Arthur David Kahn, Experiment in Occupation: Witness to the Turnabout—Anti-Nazi War to
Cold War, 1944–1946. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Experiment in Occupation is a memoir by a quondam member of the Office of
Strategic Services assigned to various functions in the American occupation of
Germany from late 1944 through May 1946. The work is both an intermittently
interesting personal memoir and bad history reminiscent of the more jejune
efforts of early Vietnam-era Cold War revisionism. The book rehashes the
allegations Kahn first made more than a half-century ago in a privately
published work—Betrayal: Our Occupation of Germany, which was
subsequently put out by KsiąZka i wiedza in Poland.
Kahn charges that the American occupation of Germany, though redeemed
to a small degree by the service of some individuals like himself, was on the
whole [End Page 140] botched. His bill of particular failings is threefold: (1)
that many of the men assigned to occupation duty had been poorly prepared
for their functions and knew too little about German history and the German
language; (2) that the occupational authorities disposed too few resources and
were overwhelmed by the tasks of reconstruction that confronted them, forcing
them to abandon even the small degree of supervision of German life they had
achieved; and (3) that the indiscipline of American soldiers and their penchant
for corruption tended to undermine the moral authority of the occupation. This
much of Kahn's description of the shortcoming of the occupation occasions
little surprise, resembling as it does the journalism of the day and even the
U.S. Army's official histories.
Kahn, however, pushes his critique further. His fundamental complaint is
that the United States lacked a compelling vision of a democratic Germany.
This, he believes, was a tragedy because his contacts with Germans left him
convinced that most of them had not been deeply tarnished by Nazism and
would have responded affirmatively to what Kahn likes to call the "goals of
FDR and Eisenhower" if those goals had been adequately presented by a
stricter, more comprehensive, and more enduring occupation regime. Under
the more lenient occupation, he argues, German conservatives and even
outright Nazis were able to reassert themselves, often aided by conservative
Americans tainted by anti-Communism. Foremost among these malefactors
was General George S. Patton, whose alleged misrule in Bavaria is the
subject of two chapters. The result, Kahn laments, was a disaster. One of the
final chapters of the book bears a Pravda-like title of leaden irony: "Democracy,
American Zone Style!"
When Kahn published Betrayal in 1950, the future of Germany was still
very much in question, and his indictment perhaps seemed compelling. But
from the perspective of the early twenty-first century his account poses a
problem: Germany, as Kahn is forced to admit, did not turn out too badly (p.
180) Moreover, the Germany of today is much more the legatee of the
American occupation than of the Soviet occupation, whose policies Kahn
frankly admires. To extricate himself from this embarrassment, Kahn produces
a deus ex machina: the "democratic resistance" to American misrule waged by
German workers and their unions (pp. 178–189). Others might contend that
the Western zones flourished in proportion to the curtailment of precisely what
Kahn advocates, namely, the strict supervision, which is epitomized in
German memories by the jesuitical tyranny of the Frageboden.
As the preceding paragraph will suggest, Kahn's memoir is best when it
hews closely to his personal experiences. It is at its most interesting when he
relates his personal experiences and reproduces in numerous appendices
extracts from his official reports and letters home. But when he ventures
further afield, the reader encounters a weird alternative history of postwar
events. Thus the fusion of the German Communist Party with parts of the
Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in April 1946
was, in his depiction, an aspect of the spontaneous "democratic resistance" by
German workers against the American indulgence of reaction, not (as it so
plainly was) an instance of the national-front strategy applied by the Soviet
Union everywhere in Europe to leverage the power of the Communists and
their natural allies at a time when (as Josif Stalin himself observed) outright
Communism had [End Page 141] lost much of its appeal (pp. 108–109, 122–
123). For Kahn it was the Americans who violated the Potsdam Agreement
with their reluctance to administer Germany as a single entity, even though no
one to this day can explain how there could have been an economic policy for
all of Germany when Soviet troops were carting away so much equipment
from their zone without even a pretense of accounting. Nor is it clear how the
Americans could have believed that the Soviet Union was sincere about
unified administration when they knew that Soviet leaders were violating
Potsdam's injunction against the manufacture of weapons by keeping open
until 1947 factories producing all kinds of weaponry, including rockets and jet
aircraft.
In Kahn's postwar Germany, Communists are invariably selfless custodians
of the public interest, and their rejection at the polls in 1946 is proof only of
American indulgence of their reactionary opponents (pp. 142–143). Although
Kahn claims to have read Norman Naimark's The Russians in Germany: A
History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), Kahn's Soviet soldiers—unlike Naimark's—
are all inspiring models of deportment. In Kahn's Germany, only Americans
were looters and rapists. When at last the Soviet occupation authorities
regretfully adopted "Stalinist repression" in their zone, they did so only in
response to the "cold war pressures" of the United States (p. 176). For Kahn,
in short, the Cold War was a more or less deliberate American creation. And
he has a witness. Just as in Aeschylus' The Persians a series of messengers
brings to the court at Susa news of the unfolding disaster at Salamis, so in
Experiment in Occupation at each ratcheting-up of postwar tensions a voice,
clear and true, rings out to decry the disastrous trend of things and to indict
those responsible—the voice of Marshal Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov (pp.
119–120, 127, 176, 204, 209). (Someone should have informed Kahn that
Zhukov told his friends that his memoirs should have appeared under
someone else's name, so little did they resemble what he had actually written.)
What is the source for this parable of alliance lost? Not, surely, the few
historians whom Kahn selectively cites. The source, rather, is the same myth
that has sustained two generations of writers and political activists of a certain
bent: that at the end of the Second World War a chance existed not only for an
enduring peace but for an era of global reform in which (as Henry Wallace
said) every Hottentot should have his daily portion of milk. The cooperation of
two great progressive forces—Soviet Communism and the American New
Deal—could have made this possible. But misfortune struck down the great
Franklin Roosevelt in the hour of victory, and reactionaries everywhere soon
took advantage of his passing to make common cause. By conjuring baseless
fears, they brought into conflict two states that should have remained allies for
the common benefit of humanity. Now, decades on, Kahn and the other
custodians of this improbable dream, like the Holy Fool in the final scene of
Boris Godunov, still linger disconsolately on the darkening stage of history.
"Leites', leites', slezy gor'kie . . ." (Flow, flow, bitter tears.)
Eduard Mark
U.S. Department of the Air Force