IN THE RUINS OF THE THIRD REICH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 12

IN THE RUINS OF THE THIRD REICH

Lord Beveridge Finds Germany a Land of Misery

].ORD BEVERIDGE, author of the famous Report on social security which bears his name, visited the British occupation zone of Germany recently. It was, in his own words, "a searing experience." In the talk printed below, which he gave in the Overseas Service of the BBC (and which was recorded and re-broadcast the other evening by. 2YA), he describes what he saw, and draws three morals from. it.

| Y first and strongest impression from the British zone of Germany is that of devastation of towns, of how well the RAF. and the American Air Force did their work. In practically all the large towns two-thirds of the buildings -sometimes more and sometimes lesshave been destroyed completely, or damaged so badly that they cannot be occupied. Of the remaining third of the town a considerable proportion is damaged, with broken windows and leaking | roofs. | This devastation of towns gives rise to |a housing problem which is frankly ap- | palling. Few people live in houses at all. | There are three families where before there was one. Large numbers of people in all the large towns have no ordinary housing. They live ten or more persons. to a room, they live in sheds, they live in cellars, they live in bunkers-the immensély strong concrete air raid shelters which survived our bombing. Living in a bunker is like living in-a tomb without daylight, without furniture other than a bunk, without cooking facilities. Yet a large number of people have been living in this way now for many months and so far as they know will be there indefinitely. Critical Shortages With this appalling housing problem there is a deficiency of all the other necessary supplies-food, coal and clothing. Practically everything eatable is rationed, and the rations up to the present have provided less than half the calories which we in Britain think indispensable for health. It has meant making the rations of fat, meat, sugar, cheese, which we get for a week in Britain (and think insufficient for a week) last a month. There is now some hope of improvement in Germany, but far from sufficient improvement. There was no domestic coal ration last winter, and on present plans there will be none next winter. Germany is'‘a cold country, and the houses of those people who have houses in’ the towns will still be largely without glass. | Practically no new clothes are being made and the old ones are wearing out. For next winter many children have the prospect of walking barefoot through the | snow, to get the school meal. Or, of course, going without the school meal and the schooling. Everything else, including soap and medical supplies, is as desperately short. Desperate want, of nearly everything, sums up the British zone,

Of course people don’t all live wholly on their food rations. They couldn't. There is naturally more food in the country districts. One of the causes of high absenteeism from work in the towns is that the workers spend two or three days each week foraging for food in the country. But they can’t all do this, and some, particularly the solitary old, literally starve in the towns. The country, as it has more food, differs also from the towns in that the houses have not been destroyed, but for another reason the housing problem there is almost as acute as in the towns. The normal population of many parts of the British zone ‘has been doubled by the presence of refugees and displaced persons. Refugees means Germans who have been expelled or have fled from other parts of Germany, or from neighbouring countries like Poland or Czechoslovakia. Displaced persons means people of nationalities other than German who for one reason or another, cannot or dare not go back to their homes. The largest national groups among them are Poles and Yugoslavs, who fear the present regime in their country, Lithuanians, Latvians, Esthonians from the Baltic States, who fled when the Soviet came in, There are also many from the Ukraine. These uprooted millions of refugees and displaced persons, the latter living largely in UNRRA camps, are an added complication of the main German problem. Land of Misery A visit to Germany to-day is a searing experience. It is a land so full of every sort of misery. There’s the misery of sheer physical want, of cold and hunger and acute discomfort in housing, for themselves and for helpless children

