As part of the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum's World War II Roundtable Series, the museum hosted Dr. Adam Seipp of Texas A&M University on April 24. Seipp's presentation "GIs, Germans, and the Ends of War: 1944-46" described the cultural dynamics at work as U.S. and other Allied forces invaded and occupied Germany. Seipp stopped by KETR to discuss topics from his presentation. You can hear the conversation in the audio player above, and follow along in the transcript below.
Mark Haslett: Today, we are visiting with Adam Seipp, who gave a presentation at the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum. Dr. Seipp is a professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M. Last night's presentation was called “GIs, Germans, and the Ends of War, 1944 to 1946.” Dr. Seipp, welcome to KETR.
Adam Seipp: Thanks very much. It's great to be here.
Haslett: So for the benefit of those who weren't able to attend last night, could you tell us what the presentation was about?
Seipp: First off, I just want to thank the folks from the Audie Murphy Cotton Museum and thank the community for showing up and particular thanks to my old friend and graduate school classmate, Dr. Sharon Kowalsky, here at East Texas A&M for arranging this. It's been really terrific to be here. So the talk that I gave last night was a part of a book project that I've been working on for the last couple years that looks at the encounter between Germans and the U.S. Army between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. And so thanks to folks at the Audie Murphy Museum, I had the opportunity and the invitation to talk about the first chapter of the book, which is really about that first encounter the moment at which Americans and Germans encountered each other during and immediately after the invasion of Germany that brought World War II to an end. It's this really fascinating moment at which an awful lot of American history and German history really collided in these very intimate spaces in the rubble of what had been Hitler's Reich. And really the argument, the things that I want people to take home from this talk were threefold. There were three things that I wanted folks to take away from that from that talk.
The first is that the end of the war really needs to be seen, not as an event, but as a process. There's no magic moment at which the guns fell silent, and we move from war to not war. The end of war is a much more complicated process than that; we need to treat it in that way. The second is that Germans and Americans encountered each other in many spaces from the individual and the intimate to military violence on the battlefield, to all of the business that made up the American occupation of Germany. And the third, and this is one that I really want your listeners to think about, particularly now, at a time where the future of the American military presence in Europe is very much in question. The Trump administration is thinking about what the future of America's military commitment to Europe is going to look like. The men -- they were mostly men, but women played a role in this as well -- who occupied Germany after World War II, about 1.8 million American servicemen on the ground in Germany at the end of the war did not know that eight decades later, there would still be 35,000 American troops in Germany. They didn't know this and no one knew it. The assumption was that once the war ended, the Americans would go home, but they didn't because the world was changing. And we were headed from the Second World War into this really extraordinary period of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and its allies. So those are the three basic takeaways that I want people to come away from my talk with. And then I'm going to try to articulate that using some evidence and using the tools that a historian uses, the kinds of sources the imagery the diaries, the newspapers, the red meat that makes up real, primary-source historical research.
Haslett: Dr. Seipp, let me present to you what might be a common layman's idea of what this looked like, and then you can debunk that to the extent that it's wrong. So if I'm thinking about the final days of World War II, the Soviets are coming from the east and the Yanks and the French and the Brits are coming from the west, and so the process looks like: Here come the Allies from the west and there's a village and then there's a little bit of a scrum, and the Allies take the village and the Germans retreat. And so the troops are coming in through the freshly defeated and now-occupied village. And some of the villagers say “Hooray!” and some of the villagers say “Booo!” and sulk amongst the rubble. So how accurate a picture is that?
Seipp: To some extent I think what you've presented is a picture, the way that story has been told over the succeeding generations. I'm really fascinated by what I call the First Americans story. And they show up every 10 years, when there's an anniversary of 1945, you'll see German newspapers running these stories about how our village experienced the end of the war. And the stories are remarkably similar. It's always a story about the Americans riding into town, usually in vehicles. And I want to stress this point, just how strange the Americans looked to ordinary Germans. This was a country that had been at war for six years. They'd gone through the Great Depression. This was a country of people who had been living in really tough conditions for a long time. The Americans came through with endless amounts of fuel and these giant vehicles, and they had so much food, they could actually share that food with the townspeople. There were lots of German kids in 1945 who'd never eaten chocolate before. So being handed a Hershey bar was a revelatory experience, which is something we don't think about with Germany. So that impression of just overwhelming force and fear. But then tempered with this extraordinary kind of human kindness that the Americans quickly became known for. And whether this is legend or not, it became part of the story.
