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II THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM?

For Britain, the most important aim of diplomacy in the 1930s had been to maintain in Europe a balance of power so that no nation would be strong enough to threaten her interests. In 1939, Britain hoped to achieve this partly by threatening Germany with war if Germany attacked Poland. Germany was seen as the only threat, and Poland was the place to end her aggressions. But, in fact, Poland was attacked in 1939 by two European aggressors, Germany and the USSR. Six years later, Poland was free of Germans, but the USSR was still in ugly possession of eastern Poland and other territories it had first taken with the help of Hitler. The British guarantee to Poland had not been fulfilled. And the Soviet threat to Europe in 1945 was great.

A decision was made in 1945 that shaped modern history. The last battle of the Second World War was not to be fought. As the Polish Minister Babinski in Ottawa said to the Prime Minister of Canada Mackenzie King in July 1945, ‘Poland has lost the war she fought, and the Allies have lost the war … Russian communism has won the day.’¹ The weakness of the British vis-à-vis the Soviets is often assumed to be the cause, but the ‘weak’ British of 1939 had gone to war against Hitler; and in 1940, when they were even weaker, the British had continued to defy him. Now the victorious British of 1945 were meekly collaborating in the Soviet takeover of all eastern Europe. Why?

The answer begins with one of the dominant international facts of the twentieth century, the strength of Germany. The Axis alliance in 1941–42 seemed so strong that our leaders believed that it was imperative to ally ourselves whole-heartedly with the dictator Stalin against the dictator Hitler.

This was one of the more astonishing reversals in history, for the British, French, Canadians and Americans had all fought against communism during the first days of the Russian revolution. They had failed to suppress communism in Russia, but their old enemy Germany had secretly begun to co-operate with Soviet Russia to re-arm in the 1920s. The Germans under the Weimar Republic had begun to rebuild their air force and army, which was illegal under the Treaty of Versailles. In Kazan, German tank units under General Heinz Guderian were secretly trained, and helped to train Red Army units; at Lipetsk airbase nearby, the Germans tested ‘a whole new generation of German fighters and heavy bombers.’² And in August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed in a secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, to conquer Poland together and then split the spoils. Assured of a speedy victory in Poland, Hitler courted the risk that Britain and France would declare war on Germany. Thus started the Second World War.

Hitler continued the war against the British and French with the help of the Soviets, who delivered oil, rubber, wheat and strategic metals in return for some machinery and for Hitler’s compliance in their takeover of the Baltic states. Thus for almost two years, the UK and British Commonwealth – with a little help from France – fought against German armies fuelled and fed in part by the Soviets.

Desperate for help after the fall of France in 1940 and Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941, the British and Canadians began to revise public opinion about the tyrannical Soviet regime. It was clearly ludicrous to pretend that the Soviets were helping the democracies, but the Western Allies did it anyway, manufacturing public opinion through their control of press, film and radio. The major thrust of this propaganda was to demonize Germany and later Japan, while praising the Russians for their heroic struggle to defend their homeland. On the June day in 1941 that marked the beginning of Hitler’s assault on Russia, Churchill said with a smile, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’³

Pondering how to conduct the war from 1941 on, Western leaders did not choose the democratic way, to obey the public will. Instead, having determined their policy in secret, they deceived the public. They suppressed the brutal truth, that they believed the West was so weak that they had to support one criminal regime in order to beat another. So the Western leaders pretended that the greatest mass-murderer of all time, Joseph Stalin, was a wise and heroic leader resolutely defending Mother Russia against the fascist hordes. And it was the democracies’ duty to help defend him.

Soon after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941, the American government, with the willing co-operation of the press, created a vast propaganda machine to dupe their people about the Soviets. This was necessary for several reasons, one being that the American public, even nine months after the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, was still confused as to why they were in the war at all. According to a Gallup Poll in September 1942, almost 40 per cent of Americans had no idea ‘what this war was all about’. The pollsters concluded that ‘this large minority of the population has not been adequately sold on the war’.⁴ There was such a widespread indifference or opposition to government policies that their report had to be marked confidential, and circulated only among the top echelons of the media, with recommendations on how to change public opinion to favour the war.

As the war progressed, the Allies gradually extended their military co-operation with the Soviets, championing their cause against all kinds of critics. The mass killer Stalin was pictured in the Western press with a benign smile over the caption ‘Uncle Joe.’ Life magazine stated unequivocally in 1943 that the Russians ‘look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.’ The New York Times took the long view, saying that ‘Marxian thinking in Russia is out.’⁵ No mention was ever made of the vast atrocities committed before and during the war by the Soviets.

Then Roosevelt and Churchill took the next step: they began to cover up Soviet war crimes against their allies, the Poles. And finally, after the war, they helped the Soviets commit new crimes, against the democratic leaders of Poland, and against former allies of the West. These were White Russians who had fought first with Western troops against the communists in the Russian Civil War, then later sided with Hitler against Stalin. Victory over Germany justified for some people in the West the totalitarian means that had gained the end, so these people were sent by force to Stalin, although they had never been Soviet citizens. Finally, the Western democracies co-operated in the bloody Soviet-Polish expulsions from eastern Germany, maintained camps where about one million German prisoners of war died of starvation, exposure or disease, and countenanced or contributed to the starvation of millions of German civilians from 1946 to 1950.

The influential American columnist Dorothy Thompson clearly saw and eloquently warned against the danger that Western democratic leaders would continue to adapt some totalitarian methods to their own use after the war. She was joined by Harvard President Conant and many others. Herbert Hoover condemned the whole process in 1948: ‘I felt deeply that … we were aligning ourselves with wicked processes and that the old biblical injunction that “the wages of sin are death” was still working. We see the consequences today.’⁶

The democracies accommodated the Soviets in 1945 partly because they still feared and hated the Germans. The democracies were also indifferent to the Soviets’ totalitarian cruelties. They were co-operating with the Soviets in hiding atrocities in the east, and in the murderous expulsions from the seized territories of Germany. But their refusal to fight the Soviets was more fundamental. A fascinating change had begun that is still going on in the English-speaking democracies: the peacemakers were beginning to win their struggle with the militarists.

In most crises in the Anglo-Saxon nations before 1945, the victors had usually been the militarists. And with good reason, for Anglo-Saxon military power was by far the most successful that the world has ever known. Neither England nor the United States had ever lost a war against non-Anglo-Saxons in over five centuries of struggles with the greatest military powers on every continent, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, on land, under every kind of regime.

After the United States, Britain in 1945 was probably the most powerful nation on the face of the devastated earth, with the biggest empire in the history of the world. The Soviets had to remember that in any confrontation with Britain, huge resources might be available to Britain from Canada and the USA, who were able to pour billions of dollars in food, munitions, and advanced equipment into her ports. The Royal Navy was the strongest on earth, after the American fleet; the Royal Air Force enormous and highly skilled; the armies numbering millions of men, well-equipped and flush with victory.

There was recent and powerful precedent for the British to resist Russian influence in Europe. Britain had actually sent troops and ships against Russia twice before in recent times, once against the Tsar in the Crimea, and once again during the Russian Civil War. To assist them in a land battle, the British could call on more than two million German captives in their possession in the summer of 1945. The warlike spirit was still strong in the land. Churchill in May 1945 was keeping many German prisoners ready for battle, in their original formations, with all their guns and other equipment intact.⁷ For the British of yore, personified in Churchill, the commitment to Poland would have been a matter of Britain’s national honour, and her ancient pride – a test of British mettle. To fulfil it by driving out Russia would have been a stern duty. But the Empire’s power depended largely on the willingness of the Canadians and Americans to go on subsidizing the British. Billions of Canadian dollars had already been sent, billions more were on their way to shore up the British economy. How long would it last?

Mackenzie King, the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, who had been arrested and jailed for leading a Canadian rebellion against the British in 1837, was opposed to an Empire dominated by the British. On a visit to Downing Street in September 1945 to receive British petitions for food and money, he wrote: ‘It is strange that Mackenzie [his grandfather] should have gone to Downing Street to try and get self-government, Canada’s grievances remedied and that Downing Street today should be asking me to come to help Britain with her difficult problems.’⁸ By King’s decision, Canada would not send the troops Churchill had wanted to help the British reconquer south-east Asia. But his objections went deeper than that. ‘I was thinking a day or two ago, that I had first my grandfather’s work to carry on; then Mulock’s work, Laurier’s work, and now my own work. All on this one theme, seeking to have the organization of Empire such that it will hold together by its several supports rather than all fall asunder through the efforts of Tory imperialists to create a vaster Empire than has been, thereby sowing the seeds of another world war.’⁹

Bankrupt, short of food, weary of war, lacking warlike allies, the British made no threats against the Russians. Most of the imperial grandeur was swept overboard like cannon from the deck of a listing ship. The guarantee to Poland was ignored by all but the Poles.

The Americans had made no guarantee to Poland, but they felt strong sympathy for her people, and the politicians were keenly aware of the large Polish vote in the USA. Herbert Hoover had toured the US raising millions of dollars for relief to Poland in both the wars. By March 1945, even Roosevelt, invincibly credulous about Stalin, was beginning to wonder if the Soviets had any intention of accepting Anglo-Saxon ideas for sharing world power, or of making the United Nations work. By September 1945, when the Japanese war was over and the atomic cloud had spread around the world, no one could doubt that the Soviets were already breaking all their promises about Poland. The Western sympathizers in Poland were being arrested and murdered, the communist Lublin Poles controlled Poland in the interests of the Soviets.

The Americans now had a strong complaint against the Soviets, and a strong ally in Britain. They would gain much in other parts of the world by bringing the Soviets to heel. The Soviets threatened the growing American oil interests in the Middle East; they were helping Mao Tse-tung in China against the pro-American Chiang Kai-shek, and communist spies were caught stealing secrets from the highly advanced Canadian atomic development programme.

If the British and Americans had issued a joint ultimatum to the Soviets over Poland, one choice for Stalin would have been war against the most powerful nations in the world, whose aid was now essential to the Soviets just to keep the nation from starving. The USSR, strong compared to Germany, was feeble against the West. The USSR had huge armies in Europe, but much of their food came from Canada and the United States. Their soldiers marched into battle in fifteen million pairs of North American boots. Over 21,000 of their planes, half a million trucks, 12,000 tanks, and one-third of their merchant shipping fleet, were made in Great Britain, Canada or the United States.¹⁰ Stalin said in 1943 that ‘without this equipment, we would lose this war’.¹¹ Stalin’s train arrived at Berlin for the Potsdam Conference on Canadian rails; much Russian bread was made from wheat grown in Canada and the USA.¹² Not only that, but there were revolts, insurrections and guerrilla movements in several places in the ramshackle Soviet confederation. There was guerrilla warfare in Poland and the Baltic countries; an uprising in the Ukraine; and low-grade protests in the army, in industry and in the Gulag, the Soviet administrative department responsible for maintaining prisons and labour camps. Not only did the allies know the full extent of the supplies the Soviets needed, they also had a statistical picture of the destruction that the country had suffered. In February 1945, the US State Department issued a confidential summary of the state of the Soviet economy, under the title ‘Outline of Factors Determining Russia’s Interest in American Credits’. The summary showed that the Allies judged that the Soviets had lost 25 per cent of their stock of fixed capital (i.e. buildings, dams, roads, equipment, bridges). The losses in inventory (stocks of food, clothing, etc.) would add approximately another 6 per cent to that. In all, the Soviets had lost close to one-third of inventory and equipment, plus millions of young men.¹³

In addition to the millions of men in their own world-wide forces, the British and Americans in the summer of 1945 held over six million German troops in their camps, while the Soviets had just over two million. The British and American armies nearly matched the Soviets in numbers, and they were far better supplied and more mobile. A lot of the Soviet transport was still drawn by horses, but the armies of the West were the first in the history of the world to be propelled entirely by engines. And the Westerners had the most powerful weapon ever known – the atomic bomb. Why, with the danger of the Soviets plain to see in every sphere, did these two victorious powers not stand firm while they were so superior? For the British, Poland was a matter of honour; for both British and Americans, Poland was a useful pretext to deliver an annihilating lesson to the Soviets. Why did they not do it?

First, there was the fear that Germany might rise from the wreckage and challenge the democracies again. This fear soon diminished as the Allies took over in Germany, then finally disappeared into the antagonism between communism and democracy. But even more important was the desire in the democracies to find a better way than war to settle the hostilities of the world.

They had tried once before with the League of Nations, they would try once again with the UN. But the UN could not work without the USSR. To bring the Soviets into the world community of nations – to create that sense of community in the first place – the democracies sacrificed eastern Europe, including Poland and eastern Germany, and placed their honour and their power in the balance.

Their policy was partly in Churchill’s plan to share power with the Soviets in Europe,¹⁴ partly a determination to crush Germany under an occupation so heavy that it could never again threaten the supremacy of the West. It was in the remnants of Wilson’s 14 Points; it was partly in Mackenzie King’s ‘law of peace, work and health’; and it was partly in the determination of Roosevelt and other American leaders to ‘get along with’ the Soviets.

But there were people in the West who believed that the Second World War was only the crusade against Hitler. Victory was all, Poland scarcely mattered, the Soviet threat meant little. After the war, these few powerful people kept the war going in the form of camouflaged vengeance. On the Western side, this vengeance was named the Morgenthau Plan after one of its progenitors, Roosevelt’s friend Henry C. Morgenthau, who was also Secretary of the US Treasury. Morgenthau said it was necessary to reduce the military-industrial strength of Germans forever, so that never again could they threaten the peace.¹⁵ To him and his friends, Poland and the security of Europe meant little or nothing. In fact, their plan was a serious threat to the safety of Europe because it distracted the Allies from the resistance they might have made to the Soviets. It caused quarrels among the Western Allies because they feared the communists would ‘exploit’ the misery the Morgenthau Plan would create in Germany. The reconstruction of Europe, which would avert that threat, was seriously delayed by the destruction of the German economy carried out under the Morgenthau Plan after May 1945. And the moral issues raised by the vengeance set people against each other throughout the West.

Western planning for vengeance against Germans and for the destruction of Germany began in England in August 1944, with its chief architects Morgenthau and Dwight D. Eisenhower.¹⁶ The birth of the plan was witnessed by one of Morgenthau’s aides, Fred Smith, who wrote:

On August 7, 1944 at approximately 12:35 P.M. in a tent in southern England, the Morgenthau Plan was born. Actually, it was General Dwight D. Eisenhower who launched the project … The subject first came up at lunch in General Eisenhower’s mess tent. Secretary Morgenthau, Assistant to the Secretary Harry D. White and I were there.

White spoke of Germany, which was now certain to be defeated … White said, ‘What I think is that we should give the entire German economy an opportunity to settle down before we do anything about it.’ Here Eisenhower became grim and made the statement that actually sparked the German hardship plan. [Smith notes here that ‘This material is taken from notes made directly after the meeting.’] He said: ‘I am not interested in the German economy and personally would not like to bolster it if that will make it any easier for the Germans.’ He said he thought the Germans had punishment coming to them: ‘The ringleaders and the SS troops should be given the death penalty without question, but punishment should not end there.’

He felt the people [emphasis in the original] were guilty of supporting the regime and that made them a party to the entire German project, and he personally would like to ‘see things made good and hard for them for a while’. He pointed out that talk of letting Germany off easy after taking care of the top people came from those who feared Russia and wanted to strengthen Germany as a potential bulwark against any desires Russia might someday have …

The General declared he saw no purpose in treating a ‘paranoid’ gently, and the ‘whole German population is a synthetic paranoid. All their life the people have been taught to be paranoid in their actions and thoughts, and they have to be snapped out of it. The only way to do that is to be good and hard on them. I certainly see no point in bolstering their economy or taking any other steps to help them.’

White remarked: ‘We may want to quote you on the problem of handling the German people.’

Eisenhower replied that he could be quoted. He said: ‘I will tell the President myself, if necessary.’¹⁷

Lord Keynes, the famous British economist, asked President Roosevelt in late November if he was planning ‘a complete agrarian economy’ for Germany. Although the American people had been told that the Morgenthau Plan had been abandoned, Roosevelt now told Keynes in secret that the plan would be implemented. The German economy would be reduced to a level ‘not quite’ completely agrarian, he said. The plan went ‘pretty far’ in de-industrializing the Ruhr and eliminating many of Germany’s basic industries.¹⁸

The Morgenthau Plan has three remarkable aspects: that it was devised, that it was implemented after it had been cancelled, and that it has since been covered up so well. Now it has shrunk from sight in the West. The basic idea of the plan was to wreck or confiscate all important German industry, converting the country into a huge farm, while at the same time destroying the fertilizer plants on which German agriculture depended. It would also cut Germany into pieces, and allot a huge piece of territory to the Poles and Soviets.¹⁹ Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill at Quebec: ‘You can’t do this. After all, you and I have publicly said quite the opposite.’ Churchill replied, ‘Now I hope, Anthony, that you are not going to do anything about this with the War Cabinet if you see a chance …’ Eden also said that he and Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, were both ‘horrified’ at the plan.²⁰

Cordell Hull did not go with Roosevelt to Quebec, so it was odd that Roosevelt allowed Morgenthau to present a plan for the post-war treatment of Germany, a fantastically complicated subject for which Morgenthau had no training at all. His vengeful views were the opposite of Hull’s views on Germany. It was a tragedy for the United States and all Europe that Hull had no influence at Quebec, or at the major summit conference at Yalta four months later.

Hull was never consulted about any of this vengeful business, which he hated. He said after Quebec that, ‘This whole development at Quebec I believe angered me as much as anything that had happened during my career as Secretary of State.’²¹ He knew and said, along with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, that the Morgenthau Plan would mean the deaths of some twenty million Germans by starvation and exposure. If the plan were leaked, it would give Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, strong arguments for a bitter, futile resistance by the Germans. The plan was leaked, Goebbels soon obliged, and the Germans resisted to the bitter end. The Germans’ fear of Allied vengeance was so powerful that William Donovan, Director of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), wrote to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 27 November 1944 that, ‘The horrible prospects of exile to Siberia, eternal slavery, de-industrialization, break-up of Germany and even sterilization, have been carefully portrayed to the Germans by their Nazi leaders. It is considered that the German spirit of resistance has been bolstered greatly by fear of the consequence of unconditional surrender.’²² The Germans fought even when their country had been cut in half, but the Japanese, who for years had defended their conquered possessions to the last man, gave up before they were invaded.

In shutting out Hull, who was supported by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt and the Morgenthau planners were also deliberately shutting out from government the opinions they represented. In the nation these were clearly in the majority. The majority of the press also opposed the Plan.²³ Hull was admired and respected throughout the United States and the world because he was free of the vengeful violence that infected the Morgenthau supporters. In 1945, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Churchill told Stalin a few weeks after Quebec that the public reaction to the Morgenthau Plan had displeased Roosevelt and him. They were ‘not very happy about its reception’. But he added, ‘Great Britain would not agree to mass execution of Germans, because one day British public opinion would cry out.’²⁴ Yet development of the Morgenthau Plan went ahead in secret.

Eisenhower began to carry it out on his own initiative in 1944. The first to suffer were the German prisoners. American prison camps under Eisenhower’s command in France were kept far below the standards set by the Geneva Convention.²⁵ These camps were described by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, who was in charge of the US camps in France in 1945: ‘The standards of PW [prisoner of war] camps in the ComZ [the US Army’s rear zone] in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavourably with the Germans.’²⁶ To maintain such camps was a war crime punishable by death, according to the Americans after the war. They shot Japanese General Masaharu Homma in 1946 for maintaining camps in approximately the conditions described by Allard. After the German surrender on 8 May 1945, the American camps grew steadily worse.

The total occupation of Germany, and the destruction of Germany’s armed forces, national government, political parties, coupled with the trials of the war criminals, was the beginning of the Allies’ post-war policy. At the surrender in May 1945, schools and universities were closed, as well as radio stations, newspapers, the national Red Cross and mail service. Germany was also stripped of much coal, her eastern territories, industrial patents, lumber, gold reserves, and most of her labour force. Allied teams also looted and destroyed Germany’s factories, offices, laboratories and workshops. So much food was confiscated that Max Huber of the International Red Cross complained about it in August 1945 in a letter to the US State department.²⁷ Starting on May 8, the date of the surrender in the West, German and Italian prisoners in Canada, Italy, the USA and the UK, who had been fed according to the Geneva Convention, were suddenly put on greatly reduced rations. In the US, some ex-prisoners allege, starvation set in.²⁸

Gruesome expulsions of civilians from the eastern territories now began. These were described by some writers in the West as ‘orderly and humane population transfers’, while others reported the lethal conditions as they were. German industrial production in the winter of 1944–45, which even under the Allied bombings was 105 per cent of pre-war levels, was reduced under the Morgenthau Plan to 25 per cent of pre-war levels by autumn, 1945.²⁹

The public was fooled time and again into believing that the Plan had been abandoned when it had not; that there was a fatal world food shortage, when world food supplies were down by only 2–10 per cent; that there was a shipping shortage, when scores of ships lay idle at wharves in North America and Europe.³⁰ Even so seasoned an observer as British historian Martin Gilbert has mistakenly written, after years of research on the war and its aftermath, that: ‘In the event, it was the State Department which rejected it [the Morgenthau Plan].’³¹ Morgenthau himself wrote, in the New York Post on 24 November 1947, after long study of Germany: ‘Much has been said and written about the so-called Morgenthau Plan for Germany from its first beginnings until it ceased to be attributable to any one individual. Then it became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action … for the three greatest powers on earth.’

Morgenthau’s friends were clearly more interested in vengeance than in reparations. As Senator William Langer of North Dakota stated in the United States Senate: ‘History already records that a savage minority of bloody bitter-enders within this government forced the acceptance of the brutal Morgenthau Plan upon the present administration. I ask, Mr President, why in God’s name did the administration accept it? … Recent developments have merely confirmed scores of earlier charges that this addlepated and vicious Morgenthau Plan had torn Europe in two and left half of Germany incorporated in the ever-expanding sphere of influence of an oriental totalitarian conspiracy. By continuing a policy which keeps Germany divided against itself, we are dividing the world against itself and turning loose across the face of Europe a power and an enslaving and degrading cruelty surpassing that of Hitler’s.’³²

Senator Langer was not alone. His speech was warmly applauded. The Senate voted in approval of a resolution that stated in part, ‘Whereas … reports reaching the United States indicate that … the policies of the victor powers are subjecting millions to mass starvation, and whereas the United States has been a party to the commitments and agreements reached among the victor powers which have led to these conditions; and whereas the Congress has been bypassed and the American people have been ignored in the formulation and implementation of these policies, and whereas it is essential that the Congress of the United States should obtain the necessary information to enact legislation and to request the President to take executive action designed to eliminate the starvation conditions resulting from the policies for which this Government is directly responsible, Therefore, be it resolved …’ And the resolution went on to set up a group with a budget to study conditions in Germany and to report in detail.

This resolution was proposed by the influential Senator Kenneth Wherry, together with several others, including Capehart, Hawkes, La Follette, Hickenlooper and Taft. In presenting the motion, Wherry said, ‘Much has been said and little done relative to opening the mails to Germany and providing sufficient food to prevent mass starvation in Germany, Austria, Italy and other countries of Europe. Terrifying reports are filtering through the British, French and American occupied zones, and even more gruesome reports from the Russian occupied zone, revealing a horrifying picture of deliberate and wholesale starvation.’ He criticized the Truman administration for doing nothing despite the ‘rising chorus of pleas for intercession’ to prevent a ‘major tragedy’ that was rapidly developing. He had questioned Governor Lehman, in charge of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), who admitted that the UN aid was not feeding any of the starving Germans. Yet President Truman had told Senator Wherry that UNRRA was feeding Germans. This was not true. UNRRA never fed Germans, who thus starved within reach of adequate food.

‘Time and again,’ the Senator continued, ‘the administration has advanced the excuse that transportation facilities were lacking, but for months scores of ships have been lying idle in both eastern and European ports. So it is not a question of the lack of ships. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of GIs in Europe are apparently sentenced to enforced idleness for want of something to do. Millions of dollars’ worth of surplus trucks and jeeps are falling apart in their open-air garages in Europe.’ Nor was food scarce, for there was plenty in the civilian and the military stores, Wherry said: ‘The truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of tons of military rations in our surplus stock piles that have been spoiling right in the midst of starving populations.’ The government’s defence of the Morgenthau Plan was reduced to rubble by a couple of accurate criticisms, in which Senator Wherry was joined by Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr. The government had said that the policy had been established in agreement with the Allies not to feed ex-enemies, but Russell said that the Allies were feeding Italians, who had also been the enemy during the war, and he demanded to know why they received food while the Germans starved.³³

What this actually meant to the mothers and children of Germany was a repetition on a larger scale of the Nazi-induced famine in the Netherlands during the winter of 1944–45.³⁴ Well over sixty million Germans were deliberately pushed to the edge of death by starvation. In Hamburg in 1946, in the British zone of occupation, one touring British writer said that about 100,000 people were in the last stages of starvation with hunger oedema.³⁵ In Düsseldorf and many other cities, people lived like rats in a few square feet of wet basement under a heap of rubble. The English philanthropist and publisher Victor Gollancz witnessed these conditions during his visit to Germany in 1946. He wrote:

I made a more extensive tour of Düsseldorf dwelling-places towards the end of the week. Down a long dark staircase and then along a black tunnel was a man of 79, alone in a hole which he had made habitable – according to the ruling standards – ‘all by himself’. His wife was out on the search for bread. In another part of the same cellar was a mother with three children – [aged] 6, 10 and 14. All four of them slept in the only bed, two side by side in the ordinary way and the other two side by side at the foot of it. The mother came back while we were there: it was 10:30 and she had been queuing for bread since early morning and had returned empty-handed – ‘bread nowhere’. One of the children was still in bed; none had yet had anything to eat, as the last bread had gone yesterday. The father was a prisoner of war in Russia. Two of the children had TB. There was a tiny stove, but no coal or gas, only a little wood, which they ‘fetched’. For excretion they used a pail, which they emptied every morning into a hole they had dug in the courtyard above. They had twice been bombed out. On one wall was a small faded photograph of the mother and father at their wedding and on another some prince or king with the legend ‘Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen’: learn to suffer without complaining.³⁶

Gollancz went round the city with members of the local Red Cross, who filled the starving Germans with ‘gratitude and happiness’. One dwelling place he visited with them was ‘down two long flights of stairs to an awful couple of rooms below’. There were no windows, no fresh air entering at all except by the door. This cellar had been flooded steadily for four weeks. In it were living two women and five children, from two different families. One of the women was pregnant; a child was covered with sores. The smell was so bad that Gollancz had to cover his nose and eat a lozenge on the way out. He visited cellar after cellar of this kind. A few were decorated with crucifixes, photographs. In some he found people who were nevertheless cheerful. ‘All of them were grateful, terribly grateful, when they were given something.’ ³⁷ The deaths of children with TB was already nearly three times the pre-war rate in Düsseldorf; about one third of the children in Iserlohn had TB; in Hamburg, diabetics in the first stages of coma were trying to force their way into hospital because there was no insulin. The latest news was that in the British zone the starvation ration of a nominal 1,550 calories per day (cpd) would now be reduced to 1,000 cpd for about six months. At the top level of the US Army, reaction to all this was expressed by General J. H. Hilldring, who said that the Germans were being treated too lavishly.³⁸

These were some of the conditions that led Dr Amelunxen, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia in the British zone, to predict that two to three million people in his province of eleven million would die in the next few years. (Deaths in two years at pre-war rates would be around 265,000.) The food ration did not improve in the following eighteen months, but grew slightly worse.³⁹

A member of the (Quaker) Society of Friends in Germany, Hans Albrecht, also predicted a horrendous death rate. In September 1945 he said, ‘No child born in Germany this year will survive the coming winter. Only half the children aged less than three years will survive.’⁴⁰ There was some evidence for this fear already in Berlin, where the infant mortality rate for several months had already been close to 100 per cent. In the summer of 1945 in Berlin, nearly every baby was born dead, or died within a few days. Albrecht was also predicting that among the estimated 2.5 to 2.7 million Germans aged three years and under, half would die. Among the infants alone, the toll would be well over one million, perhaps as high as a million and a half dead.⁴¹

Most children under ten and people over sixty⁴² could not survive the coming winter, according to Probst Grüber, a man experienced in such matters because he had just been saved from one of Hitler’s camps. Grüber wrote on 12 October 1945, ‘In the forest around Berlin, countless dead are hanging from the trees. One becomes indifferent to death. Mothers see their children die and bury them by the wayside, apparently with none of that pain which usually tears a mother’s heart apart … If this misery cannot be checked, it is no exaggeration to reckon on a figure of 20,000,000 dead this winter.’⁴³

‘ The infant mortality rate in Berlin is sixteen times as high as it was in 1943,’ reported the American journalist Edd Johnson. Johnson knew horror, for he had witnessed it in Hitler’s concentration camps just weeks before. A German Red Cross official had predicted to him an infant mortality rate of 80–90 per cent for winter 1945–46, amid scenes of desolation hard to believe in modern times. ‘Germans are going to die like flies this winter,’ according to United States Public Health officers attached to the army. ‘There is going to be a definite age group elimination of the German population.’⁴⁴

In the French zone, things were even worse, perhaps because the French had suffered so much from German depredations and atrocities in France. A huge number of soldiers, bureaucrats and their families was imposed on the small zone. In 1946, the French billeted 18 persons per 10,000 Germans, whereas the British billeted ten and the Americans only three. The French took all their housing and most of their food from the locals, with the result that the local rations were always lower than the meagre rations decreed in the other zones. But the French did not feel that the enormous scale of their exactions and the suffering of the Germans were justified, for they camouflaged what they were doing, according to Price, Waterhouse and Company. The big American accounting firm reported that the ‘defective nature of the accounts’ kept by the French ‘made it impossible to produce an accountant’s report on the foreign trade of the zone’.⁴⁵ The Germans complained bitterly about these false accounts. No German accounting of the foreign exports was permitted by the French, who took the goods, at prices they set themselves, and paid not in the precious dollars received, but in marks, thus depriving the Germans of the one means they had to buy foreign food.⁴⁶ For all these reasons, ‘population losses were significant,’ according to the American writer F. Roy Willis. The death rate for the town of Landau in the Rheinland-Pfalz was 39.5%%* in 1946, which was more than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%%, more than double the pre-war rate.⁴⁷ In the British zone, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery feared that the loss of life in the winter of 1945–46 was going to be ‘very heavy’.⁴⁸ The daily ration for an average adult then was 1,042 calories, which he said meant that ‘we are going to let them starve: gradually’.⁴⁹ There were many voices at home and abroad raised in protest against the treatment of Germany. The Lord Bishop of Chichester, Lord Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz protested vigorously in England, and many as well in the US. The former Chief Rabbi of Berlin, Dr Baeck, was reported in an influential US magazine to have ‘horrified the hate cult in this country by calling on his Jewish colleagues to join with him in demanding relief feeding for Germany …’⁵⁰

All this protest had no serious effect at first on the US President, Harry S. Truman. Neglected, uninformed, like most of the members of Roosevelt’s Cabinet, Truman was ignorant of many important matters when he arrived in office following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. The ailing Hull, like his successor Edward Stettinius, was ignored, and Henry Morgenthau, a great favourite of Roosevelt’s, in effect became Secretary of State for the most important decision of all about Germany. Harry Hopkins, who had never been elected, carried out the most important missions for the President. In the spring of 1945, Truman was a minor figure whose great service had been to run on the FDR ticket in 1944. He was not well prepared to deal with the disasters now impending around the world.

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.⁵² 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.’⁵³

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.’⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵

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.’⁵⁶ 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.