1904 words

4/18/05

Hesse speech

I want to thank Minister President Koch for this invitation. It
means a great deal to me. At the end of the war, I spent fifteen
months with the army of occupation at the Bergstrasse, living in
Heppenheim. It was an important experience in my life.

The Minister President suggested that the audience might want
to hear something of the end of the war and its immediate aftermath.
I do not generally speak of personal experiences. But this day, on
which the war ended [sixty years ago] and a new world order began,
may be an appropriate exception.

When I was drafted into the US Army in February 1943, I was
nineteen and had been in America four and a half years. After a year
of service in various army posts in America, I was sent to Europe with

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the 84th Infantry Division in the summer of 1944. In December 1944, during the Battle in the Ardennes, I was transferred from the infantry to counterintelligence without any previous intelligence experience.

The commanding general of our division thought I would be able to identify any German spies because of my German background and language skill. Luckily, that presumed skill was never put to the test because my division never encountered a German spy, or at least never found one. In March 1945, the German front in the West began to disintegrate, and the 84th Division moved across northern Germany through Hannover and Bielefeld to the Elbe River, where we met the Soviet troops.

To observe the collapse of a country one has known as a child was an awe-inspiring experience. The cities were destroyed; the civilian population was preoccupied with the day-to-day requirements of food and shelter. There were no communications or civilian

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vehicular traffic. With my family's experience in the Nazi period and
on the basis of what we had seen when some concentration camps
were liberated - especially Bergen-Belsen - there existed a big gulf
between Americans and the German population. Indeed, General
[Dwight D.] Eisenhower issued a nonfraternization order [that]
prohibited any social contact between Allied personnel and Germans.

It proved an unenforceable order. First, because it was
practically unfeasible and, more importantly, because the human plight
of the occupied population was bound to touch one's heart, whatever
had happened during the war. In a letter home on ________ 1944, I
wrote: [INSERT A]

Though technically assigned to counterintelligence, my work
began to concentrate increasingly on helping with the restoration of
essential civilian services. This was made all the more imperative

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because very few American military personnel spoke German, and the
German population had next to no facility with English.

In late April, with combat essentially over, I was transferred to
Landkreis Bergstrasse, charged once more with finding nonexistent
German spies and assisting increasingly in the reconstruction tasks.

The conditions of the time were chaotic: none of the modern
means of communication, no mail service, no telephone, large
numbers of foreign workers on the roads and in the cities, little shelter
for the civilian population and if __________ not to __________ automobiles.

The generation [that] knows these events only from books and
that has lived in a high consumption society for decades will find it
difficult to imagine conditions at the margin of existence. Due to the
dedication of its grandfathers, it cannot really appreciate the enormous
distance Germany has traveled since those desperate days. From the
beginning, I was impressed by the tenacity and courage with which the

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German population launched itself on the task of reconstruction.

Remember, this was before the Marshall Plan and any foreign
economic aid; the currency was still that of the war period. There was
no central German government or even a Land government, and there
would not be a central government for four more years. The
fundamental German civil administration, including police, stayed in
place; the leading Nazi Party officials were removed by the military
occupation, but the vast majority remained in place. Military
government confined itself essentially to tasks of supervision; day-to-
day operations were increasingly in German hands.

Working so closely with the German population, the image of
Germans as enemies evaporated quickly. As early as May 1945,
shortly after I arrived at Bergstrasse, I wrote home: [INSERT B]

And when my time of military service was over, I stayed on for a
year, teaching at the intelligence school in Oberammergau American

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personnel assigned for military government or intelligence duties, explaining to my parents why: [INSERT C] By then, I had been three years in Europe with the American army, most of them in [Germany]. When I returned to America in 1947, I had lived in Germany for over eighteen of my first twenty-four years. Germany can therefore never be for me a foreign country.

The Minister President was kind enough to ask me in what [manner] my experience in the Bergstrasse affected my later life. I will answer it in two ways. On one level, it represented a return to normalcy. Paradoxical as it may seem, life in occupied Germany returned to human normalcy very quickly despite the enormous shortages and hardships, and perhaps because of them. Human relations were what could ______ meaning content. The German population turned to the task of reconstruction with great energy; the occupiers soon abandoned their original punitive intent and spent more

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and more of their energy on supporting this effort. Traditional patterns returned with extraordinary speed. Football resumed in the fall of 1945. I took the occasion to see my hometown team, Spvg. Fürth, play in Mannheim and IFC Nürnberg in Frankfurt. Theater resumed, even though difficulty of heating made it necessary to dress warmly during the cold winter. Almost every town reopened its opera houses and theaters. I went frequently, especially in Heidelberg. Perhaps the most moving performance was here in Darmstadt. In a theater in what I remember as a partially bombed building (though perhaps my memory is inadequate), there was a performance of "The Skin of Our Teeth" by Thornton Wilder. It is a play about a typical American family living in a present-day New Jersey suburb, who survive the Ice Age, the Great Flood (as in the book of Genesis in the Bible) and World War II.

