CHAPTER VIII

U.S. Policy Emergent

Fraternization

Fraternization between one's own troops and enemy civilians has been a command problem and a soldier's pastime as long as armies have existed. Odysseus knew it; the Chinese reputedly frustrated successive invasions by diligently practicing it; US General Headquarters in the German Rhineland after World War I forbade it but quartered troops on civilians-with predictable results. It was bound to be a problem again in World War II, if only because the Army regarded itself as the guardian of the health and morals of the young men placed in its hands. That fraternization, or rather the prohibition of it, might become the bane of the occupation soldier's life and the figurative hairshirt of the command, however, first became apparent in the spring and summer of 1944.

In the political guide accompanying CCS 551, the Combined Chiefs of Staff directed Eisenhower to "strongly discourage fraternization between Allied troops and German officials and the population." Exactly what such discouragement might entail had not been thought out. At the time, it seemed that close contacts between troops and civilians both in liberated and in occupied territory for reasons of health and military security also needed discouragement. Later, the Civil Affairs Division mulled over the question of troop behavior in Germany, at the same time considering it sufficiently significant to become one of the few matters submitted from the US side in the CCAC (L) .

In June, General Hilldring sent the gist of the CAD thinking to General Holmes. In Hilldring's opinion, and that of the CAD, an order prohibiting fraternization would be difficult if not impossible to enforce; nevertheless, the Germans needed to be made conscious of their guilt and of the contempt in which they were held by the people of the world. They needed to see the "error of their ways" and were to be "held at arm's length" until they had done so. The most practicable means, he thought, was to restrict public contacts. The troops ought not to be billeted in German households, eat in the same restaurants as the Germans, or attend their religious services.1

Since the statement in CCS 551 also logically implied a limit on private contacts, the CAD had a booklet printed for US troops entitled "Pocket Guide to Germany." It took a rigid stand ("There must be no fraternization ! This is absolute !" ) as well as a flexible one ("This warning against fraternization does not mean you are to act like a sourpuss or military automaton.") . As if dubious of success either way, the booklet also included the regulations pertaining to marriages with foreigners and a section on venereal disease.2

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For SHAEF, in the summer of 1944, fraternization seemed to be among the least urgent questions of the war, one which could wait until the fighting was finished. In the second week of August, SHAEF G-1 drafted a recommendation for a nonfraternization policy along the lines Hilldring had suggested and pointed out that extensive training, education, and recreation programs would have to be devised to occupy the troops' time.3 Two weeks later, when he got around to it, the Deputy Chief of Staff, General Morgan, called attention to a lack of realism in the G-1 proposal, namely, with regard to women. "I consider it essential," he added, "that, if we are really to follow through with the business of nonfraternization, we should import into Germany at the earliest possible moment our own women in as large numbers as may be." 4

There the matter rested for another month, until 22 September when two cables arrived, one from Washington, the other from Moscow. American troops had begun occupying a small corner of western Germany southwest of Aachen eleven days before, and the press photographers had filed pictures showing German civilians, generally women and small children, greeting US soldiers. The Washington cable, addressed to Eisenhower, came from General Marshall. "The President desired that I transmit the following message to you," he wrote:

There have appeared in the press photographs of American soldiers fraternizing with Germans in Germany. These photographs are considered objectionable by a number of our people. It is desired that steps be taken to discourage fraternization by our troops with the inhabitants of Germany and that publication of such photos be effectively prohibited.5

From Moscow, Maj. Gen. John R. Deane, chief of the Military Mission, reported that Pravda, Izvestia, and Red Star had carried Tass quotes on 20 September from the Sunday Express, London, regarding American troops fraternizing with Germans.6  The Russians were as yet nowhere on German soil.

Eisenhower replied to Marshall on the same day asking him to assure the President "that upon first appearance of the pictures of American troops fraternizing with Germans, I repeated prior orders against this practice." He had issued personal orders, he added, to all commanders "insisting that fraternization be suppressed completely." 7 Therewith began what for the next ten months the staffs strove manfully to depict as a righteous, even noble, enterprise-the SHAEF nonfraternization policy-about which the troops, unconcerned with presidential or public opinion, preferred to develop various and mostly scurrilous ideas of their own.

JCS 1067

Although the JCS and SHAEF from the beginning had contemplated a period of military administration in Germany after the surrender and before a permanent, civilian-directed occupation took shape, planning for this so-called middle period

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U.S. TROOPS AND GERMAN CIVILIANS (September 1944). This and a few other pictures like it provoked the President's order against fraternization.

