Crimes and Mercies (8 page)

Gruesome expulsions of civilians from the eastern territories now began. These were described by some writers in the West as ‘orderly and humane population transfers’, while others reported the lethal conditions as they were. German industrial production in the winter of 1944–45, which even under the Allied bombings was 105 per cent of pre-war levels, was reduced under the
Morgenthau Plan to 25 per cent of pre-war levels by autumn, 1945.
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The public was fooled time and again into believing that the Plan had been abandoned when it had not; that there was a fatal world food shortage, when world food supplies were down by only 2–10 per cent; that there was a shipping shortage, when scores of ships lay idle at wharves in North America and Europe.
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Even so seasoned an observer as British historian Martin Gilbert has mistakenly written, after years of research on the war and its aftermath, that: ‘In the event, it was the State Department which rejected it [the Morgenthau Plan].’
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Morgenthau himself wrote, in the
New York Post
on 24 November 1947, after long study of Germany: ‘Much has been said and written about the so-called Morgenthau Plan for Germany from its first beginnings until it ceased to be attributable to any one individual. Then it became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action … for the three greatest powers on earth.’

Morgenthau’s friends were clearly more interested in vengeance than in reparations. As Senator William Langer of North Dakota stated in the United States Senate: ‘History already records that a savage minority of bloody bitter-enders within this government forced the acceptance of the brutal Morgenthau Plan upon the present administration. I ask, Mr President, why in God’s name did the administration accept it? … Recent developments have merely confirmed scores of earlier charges that this addlepated and vicious Morgenthau Plan had torn Europe in two and left half of Germany incorporated in the ever-expanding sphere of influence of an oriental totalitarian conspiracy. By continuing a policy which keeps Germany divided against itself, we are dividing the world against itself and turning loose across the face of Europe a power and an enslaving and degrading cruelty surpassing that of Hitler’s.’
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Senator Langer was not alone. His speech was warmly applauded. The Senate voted in approval of a resolution that stated in part, ‘Whereas … reports reaching the United States
indicate that … the policies of the victor powers are subjecting millions to mass starvation, and whereas the United States has been a party to the commitments and agreements reached among the victor powers which have led to these conditions; and whereas the Congress has been bypassed and the American people have been ignored in the formulation and implementation of these policies, and whereas it is essential that the Congress of the United States should obtain the necessary information to enact legislation and to request the President to take executive action designed to eliminate the starvation conditions resulting from the policies for which this Government is directly responsible, Therefore, be it resolved …’ And the resolution went on to set up a group with a budget to study conditions in Germany and to report in detail.

This resolution was proposed by the influential Senator Kenneth Wherry, together with several others, including Capehart, Hawkes, La Follette, Hickenlooper and Taft. In presenting the motion, Wherry said, ‘Much has been said and little done relative to opening the mails to Germany and providing sufficient food to prevent mass starvation in Germany, Austria, Italy and other countries of Europe. Terrifying reports are filtering through the British, French and American occupied zones, and even more gruesome reports from the Russian occupied zone, revealing a horrifying picture of deliberate and wholesale starvation.’ He criticized the Truman administration for doing nothing despite the ‘rising chorus of pleas for intercession’ to prevent a ‘major tragedy’ that was rapidly developing. He had questioned Governor Lehman, in charge of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), who admitted that the UN aid was not feeding any of the starving Germans. Yet President Truman had told Senator Wherry that UNRRA was feeding Germans. This was not true. UNRRA never fed Germans, who thus starved within reach of adequate food.

‘Time and again,’ the Senator continued, ‘the administration has advanced the excuse that transportation facilities were lacking, but for months scores of ships have been lying idle in both
eastern and European ports. So it is not a question of the lack of ships. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of GIs in Europe are apparently sentenced to enforced idleness for want of something to do. Millions of dollars’ worth of surplus trucks and jeeps are falling apart in their open-air garages in Europe.’ Nor was food scarce, for there was plenty in the civilian and the military stores, Wherry said: ‘The truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of tons of military rations in our surplus stock piles that have been spoiling right in the midst of starving populations.’ The government’s defence of the Morgenthau Plan was reduced to rubble by a couple of accurate criticisms, in which Senator Wherry was joined by Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr. The government had said that the policy had been established in agreement with the Allies not to feed ex-enemies, but Russell said that the Allies
were
feeding Italians, who had also been the enemy during the war, and he demanded to know why they received food while the Germans starved.
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What this actually meant to the mothers and children of Germany was a repetition on a larger scale of the Nazi-induced famine in the Netherlands during the winter of 1944–45.
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Well over sixty million Germans were deliberately pushed to the edge of death by starvation. In Hamburg in 1946, in the British zone of occupation, one touring British writer said that about 100,000 people were in the last stages of starvation with hunger oedema.
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In Düsseldorf and many other cities, people lived like rats in a few square feet of wet basement under a heap of rubble. The English philanthropist and publisher Victor Gollancz witnessed these conditions during his visit to Germany in 1946. He wrote:

