General Leylenon, I noted in my journal, seemed to be a somewhat embittered person. I said "I fear I am getting hardened to many of the human sympathies which one in my position should possess, I fear also that as a soldier, my respect for rank in the army is falling. I disagree with U.S. policy in Germany and I believe it is being guided as a pressure campaign; a campaign as vicious as anything that some of the dictators perpetrated. I fear a few decisions involving the whole history of Europe are being made on a military order basis, with little or no knowledge of the facts. I would hate to be a resident of Europe for the next few years."
Comment: "That assessment looks and sounds just a little harsh, but it is based upon first-hand knowledge of suffering following a war. I said many times, and I say again now, that all of us have great sympathy, certainly, for the soldier who fights to his death. But we think very little of the millions of helpless citizens in the towns and cities that undergo the bombings and who, unlike the soldier, have no way of fighting back."
I felt at that time maybe the severity and destruction of modern bombing would somehow cause world leaders to do something about such death and destruction; relegate it to extinction as we have tried to do with the use of poison gas and other lethal weapons directed against citizens. But this was not to be. Decades after the close of World War II, we have witnessed in South Vietnam an even greater destruction and a greater weight of bombing of every kind. Every element of terror that man could conceive has been rained down upon the helpless women and children and old men of the villages of that unfortunate part of the world.
On the subject of democratizing agriculture, which was a part of our order, I noted after my trip through the French zone and a portion of the American zone (this time visiting villages and trying to assess the food supply in the little shops and stores) that people seemed to be far more interested in where they were going to get food and fuel than they were about any kind of freedom or democracy.
We were having zone problems. For centuries there have been a cluster of important potash mines in this area, and the line was drawn between East and West Germany in such a manner that the important potash mines in what was originally Germany itself fell into the Western Zone. This made everybody apparently happy since these potash mines were important sources of foreign exchange. For hundreds of years Germany had mined these deposits and sent potash throughout the world. The United States had not at this time developed its important potash deposits in New Mexico. American farmers more or less depended upon potash from Germany to supply their fertilizer needs.
As a result it was anticipated that somewhere along the line these mines would again be activated and potash would flow freely not only to the German farmers who use only limited amounts of it, but throughout the world, thus bringing Germany much-needed foreign exchange. Russians were to get similar mines or the potash back. Everybody thought the matter was settled when the line was drawn to include the mines in the Western zone. However, they overlooked a sort of a peninsula or a joggle in the line across which ran the only railroad from the mining area into what was now Western Germany. This peninsula was in possession of the Russians. This railroad ran square across it. Almost immediately the Russians posted guards at either side of this peninsula and no rail traffic passed across it. This effectively closed off these mines from any traffic with the West, since there were no trucks in Germany at that time to even try to truck the potash out of the area.
My little staff, without much authority, decided to take a fling at the windmill and try to move some potash, but our trains were stopped cold. We then took it up through military channels to the Allied Commission in Berlin. We got the transport people of the Allied Commission on which sat a Russian, a Frenchman, a Britisher, and an American, and these gentlemen apparently got together over a tea table and decided that there would be an adjustment in the zone lines which would make it possible for this railroad to operate and to haul the potash out of the mine.
In time a piece of paper came down from our transport man in the Allied Commission saying that this matter had been adjusted and that the potash traffic would move freely. We were all elated in Frankfurt that our little group could move the mighty Allied Commission into instant action and get an irritating problem solved, but it was not long until it became apparent that the Russians still had a man at the border, and every time this guard was changed the orders were apparently changed too and practically no traffic was moving through the zone that the transport people had declared had been corrected. (As a footnote to this incident -- I served my time as a Military Government officer in Germany and went home in the summer of 1946. After enjoying civilian life for about one year, I was again called back to Germany as a civilian to take on certain responsibilities in the food and agriculture sector of what was then called the Bi Zone of Germany. Lo and behold, I found the roadway and the railroad to the potash mine on the border between East and West Germany still closed tight.)
From October 7th to about the 23rd of October 1945 I became more and more skeptical of what I could do and more and more disturbed at the way things were going in our particular zone. Germany depended rather widely on rape seed and sunflower seed and items of this kind for its vegetable oil. The other oil items, which they mostly imported, were soybeans from China and cotton seed from the United States and other cotton-producing areas. This constituted their substitute for lard and butter, both of which were in very short supply.
