Chapter 1 UNRRA, Food, and Winning the Peace
Planning for postwar emergency relief, as a precursor to eventual reconstruction of ruined countries, started long before the defeat of the Nazis. In an early retrospective assessment of UNRRA’s accomplishments, Major General Lowell Ward Rooks, the last of the three Americans who served as the administration’s director, described UNRRA as having emerged from “a promise to the invaded lands and their people who were fighting for the common cause.” This promise, Rooks continued, was to help those who had suffered in extraordinary ways during the war; it was a commitment that “once the aggressor’s yoke had been lifted, the uninvaded lands would pool their resources to send food and medicines and clothing and other emergency supplies.”1
Already during the war, the “liberation of Europe” was understood to include more than the military defeat of the Nazis. In other words, peace was about much more than a cessation of active conflict and a negotiation of relations between previously warring states; it was about managing the aftermath of war in the places where the greatest damage had been done, caring for people whose lives had been overturned by violence, and reestablishing the foundations for “normal” life.2 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had reassured occupied peoples as early as August 1941, just months after the German army’s invasion of the Soviet Union, that eventual defeat of the Nazis would bring them “freedom, food, and peace.”3 The inclusion of “food” here is significant.
Shortly after Churchill’s statement, and in preparation for the postwar period, twenty-six allied countries signed the Declaration of the United Nations. This 1942 Declaration consisted of a pledge by each of the signatories—those nations united in the fight against the Nazis—not to conclude separate peace treaties with the fascists and to continue the joint war effort until clear victory had been achieved. From the start the signatory countries recognized that their most pressing challenge in the immediate postwar period would be to provide relief, including emergency aid, to people and countries shattered by the conflict. The imperative would be to set up these countries as quickly as possible for self-sufficiency. By joint agreement, this assistance would be delivered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, a temporary and new—and the first—agency of what became the United Nations in 1945.
UNRRA was formally established in Washington, DC, on November 9, 1943, when much of Europe remained under Nazi control and the western Allies had not yet landed on the continent. By this point forty-four allied countries (the so-called united nations) had signed the UNRRA Agreement, and the total number of member countries soon grew to forty-eight.4 UNRRA was itself a recognition of the potential and the need for international cooperation among allies to address pressing transnational problems. These problems included, among others, evolving understandings of global security in an interconnected world, the potential and limits of mutual assistance, the importance of economic and sociopolitical links between countries, and the availability of mechanisms for solving conflicts or dealing with conflicts’ aftermath.5
UNRRA was financially supported by all member states, and its existence relied, too, on political and moral support from those member states. This structure reflected the reality that no one country was capable of funding and providing all the aid that was required, but many countries cooperating together, across international boundaries, could hope to achieve the desired results. This was the new internationalism in action. UNRRA also modeled relatively new understandings of the role that governments and supranational bodies, as opposed to private charities and individuals alone, could and should adopt in mitigating the effects of war and bringing aid to the war-ravaged. UNRRA’s task during its short active period from the war’s end in 1945 to the date of its disbanding in 1947 was enormous and complex: It met unprecedented destruction with a response that was, too, unprecedented.
UNRRA became the world’s largest peacetime supply and shipping organization, moving twenty-five million long tons of cargo around the world from its earliest shipments in 1945 to its last in 1947; this required six thousand ships and was more than triple the amount delivered after the First World War. The aid included food, clothing, large farm equipment (like tractors), small farm equipment (like shovels and hoes), and, of course, animals. All types of aid combined, for all destinations, came in at a cost of almost $4 billion.6 This made UNRRA, as one contemporary journalist remarked, “the most ambitious humanitarian effort ever undertaken by mankind.”7
Most of UNRRA’s aid was directed at the eastern and southeastern European countries that had been under occupation by the Third Reich and its allies during the war (and which were most vulnerable to Communism in the immediate postwar era). Italy and Austria also received significant aid, however, and this despite their wartime cooperation with Nazi Germany.8 Outside of Europe, China was the major UNRRA beneficiary. The states of northwestern Europe—the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Denmark, and Norway—though they too had been invaded and occupied by the Nazis, were determined to be capable of purchasing what they needed with more limited help. In addition, UNRRA operated Displaced Person (DP) camps in occupied Germany to aid victims of the Nazi regime who, at the end of the war and for a variety of reasons, found themselves in occupied Germany. Polish citizens formed the largest population group within the broad category of DPs.9
UNRRA paid for the aid that it provided out of general subscriptions made by countries that had not been invaded during the war. The amount that each country contributed to the general pool was set at 1 percent of the national income for the year ending June 30, 1943. The United States was the largest contributor by far, with $2.7 billion; this led, not surprisingly, to the perception that UNRRA was largely American. The United Kingdom contributed $624 million, and Canada was the third-largest contributor to UNRRA with $139 million. Together these three countries provided 94 percent of the total UNRRA budget.10 President Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt to the American presidency in April 1945, justified the high costs to the American people by emphasizing a simple humanitarian imperative: people were starving and dying and needed help. But President Truman also reminded Americans the debt they owed to Europeans for functioning as a first line of defense against fascism. The Europeans conquered by the Nazis, Truman said, had “kept the enemy from realizing the fruits of his early victories and from bringing his military might to bear upon our shores.”11 There were of course additional factors that made the UNRRA program appealing economically, politically, and socially to the Americans, as we shall see.
UNRRA and the Three Rs: Relief, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction
Once the commitment to provide postwar aid had been made, UNRRA’s first task was to measure precise needs in different contexts, to define the types of aid most urgently required in specific countries, and then to plan for how exactly to deliver relief in the form of food, medical supplies, clothing, and other essential goods, while also taking on the gargantuan task of caring for, repatriating, or facilitating the emigration of allied DPs.
