CHAPTER THREE: CECIL MOVES TO EUROPE, 1944-1946

By 1944, and especially after June 6 of that year–– D-Day––it was clear that the Third Reich's days were numbered and that the United States was likely to play a role in the future of Germany. If so, there would be jobs for Americans who spoke German but were not themselves immigrants from Germany. Cecil, who was teaching at New York University at the time, took advantage of this opportunity.

A New Job
Cecil remembered hearing about the new opportunities in the fall of 1944:

I got a call from the civil service to ask me to come around to fill out an application to join the contingent preparing for the occupation of Germany! My name had been submitted by the Institute of International Education, under which I had had a scholarship to study in Berlin and Frankfurt in 1929-30!!! . . . .Edith and I talked it over. It sounded like just the thing for us!!! The war, as it seemed in the fall of 1944, was almost over and it would be safe! . . . They accepted me at Christmas time and I was given a month to finish the semester at college. . . .

On September 14, 1944, Cecil wrote to his mother and sisters:

Last week I made application, on invitation, for radio work in London so that I and the family could go across for a bit of travel. I was shunted off to a new service which is just opening up. In every German city they are going to open up an information center, a kind of cultural exchange bureau to explain American life, art, music, science, education, agriculture, etc. to whatever groups come along. I would lecture, consult with civic leaders, introduce magazines and find out about methods of producing and distributing goods. Combination public relations, research, education, and goodwill. That's me.

Last Friday I saw the chief from London and he said he liked my background and would cable my credentials to London. Now, comes Monday, I am to interview a big, big bug from Washington, who will be in town Monday and Tuesday and, if he likes me, I'll be signed up with the Federal gov't within another week or two and not long thereafter, perhaps a month, I'll be aboard a plane or ship headed for good old England, whence came the Lovettes and the Woolseys.

Edith and the boys will come over as soon as ship-space permits––perhaps in six months.

On November 14, he wrote to his mother and sisters:

Tomorrow I interview the OWI about a job overseas –– but am not interested in it now –– with robot bombs flying and all Europe sinking into a great mess. But what if it paid lots and lots of $$$?

When he was offered a job with the Office of War Information, as the new service was called, he wrote to Lucy on December 2:

The gov't, the war, the peace, and the world are getting ahold of me or on me. The OWI wants me in Germany and I can't go until March because my porch isn't finished! and my family is not resettled.

But on Feb. 1, I'll begin to work for Uncle Sam here until my passport comes through –– about March 15. That is, if I pass my medical, my moral, my financial, and my political examinations and investigations!

So here's to another trip abroad. First to London, at last! London & England & France. I can understand French now quite some. . . .

Boys & girls, I'm on my way up!

All excited and athrill, Yours, Cecil

But a few weeks later, a new event threatened their plans. As he later recalled, But there was a bigger hitch: The Battle of the Bulge in Belgium was taking place just as I was being hired! And the war was not over at all!! And Edith was scared that I might get hurt or killed in the war! But I went right on, knowing that the war would not last long. Edith tried to get me to resign, but I had already told the university and I thought it was a good thing: we could all live in Europe and the children could go to European schools!!!

On January 18, 1945, Edith wrote to her sister Renée:

Cecil has been granted a leave of absence for government service by the University for 3 ½ years. This does not mean that he will necessarily stay in Germany that long, but that his job is kept for that period.

He will start working for the OWI in N.Y. on February 1st. Training period of a few weeks. Everything is secret. Where he will go, when he will go, what he will do, etc. Looks fishy, doesn't it? He will probably go to London first.

On February 8, 1945, Cecil wrote to his mother and Lucy:

I have finished one week with the OWI. First, the hours are long. Second, everybody works, if there is anything to do. They work like men in the P.O. Next week I'll go to school. Also I'll begin to find out which month I'll go. My guess is early April . . . At the OWI I work in the library. Read all the magazines and newspapers, catalog books and maps. Lots of work to do.


Going to Europe
In March, Cecil flew to Prestwick, Scotland, and then took a train to London. He wrote an article titled "London During the Victory Season" that appeared in the periodical Forum and Column Review for June-July 1945. Here are a few excerpts:

Before April had advanced very far, all talk of celebration had died down. Plans remained embryonic, public interest lagged. The hour of victory ticked itself into a whole month of triumphant successes; the Germans would not crumble, so they had to be crushed. No clear line divided peace and war, war from peace. . . .

What was happening to morale and public opinion in London during this decisive month, which started out so hopeful and jubilant and ended up unmoved, even blase, regarding the end of the European conflict? . . .

