Age of Marshall

The U.S. Army in Occupied Germany

• The George C. Marshall Foundation • Season 1 • Episode 5

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 41:14

In this episode, Glen J. Carpenter speaks with historian Dr. Ashley Vance about the U.S. Army in occupied Germany after World War II. Their conversation examines daily life after Germany’s surrender, the collapse and reconstruction of local authority, the cigarette economy, demobilization, the U.S. Constabulary, the Berlin Airlift, American families in Germany, and the Army’s transition from occupation duty to Cold War deterrence.


LINKS


Age of Marshall is a podcast from the George C. Marshall Foundation exploring the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall’s world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century.

Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Jessine Monaghan, whose support made this series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a Trustee.

Learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation, its public programs, and its research library at MarshallFoundation.org.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to Age of Marshall from the George C. Marshall Foundation. I'm Glenn Carpenter. In this series, we explore the people, events, and ideas that shaped Marshall's world and the legacy of the soldier and statesman whose leadership helped define the 20th century. Age of Marshall was established through the generosity of Justine Monahan, whose support made this series possible. The George C. Marshall Foundation presents this series in honor of her memory and her dedicated service as a trustee. Today I'm joined by historian Dr. Ashley Vance, who's going to talk to us about the early Cold War army in Germany. Ashley, welcome.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. So can you put us in uh kind of an average German town after May 1945? What does daily life look like?

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Um, so a couple of things I'll just start as a housekeeping note. Um, I just want to add the disclaimer up front. Um, so I'm a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, but all of the views that I'm going to express are my own and based on my own historical expertise and are not necessarily a reflection of the United States government or the Department of Defense. As historians often like to do, the answer is always kind of it's complicated. Um and the reason for that is that after um May 1945, when Germany lost the war, uh, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, where the Soviet Union, um, England, France, and the United States divided up Germany and governed them separately. Um, so for the purposes of everything that I'm gonna say today, I'm only gonna focus on uh the US occupation zone, which was in the southern half of Germany, um, as that's where my expertise lies. Um, as far as kind of what an average town looks like, it really, again, was complicated and varied depending upon the town. A lot of the major cities, um, like Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Dresden, were bombed pretty heavily. Um, so there was a lot of destruction. So a lot of local work, both by the Germans themselves and by the military occupation forces. A lot of the early efforts went into kind of clearing the rubble and making just simple pathways for roads so that vehicles can travel down the roads to deliver food and medical goods and things like that. So there was a lot of, particularly in the spring and summer of 1945, um, kind of daily life was just survival for Germans. It was clearing the rubble and it was figuring out how to feed themselves and um kind of how to get back to, I don't want to say normal everyday life, but to the best of their ability on a kind of a local level.

SPEAKER_01

So uh as you said, uh as you said, it's complicated. Um, who has practical authority locally in these towns in 1945 and how do they enforce it?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. So for the most part, many and oftentimes when the troops invaded, a lot of times what happened, particularly early on, was that local government officials, fearing for being caught or tried or being captured, what they did was they took all of their kind of paperwork, their local paperwork for what we kind of commonly say are like the Nazi roles. It was like the membership paperwork. Um, they took a lot of that and they fled because they didn't want to be held accountable. So, especially in smaller towns, there was no government. Um, there were no local officials, there was no local police, and whatever local infrastructure existed, once Germany surrendered, all of those institutions became kind of occupied and controlled by the Allied forces. So within the U.S. zone, the US Army took over management of those towns. And that ranged from everything from providing medical care to uh displaced persons' camps, food, all of the things that a local government would do. Um, a lot of the Allied forces, in particular, uh the U.S. Army was taking over all of those duties.

SPEAKER_01

Do municipal governments have any power during this time?

