Year Zero (8 page)

Compared to Berlin and most other German cities, however, even
Budapest was still in better shape. For all that was left of Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Dresden, and even smaller cities and towns such as Würzburg or Pforzheim, destroyed in 1945 as a kind of afterthought, were smoldering piles of rubble, still reeking of death. The first thing that struck many visitors in the early months after the war was the eerie silence.

Standing in the center of Berlin, between the ruins of the Romanisches Café, once the most fashionable café in Weimar period Berlin, and the gutted Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer recalled that same spot before the war: the incessant din of traffic and car horns, and chattering crowds shopping, drinking, and dining. Now he felt as if he were alone amidst the silent ruins. He heard a soft scraping sound. A thin young boy, in wooden sandals, was dragging a small handcart through the debris of a cobbled street. The wind blew softly through the desolated landscape, and Zuckmayer could hear the sound of his own heart beating.

And yet, he writes, “there was at the same time, in the whole of Germany, a constant sensation of crawling, scratching, groping, like a gigantic ant hill, . . . a ceaseless coming and going, wandering, walking, crossing; the scuffing and grating of millions of shoes. This is the ‘Black Market' . . . The world and the march of the homeless, the refugees, the scattered masses, the marauding bands of youths.”
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Here is Stephen Spender on the German city of Cologne, another urban wreck: “The ruin of the city is reflected in the internal ruin of its inhabitants who, instead of being lives that can form a scar over the city's wounds, are parasites sucking at a dead carcass, digging among the ruins for hidden food, doing business at their black market near the cathedral—the commerce of destruction instead of production.”
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If Cologne, or Berlin, were bad, Tokyo or Osaka, let alone Hiroshima, was probably worse still. Not to mention Manila, Warsaw, Stalingrad, and other cities laid to waste by the Axis Powers. The chief Orthodox rabbi of England, Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, told reporters about his trip to Warsaw in December. The entire former ghetto of Warsaw, he said, “is literally one vast wilderness of bricks and debris. The streets are as they were on the last
day of extermination. Thousands of bodies lie underneath a sea of brick and human bones, some of which I personally picked up.”
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Destroying the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw was part of a vast criminal enterprise. The motives for bombing Japanese cities were different, but the resulting devastation was not. Japanese dwellings had been largely constructed of wood. The massive area bombings, followed by rapidly spreading firestorms, had left virtually nothing, apart from a few stone chimneys of public bathhouses, which still stood out pathetically in the charred debris. Japan, too, was marked by silence. Sherwood R. Moran, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, wrote a letter to his friend Donald Keene, later to become a great scholar of Japanese literature: “Tokyo, the first war casualty I've seen, is a devastated, immodest mess, but the silence is what gets me most; no honks, yells, clangs—none of the stuff you hate in a town but come to expect. For Tokyo, for all of Japan I suppose, the calamity is past, but everybody is still staring in that god-awful silence.”
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The prospect of famine, and pandemics, was quite real in the defeated nations. There were already outbreaks of typhoid, typhus, and tuberculosis in German cities. In Japan, more than twenty thousand people died of dysentery in 1945, and by 1948, almost seven hundred thousand had been infected by typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, and polio.
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Life was a little better in rural areas, where food could still be found. But urban conditions were probably worse than in Germany. Germans who were prepared to work received food ration cards. A report from Berlin in
Yank
, the magazine for U.S. armed forces, described the typical daily menu for the family of a manual worker with six children: a cup of tea and a slice of black bread each for breakfast, and a potato soup for dinner made from one onion, one potato, and half a pint of milk, garnished with a tiny bit of cauliflower. Inadequate, to be sure, but enough to stay alive.

The Japanese had already been starving well before the war was over. Government authorities were advising people how to prepare meals from acorns, grain husks, sawdust (for pancakes), snails, grasshoppers, and rats. When soldiers began to return in large numbers after the defeat, a bad situation turned into a crisis. Many of the homeless lived in the
underground passages of railway stations, like the narrow, mazelike slums in Victorian London. This Dickensian world included orphaned children collecting cigarette butts to exchange for something edible, or picking pockets, or selling their ill-nourished bodies. Tokyo's Ueno Station was especially notorious as a kind of urban beehive full of the homeless. The bands of hungry children were called “charin kids” (
charinko
),
charin
being the sound of clinking coins.
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In photographs of these tough little creatures, dressed in rags, dragging on cigarette butts, they look less human than feral. Which is just how a British soldier described their counterparts in Germany, huddling in ruined underpasses, or railway stations, “perfectly camouflaged in filth, so you could not tell they were there.” They would scurry away at the sight of a foreign soldier, only to reemerge carrying stones or iron bars, “and their teeth were black and broken,” the only clean spots on their bodies being “the whites of their eyes,” the eyes of diseased leopard cubs “whose one enemy was man.”
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To keep this in some perspective, we should also remember what it was like for countless millions of Chinese surviving in the ruins of a devastating war. American soldiers in areas controlled by General Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were shocked to see children sneaking into their barracks to pick through the garbage cans for food. One U.S. sergeant recalled how “mothers with young girls came up to our guard stations to offer these little girls of theirs and trade them for candy bars and cigarettes.”
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Meanwhile, Chinese men would crawl under army latrines to catch human excrement through cracks in the floor, which they could peddle to the farmers as fertilizer.

The scale of human misery in the aftermath of the war was so vast, and so widespread, that comparisons are almost useless. Germany had to contend not only with its own citizens and returning soldiers, but also with more than ten million German-speaking refugees from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania who had been expelled from their native lands with the official approval of the Allied governments. Many refugees died, or were killed on their way to Germany, a country many of them had never seen before. Almost all had lost everything they ever possessed. This
added huge numbers of people to the drifting masses in search of food and shelter.

