than the demobilized soldiers:
Victor Gollancz, who had taken up the cause of the defeated Germans in the English press, was appalled by the fate of the German children in Hamburg. “I have just returned from visiting a bunker—a huge air-raid shelter, without daylight or air, where 800 children get their schooling,” he reported. “In one class of 41 children, 23 had had no breakfast, and nothing whatsoever until half past two, then they had the school meal of half a liter of soup, without bread. Seven of these children had the ugly skin blemishes that are mixed up in some way with malnutrition; all were white and pasty. Their gaping “shoes” mean the end of what little health they have when the wet weather comes. Many children had no shoes at all and went barefoot—three quarters of a million in Schleswig-Holstein were in this state. Few had winter coats of any kind.[25]
Morality collapsed along with the food supply, as in:
the corrupting underworld atmosphere of greed and need, outright crime and prostitution flourished, especially among the young.[26] Tens of thousands of young people, orphaned or separated from their families by the chaos of the war, wandered across the American zone like vagabonds. In the British zone there were 100,000 of them and 80 percent of the girls suffered from venereal disease, living in gangs in the ruins and surviving on the proceeds of crime. Cases involving juvenile delinquents increased by 400 percent. In Berlin 2,000 people of all ages were arrested every month, an increase of 800 percent on prewar figures. In one month alone in Berlin 199 children aged between eight and fourteen were charged with theft, 23 with breaking and entering, and 58 with black-market offenses and causing grievous bodily harm…. By the beginning of 1946 Berlin had become the crime capital of the world with a record number of murders, suicides, thefts, rapes, abortions, frauds and cases of prostitution. Each day there were 240 robberies. Each day five people were killed and six injured by criminals. In March 1946 the civil crime list included 41 cases of murder, 11,000 thefts and 1,551 black-market offenses. Scores of gangs of dangerous criminals—ex-Nazis, Russian deserters, Poles, Frenchmen, Spaniards and Czechs—lived in cellars stocked with stolen uniforms, ammunition, British and American rations, and black jacks. One of the most notorious of the gangs was the Lehrter Bahnhof gang, which was composed of Russian deserters, Russian orphans and Germans. One gang a hundred strong attacked a train at Anhalter Bahnhof in May 1946.[27]
To make matters worse:
The winter of 1946-7 was one of the coldest in European history. The cold weather began in mid-December. Driving snow and freezing temperatures continued without remission until March. Germany was seized in the iron grip of a winter for which it was not equipped either materially or psychologically. In Berlin wolves were driven by hunger into the city’s outlying woods and signs were put up on the Berlin ring-road: “BEWARE OF WOLVES!” There was no fuel for heating. Two days after Christmas a German refugee train from Poland was found to contain 16 corpses and 57 cases of severe frostbite when it arrived at the frontier of the British zone. The refugees had traveled in goods wagons which had no form of heating even though the temperature was -20°F.[28]
The End of Operation Swallow
By 1947, the Allies decided to end the expulsions. Devastated Germany was in no position to accept millions of refugees, who:
were arriving in a country whose urban centers the Western Allies had gone to immense trouble and expense during the previous five years to level to the ground, an endeavor in which they had enjoyed considerable success and which had left Germany with “a worse housing problem than has ever before existed in any area of comparable size and population.” Even after every available camp, military base, school, church, barn, air raid shelter, and, in some cases, cave had been filled with expellees, the onrushing human tide continued to overwhelm the best efforts of the rudimentary German administration upon whose shoulders the occupying forces thrust the responsibility. As a rule, according to reception officers in all three occupation zones, the expellees were arriving in possession of little more than the—usually insufficient—clothing in which they stood. The overwhelming majority were women and children. Few could make any meaningful contribution in the short term to their own support. Hundreds of thousands needed immediate care, in hospitals, old-age homes, orphanages, or residential centers for the disabled, though the shortage of resources meant that a great many would not receive it.
