Crimes and Mercies (34 page)

Bonn: The official figures purport that the death rate in the prosperous and mainly peaceful year of 1939 was 21 per cent higher than the disastrous year of hunger, 1947. A parallel anomaly exists between 1947 and 1950. Also, the subsidiary figures for 1947 for men (44,048) and for women (55,825) do not add up to the total population given of 101,498. In view of the conditions of the years 1939, 1947 and 1950, the author finds that the official death toll for 1947 is incredible.

Karlsruhe: Because the official report from the authorities of Karlsruhe seemed odd to the author, his assistant conducted
research at the offices of the Catholic church and two of the three Protestant churches, which shows that among the churched alone, the deaths totalled 2,039. It is impossible to know now how many dead Karlsruhers in those years were members of churches, but since the church burials alone exceed the deaths recorded in the town archives, we know that the town archives are not dependable.

SOURCES:

Local governments except:
Berlin
– 1945–46, from Maurice Pate, ‘Reports on Child Health and Welfare Conditions’, FEC Papers, Box 15, the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Also Konrad Adenauer, speech to Swiss Parliament, March 1949, in
Erinnerungen 1945–53
, p. 187. Also Gustav Stolper,
German
Realities
, p. 33, and Herbert Hoover, who said 41%% in 1946 in his
American Epic
, Vol. IV, p. 164.
Königsberg
– from Ernst-Günther Schenck,
Das Menschliche Elend im 20. Jahrhundert
, pp. 78–80. Population in 1939 was 368,000.
Vienna
– General Mark Clark to Herbert Hoover, 15 April 1946; FEC Papers, Box 16, the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

The statistics that indicate a death rate of normal proportions from 1946 through to 1950 have one characteristic in common: they show a near-normal death rate in circumstances that were agreed by everyone to be abnormally harsh. In fact, some of them, e.g. for Bonn, indicate that fewer Germans died while starving, cold, despairing and exposed than died when the country was prosperous, comfortable, peaceful and well-fed in the late 1960s – the years of the
Wirtschaftswunder
, the ‘Economic Miracle’.

The British Army reported that the death rate in North Rhine province in 1946 was about 12%%. It fell during the year until it hit only 8%% in September. The death rate in Hamburg in 1946, according to official British Army reports, was 14.9%%. Having
started near 20%% in January, by the end of the year, it had declined to only 12.63%% annually.

In an overall report by Herr Degwitz to the 5th Sitting of the Zonenbeirat on 10 and 11 July 1946, the death total in the British zone was 5,800 per month more than the deaths in the same area in ‘normal times’.
¹³
Given that the death rate in Hamburg, the principal city in the British zone, was 12.03%% in 1938,
¹⁴
this means the death rate in the zone in 1946 was around 15.5%%. The increase may seem minimal, but it must be remembered that it rose through 1947 as conditions grew worse. And modern readers can get the scale of death by remembering that it is about 50 per cent higher than one experiences in modern society. In other words, it means that for every two persons you knew who died recently, you also would have to mourn the death of yet another.

In April 1947, the Canadian Army General Maurice Pope, Head of Mission in Berlin, reported to Ottawa that among the elderly, who constituted a high proportion of the war-ravaged population, ‘the death rate is high, and the suicide returns do not show much improvement’. He concluded, ‘To sum up, the situation is bad, as it always has been.’ A few weeks later he reported five ‘authenticated’ deaths from starvation in Hamburg.
¹⁵
The ‘authenticated’ is revealing. As many writers said, the Allied officers knew almost nothing of the true conditions among the German civilians. The ‘authenticated’ almost certainly refers to deaths counted in a hospital. But of course very few sick Germans ever got to a hospital in those days. As the US Surgeon General reported in October 1947, ‘The alarming scourge is tuberculosis … In the British zone, as a whole, there are known to be 50,000 open cases and only 12,000 available hospital beds, while the less serious cases number about 150,000.’
¹⁶

