Some of our trains had to move into the Russian sector, and there were frequent raids on them by Russian military squads as the trains stood side-tracked waiting to be shunted across. The cars were cracked open and often truck-loads of food and supplies were carted off. The Commander of the American zone in Berlin, General Hawley, made often and repeated protests to his Russian opposite number on the Berlin quadri-parti control commission about the stealing.
At first the matter was denied in strongest terms, but when the raids continued and American protests grew more sharp the Russian General merely shrugged his shoulders and said, "Why don't you just shoot them?" Whether an order went out or just the grapevine report of this converation, late one evening a trigger-happy Major came upon seven persons breaking into and unloading a car destined for the American zone. He shot six of them. This was the end of the stealing for the winter. However, harrassment at the Helmstedt border had continued right up to 1972.
Of course, as history will report, the border was completely closed during the famed Berlin airlift. But in the intervening years border incidents have been routine, always resulting in hurried meetings of the Allied Commission in Berlin, loud diplomatic talk, and end finally with things moving again -- until another appropriate time for harrassment. (Perhaps the 1972 East-West agreement may eliminate this problem, but many of us will have to be shown.)
During most of the fall of 1945 and well into December the staffs of the military governments in the four zones were busy trying to arrive at some level of food supply which would maintain the civilian population at a minimum ration level.
Our staff in the American zone came up with what some of us regarded as very dubious figures which indicated that the supplies in our zone would maintain a ration of 1200 calories per capita per day. This proved somewhat optimistic, but our final calculations were based on this figure.
The French zone, normally about self-sufficient, was a little more fortunate. During the invasion of France the United States and Canada had poured into France thousands of tons of bread grains and the French could draw upon this supply in a pinch. There were some 200,000 bushels of wheat, formerly in France but under U.S. Army control, stored in the Mannheim area which we of the agricultural staff eyed most enviously. We were told that this was an iron reserve and only to be used when Germans were falling in the streets from hunger.
There was also a loud argument about tens of thousands of German civilians for military installations and army depots, doing most of the heavy work for the army. Under a previous ruling by General Eisenhower these civilians were to be fed higher rations out of the Gernam economy and not out of military food stores. This put a severe strain on the slim civilian food supply, and the order was protested somewhat vigorously by our staff.
Major Horace Davis, an economist and a nutritionist from Louisiana State University on our staff, undertook to challange and change this concept. He and others worked up a memorandum in the form of a cable to the Chief of Staff of the Army in Washington, D.C. asking that this ruling be changed; that, at least, the extra rations above the 1200 calorie level be supplied from army stocks. This memorandum was duly read in Headquarters and forwarded to the Chief of Staff in Washington, D.C. signed by Eisenhower (perhaps, in the army practice, General Eisenhower never saw the cable).
The corollary to this is the fact that General Eisenhower was called back to Washington and after some consultations there he returned to Frankfurt and turned over his command to General McNary. He then flew back to Washington and became the new Chief of Staff. A few days later our office in Frankfurt received a cable signed by Eisenhower, Chief of Staff, approving the policy switch on feeding German civilians working for the U.S. Army. The way things work out! Competent staff officers with authority to act in the name of the Commanding General had seen to it that General Eisenhower had approved his own cable request.
In late November a distinguished British nutritionist on the staff of the British contingent had come upon some far-reaching studies by German food scientists at Heidelberg which had been undertaken prior to the war. The German government had collapsed in World War I largely because food supplies ran out, and in the following years scientists undertook the most elaborate studies on how much food intake would be required to keep a population on its feet and working -- ranging from a coal miner to a store clerk. These studies determined that the minimum over-all requirement for a population to remain on its feet was 1800 calories per day; but a miner working beneath the surface on an eight-hour day shift at heavy labor would require a minimum of 6000 calories, much of which should be animal or other fats, 1500 calories would just about keep a person alive if he stayed in bed most of the time. It was settled that a minimum of 1500 calories would somehow be supplied to the civilian population -- old people, babies, jobless and workers in light tasks; that the miners would receive special rations in order that the production of coal might be increased, not only for local and German heating, but for export to surrounding countries which formerly depended upon the Ruhr area for coal.
This decision was to have dire and near tragic consequences when applied. A person able to walk or ride a bicycle could scrounge, steal, or enter the black market and supplement this fixed ration and get by in a way. However, those in hospitals and in political prison camps, when held to the 1500 calorie per capita per day input, simply starved or died of "complications resulting from malnutrition" as the doctors described it.
In a large underground bunker in Berlin about 6000 political prisoners were housed. Attempts by some agencies to supply the Geneva convention rules on feeding such persons were unavailing. Only the equivalent of 1500 calories per day per capita in food was delivered to this bunker. Under the system, the military delivered the food to the bunker entrance where it was taken over by the inmates and distributed and managed.
This went on for several weeks with little attention to the operations; but one day a Major General responsible for the health programs in the American Army decided to inspect this bunker and other camps where political prisoners were held. What he found and took pictures of was almost a replica of the scenes of Buchenwald: starving people, with bloated bellies, swollen ankles and withered limbs -- many of them lying in their bunks waiting for death.
When the doctor presented these photographs at General Clay's staff meeting, we were shocked and astounded at what had happened right under our noses -- all due to strict observance of a policy without any regard to what might happen in special situations such as this. Orders went out immediately to increase the ration input into the bunker to 4000 calories per day of special foods and increased attention was given to medical services.
There never was a report on how many had died or how many survived after the new food policy went into effect. I suppose the pictures are today somewhere in army files -- locked up.
Now, thirty years later, if we will actually look at ourselves and at our own souls, we'll have to concede that in every war we have fought -- for good or bad cause -- we have, to a very large extent, resorted to the acceptance of a sort of voluntary dictatorship in the name of winning the war; the very antithesis of the slogan of "Fight for Democracy."
The problem of getting what food supply that existed into consumption centers continued to be a major problem. The victorious armies were reshuffling their bases, sending millions of troops home, and disposing of military equipment. Because of this, the main rail traffic was largely a military operation and very little if any was available for civilian supply. The army was always tolerant and cooperative when approached for transport of civilian movement of food, but the army's way of doing things was on a "crash basis."
As an example, it was easy to get the allocation of an entire freight train to haul potatoes out of Bavaria and into the Ruhr or Berlin. But on thousands of small Bavarian farms potatoes came out of their pits in small amounts and were drawn by horse carts to a boxcar spotted for all the farmers in the area. The army would not wait or divert enough transport to handle things in that way. So we had problems all along the line -- wit crops from wheat and barley to sugar and pigs.
Earlier in the fall, when General Eisenhower was touring the American zone, he stopped at the blasted city of Mannheim and looked into the cellars and rubble-built shelters in which people were living. When his medical officers told him that six hundred out of every thousand children born in Mannheim would die before they were three months old he was shocked and was said to have remarked, "My God, has it come to this?"
One of the problems, he was told by Germans, was the lack of sugar for the mothers who nursed their children in their early stages of development. Orders came down to "do something about the sugar ration to so-called lactating mothers." There was simply no sugar around at the time except the little which was systematically stolen from army stocks and sold on the black market.
This incident occurred in early November 1945 and the German sugar-beet crop was in the fields ready for harvest, but no processing facilities were open to process the beets. Early in the occupation, the famous de-Nazification law Number 8 had been issued and although there were three rather large sugar mills in the American zone and a couple in a French zone owned by a German corporation, the heads of these mills had been identified with the Nazi party and had been kicked out of office. The mills had closed down and there was no one with authority to open them. How to get them going again was the problem.
I do not know whether General Clay ever knew, but with a little cooperation from the French and with some rather informal action by the American agricultural staff and the Germans, the President of these corporate sugar mills was made the caretaker (janitor) of them and the former caretaker was named, quite informally, the President of the Corporation. He ordered the mills opened and the mills began to turn. The sugar was processed and later in the winter the authorities in the American zone were able to allocate 250 grams of sugar per month to "lactating mothers" and some additional supplies for children in hospitals.
This rather basic solution however, was obviously not adaptable to some of the gigantic problems still ahead.
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