This was not at all how the Allies had envisaged the population transfers when they had been sold on the idea during the war. Then the stated rationale had been to remove a cohort of “dangerous” Germans—above all, fit men of military age—who might threaten the security of the countries in which they lived. Instead, it had been the least dangerous Germans who had been deported, while the fit men were being held back for forced labor, and in many cases pressured to take out Polish or Czechoslovak nationality against their will. The occupying powers thus found themselves presented with a first-class social, economic, and humanitarian crisis that threatened to undo whatever plans they had made for German reconstruction, as well as to disrupt the economies of the expelling states for years to come. Predictably, each of the Big Three with the benefit of experience discovered its enthusiasm for this novel method of “stabilizing” the European continent shrinking to the vanishing point. After coping—or failing to cope—with the “wild expulsions” of 1945, and finding the “organized expulsions” of 1946 from their perspective to be less satisfactory yet, each of the Allied powers entered 1947 with the same overriding objective: to put an end to what was proving an intolerable burden as quickly as possible.[29]
German Expellees
The first refusal to allow German refugees into German territory occurred on January 6, 1947, when British soldiers at Szczecin (Stettin) balked at admitting a train “provided by the Poles to carry a transport of Germans to Lübeck, 220 miles away.”[30] Seven months later, on July 28, 1947, the British Government officially announced the termination of Operation Swallow.[31] Following its demise, Father Edward Swanstrom of the U.S. Catholic Church’s War Relief Services, wrote the obituary for Operation Swallow by calling it “as callous a bit of human engineering as the post-war west can boast.”[32] The final organized transports occurred in the summer of 1949, when another Polish-Soviet agreement provided for the dissolution of the remaining labor camps for Germans in Poland and the removal of their inmates, a total of 24,000 persons, to East Germany.[33]
Understanding that the chaos and upheaval of war could provide cover for crimes against humanity, the leaders of the Big Three “knew that the immediate postwar period offered them an all-too-brief window of opportunity to redraw the political and ethnographic map of central Europe, and in the process to achieve a social as well as a political revolution in the region.”[34]
German Expellees
In 1950 the DDR passed a law which made 400 million marks available for the amelioration of the conditions of the expellees, but instead of a “Recht auf Heimat,” (Right to Homeland) something the communists considered revanchist thinking, the expellees were offered membership in the socialist state, where they were deprived of the term “Heimatvertriebene” and renamed “Umsiedler” or settlers. Five years later, the Socialist state announced that the integration of the “Umsiedler” had been concluded successfully. The price East Germany had to pay for peace was recognition of the Oder-Neisse line as its new eastern border, which meant that the expellees now had to consider their former homeland forever lost.[35]
As the post-war looting fever died down in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the newly installed Communist governments began to see that they had lost more than they had gained. The ethnic cleansing had led not only to “an acute population shortage” in the so-called “recovered territories,” it had led to the expulsion of the most skilled and productive citizens of those regions.[36] Farms were abandoned with the harvest of 1945 still standing with no one to work them. Farmland in the region south of Lignica had reverted to the swamps Germany had drained generations ago, as Poles and Czechs turned from honest labor to looting or “gold digging,”[37] which “permeated the whole of Czechoslovak and Polish society, from the very bottom to the highest echelons.”[38]
The loss of skilled German labor had an even more devastating effect on manufacturing. Even before the expulsions, the Poldina chemical works was unable to open after the war in spite of the fact that 9,000 workers showed up for work because the firm “could not find replacements for 270 expelled German chemists, who were essential to running the plant.”[39] After the war, Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s vice premier, was forced to admit “that in expelling the Volksdeutsche, Yugoslavia had deprived itself of ‘our most productive inhabitants.’”[40] Since labor is the source of all value, it should come as no surprise that Germany was the prime beneficiary of the expulsions in the long run because they concentrated German labor where it was needed the most and in doing so led to the Wirtschaftswunder which took place in the 1950s.