SPEAKER_00

Not at all. Not at all. Um, I mean, do you you may have kind of local pockets a lot of times? So, one of the things that's remarkable about the occupation of Germany is how quickly it changed. Um, from the the full total occupation of Germany uh legally fully happened from 1945 until 1955. Um, that shifted a bit in 1949 when West Germany was created. But from the time it began until the time that it ended, it was kind of like a fast-moving, kind of ever-evolving like churn where every month something new was changing. So the conditions in a local town or local government in say summer 1945, by fall 1945 or even at the beginning of 1946, that situation could be dramatically different. And that all varied on the size of the town, how close it was to other infrastructure, other towns, other infrastructure, how close it was to a border, whether it was rural, that kind of thing. So it was really varied and it changed very rapidly. Everything stabilized a lot more rapidly than you would think. But in part, that was because when the war ended, not only did the German governments, both locally and nationally, collapse, but also there wasn't the kind of resistance to the occupation that a lot of the Allied forces feared. And so without that resistance, the Germans really became partners um for their own kind of their own sake, um, both for survival and kind of the for the long term. And so the situation changed really rapidly.

SPEAKER_01

Logistically, uh, what what's actually keeping people fed and housed in uh those first couple of years? Um, where's it coming from? And what what are the worst bottlenecks?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. So a lot of this is kind of a mix. They didn't have the Reichsmark, which was the currency in in Germany during um during the war, that still technically existed, but the value swung wildly. Sometimes it was incredibly overvalued, sometimes it was under. Um inflation was really rampant. So the the currency wasn't really worth much. Um, so a lot of the kind of basic sustenance was really dependent upon local farmers, and then everything was imported. Kind of the the early roots of what later became the Marshall Foundation kind of starts now. It starts in 1945, 1946, where the US government was pumping millions of dollars into Germany just to feed and clothe all and provide medical care for all of these people. This is a country of millions of people, not just the Germans, but also um people that fled from the eastern zones, um, displaced people, people from concentration camps. I mean, there was just millions and millions of people, both German and stateless, um, that flooded into areas where Allied military governments um controlled them. So the government, the Allied governments were really what was kind of stabilizing uh the economy and and feeding people and things like that.

SPEAKER_01

We've talked a lot about the formal mechanisms of economy, movement of material uh supplies, things like that. What about the informal Bruins economy and also why cigarettes matter so much in it?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. So, a couple of things. So, really, what happens in this period, particularly from 1945 to 1946 in that first year, is that bartering becomes kind of currency. That becomes the trade of the day. There isn't the money, it doesn't matter really, um, because it's so devalued. Um, nobody wants to accept payments in it because they know that it's not worth anything because the Reich no longer exists, right? So cigarettes become important for a few reasons. US Army soldiers were issued cigarettes. Um, that was kind of a basic allowance in addition to their pay and all of the other things that they were given. They were often issued cigarettes. Most often, soldiers had more cigarettes than what they would smoke. Some people didn't smoke, but they still took the cigarettes. Some learned the value of the cigarettes. So cigarettes became trading, um, they became kind of their own currency in and of themselves. So what happens is you develop very rapidly a large black market for cigarettes. So cigarettes become the currency. And basically what would happen is that if German would come to an American and they would say, Oh, I have, you know, XYZ to sell, well, what the American army soldier is gonna pay with is cigarettes. They're not gonna pay with US dollars because US dollars don't mean anything there at the time because there's no government, there's no infrastructure. So it's not like the Germans can take the US dollars and go spend them somewhere. So the cigarettes become kind of the currency locally. Um, very quickly, the US government gets involved and does their absolute best to try to stop the black market trading and and and curtail uh the cigar the cigarettes used as barter. Um, because functionally, it's not kind of long-term and big kind of macro scale that cigarette trading was costing the United States money because in a large part the United States is providing these cigarettes. They were also coming from other places, they were also made locally. Um, so I don't want to say that it was only U.S. cigarettes. They were coming from a myriad of places, but it became kind of a standard of like what something was worth was worth X number of cigarettes. And it became kind of a common understanding of like, oh, I'm not gonna buy that bottle of wine because that bottle of wine isn't worth X number, like a pack of cigarettes or or what how do you? So it became kind of a a standard that everyone could agree upon.

