Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  At lunchtime today we were photographing a [German] family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral.

  The cathedral now with all the damage around immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below – and then returning to Düsseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meet sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets.

  In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and fire hoses in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live.15

  Jennings held the German people responsible for their own fate – among his wartime films he had directed Silent Village, a powerful dramatised documentary about the German destruction of the Czech village of Lidice after the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. He did not, for instance, feel guilty at dining in style in hotel restaurants and British officers’ messes while black-clad German waiters (apparently known to the British with cruel humour as ‘dwarves’) scurried around, desperate to please their new masters. And, rather like Wladimir Gelfand, he commented disapprovingly on the listlessness of the natives without realising how much of a role hunger played in their condition. However, Jennings also knew, as he wrote in another letter home, ‘that nothing is clearer straight away than that we cannot – must not – leave them to stew in their own juice . . . well, anyway, it’s a hell of a tangle’.16

  Theoretically, the British Zone – like all the zones – was supposed to be self-sufficient. In practice, however, given the alternative of letting the Germans ‘stew in their own juice’, London had to feed them, at least in sufficient quantity to stave off famine.

  Since Britain itself was forced to import heavily from America to feed itself – one of the reasons for the introduction of bread rationing in 1946 was the effects of the longshoremen’s and tugboat men’s strikes in the US – it had nothing to spare for Germany from its own domestic resources. Therefore, if Britain was to fulfil its obligations, however modest, to the conquered population for which it had assumed responsibility, it had to use up yet more precious foreign currency to stop them from starving.

  The once-strong motive of revenge, not to say any residual attachment to Morgenthau-style de-industrialisation, began rapidly to fade in the light of the terrific burden that a helpless Germany represented for a Britain that was itself economically prostrate. Nor was the planned shutdown or dismantling of ‘warlike’ industries as straightforward a matter as it had once seemed. In the case of chemical plants necessary to the production of explosives, for instance, it was true that their liquidation would render Germany incapable of waging another war. It was, however, the case that these same plants, using the same ingredients, also produced the fertilisers so vital to the revival of German agriculture and to the feeding of the zone, with its twenty million largely urban inhabitants.

  At the beginning of 1946, the inter-allied Control Commission ordered drastic limitations on German production of synthetic ammonia, just such a dual-use chemical. In the last years of the war, on Hitler’s orders, supplies of this substance had been diverted exclusively to making explosives, leaving German farmers desperately short of artificial fertilisers even before the post-war crisis. The Control Council’s equally short-sighted decision would, it was calculated, cause in the British Zone alone a further shortfall in grain production of three million tons or seven million tons of potatoes.17

  By spring 1946, the food situation was truly catastrophic. Between March and July 1946 – at the same time as those British housewives were declaring their unwillingness to go without in order to feed the Germans – the zone had a shortfall of about 600,000 tons of grain. Potatoes were simply not available for a while. And this despite the fact that the British were importing an average of 96,000 tons of food monthly to Germany from their own nutritionally beleaguered island.

  When in July 1946 the British were the first of the occupiers to appoint a German-staffed ‘Central Office for Nutrition and Agriculture’ (Zentralamt für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft), almost its first task was to take responsibility for practically halving the official ration from its already painfully low level of provision. The daily fat allowance, at seven grams per day, was roughly a quarter of the recommended allowance for maintenance of health.18 The reports of the busy, overwhelmed British officials trying to cope with this appalling situation show a whole complex of problems that caused these tragic shortfalls.

  First came the failure to agree with the Soviets and the French on a central authority that could coordinate the German economy, which meant – among other things – that food surplus areas such as the east of the country (under Russian and Polish control) did not deliver to the urbanised Western zones, especially the British, as they had before 1945. The lack of a central authority and therefore integrated economic and financial policy also meant that the old Reich mark, already seriously depleted before the war ended, rapidly became all but worthless. No one trusted it.

  Second, there was the unreliability of imports from abroad. In the exceptionally severe winter of 1946–7, for instance, instead of the usual wheat the British Zone found itself replete with large quantities of North American maize, which local bakers and householders had no idea what to do with. There were few German sources that could make up for this problem.

  Third, the British authorities, struggling to feed the industrial cities of the Ruhr, could not even rely on Lower Saxony, a relatively productive agricultural area also under British control, to supply North Rhine-Westphalia (which included the Ruhr) with meat, beet sugar, vegetables and grains. Lower Saxony had food problems of its own, and all the bureaucratic outrage in the world could not make it fulfil its imposed quotas.

  As for Bavaria, in the American Zone, then as now a considerable producer of meat and dairy products, although it agreed to supply substantial quotas to the British Zone – substantial enough seriously to benefit the size of the ration available to the population – the produce was simply not delivered. Despite the notionally close collaboration between the British and American zones, culminating in the ‘Bizone’ agreement that came into effect on 1 January 1947, for month after month the separatist-inclined Bavarians did not keep their promise.