US TROOPS AND GERMAN CIVILIANS (September 1944). This and a few other pictures like it provoked the President's order against fraternization.

had become practically impossible by D-day. Discouraged in their struggle to have London become the seat of combined post-hostilities policy-making, the British were pushing for conversion to tripartite planning and the virtual exclusion of SHAEF-hence also the CCAC in Washington-from any role in the government of Germany after the surrender. Since at the time it then still seemed likely that the Allied entry into Germany would follow a surrender negotiated before the troops had crossed the German border, the JCS and the CAD saw the British attempt to eliminate SHAEF from the postsurrender period as a grave potential threat to Eisenhower's unity of command at what might turn out to be a confused and dangerous time. On the other hand, there did not seem to be any way to give Eisenhower guidance as combined commander, even for the middle period, except through some form of tripartite agreement. Hilldring confided his frustration on this score in a letter to Smith in which he pointed out that two recently submitted SHAEF papers on

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posthostilities subjects reflected careful planning but could not be regarded as authoritative because no higher level policy had yet been formulated. He thought that the Joint Post-War Committee, a JCS committee created in June 1944 to work on postwar military plans, might provide the machinery for establishing US views which, when transmitted to the EAC and approved, would become guidance for the combined command. Otherwise, he could only hope that the CAD and the Joint Postwar Committee working closely together might somehow reduce the handicap imposed on SHAEF by the lack of instructions.8

Even though the success of the invasion increased the chance of an early German collapse, the only agreed instruction the CCS could produce was a three-stage updating of the old RANKIN concept, which it forwarded to Eisenhower on 19 June. In the first stage he was to deploy tactical air forces in the Low Countries and France, in the second to set up a barrier manned by ground forces to prevent the German troops from returning home, and in the third to occupy strategic areas in Germany for the purpose of enforcing the surrender terms.9 On the object of the occupation the CCS was mute. When nothing more came by the first week of August and time appeared to be growing short, SHAEF finally converted the three CCS stages in a somewhat expanded form into a plan codenamed TALISMAN.10  The TALISMAN directive then became the only approved postsurrender guidance for the combined forces.

SHAEF, however, regarded TALISMAN as utopian. The plan assumed a defeated Germany that was economically and administratively intact and it assumed a German government capable of acknowledging defeat. But in August a German government capable of doing so would already have surrendered: Europe was invaded in the west ; France was bound to be lost soon and probably the Low Countries as well; the Soviet forces in the east were closing to the Vistula; and Hitler had only narrowly escaped death at the hands of his own officers.

The presurrender directive CCS 551, and earlier some JCS papers, had envisioned SHAEF forces fighting their way into Germany; but they, too, had assumed an intact surrender at some point of the bulk of the German territory. In August, SHAEF was beginning to anticipate an altogether different ending to the war, one which might leave Germany a totally burned-out wreck, fought across by the armies, and with no national authority, either civilian or military, to sign a surrender or prevent complete internal chaos. Worse yet, the country, economically and politically prostrate, might well become the stage for diehard-Nazi guerrilla warfare.11 On the 23d, Eisenhower sent these views to Washington, pointing out that if they proved correct his resources would be barely enough to get the German armed forces under control, care for displaced persons, and establish military government. To keep the economy from collapsing as well would be "utterly impossible," and he asked to be relieved of the economic re-

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sponsibilities assigned to him under CCS 551.12

Eisenhower's cable arrived in the Pentagon on 24 August, just two days before the handbook storm broke and on the same day the British offered their proposal in the CCS to shift postsurrender planning to the Control Council groups and the CCAC (L) . The three events together were bound to raise a spectacular turmoil. Eisenhower had in effect proposed a revision of CCS 551 that would convert it into a posthostilities directive, since, in his view, there probably would be no surrender. In doing so he threatened the long-standing British policy of restricting combined planning conducted in Washington to the period before the surrender, and he collided head-on with the new British effort to shear him of almost all postsurrender authority as combined commander. The British proposal, on the other hand, struck not only at SHAEF but at the hegemony in military government planning that the War Department claimed for the CCAC in Washington.

