Cruel World (94 page)

For the exhausted incoming Germans, the shock of reality, in what years of propaganda had implied was the Nordic Valhalla, was devastating. Nazi propaganda radio had never revealed the true extent of the bombing damage to Berlin and other major cities, nor the near-total destruction of industry and food production. There were numerous incidents of Sudeten farmers attempting to return to their lands, and even rustling incidents in which they tried to round up their former herds and drive them back into Germany.
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But for most, there was no alternative to the forced migration.

In September 1946, a Dr. Neckar, President of the Düsseldorf District, wrote to the British Military Government that the “absorbtive capacity” of his area was “exhausted.” Many people had therefore “been conveyed to cellars and bunkers.” He had done a lot of calculations and could report that certain communities were 112.47 percent, 116.93 percent, and 118.53 percent above their 1939 populations, while 45 percent of the housing was destroyed (2 percent) or partially damaged (43 percent). Furthermore, he complained, “the precipitated and … often compulsory conveys to private lodgings are spoiling the relations between the population and the refugees in the very beginning already” and had not only caused “increased listlessness” and “decreased will to deliver goods” on the part of the farmers but had led to multiple thefts. Dr. Neckar, still writing in a rather predefeat, dictatorial style, requested that the British “see to it” that no more refugees be sent, “as the people can no longer be sheltered in a way worthy of human beings,” and he added that it was “fully
beyond discussion” that the living space allotted to each person be limited to four square meters, “for it is unworthy of human beings to be folded like that. If this would be carried through not only every domestic life would be eradicated but also the men themselves would be completely worn down physically and psychically.” All of which, of course, was true, as so many millions of victims of the Nazis already knew.
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Space was not the worst problem, however. In the chaos of the postwar months, most people’s lives were dominated by the procurement of food. By the summer of 1945, whatever reserves of food individual Germans had been able to salt away were much reduced or gone, especially in urban areas. Given the destruction of transportation capacity and the fact that crops had not been planted during the combat phase, plus the disappearance of foreign forced labor and every form of normal commerce, Germans had little improvement in view. At the beginning, the American Military Government was not prepared to provide food to Germans except in “acute emergencies,” even if they were children.
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Ten-year-old Wolfgang Samuel, who had fled with his mother and grandmother ahead of the Red Army, was lucky, as they had found a Wehrmacht supply wagon full of food, pulled by two big horses, for their journey. Just east of Lübeck they ran into the Americans, who directed them to a farm that was serving as a holding camp for a motley assortment of groups, including a captured SS detachment, Polish DPs, and Italian POWs. The Nazi prisoners and non-German groups were fed by the Allies and gradually taken off to other camps or released. After that, American soldiers still were present outside the gates of the farm, but they did not distribute any food or water to the German refugees, and there was nothing for sale anywhere. The local people, once again, were not helpful even to these refugees who only needed food, ignoring them “as if we didn’t exist”:

Wolfgang and his mother survived on their supply wagon stores and shared what they could. Eventually they managed to make friends with a nearby farmer, who took care of their hungry horses and invited them to eat with him. Soon there was an outbreak of cholera in the camp, and children began to die. The Americans and British still did nothing. In July, the Americans left the town, which was to be taken over by the Russians. Most of the refugees immediately followed, but Wolfgang and his mother did not go far enough and were caught in the Soviet Zone. In the following months, they continued to be treated like pariahs by the local Germans and terrorized by the Russians; Frau Samuel almost died of cholera. Defeated, the family returned to the East German town from which their flight had begun months before. They would finally escape to the British Zone, on foot, and in a blizzard, in late December 1946.
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There they would be less afraid, but no better fed.