  Fourth, even when the food was available, the German Railways (Reichsbahn) was often so short of wagons that the provisions sat in ports or storage depots long past the planned date of use.

  Finally, there were bizarre background events that could only have happened in occupied Germany, and at a time like this – such as the sudden swoop of a Russian dismantling squad on a factory at Dinslaken, on the northern outskirts of the Ruhr, where tin was produced for making cans. Almost before the British knew it, the entire plant had been stripped and disassembled, then shipped off to the Soviet Union as ‘reparations’, creating an instant shortage of the cans used in the distribution of nutritionally vital preserved foods throughout the British Zone.19

  The British fumed impotently at all these blocks and bottlenecks and hindrances, and in early 1947 were forced to announce once more that the ration could not be fulfilled.20 The result was serious unrest, with food riots and ‘food strikes’, especially in the
all-important but desperately ill-supplied industrial towns of the Ruhr, where there had already been mass meetings to protest at the food and fuel shortages the previous month. In some parts of Germany’s greatest industrial conurbation, the daily calorific allowance was down, temporarily, to around 800–850, true starvation level.21

  The striking workers made it clear that they were taking action not necessarily for themselves – since they were on rations for heavy workers they were relatively well off – but on behalf of their wives and children. In some of the speeches by the workers’ leaders, despite their denial of any political aims there were signs not just of a certain naivety but also of a return to wartime attitudes. At the massive Friedrich-Alfred-Hütte steelworks in Rheinhausen on the left bank of the Rhine opposite Duisburg, a trade union official addressed the strikers. His words were recorded in shorthand in English by a German policeman observing the meeting:

  Comrades,

  The present food situation forces us to this demonstration. We do not believe in transport difficulties. During the war immense quantities of bombs were brought to Germany by Allied aeroplanes. If these aeroplanes would start now to bring food to Germany, the German population would always be thankful to the pilots.

  We as your representatives will inform the City Council Meeting of our request. The demonstration shall help back up our request. The Landrat, the government and Mil.Gov are asked to be helpful in getting sufficient food.

  Everything shall go on with special discipline. Only cowards do not take part in this demonstration.

  This demonstration is not a political one but is only of an economic character.

  Within the next few days, demonstrations had spread to Hanover, where an estimated 10,000 protesters turned out, and Braunschweig, where ‘though the demonstration was orderly, a gang of hooligans afterwards marched through the town, smashed windows at the Military Government offices, and overturned a lorry and two cars’.22

  The strikes and demonstrations continued all through that spring, and included workers in Cologne and Hamburg. In Hamburg, half a million, including shipyard workers and dock workers, downed tools and flocked to a mass meeting addressed by a trade union leader, who demanded special rations for Hamburg and the Ruhr. He expressed the widespread distrust for the Germans administering the food supply on the British authorities’ behalf by demanding that distribution be controlled by trade union representatives.23

  It was significant that the British did not use force against the strikers, and nor did they arrest any of the leaders. This contrasted with the situation in the American and especially the French zones, where similar movements were greeted with the use of troops and the infliction of heavy prison sentences.24 A group of American relief workers, attached to the Quaker Friends’ Relief Service (FRS) in Koblenz, made a brief visit to the Ruhr during the winter of 1946–7 and felt both the hostility of the locals to the occupiers and the relative lack of policing compared with the French Zone where they were based:

  At the Dortmund railway station we stopped to take pictures of the completely shattered and gutted station building. I wish we hadn’t. To get the sun at our backs and get a good view of the building, we stood on the streetcar loading platform in the middle of the street in front of it. There must have been about 100 Germans on it waiting for the next three-car trolley to come. We were all relatively well-dressed, in pseudo-uniform . . . and had fancy cameras hanging from our necks. Our Volkswagen (FRS team’s) was the only auto in sight most of the time. Many of the Germans glowered at us sullenly. I could feel their glances like knives in our backs. I felt, probably mistakenly, that the tiniest provocation would result in our massacre at their bare hands . . .

  . . . There are very few English soldiers here – perhaps 20 in a town of 200,000. That may have something to do with it. There are 3,000 French, so Dr. Schaffer of the Santé Publique says, in Koblenz, a town of 53,000 . . .25

  It was broadly true that the left led the fight against hunger in the Western zones. However, perhaps the most grotesque difference between the lives of those Germans who served the Allied presence and the mass of the conquered people occurred not, as might have been expected, in any of the ‘capitalistic’ Western-controlled parts of the country, but in the Soviet Zone and the Soviet sectors of Berlin. Right from the start, the ready-made German communist elite in the East was openly privileged by their Soviet masters, and in a blatantly elitist fashion.