The Marshall Plan
The end of the expulsions corresponded in time with the repudiation of the Morgenthau Plan and the adoption of the Marshall Plan in its place. As one of its first acts, the Marshall Plan reformed the currency, putting an end to an era when cigarettes were money. Once the economic recovery which followed the currency reform kicked in, the Germans whose families had lived in villages and on farms in the east for centuries were now free to live in what Walter Gropius referred to as “Wohnmaschinen,” machines for living in, dreary settlements like the eponymous Gropiusstadt in Berlin. Bauhaus, which was the architectural lingua franca of living arrangements in both parts of divided Germany, was known as the international style for a reason. It was meant to deprive the Germans of their notion of “Heimat” and turn them into sex robots and wage slaves through socialism in the east and social engineering in the west.
The social engineering which replaced the Morgenthau Plan took on various forms as it evolved over the years following the war. Both the Allies and the Axis powers engaged in Ethnic Cleansing. Hitler got the idea of expelling Jews from the Turks, who expelled the Armenians from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire in 1914 after they sided with the Russian invaders. The situations were similar. When they started attending Russian universities, Armenian nationalists became radicalized by their exposure to Narodnaya Volya, the Jewish terrorist organization that would eventually murder Czar Alexander. Eventually they coalesced into the Dashnaks, an Armenian terrorist organization which looked upon the Russians as liberators in much the same way that German Jews saw the Soviet Union as their liberators after World War I when they formed the soviet republics of Berlin and Bavaria. Inspired by the Turkish ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, Hitler applied it to the Jews whom he perceived as the Bolshevik fifth column in Germany. Stalin soon followed suit, expelling the Volga Deutsch to Siberia, followed by the removal of any group he felt posed a similar danger to the war effort.
After the war, various forms of social engineering were tried out on the Germans with varying degrees of success. Denazification was an early form of social engineering in Germany which failed because of the magnitude of its scope. After identifying 13 million potential Nazis and conducting 545 tribunals administered by a staff of 22,000 employees in the American zone alone, the Americans threw in the towel and ended the first phase of the occupation era by admitting that “denazification” had failed.[41]
Undeterred, America’s social engineers looked for more sophisticated versions of engineering the consent of the German people. Louis Wirth, a sociologist who was both a Jew and a communist while employed at the University of Chicago, wrote a report on the Detroit race riots of 1942 for the Office of War Information. As a Communist, Wirth followed Stalin’s example by imposing ethnic cleansing on groups which he felt were disloyal because of their national origin. Germans and Italians were obvious targets, but the scope of targeted groups soon expanded to include Poles and the Irish, which was only explicable if one saw Catholicism as the common denominator of disloyalty. Wirth along with Frank Notestein and other members of the American psychological warfare establishment wrote most if not all of the chapters in The American Dilemma, which appeared in 1944 under the name of Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish socialist who was the front man for the book which launched social engineering in America after the war. The social engineering of those ethnic groups which couldn’t be trusted began in Chicago immediately after the war under Wirth’s direction, prompting riots in Airport Park in 1946 and de facto civil war for the next 20 years.
The winter of 1946-47 is known in Germany as Das Hungerjahr, and it was the culmination of the Morgenthau Plan to de-industrialize Germany and reduce its population by 20 percent through starvation. Public outcry led by figures like Herbert Hoover and Secretary of War Stimson, who saw it as a manifestation of semitic vengeance and leading to a Communist takeover of Germany, led to a change in policy and the eventual adoption of the Marshall Plan as its replacement.
