The Long Road Home by Ben Shephard

Author:Ben Shephard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, bought-and-paid-for, History
ISBN: 140004068X
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

“We Grossly Underestimated the Destruction”

THE FOOD CRISIS IN EUROPE IN THE WINTER OF 1946–1947 AND WASHINGTON’S RESPONSE

Victor Gollancz spent the night of October 2, 1946, in a vast room at Schloss Nuremberg in the town of Lemgo, near Hanover. The building was the headquarters of General Evelyn Fanshawe, Sir Raphael Cilento’s successor as UNRRA chief in the British Zone. It was, Gollancz reported, “grotesquely like a very-rich mid-Victorian English house.”1

The British publisher and campaigner was on a fact-finding trip. For the past year, in numerous publications and letters to the press, he had sustained his campaign of pressure on the British government to do more to feed the Germans. Now Gollancz intended to stay longer than previous visitors and carry out a thorough survey of conditions. He was receiving wholehearted cooperation from the authorities in the British Zone and had spent the previous two days hobnobbing with generals in their “stolen châteaux.” “The quiet luxury of the food at all these places is spiritually nauseating and physically delightful,” Gollancz wrote to his wife. “One had forgotten such meals were possible.”2 He found that the attitude of the British to the Germans “varies from decent and even very heartwarming to disgusting … but even at its best [is] horribly the attitude of the superior conqueror to the inferior conquered.” “I find myself loving Germans in general just because they’re despised and rejected,” he went on.

Four days later, after having begun his investigations, Gollancz wrote again from the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg. “Much the worst thing I’ve seen is the condition of the expellees from Polish-occupied Germany, of which there are 1,300,000 in Schleswig-Holstein. It is beyond any possibility to describe their misery.… We visited a ship in Kiel harbour on which about a couple of hundred have been living for six months: it is the only time since I got here that I was quite unable to prevent myself from crying the whole time.”3

It was hardly surprising that Gollancz should find the worst conditions among expellees from the East. Fourteen months after the appalling scenes at the Stettiner station in Berlin had brought this issue to the world’s attention, the flood of refugees was still continuing. Allied attempts to slow down the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia and to create the mechanisms for an “orderly and humane” transfer of populations at Potsdam had had some success. Nonetheless, 3 million Germans from east-central Europe entered western Germany between January and December 1946. While the Czech government tried to carry out the operation in an “orderly, humane and efficient way,” the Poles did not bother, bundling refugees onto unheated trains in the depths of winter. But both states, and Poland in particular, sent to Germany their “useless mouths”—the elderly, women, children, the insane—while retaining fit workingmen in their own countries. The protests of the British authorities in Germany were overruled by the Foreign Office in London, which accepted Warsaw’s argument that the “recovered territories” must be cleared of Germans before they could be colonized by Poles and the much-promised Polish elections take place.

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