American food policy in occupied Germany

American food policy in occupied Germany refers to the food supply policies enacted by the U.S., and to some extent its dependent Allies, in the western occupation zones of Germany in the first two years of the ten-year occupation of Western Germany following World War II.

Food relief shipments to Germany had been prohibited by the U.S. until December 1945, since "they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living to the average of the surrounding European nations". "CARE Package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946".

Captured German soldiers
After the German surrender the U.S. chose to designate large numbers of German prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF) instead of using the Prisoner of War status under which the captives would have been under the protection of the Geneva convention and, therefore, would have been entitled to the same quantities of food as U.S. troops.

The Allied argument for retracting Geneva convention protection from the German soldiers was similar to that of Nazi Germany vis à vis Polish and Yugoslav soldiers; using the disappearance of the Third Reich to argue that the convention no longer applied and that POW status did not apply to the vast majority who had passed into captivity on or after May 5. The motive was twofold: both an unwillingness to follow the Geneva convention now that the threat of German reprisals against Allied POWs was gone, and also that they were, to an extent, unable to meet the high standards of the Geneva code for the large number of captured Germans.

The conditions these prisoners had to endure were often extremely harsh. A number of the camps in Western Germany, especially initially, were huge wired-in enclosures lacking sufficient shelter and other necessities. (see Rheinwiesenlager)

Since there was no longer a danger of German retaliation against Allied POWs, less effort was put into finding ways of procuring scarce food and shelter than would otherwise have been the case, and, consequently, tens of thousands of prisoners died from hunger and disease who might have been saved.

According to S. P. MacKenzie, callous self-interest and a desire for retribution played a role in the fate of these men and he exemplifies by pointing out that sick or otherwise unfit prisoners were forcibly used for labor, and in France and the Low countries this also included highly dangerous work such as mine-clearing.

The International Red Cross was never permitted to fully involve itself in the situation in DEF or SEP camps, and even though conditions in them gradually improved, even the most conservative estimates put the death toll in French camps alone at over 16,500 in 1945.

After the German surrender, the International Red Cross was prohibited from providing aid such as food or visiting the prisoner camps. However, after making approaches to the Allies in the autumn of 1945 it was allowed to investigate the camps in the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide relief to the prisoners held there.

On February 4, 1946, the Red Cross was permitted to visit and assist prisoners also in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany, although only with very small quantities of food. During their visits, the delegates observed that German prisoners of war were often detained in appalling conditions. They drew the attention of the authorities to this fact, and gradually succeeded in getting some improvements made.

German civilian population
Throughout all of 1945 the Allies forces of occupation ensured that no international aid reached ethnic Germans. It was directed that all relief should go to non-German displaced persons, liberated Allied POWs, and concentration camp inmates.

General Lucius Clay, then Deputy to General Eisenhower, stated:

I feel that the Germans should suffer from hunger and from cold as I believe such suffering is necessary to make them realize the consequences of a war which they caused.

The German Red Cross was dissolved, and the International Red Cross and the few other allowed international relief agencies were kept from helping Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel. The few agencies permitted to help Germans, such as the indigenous Caritas Verband, were not allowed to use imported supplies. When the Vatican attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to German infants the U.S. State Department forbade it.

During 1945 it was estimated that the average German civilian in the U.S. and the United Kingdom occupation zones received 1,200 calories a day. Meanwhile non-German Displaced Persons were receiving 2,300 calories through emergency food imports and Red Cross help. In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels.

General Lucius Clay stated in October 1945 that:

undoubtedly a large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and disease…. The death rate in many places has increased several fold, and infant mortality is approaching 65 percent in many places. By the spring of 1946, German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and Elbe.

U.S. occupation forces were under strict orders not to share their food with the German population, and this also applied to their wives when they arrived later in the occupation. The women were under orders not to allow their German maids to get hold of any leftovers; "the food was to be destroyed or made inedible", although in view of the starving German population facing them many housewives chose to disregard these official orders. Nevertheless, according to a U.S. intelligence survey a German university professor reportedly said: "Your soldiers are good-natured, good ambassadors; but they create unnecessary ill will to pour twenty litres of left-over cocoa in the gutter when it is badly needed in our clinics. It makes it hard for me to defend American democracy amongst my countrymen."

In January 1946, 34 U.S. Senators petitioned that private relief organizations be allowed to help in Germany and Austria, stating that the desperate food situation in occupied Germany:
 * "presents a picture of such frightful horror as to stagger the imagination, evidence which increasingly marks the United States as an accomplice in a terrible crime against humanity."