In September 1946, as part of his plan to define a more positive American alternative to the draconian Morgenthau Plan, General Lucius Clay invited Secretary of State James Byrnes to come to Stuttgart “to address an audience of Military Government administrators on the subject of U.S. policy toward Germany.”[42] Faced with a deteriorating economy that was bound to create “political unrest favorable to the development of communism in Germany,” General Lucius Clay asked the State Department to develop a “more positive American policy in Germany.”[43]
In September 1947 Secretary of State James Byrnes broke with the policy of semitic vengeance which characterized the Roosevelt administration’s Morgenthau Plan and announced that “The American people want to return the government of Germany to the German people. The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.’’[44] The speech marked the end of the negative phase of the punitive military occupation government and the beginning of a civilian regime that was deceptively mild by comparison. In his response to Byrnes’ speech, a newly elected deputy in the Hesse parliament in the American zone, declared later in the same year:
Today’s misery comes from the shutting out of democracy. The spirit of militarism and of National Socialism must die if Germany is to live. The Germans must feed themselves and pay for their own goods or every word about democracy is meaningless and a nation goes under. Not every German is guilty, but the majority made great mistakes. Collective guilt is to be rejected. The German people have contributed much to the world, and Germany freed from the ideology of the past should have a place in it, and a change in its unbearable fate. The Byrnes speech was a ray of hope for the possibility of a state, a community for Germany. It breached the iron ring of helplessness.[45]
In 1947, Paul Blanshard, a lapsed Protestant minister, began publishing articles in the liberal journal The Nation exposing the medieval views of the Catholic Church on issues like medicine and censorship and how Catholic political power posed a threat to American freedom. Those essays appeared in book form in 1949 under the title American Freedom and Catholic Power, to the acclaim of the WASP ruling class, which also made up the basis of America’s psychological warfare establishment, which would coalesce as the Central Intelligence Agency four years later. As part of the same intelligence apparatus, Louis Wirth made a seamless transition from the Office of War Information to being the main architect of social engineering in America after the war. Wirth died on May 3, 1952, two years before the Supreme Court ratified social engineering in its Brown v. School Board and Berman v. Parker decisions.
On June 19, 1948, the United States announced the launch of Germany’s new currency. “The result was electrifying. West Germany’s economic miracle began on that day. The black market was wiped out almost overnight, and the black-market barons were beggared. The cigarette, which for three years had been Germany’s only valued unit of exchange, became once again merely something to smoke, as confidence in money was restored.”[46] The Deutsche Mark eventually paved the way for Germany’s economic miracle, but more immediately it caused the Soviets to blockade Berlin to all traffic from the British and American occupation zones.
The Americans responded with the Berlin Air Lift, which dominated the news for the rest of the year. Missing from both accounts was the boom in the sale of erotica which accompanied the currency reform with the blessings of the Allies, who encouraged the consumption of pornography by liberalizing Germany’s laws governing the press and book publishing. From the time of the currency reform, erotica was easily available, and competition in the magazine branch was great.
By the summer of 1948, kiosks in big cities were festooned with rows of provocative magazines. Bookstores, especially those near train stations put dozens of magazines with thinly clad women in their show windows.[47] In the period 1948-9, roughly 140 publishers of erotica sprang up in the western occupation zones.[48] During the summer of 1949, 500 tons of erotica were smuggled across the Austrian border and then distributed throughout the western occupation zones.[49] This sexualization of the public square led to a crackdown by civil authorities. Police in Bavaria made daily raids on the train station kiosks and confiscated material that was obscene according to Paragraph 184, the law prohibiting obscene material.
The decline and fall narrative which the German legion of decency or Volkswartbund launched in response to the flood of pornography which followed the currency reform crossed into dangerous territory the minute Jewish subversion became a basic element of the decency debate. Once Jews were portrayed as profiting from an industry which promoted moral subversion because they were prominent as movie and theater owners as well as heads of publishing houses, alarm bells went off.[50] Michael Calmes, head of the Volkswartbund, was convinced that America was the source of these “tumors.”
