Crimes and Mercies (26 page)

It was precisely oil production that Henry Morgenthau had
fought bitterly to ban in 1945, among 500 other banned items.
²⁵
The enforced reduction in oil production was particularly damaging to the farmers, because it meant that their tractors were useless, and other machinery endangered. The reduction in coal meant that it was much more difficult to transport food to processing and preserving centres.

In 1945–46 the democracies were concerned about starvation around the world, excluding Germany. After that, the problem was the politics of hostility towards Germany. The 9–10 per cent reduction in world food supply, if shared equally in the world, would have meant a drop in North American consumption from the existing average of about 3,300 cpd to about 3,000 cpd.
²⁶
Since the long-term optimum for health in an active adult is around 2,000 to 3,000 cpd, depending on activity, temperature and so on, the new level would have been healthier than the old.

In Germany, pre-war consumption had been about 3,000 cpd, and the nation on average had been 81–85 per cent self-sufficient in food production.
²⁷
It was never necessary to make war to get food, or to get ‘land for the German plow,’ as Hitler had said. This was underlined by the result of the survey conducted by the US Army in summer 1945. The army discovered that the Germans had never been seriously short of food during the war, and that their requisitions from foreign countries had been ‘minor’.
²⁸

The exclusion of Germany from world relief was thought at the time to be entirely the fault of the Germans themselves. It has been repeatedly stated by Western historians that if Germany was short of food, this was neither the fault nor the intent of the Allies. The argument is simple: ‘The war was the culprit, and the Germans had started the war, so they should suffer first and most. In difficult circumstances not of their own making, the Allies generously fed the Germans from their own resources. This they did at their own expense, many hundreds of millions of dollars per year for each of the US and UK. Far from vengeance, this was an unprecedented act of generosity.’ In the words of the British Select Committee on Estimates in London, ‘It is probably without parallel in history that twelve months after the end of a war,
Great Britain should be paying eighty million pounds a year towards the upkeep of her principal adversary.’
²⁹
It makes a creditable ending to a grotesque war. But is it true?

A few facts support the theory. Many of the Allies in the summer of 1945 had no intention of imposing mass starvation on Germany. A Canadian on Eisenhower’s staff, Lt. Gen. A. E. Grasett, was asked to report on the wheat situation, and wrote in June 1945 to his chiefs at SHAEF that ‘the wheat that will be arriving should be adequate to prevent starvation’, among the German civil population.
³⁰
Much wheat was sent to Germany intended for relief of German civilians. But many people in high places, from Morgenthau down, were determined to impose a harsh vengeance on Germany in the guise of preventing a resurgence of German power. This would be easier to carry out if the public believed that there was a world food shortage from 1946 on.

The statistics of world food production do not bear out the official history. The food production of the world measured in calories per capita in October 1945 by the US Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations was 90 per cent of pre-war levels.
³¹
Food production in the world for 1945–46 per capita
outside the US
was about 12 per cent below pre-war levels.
³²
Distributed according to need, this food would have been easily adequate to feed everyone, because the pre-war average was well above basic human need. For 1946–47, world production was up by 7 per cent, meaning that, overall, it was very close to pre-war levels.
³³
It also means that much of the 3 per cent shortfall was low production in Germany. However, in Europe, the ‘1946 harvest was surprisingly good,’ according to the World Food Appraisal report of the UN, issued in December 1946. Wheat and rye production was up one-third, to 80 per cent of normal, potatoes up 18 per cent, and sugar-beets up one-third to 66 per cent of pre-war level.
³⁴

Since production in 1944–48 was running far higher than it had before the war in the main producing/exporting countries, Canada and the US, the critical factor then and later was the availability of the Canadian-US surplus.
³⁵
The United States, Canada and several other major exporting countries began 1945
with a surplus of food. As Robert Patterson wrote to Mr Justice Byrnes on 27 December 1944, US food production in 1944 equalled the all-time high set in 1942. The 1944 crop was 10 per cent higher than any year prior to 1942. Wheat, corn, rice and many other crops broke all records. The fact was, Patterson said, there was ‘a surplus of food [in the US].’
³⁶

World food production was virtually normal in 1947, except in Germany. Since the rest of the world was so close to normal, it is clear that the reason for German starvation was not that there was a fatal world shortage of food. Allied policies were responsible for nearly all the excess deaths. The worst of the policies of the four occupying powers was the confiscation of 25 per cent of the arable land of the country, together with the forced expulsions of nearly all the inhabitants into the damaged and shrunken remainder. But this was not all. Another part of Allied policy prevented the Germans from manufacturing goods to pay for food imports; another part prevented them from collecting food or cash in return for the billions of dollars’ worth of goods that were confiscated surplus to reparations; another part prevented them from producing sufficient food for themselves; another part prevented international relief agencies from providing them with food during the most critical first year to year and a half of peace; and later, another part ordered food to be supplied to them free by Allied taxpayers. Hoover later wrote that under President Roosevelt, the American policy had ‘accumulated blunders in administration which by January 1946 had endangered the lives of millions of people all over the world.’
³⁷

What was the Germans’ agricultural capability in the summer of 1945? The British Foreign Office said in 1947 that the area occupied by the British and Americans was capable of producing about 1,750 cpd for the local inhabitants, which was the production before the war. Ambassador Robert Murphy agreed.
³⁸

Lt. Col. Grasett reported in June 1945 that the US-UK-
THE
French zone had been 60–70 per cent self-sufficient before the war. This meant a potential of 1,800 to 2,100 cpd for those zones. Grasett added the amazing fact that the cropland planted that spring was 97 per cent of normal despite the bombing, lack of labour and military campaigns that had just rolled through.
³⁹
However, both Hoover and the Foreign Office reported that German farmers in the combined British and American zones actually produced food enough
for only about 1,000 cpd in 1946
and 1947
.
⁴⁰

It is clear from this that if the Germans in the west, unburdened by refugees, had produced as much as their land would grow, very few would have starved. But they didn’t even get above 1,000 cpd production despite tremendous incentive. Why not?

