The British were having real trouble in their zone and we were trying from time to time to get the French, who had more ample supplies of food and grain than the British, to divvy up some of their supplies for the British sector of Berlin. We did finally have a break-through on this thorny question and it was finally settled among the allies on the west side of Berlin.
Also at this time, a long series of informal contacts revealed that Czechoslovakia had a considerable quantity of potatoes to sell and Poland had a large quantity of potatoes available if we could find some way to pay for thhem and get them into Berlin. Finally a deal was made whereby Czechoslovakia would ship a train-load of potatoes into Berlin in exchange for a hypothetically equal value of salt from the American zone. This relieved the strain on our stocks in Berlin very considerably and it was not too long until a similar deal was made with Poland. This was before there was too much tension between the east and the west over political questions.
I did not go along with most of our de-Nazification program as it was carried out down to the very lowest functionary in government and business. A modern state or nation simply has to have a certain group of able people who actually do the routine day-to-day tasks of keeping things together and carrying out whatever policy there might be. No matter how hard an occupation army or an outsider tries, there is simply no way of handling the affairs and the requirements of 40 or 50 million people without the help of their own technical and organizational people.
The de-Nazification program in the American zone had literally placed us in a vacuum. The British were a little bit more realistic. The French were frankly cynical of the whole business. They placed themselves in the best hotels and buildings, selected the finest wines and food, told the Germans to go about their business while they gave orders but paid very little attention to anything else. They gave the French zone Germans a massive dose of culture, music, art and all sorts of social activity. The Germans seemed to love it, and the French had a good time doing it.
The extent of going clear to the bottom of the de-Nazification program in the American zone is well illustrated by a case which came before our review board. No person who had been a member of the party or associated closely with the Nazi movement was allowed to have a supervisory role in any business, government, or other enterprise. If these people felt that they were wrongly treated, that they were not genuine Nazi fule rather than a follower of the Nazi ideology, they could come before the review board and plead their case. Sometimes their status was changed from party member or follower to one who merely had to live by the Nazi regime.
The case in which I was directly involved was the removal in Bavaria of the superintendent of a livestock slaughter floor. This individual had been performing a useful function in his community, supervising a small business and a few employees. But when he was marked as a party member, he was suddenly kicked out of his job, much to the distress of himself and the people in his community. When this came to my attention, I advised him to take his case to the review board at Frankfurt, with the proper papers and representation.
There were literally no meat-packing plants (as we understand them in the United States) in Bavaria. In Bavaria, there were only killing floors -- sometimes open-air, sometimes a shed-like building with a cement floor, plenty of warm and cold water to wash down the carcasses of the animals for the skinning process, and some tables on which the animals were cut up.
When the manager on this floor came to the review board, I was called in by the military tribunal of about four generals and others who heard his plea for a different status. To me, it was completely ridiculous. When I was called upon to comment on the case I simply said "if this body wanted to take up anybody's time to try a 'pig sticker' and remove him from his shop, I thought we were getting pretty low in having anything to do in the occupation of Germany."
This was said in somewhat a facetious tone, but was taken seriously. The Generals then questioned me further and I explained to them that this man was a simple person who managed a slaughter floor where the local people brought their animals in for slaughter and processing and where the local retail butcher and others came in and bought their meat and carried it back to their stores and shops. After due deliberation this gentleman was cleared of the charge against him and was allowed to go back to supervise the slaughter floor.
There were numerous other instances of this kind but not all of them turned out as happily as this particular one, for one reason or another.
Meantime the reports had gone out that the American zone was literally a haven for all people who had believed they were being persecuted and who felt they needed better treatment. Displaced persons out of Poland, Czechosolvakia, and other parts of Germany kept arriving, hungry and destitute, expecting the Americans somehow to set up camps and refugee centers to take care of them.
By this time I was beginning to wonder if we had not over-sold the idea that the American zone was a haven, and wonder if we were being made the fall guys for the entire refugee problem of Central Europe. The matter of the refugees was a serious one and one which concerned U.S. high policy. The Jewish people had suffered greatly and deserved all the compassion and warm treatment that could be provided. Thousands upon thousands of these people came in from Poland and Czechoslovakia. They were placed, eventually, in refugee camps and in theory a good part of the food had to come out of the German economy for these camps. This presented some exceedingly difficult problems.
