Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  It is, of course, true that the object of the Kriegswirtschaftsverordnung was to meet wartime difficulties. However, the ordinance has not yet been repealed and the scarcity of goods which was the reason for the provisions of sections 22 to 28 on ‘war prices’ still subsists and appears to have been accentuated since 1939. This applies particularly to food and cigarettes. There does not, therefore, seem to be a sufficient reason for assuming that the charge of selling English cigarettes at an excessive price would be dismissed in the German courts on account of objection c. On the other hand, there is no absolute certainty that such a charge would lead to a conviction in the courts.32

  The only certain way to limit the black market to any extent would have been the reliable provision of adequate rations, and that was never wholly the case in any of the zones. If the Germans did not have enough to eat or keep warm, and were either unable or forbidden by myriad occupation regulations to create the means of paying for these necessities, and German money was more or less without value in any case, then the development of a parallel economy (or, more brutally expressed, black market) was inevitable.

  ‘The cigarette,’ said another British report, this time a survey of large-scale black market operations prepared by the CCG’s Economic Information Section in Berlin, ‘is the begin all and end all of the black market. It has replaced the Reich mark as normal currency. Together with chocolate and alcohol derived from allied stores and canteens, the cigarette is probably one of the biggest single threats to financial stability in the country.’33

  The writer of the report concluded:

  Illegal trading in Germany and from Germany beyond its frontiers in addition to ordinary black market activities have reached unpre­cedented proportions which threaten to ruin what little remains of her financial and economic structure. Whilst Berlin has developed into the international centre of these illegal transactions, other cities and towns in the Western zones are also of great consequence. In the British Zone, Hamburg is outstanding, whilst in the American Zone Frankfurt and Munich hold the leading places.

  All nationalities appear to be involved, including a fair number of Allied personnel now working in Germany in an official capacity.

  Practically each individual investigation unearths some new aspect of this black picture and brings forth a further list of personalities who are involved in it . . .34

  The report is thoroughly bleak in tone. However, as such reports will, it recommended energetic further action. There is no indication that any action which took place then, or later, seriously dented the power of the parallel economy.

  And, of course, many Allied personnel were intimately and quite matter-of-factly involved in the black market at all levels. The same soldiers who might one day be manning roadblocks to catch German black market operators would then go back to the NAAFI or the mess of an evening and consume liquor and food obtained at some mutual private profit from those same dubious sources.

  According to Lieutenant Maurice Smelt of the Black Watch, stationed in Duisburg, the situation was pretty much universal:

  Our mess ran on the black market until the day the SIB turned up at the Gordons [the Gordon Highlanders, also stationed in Duisburg] and told the Gordons exactly how they had been catering for the past months and they had better change their ways or there would be trouble. As soon as we heard about that we of course cleaned up our act so that when they came to us it was all all right. But the moment they had gone, we went back to the old way of operating.

  Given that you would pay servants in cigarettes, how can you take a high moral line?

  The suffering of the helpless mass provided, of course, an opportunity for a privileged or ruthless few. The fact that, by Smelt’s admission, men from his own regiment – many drawn from the least salubrious sections of Glasgow’s population – for some time also controlled illegal operations in the Duisburg docks, after a manner not unknown to Al Capone and his disciples, functions as a kind of poisonous icing on that particular cake. Several were finally arrested and, according to Smelt, who acted as a courts martial officer, at least one soldier was executed for what was effectively a gangland murder committed while under His Majesty’s command.35

  If home-grown food supplies in Germany were inadequate, food had to be imported, but who was to pay for this? Not the Germans, because they were unable to produce the coal and manufactured goods that would have supplied the necessary foreign exchange. Why was this? In large part, because Germans simply were not physically strong enough to hew the coal and roll the steel that would build up the country’s export trade and pay for food. They were not physically strong enough because rations were inadequate. And German currency was worth only a little more than nothing. Therefore food had to be imported and paid for by the occupying powers . . . and so the story continued.

  After Morgenthau, and JCS 1067, and all the talk of making the Germans suffer, just a few months into the occupation the British and the Americans found themselves trapped in the vicious circle that was punitive post-war policy.

  The London Times expressed the problem clearly in the second autumn after the end of the war:

  The evidence of a deterioration in German physique over the last few months as a result of malnutrition is irresistible, and of all the forces inhibiting economic recovery in Germany this is inevitably the most far-reaching. It reduces the efficiency of industrial workers both directly by its effect on health and indirectly by drawing them from their jobs into the search for off-the-ration food. The normal rate of absenteeism exceeds 20 percent; and industrial productivity is at an exceptionally low standard. Food shortages also contribute to the progressive demoralization which can be traced in the economy of the British zone. The lack of a firm foundation, however low, upon which to build and to plan leads inevitably to a frustrating and disruptive effect.36

  Back in London, powerful voices, including many on the left wing of British politics, were pressing loudly for more aid to Germany and for a freeing-up of restrictions on aid by private individuals and organisations to alleviate shortages among the defeated population.

