Reconstruction in Germany After WWII

Editor’s note: This story from 1943 contains dated language that is no longer used today. In the interest of keeping a historical record, it appears here as it was originally published.

Dean Gauss, chairman of the department of modern languages and literatures and Class of 1900 professor in that field, was one of the speakers at the annual New York Herald Tribune Forum held last month. He has put at the disposal of the Weekly, at its request, the text of his speech on that occasion. His paper follows:

The first condition of reconstruction in Germany is the defeat of the German armies. The more overwhelming that military defeat, the greater the promise for Germany’s future. To make it as overwhelming as possible must be our first objective.

I do not say this because the German is incorrigibly militaristic because of his biological inheritance. The Anglo-Saxons have shown no constitutional antipathy to the blessings of liberty and the Saxons in that combination were of excellent German stock. Seventy per cent of the Swiss are German. They have maintained the staunchest republic in Europe. Some of the most representative Americans now fighting for freedom are of German ancestry. I mention only General Eisenhower and Wendell Willkie.

Let’s begin by wiping this Nazi nonsense about immutable racial traits off the slate. It is not, then, the biological inheritance of the Germans that is vicious; it is their institutional inheritance which can be summed up in one word, Prussianism. Prussian junker generals have organized and are commanding Hitler’s armies today. Such has been Prussianism’s success that not until these armies are decisively defeated will Prussianism disappear or reconstruction begin.

Institutions shape men. Men in their turn must reshape institutions. Germans must create new agencies to meet new needs. Let us not assume that after forty years of crisis and two World Wars history will complacently evolve them. It is man’s turn now.

A few things have been settled:

1. There will be no separate peace.

2. There will be unconditional surrender.

3. Relief will be distributed to all in need.

4. There will be an independent Austria.

5. War criminals are to be punished in the countries where their crimes were committed. No one wishes to protect those guilty of ordering innocent hostages shot or of the crimes of Lidice or the Warsaw Ghetto, but arrests should be confined to legally definable offenses. I cannot help wondering if the South in 1865 had won the War between the States how many Yankee lieutenants after Sherman’s march to the sea would have escaped from a Georgia courtroom with only a reprimand.

6. There must, of course, be restitution of all private and official loot and plunder. In this respect the problem confronting Versailles was child’s play. Our Board of Economic Warfare has estimated that by the end of 1941 German loot already amounted to thirty-six billion dollars. Some of this was in machinery of production and has resulted in a German-owned system. This is important. No profit from these thefts can be left in German hands. But if this unification of the productive system can better produce what Europe needs, it must be used for that purpose. Hitler has introduced free trade and a common monetary system over all occupied Europe. This currency will soon be worthless, but under other sponsorship free trade and a common currency must be converted into assets for reconstruction. Everything that can tend to promote the sense of common interests throughout Central Europe must be utilized.

7. It is significant that the Moscow Declaration makes no mention of Poland. Her problem is too complicated. For some time no German minority can live without military protection in areas dominated by peoples like the Poles, whom Hitler had enslaved, but the Polish Corridor is Polish and must be allowed to remain so.

East Prussia is the ancestral seat of the junkers cut off from Germany by this ethnic corridor. It is rumored that the population may be transplanted and the territory given to the Poles. This will not solve the problem since the sites and lands themselves are redolent of their Germanic history.

It will clearly be impossible to divide all Europe into solid blocks of “sovereign” nationalistic states. Neither the Corridor nor East Prussia can be made to fit into such blocks. Even desirable frontier rectifications can help but little. Frontiers must be made less and not more important. Let us hope that troublesome areas will not be immediately frozen into rigidly nationalistic states. The door must be left open for some form of federation. Such grouping cannot be enforced but if South German states decide to decapitalize Berlin, they should be free to do so.

It is fairly safe to predict that Germany will not go to war with Russia “in another thirty years.” Population studies indicate that Germany’s best fighting manpower ages, 20 to 35, will by 1970 have declined from 8,300,000 to 7,800,000. Russia’s in the same period will increase from 21,000,000 to 32,000,000. Russia has vast natural resources only beginning to be tapped. In the last fifteen years she has made relatively greater strides in popular education and in developing technological proficiency than any other power. Without allies Germany will be harmless beside her.

In re-educating the Nazis, actions will speak louder than words. We must remember, first of all, that Nazi education did not beget the Nazi party. The Nazi party was already in complete control before the Nazi educational system began. It heads up into the leadership principle, the Führerprinzip. Above the absolutely sovereign nation state which is above the law you have a Führer who is above the law even of his own state. This is anarchy quite consistent. But a Führer must lead. Hitler has been giving ground steadily since El Alamein. You will notice that in the German dispatches and communiques of recent months references to the Führer tend to disappear. The Führerprinzip is dying at the top.

This alone is not enough. We must create for ourselves not only an academic world view but we must create those political agencies and attitude s which will eliminate that post-Versailles, twentieth century sense of frustration which predisposed so many persons in favor of dictatorship. Here were all have a long, hard way ahead. The readjustment cannot be painless even to ourselves. 

What principles must govern reconstruction?

The greatest living historian, Arnold Toynbee, has said that democracy and industrialism can only exist on a world basis. Why? If you believe that all men are endowed with equal rights you cannot, without stultifying yourself, take action against your equal simply because he lives on the other side of the frontier. A tariff wall concerns him as much as you.

Industrialism means science and technology. They are both in their nature non-nationalistic, essentially leveling, expansive, and immense releasers of human energies everywhere. The automobile displaces not only the horse and buggy but the littler, the palánquin, the howdah, the jinricksha. The Peace of Versailles tried to confine these great leveling and expansive forces making for world democracy in nationalistic straightjackets. It created only “technological unemployment.”

By all odds the greatest creation of World War I was the Soviet Union, the one which Versailles tried hardest to prevent. It tried to impose a nineteenth century solution upon the twentieth century’s greatest problem. In spite of a dictatorship, an economic system that we do not need and do not want, Russia has here made great progress. No other state has dealt so successfully with the problem of diverse cultures. Ten years ago only half her population listed itself as Russian. They were Kalmucks or Ukrainians or Ruthenians or Georgians. The Jew and the Negro enjoy a higher degree of social equality than with us. That is an admiral element in democracy. Russians have the sense of cashing in on the promise of the twentieth century and of all moving forward together in a common cause. So long as there was any hope of “collective security” they favored it. They are now in favor of united action with us which means taking the first steps toward the unification of our disrupted world.

Germany will be the sick man in Europe for many years. There can be no easy way out and it would be hypocrisy for us to make soft promises to her people. The political and economic center of gravity of Europe is already moving farther east.

Many people ask where is leadership in Germany to come from. The best answer is probably from the concentration camps. There are seventy-one of them in which 1,200,000 Germans, only a fraction of them Jews, are now confined. They have suffered most and realize most deeply that the type of state which Prussia imposed and Hitler exploited is a hopeless anachronism. When these camps are opened and their prisoners released, I hope they and we will agree that it is only in some form of less nationalistic union or federation in a much more unified and democratic world that the eventual solution for Germany and Central Europe will be found. 

This was originally published in the December 10,1943 issue of PAW.