The German doctor, A. Lang, Professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Mainz, told an American officer in April 1948 that the death rate in the Pfalz was only around 13%% in 1947. However, he did not cite the source of his statistics. If these had been gathered, like the 1946 census, by
‘Germans working under the direction of the Allied Control Council’, then one explanation of the low figures could be that the results had been adjusted to provide a more favourable picture of the conditions under the Allied occupation. Pfalz was in the French zone, where rations were consistently lower than in the British–American zone, so one suspects that the death rate must have been higher, as for instance it demonstrably was in Bad Kreuznach. But one other explanation might be that the people of Pfalz, living close to the land, were able to scrounge for themselves to augment the official ration better than people in big cities. The Pfalz was largely rural, lacking any big city, small in population (under one million), and also very low in expellee population. Still, it is hard to conceive of a disparity so great that the people in Bad Kreuznach, so close to the Pfalz and also in the French zone, were dying twice as fast as the rest of the population. The statistics are also very hard to reconcile with those from the town of Landau, right in the Pfalz. On the subject of health, the American Military Governor Lucius Clay revealed an interesting comparison of the Soviet with the western zones. Clay writes that in 1945, the agricultural production in the Soviet zone was just under 80 per cent of pre-war normal for some grains, and as high as 90 per cent for grain west of the Elbe, plus about 75 per cent of the normal livestock harvest.
¹⁷
At the same time, food production in the west was only 57 per cent of the pre-war per capita production. An interesting sidelight on the Clay statistics is that since the agricultural work in all the zones was done exclusively by Germans, and mainly by hand, this superior production in the Soviet zone suggests that at that time the people in the Soviet zone were at least as healthy as Germans in the west. In sum, then, the figures of local origin generally conform to the overall statistics derived from the census comparisons and presented in the main text. The few that do not conform in general display other characteristics that make one distrust them
a priori
.

6: S
OURCES

The chief archival sources are the KGB Archives in Moscow, also called the Central State Archives (formerly the Central State Special Archive, CSSA); the Archive of the October Revolution, Moscow; the Red Army Archive at Podolsk, near Moscow; the National Archives of the US in Washington and College Park, Maryland; the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa; the Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, Germany, the Library of Congress, Washington, and the Hoover Institution Archive at Stanford. Much of the research material used in this MS has never before been published. Some of it – at Hoover, Washington and in Moscow – has only recently been declassified.

The papers of Robert Murphy, former US Ambassador in London, also former political adviser to the US Military Governor of Germany at the Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford; the reports of the US Military Governor (first Eisenhower, then Lucius Clay) from archives in Abilene and in Washington; thousands of pages of documents of the Hoover Famine Emergency Committee at Stanford; Canadian Army reports on conditions in Germany; archives in German villages and towns; the census reports of 1946 and 1950 done by the Allied occupation armies that are still in archives in the West and in Moscow; reports from the official German government statistical agency, the Statistisches Bundesamt at Wiesbaden; and the Robert Patterson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington. In addition, as a result of the publication of
Other Losses
, my publishers and I have received thousands of letters, diaries, books, documents, phone calls and visits from former prisoners and civilians describing events occurring in Germany from 1945–50.

The material drawn from Soviet sources is new to readers in both East and West. Briefly, the central source is the CSA in Moscow, the most important archive in existence about Second World War prisoners. Restricted to a few highly-placed Soviet specialists for many years because it contained state secrets, it was opened to Western researchers for the first time in 1991. The Soviet regime had long before then revealed many atrocities committed against Soviet citizens by Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, Lazar Kaganovich and others. But these newly opened archives document vast crimes against prisoners from twenty other countries around the world, including Japan, Germany and Italy. Here, in grey cardboard boxes, repose millions of individual dossiers, one for each of more than four million prisoners taken to the Soviet Union.

Without the Seal of Secrecy
Edited by Dr G. F. Krivosheyev. This book includes the Red Army’s full report on the fate of all prisoners including those taken by the Red Army. It is authoritative.

German POWs and the NKVD
Master’s thesis by Captain V. P. Galitski. Captain Galitski, of the Russian Navy, spent fifteen years working on the research for this thesis in Moscow and elsewhere. He visited Toronto in 1996 to give a speech on the topic for the Mecklenburg Historical Society at Massey College, University of Toronto.

In 1993, I received a six-page report in Russian from the Russian Army historian Andrei I. Kashirin, whom I also interviewed at length with his colleagues in Moscow. I am satisfied that this report represents to the best of his ability, which is professional, the fate of prisoners of war in the USSR, comprehending other earlier reports. This Kashirin report records the fate of all prisoners in Soviet captivity from 1941 to 1952.