Compounding the food crisis in Japan, as well as in Germany, was a terrible harvest in 1945. Agriculture had been damaged badly by the war, with depleted livestock, ruined fields, wrecked machinery, and a shortage of manpower, as well as a spell of appalling weather. In Germany, much of the farm machinery in the Eastern zones had been destroyed, or looted, in the last months of the war. And the foreign farm workers, who had replaced Germans during the war, were leaving. Japan, which once relied on food supplies from its Asian empire, was now cut off.

In October, the Japanese minister of finance told American reporters that without immediate food imports, ten million Japanese might starve to death in the coming winter. Equally catastrophic predictions were made in Germany. A social democratic administrator in Lower Saxony stated that “now one can calculate when the German people will starve if its former enemies do not come to its aid.”
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Reports of the imminent collapse in Germany were discussed in the British Parliament. Arthur Salter, a United Nations relief official, gave a stern warning that “if, as is now thought, millions during this winter freeze and starve, this will not have been the inevitable consequence of material destruction and world shortages of material.” Members in the House of Commons were warned of the “greatest catastrophe the human race ever experienced.”
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This proved to be exaggerated. Some travelers in Germany found that conditions, especially in the Western zones, were no worse than in many other western European countries and were actually somewhat better than in places farther east. But even with some leftover stockpiles of food looted from occupied countries, life in Germany was bad enough. Berlin was especially dismal, and accounts from other parts of Germany were dire as well. An American reporter observed the following scene near Hamburg: “One evening, in a marshy plot of land, an elderly German in a business suit takes his cane and clubs a duck to death. More will be said about the food situation, but that in essence is it.”
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All this was distressing, of course, but while the former victims of Nazi
Germany were still starving in places like Bergen-Belsen, and prisoners of the Japanese languished in POW camps, while millions of refugees and DPs needed to be repatriated, and British, Dutch, French, Poles, and Italians were surviving off meager rations, and Filipinos, Chinese, and Indonesians lived on even less, and while citizens of the Soviet Union still had very fresh memories of being systematically starved by the German army and the SS, public sympathy for Germans and Japanese was somewhat limited. It was difficult enough convincing U.S. congressmen, especially on the more isolationist Republican side, to fund international relief organizations, such as UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), to help the victims of German and Japanese aggression. The idea of spending more tax dollars, or, as was suggested, cutting British rations, to feed the former enemies, was not an easy policy to promote.

Yet something had to be done, for practical if not for moral reasons. A total breakdown in Germany and Japan would put an intolerable strain on the Allied governments and make any kind of orderly, let alone democratic, reconstruction of the postwar order impossible. The British
Daily Mirror
, a pro–Labour Party newspaper widely read by soldiers, put the case for relief under the succinct headline: “Feed the Brutes?” The paper made it clear that it was not necessary to act out of sympathy for the German people, or even for the destitute German refugees driven out of their homelands. No, it “was not any feeling of compassion which prompts us to emphasize the necessity of dealing with the situation.” The problem was this: “The longer Europe is allowed to sink into the bog, the longer it will take to raise up—the longer the occupation will have to go on.”
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There were other considerations, too, more persuasive to U.S. members of Congress. Even if UNRRA, with its internationalist ideals, was suspected of communist sympathies, growing rivalry with the Soviet Union prompted action, and UNRRA was indispensible. Daniel J. Flood, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, told his colleagues that “Hunger, destitution, sickness and disease will breed unrest and the specter of Communism. Hungry people are fertile fields for the philosophies
of the anti-Christ and for those who would make God of the omnipotent state.”
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And so some measures were taken. In the British zone of Germany, beginning in late November, General Sir Gerald Templer organized Operation Barleycorn, setting about eight hundred thousand German POWs free to work on farms and rescue what remained of the harvest. To be able to export more food to Germany, British citizens were made to tighten their own belts further; this is why bread was rationed in 1946. The Americans, too, following the 1944 directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS 1076) pertaining to “accommodation for prisoners of war captured in northwest Europe,” provided enough economic assistance to “prevent disease and unrest.” The idea was to keep the standard of German life to a bare minimum. How bare was the question. Politicians who favored a “hard peace” wanted to punish Germany by dismantling its industry and keeping its citizens at subsistence level. The main proponent of the hard line was Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt's treasury secretary, who planned to turn Germany into a pastoral country, incapable of making war ever again. A harsh directive was given to the Allied administration in Japan as well. Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1380/15 ordered General MacArthur to limit relief to the Japanese to “the extent . . . needed to prevent such widespread diseases and unrest as would endanger the occupying forces or interfere with military operations. Such imports will be confined to minimum quantities of food . . . fuel, medicinal and sanitary supplies . . .”
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Luckily for the Germans and the Japanese, these punitive directives were either ignored or softened by the men who actually had to govern the occupied nations and could see how disastrous such measures would be. The financial adviser to U.S. High Commissioner General Lucius Clay called JCS 1076 the work of “economic idiots.” Instead of causing even greater chaos by destroying Germany's industrial economy, General Clay, supported by such powerful figures in Washington as Secretary of War Henry Stimson, soon tried to help the Germans rebuild it. Stimson was more understanding of the Germans' plight than of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, whom he suspected of being “biased in his Semitic
grievances”
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—echoing an unpleasant but not uncommon sentiment in the upper echelons of the American and British governments. But then, to expect much feeling for Jewish sensibilities would have been to miss the point. What these men were afraid of was that German rage would favor communism, or foster a mood of revanchism. General MacArthur was not inclined to help Japanese industry back to its feet, but was convinced, like Stimson and Clay, that “starvation . . . renders a people an easy prey to any ideology that brings with it life-sustaining food.”
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