  In the autumn of 1945, Victor Gollancz, a well-known left-wing publisher (and a Jew) and the Labour MP Richard Stokes, who had also protested against area bombing by the RAF during the war and had raised the issue of the destruction of Dresden in Parliament, had founded the ‘Save Europe Now’ (SEN) campaign. Supporters included the philosopher Bertrand Russell and Bishop Bell of Chichester (like Stokes, a veteran of the wartime Bombing Restriction Committee). Despite the broad nature of its title, SEN in fact campaigned mostly on behalf of the suffering population of Germany and, more specifically, of the British Zone. It proposed, among other things, a scheme for British consumers to voluntarily forego part of their rations for the benefit of unnamed foreign civilians (in practice, as the organisation’s activities would show, mostly Germans).37

  The tireless and in most ways impeccably decent Gollancz, co-founder of the influential Left Book Club and founder of the eponymous publishing house, had led a wartime campaign to save what was left of European Jewry from extermination. Once the war ended, he switched to protesting against the expulsion of Germans from the eastern provinces and the Sudetenland. Neither cause, although wholly justified, succeeded. A skilled publicist for both himself and others, one problem with Gollancz was that the notion of balance seemed alien to him. Once he had decided on his opinion, there was, it seemed, no other to be tolerated. Nevertheless, Gollancz was held in high regard in the leftist circles now in power in London (they included many individuals whose books he had published), and very well connected. ‘Emotional but influential’, as the British Labour Prime Minister Attlee acknowledged ruefully.

  Gollancz’s leadership of SEN lent the campaign great energy and passion, but also a proneness to gaffes and insensitivity. When, before Christmas 1946, the British Food Minister, John Strachey – formerly an ally of Gollancz and co-founder of the Left Book Club – announced that hard-pressed British
consumers would be granted modest extra rations of poultry, meats, sweets and sugar over the festive season, Gollancz branded the government and his old friend ‘shameless’. ‘Have our Christian statesmen no idea of what is at present happening in Germany?’ he thundered in a letter to the liberal News Chronicle. ‘Obviously not, or they would not make such idiotic announcements.’38

  Among other things, SEN also published figures on the prevalence of hunger oedema (swelling due to malnutrition) in British-occupied Hamburg and in the Ruhr, as well as of tuberculosis, both supplied by campaigning German doctors. These turned out, on close inspection, to be seriously exaggerated.39

  All the same, the efforts of SEN and other pressure groups, including powerful American-based charities, eventually began to pay off. They were clearly right to argue that the occupation authorities alone could not cope with the situation in Germany. In the USA, an alliance of the Cooperative of American Remittances to Europe (identified by the acronym CARE, after which the famous food aid packages would eventually be known), the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, the Catholic Relief Services, as well as Unitarians, Mennonites and others, had been pressing since the summer of 1945 for access to Germany. Under the umbrella title of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies (ACVA), they were permitted early in the new year of 1946 to consult in Berlin with the American occupation authorities.

  After Eisenhower’s return to Washington to succeed George C. Marshall as Army Chief of Staff, General Lucius D. Clay became de facto Military Governor of the American Zone in Germany. Clay was still technically subordinate to Eisenhower’s successor as C-in-C Europe, air force General Joseph T. McNarney, but there was no doubt he was the man in day-to-day charge.

  Now fighting a war of attrition of his own against entrenched Washington bureaucracy, determined to overcome persistent transport bottlenecks and raise the quantity of American food imports to Germany, Clay nevertheless resisted the charities’ presence. He especially disliked their promotion of certain particularly urgently deserving segments among the German population. The General, a technocrat to the last, also considered that yet more ‘bleeding-heart’ American charity workers swarming over the zone would not only prove a nuisance but would take food away from the natives – a suspicion that, it has been suggested, may have been related to Clay’s Southern roots and inherited dislike of ‘carpetbaggers’, the bloodsucking northern careerists who had allegedly infested the old Confederate states after they lost the civil war.40

  Despite the fact that thirty-four US senators had signed a petition demanding Germany and Austria be opened up to the ministrations of private relief organisations,41 and despite alarming articles by the increasing numbers of American journalists now touring Germany with a brief to expose the conditions there, Clay remained obdurate in not permitting the aid organisations to take over.

  Like their counterparts in the British Zone, the American Military Government’s employees and their ultimate masters in Washington were aware that the public at home’s tolerance of sacrifice on behalf of the Germans was limited. At the beginning of 1946, when questioned by pollsters in three different ways about the food problem, Americans came up with three noticeably different answers. At first, when reminded that ‘the health of many Germans, including children’, would suffer under present rations, and asked if therefore Germans should be given more food, 58 per cent answered ‘yes’, 35 per cent ‘no’ and 7 per cent had no opinion. When asked if America should send more food even if the British and the Soviets did not increase rations in their zones, the numbers dipped – 47 per cent for feeding, 43 per cent for not feeding and 10 per cent of no opinion. Finally, a dramatic reversal occurred when Americans were reminded that ‘People in the liberated countries might get somewhat less food if the Germans got more’. Suddenly only 37 per cent thought the defeated nation should be fed, 52 per cent that it should not – with 11 per cent undecided.42

  All the same, concessions were made, such as licensing the sending of special aid to starving German children to supplement the extra rations already provided for, a procedure already adopted in the British Zone. It would take until the end of 1946 – as Germany, along with the rest of northern Europe, faced the most severe winter for many years – until all the disagreements were ironed out and the food charities were allowed complete access (as the ‘Committee of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany’ – or CRALOG). The sending of ex-army food parcels (the first of the CARE packages) to individuals and families in Germany had been permitted from June of that year. A few weeks later, the British, despite the problems with their own population’s rations, also relented, as, eventually, did the French.

  The original CARE package was based on the ration packs that had been stockpiled for use by American troops during the invasion of the Japanese mainland planned for 1946. The A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the invasion never took place. It was therefore decided to release the packs to individual Americans for sending to friends and relations in Europe (cost, including shipping, $10). When the first packages arrived at Le Havre in May 1946, at this time still exclusively for non-German addressees, they each consisted of:

  • 1 lb beef in broth

  • 1 lb steak and kidney

  • 8 oz liver loaf

  • 8 oz corned beef

  • 12 oz luncheon loaf (Spam or similar)

  • 8 oz bacon

  • 2 lb margarine

  • 1 lb lard

  • 1 lb fruit preserves

  • 1 lb honey

  • 1 lb raisins

  • 1 lb chocolate

  • 1 lb sugar

  • 8 oz egg powder

  • 2 lb whole-milk powder

  • 2 lb coffee

  By the end of 1946, CRALOG had sent 10,000 tons of food and clothing to Germany. CARE exported to Germany 550,000 packages for distribution, while by December the weight of private food parcels sent directly to recipients had reached seventeen million pounds per month.43

  The new system produced winners and losers. It alleviated the problem for many, but left others still struggling on the normal ration. This would remain inadequate despite all the imports and charity relief, as well as the Military Governments’ increased targeting of vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly and pregnant women. Suddenly, those Germans who had friends or relatives abroad, like those with connections to rural food producers, became a privileged class. It was also true that the Americans used the gift of CARE packages as a way of ‘rewarding’ their own ‘favourite’ Germans44 – not quite as exquisite in its hypocrisy as the privileging by the Soviets of those tame German communists, with their three-course meals (including wine) and requisitioned villas, but all the same a cause of widespread resentment.

  When it came to feeding the German people, the Allies’ progression from punitive deprivation to reluctant concession, inevitable as it seems with hindsight, had occurred with painful slowness. It was partly a result of common humanity finally outweighing the urge for revenge, an emotion that would always struggle to survive the daily human contact that was the unavoidable result of a long occupation.

  It also came from a dawning realisation that unless Germany was allowed to work, and produce, to an extent resembling her pre-war capacity, the country would for ever be a basket case, a mendicant nation dependent on the victors for its physical survival. A nation that might then, as it had after 1918, turn viciously against its tormentors.

  Last of all, with the rapidly growing disagreements between the West and Russia (France was another, more complicated case) coming to preoccupy Anglo-American policymakers, there was another plain truth about the problem, which General Clay expressed very early in his rule as America’s viceroy in Germany, when the average ration in the Soviet Zone was considerably higher than that in the American Zone:

  There is no choice between becoming a Communist on 15000 calories and a believer in democracy on 1000 calories. It is my sincere belief that our p
roposed ration allowances in Germany will not only defeat our objectives in middle Europe but will pave the road to a communist Germany.45

  Or, as Truman’s Secretary for the Army put it in a speech a little further down the line, the Allies had a stark set of alternatives when it came to the post-war management of the Germans: ‘Starve ’em, shoot ’em, or feed ’em.’46

  There was never going to be an alternative to the last of the Secretary’s options. Allied food policy had been misguided and often vindictive, especially in the early months, and bureaucratic and incompetent at times, too, but Clay and his fellow military governors were no genocidal Goerings, and their advisers were nothing like icy-hearted Herbert Backe. Post-war, the Germans suffered more than was necessary, even given the destruction and chaos caused by Hitler’s War. Some died who might and should otherwise have lived. And especially during 1946–7, at a crucial time, when the conquered population experienced the worst deprivations with still no glimmer of hope, many felt a huge resentment against the Allies. There was, ominously, even a stubborn nostalgia for the old Germany.

  In surveys carried out on behalf of the American Military Government in the post-war years, when asked the question whether National Socialism was ‘a bad idea, or a good idea badly carried out’, the population of the American Zone consistently showed a plurality for the view that it had been a ‘good idea’, and showed an actual majority for that and ‘no opinion’ combined. The view that Nazism had been simply and unequivocally a ‘bad idea’ was never held by more than 40 per cent of respondents, and by the end of the third post-war winter that number had declined to around 30 per cent with double that number – 60 per cent – now insisting that Nazism had been a ‘good idea’ gone wrong.47