All Honorable Men: The Story of the Men on Both Sides of the Atlantic Who Successfully Thwarted Plans to Dismantle the Nazi Cartel System (Forbidden Bookshelf) by James Stewart Martin

Author:James Stewart Martin [Martin, James Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781504034906
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-05-16T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Hollow Squares

Turning Berlin into a seedbed of democracy through the instrumentality of a military organization was, to say the least, an ambitious project. After my first introduction to the setup as a going concern in January 1946, I thought ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

General Clay’s Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) occupied a former Luftwaffe headquarters. On Saturday mornings a panorama of the individuals and problems that made up the core of American military government was assembled in General Clay’s conference room. Four long, polished tables arranged to form a closed hollow square occupied the center of the room. Around this hollow square sat the thirty-two men who constituted the top staff and who headed the offices and divisions of military government. For two hours, General Clay talked with each of us, proceeding clockwise around the table, hearing reports of progress or failure in four-power negotiations or in the execution of policies in the United States zone.

In another part of the American sector of Berlin was another building, this one full of conference rooms, each with its hollow-square table. The building, splendid in its park setting, where the four powers set up their Allied Control Authority, was a former court of commercial justice. It was now the seat of a strange kind of international government. At the top of the ACA was the Control Council, composed of the four military governors, whose word was law. Next was the Co-ordinating Committee, the four deputy military governors, who decided what matters to pass along to the Control Council for final approval. Then there were the directorates, corresponding roughly to the executive departments of a government, and in each case made up of the four directors of the appropriate division. The directorates, in turn, delegated specific duties to various committees and working parties.

To establish a “democratic” basis for Germany’s future, General Clay ordered the staff of military government to turn the execution of most policies over to “the Germans themselves.” We were to restrict ourselves to giving advice to the Germans, and “observing” the results. If we did not like what we observed, our complaints had to be forwarded through military channels.

Before the occupation was a year old one could begin to observe that when the “Germans themselves,” meaning the top echelons of the German administrative agencies, liked the advice they were given, they followed it. When they did not like the advice, there were difficulties. One could also observe that advice tending toward the re-establishment of the old patterns was well liked. Advice that smacked of reform was distasteful.

By drift and by an inner logic of military organization, military government was moving from its role as an enforcer of reform policies to the role of a trustee or custodian of German “recovery,” and moving along lines well charted in the habits of past generations. Back in the Ruhr, in May 1945, I had seen how the commanding general of the corps area would crack the whip because his divisions were not getting the streetcars running and the rubble cleared fast enough.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.