Scott Smith wrote:
I will get an affidavit from my Grandmother who was alive in 1945 asking her what was available on the supermarket shelves for those who could pay in cash. Compared to the Depression it was the Horn of Plenty. Just a few bucks would buy groceries for a month. My Grandfather was rather partial to beefsteaks and they were quite poor.
I grew up in a very small hard-scrabble farm town in the Midwest during the Depression and WWII. I don't know where Scott's Grandmother lived, but I can well recall that in my hometown during the Depression there was plenty of food in the grocery stores (there were no supermarkets then), the problem was finding enough money to buy it. Plenty of people were going hungry, and I can vividly recall my parents and other members of our church providing free meals for the needy in the church basement.
During and immediately after WWII, however, the situation was quite different. The economy picked up and most people had cash to spend; the problem then was there was much less to spend it on (there were still no supermarkets, at least in my hometown). Most people were not going hungry anymore, but rationing was certainly in effect and items such as gasoline, tires, sugar, butter, canned goods and certain kinds of meat were in short supply. I can well recall the ration cards and small circular ration tokens that my mother had to carefully deal with and dispense, and although our own situation could in absolutely no way compare with the hardships which the UK and European countries had to suffer through, we did NOT have a Cornucopia of Plenty. Even fresh produce was often in short supply, and we were all encouraged to plant "Victory Gardens" and put up in cans or otherwise preserve the excess produce for the Winter months. My father and I converted our flower garden to a vegetable garden which I personally felt was a desecration and hated every minute of the hours I was forced to spend planting, weeding, harvesting, canning and otherwise preserving the produce.
I am not trying to compare our minor annoyances to the depth of deprivation, hunger and suffering which Germans and other Europeans experienced in 1945-46. My dear dead wife lived through that winter in Germany and I know no such comparison is possible. My point is simply that there were indeed certain food shortages in the US at the time, and no huge supplies of food were sitting on the docks waiting to be transported to Germany for either the POWs or the civilian populace.
There is no doubt in my mind that in a perfect world the US government could, and should, have handled the obvious problem of providing for the nourishment of the German POWs, as well as of the German civilian population, in a better fashion than it did. The view is always clearer through the rear view mirror, and looking back it is easy to proclaim that it should have been obvious that the collapse of the Third Reich would bring with it problems of nourishment which the US either failed to anticipate or simply ignored. But I am nonetheless convinced that this failure was not motivated by malevolence, but rather by lack of perfect foresight, negligence, carelessless or simple stupidity. Although terrible, inexcusable things were done or not done in connection with the handling of the German POWs in certain of the Rheineswieger camps, and possibly elsewhere, I know of nothing to indicate that this was a matter of official US policy. Every nation has its share of individual brutes and bullies; the US is quite obviously no exception. But basically, I believe the overall attitude in the US after WWII was over was of the same general benevolence that motivated the US relief agencies under Herbert Hoover during and after WWI.
As witness to this belief I can vividly recall reports in the written and newsreel media in late 1945 concerning the alarming state of the food supplies in Germany in view of the approaching winter, and the response those reports engendered, at least in my little town, and I now know thoughout the US. Some 20 charitable organizations immediately banded together to form C.A.R.E., for the purpose of providing packages of food for the desparate Europeans, including the Germans. In my little town the effort was primarily carried out by the various churches, and in the fall and winter of 1945 I and my parents spent countless hours soliciting funds and assembling packages of food in the basement of our church to be sent overseas to ease the distress of those in need, primarily Germans. Efforts such as this can not be put together overnight, and it was unfortunately not until the early Spring of 1946 that C.A.R.E. packages began to arrive in Europe, but the initial trickle eventually turned into a tidal wave and millions of C.A.R.E. packages eventually arrived in Europe. Many of my German friends have expressed their profound thanks for the packages they thus received.
To assume that the US, at the end of the war, could somehow wave a magic wand and thereby supply a virtually destroyed Europe with all of the foodstuffs it so desperately needed to comfortably get through one of the worst winters in history strikes me as the highest degree of fantasy. IMHO ideally the US could and should have forseen the problem well in advance and made adequate and effective plans to deal with it, which it obviously did not do. But to equate this to the German government's carefully considered and consciously designed program to starve the Russian POWs and civilian population is, to my mind, an absurdity scarcely worthy of further comment.
Regards, Kaschner