SPEAKER_01

So during this early period, you know, victory's been declared in Europe. Um, you're expecting that that you're on the way home. What does demobilization feel like?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. So the I would answer it in two parts. So, kind of logistically macro scale for the US Army, what they did was to our point about cigarettes, they created what we now call cigarette camps in France. And the cigarette camps were named that because they were named after cigarette brands. So, like Lucky Strike. The camps were named after these cigarette brands, and these were demobilization camps. And so there were about three million soldiers in the European theater on VE Day across Western Europe. So they have to be processed out, and they're processed out off of the shores of the piers of northern France, and they are stationed in those cigarette camps before they go. Locally, within Germany, there is a large amount of people, this is millions for the first six months or so, that their job becomes the occupation. And slowly the army starts demobilizing, and they're demobilizing individually on what they called a point system. So soldiers had to earn points to go home. So they were issued points on were they married, did they have children at home? And they got extra points for extra number of children. Um, how long had they been in active service? How many battles had they fought in? Uh, were they injured? Were they ever captured? All of these things tally and there was a point threshold. And so a lot of soldiers waited for they they used those points to determine who got to go home first. So, what this looks like in practice on a daily basis is you have troops that are conducting this occupation and securing the zone to make sure that the Germans aren't going to fight back and they start managing things like food and medical care and clearing the rubble, kind of as the day-to-day. Um, and then really inconsistently, and by that I mean it, you know, it's not whole units that are demobilized. It's, you know, five guys here, five guys there, but it's done on a very large scale very rapidly.

SPEAKER_01

As those numbers drop, what stops working first? Uh, what gets harder when there are suddenly too few people to actually run the occupation?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's a great question. So the army was kind of doing two things at once. So, on the one hand, and this was it really kind of goes to um as a shameless plug back to the work that George Marshall was doing. So George Marshall was chief of staff of the army um until November of 1945. And then um Eisenhower goes back in and General Eisenhower takes over. So, because Eisenhower was in Germany at the time, especially in that first six months, there's kind of a dual system of planning and responding to real-time events. So there isn't an easy answer of like what stops working first, because they were planning for that demobilization. They were going, okay, we know we have to get all of our troops out of here. When we do that, how do we do that? And still keep the zones secure because especially in 1945, they it wasn't guaranteed that the Germans weren't going to rebel. Right. Right. Like in the in the heat of war, especially in the immediate aftermath, they prepare for it, right? Because people are still armed, weapons haven't been surrendered, things like that. But the big kind of task in the first year is like, how do we make sure that the Germans don't try to rise up and fight up against us, seeing that the number of soldiers is shrinking? So that's it becomes kind of a planning priority through 1945 as like planning ahead for how do we maintain security of the zone while also demobilizing. So nothing really like breaks down per se, because they were planning for that and kind of adjusting locally in real time. You know, if you had 30 guys from a unit leave, okay, well, now you got to start moving people around and their duties get reassigned and things like that. So there's kind of that dual action of like planning and real-time shifting at the same time.

SPEAKER_01

So uh, can you tell me a little bit about the uh US Constabulary? What problem was that meant to solve?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so the US Zone Constabulary, I will give a shameless plug. I wrote an article about that in Army History Magazine. An excellent article. That is a um if I will be so shameless, it is an award-winning article um and it's open source to the public. Anybody can download it for free.

SPEAKER_01

It's in the description box.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, great. Oh, wonderful. So the US Zone Constabulary was a really unique pull like bot organization. It was something that never existed anywhere else. It was created in Germany, it lived and died in Germany, it never went back to the US. So what it was was like a modified cavalry unit. So when we think of cavalry, we think in the you know, 1800s, we think of horses. And when we think of World War II, we think of tanks. So this was kind of a conglomeration of that because they had jeeps and they had horses. So they were a police force. The zone, the US zone constabulary was the answer to that question of how do we provide security with fewer people? Well, you make what you've got trained for police work, which is local work to provide security, but you give them the means to be able to travel around and be kind of everywhere at once. So they created this constabulary force. The plan was for 38,000 troops. They never really got above 30. That sounds like a lot, but the context here is that the US zone, the US occupation zone is, depending upon your figures, about the size of the state of Oregon. So if you think about how many police forces live and work in Oregon, take that and spread it out with way more people that are living in Oregon. So 30,000 guys sounds like a lot, but it's they they they're stretched pretty thin pretty quickly. So their job is providing local security. They did a lot more than that, but the this the zone constabulary was the answer to the demobilization. How do we provide security and still do our day-to-day and drastically shrink the number of US forces that are working there?

