Crimes and Mercies (23 page)

Canadian poster asking for contributions to help save the lives of children in Germany, undated but probably from 1947.

In 1946 Mrs Hugh Champion de Crespigny, centre, wife of the British Regional Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein, helps with the Christmas celebrations of refugee children in the convalescent home established in a wing of their official residence in Kiel.

Children emerge from ruins. Many families in wrecked German cities lived in damp, unheated basements for years after the war.

Expellees from the east, who left home with few supplies and little or no transport, pass US Army vehicles.

Displaced women and children move slowly in horse-drawn carts and on foot along the road near Wurzen.

Bunk-beds and makeshift furniture in a crowded barracks for refugees, Germany, 1946.

The first food parcel allowed to be sent from the USA arrived in Berlin at the home of Heinz Lietz on 14 August 1946. Many Germans starved to death when such readily available help was denied.

The original handwritten caption to this photograph reads: ‘Bread, the “staff of life” in Berlin. – Thanks to the providence of God and the Dutch Red Cross which brought MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] flour and other nice food to the Mennonite refugees in Berlin.’

An old refugee woman gathers sticks to help cook meagre meals supplied in part by Mennonites from Canada and the USA.

Mennonite Peter Dyck, from North America, helps a young expellee boy from the east.

American Cornelius Dyck, the first member of the Mennonite Central Committee to enter the British zone in late 1946. The Committee provided invaluable help distributing food packages in Schleswig-Holstein, where the population increased by over 70 per cent after the arrival of expellees and refugees.

A German child’s picture of the world, drawn in about 1948, shows the route of‘Hoover food’ by train from Canada, the US and Mexico and then across the Atlantic to Hamburg.

Allen Dulles, the head of the American intelligence effort in Switzerland, who ran the only important American spy ring inside Germany, complained strongly about Allied policy in 1943. ‘I do not understand what our policy is,’ he cabled to Washington, ‘and what offers, if any, we could make to the resistance movement.’ In March 1943, he told Washington that the Allied policy of unconditional surrender would mean a catastrophe ‘for the country and for the individual German. We ourselves have done nothing to offer them a more hopeful meaning for this expression: we have never, for example, indicated that it refers only to military and party leaders.’ The reason was clearly expressed by Roosevelt himself during a meeting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he said, ‘… the German philosophy can not be changed by decree, law, or military order … I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation.’
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Churchmen such as Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne, Pastor Niemöller,
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Bishop von Galen, aristocrats, leaders and officers such as Fabian von Schlabrendorf, were pushed aside, or ignored or treated with contumely by the victorious Allies. The widow of one officer, Col. Georg Hansen, who had been executed by Hitler for resistance, lived in grief and poverty after the war because she was refused a pension and her husband’s bank account was for a long time blocked by the Allies. Some, such as Ernst von Weizsäcker, were jailed by the Allies despite much evidence that they had risked a great deal to prevent war. Von Weizsäcker was found guilty and sentenced to five years. After strong British pleas to President Truman, he was finally released, when his sentence was reduced to time already served. He died less than a year later, on 4 August 1951. As the English author Patricia Meehan has shrewdly concluded, ‘It was not the imprisonment for years of an innocent man which the [British] Foreign Office deprecated, so much as the incompetence of the American judges. The “Von Weizsäcker Trial” file listed in the Foreign Office index is not, alas, to be found. No doubt it still exists somewhere in the weeders’ limbo.’
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