As early as 1928, Calmes was convinced that “the Americanization of our ethnic culture” was the source of a dangerous flattening of our spiritual life.”[51] During the summer of 1949, the same year that the Committee for Voluntary Self-Control of the Film Industry came into being in Wiesbaden, Calmes was busy handing out citations for obscenity violations. In 1949 virtually every parliament in every German state was preoccupied with obscenity issues. The consensus among the German people, if not its political class, was that something needed to be done to stem the tide, and if the governments weren’t willing to act, the people, now made up of Wehrmacht veterans who retained their military training, were ready to take matters into their own hands. The Allies, therefore, viewed the debate over Schmutz und Schund (filth and smut) with suspicion if not alarm.
Toward the end of 1949, the German PEN club under the leadership of Erich Kaestner, along with various academic and publishing organizations, warned that if Germans did not have access to pornography, Germany ran the risk of returning to the Third Reich. The Frankfurter Rundschau, mobilized by the people who had just ruined Germany, considered proponents of the proposed obscenity law explicitly “Nazi activists.” Anyone who defended a rigid sexual morality, according to an opinion which was widespread among the opponents to the obscenity law, betrayed a strong tendency to the Nazi world view.[52] Kaestner, who fitted the deviance profile established by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality perfectly, considered the opponents to obscenity intellectual arsonists of the sort who burned books during the Third Reich.[53] Virtually every magazine and newspaper in the Bundesrepublik weighed in on the obscenity issue over the Fall of 1949 and the Spring of 1950.
Shortly after New Years’ Day 1950, Clarence M. Bolds, the state commissioner for the Allied High Commission in Bavaria, held a press conference during which he warned the Germans in no uncertain terms that their planned anti-obscenity law was both a threat to freedom of the press and superfluous because the law already was capable of dealing with objectionable material.[54]
The Catholics, however, were not convinced. A Catholic layman from Passau claimed that “The freedom of the press finds its limit when it reaches the immutable laws of Christian morality. The commands of God and the welfare of the German people rank higher than freedom of the press because they guarantee the moral well-being of her youth.”[55]
The change from semitic vengeance to social engineering as the basis for America’s policy during the immediate post war period got imposed on the German people by John J. McCloy, who would also impose social engineering in the form of ethnic cleansing on Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in the United States during the period immediately following his tenure as High Commissioner in Germany. As head of the Ford Foundation in the 1960s, McCloy would employ Black ministers like Leon Sullivan to recruit Black sharecroppers from North and South Carolina to drive Catholics out of ethnic neighborhoods in Philadelphia.[56]
In May of 1949, John J. McCloy succeeded General Lucius Clay as governor of Germany. In September 1949, the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) was disbanded and replaced by the High Commission for Germany (HICOG), and its headquarters were moved from Berlin to Frankfurt. During this transition, the military governor became the state commissioner and final jurisdiction was transferred from the Defense Department to the State Department. Clarence Bolds, formerly assistant to the high commissioner, agreed to stay on as acting land commission until McCloy found a successor. During that period, Bolds continued to support the position of the German PEN club on obscenity. When McCloy returned to the United States in the Spring of 1950, he offered the job to George Shuster.[57]
George Shuster
Shuster’s support of Clarence Bolds’ understanding of the priority of free speech over the moral and social order was a foregone conclusion and probably the reason McCloy tapped Shuster for the job. In 1942 Henry R. Luce, publisher and founder of TIME magazine, contributed $200,000 to create a commission to study “the present state and future prospects of the freedom of the press.”[58] Luce created the commission in conjunction with Robert Hutchins, who was then the chancellor of the University of Chicago. One of the men appointed to that commission was George Shuster, who was president of Hunter College in New York.