Now, I want to stress here, this is very different than how people in eastern Germany subsequently remembered the arrival of the Soviets. Where there were very few memories of human kindness, those memories were much, much more brutal. It doesn't mean that terrible things didn't happen during the American advance, but it does mean that the U.S. Army by and large behaved in a way that led to this extraordinary set of remarkably positive memories in decades to come. So those first American stories, whether they're objectively true or not, have become part of German public memory, of the end of the war. So in many ways, I think the version you present is a version that's been remarkably durable in Germany. And part of what I really want people to think about when they think about this history, is that transition that would happen where Americans and Germans, who had just fought this terrible war against one another, soon became allies in a different kind of global order in what would become the Cold War. And that transition from enemy to ally I think can really only be understood if we look back to those first encounters.
Haslett: So how do you get from enemy to ally? How was that transition? An easy, perhaps surprisingly easy one in some contexts? And how was that transition difficult -- or perhaps didn't happen?
Seipp: That's a great question and something I really wrestle with. So I want to be clear that there was again, no magic moment where Americans suddenly forgave the Germans for everything they had seen. American soldiers fought their way across Europe in a landscape saturated by death. Americans had lost friends. They'd suffered wounds, they had killed, they had seen men killed. They had witnessed the crimes of the Nazi regime. In many cases, they had seen concentration camps, slave labor facilities, POW camps. They had seen what the Germans had done in Europe, and there was certainly, and I do not want to overlook this, there was a spirit of mistrust. There was a spirit, in some cases, a vengeance.
But when Americans crossed into Germany, they saw a devastated landscape. They saw a landscape that had been subjected to allied bombing for years. They saw a landscape where, when German units fought rear guard actions, the Americans simply brought in artillery and smashed cities and towns. There were essentially no decent sized cities that hadn't been seriously damaged, and there is an overwhelming sense you cannot miss it of pity for the Germans. There was also a society of human beings, waiting for the Americans. As the Americans came through some of the first people who the Americans reached out to were German children, and of course German women. And it's not just because these were mostly male Americans, a long way from home. The fact of the matter was there were an awful lot of German men who were away. Some of them never coming back. They were in the army. They were at the front. They were in internment camps. They were dead. This was a society that was to a remarkable degree, a society of women and children. And Americans pretty quickly began to warm to that society and to develop meaningful contacts with that society. So I think that transition starts really early, and it starts with that radically demilitarized German society that Americans encountered in late 1944 and early 1945.
Haslett: However intuitive it might be, sitting here listening to you say that, I hadn't really thought about that before, that they were going into this demilitarized community that also was very short on adult males. You might find some old men. But for the most part any man who was of fighting age and ability was gone and perhaps not to return, as you mentioned.
Seipp: So this is a fairly obvious statement, but generally human populations are about 50 percent male and 50 percent female. That's the sort of natural way things develop. Germany in 1945 was somewhere between 54 and 56 percent female. And of the missing men, the vast majority of them were men of military age. And there's another point that needs to be made here, which I think gets to some of your question which is that the absolute destruction, the moral, political, military, economic destruction of Germany completely discredited the previous generation. You mentioned those that might have sulked in their houses when the Americans got there, and yes, there certainly were some. They had been completely delegitimized.
World War I — for those of your listeners who know something about World War I, there was this long running story that the Germans hadn't really lost. They'd been betrayed. This is the stab in the back myth. There was no stab in the back myth in 1945. No one could possibly miss the comprehensive defeat of Nazism. So those that were associated with the Nazi party had not only been defeated, they'd been thoroughly discredited. So if there were any last-standers who were trying to rally people around them, the general reaction of the German population was, no thanks. This is the world that has come, we're not going to fight back. There is almost no armed resistance, and that's really remarkable when you think about it. There are all these legends about German werewolf guerillas, skulking in the mountains. There weren't any werewolves. The fact of the matter was the Germans were tired of war. They had lost faith in the regime that had dominated their lives for the previous 12 years. They were ready for something new. And what was new in the American zone was this new American-installed and American-protected government.
