Salzburg was alive with visitors, mostly Austrians in from the country and villages to witness the opening ceremony of the Salzburg operas, an event previously set in motion by an MG staff member. Since I didn't know how to get a ticket to opening night of the opera, I settled for a good bed in an army billet in a requisitioned old castle and sneaked out to an Austrian restaurant for some of the incomparable Austrian coffee -- brewed from real coffee beans which had somehow surfaced after years of ersatz.
Next morning I bid my jeep driver "so long" and boarded the old workhorse of the army. C-47, which lumbered off the runway loaded with almost everything from beer to truck parts. I was the lone passenger. Our winding flight through the passes into the Bavarian Alps was, as always, breathtaking in beauty and when we broke out under the clouds in Southern Germany the doll-like picture-book villages below seemed as peaceful as a summer in a country which had never seen war. The appearance was deceiving as we were later to learn, but even then one could not but be impressed with the cleanliness, the carefully laid out villages, and the scrubbed and prosperous look of this part of Germany.
Our landing at Frankfurt Main Airport was rather inconspicuous. I had hoped at least to latch on to a jeep to take me to headquarters in Frankfurt, but as we approached the runway the pilot was ordered to land and hold at the end of the runway, nearly a mile from the main terminal. I was dumped off, bag and baggage, and lugged a valpack and a 50-pound dufflebag full of clothes, iron helmets, leggings, extra shoes, field jackets and woollen underware the mile through what seemed like a broiling sun.
I learned later that my discomfort resulted from the clearing of all runways for the arrival of General Eisenhower who was returning from Washington in a brand new DC-4 (an amazing plane for the time) which had made the trip non-stop in 16 hours by taking on extra tanks of fuel, something of a record.
My assignment to the "German Theatre," as the military people phrased it, came in a period of transition from the overall Allied Command, SHAEF, under General Dwight Eisenhower, to Military Government control of all Germany under a four-power Allied Commission -- US, Great Britain, France, and Russia. In the field instance, General Eisenhower was the boss on the Western side with General Zukov on the Russian side.
The agricultural staff under General Eisenhower had been under the direction of Colonel Omer Hermann, an old Farm Credit colleague with a mixed staff of Americans, British, and French. There had been little of the actual Military Government operations similar to my experience coming up from North Africa, to Sicily, Italy, and Austria. In Frankfurt there was a small group under Colonel Hermann working on ration levels, surveying potential supplies and in general getting ready for the job of feeding the civilian population. Down in Hoehst, a factory town west of Frankfurt, in the old I.G. Farben complex, was another group representing the American section of the Allied Commission. It was to be located in Berlin, headed by General Lucius Clay, and responsible for policy in the American zone operations. My orders to the theatre did not specify to which of these groups I was to be assigned.
Since SHAEF was breaking up, Colonel Hermann, was in the hospital and a small staff under Lieutenant Colonel Ben Thibadeau, another old agricultural acquaintance, was more or less set up in an office at Frankfurt, I decided to attach myself to this group. My final assignment after SHAEF breakup would be with the Hoehst group headed by another former agircultural colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Roy Kimmel.
I found a niche in the office and began to look around for something to do. They had not as yet named a real head of the Allied Commission staff in agriculture. I learned in due course the head man of the whole agricultural and food, forestry, and fisheries section would be Brigadier General Hugh B. Hester, a career army man and for much of the time during World War II in charge of the quartermaster depot in Philadelphia. He would be in Berlin with General Lucius Clay and Brigadier General William Draper. Overall policy decisions would be made by the various segments of the Allied Commission in Berlin; General Clay for the Americans, General Robinson for the British, General Koenig for the French, and General Sokolosky for the Russians.
Before the establishment of the Berlin headquarters the Commission had been composed of the four Commanding Generals of the Allied Armies: Eisenhower, Montgomery, Koenig, and Zukov. Since Thibadeau, Kimmel, and others were working mainly on the rationing system to be inaugurated to replace the German system, and computing the possible resources and the maximum ration level these resources would support.
I took on the job, more or less informally, of finding out the status of the wheat, barley, sugar, potato, oil seed and rye crops, much of which was still in the field in the American zone. Before his illness Colonel Hermann had made strong representations to headquarters to get prisoners of war with agricultural experience released so that they might furnish some of the manpower to garner the crops. The idea was accepted in principle but getting and selecting the prisoners, now headed back from Russia, Poland, France, the United States, Great Britain and many of the commonwealth countries, was something the army bureaucracy could hardly cope with on short order. Much of the harvest job fell to the women and children and old people still in the rural villages and on the little farms.
Colonel Hermann, once over his short illness, returned to the states and mustered out of the army. Lieutenant Colonel Thibadeau, the other main-stay carried over from SHAEF, took on a new civilian assignment in Paris. It soon developed that I was to be head of the Food, Agricultural, Fisheries, and Forestry operations division of the Frankfurt office with responsibility for delivering the various agricultural production items through the first processing.