McCloy offered a compromise. The CAD would draft an interim postsurrender directive which would give Eisenhower what he asked for. When the two governments approved it, the directive would be sent to SHAEF through the CCS; thereafter the spelling-out of either CCS 551 or the postsurrender directive would be left to the Control Council elements with the CCAC (L) resolving any differences.13 The arrangement was not exactly an equal split. That SHAEF and the CAD would leave much for the Control Council and CCAC (L) to decide was doubtful from the outset; but the British members of the CCAC agreed on 29 August to submit the idea to London along with a draft cable to Eisenhower telling him he could plan along the lines he had described and would be given a postsurrender directive later.14

The reply from London came on 11 September and rejected Eisenhower's estimate and McCloy's compromise. The British government did not agree that the German economic structure would collapse and insisted that even in apparent chaos Eisenhower should count on finding stable elements through which to restore an orderly economic life. 15  The British members in the CC AC thereupon proposed to tell Eisenhower that he should do his best to carry out CCS 551 in its existing form. 16 Since the CAD was by then working to get appended to the handbook an even more radical statement on economics than Eisenhower had requested, Hilldring asked the US Deputy G-5, General Holmes, to get the 24 August request withdrawn, which was done on 18 September. 17 In the meantime, however, the War Department had become convinced that a postsurrender directive was imperative because of Eisenhower's need for one, because of the British drive to capture the postsurrender planning for the London-based agencies, and, above all, because of the handbook controversy, which had raised the most serious challenge yet to the military role in the occupation.

The internal struggle over occupation policy among U.S. agencies, which for the rest of the war would overshadow anything that had gone on between the Americans

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and the British, began, at least for the War Department, as a completely unanticipated collision. On 1 September the President's special assistant, Harry Hopkins, announced the formation of the Cabinet Committee on Germany to be composed of the Secretaries of State, War, and Treasury. The next day, in a preliminary meeting at which McCloy and Hilldring were present along with officials of the State and Treasury Departments, the Treasury representatives presented the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, and McCloy raised what to him and Hopkins was the more germane business of an interim postsurrender directive for Eisenhower.18 The Treasury representatives apparently assumed, not without some reason in the light of recent events, that the Cabinet Committee existed primarily to give Morgenthau a voice in the deliberations on policy for Germany. Deputy Secretary of War McCloy, however, had a considerably different opinion since it was Secretary of War Stimson who had asked the President a week before to organize such a committee for the purpose of developing a German policy. Stimson had done so knowing Morgenthau was interested in the German question but not knowing how much. 19 At this time, the handbook controversy was still in the future-though only by one day and Stimson had been concerned over the seeming imminence of the German defeat and the complete lack of US policy or even of a decision as to which zone the American forces would occupy.

Later the interim directive for Germany, which became known as JCS 1067, would generally be taken as only a slightly anemic offspring of the Morgenthau Plan. If this assumption is true, then the birth must have occurred at the 2 September meeting; but there the War Department and the Treasury were talking about essentially two different things. The Morgenthau Plan purported to be a permanent solution to the German problem. The War Department, except for Stimson in his capacity as a cabinet member, did not then or later claim a voice in deciding what would ultimately be done with Germany. What it did insist on-without prejudice to any subsequent decisions-was a technically workable policy for the period of military responsibility. In this regard, McCloy objected at the meeting to the chief features of the Morgenthau Plan, namely, the provisions for pastoralizing and partitioning the country. All other considerations aside, he argued, the provisions would simply have spawned more troubles than the military commander could have handled in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Nevertheless at the meeting-and later in JCS 1067-there was a greater similarity between the general tenor of War Department and Treasury views than would have been likely even a week before. The views of the one, however, did not descend from those of the other, but both came from the same source, namely, the President's expressed determination to punish Germany. The reaction to the handbook had emboldened the Treasury to submit a comprehensive plan for Germany. This reaction had at the same time alerted the War Department to the danger of being made to seem to have adopted an untenable "soft" position by the simplistic arguments of people "who were utterly innocent

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of any realization of the extent and complexity of the problem." 20

For McCloy especially, as the senior War Department official most deeply involved in occupation planning, the issue was not primarily one of "hard" or "soft" schools but of feasibility, and he went into the 2 September meeting prepared to opt for a feasible "hard" policy. Above all he was determined to preserve the War Department's predominance in the planning in Washington as well as the theater commander's in the field during the military period. With this goal accomplished he could afford to accommodate the tone of the Morgenthau Plan and ignore the substance, the tone having been already imposed by the President's statements in any case.

