Germany Through Humanitarian Relief 1919-1924

ABSTRACT

AMERICAN BENEVOLENCE AND GERMAN RECONSTRUCTION: “AMERICANIZING” GERMANY THROUGH HUMANITARIAN RELIEF 1919-1924

by Louis Anne François Grün

From 1919 to 1924, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), supplied over 5 million German children with food aid that came to be known as the Quäkerspeisung. Following four years of fighting and the British Blockade, Germany lacked proper food reserves and production to supply its ailing population. Amidst a concern of revolution and food riots, the German government appealed to the Allied Nations to support the nation with food. However, the American public was not ready to support Germany with humanitarian relief due to the recent fighting and as such the American Relief Administration (ARA) was not able to help the German people. Herbert Hoover, the director of the ARA, reached out to the Quakers and tasked the American Friends Service Committee with helping Germans. The Quäkerspeisung which officially started in February 1920, would, in the words of AFSC co-founder Rufus Jones, “Americanize” the German nation and return the former war enemy into the international community. This thesis will show the motivations of US humanitarian relief to Germany and the impact of the Quaker feeding. Furthermore, the project will highlight the Weimar government’s response to the aid and their plans to support national reconstruction by focusing on children.

AMERICAN BENEVOLENCE AND GERMAN RECONSTRUCTION: “AMERICANIZING” GERMANY THROUGH HUMANITARIAN RELIEF 1919-1924

Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Louis Anne François Grün

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2020

Advisor: Dr Erik Jensen

Reader: Dr Amanda McVety

Reader: Dr Steven Conn

This thesis titled

AMERICAN BENEVOLENCE AND GERMAN RECONSTRUCTION: “AMERICANIZING” GERMANY THROUGH HUMANITARIAN RELIEF 1919-1924

Louis Anne François Grün

has been approved for publication by

College of Arts and Science

and

Department of History

______Erik Jensen

______Amanda McVety

______Steven Conn

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... iv Dedication ...... v Acknowledgments...... vi Introduction 1 Chapter I The United States get involved 10 o The Hardship of Occupation ...... 15 o The AFSC steps in ...... 20 Chapter II The Remaking of Germany 31 o The Remaking of a Nation ...... 36 Chapter III A New Age of Humanitarianism 46 o The Armenian Case...... 52 Conclusion 59

iii

List of Figures

1.1 Occupied Rhineland ...... 15 1.2 Detailed map of the Rhineland ...... 18 2.1 Home-front propaganda ...... 34 2.2 German Relief Organization Poster ...... 38 2.3 Feeding of Children ...... 44 3.1 Hunger Map of Europe ...... 50

Dedication

Un meng Grousselteren, Léopold a Liliane Boever-Wampach & Fernand a Marie- Charlotte Grün-Pütz.

To my grandparents, Léopold and Liliane Boever-Wampach & Fernand and Marie Charlotte Grün-Pütz. For instilling the love of history in me and pushing me to pursue my dreams.

Acknowledgements

A lot of people supported and helped me in realizing this project and I would like to thank each one of them for their help.

First of all, I would like to thank my amazing advisor Dr. Erik Jensen for his unwavering and continuous support. Even when I had to delay my graduation by two months, you never doubted my ability to finish this project and helped me turn it into my most passionate work yet. Your mentorship both as an academic and teaching advisor has led me to gain a new appreciation in history and I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such an important beacon throughout my time at Miami University and especially during the global pandemic. Another very special thank you goes out to the other members of my committee, Dr. Steven Conn, and Dr. Amanda McVety. As both advisors and teachers you gave me the extra push when it came to helping me find a thesis topic that I am passionate about. I would also like to thank Dr. Sheldon Anderson, Dr. William Brown, and Dr. Stephen Norris for their support as teaching advisors. Your kind and supportive words have made me value teaching history even more. Thank you for all of your lessons and allowing to share my passion of history with you.

A huge thank you to my family back home in Luxembourg: Thank you for supporting me over the last couple of years on my overseas adventure. To my parents – Marc and Christiane: From day one you supported both mine and Michel’s dreams to pursue a higher education and I cannot imagine how hard it must have been as parents to have both of your sons studying abroad. Your love extended all around the globe and I can consider myself extremely lucky to have such loving and supportive parents. To my brother Michel: Thank you for continuously sharing funny videos and stories with me and keeping me up to date with what is happening in Europe. You brought a smile to my face every time I got a notification from you and made me feel like we were never far apart. To my grandma Boma Marietti: Thank you for sharing your love of history with me. Our discussions brought me much joy and I always loved to hear about the new things that you discovered in your books. And an additional thank you to my aunt Simone, who through her sense of humor made me take life never too seriously. Merci un iech all: Mamma, Pappa, Michel, Boma a Simone. Ouni iech hätt ech et net gepackt.

This journey could have not been completed with my remarkable partner and best friend – Alicia Walsh-Clarett. Your steadfast support over the last two and a half years kept me going and pushed me ever closer to the completion of this project. Thank you for not only helping me achieve my dream but also for being the amazing, intelligent, and adventurous woman, I have come to know, love and respect.

Not to mention my fellow cohort who became invaluable friends to me. Ben Susman’s and Zachary Logsdon’s wit and humor kept me going even when everything seemed hopeless. Both of you became true friends, and I am lucky that I could share an apartment with you. Zinaida Osipova and Kristin Osborne allowed me to share my passion of soccer with them and remained great friends throughout even the most stressful times.

Introduction The winter of 1916-1917 came to be known as one of the harshest periods in Germany during World War I. The Germans referred to the period as Steckrübenwinter, or “Turnip Winter” due to the lack of common food items induced by bad harvests, paired with the need to supply troops on the front with proper supplies and the continuation of the British Blockade that cut Germany from importing vital resources. The German civilian population had to resort to feed themselves almost completely from turnips since rye and wheat supplies needed for bread ran extremely low. The “Turnip Winter” was, in many ways, a taste of things to come, as ongoing food shortages caused widespread hunger and malnutrition throughout the country into the early 1920s, a circumstance that stemmed from the continuation of the Allied Blockade as well as massive disruptions in Germany’s domestic agricultural production and continental imports. When the Armistice, the official cease-fire between the Allies and the German Empire, was signed in November 1918, the German government was hoping to quell the civilian unrest within the country, that was growing amidst the food shortages induced by the blockade. Little could they have anticipated that the blockade would be upheld well into the year of 1919, until after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June of that year. Quaker historian Gregory Barnes states that the reason why the Blockade had continued is because “British and French, but prominent Americans as well – seemed to hold a Manichean belief in good people to be rewarded and bad peoples […] to be punished.”1 The Germans would have to suffer for the cruelties they had committed during the war and the blockade was deemed to be a just punishment. The consequences of the continued blockade would, however, have destructive consequences on the German population as historian C. Vincent Paul highlights: “in the weeks and months following the armistice, Germany’s deplorable state further deteriorated.”2 Civilians that were not to blame for the German army and government’s faults would suffer the most from the blockade and the German government, in 1918, estimated that over 750,000 people died of the effects of the blockade from 1915-1918.3

1 Barnes, Gregory A. A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee (Philadelphia: Friends Press, 2016), Chapter 2, loc. 752 (e-book) 2 Vincent, C. Paul. The Politics of Hunger: the allied blockade of Germany 1915-1919 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 145. 3 Reichsgesundheitsamtes, Schädigung der Deutschen Volkskraft durch die feindliche Blockade (1919), p. 15: „Die Gesamtzahl der Opfer der Blockade wird also mit rund 763000 Zivilpersonen nicht zu hoch eingesetzt, um so mehr, als auch noch im Jahre 1919 durch die Fortdauer der Blockade die Zahl der Opfer fortwährend steigt.“

1 Reports from German medical professionals such as Dr Fritz Parsch, claimed that the blockade could only be perceived as a brutal undertaking by the Allied powers to punish the Germans. In a 1919 issue of the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, Patsch states that “while German politicians in the last few days paint the enemies as innocent angels to inflict on [the Germans] the greater guilt, observations from a clinical and social-hygienic nature are piling up, that prove the infamous brutality of the English hunger blockade and its effects on the German national body.”4 Even if the anticipated goal had not been to harm the civilian population in Germany, the effects of the British Blockade from the beginning until its official lifting on July 12th 1919, caused severe and almost irreversible damages to both the German economy and its population. Although the blockade had ended, the suffering during war times would be an indicator of the suffering in the years following the end of the war as “the continued food blockade brought about a quarter of a million additional deaths among the civilian population of Germany, within its post-1919 boundaries.”5 While the blockade played a major role in in food disruptions, other events within Germany and beyond its borders also heavily affected food supplies during the war and in the years following the end of the war. Firstly, the German military in a move to strengthen their forces on the front drafted large numbers of people which led to “the near-disappearance of able-bodied men from the home front.”6 Secondly, both the requisition of fertilizer, which led to “a shortage that had been exacerbated by the military’s vast appetite for nitrogen”,7 a compound of fertilizer which was also required to produce explosives, and the restrictions by the Allies to import more of such compounds, furthermore lowered harvests and after the war complicated the restart of the agricultural sector. Lastly, the foodstuffs flowing in from Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, following the victory over Russia in February 1918, were disrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution. The food situation in Germany continued to worsen when Germany’s ally to the south, the Habsburg Empire, ceased to exist. Combined with the Food Blockade, these problems intensified

4 Fritz, Parsch Dr. ‘Über gehäuftes Auftreten von Osteomalazie’ in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift’ (Leipzig, 1919): „Während, deutsche Politiker in den letzten Tagen die Feinde als unschuldvolle Engel malen, um uns ein desto größeres Schuldkontu aulzulasten, häufen sich überall die Beobachtungen klinischer und sozialhygienischer Art, die die infame Brutalität der englischen Hungerblockade in ihrer Einwirkung auf den deutschen Volkskörper beweisen.“ 5 Howard, N. P. The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918-19 (University of Sheffield, 1993), p. 162. 6 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War” in Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 20. 7 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 39. 2

Germany’s food problems. Following the Peace Conference in Versailles, Germany’s “loss of much of the country’s fertile farmland in the East” 8 meant that the population of Germany would struggle even more in the future. Until the blockade was lifted and several months thereafter, most of Germany had to rely on aid that was provided by mostly non-governmental organizations from the United States. One such non-governmental organization was the American Friends Service Committee that had been established by the Quakers. While their child feeding program took until March 1920 to make significant contributions to supporting Germany with food, Quakers had already been supplying aid to a few fortunate children as early as July 1919. The program that would come to be known in Germany as Quäkerspeisung, or “Quaker feeding” would extend food to millions of German children until its fruition in 1924. In other parts of Germany, such as occupied Rhineland, Germans relied on the American Armed Forces, such as the US Third Army, to provide food aid and logistical services. In order to understand the reasons why food aid had been provided to Germany, one first needs to understand the organizations that decided to support helping Germans in the first place, as well as compare and contrast the German case with another example, that of Armenia. The reasons for humanitarian aid are multifaceted. Not only did extending food aid help those people suffering from hunger, it was also a way to foster diplomatic relations between different countries, in this case the United States and Germany. The following study will focus on the American and German perspectives of the child feeding program from December 1918 to mid- 1923. I will analyze what drove different actors such as the US Third Army and the AFSC to support Germany with humanitarian aid and how different hardships arose in various parts of Germany notably in the occupied zone of the Rhineland, and the rest of Germany. Furthermore, I will look at the reaction of the German government and its people to the Quaker feeding and their own plans of supporting the weakest and most innocent souls of their society, children, in order to reconstruct their nation. If one were to only focus on the American perspectives of the food relief, one would not understand how Germans reacted towards the food aid and how this affected diplomatic relations in the future. While many other historians have focused on the humanitarian relief that had been provided to Germany following the First World War, many tend to focus on only one city in

8 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 39. 3

Germany or a select number of larger cities. Furthermore, such studies look at either the Quaker aid from a strictly American perspectives with only a limited German input or altogether only focus on the American Relief Administration as the major humanitarian organization providing aid in Europe, or they tend to focus on the effects of the aid on children rather than the response of the German government to support such actions. My project seeks to approach the German aid program, but more specifically the Quäkerspeisung from a multi-national and regional perspectives. As for the historiography of this project, I included a variety of humanitarian history scholars and war historians’ works that helped me frame my argument. Vincent Paul’s The Politics of Hunger: the Allied Blockade of Germany 1915-1919 (1985) and Mary E. Cox’s Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924 (2019) have shed light on the brutal outcome of the blockade and the politics of hunger. Paul’s focus on the impact of the blockade on the German economy and people reveals much about the motivation behind the usage of the blockade and its effect on Germany’s economy and its people but does not go much beyond that. Cox’s more modern approach reveals much about the blockade’s effects on the health state of German children due to nutritional deprivation and uses statistics to track how the children’s physicality, imports and production were impacted before the blockade and after it was lifted. While the author includes the AFSC in her book and includes drawings and letters by German children as to show their response towards the Quaker aid, not much attention is given to the German government’s cooperation in the matter which is also shown by the lack of German sources in the specific sub-chapter which is what I attempted to do in Chapter 2 of my thesis. A combined American-German narrative is required to identify how supply issues were resolved and the aid network throughout the country was improved. Charles Strickland’s, “American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921” in a 1962 edition of the Wisconsin Magazine looked at the challenges that Herbert Hoover and the AFSC faced when focusing on Germany as a recipient of humanitarian aid. Strickland’s paper highlights the criticism that Hoover had to face from Americans that were opposed of helping Germany and the ways he tried to from a consensus among the American public that aid should go to children in order to gain favorable support for the humanitarian cause. While the American perspective is given a lot of attention, not much information is given on what Germany is doing domestically to support the American humanitarian effort. Since my project is not concerned with the political opposition that

Hoover faced in the US, I am able to quickly get into the dialogue between Hoover and the AFSC and the German government’s responses to aid. In a similar way, Aiken Guy’s article “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” in a 2019 article in Diplomatic History analyzed some of the concerns about supplying a wartime enemy with food shortly after the war had ended. Aiken goes into much more detail how the American Friends Service Committee was able to organize help on the ground. His paper includes primary sources that have highlighted the response by important Quaker figures such as Hoover, Carolena Woods and Rufus Jones towards the importance of aiding Germany. Since Aiken focuses a lot on what the AFSC is doing there is not much space dedicated to German organizations. The Deutscher Zentral Auschuss (DZA), the German Committee for Foreign relief, is briefly mentioned as working hand in hand with the Quakers and for taking over the relief after the Quakers have left but as I will show in this project, there was a much larger discussion about providing aid on a local and national level that included various private and public German organizations. Riley Barry in The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (2017), exclusively analyses America’s role in providing humanitarian aid to those in need. The book covers more than 200 years of American food aid, from the early years of the American Republic to the 21st century. The part that my project is most concerned with is the food aid to Germany after the end of the First World War. However, Barry barely focuses on the AFSC and attributes most of the aid that Germany received to the American Relief Administration. As many other scholars like Barry, most overviews of humanitarian aid spend too little time on German food aid from 1919-1923 and its connection to German national reconstruction. Michael Barnett’s Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2011) in a similar way to Barry, captures the last 200 years of humanitarianism but treats it in a larger global context and splits it into three periods. His insights into that history reveal much about the changes in motivation and organization of humanitarian projects following the end of the First World War. It is important to include both book in order to understand how food relief had been discussed prior to the efforts made by Hoover and the United States in 1919 and other international actors. Despite the AFSC playing an important role in early 20th century humanitarian projects, Barnett’s book proves that the Quakers do not receive enough attention for their efforts in providing humanitarian aid during this transitional age of humanitarianism.

In Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century Germany (2017) Weinreb Alice in the chapter on the First World War analyzes Germany’s economic and agricultural capabilities prior to the war and how they had been destined to fail in case of a prolonged conflict. Central to Chapter 1 is the occurrence of hunger through the militarization of food and new innovations to provide food and substitute staple foods. Weinreb’s particular angle on German’s quest for greater food self sufficiency leaves wide open the role that America played in supplying aid to children. How Germany’s quest for self-sufficiency combined with American aid led to the development of the German welfare state is barely discussed in Weinreb’s work. Rebecca Jinks’ “Marks Hard to Erase: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919-1927” in a 2018 edition in the American Historical Review looks at the reconstruction of an Armenian homeland through the inclusion of women that were marked by their assimilation into Turkish, Arab and Bedouin cultures and the Muslim religion, and later orphan children. The Near East Relief which provided humanitarian aid in Armenia also shared a lot of similarities with the AFSC such as their goal to save children from hunger and starvation and being entirely private. While the Armenian case is quite specific and does not provide us with conclusive insights into the broader trends of humanitarian aid at the time, it helped me to compare and contrast the German humanitarian case with that of Armenia at the end of World War I. Her paper has provoked me to see if a similar case for reconstruction in Germany exists. As for John Hiden’s article “The Weimar Republic and the Problem of the Auslandsdeutsche” in the 1977 edition of the Journal of Contemporary History, it demonstrates that Germany engaged in their own foreign relief projects during the 1920s. Although Hiden focuses on the Auslandsdeutsche, his specific focus shows that Germany was eager to engage in foreign relief, even if it meant their own people living abroad. However, the Auslandsdeutsche end up being used as a tool by the Nazis in the 1930s to reclaim lost territories and politicize the struggle of Germans in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Alsace-Lorraine. What Hiden’s article does not reveal is whether Germany engaged in humanitarian help to other nations in the 1920s. Furthermore, there is no discussion whether American aid actually led the Weimar government to provide for people behind their own borders. But my research proves that Germany over the course of the 1920s, following aid from foreign powers, progressively engaged in reforming their social welfare state through their own drives for social reforms and their support of relief organizations such as the AFSC.

By looking at reports by Quakers working on the ground in Germany and German volunteers and political officials, I am able to construct a different narrative on how the Quaker feeding program pushed the Weimar government in developing their social welfare state and becoming increasingly more “Americanized” through American aid. Furthermore, I want to argue that different ramifications of hardship existed within Germany itself. Germans had to face limitations to their daily life, depending on where they lived and who provided the aid. By focusing on a much smaller city such as Trier, which had both received food by the American military and the AFSC, I am revealing that the occupied Rhineland was differently affected by the Quäkerspeisung than other parts of Germany. In briefly contrasting Trier with the political center in Berlin and other places in Germany such as the Erzgebirge in Saxony or the city of Essen in the Ruhr region, I am able to highlight that despite success of the relief mission, organizational problems existed within the AFSC. I divided my project into three chapters which will focus on the American relief by both the US Army and the AFSC from both an American and German perspective, as well as the German government’s plan to help the Quaker program. Chapter One will focus on the US perspective and will highlight different ramifications of hardship across Germany depending on the aid they received. I will start with the analysis of the food situation following the occupation of parts of the Rhineland by American troops in December of 1918 and the ways in which the US Third Army was able to support the local population with imports of foodstuffs from the United States, and the development of an extensive distribution system in the region. Furthermore, the second part of this chapter will look at how the AFSC became involved in providing aid to Germany and how Herbert Hoover, as director of the American Relief Administration, was crucial in making the Quakers the face of the German humanitarian mission. Chapter Two will explore the German reaction towards the Quaker feeding program from different parts of society and how this relief effort helped the German government reconstruct their nation by focusing their own efforts on children. By looking at documents written by political officials across Germany I am highlighting the urgency that existed at the time to focus on children as a way to reconstruct the nation. Moreover, this chapter will also look at some of the criticism that the German government faced from one of the major opposition parties in the country, the USPD. This chapter also focuses on some private citizen’s voices that had either directly or

7 indirectly benefitted from Quaker feeding in order to emphasize the urgency of the German government to support the aid program. The final Chapter will focus on the need for humanitarian relief efforts throughout Europe during the 1920s and how the US became involved in supplying Europe and Germany with said humanitarian aid after the First World War and helped the Weimar Republic land on its feet. In this Chapter I am comparing and contrasting the German case with the national reconstruction project in Armenia to show that humanitarian projects at the time targeted mostly children and women. For this study, I relied on various German newspapers, political party papers, official documents by the American Friends Service Committee uncovered at the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin as well as the official army reports by the US Third Army as the main American occupying force in the Rhineland. I also made use of private letters, diaries, and papers by famous German figures such as artist Käthe Kollwitz, Marxist Otto Rühle, and German officials such as German chancellor Franz Schröder, and state director of Brandenburg Joachim von Winterfeldt, among others. As this year marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Quaker feeding, it is important to explore once again one of the earliest successful major humanitarian relief efforts in history and offer a new perspective on this period by combining German and American reports to offer a combined viewpoint on this important milestone in humanitarian aid programs. More research needs to be done in the study of humanitarian aid to Germany that incorporates significant German narratives in combination with the American perspective to understand how Germans perceived the food aid and in which ways the Weimar government sought to restructure its own aid programs along the lines of American humanitarian relief. Given the scope of this project, I am only able to start the dialogue on this subject but moving forward I hope that this will provide new ways of looking at this historical period.

CHAPTER I The United States get involved: Different Ramifications of Hardship in the Occupied and Non-Occupied Territories of Germany from 1918- 1921 “About one-third of the foodstuffs consumed comes from beyond [Germany’s] frontiers… Germany is […] unable to live for even a month without supplies from abroad”.9 This excerpt from the Australian newspaper The Argus highlights that Germany already faced problems with their food supply at the beginning of the war in 1914. Thus, it makes sense that Germany would struggle throughout the war with supplying their people with further food, especially since imports into the country started to decrease in the wake of the naval blockade enforced onto Germany. Following the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the food situation in Germany became ever more dire. The German government over the next few months was struggling to feed their own people with food. Although, this problem could have easily been solved by accepting the rations offered by the United States, the German leadership’s pride caused them to be reluctant of accepting American aid, and as such, “spent months without any Allied provisioning because of their own unwillingness to surrender their ships and let the Allies fill them with food.”10 Peace was dependent on the availability of food and if the German government was unable to provide for their constituents, they would jeopardize their already fragile stability and suffer under repeated uprisings and riots. Therefore, they faced a moral dilemma, remain independent, but completely powerless to help their starving citizens, or surrender control to the United States in order to feed their people, but leave themselves defenseless to an attack from France or Great Britain. Especially in the wake of the Treaty of Trianon, during which Hungary lost parts of their country despite them being populated by a great number of Hungarians, Germany was even more alert. If Wilson’s Fourteen Points, were meant to define borders around clear lines of ethnicity and nationality, the case of Hungary proved that Germany had to be vigilant not to lose their symbols of power which would safeguard them from further aggression, especially from the French who

9 ‘Germany’s Food Supply: Dependence upon Imports’ in The Argus (Melbourne, 10 September 1914), p. 7. 10 Cox, E. Mary. ‘Armistice and Blockade: November 1918-July 1919 in Hunger in War and Peace: Women and children in Germany, 1914-1924 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019), p. 213. 9

‘had been haunted by German preponderance in population and in coal’ and to whom “it seemed logical […] that Alsace and Lorraine should bring them the Saar borderland too.”11 The German government’s responsibility to their people and pressure from the international community finally led them to accept the United States’ offer to transfer their fleet. American foodstuffs began entering the German market.

Over the next years following the Armistice, various actors of international and national origin became involved in the supply of food to German children and women. The largest support came from the United States, since both the US government and social organizations became committed in helping Germany. Each organizations and group that became engaged in Germany during this time pursued different goals. Some of the interests were economic, diplomatic but for the most part they were humanitarian. In the context of the first Red Scare in the United States at the end of the 1910s, the United States might have even felt compelled to assist Germany in order to prevent the country from falling to Bolshevism. By the beginning of the 1920s the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an organization founded by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1917 with the goal of assisting civilian victims affected by WWI, started feeding millions of starving children and mothers with food aid that had been referred to as ‘Quaker feeding’, or as it had been known at the time in Germany as Quäkerspeisung. Henry J. Cadbury, co-founder of the AFSC, was quoted in a New York Times article, saying that “Germany is becoming Americanized through an intensive drive of American charity and American humanity” and “Germany is losing her spirit of militarism”.12 If the Quaker aid did not help in the national reconstruction of Germany, it definitely helped in the integration of Germany into the international community. Cadbury’s quote highlights two differing sets of motivation for providing humanitarian food aid. First of all, Germans were suffering and needed outside help in order to be saved from starvation. The AFSC coming forward, and providing said aid, helped foster a pacifist and cooperative spirit with those who regarded the aid to be essential and lifesaving. On the other hand, providing aid also meant that the United States, even if it was through a non-governmental organization, was engaging in their own national interest. If the organizations that helped Germany were seen as American, they would be promoting American values and profit from it further down

11 E. W. "The Saar as an International Problem." in The World Today, Vol. 8, no. 7 (1952), p. 299. 12 Cadbury, Henry J. “‘Americanized’ Germany Through Quaker Eyes” in New York Times (October 17, 1920), p. 3. 10 the line when Germany would be once again part of the international community and be indebted to the United States. Not every part of Germany profited the same from the help extended by the AFSC. Notably, the occupied regions such as the Rhineland had to wait much longer for Quaker aid than the rest of Germany. Part of the problem may have been the difficulty of communication between Berlin and the occupied zones. Logically, France, Britain and the United States, as the main occupying forces, would have not accepted the government in Berlin to interfere with procurement, production, and distribution of food in the Rhineland, since the occupiers were the legal administrative entity in the region. The importance of the Rhineland cannot be underestimated in the context of this study since it was one of the main industrial and economic centers of Germany. Furthermore, distribution of official food aid from the American government in the occupation zone was hindered by logistical problems on the ground, because of lack of proper organizations in charge of food distribution. One issue that was apparent in both the non-occupied regions and occupied Rhineland, were the soaring prices for American commodities that had entered the German market. Although the Quakers tried to focus their efforts all around Germany, records indicate that they enjoyed great success in almost every region except those occupied by the Allied powers. In this chapter I will argue that various forms of hardship existed throughout the non- occupied zones and the occupied zone from 1918-1922 which will help us understand the occupation from an American viewpoint. Hardship in the following chapter is defined by the negative living and social conditions of Germans that arose through food shortages. The chapter will focus on two main groups that partook in the organization and distribution of food in Germany, the US Third Army and the AFSC. Both entities worked differently to decrease food shortages in their respective regions. While those Germans who were outside the occupied zone faced food insecurity, they did not suffer from the limitations that came with the occupation. The Germans existing under occupation were better provided for and enjoyed relative stability, but at the cost of their personal freedom and constraints on nationalist expression, most notably in the French occupied zones. In both places, Germans were exposed to different notions of hardship and different methods were used in order to combat the former.

There was a reason, however, why an official government agency did not participate in helping out Germans at the beginning of the country’s occupation. Supplying food and other vital supplies to a former war enemy through official government agencies would have certainly enraged the American public who were “not yet prepared to extend either credit or gifts to their former enemies.”13 The American government and the American Relief Administration (ARA) under the leadership of Herbert Hoover instead chose the Quakers as a neutral participant in this matter. While the average American agreed with the government’s decision not to get involved, a large number of German Americans tried to appeal to the public to support those suffering from the aftereffects of the war and were outraged at the decision taken by the American government. Targeted throughout the First World War because of their national origin and cultural affiliation, German Americans had been marginalized since the entry to the war for not being patriotic or speaking the enemy’s language. Anti-German sentiment was “widespread in many parts of the U.S.”14 but was most prevalent in cities that counted above average or larger German communities, especially in the Midwest. The government acted against German Americans and soon Anti-German campaigns demanded that the German language be suppressed, “leading to the suspension of ethnic clubs and associations, newspaper, and school programs”15 with the goal of completely eradicating German culture. Following the end of the war, many German Americans, widely believed to have abandoned their former cultural identity, were outraged at the decisions taken by American politicians to not send relief to Germany, especially following the signing of the Versailles Treaty that put the war guilt entirely on Germany. Many German Americans had to resort to their own resources in order to support suffering Germans in Europe. The little support that German Americans received was from the American Friends (Quakers) who did not “agree with the political views” of the politicians who refused to help Germany, and “were interested in aiding Germany.”16

13 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921." in The Wisconsin Magazine of History 45, no. 4 (1962): p. 256. 14 Thompson, Maris. “Stories of Trouble and Troubled Stories: Narratives of Anti-German Sentiment from the Midwestern United States” in Narrative Works, vol. 5, no. 1 (California State University, 2015), p. 93. 15 Thompson, Maris. “Stories of Trouble and Troubled Stories: Narratives of Anti-German Sentiment from the Midwestern United States”, p. 94. 16 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921.", p. 259. 12

The AFSC’s commitment to helping those in need would not only reverberate through Germany but also the German American community for the next decades which point towards the importance of humanitarian aid to the victims that suffered the most from wartime conditions. When left to their own devices, the Quakers were the only organization that felt the need to help Germany, and German Americans in raising money and collecting supplies to support the starving people in Europe. The Quakers not only pursued humanitarian efforts to feed people. In their eyes, helping those in need would inspire the spirit of internationalism and form connections beyond a country’s borders by “[encouraging] and [nurturing] pacifism, temperance […] and international understanding and cooperation”.17 Thus the larger goal of the AFSC lay in developing diplomatic bonds that would lead to peace and stability in Germany.