Faust and Mephistopheles
Shuster was a German Catholic from Wisconsin whose forebears arrived in America as political refugees from the Revolution of 1848. Shuster would remain true to that dual and in some sense contradictory identity for the rest of his life. After graduating from Notre Dame University, Shuster joined the army and was immediately placed in military intelligence in France during World War I. Demobbed in 1919, he returned to Notre Dame to head the English Department,[59] where he worked closely with the President of the university until he “was unexpectedly removed from the presidency by his religious superiors,” for taking funds from “hostile forces,” like the Rockefellers.[60] Shuster also left and publicly criticized the university from New York. In a letter, he described his relationship with the new administration as ‘acidic,’ “They can’ [sic, can’t] quite forgive the fact that I’m not obliged to crawl back to Notre Dame for a job...”[61] In New York, Shuster edited papers like Commonweal while attempting to get a doctorate in English at Columbia University. Shuster would write the Catholic take on various literary masterpieces, but, according to Notre Dame historian Father Thomas Blantz, Shuster’s two favorite authors were Goethe and Emerson, both of whom were fascinated with Satan.[62]
Shuster found Goethe’s Faust particularly fascinating because the main character was “a man of universal interests” who “having gone through most legitimate ways of knowing, seemed willing to try illegitimate ones.”[63] According to Blantz’s sanitized version of Goethe’s play, Faust is driven by “his thirst for knowledge” to make a pact with the devil because he is a “good and God-fearing man” who “can be seduced into losing his eternal salvation, in this case finding absorbing satisfaction and fulfillment here on earth” in ways that reflected Shuster’s career as a factotum for WASP elites like the Rockefellers, and Jews like Rabbi Wise, especially when they were concerned about rising Catholic political power following World War II. According to Blantz, Shuster is a Faust figure who “is ultimately saved because in fact he never is satisfied; he remains constantly searching.”[64]
Blantz’s sanitized reading of Faust ignores the fact that he is damned more often than he is saved in the various renditions of the Faust myth and that his desire for knowledge is distinctly carnal. As one of his first requests after selling his soul, Faust asks Mephistopheles to conjure up Helen of Troy. Faust, like Shuster, abandoned the intellectual life for the life of an academic power broker long before he arrived in Germany, as Goethe makes clear in the opening lines of the play when Faust repudiates “Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie” in favor of worldly power and all the pleasures which go with it. Similarly, Blantz tells us that Shuster admired Emerson because he “captured American confidence and optimism well. He urged his fellow citizens to take advantage of those unique opportunities, to be truly self-reliant, to strive and accomplish goals no other nation had yet achieved.”[65]
Missing from Blantz’s account of Emerson is the same Satanic strain which he ignored in Goethe’s Faust. With Satan’s speech from Milton’s Paradise Lost still ringing in his ears, Emerson takes Satan’s claim that “The mind is its own place,” and localizes it in America, where “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” When a friend suggests that “these impulses may be from below and not from above,” Emerson nails his Satanic colors to the mast: “They do not seem to me to be such, but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”
What emerges inadvertently from Blantz’s literary profile is a portrait of Shuster as a man willing to sell his soul for worldly fame and power to those who were avid to undermine the influence of the Catholic Church following World War II. In both prostrate Germany and the victorious United States of America, Shuster did the bidding of the ruling class elites to undermine the moral law, especially in the area of sexuality, and limit the ability of the Catholic Church to influence public policy.
During the 1940s Shuster supported freedom of the press, as defined by Harry Luce, head of the Time/Life media empire and a close collaborator with U.S. intelligence agencies through his factotum C. D. Jackson, who was simultaneously in the employ of TIME magazine and the CIA. According to Blantz, Luce “feared that freedom of the press, one of the pillars of the American way of life, might be endangered either from internal weaknesses in the media itself or from government interference or private pressure groups from outside.”[66] If freedom of the press were under threat in America, then it was a fortiori under threat in Germany, which was still coming to grips with its Nazi past, under the watchful guidance of American mentors like Clarence M. Bolds, who was Shuster’s predecessor as governor of Bavaria. Blantz failed to mention that obscenity, not freedom of speech, was the issue dividing Germany when Shuster was American proconsul for Bavaria. In 1949, obscenity was not considered protected speech under the First Amendment in America, but policy under the American occupation dictated that it be considered as such in conquered Germany. Shuster was hired as land commissioner of Germany precisely because, as a German Catholic, he was better able to engineer consent among suspicious Germans. “Freedom of the press” was a red herring whose only purpose was to serve as a distraction from the Allies’ use of pornography as a form of social control.
