"The German villages compared to the cities have been largely untouched by war. Village life, save for the American military units and the horde of bombed-out people who are now crowding the villages, goes on about as it has for the last one hundred years. The German countryside like Austria and some extent Italy and many of these European countries is well kept. Weeds are cut away from the roadways, fields are fallow as gardens, crops are either neatly stacked or stored in the fields and in the village houses and barns. The people look better fed than in the cities and are generally better clothed."
We were in the Rhineland country where farming is based on the culture of grapes through potatoes and most of the harder cereals are also grown.
The fields are dotted with the cart and press contraptions where the men and women cutting grapes from the vines carry huge baskets of grapes to this press arrangement and the juice is pressed right on the spot and then transferred to a huge barrel on another cart and taken off to the village for storage and curing.
Women predominate in the vineyards now by a ratio of about fifteen to one -- most of the men folk are either among some five million killed in Germany's war or they are still prisoners among the several million in Russia, France, and other prison camps. If Germany eats this winter it will be largely the result of the German village women and children who are seen in every field and on every road harvesting, hauling, and processing the crops.
Among those we visited was a farmer named Hans. He owns perhaps thirty-five tracts of land which he and his family have bought and inherited over the years. The tracts range from two acres to about thirty. So great is the land hunger in Germany that when a family estate is settled up, the land is broken up into parcels rather than being sold and the various heirs receiving the equivalent in money. This breakup of land into small tracts through the liquidation of family estates brought on the famous Erbhof law of Germany which provides that the eldest son inherits the land and it is not allowed to be broken into small bits.
From an economic standpoint, this was probably good, but the Nazis turned it into a potent tool for their schemes -- they provided that only Aryans could inherit land and that meant virtual confiscation of all land which was not under some Aryan ownership.
The story of Hans' family and the village in which he lives is rather interesting. Hans was a Saxon and back 500 years ago when Charlemagne was down in Spain carrying on a Holy War, Hans' ancestors in Saxony revolted and kicked up quite a local war. Charlemagne's war in Spain did not go so well and he was mad at folks causing trouble at his back door. So he picked up two or three whole villages where the rebellion arose and moved them down into South Germany and resettled them very much as the Russians and Poles and Czechs were running German families out of their zones at the end of the war and piling them into Western Germany.
On our trip we had occasion to inspect a famous university and an agricultural experiment station which has been permitted to open under Military Government control.
We talked with men who had been working for thirty years, for instance, on a wheat which will stand 15 days of rain in the shock and will not sprout or spoil; with another man who had been working for years and with some success on a bacterium which forms nitrogen nodules in the soil very much as nitrogen is formed on the nodules of a legume plant. This bacteria sown in a wheat field, for instance, would produce the nitrogen necessary for the wheat crop. Another scientist was making a very tasteful sausage out of cheese whey and synthetic yeast and another fellow was making yeast out of the sulphite water slush from a paper pulp plant. These men were highly intelligent, most of them had been cleared of their Nazi connections and as long as their work was stimulating, enlightening and intelligent -- but when we switched off to politics and the hope of reforming a German government on Democratic lines -- they talked like 6th grade children on the subject.
We got a pretty fair picture of what was beginning to happen all over the U.S. zone. Moet of the known Nazi officials, from dog catcher to mayor had been fired or jailed and others, supposedly non-party members, were being put in to carry out the orders of the Commanding General or his subordinates in each area from the provincial capitol down to the dorp (commune). Meanwhile the food and agricultural men for Military Government, who had been in training and waiting in London for the Allied takeover, were beginning to reach their new assignments at various levels in Germany. Generally, they were assigned to the Commanding General's staff and were subject directly to his orders. This presented some problem for the Central Military Government agricultural office in Frankfurt since everything had to move through military channels, and no instructions or advice could be sent or delivered direct from Frankfurt to the agricultural officer in a given area.
There was, at this time, no central policy, either on operations or long-range planning. Each military area made its own rules and about all the central office could do was to seek information and pile up statistics. At this time the Commanding General of each area conducted civilian affairs pretty much as he saw fit. There was no overriding policy save to "throw out all state and local personnel having had any connection with the Nazi regime." The amount of responsibility given to Germans who were selected to handle public affairs also varied from one district to another. In some places the military did just about everything from hauling in food crops to issuing hunting and car licenses. In others, the Germans did it under strict regulations.
General Patton, in Bavaria, took a different tack. He called in a very powerful, capable, former Bavarian public official and put him in charge and told him to run the German civilian side of the whole operation in Bavaria. The gentleman was very competent and went about his job with typical German energy and thoroughness. When protests arose in the U.S. that a German was now a virtual dictator in Bavaria under Patton, the General was called on the carpet. In typical Patton language he said, "One could not run the economy of an area or a country with a bunch of soldiers who know nothing about government and could not even speak the language; that one could not take a shoemaker and put him in charge of a state and get anything done -- that one had to have somebody who knew the ropes and could operate." Patton was soon bounced from his command, and rumor had it that it was because of this incident. In any event, the German official was relieved of his post.
