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ABSTRACT
In July 1951, the American Midwest experienced one of its worst floods in its history up to that point, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. While ostensibly a national issue, the natural disaster also drew the attention of hundreds of German citizens who donated to the relief effort. In the letters accompanying their donations, these Germans emphasized that they wanted to submit a token of their gratitude to the American people and begin to pay back a fraction of what they felt they owed for American humanitarian assistance in the immediate postwar era. Though the American government did not solicit these donations, it saw value in help publicising the donations and their letters. Locked in a propaganda battle with the Soviet Union, American authorities promoted these donations not only as evidence of German-American friendship, but also as evidence that their humanitarian policy at the dawn of the Cold War had achieved significant cultural, political, and diplomatic goals throughout Germany.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge and thank Petra Goedde, Richard Immerman, Alan McPherson, the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy and the reviewers and editors of Cold War History for making this research possible.
Notes
1 “Kansas City Hit by Worst Flood in Half Century,” New York Herald Tribune, 14 July 1951, 1-2; Christine A. Klein and Sandra B. Zellmer, Mississippi River Tragedies: A Century of Unnatural Disaster (New York: New York University Press, 2014) 92-4; Kansas-Missouri Floods of June-July 1951 (Kansas City: Hydrologic Services Division, 1952), 1, 6.
2 “All Citizens Cooperate to Aid in Nation’s Biggest Flood,” The Plaindealer, 20 July 1951, 1; “Red Cross Flood Aid Group Will Push Funds Please,” Los Angeles Times, 24 July 1951, A1, 8; “Truman Asks Flood Aid of 400 Millions,” The Minneapolis Star, 21 August 1951, 18.
3 In a broader environmental history of the Missouri River in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Amahia Mallea argued that the reconstruction in the flood’s aftermath coincided with an “era of ‘slum clearance’ … urban decline, and suburban segregation,” therefore drastically altering the history of the city in the second half of the twentieth century. Amahia Mallea, A River in the City of Fountains (University Press of Kansas, 2018), 208-10.
4 The Kansas flood was not the last flood disaster with Cold War implications for American officials. Months later, in December 1951, American officials pondered whether the U.S. “should extend assistance in every way possible” to assist with floods in Italy that had been wreaking havoc since early November, because such relief had important implications “for Italian defense contribution” to Europe. Less than three years later, the 1954 flooding of the Danube and Elbe Rivers in central Europe held significant Cold War implications, because the victims and relief effort (by both state and non-state actors) spanned both sides of the Iron Curtain. Rome to Frankfurt, 6 December 1951, Box 133, Folder: Calamities, Disasters, Relief Measures, Gift Packages – July-Dec 1951, Security-Segregated Records, 1949-1952, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as NARA); Julia Irwin, “Raging Rivers and Propaganda Weevils: Transnational Disaster Relief, Cold War Politics, and the 1954 Danube and Elbe Floods,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 5 (2016), 893.
5 HICOG Press Release no. 767, 6 September 1951, Record Group 466, Security-Segregated General Records, 1949-1952, Box 132, Folder 571: Kansas Flood Relief General + Al (folder hereafter cited as 132/571), NARA.
6 Letters from America, c. 1951, Record Group 59, Box 8, Folder: Common Council For American Unity (3), Subject Files, 1948-1953, NARA.
7 Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’ Life, 17 February 1941, 61-5. Of course, the agency of local actors and states limited the ability of each superpower to influence political, cultural, and economic systems among their own allies, let alone among Third World or unaligned countries. For examples, see Alexander Stephen, The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Democracy, and Anti-Americanism After 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 23-86.
8 Stephen R. Porter, Benevolent Empire: U. S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 1.
9 Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. See also Daniel Roger Maul, ‘The Rise of a Humanitarian Superpower: American NGOs and International Relief, 1917–1945,’ in M.B. Jeronimo and J.P. Monteiro, (eds), Internationalism, Imperialism, and the Formation of the Contemporary World, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 129. While foreign aid has certainly served American interests abroad by helping to expand its influence and global presence, historians have also examined the ways in which recipient nations could also use the relationship to advance their strategic needs. For examples, see Elisabeth Piller, ‘German Child Distress, U.S. Humanitarian Aid, and Revisionist Politics, 1918-1924,”’Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 3 (July 2016), 454-469 and Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Budapest’s Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022), 213-217.
10 Heike Wieters, The NGO CARE and food aid from America, 1945-80: ‘Showered with Kindness’? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 3; Piller, ‘German Child Distress’,467.
11 Porter, Benevolent Empire, 1-3; Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion: Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1939 (Oxford University Press, 2009), 3-5; Maul, ‘The Rise of …, ’ 140; Oliver Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 3; Irwin, Making the World Safe, 11.
