Lucius Dubignon Clay (23 April 1898 – 16 April 1978) was a senior officer of the United States Army who was known for his administration of occupied Germany after World War II. He served as the deputy to General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945; deputy military governor, Germany, in 1946; Commander in Chief, United States Forces in Europe and military governor of the United States Zone, Germany, from 1947 to 1949. Clay orchestrated the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) when the USSR blockaded West Berlin.
Clay was born on April 23, 1898, in Marietta, Georgia, the sixth and last child of Alexander S. Clay, who served in the United States Senate from 1897 to 1910. In 1918 Clay graduated from West Point, where he later taught.
Clay held various civil and military engineering posts in the 1920s and 1930s, such as directing the construction of dams and civilian airports. Because Clay's work involved large government projects, he became closely acquainted with the people and workings of the federal agencies and Congress. He achieved close working relationships with an associate of President Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and with House Majority Leader and Speaker Sam Rayburn. In Rayburn's state of Texas, Clay supervised the building of the Denison Dam. At the time of its completion, in 1943, it was the largest earthen dam in the world. From 1940 to the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Clay selected and supervised the construction of 450 airports, which were the foundation of America's civil aviation network. This initiative was, however, criticised for pork barrel spending, as Clay's home state of Georgia was granted 33 airports, a number that overstated the state's importance economically, militarily, and demographically.
By March 1942, Clay had risen to the position of being the youngest brigadier general in the army, a month short of his 44th birthday. All the while, he had acquired a reputation for bringing order and operational efficiency out of chaos, and for being an exceptionally hard and disciplined worker, who went long hours and "considered lunch a waste of time".
Clay did not see actual combat but was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1942 and the Army Distinguished Service Medal in 1944 and received the Bronze Star Medal for his action in stabilizing the French harbor of Cherbourg, which was critical to the flow of war matériel. In 1945, he served as deputy to General Dwight Eisenhower. The following year, he was made Deputy Governor of Germany during the Allied Military Government.
Clay would later remark regarding the occupation directive guiding his and Eisenhower's actions that "there was no doubt that JCS 1067 contemplated the Carthaginian peace which dominated our operations in Germany during the early months of occupation."
Clay was promoted to lieutenant general on 17 April 1945 and to general on 17 March 1947.
Clay heavily influenced US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes' September 1946 speech in Stuttgart, Germany. The speech, "Restatement of Policy on Germany," marked the formal transition in American occupation policy away from the Morgenthau Plan of economic dismantlement to one of economic reconstruction.
On 15 March 1947, Clay succeeded Joseph T. McNarney as military governor (or "high commissioner") of the US zone of occupied Germany—the head of the OMGUS, the "Office of Military Government, United States." Clay's responsibilities covered a wide spectrum of social issues related to Germany's recovery from the war in addition to strictly military issues. He commissioned Lewis H. Brown to research and write "A Report on Germany", which served as a detailed recommendation for the reconstruction of postwar Germany and served as a basis for the Marshall Plan. Clay promoted democratic federalism in Germany and resisted US politicians who sought to undo a constitution that a Constituent Assembly in Bavaria had adopted on 26 October 1946. He also closed the borders of the American Zone in 1947 to stem the tide of Jewish refugees that was generating tension with the local populations.
Treatment of Nazis during governorship
Clay was responsible for the controversial commuting of some death sentences, such as convicted Nazi war criminals Erwin Metz and his superior, Hauptmann Ludwig Merz. Metz and Merz were two notorious figures of the Berga concentration camp in which 350 U.S. POWs had been beaten, tortured, starved, and forced to work for the German government during World War II. The soldiers were singled out for looking or sounding Jewish. At least 70 U.S. POWs soldiers died in the camp and on a death march near the end of the war. The commutation was partly due to the military botching the case. Prosecutors did not summon a single witness, despite dozens of witnesses saying they were willing to testify.
Clay also reduced the sentence of Ilse Koch, the "Beast of Buchenwald", who had been convicted of murder at the Nuremberg trials, and who had been accused of having gloves and lampshades made from prisoners' skin. Clay later said he commuted Koch's sentence since none of the documents about Koch actually mentioned the fact or included any evidence of her committing murder. The reductions in sentences were based on the hasty convictions of some Buchenwald personnel following the end of the war. Evidence was sometimes questionable, and many witnesses claimed to have been beaten by Allied interrogators. Clay confirmed several death sentences as valid, commuted several, and had some like Koch released after they had served a reduced sentence because of questionable evidence. Under the pressure of public opinion, Koch was rearrested in 1949, tried before a West German court, and, on 15 January 1951, sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to BBC journalist Tom Bower, despite Clay's mixed record, he was one of only two prominent American and British officials, the other being British diplomat Patrick Dean, who were both competent and showed some level of genuine commitment to denazification. According to Donald Bloxham, Clay's influence was crucial to American occupation authorities prosecuting major Nazi war criminals on their own in the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
In 1946, Clay announced to western German officials that he was disappointed with their results from denazification tribunals:"I do not see how you can demonstrate your ability for self-government nor your will for democracy if you are going to evade or shirk the first unpleasant and difficult task that falls upon you. Unless there is real and rapid improvement, I can only assume that German administration is unwilling to accept this responsibility."The results temporarily improved after Clay ordered them to make improvements within 60 days. In late 1948, Clay admitted he did not enjoy, in his position as Military Governor, having to regularly "sign many death warrants and to approve many life imprisonments." Nevertheless, he was willing to and did approve most death sentences imposed by American military tribunals. He also approved all but one of the sentences imposed in the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
Near the end of the occupation, Clay openly admitted his hopes for denazification were failing. In early 1948, a blanket stay of execution had been granted to all of the Nazi war criminals on death row in the U.S. occupation zone, with the exception of the seven defendants condemned at the Doctors' Trial. This came after false allegations of torture were propagated by several politicians in the United States, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. In October 1948, however, the stay was removed for nearly everyone, excluding those convicted in the Malmedy massacre trial. Upon the lifting of the stay, Clay embarked on a spate of last-minute mass executions, believing that as time passed, pressure would increase for the death sentences to be commuted. In response, the German Catholic priests started objecting to not only the executions, but the prosecutions of war criminals outright. However, their pleas failed to convince Clay to halt the executions. Between October 1948 and March 1949, over 100 Nazi war criminals convicted by U.S. military tribunals were hanged at Landsberg Prison.