None of these challenges and goals were in themselves brand-new; assorted relief programs had been operating in various countries during the war, and charities and private aid organizations continued to operate after the war as well. For example, the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad had formed in 1942 as an umbrella body to coordinate wartime voluntary relief agencies. After the war dozens of independent groups—the Red Cross, the War Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the American Joint Distribution Committee, War Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and American Relief for Poland, to name just several—operated in various locations too.12 Such groups often cooperated with private charity organizations in target countries as well, like Poland’s Catholic Caritas, as long as the political situation permitted doing so.13 In total over a hundred relief organizations and voluntary agencies contributed to the postwar relief effort in larger and smaller ways and operated either in cooperation with UNRRA, in a supportive capacity, or somewhat more independently of it, as circumstances dictated.14 UNRRA itself recognized the importance of the voluntary agencies.15 As Tehila Sasson has argued, cooperation between governmental bodies and voluntary aid organizations, so instrumental in the delivery of relief after the First World War (to Russia, for example), continued to mark humanitarian relief after World War II and throughout the rest of the twentieth century as well.16 Ultimately, UNRRA took on a coordinating and lead role in the postwar relief effort and often replaced or absorbed smaller, preparatory, or temporary relief-giving bodies.17 In such cases the agencies subsumed by UNRRA had to accept UNRRA’s authority and abide by the general UNRRA rules that governed the distribution of aid; this included the need to maintain “political neutrality” in aid distribution.18
UNRRA had three priorities: to provide relief, to create the conditions for rehabilitation in its target countries, and to stimulate eventual reconstruction. Each of these terms, which were referred to collectively as “the three Rs,” was extremely broad and therefore open to interpretation even while there were attempts to delineate their meaning and scope.19 Relief—immediate assistance through the provision of food aid—had been at the center of post–World War I policy approaches to crisis mitigation, and after the Second World War relief was similarly meant to address emergency food requirements and assorted pressing medical needs. At the same time, relief was considered a starting point only, a necessity in the short term but merely a stepping stone for more ambitious goals. The inclusion of rehabilitation as a policy priority was bold because it went beyond the delivery of immediate relief; it looked toward rebuilding people’s lives and the societies and economies of which they formed a part. Taking steps toward restoring normality after a period of extreme disruption would ideally also shorten the amount of time that immediate relief aid would be required, as countries would more quickly acquire the material and financial resources to take over the work of welfare provision and help their own people. Rehabilitation, in other words, was about establishing a basis for longer-term recovery and setting up the conditions for eventual reconstruction (but not actually overseeing its implementation and development).20 Reconstruction was thus the final phase of the UNRRA program as it was marked by countries’ abilities to provide for themselves; reconstruction happened only once relief (food, basic supplies, and clothing, for example) and the tools of rehabilitation (like livestock and agricultural equipment) had been delivered and once UNRRA was no longer needed.21
One editorial in the December 30, 1946, issue of Life magazine summarized these priorities in a way that the average American reader would have understood easily: “Under relief you buy an indigent man a meal. Under rehabilitation you find him a job, perhaps repair the machinery in the factory where he works or prime it with raw materials, and leave him buying his own meals.”22 The logic was repeated by UNRRA itself. UNRRA’s goal was to provide immediate assistance and relief, to be sure. But its goals were much broader still, aiming as it did to kickstart societies and economies; UNRRA’s goal, that is, was “to help . . . the people to help themselves.”23
The three Rs reflect UNRRA’s own understanding of its goals and purpose while they also suggest how humanitarian aid at mid-century was interpreted in a broader sense. “Humanitarian” and “humanitarianism” are dynamic terms that have been evolving since their emergence in the west in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.24 In the earliest days, “humanitarian” was used as a theological concept that invoked the human nature of Christ as opposed to Christ’s divine origins. In the nineteenth century, the meaning of “humanitarianism” changed to emphasize empathy and an earnest desire to ameliorate conditions for (some) individuals or groups who needed assistance to survive or prosper.25 “Humanitarian” also signified an understanding of the responsibility of the one to the many and in broad terms reflected a new “culture of sensibility” that was in evidence in the antislavery movement and even (in problematic and complicated ways, to be sure) in missionary work in colonial settings. Compassion and humanitarian sentiments soon came to be associated with civilization itself, with modern western understandings of social, political, and moral responsibility.26
Nineteenth-century humanitarianism was also associated with people who were concerned for the welfare of all sentient beings, human and animal. For example, the English social reformer Henry Salt founded the conspicuously named Humanitarian League in 1891 to advocate for a wide variety of “humanitarian reforms”: of the penal system, of criminal law, of the education system, and of attitudes toward animals.27 For animal welfare advocates in the late nineteenth century, a humanitarianism without the recognition of nonhuman animals’ capacity to feel pain and suffer was no humanitarianism at all, and it belied contemporary understandings of civilization as well.28 As Janet Davis has argued in her book on animal welfare in the United States, The Gospel of Kindness, early animal welfare advocates were motivated by a vision of global justice and a belief in the power of empathy, kindness, and decency to transform the world for both human and nonhuman animals.29
Moving into the twentieth century, however, there were still no precisely agreed-upon definitions of “humanitarian” and thus no shared understanding of what humanitarian programs ought to look like or who their specific targets or purveyors should be. In general, though, humanitarian impulses constituted a reaction to perceived suffering (and other than for a relatively small group of animal advocates, this referred to human misery and not to nonhuman animal suffering). Beyond that, the term “humanitarianism” referred to organized efforts to help individuals and groups affected by tragedies of various kinds and not of the targets’ making—wars, natural disasters, or political revolutions, for example.30
That Nazi cruelties justified humanitarian interventions did not need an elaborate explanation; plenty of evidence had already accumulated during the war and had been revealed even more starkly after the conflict ended in photographs and documentary footage and through witness and perpetrator testimony. There was little debate that the people and places destroyed during the Second World War deserved massive levels of assistance from those countries that had avoided direct or acute destruction. The debate was focused instead on what a fully humanitarian approach to aid would look like.
