The Germans were not starving, yet.

CHAPTER XII The Rhineland Campaign, 1945
On the Move
Shorthanded or not, military government was propelled onto center stage in March 1945. The war would not wait. Training and practice were over and the real occupation was on. The nation that had almost conquered Europe was being brought as low as any of its victims had been. Germany's long-range future, if it had one, was undecided; the immediate future was in the hands of the G-5's and military government detachments, and even they were unsure of what it was to be. For the moment, what they saw most clearly were the approaching shadows of two relentless companions of war, disease and hunger.

The Germans were not starving, yet. In the cities, reduced populations and cellar stocks combined to make the short-term outlook deceptively bright. Searches in the basements of abandoned dwellings regularly turned up small reserves, mostly potatoes and home-canned vegetables. In Germany flour milling was still a local industry, and the mills usually had some unground grain on hand, which could be extended by setting the extraction rate up to 90 percent. Some places had lopsided surpluses. Alzey, in the fertile Rhine plain, had 5,000 excess tons of potatoes but no meat other than horse meat and not much of that. One thing was certain everywhere: the Germans were better off in March 1945 than they were likely to be again any time soon. The Rhineland, like all western Germany, was a food deficit area. Normally, the half of the Rhineland south of the Mosel imported a half million tons of food every day, equivalent to one fifty-car trainload ; but no trains were running, nor was there enough transportation to ensure the movement of local produce. A survey showed sufficient livestock to provide half the minimum monthly meat tonnage; enough chickens to supply one egg per person per month, "provided 300,000 people do not like eggs" ; enough milk to give each child under ten a pint a week; and enough butter to provide each consumer with a half pound a month.

The statistics, however, were less chilling than what the detachments had reported during their march to the Rhine. In the countryside, fields were unplowed and practically no one was at work on the farms. The young men were gone ; the registrations showed that 90 percent of the males were over fifty years old. The foreign workers and prisoners of war who had made up the bulk of the agricultural labor force quit and took to the roads as soon as the front passed. There were too few horses. They, like the men, had been drafted into the Wehrmacht. Finally, thousands of acres of land were mined and too dangerous to work.