The Post-War Years
Although most of the memories of my early childhood years fortunately have faded by now, the hardships endured in the post-war years 1945/48 in Germany stand out vividly, especially during the extremely severe winters. Huge piles of snow that refused to melt for months on end could be found everywhere in our town. The older children took advantage of this and built themselves an igloo at the end of our street, where they would sit by candlelight – if one of them was lucky enough to have brought one – and tell each other ghost stories. To our greatest annoyance we younger ones were not allowed in.
At the end of the war, the Allies agreed that Germany should be ruled by the Morgenthau Plan. Morgenthau sounds like a Jewish name and when one considers the suffering of the Jewish population of Germany and the surrounding countries at the hands of the Nazis, it is not surprising that times of severe hardships were in store for us. The Morgenthau provided for a starvation diet with very little food for keeping warm inside and fuel for warming our homes. My hometown is situated at an average altitude of 450 metres in the heart of Europe. Therefore, it is blessed with the typical continental climate of long and hard winters and hot summers.
Several times my mother got into trouble with our teachers for keeping her children at home during extremely cold weather because of the lack of warm clothes and footwear. And one day my parents miraculously got hold of two pairs of army boots – a rare treasure indeed. My brother remembers wearing one of the pairs on his first school day. The other one fitted our big sister reasonably well. She was seven years older than me and although the boots looked very strange on her, at least she could go to school. This sister of mine was forever involved in some kind of mischief. Our science teacher once caught her in her ‘stylish’ outfit performing a Cossack dance to an admiring audience of classmates on the table of the chemistry room. Oh yes, we did have our moments, too!
I do not recall much of those early days in great detail. Just one thing sticks in my mind quite vividly and that is how, before the total breakdown, in common with all schoolchildren in Germany, each day at the beginning of our first lesson we always had to stand by the side of our desks, raise our right hands in Nazi salute and shout: ‘Heil Hitler!’ There was no school for six months, but when it started again, we still found ourselves standing by the side of our desks. This time, however, we were asked to fold our hands and say the Lord’s Prayer. Even at that tender age such behaviour struck me as one of the most ridiculous and hypocritical things that anyone could ever have thought of. I cannot imagine that it could have endeared any uninitiated person to religion in general and Christianity in particular.
A toned down version of the original Morgenthau Plan was signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944. It was limited to turning Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character. The original plan provided that the Ruhr mines should be destroyed, but this project had been dropped in the meantime. From 1945/1948, the Morgenthau Plan ensured that everybody knew that we were a nation defeated, humiliated, ground into the dust – never to rise again. But after three years of undiluted misery, the Allies realised that something needed to be done to stop West Germany from falling into the hands of communism.
That’s why in 1948 the Marshall Plan came to our rescue, as it did to other European countries, including Britain. This plan was the primary scheme of the United States for rebuilding the allied countries of Europe and combating what was seen as the communist menace, in the aftermath of World War II. The initiative was named after the United States Secretary of State, George Marshall. The reconstruction plan was developed at a meeting of the participating European states in 1947.
The Marshall Plan offered the same aid to the Soviet Union and its allies, if they would make political reforms and accept certain outside controls. In fact, America worried that the Soviet Union would take advantage of the plan and therefore deliberately made the terms hard for the USSR to accept. The plan was in operation for four fiscal years, beginning in July 1947. During that period some $13 billion of economic and technical assistance – equivalent to around $130 billion in 2006 – was given to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
By the time the Marshall Plan had come to completion, the economy of every participant state, with the exception of Germany, had grown well past pre-war levels. Over the next two decades, Western Europe as a whole would enjoy unprecedented growth and prosperity. The Marshall Plan has also long been seen by many as one of the first elements of European integration that helped to remove tariff trade barriers and set up institutions to co-ordinate the economy of the European continent.
This article is a chapter from ‘War And Peace Between Nations.
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‘War And Peace Between Nations’