Few things about defeated Germany and the Germans are as yet clear to the Allied victors. But one thing is already clear: Germany after World War II is going to be much the same sort of psychopathic wallow which produced Naziism and Adolf Hitler after World War I.
By last week U.S. soldiers had been on German soil a little more than five months. In Aachen, Roetgen, Eilendorf, Cologne they had seen the ruined face of western Germany. And they had seen thousands of German faces:
¶ A German woman and her two children — a boy and a girl — walked toward their house in a village near the Rhine. A young U.S. officer, whose unit had commandeered the house, saw them coming and barked: "Go on, go on! Beat it!" The woman stopped and tried to explain in German , that she wanted something in the house. Again the officer ordered her away. The boy cried. The girl ran past the officer, marched up the front steps, and got a doll's buggy. As the woman and the children walked off, the officer turned to U.P. Correspondent Ann Stringer and said: "A year ago, I couldn't have done that. But now — I hate the bastards, I hate them all."
¶ Karl Fuzeler, 16, was a blond, hand some boy, a Nazi youth leader who made three trips through the U.S. lines with military information for the retreating Wehrmacht before he was caught. A U.S. Army court sentenced him to death; on review, the sentence was reduced to life imprison ment. When a U.S. correspondent saw Karl Fuzeler in his cell, he was quite will ing to admit that Germany had been beaten. But he had lost none of his belief in Hitler and Naziism, none of his conviction that Germans are superior to Americans, Britons, or Russians. The Allied armies happened to have more materiel—that was all.
¶ Franz Oppenhof, of Aachen, was a director of the local armament works, Veltrup, which manufactured parts for German guns and V-2 rockets. He knew everyone, he was respected, and the Nazis had allowed him to prosper without joining the Party. So the U.S. Military Government installed him as Aachen's occupation Bürgermeister. Fifty-seven of the first 300 city functionaries chosen by him had been Nazi Party members. U.S. officers, weeding out 27 of them, had to agree with Herr Oppenhof that it was almost impossible to run the town efficiently without experienced Nazis.
¶ At Harbach, a U.S. military court tried Karl Packbier and his friend, Robert Hogen, for hiding three German soldiers on Helen's farm. On trial, Herr Hogen and Herr Packbier turned out to be middleaged, prosperous, respectable—and innocent. Had not the Allies' broadcasters instructed Germans to give every aid to German deserters? Acquitted, Herr Hogen and Herr Packbier bowed their thanks to the court, walked out with dignity.
¶ An old printer, no Nazi, had a son in the SS. Said the father, thinking of his black-shirted son: "If the 55 men must be executed as war criminals, let them execute him, too."
¶ A correspondent asked a seven-year-old girl in Aachen what she thought of Adolf Hitler. Remembering her candy ration at school, she said: "He's a nice man who gives me chocolates." Her brother, 12, piped that Britain was a robber who ought to be punished, the U.S. a country run by "Jewish plutocrats."