I made a more extensive tour of Düsseldorf dwelling-places towards the end of the week. Down a long dark staircase and then along a black tunnel was a man of 79, alone in a hole which he had made habitable – according to the ruling standards – ‘all by himself’. His wife was out on the search for bread. In another part of the same cellar was a mother with three children – [aged] 6, 10 and 14. All four of them slept in the only bed, two side by side in the ordinary way
and the other two side by side at the foot of it. The mother came back while we were there: it was 10:30 and she had been queuing for bread since early morning and had returned empty-handed – ‘bread nowhere’. One of the children was still in bed; none had yet had anything to eat, as the last bread had gone yesterday. The father was a prisoner of war in Russia. Two of the children had TB. There was a tiny stove, but no coal or gas, only a little wood, which they ‘fetched’. For excretion they used a pail, which they emptied every morning into a hole they had dug in the courtyard above. They had twice been bombed out. On one wall was a small faded photograph of the mother and father at their wedding and on another some prince or king with the legend ‘
Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen
’: learn to suffer without complaining.
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Gollancz went round the city with members of the local Red Cross, who filled the starving Germans with ‘gratitude and happiness’. One dwelling place he visited with them was ‘down two long flights of stairs to an awful couple of rooms below’. There were no windows, no fresh air entering at all except by the door. This cellar had been flooded steadily for four weeks. In it were living two women and five children, from two different families. One of the women was pregnant; a child was covered with sores. The smell was so bad that Gollancz had to cover his nose and eat a lozenge on the way out. He visited cellar after cellar of this kind. A few were decorated with crucifixes, photographs. In some he found people who were nevertheless cheerful. ‘All of them were grateful, terribly grateful, when they were given something.’
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The deaths of children with TB was already nearly three times the pre-war rate in Düsseldorf; about one third of the children in Iserlohn had TB; in Hamburg, diabetics in the first stages of coma were trying to force their way into hospital because there was no insulin. The latest news was that in the British zone the starvation ration of a nominal 1,550 calories per day (cpd) would now be reduced to 1,000 cpd for about six months. At the top level of the US Army, reaction to all this was expressed by
General J. H. Hilldring, who said that the Germans were being treated too lavishly.
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These were some of the conditions that led Dr Amelunxen, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia in the British zone, to predict that two to three million people in his province of eleven million would die in the next few years. (Deaths in two years at pre-war rates would be around 265,000.) The food ration did not improve in the following eighteen months, but grew slightly worse.
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A member of the (Quaker) Society of Friends in Germany, Hans Albrecht, also predicted a horrendous death rate. In September 1945 he said, ‘No child born in Germany this year will survive the coming winter. Only half the children aged less than three years will survive.’
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There was some evidence for this fear already in Berlin, where the infant mortality rate for several months had already been close to 100 per cent. In the summer of 1945 in Berlin, nearly every baby was born dead, or died within a few days. Albrecht was also predicting that among the estimated 2.5 to 2.7 million Germans aged three years and under, half would die. Among the infants alone, the toll would be well over one million, perhaps as high as a million and a half dead.
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Most children under ten and people over sixty
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could not survive the coming winter, according to Probst Grüber, a man experienced in such matters because he had just been saved from one of Hitler’s camps. Grüber wrote on 12 October 1945, ‘In the forest around Berlin, countless dead are hanging from the trees. One becomes indifferent to death. Mothers see their children die and bury them by the wayside, apparently with none of that pain which usually tears a mother’s heart apart … If this misery cannot be checked, it is no exaggeration to reckon on a figure of 20,000,000 dead this winter.’
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‘ The infant mortality rate in Berlin is sixteen times as high as it was in 1943,’ reported the American journalist Edd Johnson. Johnson knew horror, for he had witnessed it in Hitler’s concentration camps just weeks before. A German Red Cross official had predicted to him an infant mortality rate of 80–90 per cent
for winter 1945–46, amid scenes of desolation hard to believe in modern times. ‘Germans are going to die like flies this winter,’ according to United States Public Health officers attached to the army. ‘There is going to be a definite age group elimination of the German population.’
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In the French zone, things were even worse, perhaps because the French had suffered so much from German depredations and atrocities in France. A huge number of soldiers, bureaucrats and their families was imposed on the small zone. In 1946, the French billeted 18 persons per 10,000 Germans, whereas the British billeted ten and the Americans only three. The French took all their housing and most of their food from the locals, with the result that the local rations were always lower than the meagre rations decreed in the other zones. But the French did not feel that the enormous scale of their exactions and the suffering of the Germans were justified, for they camouflaged what they were doing, according to Price, Waterhouse and Company. The big American accounting firm reported that the ‘defective nature of the accounts’ kept by the French ‘made it impossible to produce an accountant’s report on the foreign trade of the zone’.
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The Germans complained bitterly about these false accounts. No German accounting of the foreign exports was permitted by the French, who took the goods, at prices they set themselves, and paid not in the precious dollars received, but in marks, thus depriving the Germans of the one means they had to buy foreign food.
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For all these reasons, ‘population losses were significant,’ according to the American writer F. Roy Willis. The death rate for the town of Landau in the Rheinland-Pfalz was 39.5%%
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in 1946, which was more than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%%, more than double the pre-war rate.
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In the British zone, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery feared that the loss of life in the winter of 1945–46 was going to be ‘very heavy’.
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The daily ration for an average adult then was 1,042 calories, which he said meant that ‘we are going to let them
starve: gradually’.
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There were many voices at home and abroad raised in protest against the treatment of Germany. The Lord Bishop of Chichester, Lord Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz protested vigorously in England, and many as well in the US. The former Chief Rabbi of Berlin, Dr Baeck, was reported in an influential US magazine to have ‘horrified the hate cult in this country by calling on his Jewish colleagues to join with him in demanding relief feeding for Germany …’
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All this protest had no serious effect at first on the US President, Harry S. Truman. Neglected, uninformed, like most of the members of Roosevelt’s Cabinet, Truman was ignorant of many important matters when he arrived in office following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The ailing Hull, like his successor Edward Stettinius, was ignored, and Henry Morgenthau, a great favourite of Roosevelt’s, in effect became Secretary of State for the most important decision of all about Germany. Harry Hopkins, who had never been elected, carried out the most important missions for the President. In the spring of 1945, Truman was a minor figure whose great service had been to run on the FDR ticket in 1944. He was not well prepared to deal with the disasters now impending around the world.