International: The Whale on the Beach

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More than victory was in the air last week. Poisonously, pervading even the conquerors' exultation, dying Germany's stench hung over Europe. The Nazi Leviathan might be as hard to bury as a whale on a beach. Unless the victors quickly perfected their disposal plans, the carcass would infect the peace.

The Hub & the Wheel. Why had it taken so long, been so difficult to agree on Germany's postwar fate? The easy alternatives—a "hard" or "soft" peace-missed the nub of the problem. In principle, everyone wanted the peace to be hard. The real nub was that Germany—even that smoking ruin—was still Europe's hub. Bombs had not budged it from the Continent's rich center. More than half its industries were workable; of those not working more were damaged than actually demolished.

In millions of German minds the brief, impressive years of resurgence and victory had rooted Hitler's ideas too deeply and too well for them to be torn out overnight. In postwar Europe, Germany would be ever present, ever dangerous—and ever necessary to the rest of the continent.

What kind of postwar Europe did the world really want? Until Europe itself and the remainder of the world faced that unfaced question, no plan for Germany could be either intelligent or complete. Europe was an area of power conflict, and the powers could not make up their minds on Germany, a key piece in the game, until their own future relations clarified. It was this dilemma that paralyzed the planners and robbed the Big Three's stern but incomplete Yalta agreement on Germany of any real meaning.

Ushers for Götterdämmerung. Armies did not wait for high politics. Occupation was a fact, carried out under long-prepared directives as detailed as they could be without decisions on what occupation was intended to accomplish.

The plans called for two distinct but related phases: immediate rule by military government, interim rule by the Allied Control Commission.

Already Germans were getting their first, all-important impressions of foreign rule since 1813. The reasoned vigor of General Eisenhower's regulations made sense. Sometimes the variation in their execution did not. At München-Gladbach last week a military government's court for civilians sentenced two boys (16 and 17) to death for spying. Both the sentence and the scrupulously just proceedings impressed the Germans. Leniency in other cases, when death was promised by the regulations but not enforced, made Germans sneer behind their hands. In occupied Germany, among a people who would surely compare U.S., British and Russian performances, the quality of mercy had its dangers.