Berlin Observer article

[R. W. Rynerson]

It was interesting to read the story in Berlin Observer Issue 87 (June 2020) about the U.S. occupation force in post-WWI Germany.  I found a book that tells some more about this.  In fact, in used bookstores I found two copies of it and gave one to a German colleague whose family had never talked about the period.

So here is an alert, for used bookstores, university libraries, attics, etc.:

Franck, Harry A.; Vagabonding Through Changing Germany; Grossett & Dunlap; 358 pages; 1920.  This is just one edition of the book, which came out in several editions and may have been serialized in a magazine.

Franck’s writing style is easy going and he really tries to be objective.  He went to a German university before WWI and was fluent in German.  He was assigned to the Third Army, but managed to get approvals to travel in Germany in 1919, starting before the Versailles Treaty (Europeans+UK+Germany) and the Treaty of Berlin (US+Germany).

He wrote two chapters about his time in Berlin.  The second chapter is entirely about the food shortage and will sound familiar to our older veterans of the 1945-49 era.  In brief, after both wars it was a distribution problem as much as it was an actual shortage.   Americans got a little taste (pun) of that recently.

In the first of the Berlin chapters, we learn that the Allied headquarters in Berlin was in the Adlon Hotel!  For those not familiar with that hochnaesig hostelry, it was the model for the MGM film Grand Hotel, and therefore the MGM Grand casino.  The Adlon in the 1930’s was where the foreign journalists, Nazi spokesmen, foreign ministry officials, and sleazy tipsters hung out.  It was damaged in WWII and leveled by the East Germans, who replaced it with one of their generic hotels.  After reunification the Communist version was leveled and a modern luxury hotel was built on the site, with a bar about where the famous former refreshment spot had stood.  In 2002 after our BUSMVA reunion, Rod Dimoff and I went up there and enjoyed a couple of expensive drinks and watched the renewed flow of moneyed people from around the world.

In addition to occupying the best hotel in town, the Allies had a commissary and there was also a separate American commissary.  Franck was offered American tobacco products on the street by hustlers who had found some Americans willing to sell their rations.

The big question was how the Germans would react to their recent enemy walking around Berlin streets in uniform.  Legally, the German Empire was still at war with the Allies.   The  Rhineland was occupied by the U.S. Third Army, British and French troops.  Author Franck repeatedly described situations in which Germans were courteous, some even friendly.  When a drunk in a restaurant launched into an anti-Allies rant, German officers at another table offered to run  him off the property.

Franck obtained the paperwork to travel independently in civilian clothes and was able to visit several other parts of the Empire.  In civvies, he was usually mistaken for coming from some other part of the German-speaking world, or from the Netherlands or Scandinavia.  (I identified with this, as in my times in Germany I dealt with people who were certain that I was Dutch, British, Scandinavian and Russian.)

There is a sad paragraph in the book, before Franck even got out of Berlin:

[There] were the freiwillige bands that comprised the German army of 1919, semi-independent groups, loosely disciplined, and bearing the name of some officer of the old regime.  They may not constitute an overpowering force, but there is always the possibility that some man of magnetism and Napoleonic ambition may gather them together and become a military dictator.

In his travels he met some of those people, but always managed to impress them with enough documents from Berlin to get safely on his way.

-- rwr

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[Chuck Johns]

Thank you for an interesting post.

[Author]

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