Morgenthau’s
policies led to the creation of a third world colony in the center of
Europe. Francis Biddle described
the atmosphere in Germany during his attendance at the Nuremberg Trails:
Nuremberg was
colonial, we had taken the country after this wretched war, and were living in
it, had to be there for a while.
We weren't sure how the natives would act, whether they would lie down
and lick our boots, or slit our throats on too dark a night, yet we were
determined to dine out on occasion and have as much fun as we could. It was like Kipling's Simla, pointed to
a different setting in a very different time.
This was an exciting time, especially for Great White
Hunters. Ernest Hemingway
apparently was quite proud of the trophies he accumulated during his stay in
Germany. In a letter to Charles
Scribner Hemingway tells of a young German officer who refused to answer his
questions. The officer informed Hemingway it was a
violation of the Geneva Convention to shoot prisoners. Hemingway wrote: “What a mistake you
made. Brother, I told him and shot him three times in the belly fast and then,
when he went down on his knees, shot him on the topside so his brains came out
of his mouth.” In a letter to
Arthur Mizener on 2 June 1950, Hemingway described killing his last “kraut”, an
unarmed youngster on a bicycle, “. . . I said ‘let me take him’ and I shot him
with an M1 . . . he was a boy
about the age of my son Patrick . . . I had shot him through the spine and the
bullet had come out through the
liver.”
Many
of these victims remained nameless.
However, there were also well known victims. The German
conductor Leo Borchard was killed by a US sentries in Berlin. And the Austrian composer and conductor
Anton von Webern was killed in Salzburg by an American sentry.
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