SPEAKER_01

So, what kinds of stuff does uh constabulary patrol spend most of its time on?

SPEAKER_00

It's a great question. So in the beginning, they were doing kind of parades for lack of a better, for lack of a better explanation, they were doing parades. And it was kind of in the beginning, it was a reminder of it was a show of force. Like they would have tanks rolling down the cobblestone of Main Street, of what they can see, you know, they're equivalent to Main Street. There would just be tanks in the street, um, jeeps, horses, motorcycles, all those things. And they, it was kind of a show of force. And it was to tell them, like, hey, listen, the troops that invaded are gone, but we're not going anywhere. And we're gonna make sure that everybody stays in line and that you know your place and that we're still in charge here. Very quickly, that changed because the local relationship with the Germans and their occupiers, they they by fall 1945, when the constabulary was kind of organically coming together, the US government was realizing, like, yeah, they're not gonna, they're not gonna fight back, but we still need to make sure that we maintain our authority. So this the constabulary police officers were doing border checks, they were guarding displaced persons and refugee camps, which also included kind of policing those camps to make sure crime didn't break out. Um, they did things like lightning raids. Um, the US owned constabulary's logo was a lightning bolt, um, and that was to symbolize kind of their speed and mobility. They did, so they called them lightning raids. There were these unplanned in the middle of the night raids where they would go and confiscate things like black market trading and drugs and weapons that hadn't been surrendered. So they were a really kind of all-in-one police force that did everything from, you know, help local governments get re-established to Border Patrol and arresting people. It was a really wide range of duties that they had.

SPEAKER_01

What's the hardest part of the job that's not in the description?

SPEAKER_00

Ah, that's a great question. I think that it's probably twofold. On the one hand, the hardest part of the job is the fact that many of these, we have to keep in mind that US Army soldiers in the 1940s are like 18, 19 years old. Yeah. By 1946, these guys are fresh out. By 1947, they didn't even fight in the war. So we're occupying this country with very young men. Some of them within a year of the occupation don't have any combat experience. So they're young men with like some of them don't have a lot of experience. But the kind of biggest challenge that a lot of them have is that they didn't know any German. And so not knowing any German became a real issue. So what they started doing was they would select local German officials that knew English. They were local government officials, some of them to the criticism of the army, both publicly and privately, and historically, some of them were Nazis and they were Nazis in power, but you kind of deal with what you've got, basically. And there was a shortage of English-speaking professionals in Germany in 1945 and 1946. So they would start doing kind of ride-alongs where they would provide translation service. Um, the other kind of not-in-the-job description problem um was uh border patrols with the Soviet uh border, um, with the Soviet zone. Um, the Soviets started causing kind of problems with the movement of people pretty quickly when the occupation started.

SPEAKER_01

So uh can you please walk us through how their mission shifts from rebuilding and keeping order to deterring the Soviets?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's a great question. So the thing that I want to preface is that a lot of the events that happened in the 1940s that led to what we now call the Cold War, a lot of that was really predicated on what was going on in Germany. So the there were real fundamental disagreements between the West and the Soviet Union about how to rebuild Germany. So the debates about how to rebuild Germany and how the occupation would function, how do you stabilize the economy, how do you get food to these people, um, what kind of currency do you use? All of these really big questions started to deteriorate the relationship between um East and West. But I also want to clarify that in the beginning, this is. Is the US and Great Britain versus France and the Soviet Union? France was much more on the side of the Soviets because they didn't really care about the Germans. They wanted reparations like the Soviets did. So the French coming over to the Western side was like a slow build. But all of those big questions that aren't local questions, right? Like the big national diplomatic questions, that starts to deteriorate. And because that starts to deteriorate, the mission changes. So partner by kind of bringing together, on the one hand, you have Germans locally throughout Germany, not just in the US zone, that are going, okay, we really want to work with our occupiers because we want our businesses back and we want, you know, to be able to feed ourselves and we want to rebuild that kind of willingness to work with their occupiers really changes the relationship between the Germans and the occupiers in the US government and the U.S. Army. So when you take, on the one hand, that's a positive, and that's great, and that's fostering all of this rebuilding and collaboration. But on the other hand, you have these big questions that aren't getting answered on the, you know, in Berlin, which is where all these conferences are happening. And so things start to deteriorate. So the mission starts to shift. It becomes okay, so these army soldiers that are 18, 19, 20 years old are seeing people starving. And then they their kind of personal interaction becomes I need to take care of these people. These people aren't fighting me. They don't have guns in the street. They just want to feed their families. And so that relationship changes and the kind of narrative changes. And so the West, you know, wants to rebuild Germany so that they're productive and that they can contribute to the foreign economy. And the Soviet Union are like, you know, we just want to, you know, we want reparations, we want to control everything. They don't deserve to rejoin kind of the free world. Um so that breakdown really fuels that kind of shift and it gets faster and faster as time goes on.