The Morgenthau Plan was in the long run only incidental to the revision of the War Department's thinking. Had the plan's influence been greater, the ultimate result might in fact have been less unsatisfactory; but the necessary compromise was much more fundamental. The emphasis until August 1944 had consistently, perhaps even somewhat blindly in the light of opinion developing elsewhere, been on making the Army an instrument of enlightened administration when it occupied enemy territory. After August 1944, as far as Germany was concerned, enlightenment in the Army's thinking gave way to justice as the President conceived it, hard and cold, but at least not to the black retribution of the Treasury plan. The shift was a retreat to a politically, if not morally, more defensible position but no surrender.

In the Cabinet Committee meetings, beginning on 5 September, and in memorandums to the President, Stimson made himself a leading opponent of the Morgenthau Plan within the government. After the meeting on the 5th, at which he had stood alone against Morgenthau's proposal to destroy the Ruhr and possibly also the Saar, he wrote:

I cannot conceive of such a proposition being either possible or effective, and I can see enormous general evils coming from it.  I can conceive of endeavoring to meet the misuse which Germany has recently made of this production by wise systems of control or trusteeship or even transfers to other nations. But I cannot conceive of turning such a gift of nature into a dustheap.21

On the 6th, to Morgenthau's chagrin, Stimson appeared to be making headway in convincing the President.22  On the 17th, although Morgenthau had by then apparently prevailed with the President and the Prime Minister at the OCTAGON Conference in Quebec, Stimson decided, nevertheless, to submit a memorandum he had written two days earlier. In it he condemned the philosophy of the plan. "We cannot," he wrote to the President, "reduce a nation of seventy million who have been outstanding for years in the arts and sciences and highly industrialized to poverty . . . . It would be just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate on their victims-it would be a crime against civilization itself." 23

On the 22d, McCloy, met in his office with his counterparts from the State and Treasury Departments. In an all-day session they worked over a CAD draft entitled

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"Directive to SCAEF Regarding the Military Government of Germany in the Period Immediately Following the Cessation of Organized Resistance." With their informal approval, the directive went to the JCS as JCS 1067. 24 It was the product of a tumultuous month. Allied troops were inside Germany and might soon occupy the whole country. Eisenhower had no directive, and whether or not he would have a military government mission was far from certain. At Quebec the President and Prime Minister had put their okays on the economic features of the Morgenthau Plan. Whether the leadership in occupation planning, even during the military phase, would remain with the War Department was questionable. Under pressure from the White House, US official opinion on Germany had hardened to a degree that would for months to come dismay and baffle many who saw the results but not the darker alternatives.

Few documents as important as JCS 106'7 have been written under such intense and diverse influences of the moment; nevertheless, if not enlightened, the document was what it was intended to be, a proper military directive giving the theater commander workable instructions on which to base detailed planning. At the same time, it was not, as its authors were no doubt well aware, an adequate program for administering a conquered nation. The directive disavowed any intention of stating policy beyond that of a "short term and military character, in order not to prejudice whatever ultimate policies may later be determined upon." 25  Its object was to establish a "stern, all-powerful military administration of a conquered country, based on its unconditional surrender, impressing the Germans with their military defeat and the futility of any further aggression." 26  In language it was redolent of the Treasury philosophy. In substance it was an expansion of five points, none originating with the Morgenthau Plan, on which the War-State-Treasury meeting of 2 September and subsequently the Cabinet Committee had agreed unanimously. They were : dissolution of the Nazi party; demilitarization; controls over communications, press, propaganda, and education; reparation for those countries wanting it; and decentralization of the German governmental structure (without a decision either way on partitioning the country) . A sixth point-aimed at permanently reducing the German standard of living to the subsistence level, eliminating the German economic power position in Europe, and converting the German economy "in such a manner that it will be so dependent upon imports and exports that Germany cannot by its own devices reconvert to war production"-had been considered and dropped. It had been acceptable to Morgenthau as a lightly camouflaged entering wedge for his plan and had been vehemently rejected by Stimson for the same reason. On the matter of relief, the directive restated the disease and unrest formula and discouraged importation of relief supplies, but did not prohibit them.

