Year Zero (9 page)

The Soviet authorities in the Eastern occupation zones, where much of German agriculture, as well as industry (Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz), was located, did nothing to rebuild German economic capacity. What remained of factories and other assets was looted. Machinery, railway cars, tram cars, trucks, all disappeared in convoys headed east. Bank vaults were emptied of gold and bonds, research institutes stripped of archives, and many artworks were confiscated as war reparations. And there was nothing even the German Communist Party leaders, who had just returned from Nazi prisons or exile in Moscow, could do to stop their fraternal Russian patrons.

The same thing happened in Manchuria, now northeastern China, where the Japanese had ruled over a colonial puppet state called Manchukuo since the early 1930s. Manchukuo was the industrial powerhouse of the Japanese empire. The Soviet Union, urged by the United States, had declared war on Japan just before the end, on August 8.

On August 9, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, Soviet troops invaded Manchukuo. Heavy industrial plants, modern railways, mining operations, built with great ruthlessness to the local population by the Japanese, were systematically stripped and the material transported to the Soviet Union. Entire industrial plants were dismantled and taken away in a steady parade of trains. In the end the trains themselves, and even the wooden railroad ties, were often stolen and moved to the Soviet Union. This happened before the Chinese had a chance to take Manchuria back. Neither the Chinese Communists nor Chiang's Nationalists would in any case have been able to put a stop to this gigantic exercise in asset-stripping.
And the Soviets would no doubt have done the same in northern Japan, if they had had the time to invade, which was one reason why the U.S. had been so keen to end the war in the Pacific swiftly.

Germans in the Soviet zone, including the communists, were in a bind, for even as their economy was being plundered, they were still required to feed the Soviet occupation troops, as well as themselves. In many instances, German workers would try to reassemble pillaged factories with bits and pieces of leftover machinery, only to see them taken apart again. When the workers protested, they would get beaten up. None of this helped to create much sympathy among German workers for the communist cause. A popular ditty of the time went like this:

Welcome, liberators!

You take from us eggs, meat, and butter, cattle and feed

And also watches, rings, and other things

You liberate us from everything, from cars and machines.

You take along with you train cars and rail installations.

From all this rubbish—you liberated us!

We cry for joy.

How good you are to us.

How terrible it was before—and how nice now.

You marvellous people!
²⁹

However, the rations promised to keep Germans alive in the Soviet zone were no lower than in the other Allied zones of occupation: around 1,500 calories a day for a working person; 1,200 calories is generally considered to be the minimum necessary for an adult to stay healthy. In fact, most people in the cities were lucky to get half of that in 1945. Even when there was enough bread, there was little in the way of fresh food. What saved Germans and Japanese from catastrophe in the first year after the war were the military supplies. When Allied troops in Japan were reduced in the fall from 600,000 to 200,000, large amounts of army food, such as corned beef and beans, were handed over to the Japanese government for
distribution. It made for a diet most Japanese were not used to. Some genteel Japanese ladies complained that beans caused embarrassing instances of flatulence. As one such person complained to a guest, “The new ration makes one so ill-mannered.”
³⁰
But without it, they would have starved. In the summer of 1946, Tokyo citizens still received only 150 calories from Japanese sources.
³¹

Even with Allied supplies, however, most people in Europe and Japan still had to rely on that vast criminal network, the black market. The money economy had been replaced in many places by forms of barter, with cigarettes as the main currency. For the occupation troops it was an irresistible opportunity. In the Netherlands, Canadian cigarettes, especially the Sweet Caporal brand, were the most valuable. Black market dealers bought them for one guilder each, and sold them for five guilders. A Canadian serviceman could have a thousand cigarettes sent from home for three dollars, and make almost 1,000 guilders in profit.
³²

