I had suspected that this might well be my swan song as a Military Government officer in Germany. There were continued rumors that I would soon get to go home, and I wanted to leave my job with as clear a picture of the situation as possible. It was my hope that as a private citizen back home I might help in some way to reflect the situation as I saw it.
As editor and publisher of a farm magazine, and later as head of the Regional Credit Bank of the Farm Credit Administration, plus my involvement in farm movements prior to my Army service in World War II, I had been frequently called upon by civic clubs, Chambers of Commerce, Jaycees, churches and other groups to "make a talk" when they were looking for someone to fill out their programs. I more or less anticipated that this would happen again once I returned to civilian status at home.
I was convinced then, and I learned later that it was largely true, that after the War, the American public was still feeling sorry for itself in the sacrifices of war to "knock out those Germans" and that we were feeding them while the U.S. public suffered. While policy at the very top was changing perceptibly it was still quite popular for a Congressman or a Senator or a bureaucrat to speak in terms of revenge and punishment rather than reconstruciton. This attitude had been fatal after World War I and it should not be allowed to happen again. Fortunately, as I will relate later in this Journal I had the opportunity to speak out -- shortly after returning home in mid-summer 1946.
This tour proved to be one of the most informative and, I think now, the most constructive of any I took in the nearly three years that I had been in Food and Agriculture from North Africa to Germany.
Our survey party consisted of myself, Major John Lynn, our doer on the staff, and a civilian, Dr. Omar Pancoast. The latter had worked during most of the war at the Pentagon on food-supply problems for the army, and had participated in some of the planning for the occupied areas once peace came. Also in the party was Carl Ross, now a Second Lieutenant; a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and a Chicago Tribune writer.
Our first stop was at a non-Jewish refugee settlement in the Wurtenburg-Baden area south of Frankfurt. Once a German artillery cantonment, this army installation had a unique history. It was originally laid out by Napoleon when he occupied that part of Germany, and had been in continuous use as an artillery camp since that time. Its some sixteen hundred acres had not seen a plow since its establishment.
Some seventy-five families, all ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Eastern Germany and as far away as Hungary, had been allotted this area to resettle. The barracks and horse stalls were being occupied by the families and their children, and each family had been allotted about 12 acres of land but had little with which to cultivate it. However, the group had found an old tractor, reparing it with scrounged equipment and made it ready to plow. A single tractor for seventy-five 12-acre plots was hardly a solution. The group formed a cooperative, pooled their land, and planting each crop in a long strip so that this tractor and others they hoped to get could be used effectively. On the day I was there, 1000 acres of the 1600 were being planted to potatoes, barley, rye, oats, sugar beets and the whole category of crops common to the area.
At that time there was only one horse in the area. This horse belonged to a Hungarian family which had made their way out of Hungary ahead of the Russian armies, across Poland and into Germany. The man had led the horse, hitched to a cart loaded with household goods and children, and the mother had trailed along behind the cart. It took days to get out, but they finally ended up in that part of Germany. I have a picture of the man and his horse which I sometimes look at and wonder what finally happened to this little group who seemed to have found some hope on this old artillery camp.
As a part of our survey we called upon the heads of the Military Government in the various German states of the U.S. zone. In this case our head of Military Government in Stuttgart-Wurtenburg-Baden was Dr. James Pollock of Michigan University, professor of public administration and father of the proportional representation theory of government. Dr. Pollock was more optimistic on the future of Germany than most of our party and he was proved more correct as the years have passed.
Our next stop, outside of brief drop-ins on villagers in their fields and the picture-postcard villages of Southern Germany, was at the ancient town of Freising, long famous for the location of the first brewery in Germany. The brewery, long a brewmeister's school, is operated as a branch of the company making Lowenbrau beer. The brewery was in the charge of a Major on the Food and Agriculture staff and was operating full-blast making beer for the occupation forces out of barley and rice from the United States, and hops from the famed hop fields of Bavaria and Czechoslovakia.