Haslett: A world in which Nazis were defeated and discredited. Sounds pretty good to me.
Seipp: There’s something very attractive about it. There's no question about it.
Haslett: I'm definitely on board with that idea. So -- in fairness to history itself, we can't gloss over the fact that the Americans were not without their own misdeeds during this period that you're describing. It wasn't anything along the scale of what the Soviets did as they came from the east, but still, we did not have our hands completely clean. So could you address that?
Seipp: You're absolutely right. There's, you're absolutely right. We cannot gloss over the fact that the end of the war was a messy and brutal business. There were a significant number of crimes committed against civilians. Everything from sort of robbery and pilfering for souvenirs to murder and sexual assault. These numbers are very hard to come by and there are a variety of estimates for how many Germans were victimized by American troops. Those numbers are often uncomfortably high. And I suspect, probably more or less accurate. There was, as you suggest, nothing in the American Zone comparable to what happened in the Soviet Zone in the East. It's also worth noting that the British and the French had their own patterns of brutality, particularly the French.
There are places in the landscape of occupation at the border between where the Americans were and the French were, where there were actually civilians fleeing from one Western zone to the other because the French were known for being particularly brutal and particularly unwilling to offer sort of basic foodstuffs to the Germans. At the same time, we have to recognize that France had been occupied by the Germans that France had been invaded by Germany twice in the previous 30 years, three times in the previous 60 years. So this was not an army that was feeling particularly forgiving when it got to Germany. In the first post-war opinion polling, first reliable opinion polling, which would've been about 1948 or 1949, there was a general consensus among Germans that the Soviet Zone was the absolute worst place to be during the invasion. The French were next, the Americans in third place, and the British tended to come out of it looking pretty good. But this is a pretty tough league table to look at.
Haslett: As far as -- you mentioned the cultural and historical baggage that informs all of these interactions. So you have, over on the eastern front, you've got the German or the Teutonic and the Slavic peoples, historical rivals. Of course, you can't generalize too much because, of course, the peoples had been intermingling and mixing just like peoples everywhere. But at the same time, you had this kind of obvious characterization of the Teutonic on this side and the Slavic over here, and then on the west, it's really complicated. And just speaking specifically about the Americans, you have black and brown Americans who of course would've been a completely novel sight to some of these Germans. And then you have Americans of German ancestry with names like Mueller and Seipp and all these other things. What role did that play in this encounter?
Seipp: Boy, I'm glad you asked that. So there's a lot of things I could say about this and those of you who attended my talk will know that I actually start the talk with an anecdote about the First American soldiers to cross into Germany, which was on the night of September 11th, 1944. They crossed from Luxembourg into Germany. It was a small patrol commanded by a staff sergeant named Warner Holzinger. And Warner Holzinger was born in 1916 in Silesia, in Germany. He was himself a German immigrant to the United States. So to complicate that story a little bit, because I think anyone who's seen any World War II movies, there's this sort of stock character who's the American descendant of German immigrants who can speak to the locals in German. And maybe the dialect is a little rusty, but it basically works. I've actually found that's a little bit less common than perhaps the legends might have it.
What's really interesting is the number of Germans who'd come to the United States as immigrants and then went back to Germany in the 1930s, because let's face it, in the 1930s the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression, and it seemed like the Nazi regime had solved this problem. They were pushing toward full employment. They seemed to be a dynamic, kind of exciting place to be. Lots of Germans re-migrated. What that meant was that when Americans would show up in a town and they would desperately need an interpreter, there was often someone around who had grown up in Chicago or Brooklyn or someplace like that. There's a great story that I found in the city archives in the city of Giessen, near Frankfurt in which the Americans show up in Giessen and set up a headquarters. They don't have anyone who speaks German. And these two teenagers show up and in perfect Brooklynese say, How youse guys doing? And it, it was this kind of extraordinary moment. That's only possible if you think about this transatlantic exchange that didn't just go one way. And as Americans, we think about people coming to the United States, these were people who come to the United States and then gone back and now found themself in this remarkable role where they could be these kind of transatlantic interpreters, both culturally and linguistically. I am fascinated by the question of language, and in fact, this book that I'm working on is just infused with this question of how Germans and Americans learn to communicate with each other. And that also starts in this very, the very early days, the days of the invasion and the immediate aftermath.