That is where UNRRA’s three Rs came in. UNRRA’s humanitarianism aimed to be constructive and to improve human welfare in the longer term rather than only addressing immediate needs and providing temporary comfort; it included a transformative and future-looking element. Partly for this reason, modern humanitarianism, of the type that UNRRA practiced, differs from charity and philanthropy in that its goals are more ambitious and represent a much bolder intervention with longer-term implications. More fundamentally, modern humanitarianism has reflected a move away from understanding misfortune or mass hunger as a result of providence or in terms of individual failings. It reflects instead a belief in the notion of innocent victims caught up in the whirlwind of sociopolitical and economic forces, while it also suggests faith in principles of rational management and in the possibility of coming up with solutions to empirically measured challenges. It understands humans’ interdependence and, with that, states’ interdependence too.31
It would be difficult to deny that UNRRA fed hungry people, whether in their home countries or in DP camps, and this topic is well covered in the literature.32 Analyses differ, however, in terms of whether one should celebrate or condemn UNRRA’s overall record. The more optimistic evaluations of UNRRA highlight its tangible achievements in terms of meeting people’s immediate needs; the very fact that people were helped is evidence that international cooperation could be effective. Critical assessments stress instead that aid distribution was simply inadequate and that the whole program was marred by financial waste, shocking levels of bureaucratic inefficiency, inequality, and unfairness. Critics also describe UNRRA as a profoundly flawed example of a postwar internationalism that tried but ultimately failed to reorganize the world in ways that would minimize the potential for new outbreaks of conflict.33 UNRRA did not generate the conditions needed for long-term multilateral cooperation, collective security, peace, or prosperity. Perhaps the goals were just too ambitious. Or perhaps this was because UNRRA was (to borrow a word from scholar Jessica Reinisch) “reluctant” in its practice of internationalism. UNRRA continued to work in and through a nationalist framework, and national interests, both those of its strongest member states and those of the receiving nations, determined its vocabulary, terms of cooperation, methods, and scope.34 This tension between nationalist imperatives and internationalism has formed one of the most important themes in the literature on UNRRA.35 At the same time, this literature has itself expanded in recent years to emphasize a diversity of priorities, voices, and practices, even within a single period.36 As we will see, UNRRA was far from the only humanitarian actor with an internationalist focus, even if it was the biggest, loudest, and best known.
UNRRA’s Poland Program
UNRRA has a complicated place in Polish historiography because UNRRA had a delicate relationship with Poland and with other states that were becoming part of the Soviet orbit during the 1945 to 1947 period. Not surprisingly, the first monograph on UNRRA in Poland appeared not during the long years of the Polish People’s Republic (1952–1989) but well after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, in 2018; this was Józef Łaptos’s Humanitaryzm i polityka (Humanitarianism and Politics).37 This is the most comprehensive book on the subject of UNRRA in Poland. Łaptos outlines the specific agreements, practices, problems, and successes that the program encountered throughout its relatively short life, and he also includes a detailed analysis of the aid given to DPs of Polish origin. Notably, Łaptos dedicates a few pages to the Heifer Project’s work in Poland; this is the only discussion, however brief, of the Heifer Project in Polish scholarship.38 Overall, Łaptos’s approach to UNRRA is to see the organization first and foremost as part of the national history of Poland, and by extension of other recipient countries. Jacek Sawicki’s Misja UNRRA w Polsce: Raport zamknięcia (1945–1949) (The UNRRA Mission in Poland: Closing Report) appeared just a year before Łaptos’s book, and it has similar aims: to show how UNRRA operated in Poland specifically. Rather than a monograph, however, Sawicki’s book is an annotation of a Polish summative report produced in 1949/50 that reflects on the organization’s tenure in Poland.39
In treating UNRRA as part of Poland’s national history, both Sawicki and Łaptos try to understand how UNRRA shaped Polish postwar reconstruction. Perhaps it is this very narrow national focus that makes each of these authors more sympathetic to UNRRA than those works that focus mainly on the less concrete internationalist ambitions that UNRRA had. Sawicki and Łaptos argue that despite its problems, both at the overall administrative level and on the ground in Poland, UNRRA’s Poland program was effective. People loved and appreciated “Auntie UNRRA” and even decades later recalled her gifts with gratitude and warmth.40 As Łaptos argues in his book, UNRRA allowed Poles to regain their dignity while it provided them with basic life necessities. This recognition of UNRRA’s ability to deliver real everyday assistance is different from evaluating the institution as a whole, as an international body with goals beyond the provision of humanitarian aid to individuals and groups within one specific context.