And you could buy almost anything with cigarettes: fine antique watches, opera glasses, diamond rings, Leica cameras, the kind of things people would gladly exchange for fuel and food. Cigarettes also bought more essential items. The German writer Erich Kästner was in the Austrian countryside in May, watching an endless trail of German soldiers walking, limping, hobbling on their way home from eastern battlefronts. He wrote in his diary: “To get a little cash, they sell cigarettes. The price varies from one to three marks each. There is a constant demand for civilian clothes. The supply is virtually nil. Someone in the house next door gets 450 cigarettes for an old pair of trousers. I wouldn't mind exchanging a pair of trousers for that, but I've only got the one pair I'm wearing. The trade and the result are immoral. With only one pair of trousers one cannot do business.”
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Sakaguchi Ango, a sardonic Japanese essayist and short story writer, often classified together with other writers of the immediate postwar period as the “Ruffians” or “Decadents,” noted how quickly young soldiers and airmen who were trained to die gloriously for the emperor transformed themselves into black marketers. Just so, war widows forgot all
about loyalty to their fallen husbands and found new lovers. That's the way it was, Ango wrote. And that was fine with him. For through degradation, by tasting human greed and desire in its rawest state, the Japanese would rediscover their common humanity. Out with idiotic emperor worship! Out with heroic death in suicide airplanes! “We haven't fallen this low because we lost the war. We fall because we are human, because we are alive.”
³⁴

There is no doubt that many veterans of the Japanese Imperial armed forces found their way to the black market, together with Korean and Taiwanese mobsters, gangs of Japanese outcasts, and all the other flotsam of a broken-down society. A saying at the time was: “Women become
panpan
, men become carriers for the Black Market.”
³⁵
There were more than fifteen thousand black markets spread across Japan, mostly around railway stations. The remnants of some are still there, such as the Ameyoko-cho, possibly named after the Americans, a teeming strip of small food and clothes stores along the railway line near Tokyo's Ueno Station. People went there to acquire essential items to stay alive, or to eat at one of the thousands of flimsy food stalls offering anything from fried frogs to stews made of offal, taken from a variety of animals if one was lucky; there were rumors that human remains found their way into the stews as well.

Anything was bought and sold, including old hospital blankets stained with blood. In Manchuria, Japanese colonizers, who had been lording it over the Chinese for fifteen years, panicked by the invasion of the Soviet troops and unable to return to Japan (most transport was reserved for armed forces and high-ranking Japanese officials), survived by selling all their possessions on the black market: kimonos, furniture, antiques. And sometimes even their babies. Colonial myths about the native superiority of Japanese intelligence made Japanese babies desirable, especially to Chinese peasants who needed the future manpower. Fujiwara Sakuya, who later became vice president of the Bank of Japan, was a child in Manchuria when the war was over. Both his parents sold their possessions on the black market. He remembers seeing Chinese shouting: “Babies for sale? Babies for sale?” The going price was between 300 and 500 yen.
Sometimes babies were bought and immediately sold again for a higher price.
³⁶

Much of the black market items in Japan itself came from military supplies, sold by Allied servicemen to Japanese gangsters. I once spoke to a retired Japanese gangster whose eyes misted over with fond memories as he recounted tales of those good old days when he made so much money channeling goods from the American PX stores to the black market that he could drive around in a large American car stuffed to the roof with bills. But he was a minor player compared to far better-placed Japanese, who had managed to conceal 70 percent of military stocks at the end of the war. What remained, including all kinds of machinery and construction materials, was handed over by the Americans to the Japanese government to be used for public welfare. That, too, largely disappeared, along with the looted stuff, and made many Japanese officials, some of them former war criminals, very wealthy.