The economic section of the directive prohibited "steps looking toward the

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economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy" and placed the responsibility for maintaining economic controls on the German people and the German authorities.27 This section has been cited by no less an authority on the occupation than Walter L. Dorn as evidence that JCS 1067 was "largely a Treasury document." 28 The Treasury influence was, however, mostly coincidental. In response to Eisenhower's request to be relieved of responsibility for sustaining the German economy and the President's reaction to the handbook, the CAD had, at least two weeks before the meeting at which JCS 1067 was drafted, written an almost identical statement on economic policy as the first of the three principles to be attached to the flyleaf of the handbook. (See above, p. 89.) No matter what its origin and even though it was later altered somewhat (see below, p. 212) , the economic policy was going to prove unfortunate. Nevertheless, in stating the policy, the War Department was not making the Army the instrument for achieving the long-range aims of the Morgenthau Plan, but merely taking from Eisenhower the responsibility during the initial occupation period for preventing an economic collapse, which Eisenhower believed was inevitable.

Apparently the directive was acceptable to Secretary Morgenthau, not because it incorporated his plan but because it did not prejudice the eventual implementation of the plan. At the moment, Morgenthau did not need to have the plan written into a short-term military directive. He believed that he had it established as high national policy both of the United States and of Great Britain. When his confidence on this score evaporated, as it soon did, the directive became a great deal more important to him and to the history of the occupation, not because it incorporated the plan but because it was the only approved U.S. policy statement on Germany.

The directive received JCS approval on 24 September, and several days later Hopkins carried it to the White House. He had been involved in the writing since the 2 September meeting. In the Cabinet Committee, Hopkins had seemed at the beginning to favor the Morgenthau Plan, but he had later apparently developed at least a passing ambition to become the United States High Commissioner for Germany and had then joined the War Department representatives in pushing for a less restrictive statement.29 The President, according to Hopkins, spent forty minutes reading the directive and then said it was in accordance with his views.30

In the aftermath of Quebec, Roosevelt had begun to find the Morgenthau Plan an embarrassment. The 1944 election campaign was getting into full swing, and on 24 September the major Sunday newspapers had run articles on the plan, the majority of them highly critical. Three days later the President telephoned Stimson from Hyde Park to tell him that he did not really intend to make Germany an agricultural nation. When he next saw Stimson in early October, he said Morgenthau had "pulled

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a boner," and he seemed "staggered" to learn that a passage about agriculturalization and pastoralization was in the agreement he had initialed with Churchill at Quebec.31

In early October, JCS 1067 suddenly became a valuable document-to the President temporarily as evidence, should he need it, that it and not the Morgenthau Plan was the approved US policy for Germany-to the War Department for many months to come as the only statement on Germany it was going to get. Having denied accepting the Morgenthau Plan, the President soon also professed complete lack of interest in postwar planning for Germany. To the Secretary of State he wrote, "it is all very well for us to make all kinds of preparations for Germany but there are some matters in regard to such treatment that lead me to believe speed in such matters is not an essential . . . . I dislike making plans for a country which we do not yet occupy." 32

A Program for Germany?

JCS 1067 was a US document. As such, although it was sent to Eisenhower, SHAEF could not put it into force until it was approved and transmitted through the CCS. After the uproar over the Morgenthau Plan, the War Department more than ever wanted it approved-and without changes-because the likelihood of agreement within the government on any other document or revision was extremely slight. The hope was that the President's influence would be enough to quell British resistance to policy originating in Washington and now, in the instance of JCS 1067, exclusively made there. Hopkins, when he took the paper to the President, had asked him to "write a note . . . and ask the Prime Minister to have his nitpickers lay off the documents." 33 But in October the British put forward in the CCAC a draft directive of their own. It differed from JCS 1067 in a number of respects, most painfully for the War Department planners in that it could be taken as an expression of long-term policy-just then the most highly explosive subject in Washington.34

That the British directive and JCS 1067 would die in the CCS from lack of action by either side soon became clear; thus the War and State Departments attempted to salvage their one viable piece of policy guidance by submitting it for tripartite adoption in the EAC. Pending this event, which was not to be expected soon, the CAD sent JCS 1067 to the US Group Control Council to be used in planning for the postsurrender period. 35 As Supreme Commander, Eisenhower would have to continue under the presurrender directive, CCS 551. Wickersham, on his return from a trip to Washington in November, reported, "The feeling at home is that SHAEF, in the pre-defeat period, should follow Document 1067 as closely as possible"; but how Eisenhower as combined commander was to impose a strictly US policy on the British contingent in SHAEF was not explained.36

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October was the kind of month in SHAEF that September had been in Washington. Some troops were in Germany and many more might soon join them; but the handbook was hanging fire, and all previous policy assumptions had obviously been superseded by the developments concerning the handbook and JCS 1067. The Morgenthau Plan, meanwhile, had been a godsend for the German Propaganda Ministry. Even the fertile mind of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels would have been hard pressed to devise any better means to stiffen the spines of a population and army reeling under a disastrous summer's defeats.