Even though Poland received more aid than other European countries, according to George Woodbridge (UNRRA’s official historian), this was still only a fraction of what the country actually deserved or needed; the scale of the destruction was that enormous. UNRRA aid in its various forms amounted to 22 percent of Poland’s gross domestic product in 1946, which was the peak year of aid delivery.41 Ira Hirschmann, friend and political ally of Fiorello La Guardia, calculated that Poland’s total wartime losses were the equivalent of $50 billion.42 Almost $200 million of Poland’s total allocation went toward food alone, with the remaining amounts distributed across various other categories of essential goods, from farm machinery and tools for infrastructure repair to clothing and medicine.43 Approximately $76 million went toward “agricultural rehabilitation,” and this amount included the animal shipments.44 Most importantly for our purposes, and as stated earlier, of the 360 live-aid shipments that UNRRA made during its tenure, almost half went to Poland alone. Eight of these came in 1945, 153 in 1946 (again, the peak year of aid delivery), and 16 arrived in 1947 when UNRRA was fulfilling previously made commitments but was not organizing new deliveries.45
Initial estimates of the size of aid required by each country, Poland included, were determined on the basis of perceived victimization levels and were calculated at the First Council Sessions of the United Nations, which were held in Washington during the war. Specific planning for country operations in Europe was done at the European Regional Office located in London. Then, in July 1945, an UNRRA delegation arrived in Poland to assess the country’s needs more directly. Each aid recipient country ultimately signed an agreement with UNRRA that outlined the amount, terms, and conditions of aid; Poland signed its agreement on September 19, 1945, even though initial UNRRA aid had already been delivered to Poland that spring.46
Poland was particularly important to UNRRA, and especially to UNRRA’s American backers, from a political and strategic perspective. Indeed, the creation of an independent Poland after the First World War was in some ways at the center of the new postimperial order. In large part because of its location between the Soviet Union and Germany, Poland’s stability was crucial for European stability generally. But already by the summer of 1944, it was clear that Poland’s emerging postwar political situation was volatile and complex and that the Soviet Union would exercise a greater or lesser degree of control over Poland and the other countries in eastern Europe that, as we now know, would go on to form the Soviet Bloc.
Though the London-based Polish government-in-exile was involved in the initial planning discussions with the United Nations, from July 1944 the existence of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, or the Lublin Committee, gradually and ultimately completely stripped the London government of its authority. The Lublin Committee, formed by Polish Communists and supported by Moscow, made it clear that it, and not the government-in-exile, would play the lead role in administering the liberated territories in Poland; it competed actively (if not fairly) with the Polish government-in-exile for international recognition and internal public support. The Lublin Committee became the provisional government of Poland from January 1945. Largely to appease western powers, in June the provisional government transformed itself into the Provisional Government of National Unity, a coalition between the Polish Workers’ Party (the Communists) and the Polish People’s Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe), which had been reestablished by the former prime minister of the London government-in-exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk. Throughout 1945 and 1946, the Communists neutralized and marginalized the Polish People’s Party and all other would-be opposition before orchestrating the victory of the Democratic Bloc (Blok Demokratyczny), a body that the Communists controlled, in the January 1947 elections. The year 1947 thus marks the date of the Communist takeover of Poland.
For the most part, UNRRA operated in Poland during this chaotic and complicated period when the establishment of Communist rule was still in the making instead of firmly settled. The context required walking a fine line between the Communists and the non-Communists. This was especially important given UNRRA’s imperative to maintain neutrality; neutrality, and respecting countries’ chosen political paths, formed an important if imperfect guiding principle in all UNRRA work, in Poland and elsewhere.47 And yet despite the starkly contrasting views on the postwar order during this period, there was agreement by all sides that Poland ought to receive a great deal of UNRRA aid.
The UNRRA Mission to Poland was headquartered at 35 Hoża Street in Warsaw. It was not until 1946 that Polish authorities allowed regional UNRRA offices to be established as well; these had not been part of the initial agreement made between the Lublin government and UNRRA in 1945. Regional offices were set up in January 1946 in Katowice, Kraków, Łódź, Poznań, Gdynia, and Warsaw; a little later, in September, an additional regional office was established in Szczecin, a formerly German city in Poland’s new western Baltic region. Together, these offices ostensibly facilitated more efficient aid distribution throughout the country.48 Like many other organizations, however, UNRRA’s Poland operation remained understaffed throughout its short life, as did UNRRA as a whole.49
The first UNRRA director general, Herbert Lehman, had appointed the Soviet ambassador Mikhail A. Menshikov to act as chief of UNRRA’s Temporary Delegation to Poland from March 1945. Menshikov succeeded Dr. John P. Gregg, who resigned as delegation head shortly after his appointment and before even setting foot in Poland. The Communists had refused to grant Gregg a visa and favored Menshikov for the position of delegation head. Already here the delicate political situation in eastern Europe, especially the emerging Soviet dominance in the region, shaped how UNRRA operated, and this would remain a factor throughout UNRRA’s existence. It was Menshikov who negotiated the formal agreement between Poland’s provisional government and UNRRA, and it was Menshikov who outlined the country’s specific relief needs. The first UNRRA delegates, including Menshikov, arrived in Poland in July 1945.50
Menshikov headed UNRRA’s Poland delegation for just a short time, until September 1945, at which point he was replaced by the Canadian Brigadier Charles M. “Bud” Drury as mission head.51 Menshikov was unpopular with Polish Americans, who were quickly becoming critical of the American government and of UNRRA for giving in to Soviet influence in eastern Europe so easily.52 By this point, in the fall of 1945, it was even clearer than it had been just a few months earlier that the Soviets would play an important role in Poland for the long term. Drury took up his duties not long after the first UNRRA shipment arrived in Poland via the Baltic route in the fall of 1945 (rather than via a slower overland route, which was how the very first deliveries had made their way into the country in the spring). Drury was the first Canadian in the role of UNRRA mission head, and he would stay in this position until February 1947 when the American Donald R. Sabin took over; Sabin was in turn quickly replaced by M. E. Hays as acting chief of mission in May 1947. The Poland mission closed shortly after.
