International: Rebirth of a City

Seven years ago, French, British and U.S. troops occupied West Germany as conquerors. They stayed on as policemen, then as judges and bureaucrats. Last week they became comrades-in-arms of the vanquished—pledged to defend Germany from deadlier occupiers.

The seven years have been told in headlines: from Hermann Goring cheating his judges at Nürnberg by swallowing potassium cyanide, to airlift planes shuttling to blockaded Berlin, to the meeting in Bonn of Germany's first democratic Parliament since 1933. The deeper occupation story is the slow rebirth of a nation in thousands of German towns. Typical of these is Pforzheim (prewar pop. 80,000), a jewelry-making city in the U.S. zone 20 miles northwest of Stuttgart.

Rats & Water. In one 20-minute raid on the night of Feb. 23, 1945, R.A.F. Bomber Command—convinced that jewelry makers were turning out fuses for V-2 warheads—"scrubbed out" Pforzheim: four-fifths of its buildings were flattened, 17,600 of its people killed. The rubble was "liberated" by a detachment of French Moroccan Goums, who raped and pillaged. Not until June 1945, when U.S. military government took over, did the war end for Pforzheim. The first U.S. edict: no more looting.

Commander of the U.S. occupation team was Major Robert B. Little, an architect by trade. He inherited an urban brick wilderness, infested with rats. No Germans stirred. For the first six months, Little's men worked as a maintenance gang, restoring water and electricity supplies. To keep Pforzheim's survivors alive, they moved in U.S. Army rations. Major Little put Wehrmacht veterans to work as unarmed cops. One of his aides, a New York fashion designer, supplied the cops' uniforms by confiscating a roll of Luftwaffe cloth and designing snappy blue outfits with Eisenhower jackets.

In 1946 a tank squadron of the U.S. Constabulary force was billeted in Pforzheim. The commanding officer earmarked the ten best houses on fashionable Friedenstrasse, gave their German occupants 30 minutes to get out. U.S. occupation, G.I. style, meant a black market in cigarettes and the addition of the phrase "shacking up" to the local dialect. Years later, U.S. authorities were still plagued by householders brandishing "receipts" for phonographs "borrowed" by G.I.s and by unmarried mothers seeking G.I. fathers.

Bricks & Mortar. The U.S. had hopefully assumed that the Germans themselves would be determined to punish their Nazi "oppressors." It was a false hope. Of 35,000 Pforzheimers who filled out 144-item political questionnaires, a third admitted they had been Nazis. There was no way of staffing the city administration and its schools without employing ex-party members. Result: few were punished. By 1948 Pforzheim's only newspaper was back in the hands of the man who ran it for Dr. Goebbels. Half the teachers in the schools were onetime Nazis. Quietly, without ever admitting it, the U.S. dropped denazification in favor of a more urgent policy: build German prosperity to combat Communism.