On the first great holiday, May 8, the crowds came into the parks and in the evening brought flags and squawkers to Piccadilly. This time they were out in force. With sporadic dancing, both snake and circle, and in making whoopee long into the night, the crowds showed mild excitement and an eagerness to enjoy themselves. There were few expressions about the war or the end of the war. . . .

In many ways the English are respectable, courteous, and correct. The people of England are composed, patient, occupied. The do not unbend and "kid around." They speak softly in crowds, take and hold their places with ease but without fanfare or ostentation.

From London, Cecil went to Luxembourg. On May 18 and 19, he wrote to Edith:

Luxembourg is a different world. Black slate roofs, clean. People big and fat. No shortages noticeable. Beer for half the price in U.S. Cauliflower 25 cents for a medium large head. Lettuce 10 ¢ a head (Boston).

You should see the beautiful bread here in Lux. People get 25 lbs. a month apiece – more than they can eat. Next month no more rations. I'm going to try to take a picture of the bake shop.

Cecil arrived in Germany in May 1945. He was, as he pointed out, "one of the few intellectuals, including journalists who knew a lot of German –– that is among the civilians."

He recalled:

We were shipped out to Bad Homburg, above Frankfurt-am-Main about ten miles. There the OWI, Office of War Information, under General McClure, with William Paley of CBS as his assistant, had taken over a large home and converted it into offices. I was ready to go to work, and since I was alone the events burned themselves into my brain. I can recall more than I have space to write up –– but I will try to hit the main events that stand out in my memory. It was May, June, July, and August, 1945.

His job there was to arrange shipments of books and magazines and set up libraries, to be called "Amerika Haus," in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin.

I took charge of the library in Frankfurt, and it was the seat of my operation, except some paperwork, until September, when we all moved to Berlin. In Frankfurt we had a huge building and had many books. Soon we noticed that the dictionaries were being stolen! I had a staff of five people. . . .

Hans Speier, a sociologist who had emigrated to the States and whom I knew in the New School for Social Research in New York, came over to see what was happening in his former Vaterland. He found that I kept a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelves, the evil book written by Hitler about his plans to liquidate the Jews and reassert German might in the world! He told the girls to remove it, else some Congressman might come by and see it! Meanwhile, young people were reading it!

Cecil was in Bad Homburg until September 1946, when he and his staff moved to Berlin to work for OMGUS (the Office of Military Government, United States) that administered the American Zone of Germany.


The Food Situation in Germany

Before the war, Germany had imported food from neighboring countries (and during the war, it did so at gunpoint). The defeat of Germany caused a food crisis in 1945-1946. Here is what historian Douglas Botting has written:

There was a worldwide food shortage as a consequence of the war and the situation throughout Europe, where production of grain was down by 70 percent and food in general by half, was calamitous. . . . In the widespread shortage, the Germans came near the end of the queue. The Allies were reluctant to spare food from their own depleted stocks in order to feed their vanquished enemy. The best they could do was to try and keep the Germans alive, but even that was hard. The number of head of livestock had fallen by 35 percent since 1944. There were no fertilizers, seed was scarce, farm machinery worn out, labor almost nonexistent––the foreign farm workers had left, the Germans they had replaced were either dead or prisoners of war. The first post-war harvest was sown late and there were fears it might fail. . . .

General Clay [the American commander in Germany] summarized the situation very clearly: "We had to have food. West Germany had never been self-supporting. Even Germany as a whole could not raise enough to sustain its people. Now their principal producing farmlands in North, Central, and Eastern Germany were much smaller because of the severed Eastern territory. Moreover the produce was not available to the Western zones. Yet the population of these zones had increased by about 4,000,000 and was about to increase still more." (Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York: Crown, 1985), pp. 131-32)

To alleviate the food shortage, or rather to spread it out among the population, the Allies imposed rationing. While the American authorities set an official ration for normal consumers at 1550 calories per day, the reality was quite different. In Trier, the ration of food delivered was 893 calories in November, 1100 in December, and 616 in January––concentration camp rations. The result was officially-sanctioned starvation; in Trier, one third of all children born in 1945 died of malnutrition (Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 352).

Cecil's job required that he travel extensively through the American Zone of Germany. What he saw contradicts the reports of the historians. Thus he wrote to his mother on August 9, 1945:

One thing: there is more misery within forty miles of Franklin, N.C. than in this whole section of Germany from here to Hersfeld and back to Heidelberg! Believe it or not. The Germans still have nearly twice as much living space in the city of Bremen as the Russians in Moscow, man for man, person for person. There are no children in France without shoes, even though some are ingeniously made of wood. There are no peoples north of the Pyrenees and the Alps whose diet and general conditions compare with 60 percent of the state of Arkansas. If your heart bleeds for the suffering Europeans, it does so because someone is yelling very loudly. . . .