12 Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2-6; Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘The Struggle for Germany and the Origins of the Cold War’ German Historical Institute Occasional Paper no. 16, 16-8; Aaron Bobrow-Strain, ‘Making White Bread by the Bomb’s Early Light: Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War,’ Food and Foodways 19, no. 1-2, 74-7.
13 Kaete M. O’Connell, ‘The Taste of Defeat: Food, Peace, and Power in US-Occupied Germany,’ in Heather Merle Benbow and Heather R. Perry (eds), Food, Culture, and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (International Publishing, 2019), 211.
14 Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 13-14.
15 As Elisabeth Piller notes, German diplomats in Weimar Germany had apprehensions about campaigns to solicit and accept American aid due to threats to national dignity. Piller, ‘Despondence, Dependence, and Dignity: On the Dilemmas of Being and Object of International Charity in Western Europe - a Weimar German Case Study,’ Revue européenne d’histoire, (2023), 2-4
16 For scholarly analysis on the asymmetric donor-recipient relationship and the expectations of gratitude associated with foreign aid, see Wieters, NGO CARE and food aid, 4-5, Piller, “Despondence,” 2-3, and Kind-Kovacs, Budapest’s Children, 225-234.
17 HICOG Press Release no. 767, 6 September 1951, 132/571, NARA.
18 Marta Kinst to John J. McCloy, 28 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
19 In 1950, the Office of the High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG) conducted public opinion poll which demonstrated overwhelming support for the CARE organization in the U.S. zone of Germany, with less than four percent having a ‘bad’ opinion of CARE. Further, those polled also believed that this aid was altruistic rather than for American political or economic gain. The German Public Views the CARE Organization, 6 March 1950, Record Group 306, Box 1, Folder: HICOG 7, Research Reports on German Public Opinion, NARA.
20 Extracts from letters on Kansas City Flood Relief Campaign, c. 1951, 132/571, NARA.
21 Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress, A History of West Germany, Vol. 1: From Shadow to Substance, 1945-1963 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 131; For details on the widespread devastation of Germany and the prospects for rebuilding, see Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 15, Bark and Gress, A History of West Germany, 5, 31-2, 47-59, Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33-34, 44, Hans-Josef Wollasch, Humanitäre Auslandshilfe für Deutschland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Reiburg im Breisgau: Deutschen Caritasverband, 1976), 22-7, and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Books, 2005), 104-126
22 Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 109, 117-8.
23 Agreement Between the Military Governor of the United States Zone of Occuation in Germany and Council of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany, 16 May 1947, Record Group 260, Box 28, Folder: Cultural Welfare, General Records, 1947-1950, NARA.
24 Karl-Ludwig Sommer, Humanitäre Auslandshilfe als Brücke zu atlantischer Partnerschaft: CARE, CRALOG, und die Entwicklung der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Staatsarchivs Bremen, 1999), 49-70; Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 121, O’Connell; ‘Taste of Defeat,’ 202, 212; McCleary, Global Compassion, 69-71. Despite the private involvement, CARE and CRALOG were both highly dependent on the logistical and distributive systems created and maintained by the United States army.
25 Ten Million Ambassadors, c. 1951, Record Group 59, Subject Files, 1948-1953, Box 6, Folder: CARE, NARA.
26 For the push for the Western integration of West Germany, including debates over the wisdom of such action, see Bark and Gress, A History of West Germany, 186-230, 272-291, Thomas A. Schwartz, America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 29-33, David Clay Large, Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (University of North Carolina Press: 1996), 31-107, and Granieri, Ronald, The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 6-22.
27 Letters from America, NARA.
28 Michael Krenn, The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy: 1770 to the Present Day (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 69.
29 The Soviet “Peace Offensive”: A Summary for Informational Purposes, July 1950, Record Group 59, Box 11, Folder: The Soviet “Peace Offensive,” Records of Research Projects Regarding Diplomatic Relations, NARA; ‘Cultural Offensive’, The Christian Science Monitor, 7 December 1951.
30 Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 16-7; “Information Policy Guidance Paper,” Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter cited as FRUS), 1950, Volume IV (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980), Document 157.
31 George V. Allen, “The Voice of America,” State Department Bulletin 19, no. 488 (Nov. 1948), 567; Alan L. Heil, The Voice of America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32-3.
32 G. P. Hays to Department of State, 20 November 1947, Record Group 260, Box 304, Folder: Voice of America, Records Relating to the Control of Radio Broadcasting, NARA.
33 The Voice of America, c. 1951, Record Group 306, Box 17, Folder: The Voice of America, 1950-1951, Records Relating to Committees, NARA.