While I was away several things had begun to shape up. General Eisenhower had closed Frankfurt headquarters and moved with his staff to Berlin. General Hugh Hester and a small staff were on the job in Berlin as Agriculture and Forestry Chief of the U.S. side of the Allied Command. On September 3rd our offices in Frankfurt were closed out and we set up with the Allied Commission staff at the Frankfurt suburb community of Hoehst, an industrial town almost wholly made up of the I.G. Farben works. We were in a former office building of the Farben complex.
At this time there was still some question as to how things would operate and who would do what and how -- not only in the small agricultural staff but in the other specialized staffs as well. One can hardly approach agriculture as merely putting seed in the ground and keeping the weeds down. Agriculture consumes great quantities of industrial products; iron and steel for plows, horseshoes and transport, lots of warehousing, processing facilities, fertilizer, coal, oil, electricity, water and feeds, milk cans, churns and what not. All of these items were under the control of other sections of Military Government, each with a king on his own throne, holding the reins of power tight and shutting down everything that moved. If there was a guiding philosophy, it was the Morgenthau theory, to turn Germany into a cow pasture.
After moving to our new offices -- sumptuous and comfortable, with telephones, typewriters and a clerk or two -- I noted, "With all of this it is still very difficult to get everything done through military channels and down to the Germans where things have to happen. I wonder when the powers-that-be will wake up to the fact that one cannot run the economics of a country through military channels. This zone idea, when it comes to military responsibility for a given area is okay, but it is hell for anyone else."
The Potsdam agreement had affirmed the military zones as originally outlined and had decreed that in spite of this Germany as a whole should be occupied and treated as one economic unit. This looked fine on paper, but it obscured the real facts of the Geneva convention that "the Commanding General of an occupying area was responsible for the safety and well-being of the civilian population in the area of his command."
Each General over the four zones and every Army Commander responsible for a province or a smaller area with civilians under his control, took this literally and acted accordingly. General McNary, now in command of the American forces in the American zone, seeing food shipped out of the U.S. zone into the British zone and some of it into the French zone (more or less natural transactions under normal conditions) promptly forbid the movement of any food of any kind out of the American zone. The Ruhr area (now the British zone) normally received food shipped out of what was now the U.S. zone, and Southern Germany, replaced this food from shipments out of what was now the Russian zone. When food stopped coming into the Ruhr, the British faced a desperate situation. They promptly forbid the movement of agriculatural inputs (fertilizer, machinery, chemicals, and other production items) from leaving their zone -- and thus the merry-go-round started. Almost in one day Germany became, in effect, four separate countries economically, politically, and organizationally. Each country began to impose on the Germans its particular brand of democracy and the particular system which each country followed at home. This was to have far-reaching consequences as the occupying powers proceeded in their task of dismantling the war potential of Germany.
The zone system idea originated during the fighting in a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Big Four in London. It was discussed and tentatively approved at the meeting of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt at Yalta during 1944 and formally recognized at the Postdam Conference in 1945. At the Yalta conference, there was much discussion and debate on the disposition of troops once the the war ended; whether they would stay in the place they were when the fighting stopped or whether they would withdraw to these predetermined zones.
Russian armies had swept across Poland into East Germany and finally, during the closing days of the war, into Berlin. American armies had reached Prague in Czechoslovakia, but had withdrawn to the predetermined American zone in South Germany. British forces had occupied the Ruhr. There had been a big argument on how much of the former German territory would be given to Poland in compensation for the Polish territory taken over by Russian forces. The Western borders of Poland were tentatively agreed to be the so-called Curzon line east of the Oder Neisse. Russian armies had swept across Poland and were at the end of the fighting far West of the Curzon line and the Oder Neisse. This is a very rich agricultural area and was one of the principal bread baskets of the former German Reich. More than eight million Germans were in the area and had lived and farmed this fruitful area for centuries.
The Yalta agreement had specified that the borders of post-war Germany would be decided at the peace conference and the various zones set up were mainly to secure the peace and safety of the population until the final peace settlement. Stalin had insisted that his area must be ceded to Poland in the establishment of German and Polish borders after the war. Mr. Churchill had urged passionately that Western zones of Germany could not absorb the some eight million Germans in that territory and the new Germany could not support an additional eight million Germans without the food which the lands West of the Oder Neisse produced.
Roosevelt, ill and being from a country which had always had problems of surplus rather than deficit, took little part in the discussions. The talks at Yalta ended in a stalemate and though the various zones as they existed at the time were formally recognized at Potsdam with the provision that Germany would be administered as an economic unit, the problem still exists today.
$Id: chapter12.html,v 1.2 2006/11/19 19:41:10 chesnutt Exp $