Criticism of the situation increased, Senator William Langer stated in a speech in the United States Congress:

...among the crimes with which this (Nazi) leadership has been charged (at Nuremberg) is the crime of systematic and mass starvation of racial or political minorities or opponents.... Yet to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions...I hold in my hands absolutely authentic photographs which have been taken at the beginning of the winter in the city of Berlin. These photographs are interchangeable for horror with the photographs with which we became familiar from Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and other extermination camps. These are photographs of children between the ages of 5 and 14...

In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were permitted to help starving German children. During 1946 the average German adult received less than 1,500 calories a day. 2,000 calories was then considered the minimum an individual can endure on for a limited period of time with reasonable health.

The German food situation became worst during the very cold winter of 1946–47, when German calorie intake ranged from 1,000 to 1,500 calories per day, a situation made worse by severe lack of fuel for heating. Average adult calorie intake in U.S was 3,200–3,300, in UK 2,900 and in U.S. Army 4,000.

In a comparative U.S. government study run by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover and published in February 1947, the nutritional situation surveyed in some of Germany's neighbor states (Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands and the UK) was close to pre-war normal, while the nutritional situation for certain population groups in Germany (mainly children and the elderly) was disastrously low.

In his third study report on Germany, dated March 18, 1947, Hoover stated:
 * "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it."

The precise effect of the food crisis on German health and mortality has been a matter of some contention. Speaking of the Anglo-American zones, Hoover reported that in the fall of 1946, starvation produced a 40 percent increase in mortality among Germans over 70. However, John Farquharson cites statistics indicating that the incidence of hunger oedema was low in 1946–1947. According to the British Medical Journal, mortality in the British zone was above its pre-war level until June, 1946, when the death rate fell below that of 1938. The historian Nicholas Balabkins notes that the Allied restrictions placed on German steel production, and their control over to where the produced coal and steel was delivered, meant that offers by Western European nations to trade food for desperately needed German coal and machinery were rejected. Neither the Italians nor the Dutch could sell the vegetables that they had previously sold in Germany, with the consequence that the Dutch had to destroy considerable proportions of their crop. Denmark offered 150 tons of lard a month; Turkey offered hazelnuts; Norway offered fish and fish oil; Sweden offered considerable amounts of fats. The Allies were however not willing to let the Germans trade.

Another consequence of the Allied policy of "Industrial Disarmament" (see The industrial plans for Germany) was that there was a drastic fall in fertilizer available for the German agriculture, further decreasing the food production.

German infant mortality rate was twice that of other nations in Western Europe until the close of 1948.

The adequate feeding of the German population in occupied Germany was an Allied legal obligation under Article 43 of The 1907 Hague Rules of Land Warfare.

JCS 1067
A Handbook for Military Government in Germany was ready in August 1944, it was an occupation document which advocated a quick restoration of normal life for the German people and reconstruction of Germany. The secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., author of the Morgenthau Plan for partition and deindustrialization of postwar Germany, brought it to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who after reading it rejected it with the words:


 * "Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place – that only a few Nazis are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization."

A new document was drafted, the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067 (JCS 1067). Here the military government of occupation was ordered to "…take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy" and it was also ordered that starvation, disease and civil unrest were to be kept below such levels where they would pose a danger to the troops of occupation.

On March 20, 1945, President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans "stew in their own juice". Roosevelt's response was "Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!" Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, "Why not?"

By August 1945 General Clay was becoming increasingly concerned about the humanitarian and political situation in the area under his responsibility. He stated "There is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on 1000 calories".

Two years later, in July 1947, JCS 1067 was scrapped and replaced by JCS 1779 which noted that "an orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."

General Clay would later remark in his memoirs that "there was no doubt that JCS 1067 contemplated the Carthaginian peace which dominated our operations in Germany during the early months of occupation."

Consequences
Richard Dominic Wiggers draws the conclusion in The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II that not only did the Allies violate international law when it came to the feeding of enemy civilians, but that both directly and indirectly they caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and POWs in occupied Germany, guided partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths. However, Nicholas Balabkins took a more favorable view of Allied policy, asserting that American food shipments saved the lives of "millions of Germans", although shortages persisted into 1948. Balabkins also notes that the distributed food rations were of poor composition and "considerably below minimum nutrition standards"; without access to additional food from alternative sources recipients would eventually fall prey to starvation. Balabkins also cites an authority who stated that the rations "represented a fairly rapid starvation level".