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The Myth of the Marshall Plan

The Myth of the Marshall Plan

Last updated on: January 23, 2017 at 9:22 pm by Jane the Actuary

The Myth of the Marshall Plan 2017-01-23T21:22:19-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Dresden, Teilansicht des zerstörten Stadtzentrums über die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

After World War I, the victorious allies obliged Germany to accept a treaty that was so humiliating that it directly led to World War II, because it forced Germany into a poverty and resentment from which Hitler rose to power. After World War II, the allies had learned their lesson and instead helped Germany rebuild, to create the democratic, peace-loving country it has been ever since. The lesson learned is that being magnanimous and generous even to your enemies is the right way to manage your foreign policy, and, incidentally, you can fix any problem if only you spend enough money on it.

Eh, not so much.

Turns out, I wrote about this briefly. Now I’ve been reading about this in a book I picked up while Christmas shopping, Germany 1945 by Richard Bessel. This is not about the Marshall Plan, but about the end of the war and its immediate aftermath and it’s just chock full of “holy ****, I didn’t know that!” bits.

Once the war was clearly coming to its conclusion, everyone in the East was terrified of the Red Army, so much so that it affected the course of the war: where in the West there are images of German soldiers being relieved to surrender, in the East they fought to the bitter end not just because Hitler spurred them on but because they knew the Red Army would be seeking revenge, which they indeed did, burning villages, raping women, killing civilians. The resistance at the front was also strategic, in that the generals, even in the last days, after Hitler was dead and they were working out surrender terms, were aiming at getting as many of their soldiers into territory from which they could surrender to the U.S./Britain rather than the Red Army, and they were moderately successful in this effort, leaving only 30% of soldiers in the path of the Red Army where originally the large majority of their troops were in the East. And the Red Army was so vengeful not just because of the destruction of the Nazis in the Soviet Union, nor because of propaganda, but because they were further enraged at entering German cities and seeing the prosperity, the material wealth that was still evident despite the years of war and bombings, of these cities compared with their own homes in the Soviet Union.

In the West, the army was not remotely as wrathful, but the French troops are singled out as having perpetrated their own mass rapes, though not as horrifically as in the East. Among the Brits and the American troops, the worst of the excess was in reaction to the concentration camp discoveries, both in directly taking revenge and allowing the prisoners free rein to exact their revenge. But all armies didn’t hesitate to requisition homes, offices, or other buildings, without regard to the fate of their inhabitants, giving them just hours to vacate. All armies also interned significant numbers of people — de-Nazification wasn’t just about removing Nazis from their political offices, but putting them sometimes into the very same concentration camps in which Jews and other Nazi prisoners had been held — though with reasonably humane treatment, except for the Soviets, who shipped them off to the Gulag, where half of them died. And there was a substantial fear of “Werewolves” – that is, of an underground resistance, which meant, in the case of the western sectors, a curfew and other restrictions, and, in the East, the imprisoning of young men, even teenagers, coerced confessions, and, again, the Gulag.

And — well, it wasn’t new to me that Germany had its map so radically redrawn, losing 1/5th of its territory, though I suspect most even reasonably-educated people aren’t aware of it. You read about the German/Russian carving-up of Poland in 1939, but never with the footnote that, oh, by the way, Russia never gave their piece back to Poland, but just sliced off the eastern part of contiguous Germany, plus took all of the isolated East Prussia region, to give to Poland in return. Now, to be sure, there were some grounds for keeping their piece, that is, the part of Poland that the Soviet Union kept was a region that, in centuries past, had passed between Poland and Ukraine multiple times before Russia swallowed it all, and was inhabited by both Poles and Ukrainians. As for taking part of Germany, that was a matter of purposefully weakening and punishing Germany, in addition to wanting to give Poland some replacement land. But the chaos and the dislocation that these population transfers involved, and the fact that the Germans being expelled did indeed suffer horribly both in their treatment before being removed, and after arriving, was extreme — and these population transfers were signed off by Churchill and Roosevelt, not just imposed by Stalin. (In Königsberg, as an extreme case, about three-quarters of the population of 100,000 immediately at the end of the war, died of starvation or disease before the remainder were expelled in 1947.) And although they were (that is, in the case of “real” Germans, rather than ethnic Germans, but citizens of Poland or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia) moving from one part of Germany to another, they lost their “Heimat,” their homeland, nonetheless. Now, to be sure, Germans committed horrors, too, but civilians were not the perpetrators, and for the most part, did not experience the Nazis’ crimes, so any idea that they should look at their treatment with a philosophical “well, we deserved the treatment we received” is fanciful. Their genuine suffering caused them to focus solely on day-to-day survival, not on the degree to which others suffered even more during the war.

What else? That notion that the Allies learned their lesson and didn’t demand reparations? The Soviet Union dismantled factories and had the equipment shipped to the USSR — an estimated 45% of industrial capacity by the end of 1946, plus railcars and half the train tracks in the Soviet zone by the end of 1947; even up to the end of the DDR, there were single-track lines which had originally been double-tracked. Factories that started to rebuild, only to have the fruit of their labors taken away in a further dismantling. And the Russians requisitioned various goods on top. But it wasn’t just the Russians: the French, too, requisitioned German factory and farm output, both to fund their occupation troops and for reparations sent back to France. Specifically, farmers were required to turn over to the occupying authorities their entire harvest except for what they would consume themselves or use for seed. (How those farmers were supposed to be able to manage their own needs beyond food — clothing, fuel, etc. — seems to have not been considered.)

And this all came to a head in the winter of 1945 – 1946, when Germans lacked for food and fuel. Oddly, this is a part of the story that isn’t told, except in broad terms, and in terms of the low calorie counts of the rations provided by the occupiers. How many Germans starved, or were malnourished, before the Allies relaxed restrictions and allowed food imports and food aid, isn’t clear. Heck, I have a personal anecdote, though: my Dad served in the army in the early 60s, and tells a story of driving around in Germany and having his car break down. A German family came to the rescue and fixed his car. He wanted to give them something for their trouble, but they told him that they were happy to do so, in order to, in some small way, repay the help they were given, shortly after the war, when they were literally starving, and an American GI gave them the food that kept them alive.

Finally, in Bessel’s conclusion, he addresses the question: what prevented Germany from again seething with resentment and starting another war? He has a five-point explanation:

First, the Germans were so utterly and completely defeated that they could not imagine that they were betrayed and could well have won, but for traitors.

Second, the absolute defeat meant that the entire Nazi ideology was exposed as bankrupt.

Third, despite our imagining it otherwise, the occupation, by all four powers, was harsh; there was no room for resistance.

Fourth, the losses, the complete devastation, the loss of lives, meant that Germans were “left . . . profoundly disoriented and without the energy for much more than a struggle for individual survival.”

And fifth (though perhaps too related to the fourth point to be a separate item), Germans were simply overwhelmingly focused on day-to-day concerns, both because of their material needs and because the lack of communication and transportation left them cut off from anything wider than their narrow geographic area.

Multiple reasons . . . and none of them are that the Allies demonstrated magnanimity in victory.

Now, did the United States ultimately provide aid? Yes, but not right away. Did the U.S. help Germany become a democratic, self-governing country? Yes, but not until 1950.

Does it matter? Among other things, I think that we had an image of our adventure in Iraq following this imagined model: win, be nice, forge a new alliance with a democratic country. We didn’t image that there would be resistance after the surrender, because there wasn’t in Germany — even though the situations were completey different.

image: Dresden, Teilansicht des zerstörten Stadtzentrums über die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

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