Crimes and Mercies (9 page)

He had sufficient wit to call on Herbert Hoover in May 1945 for advice on the world food problem, but not enough to accept the advice. Hoover warned Truman of the disasters that were about to occur, but Truman ignored him, to his cost. As the situation grew worse, with rumours of French mistreatment of prisoners emerging in the press and predictions of disaster emerging from authoritative people in Germany, Truman was cornered. He was caught between the consequences of the Morgenthau Plan and the widespread opposition in the administration to revising any part of American policy in Germany. Truman had never approved the Morgenthau Plan and only discovered that it was being implemented when he had to deal with its disastrous consequences.

Within a couple of months of taking office, Truman rid himself of Secretary Morgenthau. This was probably not because of
the plan, but because he had found Morgenthau over-reaching himself in other ways. Soon after, Truman was sending missions to Europe to look into conditions in refugee camps. And then in the face of a famine that had already killed off hundreds of thousands of Germans in later 1945,
⁵¹
he called on Herbert Hoover for the second time.

The circumstances of that call are interesting. As the starvation in Germany had grown worse and worse, various senators visiting the American zone discussed the situation with army officers. They also received letters and reports from American civilians and officers on the scene. Soon they were informed, and disgusted.
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Just after Christmas of 1945, they met and discussed what to do. It was decided to call on the President himself. This they did on 8 January 1946. They made a personal appeal to him to take immediate steps to permit the American people to relieve the suffering directly. They particularly requested that the United States raise the ration allowed to Germans and restore mail and package services to the American zone. The sort of language Truman heard was also audible in the Senate a few days later, in the voice of Senator Wherry: ‘The American people should know once and for all that as a result of this government’s official policy they are being made the unwilling accomplices in the crime of mass starvation … Germany is the only nation where UNRRA is not permitted to feed its nationals. Germany is the only nation subjected to a deliberate starvation policy of 1,500 calories per day.’
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This was fresh in Truman’s mind when he finally wrote to Hoover in January 1946 and asked him to do something about food relief in Europe and round the world, except for Germany. Once again, Hoover agreed.

While Hoover began to make his preparations for the 1946 world tour which would eventually save hundreds of millions of lives, the senators kept the pot boiling. Senator Wherry quoted at length from an editorial in the
Christian Century
to help him express his feelings. Calling it ‘one of the most angry and inspired editorials on this whole tragic subject’, he read the whole last paragraph for the Congressional Record of the Senate. ‘There is
not a day to be lost … With every day the opportunity grows less to make real to the people of Germany the Christian testimony to mercy and brotherhood. With every day that Christian love is thwarted by shortsighted and vengeful government policies, the prospect for a future catastrophe grows. It is time that a united demand went up from all American churches and church organizations for an end to the armed barriers which now keep Christian charity from our late enemies. It is time to let Washington know that American Christians will no longer acquiesce in the Potsdam outrage.’
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A few weeks later, on 29 March 1946, Senator Langer had received new information which caused him to rise again in the Senate, to speak as follows:

[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fanatical plot to destroy the German people by visiting on them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot permitted the whole world situation to get … out of hand … but their determination to destroy the German people and the German Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral principles, to our leadership in world affairs, to our Christian faith, to our allies, or to the whole future peace of the world, has become a world scandal … We have all seen the grim pictures of the piled-up bodies uncovered by the American and British armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity at the sight of such emaciation – reducing adults and even little children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions even more widely … among our former enemies.
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The senators spoke with deep feeling, at great length. Side by side with the hatred of evil so vigorously expressed was a moving pity for the miserable victims. Clearly, without such compassion there could hardly be the hatred of the evil-doing, which brought hot shame to the cheeks of Langer, Gollancz and all the others. In
this pity, of course, there is nothing new: it is as old as victims.

What seems to be new here is that it appeared at such a moment among such victors. Neither the British nor the Americans were known as gentle warriors. Nations and tribes all over the world, from the Irish, French, Spanish and Scots to the Sioux, Seminole, Filipinos, Zulus, Germans, Boers and Indians, had felt the furious power of Anglo-Saxon militarism, and the vengeance that sometimes followed it. What is new here is that among these warlike peoples, victorious once again in a worldwide war, compassion for the enemy was expressed by senior figures as a matter of duty, honour and pity, in deep opposition to the policy already being carried out.

