Crimes and Mercies (28 page)

In the hungriest year of all, 1947, CRALOG’s top ten voluntary agencies sent to Germany about 26,000,000 lbs of relief material all told.
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Even if all of this had been food, which was not the case, it would have supplied perhaps eight ounces per year per person in the western zones. This cynical tokenism was why Kreider’s conscience bothered him.

The high prices caused by low industrial production were an important cause of European urban food shortages in 1947. This low production was in large part a result of low activity in Germany. The farmers of Europe simply withheld some of their surplusses from the market because the people in the cities were producing so little of value to trade. Will Clayton and Hoover had discovered that the farmers were hoarding food while people in the cities were starving.
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The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, blamed the price rise for the suffering in Britain and for the need to impose bread rationing in peacetime. ‘The rise in prices has thrown us a year out [in recovery],’ he told Will Clayton in June 1947.
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Short of exports to earn foreign currency,
Britain simply could not afford to pay for all the foreign wheat that she wanted and that was available.

A memorandum by Will Clayton sent to Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson on 27 May 1947 predicted that in Europe ‘millions of people would soon die’
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unless the Allies faced the ‘grisly facts’ of their occupation policies.
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Clayton is here saying, a little more vaguely, what Robert Murphy had already said of the Germans with more detail in his secret reports to Washington of that same spring.

As a humanitarian with a clear world view and strong sense of history, Hoover was under no illusions about the cause of Germany’s plight. He had visited Hitler in his new chancellery in Berlin in 1938, which was apparently a massive stone and marble building. But Hoover visited it again in 1946, and saw what the Allied bombs had revealed: the marble was ersatz, merely plaster of Paris spread on nets of twine that now hung in shreds from the gaping roof. ‘Having seen the results of Hitler’s vengeance on the Poles and remembering the millions who had died in his rape of Europe … I had no pity for his ending.’
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But he also knew that it was pointless to continue the vengeance, for this meant that ‘mass destitution and prevention of sheer starvation had become the burden of the victors. No man with a vision that the world would have to bury the hatchet sometime if civilization were to survive, had sat in on these decisions’ to starve Germans, he wrote.
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The Canadians, like the Americans, were exceptionally far-sighted and generous, giving away billions to the British, French and others. The total Canadian aid to the UK in 1939–50 is unmeasurable in precise terms, but in 2007 dollars, it probably amounted to well over $120 billion.

This was done even though the Canadians had a very wry view of the likelihood of a massive outpouring of gratitude. They did not even expect that people would remember the help once it had ended. Prime Minister King in 1944 received from Norman
Robertson the comment that ‘Canada’s main contribution to the rehabilitation and settlement in Europe will be in the field of UNRRA, where we shall probably be the main source of supply of many of the basic food products so desperately needed. This should have a most favourable effect in advertising Canada, but by the time Stage III [of the relief program] is reached, UNRRA’s free distribution of food will probably be over and nations and people have notoriously short memories in cases of benevolence.’
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But there were millions who did remember, at least for a while.

Hoover received birthday greetings from a whole schoolful of children and teachers in July 1948. The school, a seminary for young students thinking of the priesthood, had been closed before the war by the anti-Christian Nazis, who were trying to destroy the church. It re-opened in autumn 1945.

Dear Mr Hoover

We have learnt that on August 10 you celebrate your 75th birthday. For many years you have devoted your work and care to ease the lives of poor suffering fellow-creatures, so that your name is now known all over the world and particularly the countries of Europe which have most suffered in and after the war – among them our poor Austria – are all greatly indebted to you for your having started the ‘CARE parcel action …

Although we have become very poor … all appliances for teaching, our whole library, all our linen, and nearly all the furniture has been destroyed during the Russian occupation, neither our teachers nor our pupils will lose heart … Our whole establishment, dear Sir, comprising 250 students and 16 teachers, join in sending you their best and heartiest wishes with the expression of their most devoted thankfulness.

It was signed by F. Seidl, Direktor, the Fürstbischofliche Knabenseminar of Graz, Austria.
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One letter of request, dated 5 February 1948, shows that the
Germans were starving even at that date, almost three years after the war’s end, and while the Marshall Plan was getting under way. Aloyus Algen of the Rheinland wrote to the Committee of the American Aid to Children, as follows:

Dear Mr Hoover

With this letter I take the liberty of asking you for a parcel containing underwear, shoes and food. We are six persons in our family and if we do not get help, we will perish, since we are poor and haven’t anything to eat or wear. You can hardly imagine how close to death we are. If only you could send a pair of shoes to each of us (size 6, 7, 9, 11, 13), some shorts and underwear for men and stockings.
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Hoover’s estimate that the food campaigns had saved 800 million lives from at least one fatal famine shows the astounding scale and compass of the work. Even 10 per cent of that number of lives saved was more than had been lost in the entire war, the most devastating in human history. Yet today, as Robertson had calmly predicted, this immense, unprecedented charity is largely forgotten.

Among the millions of refugees who surged through Germany in 1945 were thirty to forty thousand ethnic German Mennonites, who had been savagely persecuted under Stalin then ordered to leave the USSR by the retreating Wehrmacht. Some of these ended up in Berlin in 1946, where they were cared for in part by the Canadian Mennonites Peter and Elfrieda Dyck.
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These people gave the Christian feast of the Eucharist a new meaning one day, in a German commercial bakery which they paid to bake their bread from flour sent from Canada. One of the baker’s apprentices noticed bits of printed paper whirling around in the dough in the blending machine one morning. He switched off the machine to discover remnants of Bibles. Aware of Hitler’s persecution of the churches, the Mennonites in Saskatchewan who had made the flour had also stuffed Bibles into the sacks to make sure they fed the soul along with the body. The German baker threw up his hands and exclaimed ‘Mein
Gott!’, thinking the flour was spoiled. But Elfrieda and Peter Dyck told him to turn up the heat a few extra degrees, and bake away. As Peter Dyck commented, ‘To feed on God’s word didn’t hurt anyone. It usually doesn’t.’ And he told the puzzled baker, ‘Read Ezekiel, chapter three.’
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All of the astonishing generosity of the majority of the American people issued finally in the Marshall Plan, which has dominated much of Western thinking about Allied policy in Germany in 1945–50. It is widely judged to be a fine example of the spotless virtue of the West, one of the proofs of the far-sighted wisdom that animated Allied governments in their European policies. All over the West today, the belief prevails that the Americans generously helped the Germans ‘get back on their feet after the war’. According to this widespread belief, the German economic miracle was, to an important degree, America’s doing.