SPEAKER_01

Um, so one once deterrence kind of becomes the main focus of this, what are the big maneuvers for besides practice?

SPEAKER_00

So in 1948, I should prep a so in 1948, we have um everybody knows that there's the Berlin airlift. It lasts like uh a year. So what triggers the Berlin airlift is that the United States and uh Great Britain decide to introduce a new currency in West in the Western zones to stabilize the economy. And they introduce the Deutschmark. Well, in order to prevent rampant inflation in the Soviet zone, the Soviets introduced the Ostmark. So the Soviets shut down the Western zones of Berlin in order to protect their economy. Now, they do declare that the Ostmark is the currency for all of Berlin, which of course the Western sides are not going to go along with. So what you end up with is this kind of year-long airlift to supply Berlin. That's incredibly important for the kind of training maneuvers because what happens is the US Army um starts preparing for, okay, well, what happens if this all blows up, right? Like what happens if the relationships deteriorate so much that we're now fighting the Soviets? They need to prepare for that. I want to preface very loudly that the army had no capability of actually defending by 1948. There was no actual real capability for the army to stop the Soviets. We demobilized by 1948, we have about 80,000 guys. Um, the British have less than that. I think they have like 50 or 60, and the French have like 30. The Soviets still have over a million soldiers. Like there's millions of soldiers. They never really demobilized. So they were kind of outmanned and outgunned. So these training maneuvers that that start in the night in 1948 really become kind of symbolic for the US Army. They're kind of demonstrating to both the Germans, hey, we're gonna stand here and we're gonna protect you. Um, but that also shows to the Soviets, hey, we're gonna stand here and we're gonna protect these people. And if we have to bring in reinforcements, we're gonna do that. So the training maneuvers were just as much about preparing troops for a possible invasion as it was kind of diplomatic signaling and political signaling to anyone paying attention that the US Army and the US government was committed to that rebuilding process and committed to Germany reforming in a democratic way.

SPEAKER_01

We've talked a little bit about the overarching logistics, the uh socioeconomics of of everything that's going on by the early 1950s. What makes it feel like American servicemen and their families can build a home life there?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. So I want to like so part of so, like I said, we had about 80, 80,000 guys in uh in West in what became West Germany in the US occupation zone in 1946 or so, um, when the United States Army realizes okay, we're not leaving, we're not going anywhere anytime soon. And this is before things really start to get heated with the Soviet Union. The United States Army introduces a policy for dependents, um, wives and children. Um, at first it's mostly just wives, to move to Germany to be with their husbands. Um, in the 1940s, this is very kind of rudimentary. You're normally these are officers, and normally they have the financial means to rent a German home. A lot of times they would live in German homes, but they would hire the Germans that owned the homes to work as nannies and maids and things like that. When the Korean War starts in June 1950, the United States Army dramatically expands its footprint in Germany. And by this point, we have what is now referred to as the uh West Germany. It was the Federal Republic of Germany. Um, and that merged the British, American, and French zones. So you now have a German government in the 1950s. Um, they don't really have a lot of power, they're still occupied, but they're kind of given a lot of space to manage things themselves. So, one of the ways in which the United States influxes all this money into Germany beyond the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s is they start building all of these homes. So, kind of they build what we now, well, what they were referring to as like little Americas, and they were little pockets of American communities and American brands like Coca-Cola came in, and the American army started to kind of create these pockets of like little Americas to entice American women and their children to come live in Germany. And it was another kind of political signal of like, look, if this was dangerous, we wouldn't let you go live there. Like, this was a way for us to signal to the Americans back home that West Germany is perfectly safe and that your soldiers aren't in harm's way. And look how safe it is. We built you these beautiful American-style homes. Some of them were apartment buildings, some of them were single family homes. Um, we built these American towns basically out from scratch, using German labor to kind of reiterate that this is a safe area. But we were mobilizing all these troops to kind of signal to the Soviets, hey, we're not going anywhere and like don't try anything, because now rather than having 80,000 guys in 48, 49, by 1952, we have over 250,000 guys. And that's, you know, many of them, I would say, ballpark off the top of my head without looking at any numbers. We probably have like 50 or 60,000 dependents when you include children. So it it dramatically expands. And the way to support that infrastructure is to hire the Germans to build these little American cities and all of the housing for them.

SPEAKER_01

I I have a question that uh is potentially very stupid. Um, so so you said you you said initially it was just wives, um, and later it became kids. What was was that a budget decision? Did it have to do with with kind of the the the PR of it, like put putting children in harm's way and kind of thing?

SPEAKER_00

That's a great question. That's a great question. It's not a stupid question at all. The reason, so in the beginning, part the biggest issue in the beginning, particularly, were the logistics. So once you open up the idea of your wife and your children can come over, now all of a sudden, these soldiers that are still, depending upon the year, they could be drafted, because the draft went away for a while and then it came back in 1948, these soldiers are committed to being over there for a year, two years, three years, depending upon what their service length is. You say, hey, all of a sudden you can bring your wives. There becomes very quickly a backlog and where wives and children are waiting over a year because there's nowhere to put them, there's nowhere to house them. Um, there aren't American English speaking schools for the children. The infrastructure didn't exist to accept them. So as more of them started to come in in the 1940s, mind you, we started to create the infrastructure. Schools get created, playgrounds get created. Uh, wives were expected, they were unofficially, they were never directed by the by the military, but they were unofficially expected to do charity work. Um and really yeah, they were they were doing chair, they were expected to do charity work. Often um, the wife of the base commander became kind of the head of the ladies' clubs, and they were it put in kind of de facto leadership positions where they were directing the wives of these soldiers, like, hey, we brought you over here and you don't have to work because your husband's out on patrol or on these training exercises, et cetera. So we expect that you're gonna contribute. And like I said, the military never formally directed these women to do this, but that was their both internal and external influence of like doing their part. So they were feeding homeless children and providing education. And um, sometimes they were giving like church services and they were handing out clothes and at the holidays they would organize like Santa events and things like that. So the women were really integral in building community relations with local Germans. Um, so again, it goes back to that kind of political signaling. It had a military purpose for the soldiers themselves, but it also had a real diplomatic purpose. Um, so the delays were really logistical. Um, in Berlin, in particular, um, there were families living in Berlin in 1948 when the Berlin airlift started. And what I find very interesting is that the powers that be at the newly created Pentagon told the U.S. Army commanders in Germany, you have to evacuate those families. Like this isn't safe. Like the city is closed off. You have to evacuate them and get them out. And to his credit, General Lucius Clay, who was the commander of the army in Germany at the time, said, absolutely not. If we evacuate these families, we're going to signal to the Berliners and Germans at large that we're not committed to protecting them. So we're not evacuating them. So what do we do instead? Well, we got to feed them, we got to clothe them. So then, you know, the airlift feeds not only the Americans, but also the Germans as well. Um, and slowly over the course of 1948 and 49, Lucius Clay very quietly um starts rotating out the soldiers that are there. So there's not as many families, and it's more officers that are bachelors to kind of quietly reduce the number. But it was like a natural rotation. He wasn't removing people. If people wanted to leave, he absolutely let them leave, but he wasn't going to evacuate them because the wives served such a political kind of front-facing messaging role. Um, they were really important. So it was getting them there and getting the infrastructure to support them was really important, both for the soldiers that were living there and for kind of the broader American messaging about why the army was there at all.

SPEAKER_01

That's fascinating, Ashley. Thank you. We're almost at our time limit here. Um, is there anything that you'd like to share that you didn't get a chance to during the interview proper?

