Eisenhower announced the closure of SHAEF.
Eisenhower also eased the fraternization rules between Allied troops and German civilians allowing Allied soldiers to chat and speak to German civilians.
Nazi German poster recruiting women for for the Reichsluftschutzbund, i.e. civil defense. Women, and teenage boys, later served on antiaircraft gun crews. A few months after the end of the war, the same targeted audience was beginning to become friendly to US troops.
By September nearly all of the rules would be removed.
Fraternization in this context does not mean what people commonly assume it does, but it is more in line with the etymology of the word's origins, from Latin through French: "to sympathize as brothers". Eisenhower, who was first of all an administrator, and highly intelligent, recognized that contact between the Western Allies, and with Americans in particular, would help have a corrosive impact on Prussianized and Nazified German culture. Bans on contacts had already been lifted as to contacts with children, which were impossible to prevent between oversupplied American troops and German children anyhow. The British, contrary to what is often reported in regard to the development in policy, followed suit.
There was really no danger that French troops were going to fraternize to any significant degree with Germans, nor those of any country the Germans had overrun. And of course in Russian controlled territory, where Eisenhower's orders didn't apply rapine Red Army troops simply terrorize and brutalized civilians, and not only Germans.
Be that as it may, the inevitable problem that existed with American troops in particular fraternizing in the wider sense was already there. It had been a problem after World War One during which the American Army had taken steps to stop friendly contacts between Germans and Americans with limited success. At that time, Americans already were noting in letters home that Germany looked more like the US than France did, in that it was more technologically advanced and cleaner. By the end of World War Two this was much more the case, with Americans being shocked by what they deemed the primitive conditions the French and Italians lived in, and impressed with the more advanced state of German municipalities. While its often little noted, a non insignificant number of GIs found themselves not really liking the French and outright horrified by the conditions Italians lived in.
With things being the way they are, even before the end of the war the U.S. Army had trouble keeping soldiers away from German women, which is not to say that all such contacts had only one thing in mind. Having said that, the conditions that followed the havoc of the Eastern Front and the war in general were having a massive impact on German culture even without Eisenhower seeking to step in and direct it. The German military had been huge with a very large number of German men in it. Many of them were killed during the war and many were simply missing by 1945.
A vast number of German men were held as prisoners of war as well. The Western Allies held over 3,150,000 by April 30, 1945. By the end of the war that number was over 7,614,790,with the 425,000 German POWs in 511 main and branch camps. The Soviet Union also held at least 2,733,739, fewer than a person might suspect, actually, reflecting the nature of the combat in the east.
The Western Allies did not, and could not have, repatriated German POWS immediately. The US held German prisoners until 1946 in the US, with it notably being the case that many went from disciplined Nazi soldiers to actually enjoying the last year of their captivity. Reeducation proved unnecessary as they rapidly evolved into democratic Germans in the last months of their captivity.
The point, however, is that with over 10,000,000 German men in captivity, and with millions of German men killed during the war, and with the German citizenry in the east put to flight, nature began to play a role in things very quickly. Hundreds of thousands of German women were left without support in a country that had largely resisted imposing female labor on its citizenry during the war. Man young women knew at an instinctive level that the normal path of finding a lifelong mate had been destroyed. And the collapse of the Nazi system proved to be a bit like tearing a scab off a wound as even the Nazifield population proved capable of abandoning Nazi propaganda pretty rapidly, even if only superficially in some instance.
Added to this, the war itself had damaged domestic life globally. This has been noted in the context of World War Two marriages in the US on this site already. While the German situation was different, it was found that after the war an appreciable number of Germans, both male and female, simply changed identities up to and including abandoning a spouse, missing or not. In some instances German women became outright disgusted with German men and blamed them for the war and the fate they'd suffered, something that was also the case with Japanese women.
By June of 1944, Life magazine was noting:
There’s one blonde Fräulein with braided hair who always walked past two MPs every day on her way to do shopping, swinging her hips from side to side even more noticeably than usual. As she passed she would look slyly at the MPs, tap one hip and utter the word, ‘Verboten.’ […]
In Germany fraternization is officially a matter of high policy. But for the GI it is not a case of policy or of politics or of going out with girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies. You don’t talk politics when you fraternize. It’s more a matter of bicycles and skirts waving in the breeze and a lonesome, combat-weary solder looking warily around the corner to see if a policeman is in sight.”
Ultimately somewhere between 14,000 to 20,000 German women would marry American soldiers after the war, something that stands in remarkable contrast to the French, as only 6,500 French women married US soldiers. Between 10,000 and 100,000 Italian women married U.S. soldiers. 70,000 English women did the same.
Late war German poster celebrating Maria Schultz. The poster states; "A German Girl! 'Germany will endure all suffering and create a new world', said Maria Schultz on the 12.February 1945, awaiting her death sentence" Schultz, whose actual last name may have been Bierganz, was arrested when her diary was discovered, which was fanatically pro Nazi and full of fantasies about killing U.S. troops, but she was just let go, not executed. German women would help rebuild Germany, but not in the way she imagined.
If all of this seems a bit odd, it's probably a lot more human than people might suppose. Germany had been heavily propagandized during the Nazi era, but the era was a lot shorter than people like to recall, which is frightening in that Germany descended into madness so quickly. Be that as it may, DNA tends to rule at the end of the day and the Japanese and German examples tend to show that, with the German one perhaps being the most consequential. Nazi Germany had very distinct concepts of what women were to do, which were more than a little perverse. Germany itself was, of course, a Christian nation which the anti Christian Nazi party was seeking to transform into something else, and which it was surprisingly successful in doing in its short period of rule.
Recruiting poster aimed at teenage girls for the Hitler Youth. The female variant of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls would prove to be downright perverse, encouraging a radical pronatalist view of their role.
The Nazis were heavily invested in an exaggerated martial concept of manliness which failed. By late 1944 the Allies were on Germany's doorstep. Fairly soon German soldiers in the East would outright be fighting to the last man to try to protect German civilians from the Red Army, which is much of the reason that the fighting in 1945 was so much worse in the East than at any time prior to that. German troops did in fact go down fighting in many instances to attempt to give German civilians, including women, the chance to get away, but to a large degree they failed. German men, in other words, were unable to protect German women from rape and death in the East.
In the West, the German military failure had less severe physical consequences, but German manhood failed there too. Cities were destroyed and lives wrecked. The irony, however, was that in the West, the Allies themselves became the protector, and indeed the liberator, of German women. By making them temporarily Verboten, they gave them independence in a way that they had not had since 1932, if ever.
Italy declared war on Japan.
The French flag was formally unfurled at the summit of the Victory Column in Berlin.
The monument celebrated the German victory over France in the Franco Prussian War.
Japanese destroyer Tachibana was sunk in Hakodate Bay by aircraft of the U.S. Navy. The battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, plus two heavy cruisers and 4 destroyers, bombarded the Kamaishi steel works in the first naval gunfire directed against the Japanese home islands.
The Simla Conference ended without a positive result.
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Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australia, Diplomacy, Dwight Eisenhower, Germany (Berlin), Internment of Japanese, Japan, Luzon, Nazi Party, Racism, USSR, World War Two
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