Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Things were, naturally, worst in the slums and shantytowns of the Greek capital, still populated in large part by World War I refugees. The soup kitchens, including those especially set up for children by the Greek Church, could not feed their unappetizing but life-saving “mess of pulse or bligouri (a dish made of boiled wheat)”
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to their estimated 800,000 clients more than two or three times a week, and the amounts distributed were too small to sustain life for long. Exhausted parents trekked into the country to cut grass for stews that provided no nourishment. As in Leningrad, hungry children awoke to find dead parents:
In the Dourgouti quarter … Androniki P., 40 years old, at her door wrapped in a filthy coverlet. She has sold what little furniture she had in order to buy food. A few boards have been torn out of the floor to be used for heating. In a corner lie her three sick and crying children. The mother watches the agony of the children with a wild and somber gaze; they will soon follow the same fate as their father, who died a few days ago in the same room. No one could get up to report the death, the neighbors did not discover it for a while, and the body stayed there for three days with the living members of the family. It is not surprising that, after this three-day tragedy, the poor woman has gone mad.
… Jannitsa 9. Irene O. has watched her husband and one of her children die of hunger; with agony she is now awaiting the fate of her remaining child.… At Epano-Petralona … a widow … has six sick little ones, swollen by hunger disease. Once she was given a little olive oil and the swellings got better, but the children cannot stand up because they are so weak.… In Kaissariani … the widow Marie M., dying on her bed, holds her baby in her arms. Her husband died two months ago; who knows who will die first, the mother or the child.
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By late January, Alexander Junod estimated, there had been 40,000 deaths in Athens alone, eight times the normal mortality, and the winter was far from over. By the spring the situation was equally desperate on
many of the Greek islands and in the remote mountain regions, where, due to transportation difficulties, even what little food was available could not be delivered. So tenuous was life that the Red Cross reported that even a delay of one day in shipping would cause the death of hundreds.
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There was no dearth of organizations desirous of helping the innocent victims of the war in the USSR and Greece, or indeed in the nations previously attacked. But well before the streets of the Polish ghettos, Leningrad, and Athens had become strewn with emaciated bodies, the issue of humanitarian aid to the occupied countries would fall into the same political and bureaucratic morass as that of immigration. The issue was control of the flow and distribution of the donations.
The British, desperately alone by the spring of 1941, clung adamantly to their shipping blockade of Axis-controlled areas, which had been put into effect two days after the German attack on Poland in 1939. Their objective was to prevent anything that might aid the German war effort from reaching Nazi-controlled territory. (The
Kurtulus
shipments to Greece were allowed, as they came from
within
the blockaded zone.)
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The British determination was not surprising, as voracious Nazi consumption of the production of the conquered lands was obvious long before Göring’s little pep talk. Help to one country would bring appeals from all the others, the British rightly argued. The blockade, as well as all types of asset transfers, were monitored by the newly instituted Ministry of Economic Warfare and enforced by the Royal Navy. All neutral shipping leaving from or going to German-controlled areas was required to declare its cargo and be certified by British consuls. Ships entering certain territorial waters could be boarded and searched, and, if necessary, their cargoes confiscated. In the British view, any food, clothing, or medicines sent into the Reich would help the enemy.
The United States government was limited in deliveries of aid by its own Neutrality Act, a law carefully watched by isolationists, and it was only with the greatest difficulty and intrigue that Roosevelt was able to send vital supplies through the Lend-Lease program first to Great Britain and later to the Soviet Union. The American government, no more eager than Britain to have uncontrolled shipping crisscrossing the Atlantic, also had to restrain private organizations, such as Greek War Relief, which, with great enthusiasm, was putting pressure on Congress to allow its donations to be shipped to the Mediterranean.
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All these complications made getting any help to the innocent in the
war zones difficult, but once again, it could generally be facilitated if the aid was for children and the pressure of public opinion was strong. In early 1941 the British had reluctantly allowed a few shipments of dried milk for children to go from the United States to Vichy France, technically still independent. Permission was given on the grounds that the American Red Cross would control all distribution and that nothing would go to the Occupied Zone. The United States, in particular, hoped to inspire independence and anti-German feelings in Vichy with these donations.
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News of barter arrangements for food between the two parts of France soon put the milk shipments in a bad light in England, and further ones were only approved by the British, who considered the U.S. policy extremely naive, after a personal appeal by Roosevelt.
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There is no question that the blockade was effective. Hitler’s evergrowing need for raw materials and food would force him, early on, to make deals with Stalin that were not always to Germany’s advantage, in exchange for millions of tons of wheat and access to Russia’s Arctic, Black Sea, and Pacific ports. Later, at the height of his successes in the East, Hitler would refer to the conquered areas of the USSR as his “blockade proof lebensraum.”
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The Nazis, of course, had their own blockade carried out by U-boats operating to prevent the provisioning of Allied-controlled territories, which, in 1941, mostly meant Britain.
The delivery and control of aid, humanitarian and otherwise, after 1941 to the Soviet Union, overnight transformed from enemy to ally, was fraught with problems. The blockade was not the issue here: within hours of the Nazi invasion, while Stalin was still in a daze, Churchill, who had immediately seen the weaknesses of Hitler’s war plan, was on the air, promoting an alliance with Russia, which, only moments before, would have been unthinkable. It was a brilliant speech. After noting that the Nazi regime was “indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism,” of which he had been a “consistent opponent for the last twenty-five years,” he said that “all that fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.” Making the attack personal, as Stalin would do some days later, Churchill conjured up a vision of the destruction “in hideous onslaught” of “the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so harshly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.” Now, he declared, “we are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime … we shall give … help to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course.” Noting that the invasion of the USSR was “no more than a prelude
to an attempted invasion of the British Isles,” which Hitler had hoped to accomplish “before the winter comes” and “before the fleets and air power of the United States will intervene,” he concluded, “the Russian danger is … our danger and the danger of the United States just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men … in every quarter of the globe.”