Drury, who would later become a Cabinet minister in the Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in Canada, was a pragmatic leader during the longest and most critical phase of UNRRA’s tenure in Poland.53 Drury got on well with the Polish Communist authorities (which emerged, not surprisingly, as a source of worry for some Poles and Americans). Drury was also evidently very moved by the extent of Poland’s wartime suffering. In a letter to the prime minister of the Provisional Government of National Unity, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, Drury reassured the prime minister of UNRRA’s sympathy for the unique scale of Poland’s disaster and of its determined commitment to Polish rebuilding.54
There was in fact much to do. It was Poland that had served as the first battleground of the war, and the country had suffered a particularly long and brutal German occupation from 1939 until 1945. Many of its cities had been ruined, meaning that infrastructure, communication, distribution, and transport networks—road, rail, and waterway—had been destroyed too. Factories had been stripped and wrecked. Postwar Poland had few goods to export, even though the country had been a major exporter of agricultural and forestry products in the prewar period, and as a result the country had no foreign currency with which to purchase essentials. While the revived postwar Poland lost land in the east to the Soviet Union, it gained territories (and with them substantial coal reserves) in the west as a form of compensation.55 Coal production was essential to industrial development, and yet in the very early postwar era this potential could not be realized easily, as so many other problems needed to be solved first. By 1946 the situation improved such that Poland even contributed tens of thousands of tons of coal to UNRRA, which UNRRA in turn distributed to Yugoslavia (and a much smaller amount to Austria).56
And of course there were the demographic effects of the war: six million Polish citizens had been killed, and of this number, approximately three million had been Jews murdered in the Holocaust. This had many devastating effects. The loss of such a substantial portion of the population was also related to postwar labor shortages. Yet wages nevertheless remained low and were generally insufficient to allow many people to purchase much of anything on the open market.57
Agricultural circumstances in the new Poland were especially dire. The majority of Poland’s population before the war had depended on agriculture for its livelihood. In the early postwar period, agricultural capacity was severely compromised.58 One-sixth of all farms had been destroyed, meaning that farmers were not in a position to restart large-scale agricultural production.59 In 1945 Poland’s people were threatened with starvation.60 Unexploded mines on agricultural fields remained a real threat in many areas, and in other places weeds had taken over planting fields. Agricultural machinery, primitive though some of it had been before the war, was either ruined or confiscated, especially in the areas around Warsaw, in the northeastern provinces of the Mazury region, in Białystok, and in eastern Pomerania.61 The destruction was caused by wartime military engagements, to be sure, but also by the movement of enormous columns of Soviet troops—and the cattle, horses, and sheep that they had with them—en route to the USSR in the weeks immediately after the war had ended. This too resulted in the destruction of pasture lands, planting fields, trees, fruit orchards, and agricultural infrastructure. As they moved through Poland, the Soviets seized additional animals and hay reserves as well.62 Seeds used to plant private vegetable gardens and to prepare pastures that in the next year would feed livestock were scarce, and so were the fertilizers, both natural and artificial, that were crucial to successful mass plantings.63 Moreover, planting timelines on fields did not always line up well with people’s return to their homes or their arrival at new homes, thereby compromising agricultural production in the short term further still. Building material for homes and barns was in scarce supply and yet was desperately needed.64
Livestock and draft animals (meaning animals that were strong enough to move heavy objects and to function, essentially, as tractors) had been killed in large numbers. A majority of the country’s prewar horse and cattle population was gone, and the animals that were left were often in poor health and not fit for work or for breeding. There was a shortage of veterinarians too; only about a third of Poland’s three thousand prewar veterinarians were in a position to practice their professions in the immediate postwar period. And yet without veterinarians, livestock diseases and agricultural renewal would be compromised further still.65
Physically, socially, and emotionally, the population was exhausted, gutted, and ruined. Millions of Poles had been in Germany as forced labor during the war and now needed to be repatriated and reincorporated into the new Poland. Others had been in various camps and, like the forced laborers, were awaiting reintegration or, indeed, emigration. Then there was the challenge of incorporating—psychologically as well as logistically—ethnic Poles from the eastern regions into other parts of the country, especially into the newly acquired and recently depopulated German territories. At the most fundamental level, early postwar Poland was forced to confront the “trauma of war”: the psychological and social experiences of loss and destruction, and the lingering death all around.66 Against this backdrop, too, was the raging civil war between Communists and non-Communists and, ultimately, between competing visions of the postwar future.