Although SHAEF did not yet hold enough German territory to make the confusion over policy obvious, it had arrived at the point where an announced military government program could have enormous potential influence on the war. All that the German people knew so far was what their government told them about unconditional surrender and the Morgenthau Plan. In the second week of October the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), SHAEF, circulated for comment a projected set of guidelines on military government propaganda for the Germans, in which it proposed to offer them opportunities to rebuild for a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic future. Col. T. R. Henn, the deputy chief, answered for the Operations Branch, G-5. Although he was a British officer he apparently spoke for the whole branch. The PWD paper, he said, expressed views on which the US and British civil affairs officers "always have been in complete agreement," namely, "that we must plan beyond the short term view; that, in practice, neither of our nations will allow civilians in Central Europe to starve; [and] that it is essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of 1918-19 (when the blockade of Central Europe was not lifted for two months) . . . ." However, he declared, the doctrine of the professionals was no longer what mattered. The publicity given to the Morgenthau controversy had confirmed "to the last detail every statement of enemy propaganda for the past five years." A restatement of policy could only be effective if Eisenhower was willing to formulate policy independently of the CCS.37

The Operations Branch was coming close to talking mutiny, and the next day the G-5, General Grasett, called the first of several meetings in his office to devise propaganda themes that the Psychological Warfare Division could use without putting SHAEF in rebellion. The result was austere: the objective was to be limited to forestalling a scorched earth policy by impressing on the Germans that they would have to fend for themselves economically after the war. Glimmers of hope were to be given them in the form of promises to eradicate Nazi and Gestapo rule, purge the school system, restore religious freedom, and permit free labor unions. Material assistance in any form would not be mentioned, but the Germans could be told that the Allied armies would import their own food.38

A little later in the month SHAEF propaganda received a small and equivocal boost from Washington. In a speech on 18 October the Republican candidate for president, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, had accused the Roosevelt administration of stiffening the German resistance by its policy towards Germany. The President replied

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three days later,39 promising stern retribution for "all those in Germany directly responsible for this agony of mankind"; but he did not specifically endorse, or reject, the Morgenthau Plan. He said he did not believe "that God eternally condemned any race of humanity," and offered the German people a chance "to earn their way back into the fellowship of peace-loving and law-abiding nations." 40

Taking the speech as a guide, McCloy told Smith that some propaganda reassurance to the German people was in order. It should not, however, go beyond letting the "average German" feel he "can work in peace if he abides by the regulations." McCloy believed that this aim could be accomplished, on the one hand, by promising "punishment of war criminals and recalcitrant Germans generally" and, on the other, by "factual and colorful news of orderly life in Allied-occupied territory, things like babies being born and women hanging out wash." 41

SHAEF waited through October and into November before issuing its own military government directive. What it then put forward was an astringent precis of CCS 551 plus the four principles the CCS had ordered axed to the flyleaf of the handbook. The directive gave the army group commanders the following seven missions only:

1. Imposition of the will of the Allies upon occupied Germany.
2. Care, control, and repatriation of displaced United Nations nationals and minimum care necessary to control enemy refugees and displaced persons.
3. Apprehension of war criminals.
4. Elimination of nazism-fascism, German militarism, the Nazi hierarchy, and their collaborators.
5. Restoration and maintenance of law and order, as far as the military situation permits.
6. Protection of United Nations property, control of certain properties, and conservation of German foreign exchange assets.
7. Preservation and establishment of suitable administration to the extent required to accomplish the above directives.

The four handbook principles, recapitulated verbatim, were given as restrictions on the missions.42

The directive could hardly be regarded as an achievement by those who had worked and trained for many months to make military government a purposeful instrument of national policy. Colonel Henn expressed the dilemma of military government when he wrote:

It will take a quarter century to eliminate the theories on which Nazism came to power. This can only be done by education of the next generation for which we have made no preparations and have no plan. We are proposing to cast out Nazism-militarism, but we have nothing to put in its place. We offer no hope, no ideals of democracy or world citizenship, and no prospect of an economic future. 43

The future of military government in Germany was indeed for too long going to be officially as bleak as Colonel Henn saw it. On the other hand, armies must rely more on men than on paper schemes. The voice of Colonel Hunt was not dead, nor was the common body of doctrine acquired at Charlottesville and Wimbledon.

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Endnotes

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