Victory In Europe: Housekeeping in Hell

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A flaming stake had been driven through Germany's heart, and by the laws of sorcery this should quiet the beast. In outward appearance Germany, once the most highly integrated nation of the Old World, was a quartered corpse. Perhaps 50% of Germany's proud cities were wrecked.

Moreover, the machine shop of Europe was shut down. The Ruhr had received 150 tons of bombs per square mile. (Battered London averaged only twelve.)

But it was not easy to estimate the degree of Germany's physical destruction. The long arm of Allied bombing and the progress of the Armies had destroyed much of Germany's productive apparatus, notably the railroad system, had left much else spectacularly untouched. Quite possibly both the appearance of Germany's destruction and the appearance of her survival were deceptive.

But soon for the health of her democratic neighbors, Germany must be restored to some sort of controlled existence in which her collieries and mills could produce, her crops grow and be distributed.

The problem before the Allies seemed, in its complexity, greater even than the problem of striking Germany down.

First Steps. Any day now the victorious powers would set up the Allied Control Commission in Berlin, and Germany would formally come under the rule of foreigners for the first time since 1806.

But, planned as it was, this first stage revealed the confusion that lay ahead. Instead of being a cohesive unit, the Control Commission would be a loosely organized coalition, and the administration of Germany's four different zones might each be conducted according to four different ideas.

The zones were agreed upon in principle at Yalta, but the precise boundaries had not been revealed, and in one instance (the French zone) there was some doubt as to whether they had been determined.

The Russians supposedly were to have eastern Germany, the British the northwest, the Americans the southwest, and the French an area somewhere between the British and the Americans.

The Housekeepers. The U.S. occupation team for Germany will at the outset be headed by General Eisenhower as chief of the American section (with Field Marshal Harold R. L. G. Alexander as his probable opposite number for Britain) ; Major General Lucius Clay as his deputy and administrative chief of staff; the State Department's Robert Murphy as political adviser (with sharp-eyed Ivone Kirkpatrick his counterpart for Britain, and purge-trial prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky for the Russians); and Lieut. General Leonard T. Gerow as commander of the U.S. Fifteenth (occupation) Army. While these top four will probably stay in Berlin, American administrative headquarters will be located within the U.S. zone, probably at Frankfurt.

The American zone may possibly be less of a problem than others. It was formerly almost self-sufficient in food, and the Nazi disease was never as deeply rooted there as in north Germany.