There were obvious differences between Germans and Japanese regarding culture, politics, and history. But in terms of human behavior under similar circumstances they had much in common. One effect of a criminalized economy, exploiting people's hardship, was a breakdown of social solidarity—part of the “degradation” described by Sakaguchi Ango. It was every man, or more often, every woman, for him- or herself. In the words of Heinrich Böll: “Everyone possessed just their lives and, in addition, whatever fell into their hands: coal, wood, books, building materials. Everyone justifiably could have accused everyone else of theft.”
³⁷

And accusing others is what many people did. In Germany, Jews and DPs were often blamed for the violence and racketeering. In Japan, it was the Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese, known as “third country nationals”—neither Japanese nor Americans—who were seen as the worst criminals. Many of them had been shipped to Japan as slave workers. Korean and Taiwanese gangs certainly competed with Japanese for the spoils, just as there were Jews and DPs who engaged in the black market; they, too, had to find a way to survive. Bergen-Belsen became one of the main hubs
of black market activities. Many DPs—Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yugoslavs—were stuck in camps for years, without proper facilities. Carl Zuckmayer, in his report about Germany and Austria, warned that there “was no way to stamp out anti-Semitism in Germany, as long as there is no international solution to the DP problem.”
³⁸
Actually, Germans often failed to make distinctions—Latvians who had volunteered for work in Hitler's Reich, or Jews, they were all “foreigners.” Sometimes Germans had to go to these “foreigners” to buy goods at exorbitant prices. In fact, however, the majority of racketeers, and certainly the most powerful ones, were not Jews or foreigners at all, but Germans.

Major Irving Heymont was the U.S. military officer in charge of an area of Bavaria that contained large Jewish DP camps, notably Landsberg, the town where Hitler had once served time in prison (and wrote
Mein Kampf
). Heymont observed that “Like many individuals in Germany, the camp people are active in the black market . . . Their activity for the most part consists of simple bartering for comfort items and fresh food.”
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He also noted that the “few big operators” in the black market were former businessmen or criminals. They did what came naturally to them. This was their metier.

Simple prejudice was one reason why Jews, or third country nationals and other foreigners, were regarded as particularly egregious criminals. This common human trait, made worse by harsh conditions, was further sharpened by the common perception that the Allies privileged the foreigners, that American MPs in Japan gave the Koreans free rein, or that the Allied authorities made sure Jews lived lavishly at the expense of innocent Germans. There was a kernel of truth to this, even though very few Jews, let alone those languishing in DP camps, lived lavishly, or even comfortably. But only a kernel. For in fact, Allied officials themselves were not immune to anti-Semitism or racism. General Patton was perhaps a little more extreme than most, or at least more outspoken, in his contempt for Jewish survivors he found at the Dachau concentration camp, whom he described as “lower than animals.”
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Even though General Eisenhower
instructed Americans in occupied Germany to give Jewish DPs priority over Germans, this was often ignored. Many Americans seem to have found Germans, as well as former collaborators or refugees from the Baltic states, easier to get on with than the traumatized Jews.
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More than anything, blaming the foreigners was part of a wider sense of denial, a refusal to face up to what Germans and Japanese had done to others. It was easier to feel sorry for themselves. A reporter for
Yank
magazine, walking around Berlin in August, saw a German woman in a tattered dress and large men's shoes, sticking out her tongue at a female Russian soldier. “You are well fed and we Germans starve,” she said, before spitting on the ground.
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But there were dissident voices even then. An article in the
Berliner Tagesspiegel
deplored “the erection of walls to shield oneself against the gruesome crimes against Poles, Jews, and prisoners; the stupidly arrogant ingratitude for the gift of foodstuffs received from America and England . . .”
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In time, of course, the black market economy was gradually replaced by a more regulated one. But the long-term effects of those lawless times were significant, especially in Germany and Japan. For postwar economic collapse and the ensuing black market were great destroyers of old class distinctions. Women from grand families had to trundle to the countryside to barter family heirlooms for food. Poor peasants suddenly grew cash-rich. It was not rare to see Japanese village women stepping through muddy rice fields in beautiful antique kimonos which had once cost a fortune. Impoverished daughters of the aristocracy were compelled to marry successful, and often far from scrupulous, nouveaux riches. But the postwar chaos also created some freedom to set up enterprises unhindered by more established competitors. In 1945, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop in a bomb-damaged department store in Tokyo. It was the beginning of the Sony Corporation.