34 How You Can Help the Campaign of Truth, nd, Record Group 59, Box 5, Folder: C – 1948-1952, Campaign of Truth, Subject Files, 1948-1953, NARA. For broader discussion of the US ‘Campaign of Truth’, see Krenn, The History of United States Cultural Diplomacy, 83-4 and Gary D Rawnsley, ‘The Campaign of Truth: A Populist Propaganda’ in Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999), 31-6.
35 Agreement Between the Military Governor of the United States Zone of Occupation in Germany and Council of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany, 16 May 1947, Record Group 260, Box 28, Folder: Cultural Welfare, General Records, 1947-1950, NARA.
36 Ten Million Ambassadors, NARA; Bernard A. Confer to McCloy, 12 September 1951, Record Group 466, Box 133, Folder: Calamities, Disasters, Relief Measures, Gift Packages – July-Dec 1951, Security-Segregated Records, 1949-1952, NARA.
37 Steil, The Marshall Plan, 443.
38 Bark and Gress, A History of West Germany, 213-6.
39 O’Connell, ‘‘Uncle Wiggly Wings”: Children, Chocolates, and the Berlin Airlift,’ Food and Foodways 25, vol. 2 (2017), 142-3, 147-9. As historians have noted, the image of “vulnerable” children served an important function in raising awareness and funding U.S. disaster and war relief throughout the twentieth century, especially after both world wars. See Piller, ‘German Child Distress’, 455, Kind-Kovacs, Budapest’s Children, 2-10, and Goedde, GIs and Germans, 145.
40 ‘Kansas Flood Scene Nightmarish Panorama’, The Edmonton Journal, 14 July 1951; ‘12 Now Dead, Kansas Flood Still Rising’, The Globe and Mail, 13 July 1951; ‘Blazing Oil Adds to U.S. Flood Perils’, The Guardian, 15 July 1951; ‘New Terror in Kansas City Flood’,, South China Morning Post, 16 July 1951.
41 ‘Brennendes Oel flieβt durch Kansas City’, Passauer Neue Presse, 17 July 1951; ‘Blutroter Himmel über Kansas City’, Der Tagesspiegel, 17 July 1951; ‘Riesige Ueberschwemmungen im Mittelwesten der USA’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 July 1951; “In Kansas-City brachen die Dämme,” Neue Zeit, 18 July 1951; ‘Überschwemmungskatastrophe in den USA’, Neues Deutschland, 17 July 1951; ‘800,000 Hektar überschwemmt’, Berliner Zeitung, 18 July 1951. In East Berlin, after initially sympathetic coverage, the newspapers changed their tenor and attempted to use the catastrophe for their own anti-American propaganda purposes by juxtaposing the plight of desolate Midwesterners with the Truman administration’s military spending.
42 Progress Report – July 1951, c. August 1951, Record Group 59, Voice of America Historical Files, Box 9, Folder: Reports, IBD – Monthly 1951, NARA, 15.
43 Paul J.J. Dahmen to McCloy, 15 July 1951, 132/571, NARA; Dahmen to McCloy, 20 January 1952 (1), Record Group 466, Security-Segregated General Records, 1949-1952, Box 133, Folder: Calamities, Disaster, Gift Packages, Relief Measures – 1952, NARA.
44 McCloy to Paul Dahmen, 25 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
45 McCloy to Shepard Stone, 25 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
46 ‘West Zoner Gives 2 Marks For Flood Tot’, The Atlanta Constitution, 29 July 1951, 1D; ‘German Contributes 50c for Kansas City Flood Aid’, New York Herald Tribune, 28 July 1951, 5; ‘Poor Bavarian Gives 2 Marks for Flood Aid’, Nashville Tennessean, 3 August 1951, 2; See also ‘Around the World’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 July 1951, 2; ‘Toys - and Understanding’, Christian Science Monitor, 13 August 1951, 16.
47 Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 1-6.
48 Neue Zeitung, 28/29 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
49 Heinz Windgasse to McCloy, 19 July 1951, 132/571, NARA; Torwest to McCloy, NARA.
50 McCloy to Torwest, 26 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
51 Letter from Karl Schier, 20 August 1951, Record Group 466, Box 133, Folder: Calamities, Disasters, Relief Measures, Gift Packages – July-Dec 1951, Security-Segregated Records, 1949-1952, NARA; Letter from Herbert Scharnberg, 24 August 1951, Record Group 466, Security-Segregated General Records, 1949-1952, Box 133, Folder: Calamities, Disasters, Relief Measures, Gift Packages – July-Dec 1951, Security-Segregated Records, 1949-1952, NARA; Th. Reiners to Editors of the Neue Zeitung, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA.
