It's Got to Work

(See Cover) At last the victors met the German people. Not the Nazi Party, not the horror-masters of Buchenwald and Dachau, not the General Staff and the Wehrmacht, not Krupp's and I. G. Farbenindustrie, but the people, from whom all the evil and the vigor sprang.

The first consequence of this meeting was somewhat disturbing to the conquerors. In the inevitable amnesia of war, they had forgotten that they were fighting a people. It was easy to consider the German evil when Germany consisted of a tyrant and his tyrannies, of an army in impersonal battle, of bombs and submarines and, at the last, of the final anonvmity -- air attack without airmen.

Now, in the first long pause of peace, the conquerors found that Germany was 70,000,000 Germans.

Hope & Hate. The German people were surprisingly well dressed and healthy. Thanks to the Nazi policy of looting Europe of food, the children were sturdy. The young girls were so neat and clean in their freshly washed and pressed summer dresses, their bobby socks and their long blonde braids, that the destruction around them seemed unreal.

Nearly all of the Germans were polite (Goethe once wrote: ". . . when one is polite in German, one lies"). With a sublime and staggering disregard of their responsibility for the war, many of them had expected a great deal from the peace. Their expectations were intensely personal: a better life and an easier one, fewer regulations and more freedom for them selves, if not for their occupied country.

They were full of resentments. Most of all, they resented the bombing of their homes and cities. The Americans, they felt, had gone much too far beyond the evident necessities of war. Deep in many a German heart, the conviction grew that Americans were unfit for human society.

They had other grievances. After all. Nazi rationing had worked to the very last, and there had been some food for every German. Now, in many places, there was little or none. In Munich, 30 days after the surrender, the streetcars were still not running. In a thousand ways, the defeat had added personal inconveniences to the general ruin. The Germans did not like it.

The whipped soldiers of the Wehrmacht in their grey-green uniforms were straggling back through the shattered cities. were all of a pattern. They walked fast and flatfootedly, their heads with their peaked caps thrust forward, balancing the packs on their backs. Seldom did they raise their eyes from the ground to see what guns and bombers had done. Some of the soldiers were hailed with cheers, flowers, kisses. Many a British U.S. soldier, dourly viewing these welcomes, felt that the German people were a little mixed up about who had won the war.

I'he Germans worked. In a matter of weeks, cities that had been deathly ruins on a semblance of life and order. ds of rubble became neat piles of brick and stone; bombed houses, patched withscraps from neighboring heaps, became habitable hutches. Here & there, in factories untouched or merely scarred by the bombings, some of the 70,000,000 Went back to making things. The conquerors, witnessing and sometimes assisting this early revival, realized that Germany was by no means a complete ruin (see above).

The Innocents. From themselves, if from the conquerors, the Germans their guilt. Among British Tommies American G.I.s, the most commonplace of all wisecracks was: "There are no German Nazis." Only those committed by some public record owned any allegiance, past or present, to the vanished party. And the conquerors, at first merely scornful, came to realize that there were ons even among admitted Nazis who joined from choice, before ; those who fatuously thought, after Hitler's rise to power, that his movement be tempered for the national good; and those whose jobs, public or private, entailed automatic membership).

Thousands of Germans had been driven to the horror camps, forced to look at the barely living and to bury the bare dead. Many more had been made to view the evil truth in pictures, on billboards and in movie houses. At Burgsteinfurt, a British captain saw a woman emerge, laughing, from one of the showings. Raging, he ordered her back for another look (see cut). Most of the German audiences shuddered, some of them wept. Practically all of them said: "They did it!"

The Opportunity. In Rottenburg, typewritten signs appeared on the walls: "Nazi Youth, Awaken! Long Live the Fuhrer!" In a few places, sincere anti-Nazis took over public gatherings, denounced the old order and proclaimed a new one with the vigor of -a New England town meeting (see LETTERS). In Munich, a Catholic priest led his fresh-faced, well-dressed young charges in peaceful chorals (see cut). In Berlin, where the Russians encouraged a certain gaiety, sentimental Germans sipped nonalcoholic cocktails and listened, damp-eyed, to a torch-singer's new Lied:

"Berlin will rise again,

Berlin will rise again!"

In Frankfurt am Main, TIME Correspondent Percival Knauth asked Lieut. General Lucius DuBignon Clay whether he had given thought to the 70,000,000 and to the fact that their reactions will have something to do with the success of the occupation. General Clay smiled a quirkish smile, and mulled the question for a bit. Then he said:

"We are going to have a real military government. We are going to make the German people realize that they brought this suffering on themselves and the world by their own actions.

"But, at the same time, the German people must be left some hope that, when they have shown they are ready to return to the fold of nations, there will be an opportunity for them to form a national life of their own." Up from the Filthy Five. General Clay is the man to whom General Eisen hower, reviewing the war and the occupation last week (see U.S. AT WAR), referred as his "alter ego." Under Eisen hower, Lucius Clay is: P:Deputy Commander of the European Theater of . Operations, U.S. Army (ETOUSA).

P:Deputy Military Governor in Germany (U.S. areas).

P:Deputy member of the U.S., Russian, British and French Allied Group Control Council (for all Germany).

