Dear Mr. Cherny:
The subject of the Berlin Airlift - which has not yet started in the book, I am on page 199 - is of great interest to me because I was in Europe in 1948 - in fact, I got married in Holland just a few months before the start of the Berlin Airlift and spent a great deal of time in Frankfurt, representing a Dutch Firm for whom I was working to learn the international food business and selling the Joint Agency, with Headquarters in the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, food for the feeding of the German Population. I often drove by Rhein-Main airport and saw the constant takeoffs and landings of the planes involved in the Berlin Airlift.
What I would like to bring up to you is more of a feeling than a fact about your book, a feeling that I get that may or may not have been your intention. It really starts on page 91 2nd paragraph, when you speak about the "awful hand of vengence" (which) came down on Berlin. The paragraph starts "They came first with the bombs." As I read this I said to myself 'no, it didn't come first with the bombs, it came when the german people blindly followed a madman which brought havoc to all of Europe'. You speak of the brutality of the Russian soldiers, dismissing them as smelly boars, but not mentioning that roughly 26 million Russians perished as a result of the German attack on the Soviet Union. True much of the blame lies with the governance of the Soviet Union at the time, but still, virtually no family of the Soviet Union escaped without having a member killed by the Germans. What I feel you fail to convey is the deep feeling against not only the government of Germany but of the people of that country by the soldiers, not only from the Soviet Union but of the United Kingdom, of France and even of the United States where we had suffered little or nothing from the Germans. There was a passion, right or wrong, which led many of us not to wish to spend a vacation in Germany, to say nothing of the passions of the soldiers, and especially the soldiers of the Soviet Union, who had suffered so many casualties at the hands of the Germans. Many of these soldiers had also liberated camps in Poland and the Eastern Part of Germany and they had seen first hand what unbelievably brutal conditions existed at the hands of the German War Machine and those who fed it.
No, I am not excusing the brutal behavior of the Russian Troops in Berlin, but I am also not forgetting where the brutality began and how the German public, with a few notable exceptions, supported Hitler and his gang of thugs - as long as they were winning. They only started to turn against them when the war started to go badly, and even then, they didn't turn against him in any meaningful way. Yes, they suffered, but only as a result of those who represented them made others suffer to at least as great an extent as the people of Berlin were suffering. Ask the people of Leningrad, ask the people of Stalingrad!
I had an experience which has stuck with me through all these years. My wife and I were in Frankfurt with another person from the firm in Holland. He asked whether he could invite a contact of his, a German citizen, for dinner with us in Bad Homberg, where we were staying. The man came, he was fat and had no neck, he was wearing a silk shirt and a pearl stickpin. In the course of the dinner (this was in June 1948) he complained that no people had ever suffered as the German people were suffering under the heel of the Americans. My wife, who, with her family, had been in hiding in Holland for 2 years and 10 months, nearly starving the last winter of the war, calmly mentioned that the Dutch didn't have it so good under the occupation of the Germans. "Oh" said our guest, "we were protecting you from the British". My wife expressed some amazement, saying that she was unaware that the Dutch felt the need to be protected from the British. At this point our German guest said: "The trouble with the Americans is that they are the people of the hard hearts and the soft hands" and at that point something in my 21 year old mind snapped and I get up with the intention of taking my "soft" american hands and choking him until there was no life left within him. My wife saw what was going on and got me from behind and dragged me out of the room and up to our bedroom until I had calmed down. I never saw the person again in my life. This is something that happened 60 years ago, and yet it is as real today as it was in 1948.
Hope you do not mind my sharing some of these thoughts with you. I find your book to be excellent and I am looking forward to getting into the Airlift and reading all about it
-- Robert
Dear Robert,
Thank you for not only sharing your moving tale, but your important point about the story of the Airlift. As you mention, the story I tell in this book is about something bigger than just the Airlift itself -- that is why on page 199, the Airlift has not yet begun. I don't think we can understand, in any real way, what happened during the Airlift and blockade in 1948 without understanding the very difficult decisions America faced. One was about how to respond to the Soviet threat, but another was how to treat the defeated Germans. I hope you didn't in any way get the sense that I "went easy" on the WWII Germans. In fact, I've had a number of people tell me the opposite: that my description of the Berliners before and during the war (in the pages before the passages you site) was too hard on them since they had been less supportive of Hitler's rise than Germans in other parts of the country. I hope as you continue reading, you'll see that I lay the blame on what happened to Berlin squarely on the shoulders of Berliners -- and that I write with some detail about the feelings toward the Germans that were carried into the occupation by the American GIs.
But in a larger sense, the tension you describe is very much one of the themes of the book: how do we treat a defeated enemy? In the years after World War II, America faced -- as you've read in the book -- a very vigorous debate about how to remove what FDR called the "cancer" in the German people that had given rise to Nazism: with kindness or harshness? This was a debate that was not fully resolved until the Airlift -- and one that, as your note indicates, is still one we're struggling with today.
It is also a question I struggled with personally as I wrote this book. As I mention in the Acknowledgments, all four of my grandparents were concentration camp survivors and so the ultimate question of whether the Candy Bombers were right to treat the defeated Germans with humanity and compassion was one I had to answer for myself time and time again.
I'll try to blog more about this question in the coming days...
-- Andrei