REALITIES IN GERMANY
Sta,—I would like to thank you for your valuable article on Hunger in Germany. Unless it is more fully realised that hunger is "at the root of almost all Germany's present ills" our policies are bound to fail. German workers, as you so dearly state, cannot do adequate work nor produce the goods so badly needed to pay for imported food and to induce the farmer to sell rather than to hoard his food. Such goods— one may add—are also a desperate domestic need. At the same_time, you approve the admonitions of Sir Sholto Douglas and General Clay in calling on workers to give up protest strikes, to exert themselves and not to take the efforts of the Allies to feed them for granted. The military. governors did, in fact, deprecate "grumbling and apathy" in rather strong terms. They recommended "the brave acceptance of responsibilities, hard work and courage," and urged German leaders and officials to "face realities."
But is it really the Germans, or the Germans alone, who fail to "face realities "? Whatever their faults, the German people are at any rate famous for hard work and the will to "exert themselves." Why, then, their present unnatural apath j: Clearly it is the result not only of malnutrition, but of frustration and despair. Why add to their bitter- ness? Hundreds of thousands of German workers have been thrown into idleness by Allied action in dismantling their much-needed factories or causing them to close down for lack of the fuel which it was the policy of the Allies to export. In their efforts to help themselves German factory-owners and business men have found themselves up against embargoes at every turn, many of them unintelligible and therefore also unforseeable. Desperately-needed building has been frustrated for lack of the materials which German industry was ready and able to pioduce. The Allies have deprived Germany of her rich granaries in the East, thereby creating an almost insoluble food problem in the West. German soil in the West, however, could now be providing far more food had existing factories for fertilisers, tractors and other agricultural necessities been allowed to function. Output would have been greater, and therefore also the farmers would have been under less temptation to hoard it. Let us all face realities! It is calories and not admonishment that the
German worker requires.—Yours, &c., DOROTHY F. BUXTON. Whingate, Peaslake, nr. Guildford, Surrey.
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