17 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” in Diplomatic History Vol 43, no 4 (Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 615. 13

The Hardship of Occupation? The blockade of Germany that was upheld by the Allies from the beginning of the war throughout the months of the Armistice and even beyond that, had created large food shortages in Germany. Before the occupation of Germany commenced, the American military was able to draw various reports that showed that people were suffering from food shortages. When the American Third Army crossed the Luxembourgish border and advanced along the French-German border, reports were all too bleak for the former German occupied territories in France. (fig 1.1) As stated in the report, “[the people’s] food came entirely from foreign relief funds and activities. The most useful being the American. With this aid they appear to have had enough to sustain life and somewhat more.”18 However, from the first days following the start of the occupation of Germany – which began on the first of December 1918 – the American Third Army reported on the situation during their advance onto the Rhine which looked very different from the territories that had been occupied by the German army. Assistant Chief of Staff for Security, Colonel Williams reported on the third of December that “no serious food shortage has been noted, and the inhabitants appear anything but starved.”19 Three days later, on the sixth of December, Williams reported, once again, that “there is still no evidence of suffering from lack of food by the inhabitants in the territory occupied by Figure 1.1: Occupied Rhineland. Former German owned territories (purple) and Allied occupied this [US] army.”20 It seems that during the first days Rhineland (brown) following the Treaty of Versailles and occupied Ruhr (light brown) of the occupation, no food shortages had existed

18 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Conditions Encountered in Advance” in United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919: Volume 11, American Occupation of Germany, (Center of Military History United States Army Washington, D.C., 1991), p. 16. 19 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Entry into Germany” in United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919: Volume 11, American Occupation of Germany, p.56 20 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Entry into Germany”, p. 62. 14 east of the Rhine. However, only a month later, the ‘Officer in Charge of Civil Affairs in Occupied Territory’ proclaimed that “on account of the shortage of food supplies in the occupied territory and of the increasing difficulty of providing the civil population with the amount of food allowed by the German Government, […] American Expeditionary Forces are forbidden to purchase or requisition articles of food on the German ration”.21 As emphasized by the report of the US Third Army, the food shortages were so severe that American soldiers were forbidden to buy food from the Germans. The situation seemed more dire than the Army first anticipated. Since there were no conditions included in the Armistice Treaty with Germany, concerning supply of food, the probability that not enough supplies were available to civilians at the beginning of the occupation was high. The Treaty stated that “[the] districts on the left bank of the Rhine shall be administered by the local authorities under the control of the allied and United States armies of occupation.”22 This shows that there was no specification as to how the occupiers would handle the supply of the occupation zone, nor were there any details on how the local authorities would handle food supply while also being cut off from the rest of the country. Not only is it surprising to see that the reports in January of 1919 differed drastically from each other at the beginning of the occupation, it also highlights the possibility that the situation became worse once the occupation of the Rhineland had begun. Before the Allied Forces moved into Germany, the Rhineland (fig 1.1) had been supplied by the German government, but once the Allied occupiers had taken de facto control over the region, it was cut off from future supply from the rest of Germany. This was in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles that stated “that the German territory situated to the west of the Rhine, together with the bridgeheads, will be occupied by Allied and Associated troops for a period of fifteen years”.23 (fig. 1.1) The likelihood that the situation had worsened because of the German government’s refusal to sign a peace treaty was very real, as was the possibility of the French suppressing and exploiting the occupied territories. The Third Army after realizing that the food situation had been deteriorating rapidly in their respective zone of control, reported that “all army messes were forbidden to buy anything except

21 “Advance General Headquarters American Expeditionary Forces, Officer in Charge of Civil Affairs in Occupied Territory” in Trierische Zeitung (Trier: 27. January 1919) 22 “Article V” in Armistice with Germany (November 11, 1918) 23 “Article 428” in Treaty of Versailles (Paris, 1919), p. 185. 15 fresh vegetables […], from German sources.”24 Even though the fighting had ceased and the Rhineland was occupied, rationing was still in effect, a condition that is usually upheld during war. In order to improve the food situation and decrease the effects from social unrest, the Third Army with the help of German civilians created the Lebensmitteleinfuhr G.m.b.H (Food Distribution Company, Limited) in April 1919. Their goal was “to improve the food situation in general”25, by purchasing foodstuff from army stocks and re-selling them to the German population and authorities. Once the company had been firmly established its “duty […] was to finance the transfer of foodstuffs from various sources to the civil population.”26 While the organization of the Lebensmitteleinfuhr G.m.b.H was anything but ideal in the opening months of its operation, by the end of 1919 it was able to provide Germans with important supplies including flour, bacon, sugar and milk among other things. Since distribution fell into the hands of central governing bodies in each Kreis (district) such as the mayor of the towns of Koblenz and Trier, “the method of distribution […] often materially differed in different localities.”27 Some town and districts were able to organize distribution better than others such as in the town of Adenau (fig 1.2) where the authorities were able to request American trucks for transportation purposes. This would mean that some districts, despite being relatively close to each other, would often have different or more foodstuffs in stock.

24 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory” in United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919: Volume 11, American Occupation of Germany, p. 191. 25 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory”, p. 191. 26 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory”, p. 192 27 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory”, p. 192 16

Figure 1.2: Detailed map of the Rhineland. American occupied zone and the Protectorate of the Saarland (green)

However, while there were American food supplies on offer, they were extremely expensive, adding to the hardship of the German citizens, except for “well-to-do people [who] seldom suffered for lack of food.”28 The city of Trier introduced special tickets for poorer citizens so that they could afford some of the American foodstuffs. Furthermore, in order to prevent richer people from purchasing large amounts of food, a ticket system was instituted which entitled every person to only purchase limited quantities, in case they had enough money. Since most of the people in the occupied zones suffered from malnutrition, due to them not being able to purchase food, the American military on the behest of the Office of Civil Affairs was able to distribute “a large part of [milk] supplies on Christmas Day without regard to age or state of health.”29 This generous donation of milk supplies to the German population was caused because of irregular distribution of supplies between cities in the occupied territories. Even though large quantities of

28 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory”, p. 193 29 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Food Supply of Civil Population in American Occupied Territory”, p. 193 17 milk had been available, and demand had been high, the supplies were not distributed properly which almost led to a huge waste in foodstuffs. It seems like the US government and military had a humanitarian and benevolent goal in mind when they tried to get food to the Germans in the occupied zones but the distribution was entirely hampered by poor organization on the ground, which meant that this benevolence went unnoticed by the population, except of the distribution of milk on Christmas Day. Reason why the company was able to better organize food supply in the second half of 1919, boils down to one element: the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. By signing the Treaty, Germany opened the doors for more relief effort to flow into the country. While there is plenty of evidence that food shortages existed in the occupied zones during 1919, the Interallied Commission on the 10th of January 1920 – the day the Treaty of Versailles officially took effect – pronounced that “[the troops of the Interallied Commission] have for the past twelve months brought to the people of the Rhineland, the benefits of order, the relief of their supplies and the example of their discipline.”30 While this was certainly true for the second half of 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed, the situation was all too bleak in the beginning months of the occupation. Food supplies were definitely provided to occupied Rhineland and even offered to the populace to be purchased, but the hardship of the people stemmed from their inability to afford the, usually, more expensive American goods rather than the poor supply, of said foodstuffs, by the occupying armies. Thus, the hardship that is visible in the occupied zones does not stem from the poor organization of supplying the food to the population, instead, the difficulties arise from expensive foreign food products that flushed the German market in occupied Rhineland. While the organization of procuring food supplies was anything than perfect by the second half of 1919, the Lebensmitteleinfuhr G.m.b.H changed the situation for the better. When enough foodstuffs were finally available in the occupied zones, it was not a question of supplying the people with enough food, but rather supplying them with food that they could afford. German foodstuffs that originated in the occupied zones, despite being scarce were cheaper than those that the occupying forces were supplying. With the arrival of the Quakers in Germany in 1920, this would change. However, while some regions in Germany were able to be supplied by the AFSC rather quickly, the occupied zones

30 PROCLAMATION de la Haute-Commission Interalliée des Territoires Rhénans (Koblenz, 10 January 1920) 18 were lagging behind, once again pointing towards the difficulties of organization on the ground and the difficulties of communication between the AFSC and the military government. The AFSC steps in When Jane Addams first visited Germany in July 1919, she wrote a report for the American Society of Friends Service Committee (AFSC) on food scarcity in the non-occupied zones. At her first destination, Berlin, she was exposed to how dire the food situation really was. At the office of the central food control, Addams was told that the “supply of milk for Berlin in 1914 was 1,000,000 liters […] ,in the winter of 1918-19 it reached 150,000.”31 This drastic change in milk production affected mostly younger children up to the age of six. Furthermore, Addams stated that while ration cards allowed people to purchase a certain amount of fat, most people could not afford such products. While Addams was able to visit cities throughout Germany, she could not report on the places and people that lay behind the borders of the occupation zone. Yet, the need to visit the areas around the occupation zone were of vital interest of the AFSC. In July of 1919, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a German theologian and social worker who had been in contact with the Quakers, sent out several letters to German civilians who lived in proximity to the occupation zone’s borders. In these letters, Siegmund-Schultze enquired about people’s ability to host Quakers in their homes who had come to “enquire about the circumstances in Germany, in order to initiate aid operations from England or America.”32 Each one of these letters was addressed to cities that are situated around Dortmund and Wuppertal, cities in and around the Ruhr, an area in close proximity of the occupied Rhineland. It is important to note that, even though some cities lay outside of the occupied zones, this did not mean that they did not suffer from the occupation. Frankfurt for instance lay outside of the occupied zone, but the city nonetheless experienced extreme hardship “since the hinterland from which Frankfurt has always drawn her supply of milk is now in the occupied territory”33, as Addams reported. This meant that the effects of occupation directly affected the situation in the areas adjacent to the occupied zone.

31 Addams, Jane. Hamilton, Alice. A Graphic Picture of Hunger and Disease Stricken Central Europe. An Eloquent Appeal to the hearts of generous Americans (Nebraska, 1919), p. 5 32 Siegmund-Schultze, Friedrich. Letter to Fräulein Schniewind (Berlin, 17. Juli 1919): Wir haben nämlich eine Bitte an Sie. Augenblicklich sind einige Quäker hier in Berlin, die sich über die deutschen Verhältnisse unterrichten müssen, um dann in England oder Amerika eine Hilfsaktion einzuleiten. 33 Addams, Jane. Hamilton, Alice. A Graphic Picture of Hunger and Disease Stricken Central Europe. An Eloquent Appeal to the hearts of generous Americans, p. 5 19

While it took a few more months before food support by the AFSC arrived in Germany because of financial problems and little support for their cause, supplies had already been extended by the American government under Hoover’s Food Administration shortly after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. In August of 1919, a German citizen by the name of Albert Dräger, noted in his diary that “as the result of American imports [of food aid], the food situation has improved slightly, the situation with fat and flour supply are at least a little better now, however fresh meat and sausage are only known from hearsay and the prospects for the time being are still very bad.”34 Dräger who had lived in Berlin at the time, witnessed the first food supplies that had come to Germany through the relief effort of the Food Administration. As the capital of Germany, Berlin seemed like the logical solution to start the relief effort. Even though the Food Administration was able to support Germany with some supplies following the signing of the Armistice, the US government withdrew their support from Europe and the Food Administration seized to exist in the summer of 1919. Instead, Hoover became the head of the new American Relief Administration which was established in February 1919 and aimed at supporting humanitarian missions across Europe. However, Hoover knew that the memories of war were still fresh in America’s mind and so he resorted to using the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to run the operations of helping the Germans since “he regarded the [AFSC] as an ideal instrument for [humanitarian] purposes. The idealism of the Quakers qualified them to distribute food to the enemy people.”35 After Herbert Hoover received news that children in Germany were suffering from malnutrition and hunger, he wrote to the founder of the AFSC, Rufus Jones, requesting the Quakers take over the aid program, declaring in his letter that “we have never fought with women and children and our desire must be to see the wounds of war healed through the world.”36 Hoover understood that by targeting children as recipients of the food aid would garner more support with the American population and he was clear in his letter to Jones that the American Friends Service Committee would be a perfect fit. The idea behind Hoover’s choice was very simple: a religious organization that encapsulates

34 Dräger, Albert. Tagebuch (August 24, 1919), p. 22: “Die Lebensmittelverhältnissen haben sich infolge der amerikanischen Einfuhren etwas gebessert, wenigstens ist es mit der Fett- und Mehlversorgung jetzt besser, dagegen kennt man frisches Fleisch und Wurst nur noch vom Hörensagen und sind vorläufig die Aussichten auch noch sehr schlecht.” 35 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921.", p. 262. 36 Herbert Hoover in a letter to Rufus Jones (November 1st, 1919). See Friend of Life: the biography of Rufus M. Jones (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1958), p. 171. 20 pacifism and was specifically set up to help the unfortunate victims of WWI, could not be targeted by the American public as being supportive of the former enemy. If a public institution set up by the government such as the American Relief Administration (ARA) would run the aid directly, it would only cause further hostilities towards Germany and criticism towards the American government for supporting such endeavors. The need for a volunteer and non-governmental agency was an integral part of successfully supplying the German population. Hoover had to present the AFSC as an impartial group trying to do God’s work by helping those most unfortunate. The Quakers fulfilled all principles of a humanitarian community: impartiality, neutrality, and independence. These principles would ensure that Hoover would not be targeted for having the American government directly involved in supplying Germany with aid. The AFSC was thus “rendered […] apolitical – one of the keys of […] success [of humanitarian organizations].”37 Rather than directly distributing the food to the Germans, Hoover’s ARA would instead be responsible for buying and transporting food to Germany, the AFSC would take charge of acquiring donations and distribution on the ground in Germany.38 Hoover, however, was aware of the limitations of the AFSC in acquiring money to support such endeavors and as such also set up the ARA to assist with donations if required. Finally, on the 26th of January 1920, only five months after Jane Addams and other Quakers had surveyed Germany, the first Quäkerspeisung was served through the relief effort of the AFSC in Berlin. In March 1920, the Quakers had extended over 21,000 portions of food to five large cities in Germany. At the beginning of the food support, the Quakers deliberately organized feedings only in cities with over 50,000 inhabitants. One of the foremost problems at the beginning of the aid program was the flawed distribution due to the size of the operation. The Quakers did not have enough people that helped with the distribution and organization of the feeding. In some cases, however, the Quäkerspeisung was even distributed in smaller cities and villages like those in the Erzgebirge, despite being under 50,000 inhabitants. There was no clear reason why the Quakers would favor certain cities over others, however, one can assume that the Quakers send aid to the region after learning from various sources what was happening in the “German Hell” as