Food, Animals, and Security in the Postwar International Order
Undeniably, Poland needed many forms of aid very quickly, but the most pressing need was food, as the possibility of starvation, and the diseases that accompanied it, was a persistent concern for millions of people. As Marcin Zaremba has argued, fear of starvation was one of the most profound collective emotions of the postwar period.67 Addressing immediate food shortages would save lives in the short term, to be sure. In the longer term, and in keeping, again, with the three Rs, UNRRA tried to go beyond only providing for people’s immediate needs by establishing the bases for long-term food security in Poland. This two-pronged approach, as an UNRRA policy document stated, would “enable the liberated countries to stand on their feet again and to resume their normal production and trading function in the world economic structure.”68
The provision of food aid in the aftermath of war was not of course unexpected or new, just as the recognition of hunger as a political problem predated UNRRA. The makers of the post–World War II order were very conscious of lessons learned earlier in the century when both wartime and postwar food crises in Europe had played an important role in shaping political outcomes.69 The British naval blockade of Germany during the First World War was tied to waning support for the war effort in the Kaiserreich, for example, and, similarly, Austria’s wartime and post–World War I “hunger catastrophe” (Hungerkatastrophe) was recognized as one of many factors in the Habsburg Empire’s collapse.70 There was a belief in the period after World War I that continued hunger throughout the fragile successor states in the east European region chipped away at political and social stability, and that programs to feed the hungry therefore had to move beyond providing basic sustenance. Aid programs were at least in part concerned with protecting “western values” and saving central and western Europe from the perceived threat that loomed just beyond the eastern borders of the region in Bolshevik Russia.71
In the period after the First World War, delivery of food aid to central and eastern Europe, and also to Russia, was provided by many small private and religious charities like, for example, the American Red Cross, the Polish Grey Samaritans, the American Polish Relief Expedition, and the American Friends Service Committee. Perhaps the most interesting of these was a group established by German Americans from South Dakota and called the American Dairy Cattle Company. In 1920 and 1921, this small relief program facilitated the delivery of over two thousand dairy cattle to Germany, America’s erstwhile enemy in World War I.72
The greatest contributor of aid in the region after the First World War was the American Relief Administration (ARA) under Herbert Hoover. The ARA was formed by the United States government in 1919, and the American government also funded it. The ARA worked with several private charitable organizations to deliver and distribute many million tons of food to prevent starvation in Europe, and especially in hard-hit eastern Europe, Poland included.73 From 1921 the ARA also worked in Bolshevik Russia, which was experiencing a famine in the context of an already brutal and disruptive revolution and civil war. During this period the so-called soup-kitchen model of hunger relief—emergency communal feeding at designated sites set up and supervised by international staff—predominated.74
The ARA fed millions of people. In total the ARA distributed four million tons of food and other basic goods across Europe. Well over a million children were fed by the ARA in post–World War I Poland every day.75 In addition, the very existence of this organization reinforced an understanding of food’s important place in the political realm and its potential to shape outcomes locally as well as at the international level; food, clearly, had the potential to be weaponized to pursue specific political goals. Hunger (and the diseases that inevitably accompanied starvation and malnourishment) was interwoven with broader security concerns for east-central Europe and ultimately for western Europe too. This is reflected in one of the underlying purposes of the ARA food aid program: to stop the spread of Bolshevism. Hoover’s ARA reflected a belief that food would “win the postwar” by preventing the rise of extreme political movements.76 Hoover—who had been born into a devout Quaker family and who, of course, went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States in 1929—believed that abundance would lead to stability and security and that its lack would ultimately threaten not just Europe but America too. He also believed that the ARA would give America the chance to style itself a moral leader in the world.77
These aspirations were not entirely different after the Second World War, and indeed the continuities in relief efforts after both conflicts are important. Hunger anywhere was potentially threatening. As UNRRA Director General Lehman said, “If these countries fall prey to famine and pestilence, there can be no security for any of us. Our responsibility is clear. We of the United Nations who have suffered least must take steps now to provide out of our resources the means to meet this desperate crisis. This requires supplies. Kind expression will not fill empty stomachs. You can’t avert starvation without food.”78
Postwar food aid policies were shaped, to be sure, by concerns about regional and global security and about politics and the economy. But they also reflected a shift in thinking that incorporated the new idea of “fundamental human rights.”79 Food was emerging as one of these fundamental rights. This was evident in postwar planning from the beginning. In his January 6, 1941, address to Congress, President Roosevelt outlined the Four Freedoms at stake in the war: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear of aggression. Roosevelt defined “freedom from want” ambitiously as an “economic understanding which will secure for every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.”80 Adequate food availability, which depended on stable agricultural production, was crucial to this. In short, as one scholar has stated, “The construction of a postwar international order began with food.”81
By the Second World War, food policies reflected increasingly nuanced understandings of the relationship between food, individual bodily health, and broader national health. Nutritional science had come into its own as a field of inquiry by at least the 1930s, and during the earliest years of the war nutritional science research was used to calculate food needs for both armed forces and civilians. In 1941 the American Food and Nutrition Board established the Recommended Daily Allowances precisely for this reason: to provide reliable and standard measures of nutritional value that would guide food policies.82 The calorie—a measure of the energy content of food—was also part of this reshaping of food policies at the time.83 The calorie “reduced food to a single number” and, significantly, made comparing foods possible, even across regions and time periods. This in turn made planning—by government, industry, or charities and other aid organizations—possible and intelligible.84
