Rebirth of a City

Seven years ago, French, British and U.S. troops occupied West Germany as conquerors. They stayed on as policemen, then as judges and bureaucrats. Last week they became comrades-in-arms of the vanquished--pledged to defend Germany from deadlier occupiers.

The seven years have been told in headlines: from Hermann Goring cheating his judges at Nuernberg by swallowing potassium cyanide, to airlift planes shuttling to blockaded Berlin, to the meeting in Bonn of Germany's first democratic Parliament since 1933. The deeper occupation story is the slow rebirth of a nation in thousands of German towns. Typical of these is Pforzheim (prewar pop. 80,000), a jewelry-making city in the U.S. zone 20 miles northwest of Stuttgart.

Rats & Water. In one 20-minute raid on the night of Feb. 23, 1945, R.A.F. Bomber Command--convinced that jewelry makers were turning out fuses for V-2 warheads--"scrubbed out" Pforzheim: four-fifths of its buildings were flattened, 17,600 of its people killed. The rubble was "liberated" by a detachment of French Moroccan Goums, who raped and pillaged. Not until June 1945, when U.S. military government took over, did the war end for Pforzheim. The first U.S. edict: no more looting.

Commander of the U.S. occupation team was Major Robert B. Little, an architect by trade. He inherited an urban brick wilderness, infested with rats. No Germans stirred. For the first six months, Little's men worked as a maintenance gang, restoring water and electricity supplies. To keep Pforzheim's survivors alive, they moved in U.S. Army rations. Major Little put Wehrmacht veterans to work as unarmed cops. One of his aides, a New York fashion designer, supplied the cops' uniforms by confiscating a roll of Luftwaffe cloth and designing snappy blue outfits with Eisenhower jackets.

In 1946 a tank squadron of the U.S. Constabulary force was billeted in Pforzheim. The commanding officer earmarked the ten best houses on fashionable Friedenstrasse, gave their German occupants 30 minutes to get out. U.S. occupation, G.I. style, meant a black market in cigarettes and the addition of the phrase "shacking up" to the local dialect. Years later, U.S. authorities were still plagued by householders brandishing "receipts" for phonographs "borrowed" by G.I.s and by unmarried mothers seeking G.I. fathers.

Bricks & Mortar. The U.S. had hopefully assumed that the Germans themselves would be determined to punish their Nazi "oppressors." It was a false hope. Of 35,000 Pforzheimers who filled out 144-item political questionnaires, a third admitted they had been Nazis. There was no way of staffing the city administration and its schools without employing ex-party members. Result: few were punished. By 1948 Pforzheim's only newspaper was back in the hands of the man who ran it for Dr. Goebbels. Half the teachers in the schools were onetime Nazis. Quietly, without ever admitting it, the U.S. dropped denazification in favor of a more urgent policy: build German prosperity to combat Communism.

Pforzheim's jewelry firms were already digging themselves out. One of the first to get going was Adalbert Grosse, a necklace manufacturer. While his aged father scavenged for potatoes to feed the workmen, Adalbert rounded up 15 artisans to help rebuild his factory. They salvaged fragments of gold and silver buried in the rubble, bartered them for boards, bricks and concrete. Within a year the hardworking Grosses were back in business; their impressive turnover in 1951: $2,500,000.

New Notes for Old. Major Raymond Lascoe, 36, a Chicago chemical engineer who succeeded Bob Little as U.S. military governor, had a Midwesterner's built-in drive to make his city tops. With Lascoe, aloofness was out. He slapped backs all around town, learned to speak fluent German. Because Pforzheimers kowtowed to him as "Herr Gouverneur," he put an ad in the local newspapers: "My title is Mr. Lascoe. Please refrain from use of the word Governor."

What helped Lascoe most was the West's decision to give Germany a new, healthy currency. Shops were empty, factories at a standstill because farmers and businessmen refused to sell their products for worthless Reichsmarks. One day in June 1948, a convoy of army trucks pulled into Pforzheim, bringing stacks of crisp, new Deutsche marks. Pforzheimers queued all day to exchange their old money for new. The city was transformed. Farmers glutted the market with fruit and vegetables; shop windows filled with furniture, cosmetics and shoes.

Marshall Plan aid reinforced Pforzheim's gains: 400,000 marks for a new bridge; 600,000 marks to rebuild the gasworks. On Pforzheim's wastelands, hundreds of new buildings mushroomed.

Democratic Ideals. It was Ray Lascoe's job to infuse the new prosperity with democratic ideals. There were free city council elections. As Oberbiirgermeister the councillors chose Johann Peter Brandenburg, 44, an anti-Nazi lawyer who shared Lascoe's enthusiasm. Lascoe wanted the council to meet town-meeting style; no Pforzheim municipal official had ever before exposed himself to public questioning. Brandenburg winced but obliged, and won the city's first elections.

Brandenburg and Lascoe made an ideal team. To familiarize high-school students with democratic government, they organized a U.S.-style "Youth Day." Stuffed shirts groused, "It's not a German idea." But Youth Day was a hit.

German Allies. The airlift, Korea, and the arrival of 2,500 Iron Curtain refugees brought the cold war to Pforzheim. From on high came a new occupation policy: recruit the Germans as allies. "Our so-called war criminals must be released before we can join the West," objected an ex-Wehrmacht colonel. Lascoe got U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy to come down to Pforzheim to talk to the town's leaders at an informal buffet supper (one dish: corn on the cob). They still had misgivings.

Today the French--this time Algerian Spahis--are back in Pforzheim. They came not as occupiers but as part of the thin line of defense the West is building against Soviet aggression. "This is the first time in history," said a Pforzheimer quietly, "that the French have entered our country without ravaging it."

Where there had been rubble, the French found prosperity. Pforzheim's city center boasts six new hotels and block after block of new factories and office buildings, though 12,000 families still live in barracks and cellars. Karl-Friedrich-Strasse is twice as wide and twice as traffic-ridden as it was prewar.

Judged by its material achievements, U.S. occupation had scored an impressive success. But to Ray Lascoe, giving up his proconsul's job last week, the bigger question remained: Had occupation rooted in Pforzheim a responsible love of freedom, and a vigilant determination to defend it? He was not at all sure.

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