Crimes and Mercies by James Bacque Read Free Book Online

as it always has been.’ A few weeks later he reported five ‘authenticated’ deaths from starvation in Hamburg. 15 The ‘authenticated’ is revealing. As many writers said, the Allied officers knew almost nothing of the true conditions among the German civilians. The ‘authenticated’ almost certainly refers to deaths counted in a hospital. But of course very few sick Germans ever got to a hospital in those days. As the US Surgeon General reported in October 1947, ‘The alarming scourge is tuberculosis … In the British zone, as a whole, there are known to be 50,000 open cases and only 12,000 available hospital beds, while the less serious cases number about 150,000.’ 16
    The German doctor, A. Lang, Professor of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Mainz, told an American officer in April 1948 that the death rate in the Pfalz was only around 13%% in 1947. However, he did not cite the source of his statistics. If these had been gathered, like the 1946 census, by‘Germans working under the direction of the Allied Control Council’, then one explanation of the low figures could be that the results had been adjusted to provide a more favourable picture of the conditions under the Allied occupation. Pfalz was in the French zone, where rations were consistently lower than in the British–American zone, so one suspects that the death rate must have been higher, as for instance it demonstrably was in Bad Kreuznach. But one other explanation might be that the people of Pfalz, living close to the land, were able to scrounge for themselves to augment the official ration better than people in big cities. The Pfalz was largely rural, lacking any big city, small in population (under one million), and also very low in expellee population. Still, it is hard to conceive of a disparity so great that the people in Bad Kreuznach, so close to the Pfalz and also in the French zone, were dying twice as fast as the rest of the population. The statistics are also very hard to reconcile with those from the town of Landau, right in the Pfalz. On the subject of health, the American Military Governor Lucius Clay revealed an interesting comparison of the Soviet with the western zones. Clay writes that in 1945, the agricultural production in the Soviet zone was just under 80 per cent of pre-war normal for some grains, and as high as 90 per cent for grain west of the Elbe, plus about 75 per cent of the normal livestock harvest. 17 At the same time, food production in the west was only 57 per cent of the pre-war per capita production. An interesting sidelight on the Clay statistics is that since the agricultural work in all the zones was done exclusively by Germans, and mainly by hand, this superior production in the Soviet zone suggests that at that time the people in the Soviet zone were at least as healthy as Germans in the west. In sum, then, the figures of local origin generally conform to the overall statistics derived from the census comparisons and presented in the main text. The few that do not conform in general display other characteristics that make one distrust them a priori .

    6: S OURCES
    The chief archival sources are the KGB Archives in Moscow, also called the Central State Archives (formerly the Central State Special Archive, CSSA); the Archive of the October Revolution, Moscow; the Red Army Archive at Podolsk, near Moscow; the National Archives of the US in Washington and College Park, Maryland; the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa; the Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, Germany, the Library of Congress, Washington, and the Hoover Institution Archive at Stanford. Much of the research material used in this MS has never before been published. Some of it – at Hoover, Washington and in Moscow – has only recently been declassified.
Sources for deaths of German civilians, 1945–50
    The papers of Robert Murphy, former US Ambassador in London, also former political adviser to the US Military Governor of Germany at