The major plant to be destroyed in the American zone was a very large I.G. Farben complex located in the woods some fifteen miles from Munich. This was a sturdy, highly organized completely equipped plant resembling ever so much a branch of a General Motors truck plant in Pontiac, Michigan. U.S. Army demolition experts set about planting dynamite in the proper places to blow the whole thing to rubble with one mighty blast. The day came for destruction. There was a radio hook-up and the commanding General with proper words pressed the button which blew the whole thing sky-high. A few broken walls and jagged and twisted steel beams were all that was left.
In the French zone the Military Commander was a little more quiet about destroying the famous Mauser rifle factory. The French first removed the lathes and equipment which France might conveniently use. Next, some rifle barrels and the wood for stocks and steel for the finely-turned guns were stockpiled outside the destruction area. Certain of the buildings were reserved for other purposes and, in the end, a mighty blast destroyed the main power plant and some of the basic structure of the enterprise.
This holding out of the rifle barrels, stocks, and other parts of rifles turned out to be something of a bonanza for the French. After things quieted down the old gunsmiths, who had made the Mauser sporting rifle the envy of the world, were allowed to open little home shops and with French permission, make rifles (for sale mostly to military personnel in the Western zones). I was a recipient of one of those fine rifles, given to me by my staff after leaving Germany.
The Mauser factory which was first established in the 13th century to make armour for the Teutonic Knights is again in production -- thanks to the major turn-around in Allied Military Government policy which came with Secretary of State Byrnes' Stuttgart speech.
One major facility marked for destruction by the British was an elaborate industrial research complex on a large estate east of Hannover where the basic research and development for the buzz bomb which rained on London was located. Interest in the rockets and buzz bombs had been centered in Peenemunde where the rockets were tested and this complex near Hannover was not discovered until the British occupation. British intelligence and daring raids had pretty well put Peenemunde out of business at the end of the rode, but Volkenrode, as this research center was called, consisted of a vast complex of laboratories, machine shops, and assembly plants, plus private rooms in a sprawling hotel for 1500 scientists. It had dining halls, recreation facilities, and an underground artillery range. To cap it all, there was a gigantic wind tunnel for testing air flow around rockets and airplane wings. The wind tunnel was said to be the largest in existence at that time.
This complex, like the I.G. Farben plant in the American zone, was marked for complete demolition. Part of the wind tunnel had been destroyed when the whole operation was halted through the influence of a single man, a British agricultural scientist on the staff of General Robinson, who saw in the facility and its many excellent accomodations the possibility of making this a great agricultural research center. He personally carried the fight to save this facility through all the red tape to the throne of England and by act of the King the complex was saved. Since the installation and the entire area -- including the surrounding farm -- was declared military booty, the next question was how to get hold of it amd do something with it.
In late December 1945 and early 1946 food problems were beginning to loom large, particularly in the British zone. Food supplies which normally came from what was now the Eastern or Russian zone were summarily cut off early in October of 1945 as were all food imports from the Russian zone into the Western sectors of Berlin. In the meantime, the British, French, and American Military Government Food and Agricultural offices decided to make Volkenrode an international agricultural research center hopefully under the broad direction of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It would be staffed by international agricultural scientists and, for the present, the State of Hannover would fund the operation.
There were numerous German scientists connected with Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin who had fled to the west. Others from universities and institutes had fled the Russian zone and were looking for work since nearly all installations, schools, and research centers had been closed by the military. A number of these people were quickly rounded up and set to work transforming this great facility to peaceful uses.
Some agricultural research had been done at Volkenrode. The Germans had a theory that ultrasonic sound might be developed to a point where it could immobilize a company or a group of men. In the course of flying planes over wheat fields, generating this intense sound, they found that it killed the chinch bugs and other pests which had preyed upon farm crops. This idea had been recently picked up and some testing has begun in the United States. The main weakness of this system, however, is the cost of developing and carrying aloft the immense amount of power it takes to develop a sound intense and broad enough to do an effective job. It says something about the British character when one considers that here were people who had every right to want to destroy and grind this facility ot earth, yet it was a Britisher who saved a facility designed to destroy mankind and turned it into one to help mankind survive.
Volkenrode is now a highly-respected agricultural research center where various research is conducted, from studies of leaf humus to what takes place in the stomach of a sheep -- this latter seeking more efficiency in terms of feed intake.
One feature was added to the center which is not commonly related to physical and biological research in agriculture in Europe. It was a new Institute of Agricultural Economics which for years after the war was headed by one Dr. Hanau, a learned economist whom Gynne Garnett sought out after the rules against using Germans in our work were relaxed in 1946.
In the U.S. zone we had problems. In a small town near Regensburg was the world's first synthetic nitrogen plant. This plant was marked for destruction. It had produced nitrates for explosives during the war. Its destruction was stopped by our top Zone Commanders after they understood that it would produce nitrogen fertilizer -- one dollar's worth of which would produce food valued at seven dollars.
When the Russians, in October 1945, summarily blockaded all movement of food and agricultural products out of their zone into the Western sectors of Berlin, it threw our agricultural staff as well as the top people in our occupation group into something of a panic. Here were three or four million people nearly two hundred miles into the heart of the Russian zone whose food supply was completely cut off except for the small amounts grown in the limits of the Western side of the city.
In the face of this action on the part of the Russians, there was nothing to do but ship food in from the American, British, and French zones. Wheat flour and other normally processed products could be taken from army stock in each of the zones but meat had to be moved into the city for feeding hospital patients, and to supply minimum rations for certain working groups. This meant that cattle and hogs had to be requisitioned from the three Western zones. As it turned out most of the cattle were located in the American zone. The problems encountered in this operation is a story all its own.
First, there was the Russian red tape at the borders. Time after time a trainload of live cattle freshly taken away from protesting farmers in Bavaria was held on the tracks at the border for hours -- sometimes even days -- while the escorting officers of the train haggled with the Russian guards who never understood nor could read English and who knew little about their own orders except to stop everything. At times nothing moved until somebody in East Berlin gave the word.
In addition to this transportation problem, it had become increasingly difficult to get the cooperation of the German Agricultural officials in Land-Hesse and Bavaria to help in requisitioning cattle and to take a German IOU or military currency for the animals taken. The system was for the military to order the minister to deliver so many cattle to a given place at a specified time and turn them over to the military. It was surely politically unpopular for the minister to requisition cattle as most of the time the animals were working in the fields. Farmers not only wanted to retain their cattle for future breeding and restoration of their herds but in Bavaria cattle were extensively used to replace horses and tractors in heavy work.
As a result, there was a near revolt of farmers in that area and Minister Schlagel, whom our political people wanted to keep in office because he had a long record of opposition to the Nazis, came up to Frankfurt to protest the hard and fast grain and cattle delivery quotas which our statisticians had allocated to Bavaria. After a rather stormy meeting in which Schlagel passionately delivered his side of the case and our statisticians and economists presented their figures, Schlagel said, "I simply cannot deliver what you ask -- put me in jail and let the army gather in the grain and requisition the cattle." I replied, "Well, Mr. Minister, we may just do that very thing." After awhile a compromise was reached on the amount of grain and the number of cattle that he thought he might reasonably deliver to our depots for delivery to Berlin.
Years later, after the three zones had been consolidated into what was to become the Federal Republic of Germany, I conducted a tour of Europe for Secretary of Agriculture Charles Brannan. I, with John McCloy, U.S. Representative on the Allied Commission, visited Bavaria and noted the great progress in the reconstruction of that area and the excellent husbandry practiced by the hard-working Bavarian farmers. Minister Schlagel was still ruling the roost as Minister of Agriculture. There were many entertaining and festive events planned by the Bavarians for our tour. In one of them, a relatively large farm which boasted its own brewery and a sort of restaurant in connection with it (there were at the time some 1600 of these private breweries in Germany) Minister Schlagel offered a toast to his guests and referred to the fact that I had threatened to put him in jail. All was forgiven, he said, because Herr Andrews had helped to create more Hauptschule (practical schools for the young, in contrast to academic schools) than Germany had built in forty years before the war. Singer sewing machines were added, a wide variety of woodworking and metal-working shops were built, kitchens and dining facilities and so on. These were made possible by the use of the military currency generated by our food, fertilizer and seed shipments into Germany during the occupation period. They are extant today in great numbers and in much use. They are at least one example of a constructive attitude taken toward a beaten foe at a time when it counted most.
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