Here was a generous policy openly debated and heartily approved by public opinion. Marshall Plan funds were even offered to the Soviet Union, which haughtily turned them down.

Then, at considerable cost to the American taxpayers, Europeans were offered funds for reconstruction and development, on a matching funds basis, i.e. that the European nation had to put up as much development capital as was taken from the Marshall fund. The policy passed Congress, and was signed by President Truman in April 1948, becoming effective in a remarkably short time with little opposition. It was strongly supported by public opinion, which had been demanding just such a turn in policy since 1945. There is no doubt that in 1948 it helped re-elect Truman and most of those Senators and Congressmen who supported it. The Marshall Plan was a great expression of the public opinion that is commonly supposed to be free, wise and kind. It was never regretted and nowhere deplored. Except by Stalin.

The Germans were at first excluded, but within a year, the
plans were expanded to include them. This was one small part of the German ‘economic miracle’. Although they needed more, it was understandable that they would receive less than any other nation, around half per capita of the sum allotted to the UK, and less than 60 per cent of the amount the French got. Between 3 April 1948 and 30 June 1952, the Germans got $39 per person, the French $72, and the British $77. (The equivalent in today’s money is probably above ten times the amounts shown.
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). The effect was magical. The change in Germany, with this and with currency reform, was almost miraculous. According to General Maurice Pope, who was with the Canadian Military Mission in Germany in 1948, following the end of the blockade and the currency reform ‘conditions improved overnight … [soon] the modest corner grocery store was displaying delicacies of all kinds and at quite reasonable prices.’
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Within months, the German economy was plainly reviving; within a year it was expanding faster than any other European economy; and within a decade Germany was close to the richest country on the continent. Soon after that the Germans possessing almost no natural resources and very little land, were the richest people in Europe. They paid back to the US nearly every dollar they had received in aid.
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The Germans actually received about $1.4 billion, and they repaid around $1 billion, leaving them with $0.4 billion in outright gifts. Britain received eight times as much, about $3,176,000,000; the French $2,706,000,000 and the Italians $1,474,000,000. Only the Germans paid back any of their Marshall Plan money.
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The German repayment was not their only contribution to reconstructing the damage they had caused. Reparations probably exceeded by far the initial estimates of $20 billion to go to all Allies. Not only were some of the ‘reparations’ no better than theft, they also went on under cover as late as 1948. Officials in President Truman’s administration denied that reparations were continuing, but Herbert Hoover told the Governor of New York, who was then campaigning against Truman, that he had evidence that the process was still going on. Hoover also said that the
reparations policy had cost the American taxpayers about $600,000,000 per year for food because the Germans were not allowed to manufacture enough for export to buy the necessary imported food. According to Hoover, the destruction or removal of factories for reparations from Germany kept the Germans ‘in degeneration and idleness’. American, British and French manufacturers enriched themselves at the expense of their fellow taxpayers, who were paying some of the occupation costs.
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Herbert Hoover’s team in Germany in 1946 found much lying going on about economic conditions among US occupation officers. A US Navy intelligence officer in Berlin told the Hoover Famine Emergency Commission in 1946: ‘The figures on economic output can be believed only one-fifth – the rest is doctored to make a good impression with top levels. The lower personnel is permeated with Morgenthau people.’
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Secretary of State George Marshall himself was party to the cover-up, according to the expert and eminent American author John Gimbel in his pioneering study of US policy in Germany,
Science, Technology and Reparations
. The sub-title is significant:

‘Exploitation and Plunder in Post-war Germany’.

At a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in 1947, Molotov told George Marshall to his face that the Americans were taking valuable reparations without reporting them in the official reparations account that all the Allies were supposed to keep. Gimbel writes, ‘Marshall responded angrily – a manner quite uncharacteristic of him, as an esteemed observer commented.’ Marshall angrily told Molotov – and the world – that the Americans were giving away for nothing the most valuable part of their reparations, the documents, patents, processes, technical know-how, samples, blueprints and so on, which they were taking from the Germans. Marshall’s State Department estimated the worth of the American haul at the time at an incredibly low figure, around $10 million.
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Gimbel has combed the Hoover and National archives and discovered a long history of falsification and cover-up on this subject. He concludes that Marshall’s angry statement in Moscow
was ‘distorted, misleading and propagandistic’.
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The State Department then and later refused to place a value on the reparations, but they can scarcely have been less than the Soviet reparations, because the motive was the same, the Western businessmen avaricious, the resistance weak, and the Western Allies occupied much the richer part of Germany. The American Colonel Gerald B. O’Grady, chief industry officer for OMGUS
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in Württemberg-Baden, said, ‘I totally disapprove of such robbery … practically none [of the investigators] are here in the interest of any government, but for purely personal gain.’
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One German estimate that Gimbel quoted was that the Allies took between $4.8 billion and $12 billion
in intellectual property alone
, apart from the seizure of foreign assets and shipping, and the machinery, food, timber and coal that flowed out east and west.
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