Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque
going to be ‘very heavy’.48 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’.49 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 …’50
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.
He had sufficient wit to call on Herbert Hoover in May 1945 for advice on the world food problem, but not enough to accept the advice. Hoover warned Truman of the disasters that were about to occur, but Truman ignored him, to his cost. As the situation grew worse, with rumours of French mistreatment of prisoners emerging in the press and predictions of disaster emerging from authoritative people in Germany, Truman was cornered. He was caught between the consequences of the Morgenthau Plan and the widespread opposition in the administration to revising any part of American policy in Germany. Truman had never approved the Morgenthau Plan and only discovered that it was being implemented when he had to deal with its disastrous consequences.
Within a couple of months of taking office, Truman rid himself of Secretary Morgenthau. This was probably not because of the plan, but because he had found Morgenthau over-reaching himself in other ways. Soon after, Truman was sending missions to Europe to look into conditions in refugee camps. And then in the face of a famine that had already killed off hundreds of thousands of Germans in later 1945,51 he called on Herbert Hoover for the second time.
The circumstances of that call are interesting. As the starvation in Germany had grown worse and worse, various senators visiting the American zone discussed the situation with army officers. They also received letters and reports from American civilians and officers on the scene. Soon they were informed, and disgusted.52 Just after Christmas of 1945, they met and discussed what to do. It was decided to call on the President himself. This they did on 8 January 1946. They made a personal appeal to him to take immediate steps to permit the American people to relieve the suffering directly. They particularly requested that the United States raise the ration allowed to Germans and restore mail and package services to the American zone. The sort of language Truman heard was also audible in the Senate a few days later, in the voice of Senator Wherry: ‘The American people should know once and for all that as a result of this government’s official policy they are being made the unwilling accomplices in the crime of mass starvation … Germany is the only nation where UNRRA is not permitted to feed its nationals. Germany is the only nation subjected to a deliberate starvation policy of 1,500 calories per day.’53
This was fresh in Truman’s mind when he finally wrote to Hoover in January 1946 and asked him to do something about food relief in Europe and round the world, except for Germany. Once again, Hoover agreed.
While Hoover began to make his preparations for the 1946 world tour which would eventually save hundreds of millions of lives, the senators kept the pot boiling. Senator Wherry quoted at length from an editorial in the Christian Century to help him express his feelings. Calling it ‘one of the most angry and inspired editorials on this whole tragic subject’, he read the whole last paragraph for the Congressional Record of the Senate. ‘There is not a day to be lost … With every day the opportunity grows less to make real to the people of Germany the Christian testimony to mercy and brotherhood. With every day that Christian love is thwarted by shortsighted and vengeful government policies, the prospect for a future catastrophe grows. It is time that a united demand went up from all American churches and church organizations for an end to the armed barriers which now keep Christian charity from our late enemies. It is time to let Washington know that American Christians will no longer acquiesce in the Potsdam outrage.’54 A few weeks later, on 29 March 1946, Senator Langer had received new information which caused him to rise again in the Senate, to speak as follows:
[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fanatical plot to destroy the German people by visiting on them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot permitted the whole world situation to get … out of hand … but their determination to destroy the German people and the German Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral principles, to our leadership in world affairs, to our Christian faith, to our allies, or to the whole future peace of the world, has become a world scandal … We have all seen the grim pictures of the piled-up bodies uncovered by the American and British armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity at the sight of such emaciation – reducing adults and even little children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions even more widely … among our former enemies.55
The senators spoke with deep feeling, at great length. Side by side with the hatred of evil so vigorously expressed was a moving pity for the miserable victims. Clearly, without such compassion there could hardly be the hatred of the evil-doing, which brought hot shame to the cheeks of Langer, Gollancz and all the others. In this pity, of course, there is nothing new: it is as old as victims.
What seems to be new here is that it appeared at such a moment among such victors. Neither the British nor the Americans were known as gentle warriors. Nations and tribes all over the world, from the Irish, French, Spanish and Scots to the Sioux, Seminole, Filipinos, Zulus, Germans, Boers and Indians, had felt the furious power of Anglo-Saxon militarism, and the vengeance that sometimes followed it. What is new here is that among these warlike peoples, victorious once again in a worldwide war, compassion for the enemy was expressed by senior figures as a matter of duty, honour and pity, in deep opposition to the policy already being carried out.
Mackenzie King expressed this plainly on 1 September 1945, during the ceremonies in Ottawa at the end of the Japanese war: ‘All the United Nations were now committed to further the law of peace, work and health, and to wishing success at the dawn of the new era. I stressed particularly the colossal loss of life and what we owe to the men who had given their lives. Blessed are the peacemakers.’56 This speech got a terrific reception, perhaps the warmest that this mild, cautious man had ever received. These words were not only rhetoric: they expressed profound feelings among hundreds of millions of English-speaking people in the world. Mackenzie King was not only the Prime Minister of a country which had made a major contribution to defeating Hitler, he was also a friend and confidant of Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Winston Churchill and many other leaders. ‘Peace, work and health’ expressed perfectly what ‘common people’ had always wanted. This policy was chosen by the English-speaking nations that could easily have continued a winning war. They were implementing it in the face of a great danger from the Soviets. And they were carrying it out massively, internationally, with superb organization at high speed and terrific cost, to the needy nations of earth save only one.
Nothing like this had ever happened before.
* Where %% means per thousand.
III ‘FROM THERE NO PRISONER RETURNED’
Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million,