Crimes and Mercies (16 page)

Hoover went on: ‘There were no insurmountable difficulties in carrying out such relief [to Holland] except the attitudes of the British and American governments. There was ample food surplus in countries overseas from Europe. Shipping was available without diminishing the transportation of the Allies.’
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The measure of Churchill’s cynicism is that in fact the British and Canadians both broke the ban for sentimental or political purposes. They sent food of course to their own men in German prison camps, and also to Greece. The Canadians justified sending food to the Greeks by saying that the help to the Germans (by reducing Greece’s food demands) was minimal, and at that
time (1944–45) the food was an important political weapon. It was sent to help lure wavering Greeks to the British side during the incipient struggle for power between left and right. To put it more clearly, it was part of Churchill’s plan to extend and protect the Empire by dominating the Mediterranean sea. Mackenzie King was deeply opposed to that, but he gave in to Churchill.

The destruction caused by war had been amplified by the scorched-earth policy of the Nazis in the last days of Hitler’s Reich, leaving huge disruptions which the occupying armies tried to correct. A distinguished American member of Hoover’s Presidential Mission in 1947 observed, ‘That within hours or days a minimum of civil order was restored out of the complete chaos and life kept going amidst the ruins; for this the German people owe the Western victors a debt of gratitude which has rarely been recognized in the distress and disappointment of the following months and years.’
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That the policy had been implemented entirely for the convenience of the occupying armies soon became evident to all Germans.

‘From 1945 to the middle of 1948 one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation.’ These are not the words of a revisionist historian, but of an American naval officer who watched German society collapsing under Allied punishment in the Western zone. His papers have very recently been opened to the public at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. He is Captain Albert R. Behnke, USN MC, a medical doctor, who compared the German civilians under the Allies with the conditions in ‘heroic Holland’ under the Germans, and concluded that ‘Germany was subjected to physical and psychic trauma unparalleled in history’. The Germans under the Allies fared much worse than the Dutch under the Germans, and for far longer. ‘In the age group 20 to 39, for example, the average [German’s] body weight in January 1946 was 137.1 lbs … and in December of 1947 it was 132.1 lbs. The average normal weight for men of this group (stature 68 inches) is 154 pounds.’ Normal
adult German consumers were rationed to 1,550 calories per day (cpd), often receiving far less, whereas in Holland in 1943 they got 1,775 cpd. In 1944, the average Dutch ration was 1,397 and in 1945 it was 1,556. In Germany, for years at a time, the average official calorie ration under the British and Americans was 1,550 per day – often not issued – and under the French, for long periods, 1,400, and sometimes as little as 450.
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The situation in the British zone was so bad in early 1946 that it drew an angry warning from the wartime hero, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commanding the British occupation in Germany. Montgomery sent a cable to the British Foreign Office demanding immediate and substantial increases in imports, with the warning that ‘If we do not we shall produce death and misery to an extent which will disgrace our administration in history and completely stultify every effort which we are making to produce a democratic Germany.’
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In the British zone for six months in the winter/spring of 1946-47, the ration was around 1,000 cpd.

For long periods in the American zone, the ration was officially 1,275 calories per day. But it was well known that even the official ration was not enough to support health. Herbert Hoover told the President of the United States that ‘the 1,550 ration is wholly incapable of supporting health’.
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One of the American Mennonites who were trying to feed people in Germany commented in March 1946 that, ‘Only if we can be an instrument of bringing food to these at our doorstep can we atone for the sin of which we personally are a part.’
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In the east of Germany in 1945, the people starved because the Russians confiscated so much food and virtually all the factories. The French took a terrible toll in their zone, by forced seizure of food and housing, and by physical violence including mass rapes, in Stuttgart and elsewhere. The famine went on for years. The churches flew black flags. The children were too weak to play. The official ration in the French zone in January 1947 was 450 calories per day, half the ration of the Belsen concentration camp, according to the writer and theologian Prince zu Löwenstein.
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The Allies had studied German food production during the
war, so they knew what to expect when they arrived. They knew for instance that to strip off the rich farmlands of the east to give them to the Poles and Russians deprived Germany of over 25 per cent of her arable land – this while most of the male labour force was imprisoned, and the many other measures we have already seen were imposed in order to reduce German food supplies. Every hope of survival was reduced to the vanishing point for millions of people. There was scant hope from the beginning of the occupation that most of the Germans could survive for long under Allied policies.
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It is possible that one of the reasons that prompted Eisenhower’s order banning civilian supply of the camps was the threat of a food shortage. Eisenhower was concerned to control very strictly the distribution of food, according to many historians. However, many prisoners and German civilians saw the American guards burn the food brought by civilian women. One former prisoner described it recently: ‘At first, the women from the nearby town brought food into the camp. The American soldiers took everything away from the women, threw it in a heap and poured gasoline [benzine] over it and burned it.’
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Eisenhower himself ordered that the food be destroyed, according to the writer Karl Vogel, who was the German camp commander appointed by the Americans in Camp 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although the prisoners were getting only 800 calories per day, the Americans were destroying food outside the camp gate.

To conserve food could scarcely have been the reason for the order threatening death for civilians wishing to feed prisoners, because the Allies’ predominant policy in Germany for many months was actually to reduce supplies of food destined for German civilians, as well as prisoners. The rations were to be held at the lowest possible level to ‘prevent starvation’,
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or to ‘prevent disease and unrest’.

