General Hester flew to Washington on January 12 to confer with Pentagon officials about food and agriculture problems of Western Germany. It was becoming increasingly more difficult to extract from the German farmers whatever food grains they had. Raids on large farms were frequent, black market and stealing was rampant, and the overestimates of our optimists, regarding the German food supply were coming home to roost. There was still no real policy on just what we would do in the coming crisis.
The British were draining the barrel at home to supply their zone, where the deficit in food was in the millions of tons. Even the French were screaming that they were in trouble, especially in their zone in Berlin -- yet there existed several hundred thousand tons of U.S. and Canadian grain in France upon which to draw.
During the mid and latter part of January, I visited the four Laender in the American zone to talk to the state government officials on how they saw the coming situation. Most were pessimistic and while at this stage there was not much real person-to-person communication with German officials at our level of the military bureaucracy, I soon found that people who had lived on and with the soil -- people who understood farming and the problem of producing crops -- could soon brush away the cloak of officialdom and formality and become people.
As I talked to Stolz, the new agricultural minister of Wurttemburg-Baden, about marketing cattle and hogs, I mentioned that on our Missouri farm we had filled up our cattle with water just before weighing in at the market. The Minister's face lighted up as if he had found a friend who understood farmers and their problems and practices.
I continued around the circuit of German state officials in our zone, Hess, Bavaria, Wurttemburg, Baden and Rhine, Westphalia -- seeking their cooperation in garnering in what food supply existed on the farms.
As a representative of the all-powerful military occupation, I had considerable power to direct and coerce cooperation from the state officials; but I soon found that threats and even jailing of these gentlemen, as we had found in Sicily two years earlier, simply did not get the grain, cattle, and potatoes into consumption channels.
The officials themselves had problems. Southern Germany is made up of a few very large estates and literally thousands of small farms, averaging about six acres. Wheat, rye, barley and oats were usually harvested in late Fall, left in shocks for drying out and then hauled into barns and sheds where it was threshed by small machines, a little bit at a time, and carted to market as the farmer needed the money. Under the Nazi regime there was forced delivery, a quota system, and a subsidy which allowed the farmers a good price for their grain. They were willing to part with it in order to buy other things they needed. But now the Deutsch Mark was all but worthless. There was little to buy and the demand for food was so heavy that they could barter their small lots and wheat for almost anything they desired. After many sessions with the state officials I noted with some discouragement, "Here I am out here forcing farmers to slaughter their scarce livestock and turn over their grain for money that is worthless, all in the name of making Germany a new Democratic nation."
A few former German organizations, like Rotary Clubs, local farm cooperatives, churches and other civilian organizations, were allowed to revive and carry on their various activities under strict Military Government supervision. One of the major organizations in the American, British, and French zones (though not allowed to operate as a unit over all zones) was the Barenverbund, headed by a stalwart farmer and a strong leader named Hermes.
Hermes had been one of the plotters against Hitler andd after the plot failed, he was jailed and awaiting execution by the firing squad when Berlin fell and he escaped. He had come back to the Western sector and had revived his farmers' organization in the American zone and was at the time pleading and arguing for better prices for the food products Berman farmers were called upon to deliver. His rather quiet but effective action all but created a boycott of the whole effort to amass grain and food from the farms.
To counteract this, we sent for Herr Hermes and asked that he come to our American zone office in Frankfurt. There were some pretty strong words with the usual warning that disobedience and defiance of Military Government meant trouble for him. He stood up and said rather quietly, "Herr Andrews, I was in jail and waiting for the firing squad, I am now on borrowed time. Maybe it was a miracle that saved me. I have been in many tight places and I am nearing 70 years old -- there is little that you or Military Government can do to me that has not already been done. I am seeking only justice for my farm people. You are asking the impossible. There is simply not the amount of grain in Germany that you say there is and it is impossible to get all of the products which, statistically, might seem to exist."
After much more talk, I asked him to estimate the probable amount of grain that might be secured under present conditions and he named a figure. "Would you be willing to mobilize your farmers in an effort to see that this amount is delivered?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "I'll do that." As we shook hands on the agreement he added that he regretted that we had not had such a conversation earlier.
Hermes did go out and deliver the grain as he said he would. I had considerable trouble with some of our statisticians and army people who felt that they were being cheated. Maybe we were -- but it was a question of either getting a little more than half a loaf or nothing, because it would have been manifestly impossible to put all of the 20,000 or so small farmers in jail and confiscate their property.
After this rather adventuresome and trying week in the American zone in which, for the first time, we came to grips with the real problem of getting cooperation of the people, I sat down at my typewriter and wrote in part:
"It is rather difficult for one who has been in the seat many of us have been in during the past two years in Military Government to keep the proper perspective and balance between the rather human tendency of one to sympathize with distress and show mercy to the helpless and the rather hard necesssity of handling in a fair and non-vindictive manner a populace which only yesterday was at war with America and the world.