and old people for whom one has to care. There’s the misery of idleness and wasted power, of not being able to do one’s job. Think of the displaced scientists who cannot or dare not go back to their countries of origin, of clever youths barred from universities because as boys they were Nazis, and many more. There’s the misery of families torn to tatters. The wives and mothers of millions who are prisoners of war, the hundreds of thousands of husbands and wives of every race-Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs -who haven’t heard of their mates for years, and don’t know whether they are alive or not. How much being able to do one’s job means for happiness I realised when I met the most smiling people in a Lithuanian camp-two doctors and a nurse looking after the health of their fellows. They had just been helping a new displaced person into this world, a night-old baby lying under a beautifully hand-embroidered coverlet. What family affection means for happiness I realised when I went from 200 bunkers, where solitary men _ and solitary women were dossing down in this miserable waste, to another bunker where husbands and wives were able to be together. There we sensed at once a dif-ference-of human happiness. I spoke to one couple there, whose home had come down to 80 cubic feet without a window or furniture-a nightwatchman resting on his bunk, his wife busy at hers. "We’re managing," they said. Hunger for Books Though a visit to Germany to-day is a searing experience, Germany is not yet a place without hope. It shows the amazing resilience of human nature. As one British medical officer put it to me: "The health of the people, though in the spread of tuberculosis it shows danger signals, is on the whole illogically good. They are an exceptionally orderly and friendly people." They are also, or were until Hitler came, a highly _ educated people. The universities have all been started again and are crowded out. I found the hunger for books voiced as often as the hunger for food. I found overflowing audiences interested to hear me on Social Security and the economics of full employment, and asking highly intelligent questions for as long as I would answer them. And behind the present misery is the memory of the 12 nightmare years of Hitler’s rule from which they have escaped.

One sees a woman living in a camp (four families to a room, with two curtains for a pretence of privacy) and asks if her husband is with her. "Now he is," | she answers, "but for three years under Hitler he was in prison for having taken | in the forbidden paper." We meet an-| other woman playing with children in a | camp and ask if these are her children. | "No," she answers, "I have no children. | My husband was an engineer who re-| fused to join the Nazi party, so soon | after we were married they took him to a concentration camp and in three months I got a letter to say that he was dead." Nazi victims are all in the same pool of misery to-day. The position of the British zone is very serious. What makes it nearly desperate is that to-day is 15 months after the surrender, and there is as yet hardly | any signs of improvement. I’ve no time | to-night to set out a detailed programme | of reform, for getting (in one way or) another) more coal, more food, some | consumer goods, the beginnings of an | attack on housing, freer communication | between Germany and the rest of the | world, or for getting the displaced per- | sons back to normal life. I will be con- | tent, before I end, to draw a few gen- | eral morals. Three Morals The first moral comes from the accomplished devastation of the towns. Shops, schools, churches, hospitals, libraries, irreplaceable historical and artistic monuments of a more civilised age than our own, lie in rubble and ruin. It is just that the German people who carried war so ruthlessly into other lands should have | learned at last in their own land what modern war means. But for the German people as a whole, apart from the few criminal leaders, we should regard what has happened to them as enough for justice and punishment. We should turn now from punishment to reformation. That is the first moral. The second moral is that, whether we like it or not, it is of vital British interest to make a material, economic success of our zone of Germany. We can’t withdraw from our zone without throwing away nearly everything for which we fought the war. We must stay there so that the Germans cannot make war again, until they and all other nations have given up wanting to make war. We can’t stay in Germany however on our present basis of impoverishing her except at heavy material cost. The third moral is, that it is of vital British interest to make a psychological success of our zone, to make the people there contented, peaceful, friendly. We are not doing so now. At Potsdam in July, 1945, we abandoned the Atlantic Charter of 1941. From Potsdam we set out on a programme of lowering the standard of life in Germany, of destroying industry, of depriving her of trade. The actions of the Allies, since the sur_render of Germany, make the Atlantic Charter a hypocrisy. German people have shown that they have some terrible things in them, but they have also great virtues of industry and order. They are unequalled in music, and unsurpassed in science. I am not suggesting for a moment that we should ignore the terrible things. We ought to remember the victims and never allow power and lust to come once more to the top in Germany. But in the last resort one can drive out evil only by implanting good, -by teaching human kindness to drive out cruelty, teaching democracy to drive out dictatorship, teaching honour to drive out treachery,