Marshall Plan Commemorative Section: Miles to Go: From American Plan to European Union

Helmut Schmidt

From Foreign Affairs, May/ June 1997

Summary:  A look back at perhaps the most important foreign policy success of the postwar period. Edited by Peter Grose, with contributions by historians Diane B. Kunz and David Reynolds, a memoir by Charles P. Kindleberger, a profile of Marshall and Acheson by James Chace and one of Will Clayton by Gregory Fossedal and Bill Mikhail. And reflections from Roy Jenkins, Walt Rostow, and Helmut Schmidt.

Helmut Schmidt was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1974 to 1982.

Three speeches had a decisive impact on the economic and political rehabilitation of Europe after World War II: Winston Churchill's in Zurich in 1946 about a United States of Europe; George Marshall's at Harvard in 1947, offering American aid to Europeans struggling to escape their postwar predicament; and Robert Schuman's in Paris in 1950, proposing communal control of Europe's coal and steel resources. It would, of course, be unfair and historically inaccurate to credit these three men alone with Europe's successful revival. Many other leaders were instrumental in rebuilding the continent, and if not for Stalin's imperialism, many courageous acts in the United States and Western Europe, among them Secretary of State Marshall's plan, would have gone undone.

To understand the effects of the Marshall Plan, one must first comprehend what life was like for ordinary Germans, like me, toward the end of World War II and in those first turbulent years afterward. We had lost. I had been convinced for several years that we would, and many of my comrades in Germany's armed forces had reached a similar conclusion. During the day, we fulfilled our missions on the battlefield; at night, we hoped for a quick defeat of our own country. After the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, when my division was driven out of Belgium and Luxembourg, I complained to my commander about Germany's war strategy: prudence dictated that we concentrate our energies on the Soviets in the east, and in the west let the Americans occupy as much German soil as they wanted. Although he angrily rejected my suggestion, he did not report me.

I had imagined that when we lost the war we Germans would have to live in caves and holes in the ground, but this apocalyptic vision turned out to be much worse than our actual conditions. True, we struggled for coal and food; there were days during the winter of 1946-47 when we stayed in bed because there was nothing to eat and nothing to burn for warmth. Divided into four zones and occupied by the Allies, Germany was in agony. Its remaining industrial capacity was being dismantled, unemployment was rising, and the black market was the only market. But my generation, cut off from the rest of the world since adolescence, had a great desire for knowledge and for a new beginning. I studied economics, while my wife taught in a secondary school.

Germans who grew up in the 1930s -- I was 14 when Hitler came to power in 1933 -- did not know much about the rest of the world. Our knowledge of America was limited to the little we were taught in school: the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. role in the First World War, Black Friday on the New York Stock Exchange. When the war broke out, my ideas about economic and social conditions in the United States did not have a positive cast. Only the widespread anti-American propaganda made me suspect that the United States must have some virtues; otherwise, why would Goebbels go to such trouble to debase it in our eyes? I do not remember Churchill's or Marshall's noted pronouncements from the postwar years, but I do recall a speech in Stuttgart in September 1946 by the American secretary of state, James Byrnes. For the first time, a Western political leader projected positive, if vague, views about Germany's future.

PAX AMERICANA

In June 1948 the American, British, and French occupation authorities replaced the hopelessly inflated reichsmark with a new currency, the deutsche mark. Together with the gradual abandoning of the ration-card economy, this reform ushered in a totally different state of economic affairs. Until then, we had lived on the meager rations our cards got us, and money did not really matter, except in the shadows, where one paid six reichsmark for a single cigarette. Now money became all-important. The ration cards slowly disappeared over the next two years, and shops began to fill with goods we had only dreamed about: bread, butter, fruit, even coffee and cigarettes.

This monetary and economic revolution would never have transpired had it not been for the Marshall Plan. The American aid program became operational in Germany in the summer of 1948, about the time the deutsche mark was put in place. The Japanese currency reform of 1946 had largely failed, while that in Germany had succeeded, and the difference was the Marshall Plan. The American, British, and French zones of occupation in western Germany merged in 1949 to become the Federal Republic, and the new state was a success within a decade. I had been raised an Anglophile, but over the course of the 1950s the United States became my most-favored nation.

In 1953 I was elected to the West German parliament, the Bundestag. At the time, the Soviet military threat loomed large, and many feared that communist parties might take over parts of Western Europe, as they had to the east. The Berlin airlift of 1948-49 and the formation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which West Germany joined six years later, alleviated the first concern, convincing me that the United States, Canada, and their European allies had irrevocably decided to jointly defend Western Europe in case of attack. We appreciated the risk the American government had assumed and saw the United States as the military, political, and economic anchor of the security and well-being of Western Europe. The United States had proved itself a generous nation, standing by its commitments and fulfilling its promises. "Pax Americana" seemed to me an accurate description of the age, and we Germans turned in hope and faith to the United States. Yet we were troubled by a nagging concern: the strategy of massive nuclear retaliation, which the United States had adopted during the Eisenhower administration, implied that in case of war against the Soviet Union, Germany would become a major battleground.

As the postwar recovery continued, it became clear that the market-oriented Western European economies, founded on the basis of free, private enterprise, had a far more promising future than the communist command economies of the Soviet Union, East Germany, and the rest of Eastern Europe. At the same time, European integration struck me as necessary, less for economic than political reasons. After the disastrous wars of the past hundred years, in which Germany had played a key role -- the Napoleonic Wars, Bismarck's war against France, and two world wars -- I believed it desirable to bind my country into a greater European entity to prevent the recurrence of such conflict. I became a proponent of the French political economist Jean Monnet's step-by-step approach that would tie France as well as Germany into the European Economic Community.

NO GRAND PLAN