Exorcising Hitler (33 page)

And for all this, she continues, you have to thank one single man. Terrible! All for nothing!

Certainly, I think, it was one man who gave the signal for the beginning of it all; but isn’t it a bit convenient for everyone involved to say: for all this we have to thank one man . . . Do we not all bear some responsibility for this terrible blow that so profoundly shattered our western world, and from which it may never properly recover, all – vanquished and victors alike? – Everything that humanity individually achieves on this earth is always a piecemeal thing, in good or in evil; it takes all of us together to do the deed . . .
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The American woman’s apparent attempt to assign the blame to ‘one man’ – Hitler – is, of course, faintly absurd, but her omni-guilty Hitler is also the German narrator’s welcome straw man. Perhaps, in fact in all probability, the woman is simply using the Führer, in a slightly lazy way, as a symbol for Nazism, the ideology to which so many Germans remained loyal for so long, even as millions died and their country disintegrated around them. So, Mann is, in the narrow sense, right, but he is also being deliberately obtuse, exploiting her dramatic exaggeration in order to slide over the question of Nazism’s responsibility – the party had twelve million members, and many, many millions more supporters, especially in the early, victorious years – and move quietly into more amenable territory.

Within this foggy moral landscape, occasionally warmed by the milky sunlight of collective blame, victors and vanquished appear equally tainted. All are guilty and therefore, if one is not careful, none are. It is clear that the Americans’ appalling treatment of himself and his fellow prisoners between April and July has given Mann permission – at least in his own mind – to do that. In a similar way, the apparently indiscriminate bombing and ground attacks carried out by the Allies in pursuit of victory – especially in the final months of the war – cancelled out, for Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, notions of the conquerors’ moral superiority and Germany’s absolute culpability for the recent European catastrophe.

This psychological process was to prove a common resort for many millions of Germans in the post-war years. If some experienced a hunger for democracy, more did so for peace, but the overwhelming majority hungered almost exclusively for – food. The last of these needs would, for some time to come, consume all the mental and physical energy available.

On a purely practical level, the frequent brutality and unfairness of Allied policy – during but especially after the war – seemed to absolve all but the most self-laceratingly fastidious Germans from moral introspection, and effectively freed them up for the struggle ahead – the struggle for physical survival. By a glorious irony, this was the opposite of what the Allies, and particularly the British and Americans, with all their talk of ‘teaching Germans a lesson’ by deprivation, had intended.

While the Reich had suffered terribly from food shortages in the First World War, and even during the following months – the Allied blockade was maintained after the November 1918 Armistice and not officially lifted until the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919 – the country’s governmental apparatus and infrastructure had survived undamaged. Despite severe economic problems and short-term political dislocation, the food situation returned more or less to normal relatively quickly.

In the post-First World War period, in other words, the German people were humiliated and greatly impoverished, but not, once the blockade was lifted, starving. There had been no fighting on German soil (although following the peace there was the nationalist
Freikorps
’ futile armed struggle against the ceding of West Prussia and Upper Silesia to Poland) and therefore no destruction of buildings and transportation networks. Moreover, after 1918 the country had remained sovereign, despite the presence of French, American and British forces in the Rhineland and later, from 1923, temporary Franco-Belgian occupiers in the Ruhr.

After the Second World War, the spectre of hunger would have haunted Germany, even had the occupation been a kinder affair. The country’s cities were largely wrecked, with between a quarter and a half of urban dwellings seriously damaged or destroyed, its railways operating sporadically or hardly at all, little fuel, and dangerously low food reserves (in the last weeks of the war, as the Allied forces approached, the authorities had opened up many emergency food dumps for the Wehrmacht and the German civilian populations – though not to DPs, prisoners of war or concentration camp inmates).
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And then there were the internally displaced – up to twenty million – and the other ten million refugees who had fled from the Russian-occupied east, to which, it was rapidly becoming clear, few would want to or be able to return. And the country had no government – or only at the very lowest level, and often, having been cleansed of experienced but politically tainted incumbents, dubiously competent.

So, by their unconditional surrender policy and their decision to abolish the German government, the Allies had ensured that it was upon their own authority – which in practice following the surrender meant their armed forces – that the governance of Germany, including the feeding and care of its people, devolved.

Article 43 of the Hague Rules of Land Warfare (1907) (Section III, ‘Military Power over the Territory of the Hostile State’) stated: ‘The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety.’
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Although feeding the population was not specifically mentioned, it was assumed at the time and later, in the words of an expert testifying to a US Senate Committee, that:

