Germany rejects food aid for Poland

On 29 July 1916 the United States ambassador in Berlin, James W. Gerard, forwarded to Washington the reply of the German Foreign Office on relief for the starving population of occupied Poland. The Germans declared that from the outset they had been ready to support the American scheme and to give every guarantee that the imported food would go solely to the local population. Relief could have begun several months earlier on the same principles as in northern France, had it not been for Great Britain, which “adhered to its unfounded and impracticable conditions”. Since the scheme was to end on 1 October, and by then it would no longer be possible to ship any large quantities of food from America, further negotiations were deemed pointless. Berlin added that, thanks to the intensive cultivation of the land in the occupied territories and good harvest prospects, relief would not be needed after 1 October. If the population of Poland and Lithuania suffered until the harvest and later lived in want, the blame lay not with the German government but with Great Britain.

The Hoover and Walcott plan

After the capture of Warsaw in the summer of 1915 the whole of the Kingdom of Poland came under German and Austro-Hungarian occupation. The retreating Russians had destroyed supplies and evacuated the population, and the occupiers requisitioned food. Poles abroad hurried to help. In January 1915 the General Committee for the Relief of War Victims in Poland (PL) was founded in Switzerland, based in Vevey, with Henryk Sienkiewicz as president and Ignacy Jan Paderewski as vice-president. Paderewski went to the United States, where before every concert he spoke about the Polish cause and raised money. At his urging President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed 1 January 1916 a national Polish Relief Day.

Money was not enough, however, when the food had to be brought in through the British blockade. The task was taken up by Herbert Hoover, head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which had been feeding occupied Belgium since 1914, together with Frederic Walcott of the Rockefeller Foundation. On 21 February 1916 the American ambassador in London presented their plan to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. The eastern lands occupied by the Germans had about 15 million inhabitants, of whom 3.5–4 million lived in and around Warsaw, Łódź, Częstochowa, Vilna, Kovno and Biała Podlaska. The American commission was to bring grain, fats and condensed milk for children into these cities, about 40,000 tonnes a month, while the Germans were to supply potatoes, salt and sugar, feed the rest of the country, pay for the imports and provide ships for the voyage to Danzig. The scheme was to last until 1 October, when the new harvest would be enough for the population. The German ambassador, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, gave an assurance on 28 February that food for Poland would not be seized in transit through Germany.

London’s conditions

The British government hesitated. The press and the military demanded the strongest possible economic pressure on Germany, and the experience of Belgium, from which the Germans had taken away local food, aroused distrust. London referred the matter to Russia, since Russian territory was involved. When the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Sazonov, agreed to the scheme, Grey set out the Allies’ conditions on 11 May. Relief was to cover the whole Kingdom of Poland, without division into German and Austro-Hungarian zones, and the export of food from the whole country was to be banned completely. Surpluses from the south, occupied by the Austrians, were to go to the north. The German gendarmerie was not to live off local supplies, the ships were to sail under neutral flags with neutral crews, and neutral inspectors were to have freedom of action throughout Poland. The Central Powers were also to undertake to feed the population of occupied Serbia, Montenegro and Albania.

On 30 May, at a meeting in Berlin attended by Gerard and men of the Rockefeller Foundation, German officials declared that Germany could answer only for the territories it occupied itself, not for the Austrian zone or the Balkans. They also demanded that about 150,000 men of the occupation forces and police be allowed to live on food bought in Poland. On 13 June Berlin formally rejected the British conditions, and Sazonov firmly opposed feeding such large forces from Polish supplies. Grey replied on 15 June that the Allies regarded Poland as a whole and would not allow the question of life and death for its inhabitants to be divided between Germany and Austria, each of which had its own political plans for Poland. At the beginning of July the Foreign Office reproached the Germans for shipping geese and eggs from occupied Poland to the Reich.

Last attempts

On 7 July the American government appealed to all the belligerents for mutual concessions. On 20 July Wilson wrote a personal letter to the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Great Britain and Russia and to the President of France, in which he wrote of millions of innocent people starving to death and offered to mediate in new negotiations. As early as May the Rockefeller Foundation had set aside a million dollars for relief in Poland, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, waiting only for an agreement. On 26 July London put forward a “final proposal”: it would let food through to all the lands occupied by the Central Powers, from Belgium to Albania, if the entire local harvest and stocks were handed over to the population under the control of neutral representatives chosen by the President of the United States. Otherwise, it declared, it would hold Germany and Austria-Hungary responsible for every victim of famine.

The German reply of 29 July formally concerned the appeal of 7 July, but it came after the British proposal had been announced and in practice closed the matter. Each side blamed the other, and the scheme for shipping food from America to the occupied Kingdom, organised on the Belgian model, never came about. The population had to rely on the help of Polish committees, including the one in Vevey, and on whatever the occupiers left it.