Mackenzie King expressed this plainly on 1 September 1945, during the ceremonies in Ottawa at the end of the Japanese war: ‘All the United Nations were now committed to further the law of peace, work and health, and to wishing success at the dawn of the new era. I stressed particularly the colossal loss of life and what we owe to the men who had given their lives. Blessed are the peacemakers.’
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This speech got a terrific reception, perhaps the warmest that this mild, cautious man had ever received. These words were not only rhetoric: they expressed profound feelings among hundreds of millions of English-speaking people in the world. Mackenzie King was not only the Prime Minister of a country which had made a major contribution to defeating Hitler, he was also a friend and confidant of Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Winston Churchill and many other leaders. ‘Peace, work and health’ expressed perfectly what ‘common people’ had always wanted. This policy was chosen by the English-speaking nations that could easily have continued a winning war. They were implementing it in the face of a great danger from the Soviets. And they were carrying it out massively, internationally, with superb organization at high speed and terrific cost, to the needy nations of earth save only one.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

*
Where %% means per thousand.

III
‘
F
ROM
T
HERE
N
O PRISONER
R
ETURNED’

Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000 and the French around 200,000.
¹
Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity.
²

As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an ‘urgent courier’ throughout the huge area that he commanded,
making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed
prisoners
. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners. This astounding order contradicted an earlier message from Eisenhower to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 10 March, saying that he would make the German civilians feed the prisoners. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved this in late April.

The order was sent in German to the
Länder
or provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered in the 1990s in several villages near the Rhine, among them Langenlonsheim.
The message, reproduced on pages 42–3, reads in part: ‘… under no circumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war. Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot …’
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Eisenhower’s order was also posted in English, German and Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Headquarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing and Regensburg, where there were a lot of Polish guard companies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted order in May 1945 has written that it was ‘the intention of Army command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as many POWs as the traffic would bear without international scrutiny’.
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Since this fatal order contravenes the order given by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower, and since it entailed the deaths of thousands of prisoners, it is important to German civilians, to the prisoners, and to Army records in general. But in the course of six months’ research in the US archives, and also in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries, the author has been unable to locate the original of this order. Nor has he found any trace of an order from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower ordering him to reverse the feeding policy agreed on just two weeks before.

The army’s policy was to starve prisoners, according to several American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in New York, who was a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an officer that ‘it is our policy that these men not be fed’.
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The 50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire, he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, ‘If you do that again, you’ll
be shot.’ Brech saw bodies go out of the camp ‘by the truckload’
but he was never told how many there were, where they were buried, or how.
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Former prisoners have led the way to putting names to prisoners and one civilian who were shot for the ‘crime’ of passing food through the barbed wire. Civilian women and teenage girls were shot, shot at, and imprisoned for trying to take food to relatives, although the Eisenhower order had purportedly given individual camp commanders a chance to exempt family members trying to feed relatives through the wire.
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The prisoner Paul Schmitt was shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Büdesheim, written by one of her children, reads: ‘On the 31 of July 1945, my mother was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers.’ The entry in the Catholic church register says simply: ‘A tragic demise, shot in Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945.’ Martin Brech watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a hillside firing shots towards German women running away from him in the valley below.

The most gruesome killing was witnessed by the prisoner Hanns Scharf, formerly of California, who was watching as a German woman with her two children came towards an American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband, who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground and killed the prisoner with five shots. The other prisoners howled, which brought round US Army Lieutenant Holtsman of Seattle, who said, ‘This is awful. I’ll make sure there is a stiff court martial.’
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In months of work in the Washington archives of the army, no court martial of this or similar incidents has ever turned up. Captain Lee Berwick, who was in command of the guard towers at Bretzenheim nearby, has said that he was never aware
of any court martial for shootings at Bretzenheim or at Bad Kreuznach.
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