Exorcising Hitler (35 page)

So Britain, bankrupt and with a semi-mutinous population that had so far seen little or no benefit from winning the war, was now saddled with a zone in Germany that brought with it quite peculiar problems. It was the most highly populated zone, containing around twenty-two million people, a number being added to daily by the vast influx to the zone of refugees from the east, which would eventually reach around 4.5 million.
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It also had the highest population density of any post-war political unit except four-power Berlin. Also in the British Zone were several of Germany’s largest cities – Hamburg, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hanover and Aachen – along with the once-mighty (though by 1945 largely destroyed) Ruhr conurbation, whose factories and mines and steel mills had constituted the beating heart of the German military-industrial complex.

Before the war, the Ruhr had been one of the richest, most productive parts of Germany, but for now, in the terrible aftermath of war, its overwhelmingly urban population represented little more than another huge millstone around Britain’s neck. It was true that the area of Lower Saxony (including the old province of Hanover), also belonging to the British Zone, was largely rural and quite productive agriculturally, but, along with the other agricultural area, Schleswig-Holstein (north of Hamburg and close to Denmark), it had become a favourite destination for refugees from the lost eastern territories, and could and did plead that it had problems enough of its own without being forced to meet the apparently insatiable appetites of miners in Gelsenkirchen and steel-rollers in Essen.

In the autumn of 1945, the British documentary film maker Humphrey Jennings took a film crew to his country’s zone and began a project for the government’s Crown Film Unit which would end up being released as the influential film
A Defeated People
. He wrote home to his wife of his mixed and, he admitted, confused impressions:

At lunchtime today we were photographing a [German] family cooking their lunch on campfires in dixies on the blitzed main stair-case of the Palace of Justice at Cologne – one of the few buildings still standing in the centre of the city – outside apparently deserted – surrounded by miles of rubble and weed-covered craters – but inside voices cries of children and the smell of drifting wood-smoke – of burnt paper – the sound of people smashing up doors and windows to light fires in the corridors – the smoke itself drifting into side rooms still littered with legal documents – finally adding to the blue haze in front of the cathedral.

The cathedral now with all the damage around immensely tall – a vast blue and unsafe spirit ready to crumble upon the tiny black figures in the street below – and then returning to Düsseldorf – much less knocked about – blitzed but not actually destroyed like Cologne and Essen and Aachen – still a beautiful city, returning here to tea we meet sailing through the park-like streets a mass of white Sunday-frocked German school children standing tightly together on an Army truck and singing at the tops of their voices as they are rushed through the streets.

In Essen they still fetch their water from stand-pipes and fire hoses in the streets and the sewers rush roaring and stinking open to the eye and the nose – seep into blitzed houses into cellars where people still live.
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Jennings held the German people responsible for their own fate – among his wartime films he had directed
Silent Village
, a powerful dramatised documentary about the German destruction of the Czech village of Lidice after the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. He did not, for instance, feel guilty at dining in style in hotel restaurants and British officers’ messes while black-clad German waiters (apparently known to the British with cruel humour as ‘dwarves’) scurried around, desperate to please their new masters. And, rather like Wladimir Gelfand, he commented disapprovingly on the listlessness of the natives without realising how much of a role hunger played in their condition. However, Jennings also knew, as he wrote in another letter home, ‘that nothing is clearer straight away than that we cannot – must not – leave them to stew in their own juice . . . well, anyway, it’s a hell of a tangle’.
¹⁶

Theoretically, the British Zone – like all the zones – was supposed to be self-sufficient. In practice, however, given the alternative of letting the Germans ‘stew in their own juice’, London had to feed them, at least in sufficient quantity to stave off famine.

Since Britain itself was forced to import heavily from America to feed itself – one of the reasons for the introduction of bread rationing in 1946 was the effects of the longshoremen’s and tugboat men’s strikes in the US – it had nothing to spare for Germany from its own domestic resources. Therefore, if Britain was to fulfil its obligations, however modest, to the conquered population for which it had assumed responsibility, it had to use up yet more precious foreign currency to stop them from starving.

The once-strong motive of revenge, not to say any residual attachment to Morgenthau-style de-industrialisation, began rapidly to fade in the light of the terrific burden that a helpless Germany represented for a Britain that was itself economically prostrate. Nor was the planned shutdown or dismantling of ‘warlike’ industries as straightforward a matter as it had once seemed. In the case of chemical plants necessary to the production of explosives, for instance, it was true that their liquidation would render Germany incapable of waging another war. It was, however, the case that these same plants, using the same ingredients, also produced the fertilisers so vital to the revival of German agriculture and to the feeding of the zone, with its twenty million largely urban inhabitants.

At the beginning of 1946, the inter-allied Control Commission ordered drastic limitations on German production of synthetic ammonia, just such a dual-use chemical. In the last years of the war, on Hitler’s orders, supplies of this substance had been diverted exclusively to making explosives, leaving German farmers desperately short of artificial fertilisers even before the post-war crisis. The Control Council’s equally short-sighted decision would, it was calculated, cause in the British Zone alone a further shortfall in grain production of three million tons or seven million tons of potatoes.
¹⁷

By spring 1946, the food situation was truly catastrophic. Between March and July 1946 – at the same time as those British housewives were declaring their unwillingness to go without in order to feed the Germans – the zone had a shortfall of about 600,000 tons of grain. Potatoes were simply not available for a while. And this despite the fact that the British were importing an average of 96,000 tons of food monthly to Germany from their own nutritionally beleaguered island.

