German families would be notified on less than an hour's notice that all of the people in their village were to be extradited to Germany. Each person was allowed to carry 11 kilos, about 30 pounds, and were to be out in front of their homes at a given hour. They were loaded in trucks, taken to rail heads and loaded into unheated box cars with only the food supplies they carried. The trains took from one to three days to wind their way over the mountains, stopping on sidings, and at the gateway into Southern Germany at Hof.
On arrival at Hof the refugees were temporarily dumped into camps and finally distributed to various towns and villages. The German villagers had been ordered by their officials to fill every room in the village with at least two people. But even the villages overflowed. One cold and snowy winter night a solid trainload of these people arrived in Munich with absolutely no place to stay. On this occasion, our little man of many parts, Dr. Phil Raup, was on the scene and after much palaver, it was decided to divert the train to the blown-up I.G. Farben complex some fifteen miles in the woods west of Munich.
This facility, covering several acres, had been completely leveled by a gigantic blast described earlier. There was nothing there but piles of brick and twisted tin roofing and steel beams. Luckily, the rail line to the place was still intact. These several hundred persons were from a single village in Sudetenland. They piled out of the cars and somehow pulled together a little shelter and survived that cold night and many other cold nights that followed, beginning rather quickly to build shelter of a kind out of the brick and rubble.
To help alleviate their food shortage, we supplied them with sweet potatoes turned over to the Food and Agriculture division by the U.S. Army Supply System. These sweet potatoes, which the army had brought under some pressure had been grown and processed in Louisiana. Germans knew little of sweet potatoes, canned ones at least, and would eat them only when they were just short of starvation; but these refugees who had been days with little or no food, ate them with gusto.
The settlers in the Sudeten village had brought with them only their skills and that was glass-making. In later weeks they came to our authorities asking for only one item -- some sand -- and the right to burn some charcoal. They had brought with them the small wooden sticks which they used in fashioning the glass. Their skill was in their heads and hands. Soon an entire city began developing around these ruins. It is a commentary on war and human beings that this Sudeten German village, ten years after, exhibited some of their fine Czech glassware for which Czechoslovakia proper had long been famous.
Almost an identical story can be told of a village of Poles who had backed the wrong group in Poland after the war and were summarily dumped into the American zone and resettled in a ruined village. These people were glove makers. They soon had a going concern in making fine leather gloves. The only thing they were able to bring out of Poland was the skills, which, matched with some leather created not only an industry but a self-supporting village of people.
Occasional warm days and sunshine during March began to signal the farm and village people that Spring was coming and planting time was approaching. Seeds of almost every kind were non-existent. We sent requests to the Department of Agriculture, consulted with former seed merchants, and began to stir up things toward getting seeds and other inputs for food production.
The various military zones by now had, in effect, become four different countries and one could not move from one zone into another without the most elaborate passes, orders and formalities. The German whisper line had informed us that there were plenty of seed potatoes in the Quidlenberg area, the sector where seed was traditionally grown. But Quidlenberg was in the Russian zone. How to get hold of the seed was the problem.
The job of working out something was assigned to Major John Lynn on our staff. He spoke fair German and got along well with the few Russians we had encountered at our various Quadripartite meetings. He first had to get permission to enter the Russian zone. This involved making an application through channels to the Allied High Commission in Berlin and to the proper Russian bureau which, after about two weeks issued a ten-day pass.
Since many of the Russian guards on the border spoke neither English, French, or German and could not read much of any language, each pass had to have a particular colored stripe across the face of it. The color of the stripe was usually changed without notice about once per month. This presumably was to prevent forgeries and illegal entries into the zone.
With proper passes for himself, driver and identification for his vehicle, Major Lynn took off for Quindlenberg, but complications developed. During the period between the issuance of Major Lynn's credentials by the Russian bureau in Berlin and the time he reached the border they had changed the color of the stripe on the pass. The guards would not let them enter under any circumstances.
After much fruitless palaver, Major Lynn returned to Frankfurt for another try. This time a new pass with the new color didn't take so long and he was off again. His trip was largely exploratory to see first whether any seed potatoes really existed, second, whether the German farmers would be allowed to sell them and under what conditions, and finally, transportation facilities for getting a train load of seed potatoes to the American zone. On arriving he found plenty of seed potatoes and farmers anxious to sell, but they were demanding German deutschmarks -- no IOUs. The common practice of the military powers was to issue an IOU -- really a chit -- indicating that a certain amount of money was due the particular German individual for his products. The farmer theoretically could then go to his provincial office and cash the IOU for his goods, and the provincial office would then charge this to military occupation cost which the German economy was supposed to be bearing at this time. However, the Russians had written so many IOUs and the provincial government was so slow at redeeming them that the farmers were busted and demanded cash, or no potatoes. This presented a problem, as Major Lynn had no cash.
