From the Keep [Der Weg 1948-01]
An original translation of "Vom Bergfried aus"
Source Documents: German Scan
Note(s): None.
Title: From the Keep [de: Vom Bergfried aus]
Author(s): The Editor
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 2, Issue 1 (January 1948)
Page(s): 53-56
Referenced Documents:
[LINK] CLAY WILL FORCE PLANT REMOVALS; Says 'Reparations' Factories Will Be Dismantled Despite Growing German Protests
[LINK] A year of Potsdam, the German economy since the surrender
From the Keep
Dismantling Madness
By Henry Wilde
Even before these lines reach the press, the Anglo-American occupation authorities in Germany will have slammed a new document of political-economic folly onto the table: a fresh, supposedly final list of businesses slated for dismantling. While the Marshall Plan and its blessings occupy discussions, actions proceed in the old Morgenthau spirit of the disastrous Potsdam Conference policy. That nothing good can come of this is a cheap prophecy—too easy for anyone who grasps the ABCs of international politics.
In Germany, a palpable agitation reigns. A winter of unimaginable suffering looms ahead, harsher than the winter of 1946–47, which already claimed countless victims with its hunger and cold. They preach to the starving masses: you must work and produce to export and survive. They hand out paper promises: we aim to help you earn your living independently again; we grant you higher production quotas. Yet what the Germans see—what stands as visible, tangible reality—fails to rhyme with such assurances for a people evidently lacking the subtle intellect of Allied statesmen. Dismantling and destruction roll on unabated. Air-raid shelters, hardly offensive weapons but serving as makeshift homes and hospitals—ugly though they may be—are blasted skyward with lavish explosives. Out into the crisp winter air with the homeless and sick! If nearby dwellings suffer damage, so much the worse: the Allies arrived in Germany as victors, not liberators.
Protest strikes have erupted. The Homag, or Holsteinische Maschinenfabrik A.G., in Kiel, recently showcased its wares at the Hanover export fair. That was either a blunder or a sly British jest. For Homag faces dismantling, branded a former military operation. Its 1,800 workers repair diesel engines, trucks, and motors for fishing boats; 3,000 could readily find employment there. But the Allies, intent on aiding the Germans, decreed otherwise. When the workers refused to dig their own graves by aiding the dismantling, British troops marched in, rifles and bayonets at the ready, to school the foolish laborers in democratic reason. A two-hour protest strike was their defiant reply.
Wild rumors swirl through the Ruhr region. They may be exaggerated, yet agitators from the far left and right find their task effortless. Between 900 and 1,800 factories, it’s said, are marked for dismantling—including, per an Associated Press report, “Germany’s entire ball bearing industry, literally all so-called peace divisions of the vast Krupp works, and three factories producing machinery and equipment for coal mining.”
The depth of outrage across all strata of German society shines through in the words of leading German figures. Never before have voices spoken so openly, clearly, and boldly.
Alfred Kubel, Economics Minister of the “state” of Lower Saxony, preempted the inevitable accusations and smear campaigns from Morgenthau’s backers in Britain and America:
“Do not label it nationalism or radicalism if we cease to comply… But we cannot fathom why further destruction must proceed as we brace for the harshest winter Western Europe has seen…”
General Clay seems deaf to the alarm and despair for a whole nation’s survival ringing in these German pleas. He appears merely irked that Germans dare resist a fresh Allied blunder without meek silence. Dropping the carrot, he brandishes the whip of hunger:
“If German unions refuse to follow orders, they can scarcely expect us to ship more food to Germany.”
The planned dismantling of German plants and factories in the British and American zones, valued at a billion dollars, will proceed come what may, declares the General. This sum, he notes, is
“less than what Germany receives in a single year of occupation from the United States and Great Britain.”
Yet:
“If we declare a plant is going to be dismantled it is going to be dismantled.”
Military authorities stand ready for any contingency, troops poised to intervene if needed.
Threats give way to mockery:
“It was never assumed the reparations would delight the Germans. Yet it remains a fact that no defeated nation in history has been treated with greater consideration than Germany… Intelligent Germans ought to see that the dismantling was meticulously planned and calculated to preserve a well-integrated economy…”
To which one can only reply: apparently, no intelligent souls remain in Germany, for no German perceives this. The intelligence on which Americans and Britons, per Clay, rest their iron fist stood sponsor when Allied policy toward Germany was birthed at Yalta and Potsdam. That same intelligence drafted the latest dismantling list. That same intelligence ordained the considerate leniency shown to Germans: the fertile East severed, 12 million expelled from their homes, the nation carved into a patchwork of absurd statelets, its industry stripped away…
The scornful laughter greeting the General-Historian’s claim was joined by that same intelligence and the specter of starvation.
In A Year of Potsdam, a book from the Economic Division of the American Military Government with a foreword by General Draper, a triumphant tone prevails (page 35):
“The Reparations program in the U.S. Zone has made long forward strides since June, 1945, when the broad ‘reparations’ principles were laid down by the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Republics. In the twelve months that followed:
War plants were destroyed;
Reparations plants were dismantled;
A quadripartite Plant Evaluation Formula was adopted and put to use;
Advance Reparations plants were allocated;
Delivery of reparations equipment got under way.
