That Was Then: Allen W. Dulles on the Occupation of Germany

Allen W. Dulles

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003

Summary:  U.S. troops on conquered territory, infrastructure in ruins, international squabbling over reconstruction: a window onto occupied Germany seven months after V-E Day, when progress was still unsteady and Europe's future hung in the balance.

Economically and industrially, Germany has scraped the bottom of the barrel, and there are few shops with anything to sell. As soon as you attempt to get Germany to tick and to make arrangements for a government, the lack of men becomes apparent at once. Most men of the caliber required suffer a political taint. When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members.

Labels are always arbitrary and sometimes they effectively mask what lies underneath. For example, citizens A, B, C, and D who didn't care about politics one way or the other were told they had to join the Nazi Party in order to make up the proper quota in the factory in which they worked. The consequences of refusal being what they were, they joined the Party. I know of one instance where two brothers tossed a coin to see which one would join the SS. I mention these things not because I think any substantial number of Germans were opposed to the Party but rather to point out how misleading and decisive a label can be. Furthermore we had altogether too many rules and regulations dealing with the Germans to make an adequate supply of men available to us. There were 126 categories of Germans excluded from any activity or from posts in German administration. Take, for example, the case of a man who owned zinc and coal mines in Upper Silesia. He was a bitter and proven anti-Nazi and a man of undoubted courage and integrity. I was not permitted to use him because he came under category 106, being classified as a war economy supervisor.

We tried hard to find financial advisers, but most of the bankers who had been in Germany in the Twenties and Thirties had by this time been liquidated. I found a banker in the prisoner's cage who had been arrested on an automatic charge because in the early part of the war he had been appointed custodian for the property of an alien, a post he later resigned. I am told that during the period of his responsibility he discharged his trust with scrupulous honesty. I had to bring his case before the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington before I was permitted to use him. Then there was Doctor Sauerbruch, one of the leading surgeons in Berlin. Him, also, I found in a cage. It took a cable to London from Washington to get his case straightened out and get him released for useful service, and this had no sooner been done when a few days later the British rearrested him because he came under some other category.

In our zone we arrested 70,000 people. There was no such thing as a habeas corpus and there was no forum to which one could apply for a hearing, although later on we did set up a tribunal of sorts. I do not blame our people too much for this state of affairs. After all, we could not examine each case individually in the early days when the chief task was to occupy Germany in the most effective manner.

The present political set-up in Germany is based on the agreements reached at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. Tehran was made when Churchill felt somewhat shaky. The arrangement did not include the French zone, which was added later. But regardless of its genesis, by and large the scheme is almost entirely unworkable. We have chopped up Baden, Württemburg, and Hesse into artificial zones. In the case of Saxony, the Russian zone cuts off the American and British zones from their counterparts there. It is difficult to see how the Allies could have done otherwise inasmuch as the Russians would not consent to British and American domination of Germany and the Americans and British likewise refused to consider letting Russia get an advantage. Even so, very little progress is being made toward the centralization of the various services. To complicate matters, the French have been saying that they could not set up an administration in the zone assigned to them until they knew what disposition was going to be made of the Rhine and the Ruhr.

In the zone under Russian control the application of Soviet doctrines is thus far confined largely to paper. The Russians are finding it a little difficult to mix collectivist doctrines, including the nationalization of banks, a new system of land tenure, and the creation of a small farmer class, with the set up as it existed under the Nazis and more broadly under a capitalist economy.

We, ourselves, have excellent men on the job. I have the highest regard for Clay, and Eisenhower is a genius as a diplomat and administrator.* Yet I am inclined to think that the problems inherent in the situation are almost too much for us. Our people in Germany are unduly fearful of criticism in the United States. For example, the road between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden is so full of holes that it is almost impossible to drive over it, and one cannot cross the Main between those two places because all the bridges are down. But no repairs are made since the Army feels certain it would be criticized for "restoring the German war potential."

Industry in Germany is at its lowest ebb except for some coal mining in the Ruhr. The minute one considers what industries should be allowed to function and how best to prime the pump in order to set them going, some very real and serious difficulties appear.

So far as the treatment of industry in various zones is concerned, the Russian policy is particularly hard to fathom. It is hard to say whether the Russians really intend to tear down the zone for the purpose of building up Russia, but there is some evidence pointing that way. The Russians have torn up all the double tracks, they are keeping all able-bodied German prisoners, and they have taken East a great many industrialists, bankers, scientists, and the like.

Russian standing in their zone is low. Russian troops are living off the land, and have looted far more than anyone else. They have gone about Berlin looting workers' houses in very much the same way they did in Hungary. This seems to indicate that in both localities the Communist party is not very strong. At any rate, the Russians have seen the West and vice versa.