  An eyewitness reported the shock of outsiders who, on being admitted to Communist Party HQ in Berlin during 1945, when the general population was near to starving, found an entirely separate and hierarchical ration system at work. Meals supplied to Party members by the canteen kitchen were graduated entirely according to rank. Thus those of Party Secretary rank, the most senior, received a meal of several courses with wine, while section heads were entitled to a somewhat more modest but still enviably substantial meal. Rank-and-file Party workers got Eintopf (a mushy one-pot stew containing potato, pulses and greens, cooked in stock – with meat or sausage if you were lucky).26 It would have been hard for the average German, learning of such, for them, unimaginable luxury (even the Eintopf) not to have felt that the German communists, whatever their pretensions to solidarity, were essentially members of the occupying force.

  It was hardly surprising that, despite all the threats and the propaganda, many previously respectable Germans quickly lost all but the most vestigial sense of guilt when it came to trading in or benefiting from the black market. Either they would buy from or barter with dealers who assumed the risk of importing food into the towns, or they would travel out into the countryside and do direct deals with the now all-powerful farmers – naturally, at exorbitant prices. The black market did, of course, favour the relatively wealthy – those who had valuables to sell or barter, or large enough amounts of cash that even in the devalued state of the currency they could buy urgent necessities. Most industrial workers, for instance, had no such advantages.

  There was very limited deterrent effect in the fact that joint patrols of the Allied military and the German police visited farms to ensure that no produce was being hoarded for the black market, or that checkpoints were set up on bridges and at railway stations and travellers searched to ensure that they had acquired no black market goods on their travels. In the British Zone, from the spring of 1946, random searches were carried out on the highways by mobile police squads.27

  In the French Zone, railway stations and approach roads to cities such as Koblenz were also ruthlessly patrolled by the French-controlled police. ‘At the station, any food they found on people, they would confiscate . . . the French were horrible [ekelig] in that regard,’ recalls Marlies Weber (née Theby). As a girl she frequently went on ‘hamstering’ trips into the countryside around Koblenz with her family as a way of bolstering an unreliable ration that was in any case lower in the French Zone than in any other. They would return with their illegal provisions on foot, often using minor roads to re-enter the city in the hope of avoiding French patrols.28

  In the British Zone, the story was similar, although it seems that the British and the German police conducted raids on a sporadic but occasionally intense scale. Towards the end of March 1946, for instance, a ‘synchronized counter Black Market operation’ codenamed ‘Second Round’ was carried out in Westphalia province, which extended from the agricultural areas to the north and east to the outskirts of the Ruhr industrial area (Münster–Bielefeld–Dortmund–Hagen).

  The three-day operation seems to have mainly involved setting up random checkpoints and searching cars and their passengers (approximately 46,000 altogether). One hundred and eighty-eight mobile teams of German police, ‘assisted’ by British military personnel, arrested 128 civilians, with another 472 charged and 485 summoned to court at a future date for what were presumably relatively minor offences. ‘The articles confiscated,’ according to a report for the Black Market Standing Committee at Military Government (Mil.Gov) HQ in Münster, ‘we
re mainly items of food, but tobacco and cigarettes were also very much in evidence.’29

  An appendix to the report painstakingly – in fact excruciatingly – lists every single item confiscated during the course of this obviously time-consuming and expensive operation. Alongside the inevitable ‘15,325.8 kg potatoes’, ‘52.650 kg leguminous plants’ and ‘747 cigarettes’ are strange and surprising items – ‘10023 combs’, ‘1 tea set’, ‘1 tin of zinc-ointment’, ‘1 play-suit with cap’, and so on and on until it seems no simple item carried on the human person was exempt.30 This Sisyphean task was not helped by the slowness of the German courts, which was put down to staff shortages. At the end of March, before ‘Second Round’, the progress of current cases against alleged black market dealers stood as follows:

  Total cases brought

  160

  " convictions

  15

  " acquittals

  1

  " cases withdrawn

  4

  " cases outstanding

  14031

  There is absolutely no indication that the situation improved as the months wore on. One problem was the doubt in official German legal circles that the sale of cigarettes ‘at an excessive price’ was, in fact, an offence. The British, overwhelmed here as so often elsewhere in their post-war occupation, were forced to fall back on a set of emergency wartime economic regulations (Kriegswirtschaftsverordnung) dating from the Nazi regime (November 1940). When, following the local German State Prosecutor’s objections to the use of these regulations against cigarette traders, an opinion was sought from the Control Commission’s lawyers at its London headquarters, the eventual advice was predictably ambivalent. To objections that the Nazi-originated regulations applied only in wartime (‘objection c’), the report announced in a masterstroke of equivocation: