My entry August 19th read: "This 4-power occupation thing sounds okay at the top, but it is a terrible strain on the little guys who try to carry it out. The situation here resembles ever so much wolves around a freshly-killed ox. The attitudes of the French, Russians, and the Poles give little hope of anything like peace ever coming out of this mess. We are doing some looting ourselves, but the scale on which Germany is being looted could never have been dreamed of even in a nightmare."
As a sidelight on what I later learned was official policy on looting, I recall my roommate in the I.G. Farben billets. These billets were east of the I.G. Farben building -- which was saved from destruction on orders from the military so that it could be used for headquarters after the war. The Farben corporation had built a series of two-story apartment buildings in which many or most of their employees in the offices resided. These also were saved from destruction on high military orders.
With the war over and the occupation underway the families occupying these buildings were kicked out and the housing was taken over by the military. Military Government personnnel and US civilians in Germany on official and other missions were also housed in these buildings. I suppose they were about the only buildings in Frankfurt at the time that could boast central steam radiator heat, white sheets, hot and cold water and good mattresses.
My so-called rank entitled me to share one of these with any other person of rank who came from the states on one mission or other. My roommate in the last week of August was a gentleman from the RCA Corporation, research and scientific development division. He was in Western Germany looking for one of the famed and rare electronic microscopes which Germany had developed. Only a dozen or so of these had been made prior to the war. They had immense magnifying qualities and were said to have been used in testing and creating the materials which went into Hitler's fortifications which could not be pierced by anything except a special artillery shell, and then almost only by accident. (The American Army, incidentally, breached Hitler's line not by blasting out the bunkers and fortifications, but simply by whipping around them in tanks and armored vehicles leaving those inside to either give up or eventually die by flame throwers.)
This chap from RCA was seeking the whereabouts of the lenses of one of these scopes and was having trouble finding them. He finally learned, through a German he talked to, that one of them had been in a laboratory at Kessell during the war. The British were in control of Kessel. As agreed by the four-power Potsdam declaration, each Army Commander proceeded to seize all war materials, air fields, factories, equipment, and supplies which had anything to do with carrying on the war. That included just about everything. This chap summarized quite correctly that the microscope in question must be in one of the British dumps of seized military materials, and he took direct action.
By a simple ruse, without saying what he wanted to inspect in the dump, he showed the military pass, which all of the so-called scientific corps carried, to the British soldier on duty at the dump and was passed into it. He found the one and only microscope thus far unaccounted for, took it out of its frame, tucked it inside his Eisenhower jacket which all of those scientific investigators wore and proceeded to Frankfurt. The night of his arrival back at the Farben apartments we had a bottle of German champagne (army-supplied) and celebrated his success.
I, in turn, bought a small Deckar camera, 1.9mm lens, Compure shutter etc., which he had bought from a soldier who had liberated it from a German. The sum in German marks was equal to $75 if I turned them into dollars at the army post office. I still have the camera: it is a good instrument. After we were allowed to speak and associate with Germans later in the occupation, a former leather worker made a neat little leather case for it. With today's automatic picture-taking devices I never use it but it is quite a memento of a certain period in a very long and interesting life.
Cameras and cigarettes were to become the chief form of currency in any of the later transactions between Germans and Allied soldiers. At this period, fraternization in any form was forbidden under penalty of court martial; and even Military Government was not allowed to contact, seek advice from, or employ Germans in any capacity. This was brought home to our little section rather forcefully in August 1945 when our food and agricultural staff, desperate for statistics and someone who knew something about the production, supply, and rationing system under which Germany operated during the Hitler regime, sought out Germans to help.
Our section found a very distinguished German nutritionist whose books were used in nutrition courses in universities in the United States. We needed his assistance in developing the minimum nutrition standards which we would have to impose on Germany. Three or four other Germans, connected with the rationing system in Frankfurt, were sought out and asked to come in and help us in the development of some sort of system. The Morgenthau boys, the name we gave our US Treasury men who swung a heavy axe in Italy and were now in Germany trying to dictate occupation policy, had decided that they wanted about the only building in Frankfurt which housed the ration cards and records of all the people in the American zone. They rather peremtorily walked in, took over the building, and dumped the ration records into the street. As a result we were left with no records or anything upon which to base our judgment of what we were going to be up against in the coming winter.
The four Germans we had asked to help us had hardly warmed their chairs when some newspaper correspondent noticed them coming into our building and flashed a headline to the United States that the "Americans were already turning occupation over to the Germans." Within hours an order came from Berlin that every one of those Germans must be out of the office before sundown of that day. I do not know who issued the order, but in the army, orders are orders no matter who issues them. The order was obeyed. It was several months later -- in fact not until September 1946 after the speech of Secretary of State Byrnes at Stuttgart -- that the occupation policy was changed along more constructive lines, and we were able to take advantage of those Germans who had ability and willingness to work hard and long for the reconstruction of their country.
A Footnote: The incident involving the RCA man and the lens of the German electronic microscope popped up two years later when I was out of the Army and in the editorial chair of an Arkansas newspaper. An AP story came across my desk telling of a super electronic microscope which had been developed by the RCA Corporation. It was touted as the finest and most powerful in the world.
Allied police had been that all German patents and patent rights had been abrogated by their surrender and patents and scientific developments once held exclusively by Germany were in the public domain. Each victorious country recruited groups of scientists to sweep into Germany and ferret out every industrial and scientific secret imaginable. If something was thought of value, the plans were taken home for use and development.
As one case in point, there was an aluminum casting plant in the British zone coveted by all of the countries, including the United States. Special valves and couplings, truck hitches, and continuous-process butter churns, similar to the Dairy Queen ice-cream makers seen everywhere today, were gathered up and carted off. One of the most valuable finds perhaps, was a special system of the transmission of electricity over long distances with minimum energy loss. This was discovered by some Navy intelligence men.
As we have all learned in the long post-war period most of the patent rights have been restored. One of the intriguing developments reported in this area was the case of the Buna rubber formula, originally developed by I.G. Farben in Germany before the war. Through an exchange of patents with one of the U.S. oil companies, the U.S. thought it had acquired the German secrets of synthetic rubber. Our war experience showed that somehow our synthetics did not measure up to the German rubber. The scientific sleuths discovered during their post-war work digging through the Farben secrets that the Germans had left out one tiny link in the chain of the chemical process which they traded to the U.S. oil company.
Members of our agricultural staff were in time to discover some rather interesting and intriguing developments in plant science, especially about the production of higher-yielding plants by breaking up certain chromosomes through radiation. Some of this got to the United States and is widely applied in areas of grain production and horticultural research today.
So it went in those first few days and weeks after the war was settled. The small agricultural staff, still not fully organized or with specific duties and power, was faced with the big question of how much food we would have for the people of our zone, and how much would have to be shipped away to other hungry areas; also how might we be sure of getting under some sort of control that which did exist.
In this uncertain period I decided to go out, as I had done in Italy, and look the situation over, first going to the villages and the fields, then to the cities to see how much, if any, of the new crop was getting into the grocery stores and shops. Here again, problems arose. Not only were the boundaries of each military zone -- U.S., British, French, and Russian rigidly controlled but at this point even the various states in each zone were staked-out territory under this or that Army and its Commanding General.
General Patton and his Third Army controlled Bavaria; McNarny and his 7th Army controlled the Frankfurt area; another Army Commander controlled the Stuttgart area. In order for a Military Government officer on the agricultural staff to get into these zones, proper military orders and permission from the Commanding General of each zone had to be in hand. To go from Frankfurt in the 7th Army zone to Bavaria in the 3rd Army zone under Patton was like going from one foreign country to another.
In Patton's area, one's uniform had to be just so; he had to wear side arms, hemlet, step smartly and bark like a Drill Sergeant. In other zones it was not so bad, but it complicated things no end trying to get anything done. When this principle of fragmented authority was elevated to the zone level, especially the Russian zone, trying to go anywhere or get anything done was almost impossible. However, in late August, I did make a trip into the countryside aware of the necessity to know what was happening there, and the result was quite interesting.
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