This one-page report by Colonel Bulanov prepared in the NKVD and dated 1956 gives detail of the fates of three ranks of prisoner from seventeen countries over a period of fifteen years. It was the NKVD under Lavrenty Beria that ran the prisoner gulag (Gupwi) and kept the records.

(The above summary reports agree on all prisoner information essential to this book. The reports below are subsidiary to them.)

The background is that in June 1943, Lt. General Ivan Petrov, chief of the department for prisoners of war in the MVD/NKVD, reported on prisoner deaths to the Party meeting among officers of his department. Because this was a Party meeting, the report was not censored by Beria, and was certainly the truth as Petrov knew it. He said that up to May 1943, a total of 193,003 Wehrmacht and German-allied prisoners had died during the whole war. However, Beria had previously told Stalin that as of 26 February, some 33,000 prisoners had died for the whole war.

Beria’s figure of 33,000 dead at 26 February taken with Petrov’s, means that some 160,000 prisoners died in the next couple of months out of a total holding of 257,000 (62 per cent),
against
Stalin’s orders
. This was due to the fact that the Red Army was not ready to receive such a huge surrender.

After the initial disorganization at Stalingrad, the NKVD and army co-operated very closely, and prisoner care improved radically. As the army entered Germany, if prisoners died or escaped, German civilians were rounded up to replace them. The count arriving at the NKVD camps was always the same as those leaving the front.

See Appendix 7 below.

7: G
ERMAN
P
OST-WAR
S
URVEYS OF THE
M
ISSING

Some Western historians who have never consulted the Soviet archives contend that nearly all of the missing Germans have been shown, by diligent research, to have been taken prisoner by the Soviets. One of the Germans most knowledgeable on this subject is Dr Margarethe Bitter, who was a founder of the first committee to investigate the fate of the missing, the Ausschuß für Kriegsgefangenenfragen. The results of the Ausschuß were based on a partial survey begun in 1947 of living Germans only. The Ausschuß could not survey the whole country door-to-door, so they put up notices in public places asking families and friends of missing persons to tell the committee the date and place where that person had last been known. The committee covered the US zone of Germany thoroughly, the British zone probably adequately but not thoroughly, the French zone inadequately and the Russian zone scarcely at all. It is not known what percentage of the expellees was covered. (In this book, it is assumed that all were covered, which reduces the number of the missing.)

Left completely uncovered were the citizens of such countries as Italy, Hungary, Austria and Rumania, which had supplied over 2 million soldiers to the Axis, and about 1.9 million prisoners to Allied cages. In one Red Cross survey of an American camp for Germans near Marseille in 1945, over 12 per cent of the 25,000 prisoners were Yugoslav, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian and Swiss.
¹⁸

In all, the Ausschuß covered only some 58–68 per cent of the potential recruiting sources of the German army. Thus the Adenauer government’s final estimate of 1,400,000 missing Germans was too low by scores of thousands. Adding in the losses among German allies, we see that the true total of missing Axis prisoners must have been above 1,600,000.*
¹⁹

The American professor Arthur L. Smith Jr. has said that the Ausschuß found that 90 per cent of the addresses of the missing showed they had last been seen in the east, and were therefore presumed to be in the hands of the Soviets. He wrote: ‘It is very important to note that this German committee under the very able direction of Frau Doctor Margarethe Bitter, arrived at its conclusions totally independent of the influence of the American Military Government.’
²⁰
Yes, indeed, so free was it of that influence that the Ausschuß was not permitted to see the only records that might have revealed the truth. These were the records kept by the Americans of the conditions and deaths in the US camps. If, as Smith says, there was no disaster in the western camps, and nothing to hide, why were all the records hidden from the Ausschuß? If there was nothing to hide, why were so many of the records destroyed? Why were the rest classified for twenty-five years? Sixteen miles of paper, viewed edge-on, came home from Europe in the army’s files after the war, but these few feet of prisoner records were so dangerous they had to be extracted specially and burned. Many of these were being destroyed by the Americans at the time Dr Bitter and Dr Adenauer were working on the fate of the missing prisoners.
²¹