The British Foreign Office reported in July 1947 that this catastrophic fall in production was due to lack of labour, lack of implements, lack of fertilizer and the increase in demand for food caused by the refugees.
⁴¹
Robert Murphy agreed.
⁴²
The most important of these – labour, fertilizer and surplus mouths – were caused by Allied policies.

The industrial production on which farming depends had been around 105 per cent of pre-war levels in late 1944 and early 1945,
⁴³
showing that once the war production had been eliminated in May 1945, there was sufficient to supply the existing level of farm production. In spring 1945, about 60–70 per cent of the pre-war livestock were still alive.
⁴⁴
It is clear that when the Allies took over in May 1945,
the potential for agricultural production in
west Germany was much higher than the food the Germans received
. The potential was almost enough to maintain life; it was certainly enough to sharply reduce epidemic disease, which occurs in starving populations.

This food potential had been achieved during the war despite the absence of most of the German male labour force, despite reliance on inefficient prisoner labour, despite the bombing, military campaigns, and shortage of oil and transport.

What finally assured the prolonged starvation of Germans was
the enforced reduction of industry. By autumn 1945, industrial production was deliberately reduced to around 25–30 per cent of pre-war levels,
⁴⁵
thus preventing the chance of buying food imports. This was not a consequence of the bombing or the military campaign. The most heavily damaged area of Germany was the Ruhr, where less than 30 per cent of the plant equipment and machinery was destroyed by war. In Germany as a whole, 80–85 per cent of the machinery and plant survived intact,
⁴⁶
but in 1946 in the US zone, exports were forced down to only 3 per cent of pre-war levels.
⁴⁷
The Allies slowed oil production to a trickle, closed down factories, kept the male labour force imprisoned, confiscated or destroyed factories and machinery, imposed restrictive financial measures, reduced the postal service, and so on.

Food production and food imports came under specific attack when the fishing fleet was prevented from going to sea for a year, and the Western Allies drastically cut the production of fertilizer.
⁴⁸
By false accounting, the Allies also refused to credit the value of some German exports to the German account, making it impossible for Germans to earn foreign currency to buy food. Baldly stated, many valuable goods were stolen, beyond the reparations agreed among the Allies.
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All foreign governments and international relief agencies, including UNRRA and the Red Cross, were prevented from assisting Germans for the first critical year. By the time such pacifist organizations as the Mennonites of Canada were permitted to send food to their co-religionists in Germany, in June 1946, the overall death rate in Germany had risen to more than double the normal rate.
⁵⁰
So much food was confiscated by the invaders that the ICRC was moved to complain in August 1945.
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The ICRC had over 1,000 boxcars and 400 trucks actually shipping relief food into Germany despite war damage in the spring of 1945. At least three trains reached Ravensburg, Augsburg and Moosburg, but were refused permission to unload by the Allies, who sent them back with their food to Switzerland. From there, the Red Cross returned the food to the original donors.
⁵²
An exception to the general rule appears to
have been the arrival in Lübeck in autumn 1945 of three Swedish ships loaded with relief supplies intended for Germans. It is not clear, however, that the supplies were actually distributed to Germans.
⁵³

As a result of the seizures of land and the expulsions in the east by Poland and the USSR, about twelve million starving, penniless refugees poured into the remainder of Germany. In the British zone between January 1946 and January 1947, more than 1,700,000 of these helpless people were imposed on the twenty million original inhabitants.
⁵⁴
Such were the avertable calamities in the three Western zones that created the situation Hoover was trying to correct.

Despite all the catastrophes of war, despite the loss of food from the seized lands and the loss of the food production of the Soviet-occupied zone, in the spring of 1945 the western Germans had at least a hope of maintaining themselves without any imports. If the Allies had not impeded them, there can hardly be any doubt that they would have found a way to feed themselves a meagre diet on their own land. Many lives would have been saved.

Another very odd aspect of all this is the fact that although the British and Americans undoubtedly did send much wheat to Germany in 1945–48, the Germans themselves rarely got more food than they produced themselves. Herbert Hoover and assorted British officers all said at various times in 1945–46 that the Germans were producing around 1,000 to 1,100 cpd, but they often received less than that. The ration actually received for long periods in the British–American zone was around 1,000 cpd and sometimes no more than 900.
⁵⁵

The Germans themselves had of course recognized the desperate plight of their children. They set up feeding programs in the cities, but the scarcity of imported food limited their scope terribly. For example, from 31 October 1945 to 31 March 1946 the welfare authorities of the city of Kiel organized feedings for 1,000
schoolchildren, who got a warm midday meal of 500–600 calories. Parents paid 10 pfennig, but money was also contributed by the British soldiers of Sperrzone F. At first only 6 per cent of the city’s children could be fed, despite the fact that 20–25 per cent were undernourished. Thus the aid went only to the neediest. In order to help as many as possible, each ‘class’ was fed for only ten weeks, then replaced by another.
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By 1946, the Germans were dying in such large numbers, probably about double the pre-war average, that the ban on private aid was slowly relaxed.
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Early in the year, the Allies set up CARE (Co-operative for American Remittances to Europe), covering twenty-two independent US charities. CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany) was set up in February to supervise sixteen American independent charitable organizations.
⁵⁸

The Germans in the three western zones co-operated through their own large charitable organizations such as the Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirchen in Deutschland, Deutsche Caritas-verband, Arbeiterwohlfahrt and Deutsche Rote Kreuz (whose work had been curtailed immediately after the war because of suspected Nazi elements in the administration).