On the matter of transportation, there was a sort of tug-of-war going on at the time between the various zones, and especially between the Russian and the Western zones. It was charged that they were stealing rail cars from each other. A trainload of goods would go into the Russian zone, but the cars carrying the goods would never come back. The Russians charged the same thing against the Western allies. So it reached the point when a train load of goods moved across the border into any zone, an equal number of empty cars had to be moved into the exporting zone to replace the cars going out.
Lynn got over that one fairly easily. Military on both sides controlled all transportation and it was simply a matter of the military in the American zone shoving an equal number of empty cars across the Russian zone line as the loaded potato cars moved into the American zone. Paying for the potatoes in cash was another matter entirely. The total bill for the potatoes would run into about six million Deutschmarks and only small-currency bills were in circulation at that time. To move that much money in one bulk would take a six ton truck and with the hazard of highjacking (which was frequent), and trucks just getting lost, the venture looked like risky business. So the idea of hauling the money by truck was abandoned temporarily. Then the idea was to fly in with the money. That would take either a DC-4 plane, which we could not get, or two old workhorse DC-3 or C-47s. However there was no landing field at Quindlenberg large enough to handle these planes. That meant landing at some other point and again trucking the money. Finally after a long debate Lynn said, "Hell, there must be some easier way to get that money up there." We began to explore other possibilities evven if they were illegal.
Before the war Germany had a vast system of banks with most of them controlled from Berlin, with branches in the principal cities. All movement of money between these central banks and the various branches had been stopped with the occupation and each branch more or less served its local constituency with no normal flow of currency between the central bank and branches. There were vast amounts of credit and deposits in each branch and in the central bank. We went to the Frankfurt branch of the Berlin bank, which also had a branch in the Russian zone, and proposed that we deposit six million Deutschmarks in Frankfurt and notify the branch bank in the Russian zone that they were authorized to pay out to farmers the money indicated on their potato sales slip.
The transaction worked like a charm. The farmers were happy to sell the potatoes for marks, they were loaded with dispatch, and the trainload reached the American zone without a hitch. The empty cars were shoved into the Russian zone and all was well. Hoever, this was not quite the end. When the military authorities got wind of this rather bizarre operation, it raised some eyebrows; but since the potatoes were already happily sleeping in the ground and the money was in the German farmers' pockets, the matter went no further. That there was pressure of hundreds of other perplexing problems also helped.
The Russians had proclaimed land reform with great fanfare; another big hurdle we had to grapple with early in 1946. The Russian system is simple. When they take over a territory, whether it be East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, or the Ukraine in their own country, they instituted a land reform with a big splash. Usually, the big estates were taken over first and the next step is to collectivize the small holdings. The big farms were usually broken-up into about 12 acre plots and landless persons were selected to buy the acreage -- with payment over a period of years.
Under this system there was not much sorting out of whether the recipients of these plots were farmers or not. If they were landless, a barber, or a plumber, or any other person on the right side of the ideological fence, they could get land. This always made a lot of people happy. But in most cases these folks got the land with no credit, no seed, fertilizer, horespower, or machinery and in many cases they knew nothing about a farm. Under the system each 12-acre farm was assigned a quota of products to produce and deliver to the state. These quotas were stiff. In about half the cases the farmer failed to meet his quota. This would go on, as my observations later proved, for about two or three years when a decree would go out in effect saying to the farmer, "since you have been unable to produce your quota of food for the state, the state will have to take over management of your property until it can be made productive." Those few who had made good on their land deal would be asked to join a collective whereby good management, inputs, and machinery would be supplied and they would be better off.
Many did join these collectives first on a voluntary basis and more often than not on a forced basis. At any rate, agriculture was soon completely controlled by the bureaucracy, which told each farmer what he must plant on what ground and in what manner. Since the farmer had no discretion in the management, he turned his attention to cultivating, in his own way, his little free plot, usually only one acre or a little more. If the main crop failed, and it most instances it did, the government had failed and he had not. He could live sparingly on his little one hectare, which he farmed like a garden, with his two hens, two sows, a cow and other animals allowed him by the system.
In 1967, nearly 50 years after the Russian revolution and the ruthless collectivization under Stalin, I made an extensive study of the system Russia had imposed on its satellite countries, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. It had signally failed in Russia and had been discreetly abandoned in all of the Eastern European countries. (see my book "Agriculture and the Common Market")
When the Russians issues their land-reform decree for eastern Germany in late 1945, the Western allies were immediately alert to the fact that they should undertake some reform in the West, and General Lucius Clay ordered the agricultural staff to come up with a plan in ten days for the American zone. We had on our staff a Dr. Phil Raup, a Kansas boy who was a graduate in land economics from the University of Wisconsin. He had busied himself during the early occupation studying land reform in the Russian zone and saw the Russian move mainly as a means of breaking up the power of the land barons and making a lot of land-hungry people happy.