Approximately 17,000 persons in the U.S. Zone are working on one or anothher phase of reparations activity — destruction, dismantling, shipping, evaluation, administration, statistics.
As of Aug. 1, 1946, 156 plants in the U.S. Zone had been confirmed for reparations by the Economic Directorate. Industries represented include aircraft, armaments, chemicals, machinery, metals, oil, and shipbuilding.”
Elsewhere (page 37), it continues:
“On 31 March 1946, the first shipment of reparations equipment — from the huge Kugelfischer ball bearing Plant at Schweinfurt — was loaded on rail cars and forwarded to Bremen, there to be transshipped to the Soviet Union. Since then, reparations equipment has been forwarded to Bremen from three other plants: Daimler-Benz Underground Aircraft Engine Plant, Deschimag Shipyards and Gendorf Power Plant.
As of 1 August 11,100 tons of reparations equipment from these plants, all representing ‘Advance deliveries’ — were made available at the port of Bremen for transshipment by water to the USSR.”
Next comes a list of 120 factories in the American zone, wholly or partly destroyed and dismantled by September 1, 1945. Among them: Kugelfischer Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt (ball bearings); Bavarian Motor Works No. 1 in Munich (aircraft engines); Deutsche Schiff- und Maschinenbau AG, known as Deschimag, in Bremen (shipbuilding); Großkraftwerk AG in Mannheim (dismantling yet to begin); Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz in Oberursel (diesel engines); Fritz Müller in Oberesslingen (machine tools); power plants in Gendorf, Bavaria, Hastedt in Bremen, and Töging AG Innwerk in Töging, Bavaria; and the Eschenruth factory (machine tools).
Dismantling has swept through all zones. Only now, as the French-controlled Südena news agency reports, has the Eastern Zone’s Central Transport Administration released a memorandum unveiling official data on railway dismantling. Just three main lines in the Soviet zone retain double tracks: Magdeburg to Marienborn (Helmstedt), Wittenberg to Erfurt, and Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder. On the Leipzig–Magdeburg and Dessau–Wittenberg routes, the second track is currently being removed. Operations falter worst on the former Berlin–Leipzig trunk line. Conditions are direst in the Greifswald directorate, where 30 lines have been erased or left idle since 1945. In Berlin’s Reichsbahn directorate, 15 lines have ceased. The total dismantled track length in the Eastern Zone spans 7,000 kilometers.
The inefficiency of dismantling shines clearest in concrete examples. Consider the Krupp Borbeck ironworks—a modern blast furnace, steel, and rolling mill dismantled for the Soviet Union. It boasted a steel capacity of 4,500 tons yearly. The plant’s acquisition value reached 120 million Reichsmarks. Per reparations definitions, the movable parts were first valued at 60 million, then slashed by a Russian commission to 45 million. After hefty dismantling costs, the Soviets credit a mere 9.5 million to the reparations tally—a fraction of one year’s output. Nine-and-a-half million for 120, excluding losses from idle labor and foregone steel exports.
An expert estimate from April this year pegged dismantling costs for the Borbeck plant, ongoing since March 1946, at roughly 20 million. Some 3,000 workers toiled on the task. The total weight of parts slated for delivery is 91,000 tons; by January 25, 1947, 28,700 tons had shipped, consuming 3,050 cubic meters of wood—enough for 3,000 bedrooms.
Foundations and factory halls, undismantlable, linger as useless husks. Whether removed parts can serve their original purpose elsewhere is uncertain. Rolling mills might manage it, but no evidence suggests dismantled blast furnaces can be reassembled to resume pig iron production—a possibility German experts gravely doubt. Thus looms the risk that these laboriously built furnaces hold mere scrap value for their recipients.
A German expert and unionist, to whom I owe these figures, remarked:
“The dismantling of heavy basic industry plants thus proves a reparations contribution of dubious worth. Preserving such facilities and diverting part of their output for reparations would surely be a sounder economic path than this increasingly questionable dismantling, especially for the recipients.”
Who could contest this, when 91,000 tons of blast furnaces, Cowper stoves, Siemens-Martin ovens, rolling mills, and cranes yield a credited value of 9.5 million marks—an average of 100 marks per ton, barely double the scrap rate?
Take the Deschimag shipyards in Bremen. Valued at 26 million marks on December 20, 1945, new Allied guidelines cut this to 8.5 million by March–April 1946, then a Russian commission trimmed it to 4.8 million on April 18. From 4,000–5,000 cubic meters of packing wood, 5,000 bedrooms could have arisen.
No one untouched by the Morgenthau-Potsdam delirium can seriously dispute dismantling’s inefficiency. This plunder of German industry—especially the peace industries vital to a working economy—has wrought Germany’s economic and moral paralysis, offering scant benefit to reparations recipients.
Germans aware of these truths lack the “intelligence” General Clay demands to see
“that the dismantling was carefully planned and calculated to sustain a well-integrated economy.”
They believe and fear the opposite for Germany and all Europe.
Those dreaming of extra profits by crushing German competition will soon feel the truth: an impoverished Germany destabilizes Europe’s economy, and an impoverished Europe unbalances the world’s.