Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque
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.33
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 1944–45.34 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.35 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.36
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.’ 37 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.38
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.39
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.’40 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.41
Most children under ten and people over sixty42 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.’43
‘ 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.’44
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’.45 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.46 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%%* in 1946, which was more than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%%, more than double the pre-war rate.47 In the British zone, Field Marshal Bernard