A brewery was established on this site by a group of Friars during the time of Charlemagne in 742 A.D., and the site has been in continuous use as a brewery ever since. It was brought under what one would now call a corporate charter in 1146 A.D. and has operated under that document and various amendments since. It was for centuries, and still is, a school for brewmeisters and was operating as such under the Military Government control in the Spring of 1946. Brewmeisters from this small school have set up breweries all over the world -- from Maimilian's breweries set up during his reign in Mexico to Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis Missouri. Modern Lowenbrau brewery branches now pretty well dot the world and the brew is found in thousands of restaurants worldwide.
As we drove toward Munich we stopped briefly at Dachau, one of the infamous concentration camps. At that particular time there was some discussion of using some of the buildings and the surrounding farm land as an agricultural experiment station. However, that was only a discussion and was not to be -- because pressure was too strong to make this place a monument to those who had suffered here and died in the death furnaces.
We arrived in Munich and that night we accompanied Mr. Kenneth Ingwalson of the Bavaria agricultural staff to a village for a night meeting with the residents of the area. Ingwalson's task was brought on by one of these informal suggestions which people at high level make and are often taken as orders to follow through upon.
There was a conviction on the part of somebody in Washington that the people of the United States were suffering lack of food in order that we might keep alive our former enemies; that these former enemies did not really appreciate the fact that America was "giving them food." It was true that by this time we were beginning to get substantial shipments of wheat, and when a cargo of this wheat arrived in Bremen, German marks (then merely something to measure or keep count of) were paid for the wheat. In the minds of some Americans this payment was nothing; the U.S. had still made a gift of the food. The higher-ups somewhere along the line thought that the individual German buying a loaf of bread at the local bakery should be told that he was receiving a gift from the American people.
As a result of this thinking, the Commanding General in the Bavarian area had suggested to the Agricultural Staff that "we should do something about this lack of information on the part of the German people." Ingwalson and staff were assigned the task of doing something about it. Ingwalson, who spoke only fair pidgin German, worked up a series of charts which showed the journey of a bushel of wheat in Kansas to the loaf of break picked up by the housefrau at the corner bakery in Bavaria. This was some exercise.
Notice would be sent to the Burgermeister of a village advising that an American team was coming to the village on a certain night and that all of the local residents were expected to attend a meeting. Burgermeisters in Germany know how to obey and give orders. When we arrived at the meeting hall, we found it filled with men, women, and children rather anxiously waiting the word which was to come. Ingwalson got up with his charts saying in his best German that he was going to show them how they were getting their bread from America. He painstakingly led his somewhat dazed audience through the whole maze of transactions ending up with the loaf of bread on the hausfrau's table, the gift of the people of the United States. This was quite bewildering to the hausfraus present because they had to pay their hard-earned Deutschmarks for that loaf of bread and the could not see it coming to them as a gift. This exercise went on through most of the winter in Bavaria, although in other areas of the U.S. zone the suggestion from on high was taken less seriously.
Thousands of refugees were settled in shacks around Munich, and some were, under German thoroughness and direction, draining swamps, clearing up trash and garbage dumps, reclaiming idle land, and planting crops and gardens in a desperate attempt to survive. At the blown-up Farben complex where we had dumped several hundred Sudeten German families in early January, we found a new village, literally a town, being built out of the bricks and rubble of that destroyed factory. Everybody was working at something and though food was not bountiful, it was adequate.
As we drove again toward Berchtesgaden, the fields were teeming with Bavarian farmers plowing, planting, mowing the lush green grass of spring. Nearly all of them worked behind those famous triple-use Bavarian cattle -- many of which we had confiscated and sent either to Berlin or the Jewish kosher slaughter floors. These sturdy animals are good work animals, yet fair milk producers, and when too old to work, so the story goes, they are slaughtered for beef.
