Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
It rained and rained. Home, when one finally got there, might have been destroyed or looted, or occupied by Allied soldiers. Babies who had lacked milk and warm clothing for many days were dangerously weak, and many children had been wounded:
Visited by man from La Haye du Puits. He had come to Cherbourg to leave sick child at Hôpital Pasteur. The vehicle on which he was traveling had overturned just outside Cherbourg.… He was very anxious to
return to La Haye because he had left behind 3 other children—his wife had been killed in the recent bombardment.… I had him returned under MP supervision.
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Other children had been separated from their families, who were desperately looking for them. Some were lodged for the time being in foster homes. Here too improvised children’s homes sprang up everywhere. The Marquis de Balleroy took seventy infants into his château near Bayeux when their previous abode was destroyed.
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A prescient Allied officer felt that the “chief enemy of civilian morale was anxiety concerning missing relatives,” and that a central information pool, which could later become the basis for a “wide-world” scheme to be carried out “some day” by UNRRA, should be set up to help “avoid the troubles caused by halfdemented parents wandering about illegally in the battle areas.”
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For all these things, more help was needed. In late August, fifty American Red Cross workers with thirty-five motor vehicles and “six combination Weapons Carriers and Trailer Kitchens” were permitted to leave the United States for France, rather an improvement on the team of two first sent to Italy.
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Although the French were willing to work for the welfare of their own citizens, they were less enthusiastic about foreign displaced persons. Little planning had been done for this group, which had apparently not been expected in France. Civil Affairs detachments did not know exactly what to do with the 4,300 people of various nationalities found in two internment camps at Clermont and Vittel, and were surprised to find 842 Russian POWs abandoned in one of the installations of the former Maginot Line, of whom 217 had “active pulmonary TB,” and 370 others were suffering from other illnesses, wounds, or malnourishment. Another detachment was even more puzzled when two young girls emerged from a bunker along with a squad of German soldiers. It seemed that they were Eastern workers sent to clear rubble. The embarrassed American officer interrogating them told American correspondent William Shirer, “This one isn’t in the books.… It doesn’t say here what to do with dames you capture. But damned if I’ll put them back with the Krauts.”
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As the Allies moved east they had also begun to find more obvious groups of forced laborers left behind by the Nazis. In Normandy most of these had been assigned to the military construction crews of the Todt Organization, which had been working on the coastal defenses, and were treated as German prisoners of war, but in the eastern areas of France and Belgium that had been annexed to the Reich, a different sort of worker
began to be seen. At Mézières approximately 10,000 Polish laborers, “mostly women and children,” were found on a huge “Vichy/German” collective farm.
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Another report noted in October that an “exceptionally large percentage” of the displaced persons in its area were Russian, and in November and December 1944, some 40,000 “Russian and Polish displaced persons were moved back from the Moselle industrial areas.” They were not what the Allies would normally consider workers. One camp of 3,500 Russians set up in a French Army barracks had “family units, composed of man and wife and children.” This group was generally healthy, but that was thought to be because “the ill and weak had mostly died in Germany at earlier date,” a suspicion substantiated by the fact that only thirty of these people were less than two years old and fewer than fifty of them were over forty.
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The officers dealing with these groups, puzzled by their bizarre composition, did not know it at the time, but they had found the tip of an iceberg.
Once out of the Normandy beachhead region, there had been no stopping the Allied forces. Paris, not at all lice-ridden but low on food, was liberated with wild rejoicing on August 25. By November, the Allies had swept up to the Westwall defenses of Germany and even across them in a few places. Belgium and a third of Holland had fallen before the momentum was stopped by supply problems and the ferocious German defense of its own frontiers. The Allies had expected Holland to be surrendered in its entirety, and many had thought the Germans themselves would surrender before their borders were crossed. But Hitler, ever more remote from reality, did not consider himself finished yet, and in a final major offensive would confront Allied forces in southeast Belgium in the Battle of the Bulge. The attack would bring combat conditions mixed with the hardships of extreme winter weather to the area, where Civil Affairs detachments were forced in some places to take up combat positions on the front lines while they struggled to evacuate and feed the inhabitants. German losses were vast, but Hitler did gain an estimated six-week delay of the final Allied offensive on his western frontier, which would enable him to resist within the Reich until May 1945. The six weeks would not change the ultimate outcome but would be fatal for the millions still surviving in precarious conditions under Nazi rule, nowhere more so than in the Netherlands, which would remain under siege until the final German surrender, and where drastic disruption of the food supply system would now bring a “Hunger Winter” to the Dutch.