My major effort then was to see that as much of these rape seeds, sunflower seeds, and oil seeds were processed as quickly as possible, in order that we might have some ration of fats and oils. At that time the fat ration had been cut down to about twelve ounces per person, per month. This seed was normally processed in a small plant in our zone and refined in a larger plant in a complex of the German, Dutch and British-owned facilities of the Lever Brothers. Lever Brothers were oil processors and soap manufacturers, with many plants over Europe and a very large plant in the British Zone in Germany.
The Americans had been more aggressive in their de-Nazification program than either the British or the French. The result was that there was no one in our zone clean enough politically to open up and operate the small processing plant in our area. I immediately contacted the people in the British zone to see if the rape seed might be processed in plants in their zone. The British were pretty sticky, since U.S. military orders had prevented any food products from the American zone from entering the British zone. They rather politely, but firmly advised us that if we were foolish enough to close up all of the plants, they didn't see why they should take the trouble to fool with our fats and oil products. This whole issue was finally resolved, but only after a great deal of argument and a great deal of pulling and hauling both in Frankfurt and Berlin.
On October 23rd, I wrote that things were more hectic than routine: "Now the grim reality of winter and starvation is finally waking up the military mind, which still bewilders me to no end."
I noted that General Hester had come down from Berlin and we talked over things. He had confirmed the rumor that had come down to Frankfurt that as the new Deputy Chief of the Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery section, I would be located in Berlin. This did not set very well with me because it meant my little staff would be far inside the Russian Zone and completely out of day-to-day touch with what was going on in the American Zone. We would have to rely on the Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery staffs in the various military areas. These areas now were: Bavaria, formerly under General Patton, but now under a civilian military government set-up; Rhine Westphalia with headquarters in Stuttgart, with a civilian; my good friend Dr. James K. Pollock of Michigan University the military government chief, James Newcome was in charge; Frankfurt, which was at first under a General McNarny, but later under a civilian.
I advised General Hester that I was pretty much bewildered at the way things were going and greatly feared that we could have real trouble in the coming months. I told him the only thing that I could do was to promise him that I would do the very best I could. When I had done that, I would simply have to let nature take its course. I was not going to worry about the "bigger picture;" a main concern to the top brass, much more than the day-to-day business of trying to reconstruct something out of the shambles the war had made.
During the last week in October I went back to Berlin. After a short series of conferences, I was invited to take General Draper's plane for a tour of the major cities in the American Zone in Germany. General Hester headed our little party and we were going to do a sort of a Herbert Hoover type of a look-see at general conditions.
When Mr. Hoover came to Germany in 1946 on a world food mission, he carried with him a special staff. When they landed at a given city, they spread out in all directions and looked into nearly every facet of the community. In a short few hours Mr. Hoover could get a pretty good picture of what was happening. We had planned to do the same thing on this particular trip. Some of us were going to look at the bakeries; others were going to look at the kids and the orphanages, and the hospitals; others were going to look at the raw supplies in the mills (or wherever there might be some food); others were going to check on the progress of the potato and the sugar-beet harvest; others on meat supply; and so forth. It was quite an expedition. We visited Wiesbaden, Munich, Stuttgart, the main area headquarters of military governments, and a number of lesser towns on this particular trip.
On returning to Frankfurt I wrote a note on what we had seen. But as I read the note, parts of which are reprinted below, I am impressed with the fact that this official tour must have been more of a tourist trip rather than an actual fact-finding situation. At any rate, it described the situation and my attitude on that particular day thirty or more years ago:
"An official air tour of the American Zone in Germany in the company of a General takes one out of the bouncing jeeps, road blocks, cold trains, and all of the red tape that goes with travel in a military zone, into the realm of the more pleasant and exciting things of army routine.
"Not many hours before this note is being written, our party left Templehof in Berlin -- the first airport built with the idea of a great flow of passenger traffic, and with all the accoutrements of running a really big air transport business added to it. But Templehof today, though its design and general layout has been duplicated in large fields all over the world, is a mere pancake in a snaggled desert of broken buildings and is so small that nearly any fair-sized city in the United States would scorn it as inadequate for modern-day traffic.
