Lord Pakenham's Prayers

In Hamburg, well-dressed citizens hungrily peeked into garbage cans in front of Allied homes. There were few pets left in the city--an old household trick, now revived, was to soak cats in skimmed milk diluted with water for eight hours, to make them tender enough to eat. The current fee for prostitutes was two slices of bread. In Essen, where the official daily ration is 1.550 calories a day, some people were getting only 887--which meant three slices of bread baked with mixed cornmeal and wheat flour and two teaspoonfuls of sugar.

It was not like that everywhere. In a recent raid on the farm of one Franz Gutland, near Munich, police found two tons of potatoes, 700 eggs, a slaughtered calf and a cow, 15 tons of wheat, one ton of coal, 1,200 gallons of gasoline, 20 pairs of trousers, 7,000 roof tiles.

Such discrepancies were at the heart of the severe food crisis which gripped the combined U.S. and British zones. What caused them?

Who Starves First? The 40 million people in the U.S.-British zone need at least 850,000 tons of grain a month to live. Since January, the U.S. (with Britain paying half the bill) has provided about 330,000 tons of that amount each month. The rest was to come from German home production. U.S. supplies fell behind by about 130,000 tons, and German supplies last week were about 200,000 tons short of their quota. The German failure was partly due to the severe winter, which had destroyed stocks and disrupted communications, but chiefly to the breakdown of the Germans' own food collection and distribution system.

The farmers give up only as much as they please to the German collectors--mostly simple villagers--and exchange the rest on the black market for commodities, rather than for nearly valueless marks. German officials, who are careful, for political reasons, not to antagonize the farmers, have no means of compelling deliveries even if they wanted to. Said one observer: "The German policemen are hungry, too."

Farmer Hans Schweiger explained his position last week: "My farm will yield 6,000 marks this year, from which I'll have to deduct 500 for taxes, 500 for the blacksmith, and 1,000 for seed and fertilizer. That leaves me 4,000. A pair of shoes for my wife costs me 800. I consider myself lucky when some city fellow brings me a few nails or machinery to trade in for bread and potatoes." Said Farmer Friedrich Sticht grimly: "Before the farmers starve, every single city dweller will starve first."

The chief trouble with the German system (which the U.S. had approved) is that it kills the farmers' incentive by demanding that they deliver 100% of their produce at fixed prices. In the Russian zone (where people are hungry but at least get their prescribed rations), farmers have to deliver only 60%, are allowed to sell the rest as they please. That gives them some incentive to produce.

"Send Us Coffee." But there was no time to revamp systems. To take the edge off the crisis, the U.S. threw in additional merchant ships to carry supplies. During the next 2 1/2 months, the U.S. will send over 1,000,000 tons of food to Germany. But the Germans were a difficult people to help. When one of them was told last week that the U.S. is sending wheat, he sneered: "Wheat we've got plenty. Why don't you send us coffee?"

The words of many Germans, however real their misery, had a similar ring of insolence. They ignored the fact that the rest of Europe is hungry too, or that--in U.S. Secretary of War Patterson's words --"This is the first time in history in which conquerors have made an effort of any such size to feed their defeated enemy." Back in Europe last week for the first time since 1939, 71-year-old Novelist Thomas Mann said: "The German people refuse to acknowledge the suffering of others. Germany takes a morbid pride in her own tragedy. . . . It is self-pity, part of the national egotism, which is preventing Germany from cooperating with the Allies in her revival." In Hamburg, 100,000 demonstrating workers heard Trade Union Leader Adolf Kummernuss proclaim from a red-draped balcony: "We want to tell the world that the bearable limit has been reached!" His audience included strong delegations from all unions except the dock workers, who were unloading two food ships in the harbor.

For Britain, which was expending huge chunks of her dwindling dollar funds to feed Germans, the first Baron Pakenham of Cowley, newly appointed Minister for the British zones in Germany and Austria, spoke up. Said the young Labor peer, who is blessed with seven children, a healthy appetite and a Christian outlook: "Take it from me that the [German] food crisis is my first concern when I say my prayers in the morning and when I go to bed at night."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.