At mid-century nutritional science was thus showing how different vitamins, minerals, proteins, and acids worked on the development of the body and the mind; not all food was “the right kind” of food, and some foods were simply better than others. Food had become so much more than an uncomplicated fuel for the body.85 This in turn had implications for the related field of “hunger studies.”86 While starvation was problematic in obvious ways, substandard nutrition was increasingly understood as a concern as well. In short, both quantity and quality of food were important, so it was relevant to talk about undernourishment as well as malnourishment (a “qualitative nutritional deficiency”).87 And if food quality mattered in explanations of hunger and in assessments of its causes—if context and environment were significant—then it also mattered in proposals for its eradication. Perhaps the idea of “dietary determinism” (that “man is what he eats”) could offer a way forward. Once hunger was understood as a biochemical condition caused by low-quality food or inadequate quantities of nutritious food, then it became a problem with a solution.88
All of this justified a robust international relief system that, using supposedly objective criteria and scientific data, formulated food policies aimed simultaneously at eradicating hunger and contributing to the pursuit of postwar security. The joint Anglo-American Atlantic Charter from August 12, 1941, had pledged American support for the war in Europe (though of course the United States did not enter the war until December of that year) while it also looked ahead with optimism to a postwar future where the conditions for stability, economic prosperity, and satiety would be secured for everyone. In this the Atlantic Charter echoed Roosevelt’s enumeration earlier that year of the Four Freedoms, the basic rights owed to all human beings.89 At any rate, “freedom from want” was already familiar language in the United States from the New Deal era and its concerns about fundamental rights and security. When “freedom from want” was used by Roosevelt in 1941, it subtly prepared the nation for military involvement in the war; freedom from want would become one of the Allied war aims.90 The meaning of “freedom from want” is perhaps best evoked in the well-known Norman Rockwell painting that shows an American family seated around a dinner table. The turkey that will form the main part of the meal that evening is at the very center of the painting. The caption reads, “OURS . . . to fight for. FREEDOM FROM WANT.”91 In 1943, the year the image was published in the American press, few Europeans could have imagined the luxury of a turkey dinner. Neither could they expect to eat this way in the first postwar years.92
Winning the peace in the aftermath of the Second World War depended, as it did in the aftermath of the First World War, on food.93 Given a choice, people would gravitate toward the political regime that offered food security. As Roosevelt stated, “A man in need is not a free man . . . people who are hungry and out of jobs are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”94 General Lucius Clay, the American occupation governor in Germany, similarly warned that a failure to understand this simple point would “pave the way to a Communist Europe.”95 At play were long-held stereotypes about the need to protect western Europe from the “contagion”—political, social, and sometimes even “racial”—that originated in the east. The narrator in the opening sequence of Canadian director Stuart Legg’s timely film, Food: Secret of the Peace (1945), reinforces this point too: “The political stability of Europe and therefore of the world,” the narrator says, “depends on food.”96
That immediate food needs had to be met in order to avert imminent starvation, with its related political implications, was clear. Meeting these needs started with the delivery of millions of tons of food that could be consumed as soon as it arrived. UNRRA’s “relief geography” was predictable and built on familiar assumptions; food aid helped “us” as much as it helped “them.”97 What had changed was the possibility—or the imperative—to do more and to help countries achieve longer-term food security. Reaching this goal depended largely on the ability to rebuild agriculture in what had been primarily agriculturally based societies in eastern Europe, Poland included, before the war. And horses and cattle were in turn crucially important to rebuilding agricultural capacity.
Prewar Poland’s agricultural lands had been dominated by small peasant farms; almost all of them were under fifty hectares, and about a quarter were under two hectares. This was a general pattern across the central and east European region.98 Typically, these farms depended on horse draft power rather than on mechanical cultivation. They also relied on farmyard manure, mainly from cattle, to fertilize agricultural lands and to maintain soil fertility, but without livestock there was no fertilizer for crops; artificial fertilizers were both expensive and difficult to acquire. The lack of adequate fertilization for the whole of the occupation period compromised soil fertility further still and resulted in sluggish agricultural production that, at the extreme, threatened the population with starvation. As the new food science was showing, both malnourishment (inferior nutrients) and undernourishment (too few nutrients) constituted troubling states of hunger.99 This would lead to an inability to fight disease and infections across the country and perhaps beyond.100
Clearly, then, already during the war the Allies understood how important food, agriculture, and nutrition policies would be to a postwar economic, social, and political reconstruction agenda; food scarcity was threatening in the broadest sense, and world leaders therefore needed to tackle this problem together.101 Important and initial steps toward developing a concrete food policy for the postwar period were taken by representatives from countries meeting for a United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture in Hot Springs, Virginia, from May 18 to June 3, 1943. The Hot Springs Resolution adopted at the conference committed to the idea that “freedom from want of food” could and should be achieved, and that doing so would take unprecedented international cooperation of precisely the kind that the developing United Nations promised.102 It would also take an extraordinary commitment by all countries involved to fostering research into nutrition and to promoting education about the best nutritional practices.103
The Hot Springs Resolution was not uncontroversial, however. Some members of the British and American governments feared what this commitment to providing food for “everyone” would do to the global economy, particularly if it became the responsibility of an independent organization to regulate food production, food prices, and food distribution; this looked like a potentially dangerous intrusion on governments’ power while it also threatened to disrupt a system of global free trade and jeopardized plans for postwar reconstruction in the US and Britain in particular.104 Nevertheless, the resolution had traction.
On the heels of the Hot Springs conference, on July 28, 1943, a young Pole named Jan Kozielewski, better known as Jan Karski, met with President Roosevelt at the White House. Karski had been working with the Polish underground and had been sent by Poland’s government-in-exile, headquartered in London, to deliver a report to the American president about the extent of the Third Reich’s brutal policies in occupied Poland. Karski’s mission was also to relay news of Soviet maneuvering in Polish territories, to outline the activities of the Polish resistance as it tried to position itself against Soviet intrusion, and to rally American support for the Polish government-in-exile against the Soviets.105 Roosevelt asked Karski a number of direct questions during the meeting, and Karski was given time to answer as he saw fit. It was during this meeting that Karski summarized the particularly dire situation for Polish Jews specifically, as is well known.