Here the middle class plays tennis and the workers take walks. The woods are not cleaned out. If they freeze next winter, don't blame the military government. It just isn't as you imagine. The social rituals here and in England are intact, the holidays are kept, nobody works overtime, there is no great dislocation except in a few bombed-out cities, such as Berlin. I know things will slow down next winter and some people will stay in bed to keep warm, but that is because they stick around cities where they lived before and have not gone to the villages or because they haven't thought to collect wood. On August 14, he wrote to Edith:

Pretty agricultural villages, old, quaint, lovely, people very busy raking hay, plowing, picking beans, tending sheep. The horses were fat and huge, the cattle fat, the oxen looked like pictures in a book. The peasants were real peasants, the women worked like men, dressed soberly, looked healthy and busy. The forests were all planted, looked as if they and the cultivated land had been growing and living together for hundreds of years, and they gave the appearance of having been trimmed, not just each trees, but each mountain-side from brim to crest.

On September 1, he wrote to his mother:

Yesterday I returned from my trip to Luxembourg. One day there, one day back. Villages, manure piles, old carts, oxen, women in fields raking hay, some even swinging the scythe, people on the roads going places, carrying things. . . .

Along the Rhine I saw some small fields of garden-stuff. That was just above Mainz on the west bank. Flat rich lands with rows and rows of garden-stuff. Apples are abundant here, as are pears. We had lots of cherries earlier and plums in the mid-season.

On September 15, after traveling to Württemberg-Baden and Bavaria, he wrote to Edith: The country between Karlsruhe and Constance is everlastingly lovely, the people are fat and healthy, the villages untouched, . . . the land filled with fruit and livestock. Those people know of the war only because of what they have read and what their sons say –– if they return. The people there are so well dressed and plump and healthy in their behavior. So different from starving Vienna (88 calories a day) and Berlin and the lower Rhineland.

All across Bavaria there are so many livestock and such hard-working farmers. Munich has gutted buildings but many stand –– the walls. The great mass of the city –– more than half of the whole and probably 75 percent of the homes are standing. The center of Stuttgart is knocked all the way down but the homes are intact and it is still a lovely sight. The wrecked buildings do not disturb me–– there was too much commercial life, too much city. Now the towns and villages are the envied people who have withstood the ravages of these modern wars. Lucky peasants, and busy. With all their manure piles.

I drank in the scenery, never tired of travelling and seeing. There is little to be depressed about if you can forget the cities!

On September 27, he wrote to his mother and siblings:

I went on a trip to Switzerland and saw some beautiful country. The section known as Swabia is untouched except in the larger cities, and the people in the country are fat, healthy, busy, and comfortable. The life in the cities is something too sad to describe. I am going to write my next article about Germany and how she looks to an outsider.

And on November 14, he wrote to Edith:

This is how the picture looks as I have seen it first hand or heard from every source: In Luxembourg there is little evidence that a war took place. Bread is off the ration. The stores are filled with things, just as they are at home. The same is true of Switzerland. The French are still absorbed in the black market and can't get organized for work as the Swiss and Lux people. But they are on the upgrade from where they were. Italy is poor and prices are high. Italy suffers from inflation, as France from the black market. Things are tight for the English, who have to live on the rations, because they lack variety in things, but in the smaller places they have plenty of things in the stores. Germany will have the first really tough winter from point of view of fuel and food, but they won't have to live in cellars or run from raids as they have been doing for two years, which is something. There are no evidence of riots of starvation in this part of the country. Anyway, the French part of Germany, the part north of Switzerland anyway, is fat with animals, warm with wood and whatever else. . . . So that if the people of Berlin or the Ruhr have it tough, the people of Wurtemberg will chuckle with glee at the fate that was not theirs. Nor will any epidemic sweep over Switzerland, because if such were in the offing, it would have come last winter from Italy, but Italy struggled along last winter and is now much better cared for by shipping and UNRRA [the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency].

On May 5, 1946, he wrote a long essay about the four zones of Germany.