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I do not know how the play would strike a modern audience.

But that grim winter in Darmstadt, the tale of the collapse and rebirth of civilizations evoked a deeply emotional response and an almost personal bond between the audience and the performers – almost as if [they] were a single family reliving a joint personal disaster.

On a less personal level, the period at the Bergstrasse marked the beginning of my participation in the cooperative relationship between Germany and America, which became one of the pillars of the Cold War world and a key element of my life. In this connection, I would reject the comparison between the occupation of Germany and the occupation of Iraq that is often made by [the] American media.

Germany was a homogeneous country; Iraq is characterized by ethnic and religious cleavages. Germany had a democratic tradition, [albeit] an occasionally contested one. In Iraq, the current effort is the first enterprise in democracy. The German population was relieved that

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the war was over and welcomed the new circumstances - American soldiers in the army of occupation experienced no hostility, not to speak of danger; in Iraq, there is an insurrection, especially in the Sunni areas, and American lives are in constant danger. In Germany, the army of occupation encountered a group of leaders such as Adenauer, Kaiser and Schumacher with some experience in democratic politics; there are none in Iraq because there has never been any democratic government. In Germany, the only hostile neighbor, the Soviet Union, acted as a warning and an inspiration to democrats; in Iraq, there are hostile neighbors, such as Iran, in a position to impede the process of democratization.

The experience of the Bergstrasse was the beginning of a process in which, one way or the other, I was given the opportunity to participate in strengthening the ties between Germany and the United States in the decades since. Perhaps unexpectedly, the generation of

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émigrés from the Germany of the 1930s, whatever their personal experiences in the Nazi period, retained and fostered in their vast majority a special relationship to the country of their birth. Many of them became active in the promotion of close ties between Europe and America. They had learned in their youth the danger of ideologized foreign policy and of treating an entire people by stereotype. They remembered Germans who had remained supportive despite the dictatorship. They felt a special obligation to help those who seek to create a new world order, in which the catastrophes of the past are overcome, and the talents of people[s] can be put in the service of positive aspirations.

That generation, too, has developed a special attitude towards the United States. They are grateful for the refuge they have found there and the opportunities afforded to them. They appreciated the matter-of-fact ease with which America integrates refugees into its

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society and the friendliness of life in America. They are therefore impatient when America is attacked as imperialistic, semi-authoritarian or the other lexicons of anti-American rhetoric.

The decisive aspect of the German-American relationship of the postwar period was the gradual emergence of a spirit of comradeship and a sense of a shared destiny between Germans and Americans.

Two Berlin crises and close cooperation during the process of unification symbolized these shared convictions.

For my generation, the recent tensions in the Atlantic relationship are therefore especially painful. It is not that previous decades were free of controversy. I have observed and participated in several of those disagreements. Spirited encounters occurred over the years with chancellors of both major German parties. In fact, my first diplomatic mission was to Konrad Adenauer on behalf of President [John F.] Kennedy during the Berlin crisis of 1961. But they have

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differed from the disputes of recent years because they never
questioned the premise of a common destiny. The basis of the
relationship was trust. Too often, the argument is made these days
that Europe's weakness caused tensions and that only if Europe is
strong - *auf gleicher Augenhöhe* - can it be dealt with seriously by
America. This does not do justice to the achievements of the postwar
period. German-American friendship was not the result of mutual
pressure but of the inner necessities of statesmen. A strong Europe
will help the cause of peace. The German-American relationship
should not turn into an exercise in [the] balance of power but [strive
to achieve] a compatibility and community of values.

Mr. Minister President, I am deeply touched by the spirit in which
you have received me and the opportunity for nostalgia you have
afforded me. In those days in the Bergstrasse, it never occurred to
me that someday I would be Secretary of State or be ______ in

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shaping a new world order. We meet at a period of unprecedented
change. Foreign policy is global, the center of world affairs is moving
towards Asia, private groups are achieving the ability to threaten
security in a way heretofore reserved to states. To master these
challenges, German-American friendship is essential and in the interest
of both people[s]. And, for me, the long road to this point had an
important beginning in this region. Thank you for inviting me.