We set out to draft a land reform decree for the American zone; but first we felt that we must know more about the land-holding pattern. Raup and two other staff members were dispatched to look at the situation, and when the statistics were compiled they showed that the average land holding per farm family in the American zone was just a little over six acres. Often that six acres was in many small unconnected plots due to the land inheritance system in vogue in Germany over the centuries. There were very few farms of 100 acres or more, only a few dozen large estates of 1000 acres or more, and only one great estate, some 50,000 acres, belonging to a family whose head had been an ardent anti-Hitlerite and had fled for his life, but who had just come back to take over his property again.
Another jarring fact we discovered was that the Catholic Church was the largest landlord in the American zone of Germany and to break up those church estates meant a real hassle with Rome and all of its political and religious connotations of the time. A law was drafted but never issues. As I recall, the problem was turned over to the Germans who were told that something must be done toward a redistribution of the land.
In accordance, the Germans undertook, on their own, a land reform of sorts, which, in addition to providing for the voluntary relinquishment to the state in return for bonds of lands in excess of about 200 acres, provided for a revised system (long limping along in Germany) of consolidating the fragmented plots. This would make cultivation more efficient and gain some productive land by eliminating the endless paths and inlets to each little parcel of land, which in many cases made up a 30-acre farm.
The Military Government Agricultural Staff helped as far as possible in getting the farmers in each village together to exchange tracts and swap about until each had his acreage in as near one piece in one place as possible. The farm families lived in the village and traditionally went out to their plots with their oxen or hoes or horses to work each small plot.
In one village I studied, a couple of years after this program was revived under the Occupation, the village had actually gained more than five acres of cultivated land simply by consolidating and cutting out the paths and easements necessary for the farmer to get to each fragmented plot. (Germany now, some 25 years later, has a program of gradually enlarging the individual farm structure by paying farmers over 55 years of age with a small tract of land, a fairly high pension to let their land be consolidated into a large tract so that modern, small-draft machinery may be used. However, Germany still makes it attractive to the small farmer to remain on his land and not crowd into the cities to join relief lines.)
The matter of securing potato seeds spurred the interest, not only of Germans but of the military authorities, in other kinds of seeds and inputs which might in the spring and summer bolster to some extent the shaky food supply. Some of the high brass observed what a former hot-house used for producing flowers in winter could do when such a small space was turned to vegetables. It was easy when we proposed that literally tons of garden seeds be secured anywhere we could find them for possible use in home and communal gardens -- something we then imagined on the order of the Victory Gardens in the USA. But as a matter of fact, the Germans were already ahead of us on that. This was especially true of the city-dwellers. They saw gardening as outdoor recreation, a week-end combination of fun and food. Literally thousands of people before the war rented small strips of land outside the cities, along railroad tracks, roadways, or on common land, where they planted fruits and vegetables.
With the surrender, the dislocation of everything, the shortage of seed, and restrictions on travel imposed by the military, these projects languished despite a large vocal demand for seed and tools. But now, with the favorable attitude of the military, and enthusiasm among the Germans for anything that would let them get busy at something and provide a little food for themselves, we launched the Kleinegarten program.
Our young hustler, Raup, headed it up and we called in experts from the USDA and sought seeds in USA which would do well in the German climate. This movement snowballed and we were soon in trouble to find strips of land on which people could work and plant their gardens. We then sought and got permission to take over hundreds of former military parade grounds, military installations, and airstrips for Kleinegarten use. As a result, when the totals were added up the Kleinegarten program was responsible for something over 900,000 families having something to do and having some fresh fruits and vegetables to eat.
In the U.S. the impression seemed to be that Germans were eating their heads off -- that was the view reflected in news reports and some congressional speeches. The little-publicized and less understood food crisis in Germany began to spread into Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and almost throughout the world. Washington began to listen to General Hester, Tracey S. Vorhees, and others who saw the crisis coming. When it spread to our allies and Eastern Europe, wheels began to turn.
As already mentioned, President Truman summoned Mr. Hoover from obscurity to Washington to consider the world-wide situation. We in Berlin had heard rumors that things were beginning to stir in Washington and General Hester's return had brought news that maybe some food allocations would be made by the World Food Board directly to Germany rather than through UNRRA or the military.
On April 1st, I was ordered to attend a food conference in London, ostensibly called by the British government, but with delegates from all of the Western European countries, including Austria and Spain. Germany was not allowed to participate under the Potsdam rules and I was, presumably, to represent the American zone of Germany in this conference.
In preparing for the trip, I quite naturally speculated upon what would develop in relation to our own immediate problems.
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