During the early part of the refugee movement when these people had traveled for days -- maybe by foot and sometimes in unheated box cars, with no food -- the problem of feeding them was not to difficult. Army supplies were simply made available and they were fed good standard army rations in the camps; although some of them scrounged for other food which they preferred. But as things settled down and the refugees had a chance to become better organized, the refugee problems became more political. The shameful, degrading treatment the Germans had given to these people in Poland and Czechoslovakia created lasting bitterness. The whole refugee problem was blown into a highly-emotional political issue. Great emphasis was placed upon trying to wipe out some of the tragedy that these people had suffered under Hitler. It was understandable that they felt intensely wronged and were not slow in demanding almost anything they could imagine out of the allies -- as well as their pound of flesh out of the German economy.
We would be required to surround a German village and notify the people in it that they must be out of their homes with only the things that they could carry with them in thirty minutes. During that time trucks would come by, take the local Germans away, and disperse them into other parts of Germany. The whole village would then be replaced with the Jewish refugees and others that were flowing into the American zone, where whole villages were entirely inhabited by refugees. One, a few miles from Frankfurt, became notorious as the days went on as a center of the black market. There anyone could buy anything from pure gold to an automobile. Its illegal activities were almost an international operation.
On one occasion, when a bunch of U.S. Congressmen came over to inspect things, they were given Post Exchange cards which allowed them to buy anything at they wanted at the local Post Exchange. They would load up their suitcases with cigarettes, and, on at least one occasion, a very prominent congressman asked me: "Tell me where this black market village is?" and he headed straight for it. There he traded cigarettes for things that he wanted. He could get anything from diamonds to scotch whiskey.
In the first month after my arrival in Germany and in my first session with General Walter Bedell Smith, General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, the problem of feeding and housing the refugees came up. General Smith had summoned me to his office and I was advised to get ready to supply the Jewish refugee camps with fresh kosher meat slaughtered under the traditional Jewish rites. I bristled at the suggestion and asked, "who in the hell gave that order?" After a pretty sharp reprimand for challenging an order from top command he pulled a letter from his desk and read portions of it. It was a letter on White House stationary to General Eisenhower reading like an order from a Colonel to a Corporal saying that the Jewish refugees were being mistreated and neglected and the closest attention should be given to their needs and demands.
Note: It was learned later that this letter had been drafted by the late Senator Gillette of Iowa who was the head and chief spokesman for a Jewish relief organization in the United States and was cleared through the White House channels -- direct to General Eisenhower. [Ed.: Stanley Andrews' manuscript has a penciled-in notation stating that this should be verified. Colonel Andrews may have relied upon heresay in this statement]
That settled the argument and I was set about -- with ample assistance from the army and with some grudging cooperation from Germans -- to supply that meat. It required requisitioning cattle from the farms, sometimes taking an oxen from a plow, setting up special days at slaughter floors where a Jewish Rabbi would oversee the slaughtering. Masses of army trucks distributed this meat to the designated camps. There were some 1600 different refugee camps in the American zone, not all of them orthodox Jews, thank goodness.
The provision for fresh-killed koser meat under proper ritual supervision quieted the refugee food complaint for a time. However, as the days and months rolled on, I found more and more problems with these helpless and miserable people who had first run away in the Hitler Regime and were now refugees from their own country. Many of them were to remain long after the military government operation in Western Germany was over. Not only were there Jews but thousands of non-Jews who had no place to go. The latter were not able to migrate to Israel as the Jewish people were. They were also afraid, or did not desire to return to their homeland for various reasons, mostly political. This movement of people, and the preventing of the movement of people between border states for various excuses, is still a problem and to some extent a tragedy more than thirty years later.
On Washington's birthday, February 22, 1946, I noted that history and politics not only created some strange things, but took considerable radical turns; that the very severity of the food problem may "wake up the world and the nations to the real German problem -- that reserves are running dangerously low, and if commerce does not begin to move, this situation will blow up." Just a few days later there were food runs on the grocery stores in Bavaria and the shelves were wiped clean of anything that looked like food. There was also trouble with clandestine brewing of beer, and the hiding of wine.
General Hester was coming back from Washington and it was my hope that he would bring some news about possible food shipments which might relieve our situation. The continuous arguments among the western allies themselves and with the Russians were creating real tension. There was more and more angry talk being thrown across the tables, and it was becoming more and more difficult to get any really united action on the part of our allies.
General Hester reported on his return that the Military Government staffs at the technical level would gradually be civilizationized as had been planned in Italy, but was never accomplished. He gave me hope that I would be going home sometime before April 1946. General Hester reported that we were still prevented under the JCS/1067 and the Morgenthau plan policy from getting very much assistance out of Washington on our food problem. He did say that a large group of civilian experts from the Department of Agriculture adn the Land Grant Colleges and people of high positions from all over the United States would be coming to Germany soon to replace the military personnel in charge of the technical division.
