The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (36 page)

The British zone of occupation faced perhaps the most serious food crisis. This zone contained the Ruhr val- ley, Europe’s largest concentration of heavy industry; but its great coal and steel producing cities had always imported food from eastern Germany. With the Soviets now rapidly denuding their zone, and with transport in any case wrecked, there was no food to be had from the east. Hamburg and Hannover had some modest stocks of food but these were quickly exhausted. The Brit- ish and Americans had agreed that their own stocks,

accumulated in the last stages of the war, would be enough to assure a diet in their zones of 1,550 calories a day, mostly made up of bread, potatoes, and oatmeal. There were few vegetables to be had, no fruits, little fats. This ration could not sustain people for long, and it certainly was inadequate to feed the heavy laborers whose work was needed in the coal mines. The only thing to do was import food into Germany from Brit- ain and the United States—a major turnaround from SHAEF plans that had envisioned Germany living off of its own supplies. In the summer of 1945, the British zone imported about 70,000 tons of wheat per month, and also distributed 50,000 tons of potatoes import- ed from Britain as well as surplus Army ration packs. But these were only stopgaps. Without fertilizers, coal, transport, and manual labor, there was no hope of get- ting self-sustaining agriculture up and running. By the fall, the British zone was forced to cut back its official daily ration to just over 1,000 calories: virtually a star- vation diet. In November, Field Marshal Montgomery called the food situation “more critical than at any one time since we entered Germany.” A detailed survey by the Times concluded that “Germans are going to have a miserable time this winter—not so bad as those they brought upon allied peoples, but still bad, precarious, lean.”
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The conditions in the American zone were equally bad. Historically, the area under American occupation had imported 25 percent of its food and had never been able to sustain itself. General Clay thought he could supply the Germans in his zone with 1,500 calories a day, but only with significant imports from America. Military Government set up community kitchens which served over four million meals a month. One survey in late Au-

gust concluded that 60 percent of the Germans were living on a diet that would lead to disease and malnu- trition. By October, random weighing of German civil- ians revealed a falloff in body weight of 13–15 percent in adult men and women. Children, pregnant women, and the elderly suffered most. Their diets lacked sufficient protein and vitamins, and cases of rickets were com- mon among infants. In December, the U.S. government announced that it had approved private relief agencies in America to begin collecting food and clothing for shipment into Germany. Six months after the bombs stopped falling on Germany, Americans were packaging up bundles of supplies for humanitarian relief.
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This irony was not lost on Military Government administra- tors. In one of their weekly information bulletins, an unsigned article mused on the problem of Germany’s food shortages. “ We can say they should have thought of that before they started the war, and then let them starve as best they may. That might be alright if we were not trying to maintain law and order in the country and convince people that democracy is the best way to live. It is difficult to govern, much less persuade to your views a hungry people.” And so Military Government buckled down to work, urgently trying to restore coal production, repair transportation, find fertilizer and farm machinery, and secure additional imports from overseas to keep the German people alive.
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German observers understood the significance of the shift in their fortunes, and in Anglo-American policy. The Stuttgarter Zeitung, one of the earliest postwar publications to appear in Germany under U.S. license, profoundly approved of the efforts that the Allies were making on behalf of the German people. “If we con- sider what unbelievable sacrifices Hitler’s war has de- manded from the allies,” the paper wrote in an obse- quious editorial, “how the strengths of nations were taxed to the utmost, it fills us with immense gratitude, and the sense that humanity still has a place in this world, when we hear that the allied occupation govern- ments have adopted the German cause as their own.” The Germans could see that the “new struggle” at hand was one of recovery and stability in Germany, and that Americans and Germans would fight it side by side. The American-produced German-language press echoed this newfound sense of solidarity. “ The allies have cre- ated the essential conditions for the long and difficult— yet hopeful—process of German reconstruction,” said a Heute magazine editorial, “by assuming most of the responsibility for the preservation of public order and public life in Germany.” This opened the way for Ger- mans to do their part in the work of recovery, and the results had been positive. “ Water and electricity are up and running. Thanks to the support of the military gov- ernments, railroads are partially repaired…. Trams

are running in cities…. Moreover, the occupying pow- ers have begun to import food from overseas to regions that suffer most from a lack of food—regardless of the principle that Germany has to feed itself as much as possible.” The United States could not have been more open about its aims: to feed, clothe, house, and nurture the German people.
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Americans had arrived in Germany as conquerors and occupiers. In September 1944, U.S. military direc- tives insisted that “Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy na- tion.” Within weeks of the end of the war in May 1945, this policy changed. Americans went to great lengths to help Germans, to repair the damage Allied aircraft had caused, and to build the foundation for German recovery, just as the Allied armies had done in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This required a willful forgetting of the intensity of American hatred for the Germans just a few months earlier; it required an al- most schizophrenic ability to separate the occupier’s duties of denazification and reeducation from the lib- erator’s role of giving comfort and aid. Americans, un- comfortable with a punitive occupation of Germany, chose to transform themselves into liberators of their former enemy. In doing so, they had a great deal of help from the German people themselves. After all, both Ger-

mans and Americans had a common interest in laying claim to liberation. Americans did not wish to occupy if they could liberate instead, while the Germans gladly embraced the notion that they had been liberated from Hitler and his “alien” ideology, Nazism. Germans were quite happy to get on with the tasks of recovery, side by side with these wealthy, generous, earnest, sometimes messy and provincial but protective Americans. Liber- ation arrived late in western Germany; but it arrived all the same, accompanied by a gratifying forgetfulness.