P:U.S. member of the Council's working committee, which will do most of the controlling.

Lucius Clay rose to this varied eminence from a comfortable home and a good family in Marietta, Ga. When he was born there in 1897. Georgia and the South were emerging from a defeat as crushing, a reconstruction as bitter as anything visited upon or in prospect for the Germans.

The boy was like the man: he was not the type for anecdotes. He was the young est of U.S. Senator Alexander Stephen Clay's six children (five boys, a girl).

He played around with a neighborhood gang called the "Filthy Five," did so well at his books that he got himself admitted briefly to Georgia Tech before he had finished high school.

But his intended school was West Point.

An older brother, Frank, had been a West Pointer, and Lucius followed in 1916. His class was West Point's "war baby" (three years instead of four) and he finished in 1919 -- just in time for a short assignment in Germany with the army of occupation. Then a temporary captain of engineers, he reverted to first lieutenant when he returned to the U.S.

Ahead lay 20 routine years of polo, occasional fishing trips, Army schools, engineering duty. In 1940, when the war in Europe began to stir the Regular Army from its doldrums, Lucius Clay was a major.

The Driver. Major Clay was one of the many talented Army juniors to whom the war brought quick promotion, immense labor, and little glory. As a brigadier general and director of material in the new Army Service Forces (originally the Service of Supply), he did much of the work and planning for which his superior, General Brehon B. Somervell, usually got the credit. In his driving efforts to get munitions produced and delivered to the fronts, Clay knew one rule: the Army comes first, civilians second. He made enemies, but he also made a tremendous reputation within the Army.

Early this year Jimmy Byrnes, then director of the Office of War Mobilization & Reconversion, borrowed Clay and put him in working charge of the U.S. economy.

As deputy mobilizer, Clay got many a civilian back up. His grim insistence on war priority, his sometimes arbitrary ways of getting it, gave some civilian officials, and some of his Army colleagues, a feeling that he had forgotten that the U.S., even in war, is a democracy. His critics even credited him, rather than Byrnes, with the ineffective curfew (he denied responsibility for the curfew, but insisted that it was right "in principle").

Lucius Clay was never a man to show his hand, and his critics did not know the whole score. Slugging as hard as ever for necessary war production, he nevertheless instituted some of the early cutbacks. By the time Eisenhower again called for him, to take on the great assignment in Germany, Lucius Clay was a feared and respected figure in Washington's wartime hierarchy. Editorialized the Washington Post: "General Clay's exceedingly high abilities are better suited to the German situation than to our own . . . that task calls for authoritarianism."

Up from Death. The task also calls for patience, understanding, an ability to show Germany's authoritarians that democrats can be efficient. In his early approach to a tough job, General Clay seemed to meet the requirements.

His manner is more striking than his appearance. He stands a compact 5 ft. 9 in.; his black hair is greying. He conveys an impression of quiet competence.

His office in Frankfurt is a big, corner room in a big, yellow, many-winged building which must remind General Clay of the Pentagon. Noticeably unbombed amid Frankfurt's desolation; the Frankfurt building once housed the central offices of the vast I. G. Farben Works. Now it is SHAEF's new headquarters in Germany, and General Clay's headquarters when he is functioning as Deputy Commander. At HOechst, three miles from Frankfurt, is his Deputy Military Governor's office--in another unscathed I. G. Farben building.

Actually, his titles and his offices are interchangeable. Up to now, U.S. Government in Germany has been an Army function, primarily intended to serve Army needs. Both as Deputy Commander and Deputy Governor, General Clay must now supervise the transition to Control Council government.

All around him, in Frankfurt, were the portents of a changing job in an awakening Germany. The city, so deadly quiet two months ago that a jeep's backfire was like a blow to a listener's heart, was coming to life. Most of the obvious life--the jeepy traffic, the white-helmeted MPs, the crowding soldiers and WACs--was American. But German civilians were also astir.

Already the bars of non-fraternization between them and the conquerors had been let down, just a little. U.S. soldiers (and British Tommies, in their neighboring zone) now could notice German children without danger of arrests and fines. Fraternization with Frankfurt adults (in cluding Fraulein) was still forbidden--in theory. But soldiers in both the U.S. and British zones were in near-rebellion. They, too, were human. The angers of battle, the horrors of the death camps were wearing off.

As he shuttled between Frankfurt and HOechst in a small Plymouth sedan, General Clay missed none of the signs. But, for the moment, his thoughts were mostly on his control organization and its difficult, complex integration with his British, French and Russian Allies.*

His misgivings about cooperation with the Russians were not acute; he simply said that question would be answered, one way or the other, within three months. But, at best, the hazards of a four-power occupation would be enormous.

Could it possibly work? General Clay slapped a fist into his other hand and said: "It's got to work. If the four of us cannot get together now in running Germany, how are we going to get together in an international organization to secure the peace of the world? The test is here."

* Ordinarily, he detests big, showy cars. But he expects to be in one when the Control Council sets up shop in Berlin. Said he last week: "I want to ride in there in the biggest, shiniest, longest car I can get. And I've got a 1939 Cadillac which I think fills the bill."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.