Crimes and Mercies (27 page)

These organizations banded together to form the Zentral-ausschuß zur Verteilung ausländischer Liebesgaben, with headquarters in the seaport city of Bremen.
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The Zentralausschuß authorized the delivery and distribution of foreign aid that had finally begun trickling in. According to the German author Gabriele Stüber, the reliable infrastructure of these German welfare agencies helped to ensure an equitable distribution to those in greatest need.

The grisly mortality rates for children quoted by Hoover to Mackenzie King certainly applied to the Germans ahead of all others. Yet Hoover had to beg the American Military Governor, Lucius Clay, to improve the official ration, which had been cut from slow starvation, 1,550 cpd, to 1,275, effective from 1 April 1946.

Hoover was typically generous when the autocratic Lucius Clay
swallowed his pride to make his own appeal to him for help. Hoover replied: ‘Feeding the enemy requires no debate with me, since it must be done for many reasons.’ He urged Clay to restore the 1,550 calorie level, promising to do his best to arrange immediate help. But as Hoover wrote: ‘The General apparently determined to take no risks and held to the reduced 1,275 calories – which was below the endurance level.’
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Even this might not be maintained, and in fact was not, as Patterson was ‘deeply disturbed’ to note in May 1947. He told Anderson that the situation in both Germany and Austria was ‘extremely critical’.
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He also told Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947 that the ‘average ration for the last six weeks has been 1,200 calories, and in many places it is as low as 900 calories … this is slow famine …the British ration [in the UK] is 2,900 calories per day, the average American consumes 3,300 …’
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Clay did lift one restriction that had prevented Americans from sending CARE food-relief packages to Germany. As Hoover pointed out, some Americans imbued with ‘the spirit of the Morgenthau Plan’ had ‘invented the warning that [relief] packages would all go to the “upper classes” so our military authorities had refused to allow the distribution of CARE packages …’ id="d8e30364">
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The many letters of thanks received from the grateful recipients demonstrate that the CARE packages were not going to the ‘upper classes’. Even the smallest CARE packages lifted the spirits of the parents and children. To receive even one half of a CARE package so cheered Deacon Wilhelm Lorenz in Kiel in the British zone that he wrote, in May 1947:

You will think it is not very much since it is intended for the sixty-five students and seventy small children we have in our care. Quite the contrary. For us it is a great deal to get our hands on such a thing in these scarce times. We are able to create with it much joy. For us even the smallest help is worth while.
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In happy contrast to the situation in Germany, conditions in Holland, Belgium and France ‘are much better than had been
anticipated’, Mackenzie King was told by the former Premier of France, Léon Blum, in August 1946. King had no trouble believing this, because he had already heard from the Canadian Military Mission in Berlin that the Belgians were flourishing. They had eggs and steaks, and queues for food were small and rare.
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According to the United Nations, ‘the United Kingdom, although a major food importing country, still maintained a diet which though much less varied than in normal times, reaches about 90 per cent of the pre-war calorie level.’
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Germany and Italy were much worse off than the others.
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The US Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson had told Truman the same thing in March 1946. He said that ‘the food situation had been thus far nearly normal in the Scandinavian countries, Britain, Holland, Belgium and France. As for Italy, one of the principal troubles was faulty distribution … the situation was not good in Germany … [General McNarney felt] deep concern about the food situation in the United States zone in Germany’.
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The first few CRALOG packages arrived in the US zone in February 1946.
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The Evangelische Hilfswerk distributed packages in the US zone in April 1946, but it was not until October 1946 that the Hilfswerk distributed parcels in the British and French zones.