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Food reserves in Holland were already dangerously low by November 1944. They were further depleted by a defiant strike by Dutch railway workers and by restrictions on maritime operations ordered in retaliation by the Nazis, plus their stepped-up requisitions for the homeland, deprived now of a great percentage of its own food sources. In January, the familiar pattern of starvation began. Soup kitchens with ever-diminishing supplies were opened in the Dutch cities, but in some places they could, from the beginning, provide children with only one meal a week. Black market prices soared as rationed goods became scarcer. Whole families began to live on half a loaf of bread a day. By the end of January, many were not getting more than 500 calories a day, and cases of hunger edema and related problems increased. In some towns special starvation hospitals were installed in schools and other vacant buildings. Members of the Resistance helped set these up and smuggled in what food they could procure.
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There were not enough coffins for the dead, and many families were so unable to cope with funeral arrangements that 3,000 bodies had to be stored temporarily in one of Amsterdam’s great churches. In the food lines, children, more agile than their elders, would run over and lick the sidewalk if anything dripped from the huge vats of soup, and later would hang suspended on the edges of the empty containers to clean off any remaining morsel. Bakery deliveries, such as they were, required police escorts to distribution points. For mothers whose husbands had been conscripted for labor service, the stress of the struggle to find food and live without electricity or fuel was crushing:
I stayed behind with six children … we go to bed early, and don’t undress as I already have traded many blankets for food. I hope that my children will sleep through this night and will not wake up crying from hunger … tomorrow I will chop up the linen chest, because, otherwise, I don’t know how I can dry the baby’s diapers.… My oldest wakes up and says he cannot sleep because he is so hungry … groping in the dark I look in the kitchen where I know there is still a cabbage stalk and give it to him … I am near despair and think that it cannot be possible that I will see my children die of hunger before my eyes. I have to figure out … what else I can trade or steal to keep the seven of us alive another day … my children are skeletons.
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The despair was largely that of middle- and working-class city dwellers. The rich could find things on the black market, and farmers had far greater resources. The farmers were soon besieged by desperate food seekers. In the terrible cold, often so weak that they could hardly carry a
bundle, thousands of people went out into the countryside on bicycles and on foot, some with money and others without. In general, the farmers did what they could, but there were many cases of war profiteering. The Nazis did not help: even this fellow Nordic population was forbidden to bring certain “black market” foods, obtained at terrible cost, into the cities. The foragers were often searched and their pathetic take confiscated.
City governments made great efforts to give children a little extra sustenance, but it soon became clear that the only way to save many of them would be by sending them to foster families in the farming districts in the north and east of the country, where food was still relatively plentiful. Parents, churches, and finally, after desperate pleas from Dutch Nazi officials, even the German occupation government ran evacuation programs.
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Some parents simply put nametags on their children and sent them out of the city with instructions to knock on doors, but more than 50,000 youngsters would be officially evacuated in moving vans, garbage trucks, barges, and on foot:
None of us was used to walking like this. Everyone had foot problems. There were children whose socks were soaked with blood, but they had to go on. I had never realized that children would be so brave.… We walked for hours and hours in the rain. Many of the children had no coats … and shivered from the cold. It was still raw in the early days of March and we got little food. There were places where they took care of us … but there were also places where we sat in the cold for hours in wet clothes until we got a bowl of soup.
