GIs and Fräuleins

The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

Maria Höhn

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807853757, 9780807827062
• eBook ISBN: 9780807860328
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany’s Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

1

“. . . And Then the Americans Came Again”

In the course of 1950–51, more than 100,000 American soldiers and their dependents came to Rhineland-Palatinate, a largely rural state in the southwest of Germany. The American military arrived in Rhineland-Palatinate to facilitate an extensive American military buildup after the outbreak of the Korean War increased fears among the Western Allies over possible Soviet expansion in Europe. As a consequence of the Cold War tensions of the superpowers, Rhineland-Palatinate—mostly known for its fine Nahe, Moselle, and Rhine wines—was to emerge by the end of the decade as the center of NATO’s allied air defense and as the main supply depot for the United States Army in Europe.¹ Since that fateful year, millions of Americans have passed through the Rhineland-Palatinate on two-or three-year tours of duty, as soldiers, dependents, or civilian employees of the U.S. Department of Defense. While most Germans at the time speculated that the American troops would be in their communities for at most ten years, history has shown otherwise. The people of Rhineland-Palatinate have been living with their American neighbors for more than fifty years now, and despite the overall drop in the number of American troops in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Rhineland-Palatinate still hosts some of the largest American military bases outside of the United States.

The deployment of the American troops in Germany, which was financed through a West German defense contribution, had tremendous implications for the future of the young Federal Republic. Without the Korean War and the Cold War security concerns it generated, the debates on German rearmament that culminated in the 1955 Paris Treaty, the abolition of the Occupation Statute, and Germany’s rearmament and inclusion in NATO would not have been possible so soon after the end of World War II. That distant conflict, then, helped fulfill the most cherished goals of West Germany’s Christian Democratic (CDU) chancellor, Konrad Adenauer: it made possible the first steps toward a political and military rehabilitation of his nation, greater equality among the Western Allies, and the attainment of West German sovereignty just ten years after the defeat of Nazism.²

The decisions forged in Washington because of the Cold War tensions between the superpowers affected Rhineland-Palatinate and its people as well. Part of the French zone of occupation, Rhineland-Palatinate was among the poorest of the new states that made up the Federal Republic. Only a couple of its cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants, and Ludwigshafen and Mainz were the only large industrial centers. The state was also deeply divided against itself. The French military government had created Rhineland-Palatinate out of territories that shared few historical ties and cultural traditions: the Palatinate, Rhine-Hesse, and the regional governments of Koblenz and Trier, as well as the four Nassau districts east of the Rhine (Ober-and Unterwesterwaldkreis, St. Goarshausen, and Unterlahnkreis). The state was approximately the size of Hesse but had a mere 2.6 million inhabitants in 1946. Not much enthusiasm existed for the new state; it was considered an artificial, test-tube creation.

The deepest division in this new state was religion, with the scenic mountain range of the Hunsrück serving as a demarcation line. North of it ruled a stridently anti-Prussian Catholicism under the conservative Christian Democrat, Peter Altmeier. Although Altmeier was an ardent supporter of Rhineland-Palatinate, some within his party had not made their peace with the new state and hoped fervently for a union with the Catholic Northern Rhineland. The most consistent critique of the new state, however, came from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which dominated the more industrialized Protestant regions of the Palatinate and Rhine-Hesse. The SPD did not consider the state economically viable and agitated to merge with the more industrialized and prosperous Baden-Württemberg to the south. Pragmatic accommodation between CDU and SPD was possible after 1948 only because of the escalating Cold War and the looming division of Germany. The SPD gave up its opposition to the new state while sections within the CDU tempered their Rhenish patriotism (Lokalpatriotismus) to support Adenauer’s policy of “West-integration.” The decision to move the capital of the state from Koblenz to Mainz was to reflect that compromise, but no love was lost between the state’s CDU and SPD. ³ After 1951, the state’s deeply conservative CDU was able to rule with a comfortable majority, avoiding any sort of alliance with the SPD.

When the Americans arrived in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1950–51, large sections of the population were still not reconciled to the state’s artificially imposed political boundaries. The Americans also reported with much dismay how backward the area was compared to the American zone of occupation. The so-called Korea boom of the early 1950s, however, catapulted the area into an economic miracle that would rival developments in the more industrialized parts of Germany. The American soldiers brought much hardship and many inconveniences, but the American GIs also brought an unprecedented prosperity that not only affected the purses of the local populace but revolutionized their whole way of life.

The Baumholder Story

To show how dramatically the American troop deployment impacted the people of Rhineland-Palatinate, I will describe developments in one such garrison community. The town of Baumholder, in the county of Birkenfeld, serves as a microcosm to illustrate the “Gold Rush” atmosphere that so marked all communities where American troops were stationed during the 1950s. The obvious reason for choosing Baumholder as an exemplar is that during the 1950s the little town emerged as a code word in the national debates on the social changes and social problems that accompanied the American troops to the provinces. But Baumholder was also chosen for other reasons. Baumholder has been host to military troops since the Nazi regime created the Reich’s largest training camp there in 1937–38. By tracing the town’s fortunes back to the 1930s, I will show that the years of Nazi rule, the war and the dislocations of the postwar years, had already undermined many traditions and institutions that marked the life of Germany’s rural communities. But this discussion will also show that the economic miracle of the 1950s was not just a continuation of a process of modernization begun in the 1930s.⁴ The American-induced economic miracle of the 1950s differed profoundly from that of the 1930s. Baumholder’s rocky path from being a deeply nationalistic and fully Nazified community to becoming a modern consumer society by the end of the 1950s presents a valuable case study of the continuities and changes in German history since the 1930s.