The one constant in Shuster’s career was his determination to weaken the Catholic Church. As land commissioner in Bavaria in 1950-1, Shuster’s job was to neutralize the Catholic Church as the prime defender of the moral order in Germany and bring about the recognition of the de facto separation of Church and State even if the Church received subsidies from the state. In 1963, Shuster played the same role at Notre Dame University as the bag man for Rockefeller money, which was used to undermine the Church’s teaching on contraception during a series of secret conferences which lasted from 1963 to 1965.
As a follow-up to the intelligence work he did for the Signal Corps during World War I, Shuster took a number of trips to Germany during the 1930s to investigate the rise of Hitler. Blantz tells us that Shuster received a grant from the “Vereinigung Carl Schurz, a German foundation supporting and encouraging wider American interest in German life and culture” which allowed him to travel for eight months throughout Germany to “conduct interviews with prominent political and religious leaders, including Heinrich Brüning, then chancellor of Germany.”[67]
Based on his travels in Germany during the 1930s, Shuster wrote a number of books which discussed the antagonism of Nazism to religion. In Like a Mighty Army: Hitler versus Established Religion, Schuster claimed that “Europe was a religious continent, a Judeo-Christian continent, and the author raised the question of what might happen if religion were to break down or be destroyed. Thus it was ‘Hitler’s challenge to the historic churches of Judaism, Protestantism and Catholicism’ that in this work was of primary concern.”[68]
The Schurz grant allowed Schuster to make contact with Catholics who were potential opposition leaders, including Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne who would become the first prime minister of the Bundesrepublik, but was living under house arrest at the time of their clandestine meeting.[69] According to Adenauer’s recollection of their meeting:
Dr. Shuster suddenly appeared from behind a bush! He came on a mission from the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. He wanted my opinions on Hitler and the future of Germany. He left, crawling away from my refuge on his hands and knees to avoid detection. I little thought that the next time I should meet Professor Shuster he would hold a high official position with an American occupying army.”
According to Shuster’s account, “I lay hidden in the bushes till Adenauer was alerted…. We spoke in German. We talked nearly two hours. He warned that Hitler was set on war and that the invasion of Poland was inevitable.”[70] Shuster left immediately to return home by train via Holland. On his way to the ship which would take him back to America, Shuster was questioned by a Gestapo agent, who became suspicious because of Shuster’s lack of papers. Shuster pretended that he didn’t speak German and began reading the London Times. By the time the Gestapo agent had caught on, the train had crossed the border….
[…] This is just an excerpt from the April 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Not that Innocent: Who are the Real
Villains in the Life of Britney Spears? by Eric Brandt
Saul Alinsky’s Chicago by Jack Kopreus
Features
The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War by Dr. E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Satanism as the Hidden Grammar of America by Sean Naughton
(Endnotes Available by Request)
[1] Gerhard A. Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 1958), p. 246.
[2] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 246.
[3] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, pp. 250-1.
[4] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 251.
[5] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 247.
[6] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 247.
[7] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, pp. 247-8.
[8] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 225
[9] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, pp. 225-6.
[10] Letters from Bishop of Cologne, Notre Dame Archives, Shuster papers, C Shu 2/10. My translation.
[11] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year.
[12] Letters from Bishop of Cologne, Notre Dame Archives, Shuster papers, C Shu 2/10. My translation.
[13] Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York: Crown Publishing, Inc., 1985), p. 123.
[14] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 182.
[15] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 191.
[16] “Deutsche Vertriebene im 2. Weltkrieg,” mdf (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk), June 20, 2023, https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ns-zeit/zweiter-weltkrieg/nachkriegszeit/vertriebene-deutsche-sudetendeutsche-heimat-ostpreussen100.html [my translation]
[17] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 185.
[18] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 124.
[19] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 105.
[20] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 124.
[21] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 125.
[22] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 130.