This civilian group would include not only the food and agricultural experts, but people in steel, chemicals and industrial manufacturing. These latter would be helpful in trying to untangle the great combines which military government decrees had ordered broken up. The I.G. Farben combine had been taken over by the military and was in the process of being dismantled and dismembered. The Krupp ironworks, great coal and steel combine, was to be dismantled and separated. This was going on all along the line and American experts were called in to do that job. Many of them were quite bewildered, and some of them were frank in their reports stating that this was heresy and could not be done; that it would destroy completely any semblence of a German system of manufacture that could compete in world markets. But, Orders Were Orders, and we were still operating under the theory that Germany was to be dismantled as much as possible. These people went about making plans to do the job, although they felt it was a silly business. However, after Byrnes' speech in Stuttgart, the very same people were asked to put some of these combines back together.
Civilians in Agriculture were to help us in long-range planning and in figuring out how to best increase the food production so as to make possible self-sufficiency, or as near self-sufficiency as possible. They were some of the most able men in Agriculture and in Land Grant colleges. They came over with a great deal of enthusiasm and a great deal of know-how. We had hoped they would get things going for us -- but we all forgot that these men were high-level administrators and decision-makers.
In their offices in America they had been surrounded with legislatures and congressmen who provided the money to run their particular bureaus, or sections of government, or colleges. There they had adding machines, secretaries, and assistants; they had batteries of telephones and access to libraries; all sorts of ways and means to pull together the information which they could analyze and from which they could plan decisions with some validity. However, when they came to Berlin there was a bare office, some bare tables, maybe a typewriter, no clerical help, no adding machines, libraries or telephones; yet these gentlemen were expected to come out of this vacuum with some sort of concrete answers.
Up to that point, I was not permitted to bring in German statisticians and clerks and other people who could help untangle this web of information. To expect American GIs who could not speak German or run a typewriter to be very much help was simply an exercise in misunderstanding what the situation was. These civilian experts, newly arrived were completely disgusted. Some, in spite of this, worked night and day with a pencil and a yellow pad -- trying to arrive at a concrete program for Western Germany in food production.
A rather ironic twist in this -- all these people were high-level bureaucrats and administrators who made what was their top pay for a bureaucrat -- usually ten thousand dollars a year or above. Under the army system, a man's right to housing and other fringe benefits was determined by his rank. His rank to some extent was represented by his salary. These gentlemen earning ten thousand or more per year in their civilian occupation thus had a simulated rank of Major General in the army, with certain very important prerogatives -- namely a house with servants, a gardener, a car, a chauffeur, and sometimes a footman. So it followed that these contract-civilians had the right to demand everything to which a Major General was entitled. Some of them took it modestly and others abused the privilege and caused no end of trouble for themselves and for many of us in the occupation army area. [Ed.: The remainder of this chapter is struck-out in Colonel Andrews' original manuscript. Since no names are mentioned, and all parties involved are likely deceased at this time, the section is retained.] One gentleman in particular irritated me, a dean of agriculture from a very important western university whose Form 57 read like a record out of an encyclopedia in terms of his accomplishments as administrator, as director of research and as a student.
I had met this gentleman previosly in the United States. When his Form 57 came across my desk, I thought now here is a fellow who can really help us get down to business in projecting this food situation. He will know what we might do in terms of new production, and in general be ready to take over when we military people clear out of the way. It turned out, however, that he was totally lost in the atmosphere of Berlin. He had no telephone, no staff to do his grubbing work, no secretaries to look up the spelling of words or find his data. Since he was used to being and administrator, giving orders, and not doing things himself, this seemed a great handicap.
Since his rank gave him entry to almost everything -- yet with little authority to do anything -- he bounced from here to there mainly disrupting what little that was going on in his particular field of knowledge.
Many of my associates wondered what that guy was doing in Berlin. He became frustrated and wanted to get action somewhere. So, we put him in a jeep with a driver and made him what was called "a roving field man and observer." His business was to go about the rural villages and the communities in the American zone to see how the people were getting along with their food supply and see what was happening in the countryside in terms of planting new crops. Unfortunately, under the rules at that time, we were all required to board and bed at an army installation somewhere in the zone rather than living on the so-called German economy. This gentleman would go into an installation and demand a General's accomodations. At Regensburg he went to the Military Headquarters and demanded a Major General's standard of housing, mess and all of the prerequisites that go with that rank. When this was not immediately available he kicked up an awful storm about it and caused no end of friction and bad feeling among army people there.
After two or three such instances and with the opening of his University in the states I suggested that possibly we could get along without him and he could go home.
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