In the US zone the military government would not allow other aid organizations outside CRALOG members to operate. Robert Kreider, representing the Mennonite Central Committee as a member of the first CRALOG delegation, came to Berlin in March 1946 and later worked in Stuttgart under the US military government. For a pacifist Mennonite like Kreider it was an unusual experience:

We were assigned billets in a requisitioned apartment house, issued mess cards, PX
*
cards, clothing ration cards, photographed for our military pass, issued currency control booklets. Never in my life have I felt so enveloped in the
military … I am confident that our civilian dress and status will have its rewards as we proceed with our work. It is best that we be not too closely identified with the conquering power. Frequently I experience sharp pains of conscience in regard to our comfortable existence. In the officers’ mess we eat far better than we did at home, and then on our doorstep are the German people who live on a 1,275-calorie-a-day ration. Only if we can be an instrument of bringing food to these on our doorstep can we atone for the sin of which we personally are a part.
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In the Mennonite archives at Goshen, Indiana, is a letter from Kreider describing the relations between the US military government and the efforts of the Mennonites. ‘The AMG (American Military Government), apart from the Welfare Branch, apparently is none too keen on CRALOG – as military men only tolerating this civilian group … we are happy to cooperate fully with the other agencies in this joint relief distribution effort of CRALOG. As demonstrated by our work in England, France, Italy, Belgium etc. – our relief concerns go far beyond the needs of our own group. In Germany our concern is beyond the needs of our own people.’
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The Mennonites, through the Evangelische Hilfswerk in particular, helped to supply school feeding programs. Twenty tons of Mennonite flour went into a feeding program for 72,000 children in Greater Hesse, who received
Brötchen
, or 100-gram rolls, which the children said were ‘better than cake!’.
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Cornelius Dyck arrived in Kiel in the British Zone as a CRA-LOG representative for the Mennonite Central Committee of the US and Canada in late December 1946. By 13 January 1947 he had arranged facilities to feed 5,000 children in Kiel aged from three to six.
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A further 6,000 were fed from Swiss aid. The German Red Cross, with foreign help, took on another 2,500. Food was given out in the form of a warm meal (usually soup) served in the local schools. But before the children could even walk the snowy streets to school for food, the Swiss had to distribute 1,000 pairs of shoes to the barefoot. Huge kettles left kitchens set up in the dismantled
Germania-Werft factory and were carried in trucks fuelled by British gasoline. Sometimes in this particularly severe winter of 1946–47 the kettles had to be dragged by hand through the snow near the schools when the trucks got stuck in unplowed drifts. At the end of the initial feeding in April it was decided to continue feeding 7,500 especially undernourished children in Kiel. As late as 1949, more than a third of the schoolchildren in Kiel were barefoot.
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Similar programs were set up in Lübeck, and Krefeld in the British zone. In the French zone there were a number of child-feeding projects in the cities and in the Saar area where 9,000 children were fed by the Hilfs-Ausschuß, a committee with representatives from at least four German agencies. In Ludwigshafen 8,000 children between the ages of six and fourteen got a 300–500 calorie meal six times a week.

By the summer of 1947 the Mennonite Central Committee was reaching approximately 80,000 people in feeding operations in Germany. Of the more than 5,815 tons of food, clothing, Christmas bundles and other supplies sent to Europe by American and Canadian Mennonites by the summer of 1947, nearly 4,000 tons went to Germany.
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Other donations arrived from the United States and Canada, especially from Lutheran Church members, and citizens of German background, and various non-denominational charities like the Save the Children Fund. Sweden and Switzerland and later Denmark
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made large contributions. British relief agencies belonging to COBSRA (Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad) had been working along with the French
Mission
Militaire de Liaison Administrative
in the British 12th Army Group area even before UNRRA teams arrived. By the summer of 1945 COBSRA had 1,500 relief workers operating in the British zone, but their contribution was directed towards supplying and helping displaced persons rather than German civilians.
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In the summer of 1945, Eisenhower had forbidden the North American Quakers to come to Germany to help orphans who were wandering the streets ‘unaccompanied’. He had also recommended to
the War Department that this policy be kept secret.
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But finally, one year later, Canadian, British and American Quaker personnel were allowed to take care of the children. It is painful to imagine what happened to the orphaned children in the year when help was banned.