Haslett: Speaking of the book, like so many things in academia, it's in the works, but it's coming soon. So could you give us -- I'm not going to ask you to predict when it's going to be published because that would be rude -- but I am going to ask you what's in this book? Because we are looking forward to it and it will come out at some point.
Seipp: I'm looking forward to it too. So the working title is “Amis: German Society and the U.S. Army, 1945 to 1995.” And I'm exploring this fundamental question of what it meant to be German in the post-war period coming out of the destruction of Hitler's Reich. The Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany today, reunited Germany after 1990, was a country that was created in the presence of a massive foreign military, the United States Army, just one of the seven armies that operated in West Germany.
During the Cold War, for most of the Cold War, more than 200,000 Americans at any given time were living in the Federal Republic as soldiers. That's astonishing. This is the longest peace time encounter between a foreign military and a civilian society in the history of the world. It is absolutely amazing. Over the course of the Cold War, something like 23 million Americans lived and worked in Germany as either military personnel, family members, or civilian employees of the U.S. military. Twenty-three million people, including my father, including lots of men of his generation. So my grandparents' generation experienced Germany as a defeated and broken enemy. My father's generation experienced Germany as a fairly pleasant place to spend your military deployment. And my generation, which saw the end of the Cold War, experienced a reunited Germany that is still wrestling with the legacies of its past. And in many ways, that's the story that I'm telling.
It's this eight-decade encounter that's still going on. And that's something I really want the readers of the eventual book, people who come to my talks to, to grapple with, that this is a story that is still being lived out. Today in places like Stuttgart, in places like Grafenwoehr, there are lots and lots of Americans, and I'm assuming that there are lots of people in this community, the East Texas community that I'm talking to, who have personal experience with this incredible encounter between a foreign military and a peacetime society. That's the story that I'm telling. It's the story that, that keeps me going as a historian. And it's a story I'm just really looking forward to telling.
Haslett: Let's wrap it up with a question for the benefit of those who didn't make it to the presentation at the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum. If someone were really curious about any of the topics that we've touched on here, and if the book hasn't come out yet, where are some places where people could go and do some reading? Because I'm sure that some folks have had their interests piqued by this and might be interested in doing a little bit of reading in the meantime before we get your book.
Seipp: Sure. So there's lots of really great books. There's lots of great museums, so I would highly recommend the new Museum of the U.S. Army in Virginia is really terrific. There are a number of really great books that I can recommend. So one that I've re been recommending a lot recently for people who are interested in the military history of the end of the conflict is a brilliant new book by the British historian, Peter Caddick-Adams called Fire and Steel, which is about the last days of the war in Europe. And I really, that's one of those books that you just read and you think, gosh, why couldn't I write this? So those are absolutely terrific. I will say there were an awful lot of Texans who found themselves in Europe at the end of the war and people who have ever engaged with the online Portal to Texas History through the University of North Texas. They have a lot of material from Texans about the end of the war – photographs, letters. This is a national story. It touched on just about every community in the United States. And so even if you're not, if you don't want to travel and you don't want to go to Germany, or you don't want to go to a museum in Virginia, or you don't want to take on an 800-page book by a British historian, there are going to be people in your community who have lived experience with this -- maybe not the end of the war, that generation is largely gone – but of the post-war period and of that long encounter between Americans and Germans. So go find people in your community or go read any of the wonderful books or see movies or go to the museums or go to Germany. These are all great opportunities to learn more about this incredible encounter.
Haslett: We've been visiting with Dr. Adam Seipp of Texas A&M University, who made a swing through Northeast Texas to give a presentation at the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum last night. And what an interesting story. I can't hoist a mug of dunkel because I’m at work, but clink, there's a virtual clink, Prosit. Thank you, Dr. Seipp, we appreciate it. You can find more information about the Audie Murphy American Cotton Museum at cottonmuseum.com, and you can find Dr. Seipp’s page at tamu.edu.