The assigment was somewhat fuzzy. It was further complicated by lack of any clear authority to act. The whole economy of the American zone in West Germany, that which had not been destroyed by the bombing and the fighting, had come to a virtual standstill. Nothing moved or was undertaken by Germans themselves except by permission of the military. The military controlled fuel, transportation, food supplies, money -- the works. This, plus people struggling back to some sort of existence in their destroyed and bombed-out homes, made the outlook pretty bleak.
As a greenhorn from Italy, I decided to try to duplicate what my chief, Lieutenant Colonel Hartman in Italy had done -- take a problem to the very top. I sought and received an appointment -- one might call it an audience -- with General Eisenhower's chief of staff, the late Lieutenant General Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith. General Smith had the reputation of being rough but fair. After a few remarks on who I was and where I had come from, I broached the subject of action on opening factories, setting up machinery, loosening up transportation, labor, materials, (binder twine, horseshoes, etc.) and releasing prisoners so that the harvest could be gotten in promptly. I reported that I had flown over Southern Germany coming in and it appeared from a rather low altitude that fields all had been planted and were ripe with a good harvest, especially wheat, rye, and barley.
General Smith listened, but in the end said simply: "Don't get too worked up and concerned about these Germans, the policy is to make it hard on these SOBs to get going again."
I left with the remark that unless every ounce of food in the US zone was collected -- or unless food was brought in from somewhere -- a lot of Germans would starve in the winter. That ended the conversation, but were were to meet and argue more on many occasions in the future. The food policy for Germany, at the time was laid down in the famous Joint Chief of Staffs memorandum, JCS 1067. It said, in effect, that in the post-war period, Germany and the former enemies of the United States and European Allies would stand at the end of the line so far as food supplies were concerned. At a time of world-wide food shortage that meant that "if anyone starved, former enemies would starve first."
The agricultural situation in the American Zone presented particular problems. It was greatly fragmented and it was a typically European peasant situation. In many parts of Europe the peasant had to cling to his little fragment of inherited land as a means of survival. He was cut out of most of the welfare, work compensation, educational, and other government services which were enjoyed by the urban population. He fed himself first and sold what he could to take care of the minimal needs of his family. In Southern Germany, fall rains inevitably damaged much of the wheat, rye, and barley crops, and the struggle was always to get the grain in shocks (often cut by hand scythe) as quickly as possible and into the barn or other shelter for storage through the winter. Threshing was done during the winter months with small threshers in the barn, which sheltered the sheaves of wheat. The grain moved to markets in small amounts and in this way there was little need for the large storage and transport facilities common to a combine or even an ordinary binder harvesting system.
While our American Zone statistcally showed a surplus of food grains in the average year (that is, grains moved out of the area into the Ruhr) this was deceiving. Under the market system a great deal of grain come into Southern Germany from the area around Leipzig and replaced the grain which had moved up from the south into the Ruhr. With the Leipzig area under Russian control, very little of this grain would get into Southern Germany. That meant that if we did not collect and market the grain available in the south, trouble was ahead. This was the broad picture. How to do something about it in the turmoil and confusion of the moment was something else.
One afternoon I sat in my battered office and looked out the window at the much more battered and deserted Frankfurt and I saw two German civilian trucks across the street; a scene I had witnessed over and over during the past month.
These two trucks were apparently trucks which had been set aside by the Military to be used by civilians in hauling back prisoners of war, nurses, displaced persons and general strays to the vicinity of their original home. About half the persons on the trucks were former German soldiers coming home from a prison camp. This evening the scene was a little more depressing than usual because a slight rain was falling and apparently the passengers had been riding for most of the day, crowded about forty or fifty to a truck, in a cold drizzle.
The soldiers are first off the trucks and they stare rather blankly, as only a German superman properly subdued can stare, at the surrounding destruction which is Frankfurt. As I watched, they shouldered their packs and trudged off down the street looking neither right nor left but at the ground. The nurses apparently had warned someone that they were coming, for nurses from a local hospital were out to meet them. They soon went off in the direction of a military hospital, each carrying a large bundle.
The civilians reacted differently. Some of them must go on to other small towns around Frankfurt. Others must look for their former homes -- few of which remain. Some picked up their bundles and haltingly pushed their way through traffic ... others hesitated and tried to thumb a ride in a military truck. As darkness fell and the rain got heavier there were some still sitting on their suitcases by the side of a bombed-out building.
Earlier in the afternoon a different group passed our window. They were walking, each carrying a pack of some kind, or pushing or pulling a cart usually piled high with suitcases and bundles with fifteen or twenty persons following each cart. These people had come up the river on a tow boat and the landing was nearly two miles away. The stream of people passed for at least an hour, weary and sweating and saying nothing ... the depressing thing was the absolute silence of the migration. We saw similar groups by the day and hour all over Italy in the war period but Italians, even in the greatest diversity, must chatter among themselves about something and nearly all of them would get up a smile on occasion -- but in these throngs even the kids were morose and silent.
In defeat these people had lost the swagger and the brusque energy so characteristic of the Germans most of us know -- they were taking defeat without much bitterness, but certainly with little sorrow for what they did to their former main enemies -- the Poles and the Russians -- whom they were trying to regard as their real enemies rather than the United States and Great Britain.
When we arrived in Frankfurt a month past here were approximately 200,000 people in the city which once held 750,000. In the past thirty days possibly 50,000 had returned to the ruins which were once home. Most of these people were hungry, short of clothing, and without shelter and without coal or wood. The winter ahead looked pretty dark. However, with characteristic German enterprise they immediately began to clear away the rubble which was once a dwelling, salvage the bricks and the timber and threw together a shelter of some kind. Streets which were piled twenty feet deep in rubble a month ago were now cleared out and Army trucks and Frankfurt street cars operated through them.
Many of our politically-minded folks were a little disappointed that the rank and file of civilians take so little interest in politics. But an empty stomach and winter winds whicch local residents know are ahead put politics in the background.
At that time I wrote: "Thus far the American occupation forces have not issued any American food. The American zone, counting perfect distribution and taking total food production of every kind, will supply only about 1200 calories of food per day. That is 800 calories less than health authorities declare that it takes to keep a person alive even if he does no work. But if German civilians get more than 1200 calories it will have to come from America. The great zone in Pomerania and East Prussia from which surplus food moved into this area is pretty well wrecked -- the Germans have either been driven out or have run out of their own accord.
"Because of the struggle and disorder there, Poland has been unable to get migrants into the zone to look after food crops and Russia has been too busy elsewhere -- so no food will come from the East -- people will be hungry. Some will probably starve. Starvation is not the dramatic thing one so often reads and imagines -- of people in mobs crying for food and falling over in the streets. The starving ... those who are dying never say anything and one rarely sees them. They first become listless and weak, they react quickly to cold and chills, they sit staring in their rooms or lie listlessly in their beds ... one day they just die. The doctor usually diagnoses malnutrition and complications resulting therefrom. Old women and children usually die first because they are weak and unable to get out and scrounge for the extra food it takes to live. It is pretty hard for an American who has lacked enough food to become ravenously hungry perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime to understand what real starvation is."
I now recall this particular period from late July to mid-August 1945 in Germany. It is difficult to realize now, some 30 years later, the kind of vengeance, horror, absolute disregard for the civilian population, even the ultimate terror used to the very limit, that supposedly civilized peoples and nations set in motion in World War II; yet that destruction and death which was meted out on Germany was only a starter for what we have observed on our TV screens from South Vietnam since about 1965.
Our rationalization, I suppose, is that Hitler started it with the all-out bombing of London, and what happened to Germany in the aftermath was merely repayment in kind. But how can that rationalization justify the destruction we rained on villages and towns and civilians in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos?
I looked out my office window that dreary August in Frankfurt in 1945 and saw a city once proud of its public buildings and theatres and opera houses, railway stations, and monuments actually leveled to the ground. On my first trip from the untouched and stately I.G. Farben building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, I picked my way through a tiny foot path across the rubble of buildings blasted into the streets; a path that led from the edge of the city into the heart around the railway station. Not even a bicycle could make its way through this once wide thoroughfare.
Bulldozers were everywhere pushing and clanking, trying to push the bricks and stones out of the way so that a little traffic could move. Here and there a body would come up in the rubble and in late summer heat one could smell the sweet, rancid odors of decaying human bodies under the blasted homes and buildings. After one major raid by the Allied bombers 40,000 persons were hauled in trucks to a bulldozed open trench and buried in a mass grave.
In addition to the destruction, every kind of business that might have the least possible military potential was closed down tight. Among other stories of Hitler's dastardly regime, had his SS men making the fatal knock on doors at midnight. Now I was to learn sadly, by my own observations, that our CID was systematically doing the same thing in the aftermath of victory. This was in the name of destruction of the Nazi infrastructure. People were whisked away in the night and never heard from for months as our so-called Intelligence Squads sought out Nazi leaders and party members and took them away for questioning, screening, and, in most instances, to political prisoner internment camps. This happened to the highest and most lowly functionaries in government, cooperatives, businesses, lodges, churches, and other organizations which served under Hitler. Later I learned that this same thing was happening to Kassel, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Munich, Mannheim, Cologne, Regensburg and all of the other major German cities, not to mention Berlin which was a separate and distinct case.
What to do and how to go about carrying out the Geneva convention principle of the occupying army "to protect and to guard the general welfare of the civilian population, under the Commanding General of the victorious army" was something to ponder. These were truly eventful and questioning days that summer and fall of 1945.
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