A GI applies bug spray around garbage cans marked to inform the hungry German population of their contents
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(photo credit 16.3)

As had been the case in Athens and the Netherlands, the lack of rationed food led to an explosion of the black market, which even though it was strictly prohibited by the Allied authorities, was heavily exploited by members of the occupation forces, and was universally acknowledged as having kept millions of Germans alive. By October 1945, the food ration for Germans was 1,300 calories a day, about one-third the normal GI ration of 3,600, and well below that of the DPs. Allied military authorities knew that even this low standard was often not met, and that it would be difficult to maintain through the winter. In August, a young aide visiting
Berlin with a group of congressmen who were looking at DP camps had been surprised to see that the Germans looked worse than the DPs, whom he had found pathetic enough:

The Western Allies had not been unprepared for hunger in Germany. They had arrived with 600,000 tons of grain, which was divided among the Western zones. But in their prewar planning they had not counted on the enormous influxes of refugees or the fact that no food would come from the Soviet Zone, which had huge agricultural areas. Requests for more aid from the United States and Britain in November 1945 were not fruitful; food production in all war zones had been disrupted, and even the United States was feeling the pinch. To conserve both food and fuel, the American Military Government set up community kitchens for Germans, who were still required to use ration coupons and pay for their meals. More than 4.5 million such meals were served each month in Bavaria alone.
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Army messes went so far as to mark their garbage cans “edible” or “nonedible,” and leftovers were distributed daily to institutions. In December, a few private relief agencies were authorized to send supplies to particularly stricken areas. Sometimes it was easier to move the hungry to the food: in the appropriately named Operation Stork, the British evacuated 20,000 babies from Berlin to the Western zones.
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In February 1946, an Allied official in Berlin confided “in a whisper” to a colleague he met in a bar that he “was supposed to be in charge of rationing, and there wasn’t anything to ration.”
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In March, General Lucius Clay, the American Military Governor, emphasizing that the “suffering was real” and that incoming stocks were nearly depleted, once again appealed for food shipments. A commission led by former President Herbert Hoover, who, at Truman’s request, had gone to Europe to look into
the food situation, agreed that the situation in Germany was grim. By now, the Americans, not as immune as the Nazis to massive death tolls, were beginning to waver on the economic punishment of Germany. In both April and May 1946, Clay was forced to reduce the minimum ration and dig into the Army’s own supplies to sustain even the new calorie low. Assistant Secretary of War McCloy had already said that industry must be restored, “unless we are to establish permanent soup kitchen feeding.” He and many others felt that Germany could not be kept in “medieval isolation,” and that unless normal commerce was restored there would be “collapse and progressive physical and social deterioration of the people in an area whose influence is such that it will set the level of European living so low that we also will be demoralized by it.”
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All agreed that lack of food might cause unrest and require “a larger army of occupation for a longer period of time,”
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not a popular idea back in the United States. Germans had been heard to say that they had been better fed under the Nazis, and no one wanted a repeat of the post–World War I conditions, which might lead to the rise of another Hitler or, more importantly in 1946, to empowerment of the Communists.

Hoover, meanwhile, had some success. Both Britain, which had very severe rationing itself, and the United States delved into their national reserves in the first half of 1946 and allocated grain for Europe, most of which would go to Germany.
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Publicity generated by Hoover’s activities and by numerous congressional junkets also stimulated the traditional aid agencies in the United States, which were already involved in relief efforts in the rest of Europe. The ban on such private relief was lifted and the groups were allowed to combine into the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany, or CRALOG, which would send its first shipment of clothes, food, and medical supplies to Bremen in April 1946. The agency, which was made up of fifteen disparate organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, the International Rescue and Relief Committee, labor unions, all sorts of church groups, and the Russian Children’s Welfare Society, would soon be joined by other aid co-ops, including the International Red Cross, representing non-American groups, and later by CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), which would be permitted to send its soon-to-be-famous packages to Germans starting in June 1946.
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All these efforts were a good beginning, but still not enough. An investigation in Mannheim revealed that 60 percent of individuals who received physical examinations showed signs of rickets. Just how dire the need had become, particularly where children were concerned, was made clear in
England by a series of passionate articles, letters, and photographs published by an unlikely source. Victor Gollancz, an English Jew, visited the British Zone in late October 1946. He was appalled by the physical condition of the children he saw. He also found the often luxurious lifestyle of some of the officers of the Allied armies to be an unattractive contrast to the abject situation of the Germans. Taken around the most devastated areas of a number of cities by Salvation Army and Red Cross workers, Gollancz described dreadful conditions. Thousands lived in damp and moldy basements with virtually no sanitation. He saw numerous cases of hunger edema, tuberculosis, and malnutrition. In the awful cellars he visited, people were jammed together in far less than the four square meters that had been declared inadequate in Düsseldorf: