Strangers in the Wild Place , livre ebook

S TRANGERS IN THE W ILD P LACE
S TRANGERS
IN THE
W ILD P LACE
REFUGEES, AMERICANS, AND A GERMAN TOWN , 1945-1952
A DAM R. S EIPP
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2013 by Adam R. Seipp
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1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
FOR LESLIE, ROWAN, AND CORA
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Wild Place, 1933-1945
2 The Seigneurs of Wildflecken, 1945-1947
3 Keeping Refugees Occupied, 1945-1948
4 These People, 1947-1949
5 A Victory for Democracy, 1949-1952
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without the help, guidance, and support of a great many people. For several years, friends, family, and colleagues have had to endure my decidedly Wildflecken-centric view of modern German history. Mostly, they made it possible for me to research, write, and publish a book about a subject that I still find fresh, compelling, and fascinating.
The influence of Konrad H. Jarausch looms large over my efforts to understand German history. His comments at an early stage, along with encouragment by Gerhard Weinberg and Norman Goda, helped to move the project forward. Laura Hilton and Kathy Nawyn were indispendible and patient guides to, respectively, the complexities of the DP camp system and the vagaries of the National Archives. Michael Meng has been a great friend and an intellectual sparring partner who forced me to refine many of my arguments long before they got to print.
Funding for this project came from the German Academic Exchange Service, German Historical Institute - Washington, College of Liberal Arts at Texas A M, Office of the Vice President for Research, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum both funded part of my research and gave me a congenial spot to work. My thanks especially to Dieter Kuntz, Nicole Frechette, Vincent Slatt, and Eric Steinhart.
Research travel for this project took me to lots of interesting places and gave me the chance to work with some really fascinating people. In W rzburg, Ingrid Heeg-Engelhart at the Staatsarchiv W rzburg was a great help making my way through a mass of documentation. Jochen Achilles and Birgit Daewes made my time in the city both productive and a lot of fun. Klaus and Rosemarie Zepke were wonderfully hospitable and generous guides to the place and its history. Andrea Sinn s friendship helped to make Munich an even more terrific place to work. Susanne Urban and Dieter Steinert were immensely helpful in Bad Arolsen, while Panikos Panayi was an amiable companion at the Bundesarchiv in Freiburg. Michael Brodhead helped me during my trip to the US Army Corps of Engineers Archive.
The day I arrived on my first visit to Wildflecken, I missed a bus connection, was offered a ride by strangers, and soon found myself invited to a family reunion. What started as a research trip turned into an unforgettable experience with wonderful people. Heinz Leitsch has helped this project along in countless ways. Peter Heil and B rgermeister Alfred Schrenk were terrific hosts in the local archive. Walter Koempel and Norbert Rueckel offered their time and expertise. Werner and Evelyn Kirchner made me welcome (and kept me well fed) at the Hotel W rzburger Hof. Volker and Maria Zinn of the Kreuzberg-Apotheke opened their home for me and the rest of the NordicTreff Wildflecken, who welcomed me as a temporary teammate and treated me to a Kulturabend . I also have to thank the many people around the world who inhabit a virtual community of Wildflecken. Whether as former residents of the DP camp, locals who later emigrated, or American soldiers who came after the story I tell here came to an end, these people have given their time to tell me their stories. Special thanks to Janie Michelli, Andrew Zdanowicz, Chester Wolkonowski, and Dale Pluciennik.
The Department of History at Texas A M continues to be great place to teach and write history. This has much to do with the successive leadership of Walter Buenger and David Vaught, as well as that of Deans Charles Johnson and Jos Luis Berm dez. R. J. Q. Adams, Chip Dawson, Sylvia Hoffert, Walter Kamphoefner, Hoi-eun Kim, Arnold Krammer, Brian Linn, and the members of the Faculty Colloquium series have all been greatly helpful in this process. Chuck Grear did a terrific job with the map. Graduate and undergraduate students have consistently challenged me to find ways to explain the dark heart of Europe s twentieth century in all its complexities. Special thanks to Jared Donnelly, who came through with some last-minute help in locating a photo. Muldoon s Coffee Shop in College Station kept me caffeinated and didn t object as I wrote much of the first draft of this book at a table in the back.
Leslie, Rowan, and Cora have been the center of my world throughout this process. This book would not exist without their love, support, and patience. Good friends have helped to see this project through, hosted me on various trips, and been there for my family while I was away. Special thanks to Matt Woods, Tasha Dubriwny, and Zariana Woods; Dario Vittori; Jonathan L Hommedieu; Bruce Baker; Norm Leung; Jason, Meg, and Nathan Savage; and Mike, Anna, and Oscar Anderson. My extended family has been a source of support and comfort through all the moves and changes of the past decade.
My grandmother, Virginia Ramsey, died as I finished work on this book. My mother, Catherine Kane, has battled illness with extraordinary courage and strength through much of the time I have been writing. Finally, I want to honor the memory of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, who lost his life on June 10, 2009, while protecting hundreds of people, myself included, from a gunman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
S TRANGERS IN THE W ILD P LACE
Occupied Germany, 1945-1949. Prepared by Charles Grear .
I NTRODUCTION
This book is an international history of a very small place. Over the course of less than two decades, Wildflecken, a tiny town in northern Bavaria, went through a series of extraordinary and wrenching transformations that mirrored the profound shattering and reformation of political, social, and economic life in mid-twentieth century Germany. An obscure farm town in 1935, Wildflecken became a base community for the rapidly growing German military machine of the late 1930s. In the aftermath of Hitler s disastrous war, American-occupied Wildflecken became a catchment area for several distinct groups of refugees. Just as the refugee crisis began to ebb in the late 1940s, the nascent Cold War escalated, and the American presence, previously declining, dramatically reversed course. For the next forty years, Wildflecken became an American base town, one of many to dot the region as a guarantor of West German security in the midst of a global conflict.
This is a book about land and the strangers who lived there, in close proximity to each other, during the years after the war. The land was a hilly, forested 18,000-acre tract just north of Wildflecken stretching out between the town and the border between Bavaria and the state of Hesse. Over twenty years, different groups and institutions laid claim to that land and asserted their right to make use of it as they saw fit. Military and civilian officials passed countless maps back and forth. They outlined in vivid and contrasting colors the shifting boundaries of a piece of property shaped and re-shaped by events taking place far beyond the valley of the Sinn River.
Strangers came to Sinn Valley by the thousands, beginning with the construction of a Germany military base in 1936. At the end of the war, the pace only quickened as streams of refugees flooded the valley to escape devastated cities, flee the oncoming Red Army, or because they had no way of returning home. To understand Wildflecken is to understand something important about the transformation of West Germany from defeat to stability. In postwar Germany, local and regional politics were dominated by questions of what to do with millions of people made refugees by the war. Debates over their fate had much to do with land and property, which became an issue of sovereignty as West Germany moved toward self-government but continued to play host to hundreds of thousands of occupation troops. To understand this nexus of competing groups, interests, and ideas, one must try to see it from a multitude of perspectives. This book examines the experiences of ethnic German expellees fleeing Eastern Europe, homeless German civilians from heavily bombed urban areas, non-Germans who came from liberated concentration camps, compulsory labor facilities, or from Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (Displaced Persons or DP s)