"One tends to 'go overboard' on sympathy and desire to help those who are in trouble or take the other extreme of becoming callous and cynical to the point where mercy, common humanity, and common human responsiveness to another human being in trouble is lacking."
Later, upon observing the reaction of soldiers toward the German population, I wrote "It is apparent that soldiers who fought the Germans as soldiers on the battle front are more lenient and less vindictive in their attitude toward the civilian population than those who came up from the rear areas after the war was over, or even those who have lately come from the United States.
"We are not quite sure just why this is unless it springs from a sort of undefinable understanding which comes between human beings as a result of looking death squarely in the face even though the death may come from opposite sides of the line.
"A German in deep trouble, a broken family, a destroyed business, a starving child, a dying old man or woman, look about the same the world over -- no matter the nationality or the status -- enemy or friend."
At that time I was a little bewildered to read in the press from the States that Americans were flirting with the Nazis -- that we were not tough enough, that we are not "kicking the Nazis out" and the Russians were the only ones who "knew how to handle Germans." Well a whole lot could be said about that misinformation -- as a matter of fact the Americans were much tougher on the Nazi crowd, or anyone who happened to mixed up in the party, than any of our other allies. Further -- we doubt whether public opinion would support a United States policy of starving the population in the American zone -- nor would it support shooting them -- nor would world public opinion have supported that thesis. With that fact in mind then, it was only good business for the Americans to get Germans in shape to help themselves as quickly as possible because without some restoration of the German economy, America and the allies would have had a relief client on their hands for the next fifty years.
At about this time, in Germany, we were shown two documentary films which I doubt were ever shown in the United States -- but to us they were the most sobering pieces of film reporting we had ever witnessed, convincing us beyond all doubt of the power of film to distort truth -- both at home and in Germany or any other place in the world.
If you remember the news reels shown in theatres in the United States of Hitler and the rise of Nazism in Germany they always gave a serious comic buffoonery twist when Hitler was shown. Those films which appeared in our theatres apparently were cut to the public opinion of the times that Hitler was a sort of Charlie Chaplin-esque paper-hanger who was a rabble-rousing crack-pot which gullible Germans were following.
Well, maybe so, but the official news reels take by Germans and showed to Germans in German theatres during that time showed Hitler as a far abler man than any news reel which came to America ever showed.
The whole scheme from Munich to the Berlin Chancellery reflected by those pictures showed a nation handled by a group of leaders bent on war and with war as a single aim and the destruction of Central Europe as a planned program on a time-table basis. This particular documentary film was later shown at the Nuremburg trials and if ever a group of criminals were convicted by their own record, with their own pictures in the plot, those fellows and the dead Hitler and others of the Nazi gang stood convicted by their own record.
The point we make is that here was a designed plan, written out in a book Mein Kampf and pictured in the minutest detail daily to the German people and the world all during that period and we in America were regarding all of this as the mere ravings of some harmless paper-hanger and an army corporal.
Now the other film -- the United States as Germans -- as the movie-goers in Germany saw us in 1933 to 1941.
The German propagandists very cleverly cut out portions of such regular commercial motion pictures as Escape from a Georgia Chain Gang, Dead End Kids, and Grapes of Wrath, showing these scenes as documentaries. They spliced in newsreel shots of Father Divine, jitterbug contests in the U.S., racial clashes, numerous strikes and riot newreels which to us in America is pure run-of-the-mill; but when tied into newsreels and documentary film depicting "true life in the United States" they present a weird and distorted picture of Americans.
Such films served to reorient one on the whole subject of what we were there for. That exceedingly able and efficient scientist who was in our office a few moments ago was a part of that machine which grew up here in Germany according to plan and all but destroyed the world. That well-to-do farmer who used to be the head of a cooperation association and whose farm now is the very epitome of good management, hard work and a high standard of rural life, at least accepted the fruits of the Nazi system while human beings rotted in Dachau and Buchenwald twenty miles from his home.
The neat waitress who served tables at the officer's mess was one of the Young Frauleins who marched with the Hitler Jugend and cheered the Wehrmacht and the SS troops as they marched away to destroy Poland, rape the low countries and all but bleed Russia to death in the early days of the planned war.
How far can one blame the individual for becoming a part of the whole design -- to what extent was mercy for the individual human being to be applied to a nation finally broken and shattered? This was but one of the many perplexing problems which challenged the humanity as well as the common sense of many of us there in Germany at that time, trying to carry out the will of America to "destroy Nazism."
$Id: chapter20.html,v 1.2 2006/11/19 19:41:10 chesnutt Exp $