37 Barnett, Michael. “Empire of Humanity” (Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 2. 38 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921.", p. 262. 21 the region had been referred to by German reporters.39 The population criteria that had existed at the beginning of the distribution of aid seemed to have been ignored in the case where the situation was extremely precarious which could have led to irregular distribution of food in other parts of Germany. Furthermore, no notes of logistical problems had been made of areas not being able to receive food. Shortly after, however, “due to the success of the great Hoover Drives [in 1920], it was possible to significantly expand Quakers' feeding activity.”40 This was due to Hoover recognizing that donations to the AFSC began to decrease and the demand of humanitarian aid could not be kept up by the Quakers alone. As far as the American Relief Administration was concerned, they had focused mostly on the other European countries towards which no American animosity existed. Hoover tried not to affiliate himself directly with the AFSC in order to avoid any possible protests by the American public, as he did earlier already, but he recognized the need for more donations in order to help the children in Germany. By December of 1920, various newspapers across the United States published an article entitled “An Appeal to the American People”. In it, Herbert Hoover, and the newly created European Relief Council (ERC), which compromised humanitarian organizations such as the AFSC, the American Red Cross (ARC) and the ARA, of which he was the chairman, called upon Americans to once again help children in need as they had done during the Winter of 1919. The appeal mentioned that “three and one-half million children in Eastern and Central Europe have no alternative to disaster between now and next harvest except American aid.”41 The European Relief Council highlighted Hoover’s change in not involving government sponsored organizations with the plight of children across Europe. While the language still remained neutral and did not highlight specific countries, the word “Central Europe” was an indicator that Germany must have been receiving some of the money that the European Relief Council was pleading for. Evidence that Germany did receive some of the donations can be found in the official Interim Report of the European Relief Council which stated that “the various distributing organizations penetrate the

39 Dr. Rohrbach, Paul. „Can Germany Recover?” in The Review, Vol. 2, No. 38 (New York: The National Weekly Corporation, 1920), p. 105. 40 Dr. Bentheim, V. Bericht über die Quäkerspeisungen (1921), p. 1: „Auf Grund des Erfolges des grossen Hoover Drives am Ende des vorigen Jahres war es möglich, die Speisungsaktion der Quäker in Laufe dieses Jahres ganz bedeutend zu erweitern.“ 41 The Democratic Banner. (Mt. Vernon, Ohio, 14 Dec. 1920), p 8. via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. 22 following countries”42 and Germany figured on that list. While Hoover, the ARA and the ERC remained reserved in public about where the donations were going, official reports showed that Hoover was getting ready to assist Germany in a more meaningful way. In mid-1920, “Hoover himself began to speak out more boldly in defense of German relief during the course of the campaign”43 and even transferred ARA funds to the AFSC. Even though this proved to be a great risk, Hoover decided to include German children in the appeal for donations. Luckily for him and for the sake of the children, the gamble paid off and by 1921 donations to feed all children of Europe, including those in Germany, began to flow in. In a report by German volunteers to the Quaker mission in Germany, the expansion of the food aid is highlighted. While initially children until the age of 14 and mothers were allowed the Quaker feeding but when the Quakers were able to expand their activity, adolescents up to the age of 16 were added to receive food.44 It seems that the efforts by the AFSC could have not been possible if not for the support of Hoover and the American Relief Administration. The AFSC gave Hoover the opportunity to extend humanitarian aid across all of Europe, even former enemies. The ARA on the other hand was able to draw upon the AFSC to help German children directly by sending Quakers to Germany. The efforts by Jane Addams and Alice Hamilton proved to be fruitful, despite the situation looking all to bleak at the beginning of their assessment. Hoover was able to rally the American people around helping those in need without antagonizing the general public and “only the American Friends Service Committee was far enough removed from the antagonisms of war to believe that the feeding of German children was a humane obligation.”45 Hoover understood this and had already stated in his letter to Rufus Jones in 1919, that “the American Quakers, which is beyond all question of political interest, should become the filter through which such an [American] effort should pass.”46

42 European Relief Council. Interim Report of European Relief Council. (New York: M. B. Brown printing & binding co., 1921.) 43 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921.", p. 264. 44 Dr. Bentheim, V. Bericht über die Quäkerspeisungen (1921) via EZA 51/Q I b 2 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin), p. 1: „Der Kreis der Gespeisten, der anfangs nur Kinder bis zu 14 Jahresn und Mütter umfasste, wurde vom 1. November v. Js. Durch Hinzunahme der Jugendlichen erweitert.“ 45 Strickland, Charles E. "American Aid to Germany, 1919 to 1921.", p. 270. 46 Herbert Hoover to Rufus Jones (November 1st, 1919). See Friend of Life: the biography of Rufus M. Jones (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1958), p. 172. 23

By 1921-1922, newspaper across the United States started to speak up for the plight of Germans. Their messages of support were constructed as to show that if Germany suffers, all of Europe would suffer and it would only be logical to help every nation in need. In Arizona for instance a newspaper stated that while it is fair that France is owed reparation, “Germany cannot pay what she owes France, and that Germany is as near the brink of absolute ruin as a nation can be” and highlighted that “Germany must have aid” and that “it is time to forget for the good of all people that Germany was formerly an enemy.”47 The Quakers were, however, not only relying on the help of the ARA and Hoover. The AFSC help in effectively feeding the children of Germany had prompted the German government to sponsor food and money to the religious organization. The reports drawn on the Quäkerspeisung in 1921, however, fail to mention one particular region: the Rhineland. Among the seven cities that figured in the report, no major city in the Rhineland figured on the list. Many possibilities arise why there had been no Quaker food aid prior to 1921. Firstly, the occupation could have hindered the German government from properly operating and organizing the political institutions in occupied Rhineland which meant that communication between the AFSC, the German government and the Interallied Commission was obstructed. Secondly, the AFSC sought to first supply non-occupied territories because organization with the German government was favorable over that of the occupied region and the German government was struggling to support its own people with food that was collected and cultivated on German soil. The former two-time chancellor of Germany Marx Wilhelm emphasized that the people in the occupied territories on the other hand were supplied by the occupying armies, at least in the case of the British and American who “attempted to make the occupation more bearable by cultivating better relations with the inhabitants of the occupied regions.”48 Despite the reasons surrounding the possible problems of supplying the occupied territories with the Quäkerspeisung, in March 1921, some cities in the Rhineland were able to be supplied by the AFSC. A newspaper in Trier published, on the 17th of March 1921, an article that announced the distribution of the Quäkerspeisung. After evaluating the state of health “of all students in all the schools including the higher education institutions” the Quakers started “immediately with the

47 Bisbee daily review. (Bisbee, Ariz., 19 Dec. 1922), p. 4. via Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. 48 Marx, Wilhelm. "The Rhineland Occupation." in Foreign Affairs, vol 7, no. 2 (1929), p. 202. 24 issuance of tickets and in the next few days with the feeding itself.”49 Not only did the Quaker feeding start more than a year later in Trier than the rest of Germany, the children that were fed had to pay 25 pfg. (cents) per meal, information that had not been mentioned in documents from the non-occupied regions. While 25 cents (in German Mark) was not a large of amount of money, the question why the Quakers would ask for money in the case of the occupied zones remains to be asked. It is possible that in order to upfront some of the costs that it took to get the Quaker aid to the Rhineland, those responsible for the Quaker distribution had to require children, or their parents, to pay for the meal. However, since hyperinflation ran rampant in Germany, the amount that was asked to pay would have made almost no difference.50 The occupied zones seemed not only to be under special regulations for ordinary supplies, they were also treated differently when it came to feed the children through social organizations. This could stem from notable resistance from the side of the occupiers, notably France who had been exploiting the Rhineland for the past three years and suppressing displays of German nationalism. On the 18th January 1921, the 50th anniversary of the Reichsgründung, the founding day of the German Reich, the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission banned all public festivities surrounding this historic event. Despite some minor isolated cases of disputes between soldiers and civilians, “the attitude of the People of the Rhine towards the occupying forces, has been characterized by a very dignified restraint.”51 This account from the Kölnische Volkszeitung highlights the attempts of the Allied forces, most notably France, in preventing any public display of nationalist sentiment in the Rhineland. Their goal was to create anti-Berlin sentiment among the Rhenish population and instigate them against their own government as had been apparent in French newspapers and speeches held by leading French politicians. The fear that the Rhineland “might be able to one day be separated from their fatherland”52 was a feeling shared among many

49 “Quäkerspeisung“ in Lokales (?) (Trier, 17 March 1921) via NL Laven 3605 (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Nachdem nunmehr die Untersuchung sämtlicher Schüler und Schülerinnen aller hiesigen Schulen einschliesslich der der höheren Lehranstalten beendigt ist […] wird nun sofort mit der Ausstellung der Karten und in den nächsten Tagen mit der Speisung selbst begonnen werden.“ 50 According to R.L. Bidwell, in Januar of 1921, 1$ equaled 57-74 German Mark. The currency only continued to lose more of its values over the years before being replaced in 1925 with a new currency; Bidwell, R.L. Currency Conversion Tables: A Hundred Years of Change (London: Rex Collings, 1970), pp. 22-23, 24. 51 Kölnische Volkszeitung (?) - Trier 29. Januar 1921 - Eine Englische Stimme über das Deutschtum am Rhein: „Die Haltung der rheinischen Bevölkerung gegenüber der Besatzungsarmee ist im ganzen durch eine sehr würdige Zurückhaltung gekennzeichnet gewesen.“ 52 Kölnische Volkszeitung: „ihr die Befürchtung eingeflösst haben, sie könnte möglicherweise eines Tages von ihrem Vaterlande getrennt werden.“ 25 people in the Rhineland. While a certain anti-Prussian sentiment was apparent in some circles of the Rhenish population, there was no denying that the people of Koblenz and the rest of the Rhineland felt thoroughly German and could have used the 50th anniversary in order to connect with their German brothers and sisters. Rather than allow German sentiment to grow, “the Rhineland Commission’s ban has reinforced the nasty suspicion that is constantly growing in the hearts of the Rhinelanders, that their territory is practically at the mercy of France.”53 Concerns that the French would occupy the Rhineland permanently were all too real, especially in the first months following the occupation of the region. The people that found themselves in the occupying territories “expected that the Rhineland would be handed over to France as part of the price of victory [and] in view of the apparent temper in Entente countries at this time, a certain amount of skepticism as to the likelihood of the application of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points seemed not unnatural. However, both the British and American occupying forces opposed such plans.”54 In general, the French conducted a much stricter occupation policy than the other members of the Inter-Allied Commission. In Bitburg, for instance, the American Army was praised for their exemplary behavior: “The occupation of the city and Kreis by the American troops has been accomplished so far with no restriction of the liberty or circulation”55 and in the Trierische Zeitung they received such high praise that it could have only been seen as a way to distract from the hardship of occupation. Both of these accounts highlight that, despite people having most of their freedom, the occupation was still felt by the local populace. The one factor that was affected most by the occupation was the distribution of food, the one problem that persisted throughout most of the occupation. Conclusion In 1922, the AFSC decided that they would seize their operations and leave Germany. Ever since the feeding program started, “the AFSC had decided at the very beginning […] that as soon as the Germans were able to feed themselves, it would leave; it did not want to appear paternalistic or to encourage any long-term dependency on its relief.”56 The AFSC’s goal had been to support Germans through American relief and transform the country by turning it away from militarism.

53 Kölnische Volkszeitung: „Statt dessen hat die Rheinlandkommission durch ihr Verbot den üblen Verdacht, der in den Herzen der Rheinländer ständig wächst, noch verstärkt, dass ihr Gebiet praktisch Frankreich ausgeliefert ist“ 54 Reynolds, B. T. "A Review of the Occupation of the Rhineland." Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 7, no. 3 (1928): p. 198. 55 Department of the Army, Historical Division. “Military Government During the March to the Rhine”, p. 155. 56 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” in Diplomatic History, p. 609. 26

Already in 1918, the focus of helping Germany’s reconstruction after the war was highlighted by Corlena Morris Woods, a New York Quaker. She believed that the “Friends have, awaiting them in that country [Germany], an important service in spiritual healing and reconstruction.”57 Co- founder of the AFSC, Henry Cadbury had stated in the New York Times in October of 1920 that “the old Germany, in a word has been buried along with the ruins of war, and out of them has arisen a new nation that seems to have but little in common with the Vaterland of the Kaiser.”58 Germany was becoming more “Americanized”, Cadbury exclaimed, and the Quakers had played a pivotal role in doing so. In 1922, the effects of war had largely ceased to affect the country, and since Germany had transformed into a democracy, the AFSC perceived their job to be done. The Quakers would not have expected that they would have to return, on the behest of the German government, to Germany following the French invasion of the Ruhr valley. When the Quakers left for the first time in 1922, they had transferred most of their operations over to the Deutscher Zentral Ausschuss (DZA), the German Committee for Foreign relief with whom the Quakers had worked hand-in- hand since the relief operation started. One can consider that ever since the start of the operations, the Quakers had been preparing the Germans to take over their operations looking at the use of German civilians in organizing food and cooperation with German social organizations such as the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk, the German child fund. The AFSC’s did not stand alone in feeding the German population. Ever since the occupation of the Rhineland started, the American military had been partaking in setting up the occupied zone for proper food distribution. Had it not been for the US Third Army and their benevolent help in the Rhineland, the Germans would have been left at the mercy of the French who since the beginning of the occupation had been exploiting the region for its industrial value. While there is no clear answer whether one or the other suffered more, the hardship experienced by the Germans varied from region to region. The people of the Rhineland even though they were under military occupation could count since the start of the occupation on American supplies reaching the region. While the occupation meant that the freedom of Germans had been limited, they had a steady supply of food available. However, while goods were available,

57 Carolena M. Woods to AFSC (October 15, 1918). See Aiken Guy, Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” (2019) 58 Cadbury, Henry J. “‘Americanized’ Germany Through Quaker Eyes” in New York Times (October 17, 1920), p. 3 27 many Germans were not able to afford the prices of foreign foodstuffs until the Third Army introduced the ticket system. Furthermore, the organization of supplies in the Rhineland remained, for the most part, ineffective, especially in the opening months of the occupation. This is also exactly what hindered the Quakers from actively getting involved in the occupied territories until March 1921. Even though these people had to wait much longer than the rest of Germany, the AFSC’s work did not go unnoticed. The Germans who lived free from occupation had to face different hardships following the end of the war. The Allied Blockade had caused famines throughout the country until it was lifted in July 1919 and the German government was once again able to import food to help the people. The growing fear that children would starve due to the prolonged blockade was one of the main reasons the AFSC became involved in Germany. While briefly serving as member of the executive board of the AFSC, Herbert Hoover was pivotal in making the AFSC focus on German children. In November 1920 he asserted that “The United States is not at war with German infants.”59 Through their help, Germans in non-occupied Germany, starting in 1920, were able to profit from the Quaker food aid. Moving into the future, the responsibility of food security fell onto the German government. Since the end of the war the AFSC and the ARA had helped the German government become self-sufficient. The aid yielded more than just appreciation on the German side, it shaped relations between the United States and Germany for the better and affirmed the United States as a humanitarian force in the world.

59 Herbert Hoover, "Three Million Children Crying to America," in Current Opinion (November 1920), p. 611-616. 28

CHAPTER II The Remaking of Germany: The Politics of German Aid Acceptance By assisting German women and children in need, political organizations, and leaders all across Weimar Germany felt compelled to engage in diplomatic cooperation with the countries that came to its aid after the naval blockade, especially the United States. In Trier for instance, the chairman of the district committee Dr. Karl Pohl, send donation letters to various community members asking for financial support. The government official, directly appealed to the recipient by highlighting that the donations would be used for “treatments for poor and tuberculosis-stricken children in the district who are in need of rest” and that “the undertaking of this relief effort has become necessary because of the hardship of the economic conditions caused by the war and post- war period”.60 Even four years following the end of the war, the effects of malnutrition on children were still apparent. Dr Pohl’s duty as a political leader of Germany was to prevent the next generation from being harmed further. He emphasized that “the initiation of this aid campaign has become vital, because the difficult economic conditions of the war and post-war period have weakened the health of the children and the education of an efficient generation [of Germans] must be improved.”61 The letter by Dr Pohl shows the need within Germany to help raise money to properly nourish and educate the next generation, especially between 1918 and 1920, when occupation, revolution and mass starvation seemed to herald the end of the German nation as people knew it. Political leaders such as Dr Pohl knew that by appealing to the average German by evoking the suffering of children, the future of the nation could be safeguarded. Dr Pohl’s interest was in preserving the strength of Germany by helping children that suffered from the war and post-war effects. Only if Germany would focus on the children, could they raise an efficient generation that would rebuild and strengthen the country. While children became the target of national reconstruction or in the least sense, national rehabilitation, one might say that women were the tool through which effective change happened.

60 Dr. Karl Pohl, “Mitteilung“ (1923) via Sammlung Kinderhilfe (14/349) (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Der Kreisausschuss des Landkreises Trier beabsichtigt, im Wege einer Geldsammlung im Landkreise Trier Mittel aufzubringen, die nötig sin, um Kuren für arme erholungsbedürftige und tuberkulose Kinder des Kreises durchzuführen. (…) 61 Dr Karl Pohl, “Mitteilung“ (1923) via Sammlung Kinderhilfe (14/349) (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Die Einleitung dieser Hilfsaktion ist deshalb notwendig geworden, weil einerseits die schwierigen wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse der Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit geschwächte Gesundheitszustand der Kinder im Interesse der Heranbildung einer leistungsfähigen Generation unbedingt gebessert werden muss.“ 29

Since German women did not participate in the fighting, they were usually deemed as suffering from the war effects. However, because the German government tried to involve them as “kitchen soldiers” or in other industries across the country, they might be seen as partly involved in the wartime effort. At most they represent a neutral place within Germany and offer a way to remake German society by helping the most unfortunate, in this case children. Women in Germany faced with the effects of the war on their country also reconsidered what it meant to be a German woman. Heather R. Perry illustrates that “a decade of food and economic insecurity (…) impacted ideas about gender, health and national identity.”62 German women participated in the reconstruction of their home country by becoming an integral part of food conversation. Following the Allied blockade which provoked food scarcity on an unprecedented level and prompted Germans to rethink their nutritional order, women were mobilized as “kitchen soldiers”. Perry states that calls for less consumption and saving food were not enough to change German food culture. Women were given “handy information on substituting foods, saving fats, recycling leftovers, cooking unfamiliar dishes and home-growing some of their own ingredients.63 By mobilizing women as “kitchen soldiers” they became an integral part of keeping the nation healthy by properly feeding their family and also enabling other families to purchase enough foodstuffs without hiking up the prices by constantly buying new supplies instead of conserving them. In that regard women were placed at the center of preserving Germany since they would feed the future generation. National reconstruction would have to start from the bottom, which meant those who were not responsible for the crimes that had been committed previously. The German government realized that in order to safeguard the future of the country and prove that Germany was truly changing, children would have to be used in order to garner pity from the other nations. Germany thus engaged in “diplomacy of pity” in order to “mobilize US sympathies for a more lenient treatment of [Germany].”64 However, in order to receive any help in the first place, Germany would have to submit to the nations that defeated them, a task that proved to be difficult considering

62 Perry, H. R. “Onward Kitchen Soldiers! Gender, Food and Health” in Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), p. 21. 63 Perry, H. R. “Onward Kitchen Soldiers! Gender, Food and Health” in Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), p. 27. 64 Piller, Elisabeth. “German Child Distress, US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918-1924” in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 51, no. 3 (2016), p. 454 30

“German prestige and national dignity”65 might complicate things on the German side. The hesitancy on the side of the German government stemmed from their fear of dependency upon the United States. While starving children garnered the sympathy of even the most apathetic people among the American population, women might have not had the same effect on convincing people that feeding Germany was of utmost importance. Yet, German women were able to voice their opinion on a national level and shape policies in a positive way. In Berlin for instances, “severe food shortages (…) galvanized women into protest actions”.66 Especially during the war when the government was more focused on the war effort than helping those at home, and the blockade was putting an enormous strain on nutrition within the German Empire, social structures within Germany were completely reshaped. Since men were off fighting, women became the heads of the household, holding more power than they did ever before as they “became much more involved with politics [and] were empowered as they led hunger marches and protests.”67 Food shortages and scarcity reformed how Germans and especially women thought of nutrition. As active members to help those on the Homefront it gave them the opportunity to rethink their identity as heads of the household and people that could bring about change. Through the language of patriotism, German nutritionist and policy makers, were aiming to remake the identity of women as crucial part to victory and “the scientization of the kitchen and diet (…) contributed to the cultural empowerment of housewives.”68 Some women even came to think of themselves as active participants in the war effort since they were being “mobilized” as “kitchen soldiers”. The German government during the war did not help in creating a pacifist picture of women as they regularly created propaganda that called upon women to help on the home front. (fig. 2.1)

65 Piller, Elisabeth. “German Child Distress, US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918-1924”, p. 454 66 Perry, H. R. “Onward Kitchen Soldiers! Gender, Food and Health”, p. 20. 67 Cox, Elizabeth Mary. “The First World War and the Blockade of Germany 1914-1919” in Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924 (Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 61. 68 Perry, H. R. “Onward Kitchen Soldiers! Gender, Food and Health”, p. 34. 31

Figure 2.1: Home-front propaganda. Posters like these showed women as integral part of the war effort, distorting the view that they too, like their children, suffered from the war and could not be held responsible for helping the armed forces.

In the following chapter I will analyze the ways in which the German government sought to reconstruct their country by focusing their attention on the most innocent people in Germany at the time, children. While a certain part of the female population also received aid, the Quakers were much more engaged in feeding women and children, while most German organizations and the Weimar government focused primarily on children. In any case women were either the tragic target of the war effort or active participants in prolonging the war by limiting nutrition back on the home front or helping in armament factories. Reframing women from participating in the war to being innocent bystanders was central to the Weimar government’s decision who saw women as a much more central figure in the nation, especially as a voting constituency following the Weimar government’s decision to extend voting rights to German women in November 1918. The supplying of food aid to children was easier since they could not be held to the same degree as women did. Political leaders such as Dr Pohl, highlighted the importance of the need to help children. He understood that by improving the livelihood and health of the children, they would irreversibly also heal their nation and strengthen it. Children, as the future generation of Germany, heavily affected by the war, could truly be deemed recuperable.

The Remaking of a Nation: German Children as Targets of Food Aid Newspapers in the United States were not the only ones that appealed to the public to support starving children and mothers. German drives for charity both in newspapers and official government publications, highlighted the need to support the suffering souls through donations of food and money. However, drives for donations, especially within Germany during this time of turmoil also garnered criticism from some political parties. The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) for instance was critical of such drives because they would not get rid of the deep-rooted evils of German society. In Freiheit, the official newspaper of the USPD, the party criticized the German people “trying to, once again, calm their bad conscience” by appealing to “the good heart of the donors in order to organize a large collection for suffering children”.69 The USPD’s criticism of the call for donations highlights the tensions between the more left-leaning parties in Germany, wishing to form a much larger structured and extensive welfare state, and those in power, such as Dr Karl Pohl in Trier, relying on private donations to improve the situation. The USPD recognized that “the evil lies deeper” and that “it arises from our entire social situation.”70 The root problem, in their eyes, was the inadequate social policies by the Ebert administration. Rather, than rely on private citizens to help those in need, the USPD recognized the faulty social system of the Weimar government and demanded immediate change. Furthermore, tensions within Germany also boiled down to the rise of Bolshevism and the fear that Germany might fall to it if no action would be taken to help the ailing population. Similar to the Red Scare in the United States in 1919-20, the Weimar government was reluctant to allow for more left-leaning parties such as the USPD, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to participate in the new German government. The need for food and money to support the population was immediate. Despite the criticism that some political parties had of the social order, most of the Germans realized that they could not supply their own people without the help of outside forces, even in the case when Germans wanted a remake of the social order by supporting the USPD and the KPD radical ideas.

69 “Fur die Notleidenden Kinder“ in Freiheit (Zeitung der USPD) (21 November 1920) via Deutsche Kinderhilfe (1920-1922) Bestand 51/H I b 6 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin): „Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft versucht wieder einmal ihr böses Gewissen zu beruhigen. Sie will deshalb eine grosse Sammlung für die notleidenden Kinder vornehmen. Es soll an das gute Herz der Gebefreudigen appelliert werden. Als ob durch solche Hilfe grundlegend und dauernd die Not gebannt werden könnte.“ 70 “Fur die Notleidenden Kinder“ in Freiheit (Zeitung der USPD) (21 November 1920) via Deutsche Kinderhilfe (1920-1922) Bestand 51/H I b 6 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin): „Das Uebel liegt tiefer, es entspringt unserem gesamten sozialer Verhältnissen.“ 33

Medical experts across Germany agreed that the British Blockade was the underlying reason why Germans were starving. The Reichsgesundheitsamtes, the health ministry of the German Empire published various reports that the blockade was causing “unbelievable damages to the masses and the health of the people.”71 As early as December of 1918, the German government was trying to appeal to the atrocities that the Allied governments were partaking by blocking sea trade to Germany. Humanitarian appeals came from the highest authorities of Germany, proving that despite German pride, the need for assistance was immediate. The German government was not willing to risk to further antagonize the German people who were already protesting against the war and the government by November 1918. However, the German government, despite engaging in humanitarian pleas and “diplomacy of pity”, had difficulties in convincing the American people that their plight was real. Following the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Germany immediately engaged in revision of the treaty by appealing to the United States through the use of children’s suffering. Once the blockade had been lifted, suffering from the effects of the blockade turned into suffering from the peace treaty and the German government “had during the spring of 1919” used child distress as a ways to garner support and “registered […] an increasing activism of humanitarian groups in neutral and even belligerent countries.”72 German health officials’ concern, however, were not only with the injustice of the Versailles Treaty imposed on the German nation, they were seriously concerned with the health of German children. While the Quakers had already been involved in Germany since August 1919, various German health officials, social reformers and agencies had been organizing national drives for

71 Reichsgesundheitsamtes, Schädigung der Deutschen Volkskraft durch die feindliche Blockade (1919): „Die völkerrechstswidrige Absperrung Deutschlands von der Einfuhr von Nahrungsmitteln und sosnstigen für die Zivilbevölkerung notwendigen Waren hat abgesehen von dem rein wirtschaftlichen Nachteil, auch ungeheuere Schäden an der Volkskraft und Volksgesundheit zur Folge gehabt.“ 72 Piller, Elisabeth. “German Child Distress, US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918-1924”, p. 463. 34

donations. The Deutsche Kinderhilfe, an organization seeking help for ailing children, was one of the most prominent organizations fighting for children across Germany. Under the call of “Children in Need” the Deutsche Kinderhilfe tried to collect money for suffering children by appealing to people from all layers of society and employed striking posters to Figure 2.2: German Relief Organization Poster. The Deutsche get Germans to contribute. (fig Kinderhilfe regularly employed posters such as these to get people to donate to the cause of helping children in need. 2.2) In the call for donations, the state director of the Deutsche Kinderhilfe of Brandenburg highlights the help that Germany has received from the outside stating “we are gratefully accepting the generous help, that has been provided from outside in this area [child feeding] so far but the questions from abroad, what Germany itself is doing for the ailing, hungry children in need of care, alerts us that the helping forces need to be adjusted to a much higher degree than had be done so far.”73 Over the next years, “German government had been contributing to the Quaker relief effort by providing sugar and flour free of charge.”74 This assistance on the side of the German government points towards favorable cooperation with the Quakers since they had repeatedly offered assistance to the AFSC. It seems that by provoking its own population by pointing towards the amount of help they received from abroad, German officials were able to positively affect change within Germany. As proven by many of the official reports drawn by health and political officials, Germans “strongly welcomed this unprecedented US humanitarian engagement for both its anticipated social and political impact in general” and “were thankful of the help they received from the

73 Deutsche Kinderhilfe. Volkssammlung für das notleidende Kind (Berlin, 15 September 1920) via Sammlung Kinderhilfe (14/349) (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Wir dürfen die reiche Hilfe, die das Ausland auf diesem Gebiet bisher geleistet hat, zwar dankbar anerkennen, die Frage des Auslandes, was denn in Deutschland selbst für die notleidenden, hungernden und pflegebedürftigen Kinder getan werde, mahnt uns jedoch, die helfenden Kräfte in viel stärkerem Masse anzuspannen als dies bisher geschehen ist.“ 74 Dr. Bentheim, V. Bericht über die Quäkerspeisungen (1921), p. 3: „Die Deutsche Regierung wird voraussichtlich wie bisher zu der Hilfsaktion der Quäker durch unentgeltliche Lieferung von Zucker und Mehl beisteuern. 35

United States.”75 Fears of prolonged dependency on the humanitarian help of the United States seem to be disproven at the beginning of the 1920s, as social organizations all around Germany participated in drives for donations to support starving children. The Quakers’ help and usefulness had been acknowledged by the highest authorities in Germany including Under Secretary of State Franz Schröder. In a letter sent to Schröder, from an unknown source, the usefulness of the Quaker becomes apparent: “At present there are some Quakers who have brought us large quantities of food for the German children and who will be of future benefit to us.”76 Such letters prove that the aid extended by the Quakers reached the highest authorities in Germany and humanitarian aid was welcomed and accepted. The contributions to German social organizations on the part of the German government and its people show that the country was willing to participate in feeding its own generations and was not entirely reliant on American help. However, accepting the food aid in the first place shows that Germany could have not supplied its own people on their own and thus chose to accept foreign aid, despite the outcome on German independence. The new socialist government of the Weimar Republic seemed to focus on the overall health of Germans rather than focus on national pride. As late as March 1923, local governments were still trying to acquire funds through donations for the Kinderhilfe as per a newspaper notice in Trier. There seems to have been a consensus on a national and local level that children, as first casualties of war, needed to be helped in order to safeguard the nation’s future. Similar to the donation letters sent by Dr Pohl, the call for help emphasizes the importance for specialized treatment through a “stay in health resorts and convalescent homes” in order to “lift their state of health”.77 Due to the ongoing inflation, the costs for such treatment rose rapidly and could only be financed through the help of public donations. What sticks out in the pleas for help in 1920 by the Kinderhilfe in Berlin and in 1923 in Trier, is that the first plea seems to highlight the need for supplies in order to help hungry children and the latter ones focus on the mental and physical health. In September of 1920, the state director of the province of Brandenburg Joachim von Winterfeldt emphasized that while “children’s needs

75 Piller, Elisabeth. “German Child Distress, US Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918-1924”, p. 468. 76 Letter to Under Secretary of State Schröder (Berlin, 19 July 1919) via Deutsche Kinderhilfe (1920-1922) Bestand 51/H I b 6 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin): “Gegenwärtig sind hier einige Quäker, die uns für die deutschen Kinder grosse Lebensmittelmengen gebracht haben und uns auch weiterhin von Nutzen sein werden.“ 77 Kinderhilfe im Landeskreise Trier (7 March 1923) via Sammlung Kinderhilfe 14/349 (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Hebung des Gesundheitszustandes dieser bedauernswerten Kinder [durch] Vermittlung eines Aufenthaltes in Heilstätten und Genesungsheimen“ 36 are equally important throughout the empire” and “needs should first be alleviated in [our] own region”78, some areas suffered much more urgently and he valued those people who went beyond their own regional borders to support German children nationwide. In his call for action Von Winterfeldt, emphasizes “urgent supplies” as needed to support the children, and singled out the children of the Erzgebirge who are suffering the most from hunger. The Erzgebirge was also the region that was selected by the Quakers despite not meeting the population criteria in March 1920, showcasing that this region was worse off than others. Why exactly an official in Brandenburg focused on a different region is unknown but one could suggest that the geographical proximity, paired with reports from German journalists might have moved more politicians to increasingly focus on the Erzgebirge as a place needing immediate assistance. Furthermore, the province of Saxony, in which the Erzgebirge was located, was a hotbed of KPD and USPD activity and considering the precarious situation Von Winterfeldt might have been trying to focus attention on a region to prevent a socialist or communist uprising from happening. How bad the situation was in the Erzgebirge is highlighted in an article in the Weekly Review in January 1920. Dr Paul Rohrbach, a German theologian and writer, referred to the Erzgebirge as the “German Hell” and provides the impressions of a journalist from Hamburg that toured the region with the Hoover Commission: “I saw the interpreter of the American Mission sob at the sight of the babies; I saw an American hospital-nurse, whose nerves had been hardened by a five years’ lazaret service drop unconscious […]” and Rohrbach himself reveals that “Conditions as bad as these are as yet found only in a few parts of Germany. But they are indications of what will happen, if Germany is to be left without raw materials […] and the food supply from her own soil remains insufficient to feed the nation.”79 Moreover, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), in their official newspaper Vorwärts, highlighted in February 1920 that the Erzgebirge required emergency aid.80 It is no surprise then to see that the Quakers after seeing reports by both Von Winterfeldt, Rohrbach, and the SPD made sure to provide the hardest hit regions of Germany with food aid first, even if it might not have conformed with

78 Deutsche Kinderhilfe. Volkssammlung für das notleidende Kind (Berlin, 15 September 1920) via Sammlung Kinderhilfe (14/349) (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Die Not der Kinder ist im ganzen Reiche gleich dringend. […] Der Verbleib von vier Fünfteln des Sammlerergebnisses in der Provinz bietet zwar die Gewähr dafür, dass zunächst die Not im eigenen Lande gelindert wird.“ 79 Dr. Rohrbach, Paul. „Can Germany Recover?” in The Review, Vol. 2, No. 38 (New York: The National Weekly Corporation, 1920), p. 105. 80 „Nothilfe für das Erzgebirge“ in Vorwärts, Nr. 97, 37 Jahrg. (22 Februarz 1920) via Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (online) 37 the official plan of providing only cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants first. Von Winterfeldt’s plea as well as the various reports line up with the start of the Quäkerspeisung in March, which confirms that food was of utmost importance in the opening months of 1920, following the official start of the Versailles Treaty, especially in the critical regions such as the Erzgebirge. In her diary, German Artist Käthe Kollwitz who lived in Berlin with her husband and her son, noted that after the turbulences of the failed Kapp Putsch to overthrow the Weimar government, her family made use of the supplies from the Quakers that had arrived in Germany in March, in order to help others. She writes that her son Hans, collected Quaker aid for her husband Karl, a physician: “Hans brings donated supplies from the Quakers, for Karl’s poorest patients” and Hans’ friend Otty, “collects dirty laundry in Friedenau for the Quakers.”81 The aid that Hans was able to receive from the Quakers, shows that it was not only limited to children but a larger charity drive that was supposed to help different parts of society. Furthermore, Otty driving around and collecting laundry for the Quakers shows that they had to rely on the Germans to aid them and the willingness on the part of the German population to do so shows that their help and generosity was much appreciated and needed. The dire situation in Berlin and the need for Quaker aid becomes even more apparent when one looks at prominent German Marxist, Otto Rühle’s study Das Proletarische Kind. In his work, Rühle stated that, even in 1922, while the situation improved for a lot of inhabitants of Berlin, notably children, many others were struggling to provide themselves and their families with adequate food. The working class was most affected.82 Rühle recognized that “without the Quäkerspeisung, which is the only shimmer of hope in the life of thousands of Berlin families, a whole generation would wake up, without ever receiving anything for their enjoyment or strengthening other than dry bread, coffee substitute or water vegetables.”83 Furthermore he highlights that mothers, would sometimes be as affected as the children and not receive any food

81 Käthe Kollwitz. Die Tagebücher, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz (East Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1989), p. 461: „Hans bringt Lebensmittel für Karls ärmste Patienten, von den Quäkern gestiftet, Otty fährt in Friedenau schmutzige Wäsche einsammeln im Auftrag der Quäker.“ 82 Otto, Rühle. Das Proletarische Kind (Berlin, 1922), p. 199: „Für einen Teil der Bevölkerung hat das furchtbare Ernährungselend, […] inzwischen einer besseren Versorgung Platz gemacht, und damit hat sich der Gesundheitszustand dieser Kinder gebessert. Aber für die Kinder des Proletariats und der proletarischen Mittelschichten besteht die Hungersnot fort.“ 83 Otto, Rühle. Das Proletarische Kind (Berlin, 1922), p. 199: „Ohne die Quakerspeisung, die der einzige Lichtpunkt im Leben von tausenden und abertausenden von Berliner Familien ist, würde eine ganze Kindergeneration aufwachsen, die nie etwas anderes zur Kräftigung oder zum Genuss bekommen hätte als trocken Brot, Kaffeeersatz und Wassergemüse.“ 38 except for some of the remaining Quaker aid that the child brought with them. One should thus recognize the Quaker aid in Berlin, and other parts of Germany, not only as supportive but as lifesaving to many German children and adults alike. Meanwhile, Dr Karl Pohl’s and the Kinderhilfe’s call for donations in 1923 only mention the importance of physical and mental health and their treatment, suggesting that food aid had already been widely distributed in the years prior to this. However, in the years right after the end of the war, the political leaders of the city and region of Trier had to make an emotional announcement stating that “Thousands of mothers face despair because they can no longer provide their children anything to eat. […] No Milk, no fat, no potatoes, not even bread.”84 This statement shows that between the years of 1920 and 1923, significant help in form of food must have been given to the people of Trier. A newspaper article from March 1921 shows that the Quakers had been the foremost organization providing aid to the children of Trier, even though the American armed forces did not report on outside help in their reports. The newspaper reported that the Quakers “were feeding 1200 children daily in the city of Trier” and the meal was sometimes consisted of different ingredients such as “flour, sugar, beans, cacao, and condensed milk”85, ingredients that the local politicians were highlighting in their statement few months prior. Following the distribution of the Quäkerspeisung in Trier, many were gracious for the vital help that saved the younger generation from starvation, including the children themselves, parents but also those who could not bear to see the former suffer any longer across the country. Exactly how dedicated the Quakers were to their goal was evident by their announcements in the Trier newspapers: “How warmly the [American] children's aid mission cares about our poor little ones can be seen most clearly from the circular it has issued, which is published in the advertising section of this paper.”86 Not only were the Quakers able to supply the children of Trier with food and garner much attention by doing so, their friendship lead to cooperation with the local population which offered their support in helping prepare and assemble the food for the children.

84 Amtliches Kreisblatt für den Stadt-und Landkreis Trier (zit. Kreisblatt) Nr. 75/76 (22 November 1924): “Tausende von Müttern stehen vor der Verzweiflung, da sie ihren Kindern nichts mehr zu essen geben können. […] Keine Milch, kein Fett, keine Kartoffeln, nicht einmal Brot.“ 85 „Quäkerspeisung“ in Lokales (?) (Trier, 17 March 1921) via NL Laven 3605 (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Vom Arbeitschsausschuss der Quäkerspeisung der Stadt Trier erhalten wir folgende Mitteilungen. […] In der Stadt Trier werden täglich 1200 Kinder gespeist. […] [Die Malhzeit] besteht aus einer bindflüssigen (?) Speise, abwechselnd aus Mehl, Zucker, Bohnen, Schmalz, Kakao und kondensierter Milch“ 86 Quäkerspeisung“ in Lokales (?) (Trier, 17 March 1921) via NL Laven 3605 (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Wie herzlich es die Kinderhilfsmission mit unsern armen kleinen meint, geht am deutlichsten hervor aus einem von ihr erlassenen Rundschreiben, welches in Anzeigenteil dieses Blattes veröffentlicht ist.“ 39

In Trier, the food preparation for all the dining places was done by the local “brothers” who “who were courteous and grateful to this difficult and extensive task.”87 All across Germany, the Quakers were relying on volunteers to help them either with the preparation or distribution of food. In Essen, one of the largest cities of the Ruhr area, Hanns Gramm, a German, was leading the child feeding program for the Quakers, supervising the feeding of over 250,000 children. Before leaving his post to go to help in Quaker headquarters in Berlin and giving his post to an American, Gramm wrote a letter to Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze in the nation’s capital, providing a detailed account of the feeding mission in Essen and the Ruhr. Not only were they feeding thousands of children across 800 kitchens and 1800 different dining places, the Quakers also relied on over 7000-8000 helpers, most likely of German origin, in the feeding district to help with the child feeding program.88 Under the Quaker feeding program, not only children profited from the aid, but also “adolescents, breastfeeding mothers, and mothers to be as well as babies.”89 (fig 2.3) While initially the Quäkerspeisung was only supposed to go to children up to the age of 14 and mothers, the mission Figure 2.3: Feeding of Children. This picture taking at a high school in Brandenburg an der Havel, near Berlin, depicts children of various ages quickly expanded their benefitting from the Quaker feeding. feeding program to also

87 Quäkerspeisung“ in Lokales (?) (Trier, 17 March 1921) via NL Laven 3605 (Stadtarchiv Trier): „Die Zubereitung erfolgt für sämtliche Speisestellen in der Küche und Bäckerei der barmherzigen Brüder, welche sich in zuvorkommender und dankenswerter Weise dieser schwierigen und umfassenden Aufgabe widmen werden (…)“ 88 Hanns Gramm. Brief an Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (Essen, Mai 1921) via EZA 51/Q I b 1 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin): „Die Leitung dieses Speisebezirkes Essen, in dem z.Zt. täglich 250 000 Kinder in mehr als 800 Küchen und mehr als 1800 Speisestellen […] verteilen, gespeist werden, übernimmt dann ein älterer Amerikaner namens Pennock. […] Es gehört yu unserer Aufgabe ab und zu mit den etwa 7-8000 Helfern in unserem Speisebezirk Zusammenkünfte abzuhalten.” 89 Brandernburg an der Havel (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2000), p. 78: „Die Kinderhilfsmission der regliösen Gesellschaft der Freunde (Quäker) von Amerika übernahm vom September 1920 an die Speisung von 1.000 Schulkindern, und Jugendlichen, stillendenden und werdenden Müttern und Kleinkindern.“ 40 include adolescents. In the report on the feeding program in Essen, Dr Bentheim did not include a note on why the Quaker feeding was extended to include older children but there is reason to believe that due to the funds that were raised in the previous year in the United States, the Quakers were able to considerably increase their feeding aid to include adolescents.90 Despite evidence missing, giving food to mothers and expecting women, might be an indicator that the Quakers were trying to support those women that would, in the future, raise them in the image of compassion and international friendship and even teach them about the ways of the Quakers. The Weimar government’s financial support towards the Quaker child feeding program is another signifier that not only those on the ground were grateful for the aid extended to children, but also that political leaders were aware that without the Quaker aid, Germany could not have supported its own child population. In the yearly report on the Quäkerspeisung in 1921, Dr Bentheim noted that the German government not only helped with providing the Quakers with certain supplies, they also attributed a significant amount of money to the feeding program in the yearly budget. He notes that “50 million Mark91 were made available to continue supporting the feeding of the Quakers in the current form until the end of August 1921.”92 It shows that the Weimar government was embracing cooperation with social organizations outside of the nation’s borders as an important step to rebuilding the nation. The Quäkerspeisung reached every single layer of German society. Germans either benefitted from the Quakers aid, helped organize the feeding program or supported it through financial means. In a 1925 poem, the writer reminds German readers of the Quakers help in Germany’s most grim moment: “This is one of the societies that came to Germany despite all hatred, to feed – the Quäkerspeisung – who does not know of it?”93 Throughout the following years many poems, and letters were written that reminded people of the help that the Quakers provided to the Germans when no one else supported the suffering and innocent people.

90 Dr. Bentheim, V. Bericht über die Quäkerspeisungen (1921) via EZA 51/Q I b 2 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin), p. 1: „Der Kreis der Gespeisten, der anfangs nur Kinder bis zu 14 Jahresn und Mutter umfasste, wurde vom 1. November v. Js. Durch Hinzunahme der Jugendlichen erweitert.“ 91According to R.L. Bidwell, 50m Mark consisted of 602,000 USD in 1921 (avg.) Bidwell, R.L. Currency Conversion Tables: A Hundred Years of Change (London: Rex Collings, 1970), pp. 22-23, 24. 92 Dr. Bentheim, V. Bericht über die Quäkerspeisungen (1921) via EZA 51/Q I b 2 (Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin), p. 3: „In dem Etat des Jahres 1921/1922 sind 50 Millionen Mark eingestellt worden, um die Speisungsaktion der Quäker in der erwähnten Weise bis Ende 1921 zu unterstützen.“ 93 W., Leyl. (?) Bei den Quäkern in Berlin (Schneidemühle, ca. 1925): Also das it eine von der Gesellschaft die trotz allen Hasses nach Deutschland kam um den hungernden Feind zu sehnen und zu speisen – Quäkerspeisung – wer kennt sie nicht? “ 41

Chapter III A New Age of Humanitarianism: Changing Views of Emergency Relief following the End of the Great War Providing humanitarian relief seems like a noble and humane cause nowadays. In the past, however, especially before the start of World War I, different attitudes prevented relief such as food aid to take the form of substantial humanitarian aid to struggling nations and people. The United States of America has long been engaged in humanitarian relief efforts in order to provide those in need with food and other basic necessities, whilst at the same time using it to further its own aims. As Barry Riley notes in The Political History of American Food Aid, “American food aid has been used as a tool of foreign policy and as a response to famine; as a political device to win the votes of American farmers [and] [it] was a weapon used to blunt the advances of bolshevism in post-World War I Europe and communism after World War II.”94 Humanitarian aid, no matter its secondary function, had always been primarily used to help those alleviate the suffering of those affected by natural catastrophes, war and famines. In the early days of the American Republic, food aid was not seen as the great philanthropic gesture. There was much contestation whether the American government should provide aid to the needy during the 19th century and early 20th century. The most important factor, according to Riley in pre-1914 society, was the fact that government officials were unwilling to spend public funds on international humanitarian efforts and private charities were the norm for providing aid. Michael Barnett, professor in International Affairs, states World War I “continued [the] tradition of private, fly-by-night charities giving to those who shared their identity.”95 While some private non-governmental organizations proved to be successful, as in the case with the Committee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB) operating separately from the American government, they would face challenges from the federal government that opposed providing aid. With the end of World War I, the perception on helping those in need and the number of independent organizations changed, as countries became more involved with organizing aid.

94 Riley, Barry. “Introduction” in The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (Oxford University Press, 2017), p. xxi. 95 Barnett, Michael. “Saving Soldiers and Civilians during War” in Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 82. 42

Michael Barnett, observes that following the increased destructiveness of World War I, limitations to humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) became apparent and found themselves “busier than ever, providing medical relief and expanding into new areas such as helping prisoners of war. The combination of the destructiveness and longevity of the war also led to a surge in private voluntary relief organizations, including Save the Children and the seldom-heralded Committee for the Relief of Belgium”.96 However, while the Great War showcased the need for further humanitarian actions in case of future conflicts, relief did not go to all of those who suffered under the extended effects of the war. Organizations such as the American Red Cross (ARC) and the American Relief Administration (ARA) who had been closely affiliated with the United States government and in the case of the ARA, funded by the government, were not allowed to help former enemies of the United States, during World War I. Barnett states that “after the war the U.S. government established a quasi- private relief agency, the American Relief Administration, which purposefully neglected the Germans, even though it knew that one-third to two-thirds of German children were malnourished.”97 Both leaders of the United States and Germany realized that food would become vital during and following the years of the war. The chairman of the ARA, Herbert Hoover realized, already in 1917, that “starvation or sufficiency will in the end determine the victor.”98 Both sides would deal with food in different ways. The US used food to strengthen diplomatic relationships with European countries, while Germany had to endure the effects from food scarcity and a rioting population. Historian Alice Weinreb highlights that “despite the radically different wartime experiences of American and Germany, both [countries] recognized that the war was remaking the international food economy. Both also believed that food had become the decisive weapon of the war.”99 As tensions grew within Germany to end the war, food became increasingly more important for the German government. Without any supplies to feed the population, Germany would be faced with internal riots and a possible civil war, thus drawing the war against the Allies to an end.

96 Barnett, Michael. “Introduction: The Crooked Timber of Humanitarianism”, p. 2. 97 Barnett, Michael. “Chapter 4: Saving Children and Civilians during War”, p. 83. 98 Hoover, Herbert. “Weapon of Food”, p. 197. 99 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 13. 43

While food aid played an important role during the war effort, especially those countries fighting alongside the United States, who heavily relied on food imports to continue the war effort, it became even more important following the end of the war. “Food Aid”, as Weinreb notes, “transformed hungry people into a source of political power.”100 The First World War proved that not only was it possible to drastically lower food imports and induce food scarcity, as in the case of the British Hunger Blockade, it also demonstrated, in the case of the United States, that food aid could be supplied on an international scale and remake political world order, or at the least influence it. Before Germany received any food aid, the United States’ partners during the war were the principal recipient of emergency relief. Belgium, in particular suffered immensely under the German occupation and had to be relieved by emergency relief from the United States. The Committee for the Relief of Belgium (CRB), a de facto neutral charity organization, was able to supply two-thirds of Belgium’s food requirements.101 Belgium was not the only country to profit from relief. However, the question on how the US would feed Belgium and the rest of Europe when the war ended remained. In 1917, Herbert Hoover and the American government introduced “Meatless Tuesdays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays”, in order to stock American food reserves that had dwindled over the previous years. Riley Barry states that “Hoover’s task, simply stated, was to entice farmers to grow more and consumer to eat less.”102 The successful campaign led farmers to produce enormous quantities of wheat in 1918 and following the end of the war, American farmers started to unload their wheat onto the American market as the price of wheat would dwindle now that the war ended. The American government faced challenges as they were “running short of both storage space and money to pay farmers.”103 Hoover through diplomatic maneuvering was able to convince the Allied governments to purchase large quantities of American wheat and thus the United States wheat surplus could now be used to turn “an economic liability into a source of international influence and potential profit.”104 While the humanitarian motivations for the relief to Belgium should not be underestimated, one has to realize that Hoover was also representing the interests of

100 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 30. 101 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 31. 102 Riley, Barry. “Herbert Hoover”, p. 25. 103 Riley, Barry. “But Now Came Famine and Pestilence” p. 33 104 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 31. 44

American farmers at home. He turned a humanitarian act into an act that gained him lots of support both from the Belgian population and the American alike. In the last chapter of this thesis, I will draw on the humanitarian relief project in Armenia, following the end of World War, I to show similarities that early humanitarian projects shared with each other but also ways in which they contrasted. By comparing the Armenian reconstruction project as presented in historian Rebeca Jinks’ article Marks Hard to Erase, I will try to argue that, as in the case with Armenia, the humanitarian aid extended by the United States to Germany shaped German national reconstruction. This chapter will highlight that the AFSC saw food aid as part of their larger mission of promoting peace and making Germany more “Americanized” in the words of co-founder Henry Cadbury. Following the end of the war, many Americans were very outspoken that no aid should go to Germany. As a former enemy nation, Germany should face punishment for the problems they had caused. Hoover, however, was gradually able to garner some support from Americans by showcasing how important food aid was to preserve the United States’ and Europe’s safety. The Hunger Map (fig 5), which circulated throughout the United States starting in 1918, raised awareness about the dire hunger situation in Europe, while also recognizing the support that Europe is already receiving from the US. It was supposed to raise awareness and convince the American public that it is in their interest to help the struggling Europeans. Interestingly, Germany and Austria-Hungary remained “unclassified”. According to Weinreb, this was “intended to reassure Americans that those lands were not the intended recipients of America’s food pledge”.105 While supplies gradually made their ways to Germany “during the transitional months before the

105 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, pp. 33-34. 45

Blockade was finally lifted”, new legislation demanded “that no enemy adult or child be fed with Congress-appropriated money.”106

Figure 5: Hunger Map of Europe

Hoover, however, also understood that it was in the United States’ best interest to find a solution to supplying the German people with food without angering the American public. In that regard Hoover was trying to appease both the American public and President Woodrow Wilson who was preaching about “liberal internationalism”, which sought to promote liberal and democratic order through interventions in other states. This could be achieved either through humanitarian relief programs or military invasions and Hoover chose the former to achieve that idea. However, due to the recent conflict with Germany, Americans were reluctant to support such a cause, especially if the aid would be provided directly through public means. Historian Aiken Guy argues that “neither the ARC nor the ARA could directly help German civilians survive and rebuild, even though Wilson’s vision of liberal internationalism depended ultimately on civilians everywhere being fed well enough to go to school, work hard, and govern rationally”107 and “the

106 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 35. 107 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic”, p. 599. 46 public outcry in the United States would have ended the ARA’s operations before they began.”108 Thus Hoover had to come up with a way that would serve both America’s interest and help Germany at the same time. In order to help Germans, especially children and women, Hoover had to find an organization that was, first, private and not affiliated to the US government, second, neutral in all regards to politics and third, American so that the praise for supplying starving children would go the United States. Out of this need the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) seemed like a perfect choice. Even though the AFSC had contributed largely to the survival of German children and women, the organization is often left out of the historiography of American relief in Europe both during and after the Great War, mostly because American and international historians tend to focus on official federal organizations. What those historians tend to forget is that especially because the AFSC was not affiliated with any public agency, it was able to provide the help to Germany on a much larger scale than government organizations did. Michael Barnett argues that “the discourse of humanity, especially one that demanded nondiscriminatory practices and that included friend and foe alike, barely registered.”109 Yet it was exactly those two practices that the AFSC represented. Furthermore, scholars tend to focus heavily on the American narrative and provide little context about what the German government did to support the AFSC’s aid program. In the case where the AFSC is covered in more detail, scholars only look at the organization of feeding program and the numbers they were able to feed but overlook the significance of the Quaker aid in guiding German politics along American lines through the practices of pacificism charity as Cadbury had stated in the New York times in 1920. The Quakers were thus able to extend food both to the United States allies and their former enemies without antagonizing or discriminating the people of Germany. One needs to wonder then why the AFSC has been in many cases left out of this historical discourse on humanitarian relief and the history of food aid. Not only was the AFSC able to provide food to Germans who even after the war were still antagonizing many Americans, they were also able to prevent Germany from slipping into a devastating civil war and, as Aiken Guy remarks, “helped the [Weimar] Republic survive its early

108 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic”, p. 605. 109 Barnett, Michael. “Chapter 4: Saving Children and Civilians during War”, p. 83. 47 days.”110 However, the American Friends Service Committee was limited in their relief effort to Germany since it had to abide by Hoover’s rules. In order for the AFSC to help the Germans, Hoover had to first separate those Germans who were guilty and participated in the war from those who were innocent and suffered under its effects. Alice Weinreb states that “The focus on women and especially children victims – reflected in the names of many of the humanitarian programs – underscored hungry peoples’ basic innocence.”111As the Armenian national reconstruction project will demonstrate, women, but to a much larger extent, children were usually deemed as unfortunate victims of the war and could be used to appeal to a wider population. As it will become apparent the AFSC’s food program shared a similar goal than the humanitarian aid of the Near East Relief (NER), both of which are American institutions, in promoting peace and reconstructing the countries along western ideas. The Armenian Case As Armenians recovered from both the physically and psychologically effects of the genocide that had been perpetrated by the Young Turks between 1915 and 1917 on the Armenian population, Armenian women such as Zumroot Godjanian, who had been absorbed into Bedouin and Muslim culture, had to find their place in a new Armenian society. Zumroot’s story is not only one of suffering but one of national reconstruction too. Her story and that of many other women is not only about finding a new home after the war had ended, it is also about finding their place within a newly created Armenian society. A society that relied on women and children for national reconstruction. However, it was particularly hard for Zumroot to find a place in this society because tattoos left her physically marked and reminded her and other Armenians of the horrors that had been committed. Various charities such as the American Near East Relief (NER) took it upon themselves to provide emergency relief to Armenian women and girls throughout the Ottoman Empire that had been the target of deportation and forced assimilation in Arab, Bedouin and Kurdish culture. Pictures of suffering and marked women, such as those of Zumroot began to circulate in humanitarian campaigns helping multiple relief organizations gather support for the plight of Armenians in what was a defining moment in interwar humanitarianism which historian Rebecca Jinks outlines in the article “Marks Hard to Erase.”

