Once it became apparent, around 1944, that Nazi Germany was going to lose the second world war, plans began to be floated as to what was to be done with the country. By September of that year, Henry Morgenthau, US secretary of the treasury, had gained support from both the US and UK governments for a plan involving a deindustrialised Germany, turning the place into, in effect, “a giant farm” (to use Lara Feigel’s words). As we know, this didn’t happen (and it’s probably just as well). But as troops advanced deeper into Germany, the reporters accompanying them or following behind began to reveal the astonishing scale of devastation: it seemed as though Germany would never be able to build a factory again, let alone a city.
This book tells us, in some detail, about the destruction visited by the allies on the enemy. In Cologne, for example, every building (except, eerily, its cathedral) had been flattened, each of its bridges collapsed into the river, and a population of 700,000 reduced to 20,000. In Nuremberg – the scene, a decade before, of Hitler’s largest rally – what was left of the population starved in freezing cellars, while everywhere displaced persons roamed the country, scrounging for scraps and pushing the last tattered remnants of their property in wheeled carts before them.
The American and British governments decided, as part of a propaganda effort, to get some decent writers and cultural figures on to the scene; writers for the most part were keen to get out there and see for themselves, though Ernest Hemingway was reluctant and Evelyn Waugh initially sceptical. George Orwell, whose wife had died during a routine operation, returned to Britain too late for the funeral and flew straight out again. “Perhaps after a few weeks of bumping about in jeeps etc I shall feel better,” he wrote to a friend. WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Martha Gellhorn flew out (Gellhorn taunting her husband Hemingway for his inaction); as did Marlene Dietrich, and the photographer Lee Miller. There is a famous picture, reproduced here, of Miller soaping herself in Hitler’s bath, her muddy boots placed insolently on the bathmat.
Naturally, there was a certain amount of sleeping around. Feigel, whose previous book, The Love-charm of Bombs, told how the blitz seemed to propel people into each other’s arms, is well practised in relaying the higher wartime gossip of who slept with whom, and how often. This, for me at least, is not the most interesting part of the book. What makes it most worthwhile is its portrait of a shattered country, and the decisions that had to be made in order to get it back on its feet. This involved agonising about whether and how Germans should be told about the death camps, and how much emphasis should be placed on the level of Jewish suffering. In Bavaria, people would only receive ration coupons if they went to screenings detailing the horrors of the concentration camps; however, only about a third of Bavarians had ever been to the cinema in the first place.
And then there were the Nuremberg trials to organise: seen by many Germans as a formality before the inevitable executions, they also exhibited instances of almost slovenly unprofessionalism from the allied lawyers. “My knees haven’t knocked so much since I asked my wonderful little wife to marry me,” said one lawyer, Captain Sam Harris, at the opening of an address on the occupied territories. “Jesus,” wrote the presiding judge, Francis Biddle, in his notebook, in exasperation. (Biddle was having an affair with Rebecca West, we learn here.)
This is a necessary, superbly researched book. Its title is well chosen. The allies and their cultural ambassadors were alarmed, disheartened and in some instances traumatised by what they saw. Tensions with the Soviets were becoming more apparent, and the seeds of the cold war were sown, and began sprouting, in the rubble of Berlin. It’s a miracle Germany got back on its feet, let alone became the moral exemplar it is today.
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