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The trouble was that Britain had little food or arms to spare. Churchill’s speech was a clear challenge to the United States to expand its Lend-Lease program, already controversial, to a regime regarded in many American quarters as far more dangerous to U.S. interests than the Nazis. In mid-May, polls had shown that 70 percent of Americans felt that the aid going to Britain was sufficient or even excessive.
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Sending arms to Russia, which many thought had no chance against Hitler’s war machine, seemed like a bad idea to the War Department; but on June 25, Roosevelt publicly committed the United States to providing aid to the Soviet Union.
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As would be the case in all future aid efforts, months would elapse before anything actually was transferred. In the meantime, yet another array of hastily organized, nationality-oriented private organizations, each with its own agenda, clamored to be allowed to send humanitarian aid to the new war zone. The Soviets were not at all reluctant to take such capitalist donations: soon after the invasion, a Russian official in Washington asked the State Department if fund-raising would be permitted in the United States. The State Department, wary of Communist machinations, reluctantly noted that such efforts could not legally be prevented.
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By the fall of 1941, people with relatives in the far reaches of Russia were writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to ask for help in sending food parcels to them. Polish groups demanded aid for the tens of thousands of Polish prisoners deported to Siberia in 1939, who had now been released by the Soviets and were, in terrible conditions, attempting to make their way to Allied refugee centers in the Middle East. The Mennonites wanted to help the Volga Germans; the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to send typhus vaccine. An organization called Russian War Relief, with an impressive array of names on its masthead, splashily advertised a major fund-raising rally in Madison Square Garden in the
New York Times
. To all these, the State Department had to reply that no representatives could go to Moscow, as, in the past, the Russians, ever fearful of spies, had “consistently refused to grant permission to foreign relief organizations to operate in Soviet territory.”
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The suspicions were mutual: Russian War Relief was later infiltrated by FBI informants, and J. Edgar Hoover notified the State Department that informants at a meeting of the Mosholu branch of the
organization in the Bronx had reported that “most of the faces were familiar as being those of members of the Communist Party, International Worker’s Groups and other pro-Communist groups.”
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In mid-September, the State Department finally permitted the American Red Cross to send a special team to the Soviet Union to try to coordinate the distribution of humanitarian aid, some of which had already been shipped with no specific destination. At a three-power conference with the British Red Cross and the Russian Red Crescent organizations, an alliance was set up to deal with such incoming materials. American diplomats were not optimistic about the chances of the American Red Cross being allowed to supervise any of the aid distribution, a measure upon which they normally insisted. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt suggested that only one person stay on, to live and work from the embassy for a short time and then go home. This advice was inspired by the fact that German forces were rapidly approaching Moscow, causing the embassy to be evacuated to Kuybyshev, a town on the Volga some 600 miles to the east. There the necessities of life were already in such short supply that the ambassador appended a plaintive appeal to the Red Cross for canned goods, blankets, soap, and toilet paper for the diplomatic staff.
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The Red Cross, not to be denied, went to Kuybyshev too. A few weeks later, Russian Vice Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky questioned both their presence there and their requests for “special privileges.” Perhaps having been briefed on the magnitude of the aid already en route, he soon relented, “apologizing with dignity and cleverness” for not having “completely understood our original proposals.” Delighted Red Cross officials made Vyshinsky an honorary member of their organization and presented him with a lapel pin. But the Soviets still refused to allow “Amcross” workers to travel freely in the country or even to supervise distribution of the incoming materials, stating huffily that such demands were “an attack on [our] integrity.” After a few more attempts to change this, it became clear to the Red Cross that they must either concede their most cherished principle of control or leave. They conceded, noting that “the important thing is to meet the need and not be too exacting with reference to conditions.”
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Red Cross business and communications, plus those of a representative of Russian War Relief, which also represented several other organizations, would henceforth be conducted from the diplomatic safety of the American embassy, and their humanitarian shipments would be mixed in with military ones in the convoys struggling to Soviet ports. Russian secrecy on the true conditions across the country, most of which were hidden from
the Russian public, allowed only glimpses of the truth, and priorities had to be deduced from shipping requests. The little that could be learned was daunting enough. In January 1942, informants reported that the only people getting eggs and milk in Moscow were children under the age of two. Unlike most countries, Russia had little food available outside the rationing system, even on the black market, and then only for barter. In March, the Soviets requested that extra food be shipped “at expense of trucks,” a drastic admission. By April, the Red Cross knew that the only food issued per person in Moscow for the month of March had been salt, eight ounces of herring, and a pound of pickles. Children got an additional four ounces of red caviar and eight ounces of flour. Of the situation in Leningrad they heard only rumors. Everyone knew there were typhus epidemics, but not exactly where or how bad. That they were ongoing was made clear by the steady demand for Lend-Lease soft green soap, “which is needed as base for certain preparations and because efficacious against vermin.”
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Unaware of these complications, private Allied organizations poured in help. Among many others, Lady Churchill announced in November 1942 that two million pounds sterling worth of aid had been sent from Britain, including 50,000 children’s coats and the equivalent of three years’ worth of all the novocaine normally used in Britain. The American Jewish Council for Russian War Relief had also pledged $1 million to rebuild destroyed Jewish areas in the areas liberated by the Red Army. By August 1943, the American Red Cross would calculate that goods valued at $19,897,608 had already been sent or were on the way to the USSR.
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