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As had been true for the British children, and for the hidden Jewish children the evacuees now sometimes encountered, the adjustment to a new family that had not always chosen one willingly was not easy; but the presence of food overcame most inhibitions: “My foster parents came to get me and when I went into the kitchen I couldn’t believe what I saw … sausages and bacon hanging up over the fireplace! My mouth watered.… They fed me bacon until I was sick.”
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To the astonishment of health workers, some of these children gained ten or twenty pounds in a month. Later, packages of food would come in from Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland. These shipments had been requested in early October 1944 by the Dutch government in exile, but were not approved for months by the Nazis, and more red tape would delay their distribution until February 1945. None of this food would, however, go to the tens of thousands of Dutchmen aged sixteen to forty-six who had been conscripted to dig border defenses. Allied nutrition experts
investigating the Dutch famine immediately after liberation, unaware that what they were seeing was not unusual in the Reich, found only two groups of “severely malnourished patients” in the east of Holland where, unlike the west, there had been adequate food supplies. One group was in an insane asylum, the other was made up of the forced laborers:
The men who had survived their experience … had been distributed in hospitals.… They were in surprisingly bad condition … when one considers that they … were in the Todt camps for only a period of three to four months. Questioning … revealed that it was maltreatment, poor living conditions and disease rather than uncomplicated lack of food, that were responsible for their condition. They had been billeted during the exceptionally severe winter in sheds with roofs but no walls and most of them suffered frostbite. There had been no sanitary facilities and diarrhea had become an almost universal complaint … the Germans had refused to provide any food to those who could not work.… Even after four weeks of hospital, these men showed evidence of severe cachexia [malnutrition]…. Average weight of 106 of these men ranging in age from 16–46 … was 54.5 kg [120 pounds].
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In April, General Eisenhower warned General Blaskowitz, the Wehrmacht commander for the Netherlands, that he and each member of his command would be regarded “as violators of the laws of war who must face the certain consequences of their acts” if they did not allow airdrops of food for the Dutch population. The drops were arranged, as were future shipments by land and sea, after a few unpleasant face-to-face meetings between high-ranking German and Allied officials.
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The “disgruntled and unhappy” Germans agreed not to target the food planes and to help distribute the food. Leaflets were scattered to alert everyone, and the airdrop took place on April 29, just a week before the end of the war but too late for some 20,000 Dutch citizens, many of whom were children:
A soft droning could be heard from far off. The droning swelled. The people on the rooftops shouted and pointed at the sky. There they were—scores, perhaps hundreds of heavy four-engined bombers thundered low over the city. The roar of the engines was deafening. The people in the streets and on the roofs shrieked, screamed, shouted, howled, cheered. Tears rolled down thin cheeks. Never have I seen so many adults crying at one time. Strangers fell into each other’s arms. People waved red-white-blue flags. Everyone was mad with happiness. The children didn’t understand what was going on. First they looked
with amazement at the planes and the crazed grown-ups, but then, infected by the crowd, they began to sing and dance.
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While the Allies were progressing toward the Reich frontiers, the Red Army had continued its own liberating advance across hundreds of miles in the East, regions in which there had been no lack of scorching. The Soviet troops had been greeted, mile after mile, with evidence of the horrors visited on their countrymen: they saw the burned villages, heard of the forced abductions of thousands, and found hideous piles and pits full of the decomposing bodies of prisoners of war, Jews, and other civilians. By D-Day they were approaching Poland, and on July 23 would take Lublin and along with it the Majdanek concentration camp. This was the first of the camps to be liberated in which there had been killing on an industrial scale. Many of its structures had survived total destruction due to procrastination by the SS, which had, however, already moved all but about 2,000 of the still living inmates back into the Reich, among them the Russian “partisan children,” who were taken to Lodz-Konstantynow. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, the extermination camps farther east, had been shut down in good time by the Nazis in the fall of 1943, their installations demolished and the terrain replanted with trees or disguised as farmland. The Red Army had swept past them unaware, and Majdanek, where 360,000 Jews, Russians, and Poles had died, was a revelation. The Russians, no amateurs at concentration camps, were appalled at what they found, and required their soldiers to take guided tours of the killing apparatus.