Part III: MOVING BODIES

Prologue: They Have Suffered Unbearably

I

T IS A tribute to the breadth of vision of Allied lead- ers that they conceived of the liberation of Europe as a complex process involving at least three dimen-

sions: a military dimension—the defeat of Germany’s armed forces; a political dimension—the restoration of political freedom to those countries under German oc- cupation; and a social dimension—the caring for Eu- rope’s war-stricken civilians. Historians of World War II, and especially its final months, have given pride of place in their writing to the military achievements of the Allied armies, and some scholars have explored the political challenges of restoring sovereignty to Eu- rope’s liberated states. But the social aspect of libera- tion, which loomed so large in the minds of wartime planners, has largely been ignored by the war’s chroni- clers. This omission is odd, because the humanitar- ian aspect of the liberation forms one of the most im- pressive legacies of the period 1944–45, and stands as a testament to the basic decency of the Allied cause. Americans and Britons did not wish merely to destroy; they also wished to repair and to heal. They had already given so much to defeat Hitler, yet they also took on the additional burden of humanitarian relief, mobilizing in an unprecedented fashion to send to Europe nurses,

doctors, relief workers, and an avalanche of food, med- ical supplies, clothing, and goods that could provide Europeans with the means to sustain themselves in the aftermath of total war.

Of course, such efforts to help liberated civilians served a military purpose. In December 1944, with the Allied armies gathering for the final assault into Ger- many, Dean Acheson, the razor-sharp, influential as- sistant secretary of state, set out in a brief memoran- dum for Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s special assistant, his views on the importance of caring for lib- erated peoples of Europe. “ The war,” Acheson wrote, “can be lost in the liberated countries. It cannot be won without success in the liberated countries.” By this, he meant that as the great armies of liberation passed through Europe on their way into Germany, they would have to do more than destroy the German armies. They would have to offer food, medicine, shelter, and most important, the opportunity for work and a promise of a better future. Liberated peoples, Acheson believed, “are the most combustible material in the world. They are fighting people. They are violent and restless. They have suffered unbearably.” To ignore them now, to fail to meet their needs, to leave their nations in shambles without attending to their economic and social con- cerns, would invite “agitation and unrest,” which would

lead to “arbitrary and absolutist controls. Then follows the overthrow of governments, with rival aspirants for the succession from the right and the left.” This was a dire portrait of liberated peoples, facing scarcity, frus- tration, and hunger, falling into civil war. As Acheson wrote, this very scenario was unfolding in Greece and Yugoslavia; such scenes might multiply across the con- tinent, drawing the great powers into further conflict. In such a scenario, the great campaigns of liberation would have been for nought.

“ To win the war requires that we win the battle of the liberated countries,” concluded Acheson. But how was this to be done? Fortunately for the Allied cause, a new institution had been created in late 1943 to ad- dress precisely this matter. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), funded almost exclusively by the United States and Britain, set out to organize a gigantic global relief effort of a kind never before attempted, one that would dwarf the pri- vate relief efforts of the First World War. At a time of scarcity in food and medicine, and a period of severe shortages of shipping that could carry such materials across the ocean to the theaters of war, UNRRA sought to mobilize the world’s supplies on behalf of liberated Europe. It was a huge challenge, one that came close to failure and never entirely fulfilled its leaders’ ex-

pectations. Nonetheless, UNRRA served as a beacon for thousands of citizens from around the world who volunteered to work for UNRRA in the field, trying to restart the most basic elements of life in a broken con- tinent. For the millions of people who benefited from its work, UNRRA offered relief as well as that rarest of commodities in 1945, hope for a humane future.
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Soup kitchens and medical aid stations, DDT dust- ings and registration cards, stinking straw mattresses on dirt floors, borrowed clothes, ill-fitting shoes, flea bites, lice, filth, coughing, and foul-smelling people: these were the daily realities for millions of people in Europe at war’s end, but none suffered these indigni- ties as much as the eight million displaced persons that the war unleashed. These were the men and wom- en whom the German war machine had sucked into the infernal industries of the Reich; they came from Rus- sia, Poland, France, Italy, and a dozen other countries that the Germans had ransacked for forced labor. The great majority of them wanted nothing more than to go home, and as the Third Reich collapsed, millions of them flowed out onto the roads of central Europe, trekking homeward along byways already choked with military vehicles, soldiers, and endless refugee col- umns. UNRRA worked hard to make this passage be- tween war and home a tolerable one. But UNRRA could

not answer every call. There were far more needy souls than could easily be cared for by international orga- nizations. Allied armies, faced with such a huge flood of people, proved somewhat less interested in caring for displaced peoples than they were in sorting them out and getting them shipped back whence they came. And so it all began again: great clattering boxcars full of ashen, gray, exhausted people set out across Europe, threading their way across the burned earth, bearing their woeful cargo home.