SPEAKER_00

If there was anything that I could say to people as like a key takeaway of like, why should you care about the occupation and like why should you care about what the army was doing there? What I would say is this is a really transformative time. Um the relationship that we built with the Germans and the mechanisms that allowed West Germany to get created 50 years later or 40 years later, what allowed German unification. Um, Germany is one of the leaders of the European Union and has been for many years. That embracing of Germans and democracy happened because of the efforts and because of the things that happened on the ground during this occupation. It wasn't by chance. Um, the Allied forces, all four of them, I mean, we count France, but even though you know France wasn't an Allied force during the war, but they definitely were after, the Allied forces wanted to make sure that World War III didn't happen. Like they learned from the Treaty of Versailles and World War I and the rise of Hitler and the Nazi power, like we have to fundamentally change the narrative and fundamentally create a platform by which the Germans can rebuild democratically and become a partner in peace rather than a potential belligerent. And Marshall was a really big part of that because that was us kind of pumping billions of dollars, not just into Germany, but to all of Western Europe to rebuild. I mean, granted, there is some kind of we want you to rebuild in our image, right? Like there is some of that that is a natural criticism because the Soviet Union had the Warsaw Pact. They did the same thing with their satellite states. They were rebuilding these smaller countries in Eastern Europe in the Soviet image under communism. So it wasn't, you know, all completely altruistic, but but we were rebuilding democracy across Western Europe and the that shift and the kind of long history of Western Europe since then really took the foundations of that happened during this 10-year period of this occupation. And and I think that the impacts, they had no idea at the time that what they were doing was going to have such a lasting impression. They just wanted to make sure that in 10 years, World War III didn't break out. And the best way to do that is to protect the peace that you fought so hard to earn. And so, how do you protect that? So, like that was kind of the questions that they were grappling with. And nobody really had any blueprint. A lot of this, both locally within the US Army, the US government, the partnership with the Allies, all of this was kind of being made up on the fly. And that was true during the war as much as it was during the post-war period. There was no global precedent that these countries could follow. So it's really kind of miraculous that all of this unfolded the way that it did, and that we've preserved that peace ever since.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, Ashley. Um, but before we end, um, I probably should mention you've been involved with the Marshall Foundation for some time now in our digitization project. Um, do you mind telling us how you got involved in the foundation to begin with and um what this process has been like for you?

SPEAKER_00

Sure. Um the kind of quick background of how I got involved with the Marshall Foundation. I um I won a dissertation research award um through uh the Virginia Military Institute. Um, and they brought me down for a visit, which was incredible. Um they were they were very lovely. And when I was there at the Virginia Military Institute at VMI, I visited the Marshall Foundation uh library because I was doing research for my dissertation, and there were a lot of really great records on George Marshall's time, both as the chief of staff during the war, but also he didn't leave that position until November of 45. So those records were really rich and helped me with my research. And then I later came back to the Marshall Foundation about a year or two later and gave a lecture on this topic. And then I got involved when um Melissa Davis, the librarian at the Marshall Foundation, uh reached out to me um to let me know that they were starting this big digitization process. And so I've been involved kind of since from the ground up in this massive digitization project where the Marshall Foundation Library is digitizing all of George Marshall's papers and making them individually searchable in a way that I can say as a historian is just is never been done before. And it's really groundbreaking what we've managed to accomplish and what the foundation has has done. Um I highly recommend anybody that is watching or listening to this to check out the library catalog because I'm quite proud of the work that we've done. So, what we've been doing is we've been individually digitizing all of these files, and there's like 250,000 files that have been digitized. Um, all of the chief of staff papers are already live on the website as of early 2026. And we're currently working through the department, uh his State Department papers. And later we will get to um his papers while he was Secretary of Defense. So it's a multi-year project, but I'm really excited and grateful to be a part of it. And I know that it's gonna have real, real impacts for scholars moving forward to be able to access all of these records with a click of a mouse.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. And your involvement means the world to us. It really does, Ashley. So um, thank you so much for sitting down and talking this through. Um, I think this was a fascinating discussion, and um, we we look forward to uh to talking to you in the future.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much. It was great to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you for listening to Age of Marshall. To learn more about the George C. Marshall Foundation and its programs, and to support our mission, visit Marshall Foundation.org.