52 ECA Administrator to Amembassy, Paris, 18 July 1951, Record Group 469, Box 41, Folder: Disasters – Midwest Flood, Subject Files, 1948-1953 (hereafter cited as 41/Disasters), NARA; Foster to HICOG, 27 August 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA.
53 Brussels to Secretary of State, 31 July 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA; Rome to ECA Administrator, 7 August 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA.
54 ECA Administrator to All European Missions, 26 September 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA; ECA Administrator to HICOG, 26 July 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA.
55 ‘German Water Pumps to Aid U.S. Flood Areas’, The Atlanta Constitution, 1 August 1951, 7.
56 Acting ECA Administrator to Amembassy Paris, 3 August 1951, 41/Disaster, NARA.
57 ‘Mayor Thanks Germany for Offered Help’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 August 1951, 5; ‘Tokens of Friendship’, Information Bulletin (September 1951), 35.
58 “German Pumps to be Flown to Kansas for Flood Work,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 August 1951, 8A.
59 ECA Administrator to HICOG, 16 August 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA.
60 “Tokens of Friendship,” 35.
61 Frankfort to ECA Administrator, 10 August 1951, 41/Disasters, NARA.
62 Hans Toussaint to Neue Zeitung, 29 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
63 Neue Zeitung, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA.
64 Willy Köhler to McCloy, 27 July 1951, 132/571, NARA; A.F. Laurer to McCloy, 31 July 1951, 132/571, NARA; Ein Schwarzwälder to McCloy, 2 August 1951, 132/571, NARA. Dahmen himself had been imprisoned, fallen ill, and was expelled from the Soviet-occupied zone.
65 Elizabeth Lovarz to McCloy, 29 July 1951, 132/571, NARA; Fritz Bär to McCloy, 26 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
66 Alexej Bolschakow, 26 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
67 Extracts from letters, NARA; Lovarz to McCloy, NARA; Christof Schiller, The Politics of Welfare State Transformation in Germany: Still a Semi-Sovereign State? (London: Routledge, 2016), 179.
68 Kurt Reuter to Neue Zeitung, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA.
69 Karl Büchler to McCloy, 31 July 1951, 132/571, NARA
70 Johanna Lange to McCloy, 29 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
71 Laurer to McCloy, NARA; Otter Schlepper letter to McCloy, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA; Bär to McCloy, 26 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
72 Berthold Tietz to McCloy, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA; Extracts from letters, NARA; Bär to McCloy, 26 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
73 ‘German Offers P.W. Earnings to U.S. Relief’, New York Herald Tribune, 24 October 1951, 9.
74 Köhler to McCloy, NARA.
75 Torwest to McCloy, NARA; Excerpts from letters, NARA; Kinst to McCloy, NARA.
76 Ein Schwarzwälder to McCloy, NARA
77 Alfred Hanka to McCloy, 1 August 1951, 132/571, NARA
78 ‘Bavarians Raise Funds for Kansas Victims’, Washington Post, 10 November 1951, 1.
79 Occupation, United States Forces European Theater, c. 1946, Record Group 260, Box 384, Folder: Occupation, Records Relating to Allied Control Authority, 1945-1949, NARA; Brian C. Etheridge, Enemies to Allies: Cold War Germany and American Memory (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 65, 112.
80 Lovarz to McCloy, NARA.
81 ‘East German Worker Sends Gift to Victims of Flood’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 16 August 1951.
82 ‘East German Gives Bit for Flood Aid’, The Christian Science Monitor, 16 August 1951, 1; ‘German Offers Flood Aid’, New York Times, 17 August 1951, 24.
83 Name Illegible to McCloy, 30 July 1951, 132/571, NARA.
84 Extracts from letters, NARA.
85 HICOG Office Memorandum, 2 August 1951, 132/571, NARA.
86 Simon Mee, Central Bank Independence and the Legacy of the German Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 98-9, 107-111, 144-7; Bark and Gress, A History of West Germany, 200-7.
87 HICOG Office Memorandum, 2 August 1951, 132/571, NARA; HICOG Office Memorandum, 6 September 1951, 132/571, NARA.
88 Haynes Mahoney to Vaughn Snoderly, 5 September 1951, 132/571, NARA; Disposition of Flood Relief Funds Memorandum, 6 September 1951, 132/571, NARA.
89 HICOG Press Release no. 767, 6 September 1951, 132/571, NARA.
90 “Tokens of Friendship,” Information Bulletin (September 1951), 35.
91 “Germans Donate $129 for Mid-West Flood Aid,” New York Herald Tribune, 7 September 1951, 6.
92 “Information Policy Guidance Paper,” FRUS, Document 157.