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National Geographic : 1947 Jan
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What I Saw Across the Rhine manager said that fully twenty percent of the milk due his dairy was being sold on the black market. In 1944, 14,800 milk cows in the area pro vided nearly 90,000 quarts of milk a week. In 1946, 14,000 cows in the same area fur nished some 48,600 quarts per week. The shortage is not all due to black market ing, by any means. A high percentage of it is due to shortage of proteins in the stock feed-lack of fertilizer again. In 1945, while the American Military Gov ernment was overseeing the area, the farmers sent in nearly 69,000 quarts of milk per week. Now the Military Government has turned supervision over to the local German govern ment, which is very timid. It is supported by only a minority of citizens. A farmer caught selling milk on the black market is fined ten, twenty, maybe thirty marks. The paper marks mean little to him. He can black-market a few gallons of milk and pay all the fines assessed. The normal population of the area is around 250,000 people. But so many expellees had been brought in that, according to the Austrian manager, it had risen to 450,000. His figures on the number of immigrants may be too high, but there are tens of thousands. It is esti mated that not more than 20 percent of them are good for any kind of labor. This dairy sells all the milk that is sold legitimately in the area. Naturally it cannot provide milk for 200,000 extra people when the supply for the normal population has already been nearly halved. The American Govern ment is furnishing large quantities of pow dered milk to help offset the deficiency. In the terribly devastated city of Darmstadt we stopped at public market tables on a square. A woman, enormously fat, sat behind the best-stocked table. It was loaded with cheeses-to be bought only with coupons, of course-which her family has been making for generations. She also had eggs to sell, for coupons. The per-capita allowance in Decem ber, 1945, was four eggs; in April, 1946, two. As far as food goes, a farm family with two or three cows, a few chickens, and a few acres in wheat is better off than the wealthiest urban manufacturer. Berlin Dreary, Desolate Like most Americans in Germany, I wanted to get to Berlin. After an excellent supper in the dining car, at a cost of 25 cents in marks, and then a night of sleep on a hard bolster, I looked out the window and saw that our train was running through a forest country, mostly small timber. The soil was sandy, like most of the forest land in Germany that I have seen, little of it worth cultivating. If this kind of ground is denuded, it blows away; and Berlin's soil would blow away, they say, like the dry lake next to Mexico City, if the surrounding forests were cut down. My first view of Berlin was in an Army jeep driven by a 24-year-old German guide who had been a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. Among other questions, I asked him about the Berlin newspapers. There are four or more, sponsored by the British, Russians, French, and Americans, respectively, besides various other papers. I asked him which he read. "All," he replied. "Which gives you the most facts of conse quence?" I asked. "The British," he answered. The Russian paper, he said, has too much propaganda, and the American paper is too lacking in realism. We drove first through Grune Wald, an enormous park, in which much wood was being cut. Later I saw the denudation of the Tiergarten in the heart of the city. This famous park is now more naked of trees than of statues and is pitted with shell and bomb holes. German Shows Hitler's Chancellery What was the main part of the city is in the Soviet Zone, and in no other urban center have I seen such a dearth of human activity. In front of the ancient Castle, right in the midst of what was Berlin's busiest area, a woman and two men were pulling and pushing a cart loaded with freshly killed beef. They had the whole street to themselves. My guide was more eager to show me Hitler's Chancellery than anything else. One can still walk through the gutted rooms of imitation marble that the Nazis erected for their Fihrer. "Now," said the guide, with what seemed to me like reverence in his voice, "we come to the most important of all the rooms. Here was Hitler's desk. There by the fireplace Hitler held his most secret conferences. That door opens into his bedroom. "The bunker out the window there is over the bombproof shelter in which he took last refuge. Next to it you see Ribbentrop's house, then the house of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun. They say that his and her bodies were burned four yards from the bunker door. I don't know if this is true or not." An Englishman and an American with cameras had joined us and wanted to take a picture of the bunker. "A Russian guard is
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