Birkenfeld County, a cold and windy stretch of land located between the hills of the Westrich and Hunsrück, emerged in its present shape only in 1937, when the county of Birkenfeld and parts of the county of Baumholder/St. Wendel were merged. Until then, the county of Birkenfeld, although located in the Rheinprovinz, was not Prussian but belonged to Oldenburg, a state in the northern part of Germany, while Baumholder/St. Wendel had been part of Prussia. In a state where 56 percent of the population was Catholic, the county of Birkenfeld was home to a Protestant majority of 80 percent.⁵ The region was a poor one, with only one industrial center, the city of Idar-Oberstein, which was renowned worldwide as a center for the cutting and polishing of precious and semiprecious stones. The city’s almost 27,000 inhabitants were dependent on that highly volatile industry, with most of the workers employed in more than 2,000 workshops. Those not employed in the precious stone industry worked in local leather factories. The only other towns of any size were the county seat of Birkenfeld, with about 5,000 people, many of them civil servants, artisans, or small businessmen. Baumholder had 2,500 inhabitants, who made their living as farmers, civil servants, or artisans. Another 50,000 of the county’s inhabitants lived in over 100 villages and hamlets. The great majority of farms were minute properties, most of them smaller than twelve acres. The soil was among the lowest quality recorded in Germany, prompting local farmers to describe their daily toil as yielding “many rocks, but little bread.” Many of the villages in the county had by the late nineteenth century turned into working-class villages (Arbeiterdörfer), where the men traveled to the coal mines of the Saarland to supplement the farm’s meager income.⁶

The end of World War I brought unprecedented hardship to a county that had never known economic well-being. Once France severed the Saarland from Germany as part of the Versailles Treaty, thousands of jobs in the mining industry were lost to the county’s workers. Farmers suffered as well, because the industrial Saar had been one of the chief markets for the county’s agricultural products. The occupation of the Rhineland by the French and their use of colonial troops only furthered animosity toward Germany’s archenemy, while also stirring resentment against the Weimar Republic. Before 1929 that resentment was expressed largely through voting for traditionally right-wing parties, such as the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP). Once the county’s precious stone industry collapsed in 1929, voter behavior on the right radicalized much more dramatically than in the rest of Germany. Contrary to what was implied in Edgar Reitz’s immensely popular TV series Heimat, Nazism was not imported from the city to a hard-working and devout countryside but was a wholly homegrown phenomenon in the Protestant regions of the Rhineland and Palatinate.⁷ Among the Nazis marching on the Feldherrenhalle during the 1923 Bierhallen Putsch were a husband and wife from Birkenfeld County who boasted NSDAP membership numbers forty-six and forty-seven.⁸

While the 1928 election in Birkenfeld County had brought the NSDAP only 4.3 percent of the vote, the onset of the world depression would change those numbers radically. Increasingly, the civil servants in the county seat of Birkenfeld, the county’s Protestant farmers, the industrialists and artisans of Idar-Oberstein’s precious stone industry turned to the NSDAP. In 1931 the NSDAP received 34.3 percent of the county’s vote. In the summer election of 1932, the Nazis were able to gain 38 percent of the German vote nationwide, while an astonishing 59.6 percent of the people in the city of Birkenfeld voted for the party. In that election, almost the “whole rural population” in Baumholder also shifted their allegiance from the reactionary DNVP and the Landbund to the Nazis.⁹ Election results in the rest of the county brought even more stunning victories for the Nazis. In the city of Idar (later to be incorporated with Oberstein), Nazi support reached almost 70 percent. Those numbers were even higher in the neighboring hamlets that were home to the precious stone industry’s hundreds of small artisan shops. In the tiny hamlet of Niederbrombach the Nazis received 91.8 percent of the vote.¹⁰ For the most part, the Catholic villages of the county remained true to the Catholic Center Party. In the mining villages bordering on the Saarland, many continued voting for the SPD or the Communists, but up to 50 percent of voters in those villages also turned to Nazism.¹¹

The conclusion that Gerhard Nestler and Hannes Ziegler had drawn about the Protestant regions of the Palatinate also applied to the southern parts of the Rhineland and the county of Birkenfeld: for a good proportion of the Protestants in this rural region of Germany, the seizure of power of by the Nazi regime was “not a violent subordination but a voluntary devotion (Hingabe).” ¹² Mambächel, a tiny hamlet right outside of Baumholder was the first German community to make Hitler an honorary citizen. By April 1933 almost all of the county’s civil servants were members of the NSDAP. ¹³

As in most rural, Protestant communities, the success of the Nazi party depended largely on its ability to attract prominent local residents (Honoratorien), such as wealthy farmers, teachers, or clergy to their cause.¹⁴ In the counties of Birkenfeld and Baumholder/St. Wendel the NSDAP was able to do that. One of the Protestant ministers of Birkenfeld was not only a member of the NSDAP but also the Ortsgruppenleiter (local Nazi leader) and the local leader of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers).¹⁵ In Baumholder, the school principal held this prestigious office. Baumholder’s Protestant minister was a member of the SA, the SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazis’ most elite and racist special unit), and the Deutsche Christen, the faction within the Protestant church that accepted the Nazis’ Volkish ideology of establishing a racially pure church.¹⁶

Despite the overwhelming enthusiasm for National Socialism in both counties, the regime did not bless the region with an expansion of its limited industrial base.¹⁷ The counties were just too close to the border with France. Matters began to look up somewhat in 1935, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “. . . And Then the Americans Came Again”
• 2 Living with the New Neighbors
• 3 When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat
• 4 Heimat in Turmoil
• 5 Controlling the “Veronikas” and “Soldiers’ Brides”
• 6 Keeping America at Bay
• 7 Punishing the “Veronikas”
• 8 The Kaiserslautern Steinstrasse Affair
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index