"Our plane was the sturdy and dependable DC3 or C-47 as they are called in army parlance -- she still wears her coat of odd war paint and carries the Stars of a General on her fuselage. Her 21 seats have been ripped out. She once carried 30 paratroopers under full gear, but now she has been refurnished with eight reclining and comfortable seats, a carpeted floor, a lounge and various other conveniences which a General would want in traveling in style and comfort. Our pilot, just a year ago, was pushing bombers off the flats down in Foggia, Italy, in the daily runs from there over Austria, Central Germany and North Italy. He is not much impressed with this log wagon run, but he is keen, capable, and enthusiastic.
"Soon the fog-filled valleys around Munich tell us that we are arriving in a little over two hours in this plane against a common 48 hours by train and two full days of travel in a car.
"Again the General's stars work wonders on such routine things as clearance, getting transport to town and billets in town not to mention the clearing of traffic as a General's car sweeps through Munich's winding streets.
"Munich is bomb-blasted; the heart of the old city is shattered and most of the houses and buildings hold three or four families where one family once lived. There is no coal for household use and the wood is scarce. In every city block there is a "warmbstuben," which in common English is a "warming room" heated day and night; a refuge where people can dodge out from their chilled houses, especially old people, and get good and warm. There is a cup of thin but hot soup and a cup of ersatz (drink made from barley and chestnuts) coffee for each. The "warmstubens" are ever so much like the pot-bellied stove on winter's days in the country villages where many of us grew up. They are not only a haven of comfort, but a debating society and lecture hall.
"Walking down from the main railroad station through the gates in the old city wall one comes to the Rathaus or State Capitol building. The stone statues of the Bavarian kings worked into its cornices and facades are chipped with shell splinters. Further down the street one comes up on the Munich beer parlor, where the budding Hitler of years ago started his ill-timed but finally successful rise to power. It's a GI Red Cross Club now and steaming coffee and hot doughnuts take the place of the beer and pretzels of another day.
"One drives 50 miles south of Munich to the high Alps and the land of the ski enthusiasts -- to Garmish, the international resort where once the Olympic ski trials were held.
"Just up from Garmish is Oberammergau, the little Bavarian village where the Passion Play was held for years and where Anton Lang, who played the Christus in that production still holds forth at his wooden gift-carving shop. But prospects for revival of the Passion Play in that village now are a little dim, since nearly all of the cast were Nazi party members and as such are not permitted to take part in public performances as professional entertainers. It's a rumor, if not a fact, that about the only member of the last cast to play the Passion Play who will today pass our de-Nazification edicts is the chap who played Judas Iscariot.
"Ten miles out on the autobahn from Munich one sees a road sign pointing to Dachau -- a village off the main highway and in whose nearby forest the famed concentration camp was located. It is still there, of course, much of it renovated and cleaned up.
"As one enters the enclosure one is greeted by a giant black and white sign reading 'Here 238,000 men and women were murdered.' If one has the stomach to follow through the whole highly-organized system of studied starvation, then shooting and cremating and bottling and selling the ashes of the victims, there it is for all to see. The large pit with slats over it where victims were shot and rolled on to the slats so the blood would drip into the pit -- there are the trays on which two bodies at a time could be carried to the crematory and there are the clay, urnlike flower pots which held the ashes.
"All of these things and the untold and unimaginable tortures are facts which stare one in the face -- facts which shock the logical when they contemplate the quiet, well-behaved and courteous Germans seen a few hours before in offices, stores, hotels and on street cars in Munich.
"The contrast between the planned murders at Dachau and the fact of the burghers and hausfraus in energetic pursuit of peaceful occupations, is one of the imponderables of Germany which none of us can really understand or explain. Surely these people must have known about Dachau and the other camps -- surely they could have cried out against it."
My notes also reflect my fascination with the great cultural heritages of the principal cities we visited. Seemingly, these cities once held about everything that was fine in culture -- art, music, and even industry. I find it exceedingly difficult to reconcile such things with places like Dachau. This is something the world will hardly forget soon. To me, it says something about so-called civilization. Germans were highly intelligent, diligent, hard-working, and with a vast resource of talent in art, in sculpture, in music and most everything else that is supposed to make life beautiful and peaceful. Yet we are confronted with a nation that started a war and indeed carried it to the limit with a philosophy of ultimate terror and destruction of the human being and almost everything that a decent human being should or might stand for!
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