Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

was finding a solution to the problem that would dog the victors throughout their occupation of Germany: which Germans were the ‘good’ Germans, unsullied by involvement in the Nazi movement, and even if that could be established, was it possible to run the conquered country through the agency of such people alone?
    Though in October the Allies could not know it, they had most of the coming winter to explore this formidable challenge in this single locality. Until March they would be stuck on the left bank of the Rhine, and what territory they did manage to take during the rest of the winter would be appallingly hard won. The US First Army lost 21,000 men between 16 November and 16 December in the ferociously bitter battle for the Hürtgen Forest, south of Düren. 20
    During October and November, with costly fighting still raging a score or two kilometres to the east, Aachen settled down, if that is the word, under American occupation.
    From the outset, all the difficulties that were later to darken the record of the Allies in the post-war period were foreshadowed here. Keen to ensure that the small number of remaining civilians in the city be checked for political reliability, the occupation authorities gathered up most of the surviving population and shipped them off over the nearby border into Belgium, where they were housed in evacuation centres at a former Belgian army camp, the Homburg Barracks. Specially trained American army teams were detailed to interview each newly subjugated civilian individually to ascertain his or her political history.
    Much useful intelligence was, in fact, gathered. However, to undertake mass transfers of civilians to such ‘concentration camps’, as Goebbels’ propaganda machine did not hesitate to dub them (to be fair, a not entirely erroneous description in the original, literal meaning of the words), was to inflict a strain on transportation and human resources that could not be repeated ad infinitum as the Allies advanced further into Germany and captured more major towns.
    It seems that one useful piece of future good practice, learned in interrogating the Aachen civilians, was to ask a subject not if he or she was a member of the Nazi Party but whether he/she ‘had felt compelled’ to join the party. A change to this mode of questioning immediately got a much more ready response and a significant rise in the number of admissions of political guilt. 21
    Within a short period, as Aacheners, innocent and guilty alike, began returning to their city, the Americans were forced to set up some kind of civilian administration for the place. Searching around for a suitable Burgomaster, the American Military Government (AMG) officer charged with this task, Leo Svoboda, took advice from the Catholic Bishop of Aachen. Catholic clergy and their flocks were significantly, though not invariably, less likely to have been pro-Nazi than their Protestant counterparts. The bishop helpfully directed Svoboda to one Franz Oppenhoff, a forty-two-year-old lawyer and businessman, who before 1933 had been a stalwart member of the Catholic Centre Party. Oppenhoff had resisted joining the Nazi Party after Hitler’s seizure of power, and by all accounts was a competent organiser. What was there to disapprove of?
    The New York Times described how a ‘slight, bald anti-Nazi lawyer of about 40 years’ (his name was withheld for security reasons) was sworn in in front of an American flag, the oath being administered by Lieut Col. A. A. Carmichael of Montgomery, Alabama. ‘Have you a house?’ someone is reported to have asked the new Lord Mayor. ‘ Ja , but a house not standing,’ Oppenhoff answered dryly before heading for his new official quarters in a city-centre cellar. 22
    As Oppenhoff took charge, however, it became clear that things were not quite as simple as the AMG training guidelines, and the bishop’s advice, had implied. Centre Party = Democracy was not quite such a clear equation. In fact,