Reparations also reduced the shrunken German food supply. The Allies decided to take huge reparations, amounting to at least
twenty billion dollars. All used German prisoners as slave labour, thus subtracting them from the labour force needed to bring in the reduced harvest. The Western Allies had more than three million prisoners in their camps in January 1946, purportedly working for them. Beyond that, about 650,000 Germans had already starved to death in the Western Allied camps. Hundreds of thousands had died in the Soviet camps, and another million were enslaved there. German prisoners who had worked as farm labourers in the UK and France have reported their horror at arriving home in 1947 and 1948 to find their families starving.
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Unable to feed themselves adequately from home production, the Germans were trying desperately to increase production for export, but they were seriously hampered by the Allied reparations policy. Even as late as 1949, the pace of dismantling was rising. In that year, 268 factories were removed, in whole or in part. In the French zone, ten factories were dismantled in 1946, nine in 1947, forty in 1948 and fifty-one in 1949, of which thirteen were shipped whole to France. In the previous three years, nine dismantled factories had been sent to France.
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The Poles, Czechs, Russians and others were driving about 14/15 million eastern civilians (expellees) into the occupied remainder of the country.
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By common Allied policy, no Germans were permitted to emigrate until late 1949, so the catastrophe was intensified, with no end in sight.
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One of the most harmful deprivations under the Morgenthau Plan was the drastic reduction of German fertilizer production, some of it on the grounds that nitrogen fertilizer can be diverted to production of ammunition, some because other components were by-products of steel and coal production, themselves severely reduced.
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As we have seen, production of manufactured goods as well as of food, fell drastically, partly as a result of this policy.
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The total application of the three principal fertilizers dropped from 2,113,000 tons in 1938–39 to 782,000 tons in 1945–46, but the drop in effectiveness was greater than the loss of tonnage, because the effectiveness of the combination of the three fertilizers
is largely controlled by the amount of nitrogen. And this drop was catastrophic, 82 per cent, from 563,000 tons to 105,000.
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The British and Americans, fearing ‘disease and unrest’ that might imperil their armies, were forced to import large quantities of food to maintain civil order. The military authorities thought that if they did not do this, the communists would exploit the situation to begin a revolution. The British especially felt the load, because their zone received more refugees than any other. Also, some of the grain they were getting cheap or free from Canada for domestic use had to be diverted to Germany, so their own ration was threatened. But not nearly enough was sent to Germany. So it happened that the Allies forced the Germans into starvation, and then in fear of public reaction at home and of communist ‘exploitation’ in Germany, fed them inadequately while complaining about the cost. They then praised themselves for their generosity.

The famine that began in 1945 spread over all of occupied Germany and continued into 1948. This was camouflaged as much as possible by the various armies and governments. American senators, churchmen and writers, British parliamentarians and church leaders protested, at first to no effect, but later with great success. The soldiers and politicians gradually saw the sense of helping the Germans, who could then help to rebuild Europe. And if West Germany did not starve, it would cease to be a hindrance to the West.

Mixed in with this new attitude, like the salt in the porridge, were the teachings that lie at the heart of Western democracy. The ideas that it is best to forgive your enemy, love your enemy, and do good to those who have hurt you, slowly blended into a new policy which predominated in Allied council chambers and in the ruins of Germany by 1950.

The expulsions

The fate of post-war Germany was largely settled at the Potsdam conference in July–August 1945 by the three principal Allies, the
USSR, the USA and Great Britain. They were determined to eliminate the German problem once and for all. One solution was to weaken Germany by annexing her territory. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt had agreed years before Potsdam that Poland could have East Prussia.
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But this would mean that a discontented German minority would be left behind, like the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. Or else that the Allies would have to abandon one major war aim – self-determination for all peoples. Roosevelt abandoned the principle in a letter to the President of the Polish Government in Exile in November 1944: ‘If the Polish government and people desire in connection with the new frontiers of the Polish state to bring about the transfer to and from the territory of Poland of national minorities, the United States Government will raise no objections and so far as is practicable will facilitate such transfer.’
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Stalin was determined to retain the eastern section of Poland, which he had seized under his secret agreement with Hitler in 1939. When the British and Americans ratified this seizure at Potsdam, they were thus carrying out one of Hitler’s foreign policy aims. The nominal difference this time was that Poland would be compensated for this loss: she got part of East Prussia, East Brandenburg and Silesia. But in fact, the whole country was turned into a province of the Soviet empire, and remained that way for half a century.

So far as most Germans were concerned, Potsdam was a word meaning mainly brutal expulsions of fourteen million or so people from the eastern section of Germany, and the loss of 25 per cent of the country, including much of its best farmland. They were told that the expulsions would be carried out in an ‘orderly and humane manner,’ in the soothing words of the victor.

What ‘orderly and humane’ meant was visible to the Canadian army officer and writer Robert Greer when he visited Berlin in late 1945:

There’s something I must tell you about before I go to have dinner. It’s the worst of all. In driving about [Berlin] on
Sunday morning, we came to the Stettiner Bahnhof. It’s a complete wreck of course, the great arched glassway broken and twisted. I went down to the ground level and looked.There were people. Sitting on bundles of clothes, crouched by handcarts and little wagons were people … they were all exhausted and starved and miserable. You’d see a child sitting on a roll of blankets, a girl of perhaps four or five, and her eyes would be only half open and her head would loll occasionally and her eyes blink slowly as though she were only half alive. Beside her, her mother apparently, a woman with her head on her outstretched arm in the most terrible picture of despair and exhaustion and collapse I’ve seen. You could see in the line of her body all the misery that was possible for her to feel … no home, no husband, no food, no place to go, no one to care, nothing nothing absolutely nothing but a piece of the floor of the Stettiner Bahnhof and a night of weary hunger. In another place, another woman, sitting with her head in her hands…my God, how often have I sat like that with my stomach sick within me and felt miserable and helpless and uncaring…yet always I had someone to help, or a bed to rest on and a meal to eat and a place to go. For her there was nothing. Even when you see it it’s impossible to believe. What can you do when you have nothing? Where can you go, what can you do, when you have no strength left and hunger is a sickness in your belly? God it was terrible.