When in July 1946 the British were the first of the occupiers to appoint a German-staffed ‘Central Office for Nutrition and Agriculture’ (
Zentralamt für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft
), almost its first task was to take responsibility for practically halving the official ration from its already painfully low level of provision. The daily fat allowance, at seven grams per day, was roughly a quarter of the recommended allowance for maintenance of health.
¹⁸
The reports of the busy, overwhelmed British officials trying to cope with this appalling situation show a whole complex of problems that caused these tragic shortfalls.

First came the failure to agree with the Soviets and the French on a central authority that could coordinate the German economy, which meant – among other things – that food surplus areas such as the east of the country (under Russian and Polish control) did not deliver to the urbanised Western zones, especially the British, as they had before 1945. The lack of a central authority and therefore integrated economic and financial policy also meant that the old Reich mark, already seriously depleted before the war ended, rapidly became all but worthless. No one trusted it.

Second, there was the unreliability of imports from abroad. In the exceptionally severe winter of 1946–7, for instance, instead of the usual wheat the British Zone found itself replete with large quantities of North American maize, which local bakers and householders had no idea what to do with. There were few German sources that could make up for this problem.

Third, the British authorities, struggling to feed the industrial cities of the Ruhr, could not even rely on Lower Saxony, a relatively productive agricultural area also under British control, to supply North Rhine-Westphalia (which included the Ruhr) with meat, beet sugar, vegetables and grains. Lower Saxony had food problems of its own, and all the bureaucratic outrage in the world could not make it fulfil its imposed quotas.

As for Bavaria, in the American Zone, then as now a considerable producer of meat and dairy products, although it agreed to supply substantial quotas to the British Zone – substantial enough seriously to benefit the size of the ration available to the population – the produce was simply not delivered. Despite the notionally close collaboration between the British and American zones, culminating in the ‘Bizone’ agreement that came into effect on 1 January 1947, for month after month the separatist-inclined Bavarians did not keep their promise.

Fourth, even when the food was available, the German Railways (
Reichsbahn
) was often so short of wagons that the provisions sat in ports or storage depots long past the planned date of use.

Finally, there were bizarre background events that could only have happened in occupied Germany, and at a time like this – such as the sudden swoop of a Russian dismantling squad on a factory at Dinslaken, on the northern outskirts of the Ruhr, where tin was produced for making cans. Almost before the British knew it, the entire plant had been stripped and disassembled, then shipped off to the Soviet Union as ‘reparations’, creating an instant shortage of the cans used in the distribution of nutritionally vital preserved foods throughout the British Zone.
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The British fumed impotently at all these blocks and bottlenecks and hindrances, and in early 1947 were forced to announce once more that the ration could not be fulfilled.
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The result was serious unrest, with food riots and ‘food strikes’, especially in the all-important but desperately ill-supplied industrial towns of the Ruhr, where there had already been mass meetings to protest at the food and fuel shortages the previous month. In some parts of Germany’s greatest industrial conurbation, the daily calorific allowance was down, temporarily, to around 800–850, true starvation level.
²¹

The striking workers made it clear that they were taking action not necessarily for themselves – since they were on rations for heavy workers they were relatively well off – but on behalf of their wives and children. In some of the speeches by the workers’ leaders, despite their denial of any political aims there were signs not just of a certain naivety but also of a return to wartime attitudes. At the massive Friedrich-Alfred-Hütte steelworks in Rheinhausen on the left bank of the Rhine opposite Duisburg, a trade union official addressed the strikers. His words were recorded in shorthand in English by a German policeman observing the meeting:

Comrades,

The present food situation forces us to this demonstration. We do not believe in transport difficulties. During the war immense quantities of bombs were brought to Germany by Allied aeroplanes. If these aeroplanes would start now to bring food to Germany, the German population would always be thankful to the pilots.

We as your representatives will inform the City Council Meeting of our request. The demonstration shall help back up our request. The Landrat, the government and Mil.Gov are asked to be helpful in getting sufficient food.

Everything shall go on with special discipline. Only cowards do not take part in this demonstration.

This demonstration is not a political one but is only of an economic character.

Within the next few days, demonstrations had spread to Hanover, where an estimated 10,000 protesters turned out, and Braunschweig, where ‘though the demonstration was orderly, a gang of hooligans afterwards marched through the town, smashed windows at the Military Government offices, and overturned a lorry and two cars’.
²²

The strikes and demonstrations continued all through that spring, and included workers in Cologne and Hamburg. In Hamburg, half a million, including shipyard workers and dock workers, downed tools and flocked to a mass meeting addressed by a trade union leader, who demanded special rations for Hamburg and the Ruhr. He expressed the widespread distrust for the Germans administering the food supply on the British authorities’ behalf by demanding that distribution be controlled by trade union representatives.
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It was significant that the British did not use force against the strikers, and nor did they arrest any of the leaders. This contrasted with the situation in the American and especially the French zones, where similar movements were greeted with the use of troops and the infliction of heavy prison sentences.
²⁴
A group of American relief workers, attached to the Quaker Friends’ Relief Service (FRS) in Koblenz, made a brief visit to the Ruhr during the winter of 1946–7 and felt both the hostility of the locals to the occupiers and the relative lack of policing compared with the French Zone where they were based: