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Starvation of Germany after World War II

Allied Policies Force Starvation

Capt. Albert R. Behnke, a U.S. Navy medical doctor, stated in regard to Germany: “From 1945 to the middle of 1948 one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation…Germany was subject to physical and psychic trauma unparalleled in history.” Behnke concluded that the Germans under the Allies had fared much worse than the Dutch under the Germans, and for far longer.[1]   

Normal adult Germans in the American and British Zones were rationed only 1,550 calories per day. The average official calorie ration for Germans in the French Zone was only 1,400 per day. The actual calories received in the American, British and French Zones were often far less than these official amounts, and it was well known that these official ration amounts were not sufficient to maintain a healthy population. Herbert Hoover told President Truman that “the 1,550 ration is wholly incapable of supporting health.”[2] Hoover estimated that 2,200 calories per day “is a minimum in a nation for healthy human beings.”[3]   

The destruction of the German infrastructure during the war had made it inevitable that some Germans would starve to death before roads, rails, canals and bridges could be restored. However, even when much of the German infrastructure had been repaired, the Allies deliberately withheld food from Germany. Continuing the policies of their predecessors, U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee allowed the spirit of Henry Morgenthau and the Yalta Conference to dictate their policies toward Germany. The result was that millions of Germans were doomed to slow death by starvation.[4]    

The Allies had studied German food production during the war, so they knew what to expect once Germany was defeated. The Allies knew that to strip off the rich farmlands of the east and give them to the Poles and Russians deprived Germany of over 25% of her arable land. Germans also starved in the east because the Russians confiscated so much food and virtually all of the factories. The French forced famine in their zone by the seizure of food and housing. The famine in the French Zone went on for years.[5]

The danger of hunger and starvation was slow to abate throughout Germany. The famine that began in Germany in 1945 spread over all of occupied Germany and continued into 1948. This famine was camouflaged as much as possible by the Allied armies and governments.[6]

Many Germans were prepared to see the Allies as liberating angels at first, but they soon realized that the Allies were adopting policies designed to hurt Germany’s recovery. The drastic reduction of fertilizer production under the Morgenthau Plan, for example, hurt Germany’s capacity to grow her own food. The use of German prisoners as slave labor in Allied countries subtracted from the labor force needed to bring in the reduced harvest. German prisoners who worked as slave laborers in the United Kingdom and France were horrified upon arriving home to find their families starving.[7]       

Unable to feed themselves adequately from home production, the Germans tried desperately to increase production for export. However, the Germans were seriously hampered by the Allied reparations policy, which prevented them from exporting goods to increase the shrunken German food supply. The Allies had decided to take huge reparations amounting to at least $20 billion ($279 billion in 2018 dollars). Even as late as 1949, 268 factories were removed from Germany wholly or in part. The reduction in exports for food ensured that the German people would keep on starving.[8]

The Allies not only prevented the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from distributing food to German POWs, but they also refused requests by the ICRC to bring provisions into Germany for civilians. In the winter of 1945, ICRC donations to Germany were returned with the recommendation that the donations be used in other parts of war-torn Europe. The return of ICRC donations was made even for Irish and Swiss contributions that had been specifically raised to benefit Germany. It was not until March 1946 that ICRC donations were permitted to reach the American Zone in Germany.[9]

The Allies also prevented various private relief agencies from providing food to German civilians. For example, the Swiss Relief Fund started a charity to feed a meal once a day to a thousand Bavarian children for two months. The American Zone occupation authorities decided that this aid should not be accepted. One Quaker attempting to provide relief to Germans said, “The U.S. Army made it difficult for relief.” In the United Kingdom in October 1945, “even the concept of voluntary aid via food parcels from Britain’s civilians was anathema to Whitehall.” Such aid to Germany was strictly forbidden.[10]

U.S. Pvt. Martin Brech describes the famine conditions in Germany in 1945:

American soldiers also stole from the German people and let German children go hungry. American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh wrote:

The Allies adopted additional policies that caused starvation in Germany. Food production and food imports came under specific attack when the German fishing fleet was prevented from going to sea for a year. The Allies also used false accounting to not credit the value of some German exports to the German account, making it impossible for Germans to earn foreign currency to buy food. Simply stated, many valuable goods were stolen from Germans beyond the reparations agreed upon by the Allies.[13]

The German people put up a brave struggle for survival despite the harsh conditions. Malcolm Muir, publisher of Business Week, stated after a five-week tour of Europe, including Germany: “The Germans are making every effort to help themselves…It is not unusual to see a milch cow hitched to a plow, a woman leading the cow and a small boy guiding the plow.” However, despite the best efforts of German farmers, the food situation became critical and then catastrophic.[14]

An official of the Food Branch of the American Military Government made the following report concerning the conditions in Germany:

American journalist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson wrote:

The desperation of the German population for food was observed by Kathryn Hulme, the deputy director of one of Bavaria’s many displaced persons camps. She wrote about the scramble for Red Cross packages at the Wildflecken Camp:

One survey in the American Zone concluded that 60% of the Germans were living on a diet that would lead to disease and malnutrition. By October 1945, random weighing of German adults revealed a falloff of body weight of 13-15%. Children, pregnant women and the elderly suffered the most. Their diets were lacking sufficient protein and vitamins, and cases of rickets were common among German infants.[18]

The German Central Administration of Health reported the deadly effects of malnutrition:

The German people starved while the Americans around them lived in luxury. American historian Ralph Franklin Keeling wrote:

George Kennan was also outraged by the disparity in living conditions between the Germans and Americans in Germany. Kennan stated:

U.S. Senators and British Humanitarians Protest Starvation Policies

Some informed political leaders spoke out against the Allied policy of mass starvation of the German people. In an address before the U.S. Senate on February 5, 1946, Sen. Homer E. Capehart of Indiana said in part:

Sen. Capehart’s remarks were interspersed with a mass of supporting evidence.[22]

In a speech to the U.S. Senate on December 3, 1945, Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi spoke of the great difficulty he had encountered in gaining access to the official report on conditions in Germany. Sen. Eastland stated:

Sen. William Langer of North Dakota stated in the U.S. Senate:

The Senate warmly applauded Sen. Langer’s speech.

The Senate approved a resolution proposed by Sen. Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska to establish a group with a budget to study and report in detail the conditions in Germany. Wherry stated:       “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.” Wherry criticized the Truman administration for doing nothing despite the pleas for intercession to prevent a major tragedy. Wherry also questioned Governor Lehman, the person in charge of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), who admitted that the UN aid was not going to the starving Germans. Finally, 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.”[25]

Sen. Langer received new information which caused him to speak in the Senate on March 29, 1946:

Sen. Albert W. Hawkes of New Jersey urged President Truman to allow private relief packages to be sent to Germany to prevent mass starvation of the German people. Truman in a reply dated December 21, 1945, stated “there is as yet no possibility of making deliveries of packages in Germany” because “the postal system and the communications and transportation systems of Germany are in the state of total collapse.” Truman then said:

British intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz also worked to publicize the suffering and mass starvation of the German people. Gollancz objected to the contrast he saw between the accommodations and food in the British officers’ mess and the miserable, half-starved hovels outside. In March 1946 the average calories per day in the British Zone had fluctuated between 1,050 and 1,591. British authorities in Germany were proposing to cut the rations back to 1,000 calories per day. Gollancz pointed out that the inmates at Bergen-Belsen toward the end of the war had only 800 calories per day, which was not much less than the British proposal.[28]

Gollancz made a six-week tour of the British Zone in October and November 1946. In January 1947 Gollancz published the book In Darkest Germany to document what he saw on this trip. Assisted by a photographer, Gollancz included numerous pictures to allay skepticism of the veracity of his reports. The pictures show Gollancz standing behind naked boys suffering from malnutrition; or holding a fully worn and unusable child’s shoe; or comforting a crippled, half-starved adult in his hovel. The point was to show that Gollancz had seen these things with his own eyes and had not merely accepted other people’s reports. Gollancz also wrote to a newspaper editor: “Youth [in Germany] is being poisoned and re-nazified: we have all but lost the peace.”[29]

Victor Gollancz concluded: “The plain fact is when spring is in the English air we are starving the German people…Others, including ourselves, are to keep or be given comforts while the Germans lack the bare necessities of existence. If it is a choice between discomfort for another and suffering for the German, the German must suffer; if between suffering for another and death for the German, the German must die.”[30]

Months after the war had ended and the Allies had assumed complete control of the German government, the Bishop of Chichester, quoting a noted German pastor, said: “Thousands of bodies are hanging in the trees in the woods around Berlin and nobody bothers to cut them down. Thousands of corpses are carried into the sea by the Oder and Elbe Rivers—one doesn’t notice it any longer. Thousands and thousands are starving in the highways…Children roam the highways alone, their parents shot, dead, lost.”[31] 

Starvation Policies Continue

Despite the efforts of U.S. senators and British humanitarians, the Allied starvation policies continued through 1946 and into 1947. A group of German doctors reported in 1947 that the actual daily calorie ration issued for three months in the Ruhr section of the British Zone averaged only 800 per person. Dr. Gustav Stolper, a member of the Hoover Commission fact-finding team, reported that the ration in both the British and American Zones for “a long time in 1946 and 1947 dropped to between 700 and 1,200 calories per day.”[32]

U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote to U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall concerning the famine in Germany in 1947: “[Our] occupation has no chance of success if these [famine] conditions continue. This state of affairs has been foreseen, and I have urged repeatedly that priority be recognized for food shipments to Germany. The basis for the priority is the prevention of famine in the US-UK zones of Germany…”[33]

Germany was still being operated under the Morgenthau Plan and the Potsdam Agreement. These two programs shared a crucial conceptual flaw: central to both schemes was the paradoxical policy of transforming Germany into an agricultural economy while at the same time depriving Germany of her most valuable agricultural regions and displacing the population of these regions into rump Germany. These policies made it impossible for Germany to feed her population. Germany would have to industrialize to be able to export something to buy a minimum diet for her people. By taking away a quarter of Germany’s arable land, the Allies created a situation in which Germany’s existence would necessarily be even more dependent on industrialization than before the war.[34]

The economic disruptions caused by Germany’s zonal partition also hurt the German economy. The Soviet Zone oriented itself more and more toward the East and continued to extract maximum reparations out of its zone. The French Zone stagnated because of France’s unwillingness to cooperate in any all-German program until the question of the Saar was solved in France’s favor. France also feared a revival of Germany’s economic strength.[35]

The refusal to feed the Germans—or allow anyone else to feed them—gave rise to extremely negative feelings among Germans toward the Allies. Carl Zuckmayer reported conversations he overheard in bread lines in the American Zone: “Yes, Hitler was bad, our war was wrong, but now they are doing the same wrong to us, they are all the same, there is no difference, they want to enslave Germany in exactly the same way as Hitler wanted to enslave the Poles, now we are the Jews, the “inferior race”, they are letting us starve intentionally, can’t you see that is their plan, they take away all our sources of income and let us die slowly, the gas chambers worked quicker…”[36]

German Protestant Church president and former Dachau prisoner Martin Niemöller spoke of the suffering and starvation of Germans after the war. Niemöller said to an American audience when he toured the United States from December 1946 to April 1947:

Niemöller said Germans were receiving no better than “the lowest ration ever heard of in a Nazi concentration camp.”[37]

Although Niemöller raised more money than expected from his American tour, he was disappointed in its outcome because he was not able to improve U.S. occupation policies in Germany. After months in America, Niemöller’s return to war-ravaged Germany came as a shock. Niemöller wrote to Pastor Ewart Turner:

The physical and emotional toll of hunger, cold and disillusionment made life in Germany intolerable for Niemöller. Niemöller’s wife Else bemoaned when they got back to Germany from America that, “It was so much easier there than here.” Niemöller told Pastor Turner that if things didn’t improve, “I should prefer to be back in my cell number 31 at Dachau.” Niemöller blamed “the followers of the Morgenthau Plan” who had moved their “headquarters from Washington to the American Zone.”[39]

In another letter to Turner in the fall of 1947, Niemöller wrote:

Niemöller understood the Jewish official’s phrase “a natural way” to mean death by starvation.[40]

Starvation Policies End

What finally led the Western Allies to a revision of their occupation policy in Germany was the fear of a Communist takeover of Europe. The Western Allies feared that if Germany remained Europe’s slum, social unrest would force it into the Communist camp and the rest of Europe would follow. The anti-Communists in Poland had already been forced out of power, with only a few anti-Communists escaping to safety. Similar undemocratic developments were subverting Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Communist parties in France and Italy were gaining strength and had caused several general strikes. Europe was ripe for a Communist takeover, and the Western Allies realized that something needed to be done to stop it.[41]

The threat of a Communist takeover in Europe had long been recognized by Allied leaders. French Marshal Alphonse Juin stated to Gen. George Patton at a dinner in Paris in August 1945: “It is indeed unfortunate that the English and Americans have destroyed the only sound country in Europe--and I do not mean France--therefore the road is now open for the advent of Russian communism.”[42]   

Patton himself had warned of the danger of Russian communism resulting from the destruction of Germany. Patton stated, “What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole.”[43]

After an unsuccessful Moscow meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in March 1947, the Western Allies realized the necessity of setting a new course independent of the Soviet Union. George F. Kennan observed, “It was plain that the Soviet leaders had a political interest in seeing the economies of the Western European peoples fail under anything other than communist leadership.” With total economic disintegration in Europe imminent, a new plan was needed to shore up the ailing European economies.[44] 

The European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, was originally envisaged by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall to promote the economic recovery of Europe on both sides of the iron curtain. However, the Soviet Union took steps to prevent any of the Eastern European countries from participating in the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union organized a rival program for recovery in Eastern Europe known as the Molotov Plan. The Soviet-dominated Cominform urged Communists everywhere to help defeat the Marshall Plan, which it described as an instrument for “world domination by American imperialism.”[45]

The Marshall Plan withstood the Soviet challenge. For the period from April 3, 1948 to June 30, 1952, the Marshall Plan allocated $3.176 billion to the United Kingdom, $2.706 billion to France, and $1.474 billion to Italy. Only $1.389 billion went to West Germany, of which Germany later repaid approximately $1 billion. However, the German economy was helped the most by the aid. One commentator described the effect of the Marshall Plan on West Germany:

The effect of the Marshall Plan in Germany was almost magical. The German economy was plainly reviving within months; within a year it was expanding faster than any other economy in Europe; and within a decade Germany was close to the richest country in Europe. The growth of Germany’s economy put an end to the starvation of the German people. According to Gen. Maurice Pope, who in 1948 was with the Canadian Military Mission in Germany, “conditions improved overnight…[soon] the modest corner grocery store was displaying delicacies of all kinds and at quite reasonable prices.”[47]

How Many Germans Starved to Death after World War II?

The death-rate figures reported in the U.S. Military Governor reports indicate that very few Germans died among the expelled or non-expelled Germans of the three Western zones. These widely disseminated U.S. Military Governor reports have been accepted by most historians, and are the basis for the belief today that the death rate among Germans was not unusually high after World War II. 

The falsity of these reports is shown by comparing the 1947 report, which was a year of extreme starvation and misery remembered by Germans as the Hunger Year, to other peacetime years in Germany. The U.S. Military Governor report in December 1947 stated that the death rate among German civilians was 12.1 per year per thousand. This is only slightly higher than the death rate among Germans before the war, and is less than the death rate of 12.2 per thousand per year during the two prosperous years of 1968-1969. The death-rate figure in the 1947 U.S. Military Governor report of 12.1 per year per thousand cannot possibly be accurate.[48]

The reality is that millions of resident German civilians died after the end of World War II. James Bacque estimates 5.7 million Germans already residing in Germany died from the starvation policies implemented by the Allies after the war. Bacque details how this 5.7 million death total is calculated:

Bacque’s calculations have been confirmed by Dr. Anthony B. Miller, who is a world-famous epidemiologist and Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. Miller read the whole work, including the documents, and checked the statistics, which he says “confirms the validity of [Bacque’s] calculations...” Miller states: “These deaths appear to have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the semi-starvation food rations that were all that were available to the majority of the German population during this time period.”[50]

Conclusion

The millions of Germans who starved to death do not constitute the entire story of the crime that was committed on Germany after World War II. German women who had been repeatedly raped by Allied soldiers had to bear the physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Millions of German expellees who lost all of their real estate and most of their personal property were never compensated by the Allies. Instead, they had to live in abject poverty in Germany after being expelled from their homes. Millions of other Germans had their property stolen or destroyed by Allied soldiers. The Allied postwar treatment of Germany is surely one of the most brutal, criminal and unreported tragedies in world history.

Notes