Why did Britain starve to death one million German civilians in 1919?

But the war ended at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November 1918! We know this because we celebrate it every Remembrance Day. Not that celebrate is the right word, more like commemorate, with the added wash of mournfulness for those who 'gave their lives' – those recruited or conscripted victims of war who are increasingly portrayed as heroes. Why do I say a "wash of mournfulness"? – because those who actually remember the dead of the First World War, who had real memories about those who lost their lives, are themselves all gone. You cannot remember those you never knew, nor mourn their loss. What is carried out is little better than a collective pageant, a pantomime of mourning, an indulgence in nationalistic and militaristic sentiments.  

But the war did not end at 11.00 on 11/11/18. The fighting on the Western Front Ended. The fighting in Italy ended. The war against the Ottoman Empire had already ended. But Britain's navel campaign against Germany continued until to June 28 1919. 

This came as a surprise to me whist researching for the book. The history I had been taught, and, indeed, the history that is taught in our schools even now, focusses on the end of the war being on 11/11/18. It has become the standard version of our history, repeated in film, television and book after book. There is, however, a darker truth, one which we would prefer not to remember because what happened would now count as a war crime, as a crime against humanity: the deliberate starving to death of upwards to a million German civilians.

It pays to remember that not a single allied soldier's boot had landed on German soil. The German Army, for all the push back it had suffered in the autumn of 1918, still held its ground. It was still a cohesive and effective force. It still occupied much of France and Belgium. It was not defeated. A truth that Hitler was to capitalise on later during his rise to power.

The war on the Western Front was a stalemate. For all of the sacrifices made – there was hardly a street, town or village that had not lost someone in those killing fields – there was no clear victory. It fell to the politicians to deliver to a deeply wounded public the victory the fighting failed to provide. 

In the British Cabinet, the hawks, led by Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for Munitions, argued for the absolute necessity of continuing the navel blockade: Germany needed to be forced to capitulate to every demand the allies might make at the Peace Conference. There was to be no negotiating with them. They were simply to be presented with the terms to agree to.  Churchill continued to hold this position when he became Secretary of State for War in Lloyd George's cabinet following the December 1918 election. The blockade was to ensure that no food supplies reached Germany until after they had signed the Versailles Treaty on 28th June 1919. He was of the opinion that Germany should be crushed to such an extent, if necessary by reducing its population numbers, that it would never again pose a threat. Starvation contributed to doing this. Georges Clemenceau, the French President at the time, even expressed the opinion that there were twenty million Germans to many (Patrick J Buchanan, 2008) 

There is another matter which calls for very prompt settlement. It is the last to which I shall refer before I sit down. I mean the speedy enforcing of the Peace Terms upon Germany. At the present moment we are bringing everything to a head with Germany. We are holding all our means of coercion in full operation, or in immediate readiness for use. We are enforcing the blockade with rigour. We have strong Armies ready to advance at the shortest notice. Germany is very near starvation. The evidence I have received from officers sent by the War Office all over Germany shows, first of all, the great privations which the German people are suffering, and secondly, the danger of collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.      (Winston Churchill addressing Parliament in March 1919)

This is part of British history that is usually omitted. Far better to end the account of the war with the armistice of 11/11/18 than to face the truth of how Britain reduced the population of Germany to mass starvation in order to ensure acceptance of the peace terms. 

Churchill's role in this as its main instigator does not sit comfortably with the usual laudations he receives as Britain's greatest Prime-Minister. It does not fit well with that narrative – but then a lot that he did and stood for sits less comfortably in modern eyes. He was an imperialist at the height of empire and did not shy away from using force in order to preserve or further British interests, whether by sending the Black and Tans into Ireland, or equipping the air-force with mustard gas bombs to use on Kurdish rebels in Iraq.

The Quaker imperative to 'answer that of God in everyone' led to their perceiving the people of Germany in a very different way. They were not an enemy to be defeated, but men, women and children suffering the consequences of continued hostility. The Friends War Victim Relief Committee in London had been revived in 1914, and, under the secretaryship of Ruth Fry concerned itself with all who were harmed by the war, regardless of the lines of division imposed by Governments. Someone in urgent need of relief is someone in urgent need of relief no matter what their nationality. As soon as it was possible to bring relief to the suffering peoples of Germany, the committee did so. Ruth Fry wrote in her memoir of the period:

Figures given at a meeting of German scientists show 763,000 deaths of civilians during the war due to underfeeding, and in 1918 the deaths from this cause rose to 37 per cent of the total. They estimated further, that one million children died as a result of hunger and its attendant illnesses through the blockade. Deaths were so frequent in Frankfurt-am-Main (March 1920) that there were funerals all day long, and a lady told our workers that she had to wait a whole week for the chance of burying her brother-in-law. On the other hand, the birth-rate fell to about 50 per cent of the normal, so that the deaths exceeded the births, and Dr. Meyer, of the Berlin City Health Department, stated in 1920 that the average size of babies at birth was only one-half of the normal, and that there were no children who were not undernourished. Of the children in the elementary schools 80 per cent were estimated to be unable to follow the lessons because of their enfeebled condition.  (Ruth Fry: A Quaker Adventure. The story of nine years' relief and reconstruction: Nisbet, London, 1926)

Tumbling into war: 1914 and all that

Remember the butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle clearing? The unpredictability of chaos where overwhelmingly the turbulence caused by the flapping of the wings is damped out and the air settles back into being calm, except when one flap sets up a vortex that grows into a hurricane? That was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. The political stabilisers of the age – the doves among the diplomats, politicians and civil servants – should have damped out the shock waves. They didn't. They tried to, but they didn't: the hawks within the administrations eventually dominated and millions died. 

Revisiting 1914 for a short chapter needed because of the epoch changing nature of the First World War within the Quaker microverse as much as in broader society, I was struck by how vulnerable societies are to the effects of decisions made by tiny numbers of people in powerful positions. According to William Jannen (1996: The Lions of July. The prelude to War, 1914) fewer than 100 individuals across the entire continent of Europe, all confined within tiny, highly privileged and selective governing elites, were involved in the decision making processes that led to war. Barely anyone outside those circles was referenced at all, let alone consulted. A finding born out by other scholars:

Within the respective state executives, the changeability of power relations also meant that those entrusted with formulating policy did so under considerable domestic pressure, not so much from the press or public opinion or industrial or financial lobbies, as from adversaries within their own elites and governments. And this, too, heightened the sense of urgency besetting decision makes in the summer of 1914.    (Christopher Clark, 2013: The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914)

Perhaps one of the more disturbing things I discovered during my background reading, was the deal done between the British and German High Commands via Swiss intermediaries. As the war progressed Britain became short of optics for range-finding, and Germany became short of rubber for the tyres needed on its troop transports. Both shortages were impeding the 'pursuit' of the war. An exchange via Switzerland was organised so that the shortages were made good and the war could proceed. (See Adam Hochschild, 2011: To End All Wars. How the First World War Divided Britain.) Perhaps I am alone in finding this shocking, but it does speak to me of the detachment of the those who both started and ran the war from those embroiled in its guts.

Such was the enormity of the scale of death and destruction unleashed that attributing responsibility for starting and continuing the war has been an issue ever since. The blame had to be placed somewhere, but it was too toxic to be anywhere near: blame is best projected onto others. In the immediate aftermath it was on Germany and its militarism: the goose-stepping 'Hun'.

This justified the punishment of Germany inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had to be reduced so that it could never again be a threat. There was no point in blaming The Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire, nor for that matter the Russian Empire – they no longer existed, all destroyed by the war. It would have been far too painful to admit that either the governments of Britain or France had any part to play. Given the enormous sacrifice and suffering admitting such culpability would have made those in power seem perfidious in the extreme. Political donkeys may have been leading the lions, but no-one was about to say so.  

As time and distance from the mutual carnage increased the focus shifted to blaming the miliary, the war plans of Germany especially. The fact that the German secret war plans to attack France via Belgium failed because of the secret Anglo-French war plans for the rapid deployment of British Forces into Northern France was conveniently forgotten. Guilt still had to point firmly at Germany.

Now it is more popular to see it as a massive failure of government, particularly of diplomacy: a war by accident. The perception is that wars are created by governments, but fought and suffered by peoples; wars are indeed that "continuation of policy by other means" which Carl von Clausewitz suggested they were; and in 1914 there was massive amounts of hubris among the governing elites about how easily those policies would be realised.

As unclear as the causes of the war may be, what is clear, however, is that 1914 was the shock that seemed to changed everything:

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.      C G Jung, 1936: Wotan

There had been those who had sensed an underlying mood among populations that was receptive to war, no matter how much the state-change from peace may have shocked:

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made upon people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotions, have been slowly pushing towards this event."     Elizabeth Grey Vinning, 1958: Friend of Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But there were also Quaker voices that realised what the impact of war was on civilian populations and were not afraid to say so:

What is a truth of war: that the old die before their time; the sick die for lack care and sustenance when there was no need; the vulnerable die for the scantness of resources; children fail to survive and those that do, do not thrive; babies die for the lack of their half starved mother's milk; mothers fail to carry to full term, their babies undersize and struggling if they do not die; miscarriages abound;  women die more often from childbirths because they are not strong enough; populations are half starved and have no resistance to diseases; homes, if not destroyed, lack warmth in winter; clothes become scarce and are often too poor to offer protection against the weather. This is the lot of the civilian population. Whatever horrors the soldier faces, he is often better fed, better clothed and even better sheltered.      (Mea culpa! I have lost where this quote comes from, which is why I did not include it in the book. I would be grateful if anyone could identify what the source is.)

Then there were Quakers who pledged to have nothing to do with it, such as Henry Hodgkin, one of the founders of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. A very difficult stance in the face of the first total war where opting out – especially after the introduction of conscription – was simply not tolerated. To refuse to join the military, or to support them, was cast as deeply unpatriotic; and, after 1916, as not only unpatriotic  but unlawful and criminal as well. For some the idea that the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount were suspended for the duration of the war was simply not tenable, no matter what the personal consequences. 

Quakerism, which might have seemed faintly peculiar and eccentric in 1913, was by 1916, with the state-change of war, seen as subversive and dangerous and worthy of attention by Special Branch. 

Quakers were once more showing themselves to be members of a counter culture, resisting the dominant trends of the time, even at the risk of social ostracism or penal sanctions. According to M E Hirst (1923), only one third of the male members of the Society of military age volunteered or were conscripted. 

However, it was the women of the Society who, not being shackled by the expectations of military service in the way men were, led the way in living out the peace testimony by providing relief work, even among those now counted as 'enemies' – a remarkable story in its own right, as I was to discover. That is where my researches took me next.

The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.