The Hague Conventions . . . are based on the assumptions that when a country has been defeated and occupied, the occupier or occupiers have become responsible for the orderly government of the people in their power. They must safeguard the basic rights of the local population and see to it that their basic needs are met just as they were to the national government of that country. Wilfully to deny them the necessities of life is a violation of international law.
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Questions were begged, however, even by this seemingly unequivocal declaration of intent. First, what were ‘the necessities of life’? Second, more pragmatically, even if an appropriate level of nutrition were agreed, when – as potential American and British Military Government officers were being told in training schools in England in the final months of the war – most of liberated Europe was existing on 1,600 calories per day or less, how could the Germans be given more, or even the same? (Two thousand calories was the rough life-preserving rule of thumb used earlier in the war for occupied and liberated countries alike by the British and the Americans.)
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A senior officer at the training school in London told his students that the German adult would receive ‘1500 calories as a maximum, although there is no assurance he will get that much; that is all he can have during our occupation’. He continued:

As for supplying the Germans with food, it will only be as a last resort. We are going to treat Germany as a defeated country. We expect to put out food to the German people only where there is no other food available . . . The food problem will cause more trouble from a public safety angle than another one. But we have to be strict with them and we have to watch the food now because later we will have to feed them if supplies become exhausted. We do not want circumstances to force us to import food for Germans.
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This was as early as December 1944, when only a tiny proportion of Germany was in Allied hands. Everyone knew then that there would be shortages, possibly on a catastrophic level, because they knew what things were like elsewhere. It was no accident that Franz Oppenhoff, American-appointed Lord Mayor of Aachen, the first German city to fall, spent the March afternoon before he was murdered in his garden, with his wife, breaking soil and sowing seeds for vegetables to keep him and his family alive through the post-war year he would never see.

In the end, feeding the occupied population under the Hague Convention was reinterpreted not to mean providing the best standard of living possible under the circumstances, but, as expressed in the instructions issued to Eisenhower by Washington on 10 May 1945, merely ensuring ‘supplies necessary to prevent starvation or widespread disease or such civil unrest as would endanger the occupying forces’.

The Western Allies had baulked at feeding the five to six million Wehrmacht servicemen who fell into their hands in the last weeks of the war on the same level as their own base troops – as the Hague Convention demanded and as had been the case until the last few months of the war – by reclassifying them as Disarmed Enemy Forces or Surrendered Enemy Personnel rather than prisoners of war. So, by a similar token, German civilians were essentially reduced to a new, legally somewhat dubious status, in order to satisfy the twin demands of vengeance and practical necessity.

In 1939, just before the outbreak of war, the average German adult had, as EAC’s German Standard of Living Board had calculated, been consuming around 2,900 calories per day. This was 10 per cent above the European average and higher in quality and fat content.
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The daily ration had remained comfortably above 2,000 calories until the summer of 1944, when the loss of food-producing areas in the occupied east and then of traditionally productive agricultural land in eastern Germany, accompanied by disruption of distribution routes, especially waterways and railways, through Allied bombing, had led to a serious drop in the German standard of living.

Shortly before VE-Day, average rationed consumption was calculated at around 1,050 calories, and after that it dropped another 200 calories – although American officials of the Public Health and Welfare Branches were aware that unofficial sources of food, from the black market to personal contacts, private stores and private garden production would usually increase the actual consumption substantially, perhaps by up to double.
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This was fortunate, for otherwise Germans would not simply have been undernourished, but would have starved en masse. In the larger cities, especially, there was a real danger of this even in the early days of the occupation. In Berlin, a week after the end of the war, the food rations were as follows:

Heavy workers and workers in harmful work environments
:

Daily ration: 600g bread; 80g processed foodstuffs; 100g meat; 25g sugar.

Monthly ration: 100g real coffee; 100g coffee substitute; 20g leaf tea.

Office workers
:

Daily ration: 400g bread; 40g processed foodstuffs; 10g fats; 400g potatoes.

Monthly ration: 25g real coffee; 100g coffee substitute; 20g leaf tea.

Children
:

Daily ration: 300g bread; 30g processed foodstuffs; 20g meat; 20g fats; 25g sugar.

Economically inactive family members and other
:

Daily ration: 300g bread; 30g processed foodstuffs; 20g meat; 7g fats; 15g sugar.
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This was bad enough. It got worse. By the beginning of the following year, the basic calorie allocations per person per day in the various zones were:

Often supply bottlenecks, transport difficulties and plain bureaucratic incompetence meant that even these meagre basic rations were not available. Accepted nutritional needs, by present-day standards, run at 3,400 calories per day for heavy work, 2,800 for medium-heavy work (including a housewife with children) and 2,200 for light activity.
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This meant that the overwhelming majority of people in Germany were not just hungry but starving, slowly. This was true even if some Germans were, in fact, lucky enough to have access to further food through private gardens, hoarded stores, contacts of various kinds, black market purchases and general foraging activity, especially in the countryside (known colloquially as ‘hamstering’). The basic ration card, level V, allocated to ‘non-productive’ adults – housewives, the sick, the elderly, disabled and unemployed – and also those classified as former Nazis, was known in Berlin as ‘the death card’.
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There was small print on the ration cards, which reminded the consumer that the amounts of each food listed were not a guarantee. Sometimes they were simply not available, or replaced by inferior foodstuffs. Moreover, sausage or bacon or margarine might have been injected with water, so the weight was right but the calorific content less than it was supposed to be.
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