Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (December 3, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
Indifference may make us most hated nation
By Dorothy Thompson
In April, I attended the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury. At the climax of the impressive ritual, a feminine voice rang startling through the arched nave. It came from an unassuming-looking little woman who cried, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stop this performance! While you parade in your costly robes, the children of Europe are starving!”
I smiled at this characteristic outburst of English nonconformist spirit. But seven months later it is no smiling matter. The children of Europe are starving. Six years of war, indescribable destruction, and the lunatic Potsdam policies which have added to the disintegration inherited from the collapse of the Nazi regime have done their work. Germany, and with it Europe, is skidding into the abyss.
The facts are at last being revealed through what has amounted to a conspiracy of silence here. The British press has long been more outspoken and critical. Weeks ago, a committee from both parties of the House of Commons issued an appeal to the long-deprived British people to cut down their rations to release food for German children.
The Economic Advisory Commission sent to Berlin to assist Gen. Eisenhower was utterly frustrated by attempting to advise on the implementation of Potsdam in a country which had lost a quarter of its arable land by unilateral action of the Russians and Poles, who were driving the population, along with the German-speaking Czechs, into the truncated Reich. Gen. Eisenhower now tells us that the normal population of the American zone has increased 34 percent. Eighty-five percent of the food crop in the area east of the Oder and Neisse – the normal German grain and potato source – has gone unharvested.
In the Russian sane, which together with the Polish comprises half of Germany, 50 percent of the crop is lost. The stripping of industries in the east and the demolition of others in the west and south have added to the breakdown. Efforts to bring up coal have partly succeeded, but lack of transportation piles it at pit heads. Mills that should be turning out plows, rails, locomotives, machinery for all Europe, are idle. Only five to seven percent of industry is operating.
Mr. Byron Price points out that French opposition to a unified German economic policy is a root cause for the chaos, and that unless we find some way of instilling hope into the German people, we can expect general breakdown under uncontrollable conditions.
Military officers whose positions do not permit them to come before the public, communicate with journalists, and tell of frightful conditions, especially in the east. One reports: In six months large parts of Germany will be shelterless Buchenwalds of starved corpses. Trains and trucks coming from the east with refugees from the Polish and Czech territories are arriving with corpses among the barely living, many of them children. These are often tossed out of trains and trucks upon the roads.
In Berlin, in August, out of 2,866 children born 1,148 died – and it was summer, and food more plentiful than now. The current issue of the British “Nineteenth Century and After” in an article entitled “Orderly and Humane,” draws the most horrifying picture since the opening of the concentration camps.
From Vienna, a reliable source reports that in the Russian zone no one has had food except dried peas, bread, and a little oil, in six months. Infant mortality is approaching 100 percent; slight ailments result in death from lack of resistance. Tuberculosis and rickets are becoming universal.
This war was fought by the west in the name of Christian civilization, the Four Freedoms, and the dignity of man against those who were perpetrating crimes against humanity. But policies which must inevitably have resulted in the post-war extermination of tens of thousands of children are also “crimes against humanity.”
UNRRA has no help far former enemy states. Are the children of these states enemies, too, and does anyone believe that those who survive the present egregiously compounded horrors will grow up to love democracy, or learn that war does not pay – or only that defeat does not pay? Will they believe in “Christian” civilization or grow up to despise it as a false face put upon hypocrisy and greed? Will they believe in anything except that nihilism which was the mood out of which Nazism was bred?
And does any me think that chaos, famine, freezing, and disease can be confined within any frontiers in compact Europe?
America must send food for all children wherever they may be, even if we have to ration ourselves. The United States, in addition to UNRRA, must set up its own services, under men who can be trusted not to play power games with the staff of life, but give to the starving in Allied and enemy lands – children first. The world’s richest country, the only one which has its diet during war years, will, if we do not cease our callous indifference, become the most unloved nation among the children of men.
And if ever that happens, the atomic bomb will not save us.