[23] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 142.
[24] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 142.
[25] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 143.
[26] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 145.
[27] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, pp. 145-6.
[28] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, pp. 146-7.
[29] R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 192-3.
[30] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 218.
[31] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 221.
[32] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 221.
[33] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 225.
[34] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 66.
[35] “Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen: Warum Görlitz Flüchtlinge zurückwies,” mdf (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk), June 21, 2023, https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ns-zeit/zweiter-weltkrieg/1945/odsun-goerlitz-sudetendeutsche-vertreibung-flucht-sudetenland-100.html (My translation).
[36] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 261.
[37] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 262.
[38] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 262.
[39] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 279.
[40] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 281.
[41] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 265.
[42] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 287.
[43] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 287.
[44] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 288.
[45] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 288.
[46] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 303.
[47] Sybille Steinbacher, Wie der Sex Nach Deutschland Kam (Muenchen: Siedler Verlag, 2011), p. 26. My translation.
[48] Steinbacher, p. 27.
[49] Steinbacher, p. 27.
[50] Steinbacher, p. 33.
[51] Steinbacher, p. 47.
[52] Steinbacher, p. 58.
[53] Steinbacher, p. 59.
[54] Steinbacher, p. 56.
[55] Steinbacher, p. 57.
[56] Cf. E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2004).
[57] Thomas E. Blantz, C.S.C., George N. Shuster: On the Side of Truth (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 240.
[58] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 212.
[59] “Shuster, George N.,” Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/shuster-george-n
[60] Arthur J. Hope, C.S.C., The Story of Notre Dame, Chapter XXIV, https://archives.nd.edu/hope/hope24.htm
[61] Blantz, George N. Shuster.
[62] Blantz, George N. Shuster, pp. 38-9.
[63] Blantz, George N. Shuster, pp. 38-9.
[64] Blantz, George N. Shuster, pp. 38-9.
[65] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 38.
[66] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 212.
[67] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 90.
[68] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 102.
[69] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 117.
[70] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 117.
[71] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 90.
[72] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 106.
[73] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 106.
[74] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 106.
[75] “Life unworthy of life,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life
[76] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 106.
[77] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 107.
[78] Stephen A. Schuker, Ambivalent Exile: Heinrich Brüning and America’s Good War, pp. 332-3.
[79] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 334.
[80] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 335.
[81] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 109.
[82] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 109.
[83] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 110.
[84] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 335.
[85] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 339.
[86] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 340.
[87] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 341.
[88] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 342.
[89] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 344.
[90] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 344.
[91] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 354.
[92] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 355.
[93] Schuker, Ambivalent Exile, p. 354.
[94] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 225.
[95] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 227.
[96] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 230.
[97] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 231.
[98] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 233.
[99] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 233.
[100] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 234
[101] Blantz, George N. Shuster, p. 242
[102] Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, Charakter-wäsche: Die Re-education der Deutschen und ihre bleibenden Auswirkungen (Rottenburg: Kopp Verlag, 2004), p. 229.
[103] Schrenck-Notzing, Characterwaesche, p. 93. My translation.
[104] Schrenck-Notzing, Characterwaesche, p. 96. My translation.
[105] Caspar von Schrenck Notzing, Charakter-waesche, p. 120.
[106] Steinbacher, pp. 344-5.
[107] Steinbacher, p. 346.
[108] “Willy Brandt,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Brandt
[109] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 353
[110] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 355
[111] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 353.
[112] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 353-4.
[113] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 359
[114] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 359-60.
[115] “Federation of Expellees,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Expellees
[116] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 361
[117] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 372
[118] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 372
[119] Ryan King, “Gaza must be ‘deradicalized’ like post-WWII Germany as part of ‘prerequisites for peace,’ Netanyahu says,” New York Post, Dec. 26, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/12/26/news/netanyahu-gaza-must-be-deradicalized-like-germany-japan/
[120] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 147
[121] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 260
[122] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 263
