Christmas, 1946

I feel rather disappointed that I had to celebrate Christmas in Germany, although I am trying to make the best of it. Just before Christmas, rushed imports from the US Zone restored some of the bread distributions and at least the bread rations were honored. The black market flourishes more than ever. The general manager of  one of the biggest companies tells me he spends half his time bartering minute quantities of steel and erecting barns and huts for farmers in order to get potatoes from these farmers. The potatoes are then distributed to workers who attend fairly regularly, because their wages cannot but buy their ration and one cigarette. It is astonishing and surprising that a great part of the workers and staff have enough conscience to come to work, to do their best and not give up hope. The US zone is very much better off, America is pumping quantities of food and other raw materials into their zone, and that can be felt.  People in our zone are much better fed, better clad and have more coal to heat their houses.  Machine factories in the British zone could not get permission to resume work, no mining machinery was produced, no consumer goods available for the miners, and the whole way of life has almost collapsed.The Americans have greatly enhanced their good will, whereas the British have lost it.  People sit in the cold, in dark or dimmed houses, without food, sometimes with only a beet root to eat for a day. The people believe that England is starving them purposely, and it takes a few years of living in England to be convinced that it is just British inefficiency and lack of imagination and lack of forethought rather than bad will. There is no hope and no work. They blame the British occupying government and with it democratic socialism has lost very much of the goodwill it held a year ago.The British have blundered terribly in their zone, forbidding all kind of work, sending some of their most inefficient civil servants over here, and trying to run the country.