110 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic”, p. 605 111 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 35. 48

The visual representation of Zumroot and other fellow Armenian women “began to jar with the emerging humanitarian agendas of national reconstruction.”112 Here were a people who needed to be saved from the effects of persecution and extermination. As in the case with Armenia, the AFSC also relied on visual representation to help in donation drives that would go towards the feeding of German children and women, and ultimately German reconstruction through the feeding programs. Similarly, in Germany, German social organizations such as the Deutsche Kinderhilfe employed German artists to create posters that would show the plight of the weakest souls of the nation. In some cases, children were even chosen to carry the signs themselves calling for donations to further emphasize the need to help them. Especially after the Armistice in 1919 the NER began to take a different stance on humanitarian relief and switched its focus from helping Armenian women and children with emergency relief to reconstruction of the Armenian nation and identity. Jinks notes that “these different responses were emblematic of the shifts in humanitarianism in the immediate aftermath of World War I.”113 This change in perception on humanitarianism was a shift away from civilizing goals to that of understanding underlying problems of these people’s suffering. However, while the need to save Armenian women and children seemed to be vital during the inter-war period, especially by organizations such as the NER and the League of Nations, women and girls such as Zumroot were deemed not recoverable by both charitable organization and even some Armenians themselves. In comparison, German women did not have to deal with the same problem. While there was reason to hold German women accountable for helping the war effort by aiding the armed forces on the home front, social organizations still included women as recipients of food aid in order to help rebuild the German nation as showcased in the AFSC report by Dr Bentheim in 1921. In the case of Armenia, this might be emblematic of the change of humanitarianism in which the old system of missionaries trying to civilize a people confronts with the new system of understanding the experience that some women had to go through. Jinks responds to this attempt as a way to create a “pure” society in which the tattooed women could not be included because of the marks they were carrying. In some of the missionaries and volunteers’ eyes they carried the

112 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927” in AHR Forum (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 90. 113 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 91. 49 suffering of the Armenian people on their body and served as a living reminder of what happened to their culture and could thus not be incorporated into the reconstruction project. While there existed no similar comparison to marked women in Germany, there were instances in German society that excluded women from gaining a more favorable position in society. Following Article 109 of the Weimar constitution, which ultimately gave women the right to vote and hold political office, the signs pointed towards a more egalitarian society. According to social scholars Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman and Marion Kaplan, the 1920s were marked by “the emergence of a ‘new woman’ and a ‘new family’”114 highlighted by their gains in politics, society, and the workplace. However, when life in Germany went back to “normal” in the 1920s and soldiers headed back to their jobs, women were once again pushed to the margins. German society started promoting the traditional roles for women as those who tend to the household and look after the children. Notions of women as breadwinners were once again ignored and ridiculed. Thus, in their own sense, German women faced a different exclusion from their society in stark contrast to the marked women of Armenia. While German women were accepted in their society, they were to hold roles that had been assigned to them, while Armenian women could only wish to be part of their culture. Relief workers on the ground tended to limit certain people from being deemed “recuperable” or “representative” for the restoration of Armenia. While the Armenian humanitarian mission can be understood as “a fully modern nation-building exercise, characterized, by redemptive and transformational visions, gendered practices of inclusion and exclusion, and the manufacture of a visual aesthetic of a ‘pure’ and ‘healthy’ community”115, the German project reveals a different story. Logically, a healthy and pure community would be based on the recoverability of both women and children. The AFSC felt that if one were to promote an “Americanized” Germany as, Henry Cadbury had mentioned, one would have to focus on women as extension to the children and that required food aid. Out of the necessity to rebuild Armenia the organizations on the ground switched “their visual strategies [to] stirring images of young orphans at work building the Armenian future, which

114 Bridenthal, Renate. Grossman, Atina. Kaplan, Marion. eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), p. 11–12. 115 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 93. 50 echoed the visual imagery of interwar nation-building elsewhere.”116 The American Friends Service Committee’s policy was to provide emergency relief programs that would remove militarism from Germany and help reconstruct Germany as Carolena Woods had declare all the way back in 1918. While to the NER’s “rescue of women and children was […] integral to [their] operations”117, the AFSC’s Quäkerspeisung was initially meant to aid children that had been affected by famine. In November 1919, Herbert Hoover, then president of the American Relief Administration (ARA), tasked the AFSC with leading the relief mission to Germany stating that “We have never fought with women and children” and that “the country’s women and children bore the brunt of war shortages as military needs trumped domestic ones.”118 In similar fashion to the women and children in Armenia, according to Herbert Hoover, the ones in Germany required assistance to survive the months to come, disregarding the latter’s affiliation with an enemy nation. While the tattooed Armenian women bore the mark of Armenia’s former enemy and killer, the women in Germany bore the mark of one of the perpetrators of the war. A case could be made for both groups that they had become the target of prejudice and bore some of the guilt that the perpetrators had committed in each case. However, there were also people that worked tirelessly in trying to incorporate these women into the new national groups. They would become part of the reconstruction of their respective states they lived in, whether they were deemed “impure” or “enemies” in their respective case. Even though women were sometimes locked into “a permanent state of violation and ambiguous identity, in a way that disavowed the transformative promise of the new national reconstruction projects”119, children in both Armenia and Germany, became the principal target for national reconstruction. As Rufus Jones, the chairmen of the AFSC stated later in his life, “Children are always the first catastrophe of war.”120

116 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 94. 117 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 97. 118 Aiken, Guy. “Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” in Diplomatic History, Vol 43, No. 4 (Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 604. 119 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 94. 120 Jones, Rufus. “Acceptance Speech for AFSC Nobel Peace Prize” in Rufus M. Jones Papers, 1860-1997 (Haverford) 51

Conclusion The NER and the AFSC made it their principal goal of helping children in the respective countries they were engaging in. Armenian children did not bear the marks that some of the younger women and girls did and were thus not seen as outcasts. As Jinks states, the “NER executives made a policy decision to emphasize ‘the child’ over ‘the orphan’”121 and highlights that children could be shaped into Armenians and that the term orphan would prevent this kind of transformation. Magazines and newspapers helped the NER change perception who needed saving, the children were being labelled as “Armenia’s hope”. Since a lot of missionaries volunteered for the NER, they too found the children to be purer for the regeneration of Armenian culture and could be raised as Armenians without the visual mark. While the efforts by the NER should be seen as actual national reconstruction programs, the AFSC’s main goal was humanitarian relief through the assistance of food aid, especially if one considers the AFSC strict political neutrality. One could argue that by focusing on children, the Quakers were trying to engage in assisting the national reconstruction of a new German Republic. After all, Quaker Carolena Woods “felt a concern for service among the people in Germany […] an important service in spiritual healing and reconstruction.”122 The AFSC while at its core representing the values of Quakerism acted under a strict neutral policy of political and religious noninterference. Their goal was not to antagonize people based on their religious or political beliefs. Even though they believed in the charity of the Christian faith and God in particular, they were not engaging in “traditional” missionary work. The Near East Relief on the other hand was made up, at its core, from missionaries and members of religious associations and despite their secularity, it was “[proceeding] with a Christian ethic at its core.”123 The women in Germany did not have to bear the shame that the Armenian women, such as Zumroot, did. The reasons for this are manifold. Firstly, Armenians constituted a minority within the Ottoman Empire and were targeted by the Young Turks during the genocide. Secondly, because they constituted a minority, they were in some of the cases forcefully assimilated into a different culture thus stripping them of their Armenian identity. With no independent homeland to

121 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 108. 122 Carolena M. Woods to AFSC (October 15, 1918). See Aiken Guy, Feeding Germany: American Quakers in the Weimar Republic” (2019) 123 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 97. 52 call their home, these women were left to their own devices and not even the prospect of a new nation seemed like it could salvage their place within Armenian culture. German women on the other hand were not devoid of a homeland, they were part of the fabric that made Germany into the strong European nation that it was and German women had not been pushed to the brink of society following the end of the war. On the contrary, German women were given an even bigger participation in German society when they were granted political participation and made up the majority of the electorate in their country. The tattooed Armenian women never held that position within their own society. Because they were marked, they were pushed to the edge of Armenian society. These women would not carry the torch as their German counterparts would during and after the First World War. While women in Germany might have been deemed heroic for the actions that they displayed in the face of a humanitarian crisis and their own government’s lack of assistance, Armenian women, even among their own people, had become problematic. Jinks says that “the responses of other Armenians were in fact mixed, and here, too, the issue of the women’s ‘recuperability’ revolved around the female body as the repository of the nation.”124. Since the main goal was national regeneration, those physically marked by horrors that had been perpetrated on their group, could not be part of this national reconstruction. The women would be constant reminders of the crimes and attempts of Turkification that had been perpetrated against the Armenian community. When Germany was faced with the starvation of their next generation, the AFSC brought the Quäkerspeisung into existence to help children. “Through an extensive drive of American charity and American humanity”125, as Cadbury declared, Germany became more “Americanized” and as such the AFSC focused on both children and women collectively.

124 Jinks, Rebecca. “’Marks Hard to Erase’: The Troubled Reclamation of ‘Absorbed’ Armenian Women, 1919- 1927”, p. 105. 125 Cadbury, Henry J. “‘Americanized’ Germany Through Quaker Eyes” in New York Times (October 17, 1920), p. 3 53

Conclusion When the American Friends Service Committee ended the child feeding program in Germany in 1924, no one could deny that their presence and support saved millions of German children from starvation and misery. The Quakers went to Germany in the spirit of goodwill, pacifism, and friendship to help ailing Germans. The founder of the AFSC, Rufus Jones in 1917, declared “the need which exists for mutual friendly intercourse and fellowship between those who all belong to the same great family and who have been separated during these sad years of war (…).”126 Seven years later, this intercourse had developed into a substantial feeding and national reconstruction project that fed over five million children in Germany. However, the aid to Germany in the aftermath of the First World War was just one example of increased commitment to provide humanitarian aid to helpless people in different parts of the world, and as the aid in Germany focused on women and children, other humanitarian projects tended to focus on them as well. The AFSC was not the only organization that had engaged in helping people that suffered under war and post-war conditions. Various American governmental institution as well as non- governmental organizations such as the Near East Relief, American Red Cross and American Relief Administration, among others, had been engaging in their own humanitarian projects across Europe and the Middle East in the 1920s. Though, the AFSC’s project in Germany, which has been singled out in this project, is of much greater significance since it aimed at reinstituting a former hostile nation back into the international community. As Rufus Jones highlighted, people had become separated by war and needed to be reunited through extending a helping hand. While the Weimar government was engaging in democratic reforms since its formation on November 9th 1918, one can only imagine the impact that the Quakers and the American Relief Administration had on turning the German government increasingly more liberal by promoting the values of international cooperation and friendship. While the Quaker aid might have had an immediate impact on alleviating suffering from starvation in the opening months of the Quäkerspeisung’s distribution, the continuity of the food aid over five years from 1919-1924, might have also inadvertently developed the German welfare state. Political officials all over Germany, from occupied Rhineland to the political center in

126 Jones, Rufus M. A Service of Love in War Time (1917), p. 257. 54

Brandenburg and Berlin, were struck by the commitment of the Quakers to help the German population. Rather than watch and continue accepting the aid, the Weimar government started supporting the feeding program through major budget allocations, as well as prepare themselves to take over the feeding program in case the AFSC considered their task to be complete. Local politicians such as Dr Pohl in Trier or Joachim von Winterfeldt in the province of Brandenburg calling upon citizens to donate to physical and mental therapy sessions for children that had been affected by war conditions, highlight that the need to help the next generation was of vital interest to safeguard the future of the German nation. However, the call for donations across Germany also highlighted underlying tensions within Germany itself. Amidst the fear of Bolshevist uprisings, the more far left-leaning parties such as the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) felt that donations were not going far enough to relieve Germans from hunger. Socialist and Marxist politicians highlighted the terrible response by the Weimar government, and sought for the expansion of the welfare state through pressure on the Weimar government. Marxist scholars such as Otto Rühle recognized that the working class was suffering more than the average German but recognized that the Quaker aid saved thousands of children from hunger. The Weimar government knew that they could not rely on foreign aid forever and thus instructed the Deutscher Zentral Ausschuss (DZA), the German Committee for Foreign relief with taking over the Quaker operations once they would leave the country. While the Quäkerspeisung ended up feeding more than five million children across Germany, the beginning months of the feeding program were anything but straightforward. The poor distribution of the Quaker aid was directly impacted by the organization on the ground. While the AFSC put rules in place that highlighted which cities and regions should receive more immediate attention, these rules were not always enforced as shows the supplying of cities and villages in the Erzgebirge region, despite these being under the population limit of 50,000 people. Furthermore, in the occupied region of the Rhineland, no Quaker aid seemed to have existed up until 1921, and thus Germans were suffering under various hardships depending on where they resided. Given their occupying nature, the United States Third Army was pivotal in providing aid to Germans in the occupied territories where the Quakers were not active. While not strictly engaging in a humanitarian mission themselves, the Third Army still helped the ailing German

55 inhabitant across the Rhineland. It could be suggested the US Third Army they felt compelled to help the region because they were occupying part of Germany. Through the introduction of American food stocks to the Rhineland, people were able to provide for their families albeit the process of acquiring said foodstuff was very complicated and almost impossible for poorer German citizen who couldn’t afford it until a ticket system was implemented. The Third Army’s goodwill also showed when on Christmas Day of 1919, the army distributed a large amount of milk to the citizens of Koblenz which otherwise would have resulted in a wasteful disposal. One cannot be entirely certain about why the AFSC was not able to send Quaker aid to the occupied region up until March 1921, but the most obvious sign could be the fact that the occupied territories were under direct jurisdiction by the Interallied Commission and thus limited any non-governmental organization from entering the region to provide aid in the initial years of the occupation. Even though the food issue might have been resolved by the Third Army in the occupied regions, one needs to remember that the Third Army’s foremost job was to serve as an occupation force that was meant to ensure the compliance of the German government in paying reparations to the victors of the war. This meant that while Rhenish Germans did not have to fear the risk of starvation as the rest of Germany, before the AFSC became involved, their rights and freedoms had been curtailed by both the United States forces and the other occupying powers. As such, Germans experienced different ramifications following the end of the war. While Germans in the non-occupied areas of Germany might have had more civil liberties, they were facing hunger and political instability as highlighted by Käthe Kollwitz’s diary entry after the Kapp Putsch or the deplorable situation in the “German Hell” as highlighted by Dr Paul Rohrbach. As with the development of the German welfare state, the humanitarian aid that Germany received following the war also helped Germany raise its own initiative to support populations abroad during the 1920s. An example was those Germans that were living abroad, known in German as Auslandsdeutsche, or Germans living outside of the boundaries of Germany. Following the peace settlements at Versailles, an increased number of Germans found themselves outside of Germany as former provinces became part of other nations. The Weimar government felt compelled to help these Germans as highlighted by European historian John Hiden in The Weimar Republic and the Problem of the Auslandsdeutsche. Hiden states that “there was overwhelming agreement that Germans outside the Reich could not be ignored: cultural, political and economic

56 support was indispensable.”127 Even though support to Germans outside of their homeland seems like a noble goal, the Auslandsdeutsche became a symbol of nationalist ambition for the far-right political parties as the years went on. In their eyes, the German nation would have to reconnect with these populations as highlighted by the National Socialists’ annexation policies of former German territories in the late 1930s. The success of the American Friends Service Committee’s aid program can only be understood when looking at the pivotal events of the mid-1920s. The steady increase in humanitarian aid to Germany starting in 1917 has to be seen as a triumph of humanitarianism, despite the increased radicalization of Germany during the end of the 1920s and the 1930s. The signing of Treaty of Locarno in 1925, as Alice Weinreb states, “which symbolized Germany’s readmission as one of the Western powers, corresponded with the end of Hoover’s food-aid projects in Europe.”128 The Quakers did not leave Germany in 1924 out of failure, they did so because Senate decided to terminate a bill for continued humanitarian relief to Germany. The AFSC returned home knowing that they had helped reintegrate Germany back into the international community by fostering friendship and cooperation through the rescue of children. As the Dawes Plan in 1923 and Young Plan in 1928 showcase, the United States were adamant that Germany could once again become an important international partner and were able to extend a hand to a defeated former enemy, effectively improving relations between the United States and Germany.

127 Hiden, John. “The Weimar Republic and the Problem of the Auslandsdeutsche.” in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 12, no. 2 (London: Sage Publications, 1977), pp. 273–289. 128 Weinreb, Alice. “The Geopolitics of Total War”, p. 46. 57

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