There is no starvation in the American Zone or in Berlin. People do not even have the long hungry look of many of our southern mountaineers, the miners in West Virginia when they don't mine for four years, for instance. There is no misery in Germany yet which is comparable to the misery of the crackers and clay-eaters of Georgia, the zarks of Ozark country or the dark men of Mississippi. The misery there is just like that of the slum—except among the better classes where it is not the slum condition but the Great Depression psychology and actions. The great masses of people in Frankfurt and Berlin and Munich, apart from a very few fashionable districts, live in the cold, eat an unpalatable diet, begin to look untidy and even dirty: they are slummy, poor and cold and with no zip or pep. They do not sing and only occasionally does one hear an accordion. . . The food situation is much better than you think. The people would not work with such normal energy if they did not have something that sticks to the ribs.They get food in the black market and with this food they supplement the figures you read about. And did you hear that the miners were not producing so much coal since the rations were cut? They slackened off the first week of the ration cut: That is a political movement on their part, plus the fact that they have found out that the Allies want them to produce a lot of coal. So it tickles them to confuse the allied program. However, this much is sure: the Ruhr and the Saar are both far far away from the rich agricultural regions and many people there are actually living on 950 calories a day, which is a slow-starvation diet. . . . But if you go across Baden, Wuertemberg, Bavaria, and up through the Hersfelt section of Hesse, you will find the farmers feeding cream to cats, you will find them producing livestock to butcher on the sly, you will find them refusing money and insisting on gold, cloth, tobacco, chocolate, and carrying on the daily grind of peasant life with lots of bedding sticking out the windows, geese up and down the road, fat horses and oxen.

Cecil Writes About Germany

On September 23, 1945, Cecil wrote to his family in Kansas: Tomorrow morning I load my library into a truck and head for the middle of Frankfurt. The wreckage in the center of the city has been quite complete. The concussion was so great that it made clay out of the bricks, and now grass and weeds grow in land made from bricks! You look at the pile of rubble ten feet above the sidewalk and wonder where all that dirt came from! Bricks are made from dust. Or rather, dust is made to bricks to dust.

Very few Germans look as if they were about to have a good time. Most of them are old before their years and terribly earnest. In the section south of Karlsruhe many of the people were plump and handsome. Around here they are pretty much of an ugly crew. Many are too fat, many too thin. When we first arrived they were happy and smiled and spoke to us on the street, now we are all urbanites –– only speak to or look at people you know. In some places children wave back at you, many times they just look at you and remain placid.

Some Germans who live in towns and cities made gardens this summer. Most of them stayed around town where there is obviously no trade or traffic. They wait around in town for the farmers to bring in the food at fixed prices, and the wood. I never saw farm families work more consistently and harder than they do here. And how the city folks look down on the people in the villages! I have heard that those from Frankfurt who were evacuated to the villages were almost crazy to come home. Every man to his own trade! Musicians must be musicians and antiquarians antiquarians and booksellers booksellers, and there is no place to play music, no antiques and no books! But those who have to work want to do stonework in cities –– but where is the economic base for all this urban rebuilding? The wrongs of man are in the rigidities of prejudice and custom-built attitudes toward what he should or should not do. He can't particularize each situation in terms of health, first things first, or his place in the common whole. . . .

Gardens have flowers and the parks are miles long, the people stand around in town or play tennis by the hour, but they all talk about having nothing but potatoes and bread to eat! . . . .

We had no coal for the schools, we did not require the bringing of wood by the municipal authorities, our trucks rumbled down out of the nearby mountains empty. Each child had to scrounge some wood to heat the crowded rooms. These schools opened late and the average age of teachers was said to be sixty. The secondary schools are not open, we have found 12 teachers for them in the city of Frankfurt.

On January 18, 1946, he wrote to Edith:

In Erlangen I talked at some length with a Lt. who was a bit critical of some of the things our boys have done. He was mostly just pro-German and anti-Pole, anti-Russian, and anti-Semitic. The mistakes of military occupation are always different from and more deep-lying than superficial behavior, such as breaking up furniture or beating up someone. We are getting very wise lately, however. As the printing industry runs out of paper, zinc, lead, etc., we run out of the printing business and turn it over to the Germans. Same with transport. By the time industrial life is failing to keep up with the economy, we shall be engaged only in policing. Then, if more bridges aren't built, streets and roads are not repaired, etc., the Land government will have to worry about those things. Same with radio tubes for the sending stations. We'll get out of the operating phase before the present tubes burn out. When they do, there are no replacements. etc.

To Cecil, the people seemed a sad lot; as he wrote in July 1946:

The Germans are wearing out their clothes, are hungry and weary – they have no future in this generation. . . . By May 1947 they will be near the end of their rope. They are such beggars! Even the best and richest of them.There are no goods in the market except wooden shoes. . . .

On the whole, the Germans are a beaten, disgruntled, unhealthy, nervous, hungry, tattered and torn bunch of poor whites.