Along the way we stopped at the Alpine cottage of a retired Major General of the German Army of World War I. He and his wife were living in a scene as serene and lovely as anything one might imagine in the Swiss Alps. Their cottage had been taken over for a short time by some army officers as a billet and he and his Frau had retreated to a servants quarters. He was not bitter about it; he had been the Military Governor of Alsace-Lorraine after World War I and had, as he said, taken the victor's rights. Since we were victors and he was the defeated he took things as they came. Later we stopped at the village where several hundred Poles (almost exclusively glove makers) had been allowed to establish a refugee village. They were again making gloves, but looked longingly for the time when the international situation would permit them to return to Poland. They had supported the Polish Government in Exile during the war, and were even then fearing the ultimate Russian takeover which took place a couple of years later.
I shall not attempt to describe the Berchtesgaden area. I had visited there earlier, having come up through Salzburg, Austria, into Germany just after the surrender, but as we approached the hills and valleys, the alpine cottages and the greening promise of spring in the Easter eve of 1946 I was almost breathless with the sheer beauty of that part of Germany. In my feeble way I wrote in my notes: "God, what beauty -- and how could people living in the midst of such natural and serene wonderment follow such a fake like Hitler? The Eagle's Nest is a mad-man's dream or a Wagnerian legend set in stone."
Our group put up at the Berghof Hotel, on a hill above the village. This plush hideout of Hitler's jack-booted SS and other generals had been taken over as a U.S. Army billet. It was staffed by the most elegant waiters and cooks, true Bavarian folk entertainment was presented in the main concert hall each evening, and we Americans were living it up like the Generals of only a few months back.
On that Easter evening an incident occurred which could only have happened in a story book. My colleague Dr. Omar Pancoast, who had sung with glee clubs, appeared in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, and on occasion classical operas had tired of the folk entertainment and decided to take a walk in the balmy April moonlight night up on one of the hills near Hitler's burned-out villa. As he walked around the hills he stopped and viewed the quiet and peaceful village below and, for reasons he does not know to this day, he burst out in song -- his ringing baritone drifting across the wooded hills and valleys. As he sang the opening bars of Wotan's music in Act II of Die Walkuere, a soprano voice clear and cool came out of the scattered woods singing Brunnhilde's part.
Pancoast continued singing and walked toward the voice coming out of the woods. Soon he came upon a typical Bavarian alpine house perced on the side of the hill. A lady on a small window balcony on the second floor was singing back to him. When the duet ended, she invited him in for cookies -- and this was the story. There were eleven persons in that alpine cottage, representing five different families, all refugees from the war. The lady who sang had been with a Viennese opera company and had been standed in the backwash of war. Others, including several children, were part of families scattered here and there by war's fortunes. They were occupying a cottage which doubtless belonged to the cluster of houses surrounding Hitler's villa and the Eagle's Nest above.
Now it so happened that this was Easter eve, and children in Germany have candy treats at Easter time. There was none in the cottage that night. Later in the evening, when we were all pretty well settled in our rooms, Pancoast came scrounging the candy bars and goodies which each of us were carrying from our raid on the Munich PX earlier in the day. Pancoast gathered it all in and headed for the cottage again and the children enjoyed candy for Easter.
The next day we attended Easter services in the Berchtesgaden village and again it was a scene out of a book, as both farm and village people attended, dressed in traditional Bavarian costumes. My German was not good enough to understand much of what went on, but the music was indeed heavenly.
After a swing around the demolished and partially burned Hitler Villa on the hill above the village and a peek into the 700 foot tunnel beneath it (formerly filled with choice foods and wines before the Army GIs reached it in the last days of the war) our party headed again for Berlin and the more pressing and mundane problems there.
The newspaper correspondents who accompanied us, were satisfied that Germans were indeed working and trying to meet their own problems, that there were -- at least among the people we met -- earnest people, trying to forget the war and to dream about the future. Their dispatches back to the States changed quite perceptibly; not necessarily because of the trip, but in part because of what their colleagues had seen and heard on Mr. Hoover's stop in Berlin.
Onnce back in Berlin on the morning of April 27, events were indeed moving fast, and rumors were still about that I might get the long-awaited signal that I could go home. But first another mission had to be chalked up, and this too was interesting, exciting, and to a degree important.
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