But Roosevelt also asked Karski two questions that seemed to have little to do with the human tragedies unfolding on what had been Polish territory. The first was whether Poland had in fact been a primarily agricultural nation before the war. Karski confirmed this. Roosevelt then asked Karski to further verify that the Germans had confiscated Poland’s horses as part of their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Karski again confirmed the president’s understanding. Karski recorded the details of this meeting with the American president in notes that he made just a week later.106 In addition, Karski described details from the meeting during an interview in the late 1970s with the French director Claude Lanzmann for Lanzmann’s monumental documentary Shoah; it is as a result of this interview in particular that the conversation between Karski and the president is familiar to so many.107 What has struck some critics about the exchange is that Roosevelt seemed strangely preoccupied with such a seemingly minor issue—agriculture and the fate of Poland’s horses—and was not overtly sympathetic to Poland and the Polish people generally or to the fate of Polish Jews specifically. In the end, Roosevelt looked as though he was more concerned about animals and wheat than the genocide of the Jews. Yet by the summer of 1943, President Roosevelt had known about the destruction of the Jews for quite some time, and so what Karski was saying on this subject was not exactly new.108
There is another way to understand Roosevelt’s questions and preoccupations. Roosevelt’s inquiries about agriculture and horses should be read in this broader context of relief planning for the postwar period and of agriculture’s place in those plans. It was Roosevelt who had called the Hot Springs conference just a couple of months before this meeting with Karski happened. Roosevelt, moreover, was known to be an enthusiastic supporter of a “united nations” approach to solving problems.109 Here was Roosevelt, seated across from Karski, mentally calculating Polish postwar agricultural needs, including the need for animal labor. Roosevelt seemed to understand at this moment what UNRRA would ultimately reflect through its aid program: that in addition to immediate food relief UNRRA needed to provide the means of achieving agricultural rehabilitation, and draft animals were crucial for reaching this objective. In its policy documents, UNRRA repeated this sentiment often: “The greatest harm to agriculture at the present moment is the loss of draught power which depends almost entirely on horses.”110
Various UNRRA reports reflected on and provided details about different aspects of Poland’s agricultural crisis. According to one report, 70 percent of the horses that had existed in Poland in 1939 west of the Curzon Line, which more or less followed the border with the Soviet Union, were gone after the war. And there were virtually no horses left in the territories newly acquired from Germany.111 In total, UNRRA estimated that Poland west of the Curzon Line had lost over 2,500,000 horses either in battle, because of wider destruction caused by the war, or as a result of the requisitioning of animals by enemy armies. According to the Polish Ministry of Agriculture, approximately one million farms in Poland did not have a single horse.112 The effects of this state of affairs on agriculture were bound to be devastating; the animals’ presence or absence would directly affect economic development and security at the local level and, by extension, the regional and global ones too.113
UNRRA estimated that the delivery of one hundred thousand horses to Poland as part of its aid package would produce another hundred thousand horses in three years. Of these a little more than one third, or approximately thirty-eight thousand, would be old enough to work as draft animals.114 Agricultural experts also estimated that, with the injection of adequate breeding stock in 1945, it would still take Poland twenty years to replace its horse population.115 Acting immediately on addressing livestock shortages was necessary for the agricultural rehabilitation that formed such an important component of UNRRA goals.
The situation with cattle was also dire: UNRRA’s estimates were that Poland had lost 60 percent of its prewar cattle and that it would take ten years to replace its cattle population.116 Seven hundred thousand farms did not have even a single cow (a female of the bovine species who has produced at least one calf) and therefore no ready access to milk.117 Yet as Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the leader of the Polish People’s Party after the war who served as deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture, said in a 1946 speech, cows were “of the utmost importance to peasant life, and their loss meant ruin.” He added that “the only way to increased wealth, better living conditions, and an improved level of nutrition” was to restock cattle herds in Poland.118
Reestablishing breeding programs and creating sustainable herds of both cattle and horses were clearly important for creating the conditions for socioeconomic stability in the short term and for building longer-term sustainability.119 Animals would do in the postwar period what it had long been established that certain animal species were good at doing: creating the bases for thriving, settled, and stable communities.120 As Dr. A. G. Wilder, the chief veterinarian of the UNRRA mission to Poland, said, “All the food in the world could be sent here and it would still only be a temporary measure, it would be eaten and gone. But livestock of any description sent to Poland is a foundation upon which to build a food producing machine which will stay here forever.” For Wilder, moreover, the animals delivered after the war were destined to become “permanent living monuments” to the aid UNRRA had given Poland.121 The animals offered “perpetual relief.”122
UNRRA was not the only postwar international body to reflect these understandings of the importance of animals and agriculture to broader rehabilitation goals. While the wartime Hot Springs conference informed approaches to food and food relief after the war, it also laid the foundation for the creation in October 1945 of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).123 The FAO was a United Nations specialized agency that was separate from UNRRA while at the same time benefiting from UNRRA’s work. It later received some of UNRRA’s leftover funds, resources, and staff. The FAO was tasked with bringing together the latest information about food, agriculture, nutrition, economics, and trade in order to ensure an adequate and nutritious food supply for all of the world’s people.124 Unlike UNRRA’s goals and mandate, which were short-lived and limited mainly to those countries that had been occupied by the enemy in the war, the goal of the FAO was more ambitious and broader: to eliminate hunger, to guarantee food security for all the world’s people, and to improve nutritional standards by modernizing and improving agriculture.125
The commitment to food as a right “for everyone” was evident in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, in the Hot Springs conference, in the establishment of the FAO, and of course in UNRRA. By this time, in the early postwar period, the “inhumanity of hunger” and “the right to eat”—to use phrases from Alice Weinreb’s work on hunger in modern Germany—had become universally accepted positions, at least in theory. The starving bodies that had flashed across newspapers and film reels as concentration camps were liberated shocked the world and in turn reinforced and empowered the evolving commitment to food as a global human right: starving bodies had exposed what Weinreb refers to as a “violation of the ‘rights’ of the sufferer.” This broader principle was ultimately included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In Article 25 the declaration recognized the right of every individual to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”126
At the same time that these ideas were circulating in the halls of international organizations and were on the minds of world leaders, the Brethren Service Committee was also reflecting on food and food relief at both the local and international levels. Ultimately, it was the Brethren Service Committee that provided the essential logistical support for UNRRA’s agriculture program—a key component of which was the delivery of horses and cattle. Through the Heifer Project, the Brethren Service Committee also contributed its own small number of heifers to European rehabilitation. It is to the Brethren Service Committee that we now turn.