In July 1946 the Irish Red Cross initiated a programme to bring more than 400 German children to Ireland for a three-year period of recuperation. In 1948, 100 children were given a six-month holiday at Glencree in Ireland, special preference being given to children aged between five and eleven whose fathers were dead or missing due to the war. Some of these children later reminisced that they had at first refused a banana or an orange because they had never seen one before, and remembered how they had thought that chocolates were shiny buttons.
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In the spring of 1947, in the midst of the worst food crisis since 1945, a new programme entitled Hoover Aid (‘Hoover-Spende’) was planned to broaden the scope of the school feeding operation to more children throughout Germany. Many mothers and fathers breathed a sigh of relief at the assurance that their children would at last be fed. The programme was massive: over 4.6 million schoolchildren in the Bizone (newly combined British–American zone) would be involved, 2.8 million in the British zone and 1.8 million in the American zone. The price per meal was to be between 15 and 25 pfennig. But then the disastrous news came: not enough food was available. The number of participants was cruelly cut, from 4.6 to 3.55 million, 2.15 in the British zone, and 1.4 million in the US zone. For some areas in the British zone such as Schleswig-Holstein, which had abandoned its own school feeding programs to make way for the Hoover-Spende, the new guidelines meant that at first
fewer
children could be served than under the old programme. According to the new quotas, of the 500,000 schoolchildren there, only 50 per cent could be involved at one time. These quotas were especially hard on those Stadtkreise and Landkreise which were coping with a huge influx of expellees from the east, many of whom were children.

By June 1947 it was decreed in Schleswig-Holstein that only children who were at least 15 per cent underweight or had severe health problems would be able to take part. In March the following year, meals were reduced from six to five days a week in order to be able to accommodate more children. Schleswig-Holstein was not the only area forced to reduce the numbers fed in 1947–48. In Niedersachsen, 52.8 per cent of the schoolchildren, i.e. about 500,000, were categorized as in bad health, but of these only 330,000 children obtained a meal supplement under the Hoover Plan.
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The need for extra feeding for children persisted for years. In Bonn in 1949, after the currency reform, 19,000 meals were still being given out every day at a cost of 15 Dpf per meal and the kitchens were not closed until April of that year.
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As late as the summer of 1950 the state health department of Schleswig-Holstein felt the urgent need to continue the school feeding program because 60–70 per cent of their schoolchildren were still undernourished.
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The Allies set up various agencies to ‘control’ relief into Germany, but clearly a large part of their purpose was not to control but to eliminate relief. One Quaker said, ‘The US Army made it difficult for relief.’ This is a forgiving understatement considering that they were physically barred for a whole year when the starvation was most acute.
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As we have seen, thousands of truckloads of supplies from Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland were refused entry in 1945 and 1946.
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A few were sneaked in illegally simply through the benevolence of the local Allied commander. The Swiss Relief Fund started a private charity to feed a meagre meal once a day to a thousand Bavarian children for a couple of months. As soon as the US zone occupation authorities discovered what was going on, they ‘decided that the aid … should not at once be accepted’.
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The army informed the ICRC that ‘public opinion in the US would not allow’ private charity to go to Germany. They offered no evidence for this. All
the evidence of the elected representatives of the people of the US, in the speeches of Senators Wherry, Langer and others, had shown just the opposite. While the local army officers were telling this lie to the Swiss, Secretary of War Patterson, in charge of that very army was, as we have seen, working as hard as he could to get food to Germans. And in the UK ‘even the concept of voluntary aid via food parcels from Britain’s civilians was anathema to Whitehall’ in October 1945. Such aid to Germans was forbidden.
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The modern historian comes away from these documents and interviews under the impression that for a significant time after 1945, the hidden purpose of the armies, CRALOG and other such supposedly charitable agencies was to camouflage the elimination of charitable aid to Germany. It was not therefore any paucity of private aid that caused the Germans to starve, but the bureaucratic entanglements the private agencies had to fight.